NYU Center for Bioethics

As science, technology, and medicine advance, society will confront new ethical dilemmas at the nexus of public health policy and individual choice. The Master of Arts in Bioethics at the College of Global Public Health provides a strong philosophical foundation for navigating these urgent questions.

The Future of AI Ethics: A Cross-Disciplinary Discussion

APR 10
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
19 Washington Square North

This panel discussion considers how ethical decisions will be influenced in the future by the many applications of Artificial Intelligence. An ethicist and philosopher, an engineer who designs intelligent robots, and a computer scientist whose goal will be to make “responsible AI” synonymous with “AI” each present a view of future AI ethics and then discuss how their views will diverge. While each participant will be a specialist conducting research into AI ethics, this discussion brings together scientific, technical, and humanistic issues under the broad category of responsibility.

Ludovic Righetti, Electrical and Computer Engineer; Director of Machines in Motion Laboratory, Autonomous Machines in Motion
Jeff Sebo, Ethicist and Philosopher; Director of Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy, AI Moral Well Being
Julia Stoyanovich, Computer Scientist, Director of Center for Responsible AI, AI Governance

Moderated by
Harold Sjursen, Professor Emeritus, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

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5th Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop

 

NYU’s Center for Bioethics 5th Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop

Friday, April 25th & Saturday, April 26th 
Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003 

Where philosophy meets medicine, law, technology, and ethics: NYU’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop tackles the most pressing bioethical dilemmas of our time. #NYUPBW25

 
 
 

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The New York University Center for Bioethics is pleased to present the 5th Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, being held in person at NYU on April 25th and 26th, 2025. 

We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, broadly understood. This includes (but is not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, public health ethics, gender and race in bioethics, and clinical ethics.

Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Professor Caspar Hare from MIT. 
If you would like to attend in person as an audience member, please RSVP. We have limited space for in-person participation; there will not be a Zoom option.
 
This year’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop is organized by S. Matthew Liao, Daniel Fogal, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Dan Khokhar, and Jonathan Knutzen of the NYU Center for Bioethics.
 
 
 

Workshop Program 

 
Friday, April 25
 
9:30-10:00am Coffee, light refreshments (provided)
 
10:00am Welcome — S. Matthew Liao (NYU)
 
10:05-11:25am Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) – ‘Genetic Reproductive Freedom’
Chair: Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc (Seton Hall)
 
11:35-12:55pm Sophie Gibert (NYU/Penn) – ‘Paternalism and the Right to Be Wronged’
Chair: Blake Hereth (Western Michigan)
 
12:55-2:00pm Lunch Break
 
2:00-3:20pm Michal Masny (MIT) – ‘Extension and Replacement’
Chair: Brian Berkey (Penn)
 
3:30-5:30pm Mala Kamm Memorial Lecture (NYU Philosophy): Peter Railton (Michigan)
 
5:30-6:30pm Workshop reception (everyone invited)
 
Saturday, April 26
 
9:00-9:30am: Coffee, light breakfast (provided)
 
10:00-11:20am: Nada Gligorov & Pierce Randall (Albany) – ‘The Volitional Approach to Surrogate Decision Making’
Chair: Max Kramer (UCLA)
 
11:30-12:50pm: Sam Director (Richmond) – ‘Does Black Box AI In Medicine Compromise Informed Consent?’
Chair: Emily Slome (SUNY Oswego)
 
12:50-2:00pm: Lunch Break
 
2:00-3:20pm: Ben Lang (Oxford) – ‘Dropping Anchor or Chasing a Moving Target? Challenges for Personalized, Moral Advisement LLMs’ (Graduate Student Prize Winner)
Chair: Levy Wang (USC)
 
3:30-5:00pm: Caspar Hare (MIT), TBA
Chair: S. Matthew Liao (NYU)

Prospects and Pitfalls for Real Artificial Consciousness with Anil Seth

NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy presents

Prospects and Pitfalls for Real Artificial Consciousness

with Anil Seth

 
 

Wednesday, April 16, 2025 from 1:00pm-2:15pm ET

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About the talk

As AI continues to develop, it is natural to ask whether AI systems can be not only intelligent, but also conscious. In this talk, Anil Seth will examine the science of AI consciousness. Seth will start by considering why some people think AI might develop consciousness, identifying some biases that might lead us astray, then asking what it would take for conscious AI to be a realistic prospect, pushing back against some standard assumptions such as the notion that computation provides a sufficient basis for consciousness. Seth will instead make the case for taking seriously the possibility that consciousness might depend on our nature as living organisms – a form of biological naturalism. Seth will end by exploring some implications of AI that either actually is, or convincingly seems to be, conscious. If we sell our minds too cheaply to our machine creations, we not only overestimate them – we underestimate ourselves.

About the speaker

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness and a European Research Council Advanced Investigator. He has published more than 200 research papers and has been recognized by Web of Science, over several years, as being in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide. His 2017 TED talk has been viewed over fifteen million times. In 2023 he was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize, and in 2024 Prospect Magazine listed him as one of the Top 25 global thinkers. His book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller and named ‘Book of the Year’ for 2021 by many periodicals.

This event is hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy. Thank you to the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness and the NYU Center for Bioethics for supporting this event.

