Bio Note: Piotr (Peter) Boltuc is a philosopher who formulated the Engineering Thesis in machine consciousness, the view that first-person consciousness could be engineered in robots. He presented the Church-Turing Lover, an argument that even if consciousness is epiphenomenal, we have reasons to care whether our loved ones are first-person conscious. Also, he argued that first-person consciousness is analogous to hardware rather than software. Furthermore, he developed a deflationary theory of non-reductive consciousness. Boltuc has held fellowships at Oxford, Princeton, ANU, and Canterbury and works now at the University of Illinois–Springfield where he holds an endowed professorship, and at the Warsaw School of Economics.

Affiliation: University of Illinois, Springfield, USA