New York City, NY

UA Ruhr Science Symposium – Artificial Intelligence and the Philosophy of Perception

Supported by the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York, this symposium explores how humans and machines perceive the world.

Perception is not a passive recording of reality, but an active, interpretive process shaped by our knowledge, expectations, and biases. What we see is never just what is “out there” – it is filtered through the mind. Today, as artificial intelligence systems increasingly claim to “see” the world through computer vision, pressing questions emerge: Do machines perceive in any meaningful sense? What are the limits of human and artificial perception, and how do they differ?

Join Albert Newen (Ruhr University Bochum), a leading voice in contemporary philosophy of mind, together with Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers University) for a dialogue at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and AI. Together, they will explore how perception grounds our understanding of reality, and what it means when machines enter that domain.

Date: October 17, 2025
Time: 5 PM to 7 PM
Location: German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017

Spanning from human perception (2020) to reconstructed nature of memory (2024)  and now to machine “seeing” (2025), the UA Ruhr Science Symposium traces a compelling arc through philosophy and cognitive science. Guided throughout by Prof. Newen’s expertise, the series moves from the active mind’s interpretation of reality to the shaping of self through memory and finally to the challenges AI poses to our very understanding of what it means to perceive.

Please RSVP via the link here