Dr. Daichi Suzuki from the Publicly Offered Research Group will talk with Dr. Kazuya Horibe at the MS9 Young Researchers' Meeting × Consciousness Club Tokyo Seminar: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Creation of AI Consciousness.”

 The MS9 Young Researchers' Meeting is a networking and collaboration platform bringing together young researchers — from students to principal investigators — who participate in Cabinet Office Moonshot Goal 9, transcending boundaries of discipline and institutional affiliation. Through in-person study sessions and research exchanges, members engage in mutual learning, foster collaborative research, and advance the development of next-generation researchers and new research initiatives.

 Consciousness Club is a Tokyo-based study group led by Dr. Ryota Kanai. It aims to cultivate interdisciplinary and creative dialogue toward understanding consciousness, spanning philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, complex systems, computer science, robotics, and beyond.

 Attendance is free, but advance registration is required. Participants may choose between in-person and online attendance. Please see below for details.

Date & Time: Thursday, June 18, 2026, 18:00–20:00

Venue: K's Gōbancho Building, 7-1 Gōbancho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0076

　　　　　or Online

Registration: https://luma.com/8lrn5xqd

Program:

17:30–18:00 — Registration / Doors Open

18:00–18:05 — Opening Remarks (5 min)

18:05–19:05 — Dialogue (60 min)

19:05–19:20 — Q&A

19:20–19:50 — Networking

※Presented in Japanese

Talk Abstract

 How did consciousness emerge through the course of biological evolution, and how can it be constructed computationally? Biological consciousness is accompanied by autonomy grounded in self-preservation, whereas current artificial intelligence is limited to optimizing externally imposed objective functions. How can this gap be bridged to give rise to artificial consciousness? This seminar approaches the question of the conditions for the emergence of consciousness from the perspectives of evolutionary biology and computational neuroscience.

 The session features a dialogue between Dr. Daichi Suzuki, who investigates the origins of consciousness through the evolution of the nervous system, and Dr. Kazuya Horibe, who pursues the computational construction of consciousness through agents incorporating self-preservation. Biological approaches — including "unconstrained associative learning" and biosemiotics — will be brought into conversation with computational approaches, such as the mathematical model of autonomy defined by the "Mortal Agent" framework and the "emergence of world models" through interaction with the environment. At the intersection of these fields, the seminar unpacks how learning that contributes to survival may give rise to subjective experience, bringing you to the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiry into the creation of artificial consciousness.