Infant Consciousness Workshop

The NYU Center for Bioethics and the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness present

Infant Consciousness

Friday, February 28th and Saturday, March 1st, 2025
Hemmerdinger and Jurow Halls | Silver Center for Arts and Sciences
31 Washington Place
 
 

About this event

The conference will explore current issues about the development of consciousness in infants, with particular attention to recent work on neural and behavioral markers of consciousness. The aim is to bring together neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who are working on infant consciousness to gain a better understanding

of conscious awareness in infants.
 
This event is co-hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness and the NYU Center for Bioethics, with support from the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy.  The conference organizers are Ned Block, David Chalmers, S. Matthew Liao, and Claudia Passos-Ferreira.

Program

Friday, February 28th (Hemmerdinger Hall, 31 Washington Place, Silver Center, 1st Floor)

9:00-9:30am • Coffee/Check-in

9:30-10:30am • Keynote 1: Lorina Naci – Typical and disrupted brain mechanism for conscious awareness in full-term and preterm infants

10:30-10:50am • Coffee Break

10:50am-12:50pm • Symposium 1: Neural Correlates of Infant Consciousness

– Topun Austin: Investigating the role of sleep and social touch on functional connectivity and socio-emotional development in the newborn infant

– Sid Kouider: Reflective mechanisms of perception and metacognition in infants

– Hamza Kebiri: Developmental thalamic functional connectivity and its potential implications for early neonatal consciousness

– Yusuke Nakashima: Immature recurrent processing in early infancy revealed by visual backward masking

12:50-2:00pm • Lunch Break

2:00-3:00pm • Keynote 2: Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Assessing consciousness in infants

3:00-4:00pm • Poster Session 1 / Coffee break

– Jessica Babcock: Prenatal intersubjectivity: A phenomenological analysis of fetal development

– Juan Ardia Cifuentes: Functional connectivity and fetal consciousness

– Renee Ye: Minimal self and early consciousness in Infants

– Qiyuan Zeng (and Darinka Trübutschek, Lucia Melloni): Event segmentation and subjective time perception: An inroad to infant consciousness

– Markus Tunte: Developing interoception: On the perception of bodily signals in infants and caregivers

4:00-6:00pm • Symposium 2: Pre-Natal Consciousness

– Anna Ciaunica: The Forgotten Body: The Co-Embodied Origins of the Human Mind

– Joel Frohlich: Do fetuses perceive individual rapid stimuli? Evidence from MEG frequency tagging

– William Graf: The neurobiological requisites of fetal sentience

– Niccolo Negro: An analogical abductive argument against foetal consciousness

6:00-7:00pm • Reception

Saturday, March 1st (Jurow Hall, 31 Washington Place, Silver Center, 1st Floor)

9:00-9:30am • Coffee

9:30-10:30am • Keynote 3: Tim Bayne, Babies, bees and bots: From theories to markers and back again

10:30-10:50am • Coffee Break

11:30am-12:40pm • Symposium 3: Infant Color Perception

– Ned Block: Non-conceptual color perception is more certain for children than adults

– Richard Brown Higher-Order Theories and Infant Color Consciousness

– Kathleen Akins: Color bit-by-bit: The gradualist approach to color vision development

– Yusuke Moriguchi: Comparing color qualia structures in young children versus adults

12:50-2:00pm • Lunch Break

2:00-4:00pm • Symposium 4: Development and Theories

– Cécile Gal: Do infants’ early error-monitoring and metacognition support their emerging self-awareness?

– Alison Gopnik: The phenomenology of exploration: New evidence for the infant lantern

– Thomas Varley: The emergence of a synergistic scaffold in the brains of infants

– Claudia Passos: Infant consciousness: Whether, when, where, what, how?

4:00-5:00pm • Poster Session 2 / Coffee break

1- Marianne Broeker (& Paul Azzopardi): Impact of unconscious processing onto perception and narrative system in infants: Presentation of a research tool

2. Nikolaus Kennelly: A Problem for Cross-Species Comparisons of Ontogenetic Flexibility

3. Jörg Noller (& Florian Heinen): Child Consciousness and Digitalization – A new Point of Cultural Intersection

4. Jack Spinella: A Paradox of Infant Agency?

5. Ayush Srivastava: Infant Dreaming: A Phenomenological Perspective on the First Minds

5:00-6:30 pm • Panel discussion: Susan Carey, David Chalmers, Matthew Liao, Moriah Thomason, Nicholas Turk-Browne

 

Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Modernization: What to Expect in 2025

Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Modernization: What to Expect in 2025

January 31st, 2025
12:00 PM
Meeting ID: 921 9905 2600
Passcode: 4321

Join Macey Levan, JD, PhD, for an in-depth update on the ongoing modernization of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). In this talk, Dr. Levan will explore the latest in the governance restructure for the national organ donation and transplant system.

She will cover the new entity, Independent Network of Volunteers for Equitable and Safe Transplants, operating as the OPTN Board of Directors, what these developments mean for patients, healthcare providers, and the future of organ transplantation.

Zoom Link

Please email Johanna Paguay if you have any questions about this seminar. 
Johanna.Paguay@nyulangone.org