19/02/2026
PHIL ON TAP X ART HISTORY SOCIETY 🏛️🖼️
We are back for our 7th Phil On Tap NEXT THURSDAY AT 7PM at The White Hart, and will be collaborating with .exe for a fantastic talk on ‘Beauty and The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness’, delivered by the University of Exeter’s very own Dr Tom Roberts.
SYNOPSIS:
The so-called “hard” problem of consciousness is the puzzle of explaining how and why consciousness arises in the natural world. How do feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptual experiences arise from wet, meaty brain matter? To put the problem another way, could we build an artificial system that had conscious states like pains, itches, dreams, or desires-and if so, how?
Tom proposes that there is a category of conscious phenomena that raises an even more challenging problem for scientific explanations of the mind: experiences of the beautiful and other aesthetic qualities like the amusing, the delicious, and the
awesome. Intuitively, it seems much more plausible that we might build a robot who could see shapes or hear sounds than one who could find a piece of music moving, a film hilarious, or a painting spectacular.
Why might experiences of aesthetic properties be so hard to instantiate in an artificial agent? Perhaps because they reflect distinctively human qualities such as authenticity, personality, taste, and social bonding. And these features, in turn, might tell us something about what makes the problem of consciousness so difficult in the first place.
Tickets are FREE for PhilSoc & Art History Soc members, and £3 for non-members. Get your tickets now via the PhilSoc FIXR page via our link in bio.
We can’t wait for this one - it’s gonna be a masterpiece of a night 😉
