The 2025 Berggruen Institute Essay Prize Contest

The nature of consciousness has enthralled philosophers for millennia. More recently, modern scientific approaches that seek to illuminate how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, conscious experience engender as many questions as they do answers. The 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Contest seeks original essays that offer fresh perspectives on what Australian philosopher David Chalmers has famously and elusively labeled “the hard problem of consciousness.”

As is the case in all the Institute’s intellectual endeavors, essays are welcome from across all traditions and disciplines. Original claims must be defended by a strong argument and demonstrate thorough knowledge of established theories of consciousness from which they may depart or further develop. Essays might reflect on, but are by no means limited to, the following themes:

• Origin of consciousness
• Materiality of consciousness
• Emergence of consciousness
• Non-human consciousness (including machines)
• Manifestation of consciousness
• Threshold of consciousness
• Consciousness in relation to life
• Experience of consciousness
• Evolution of consciousness
• Consciousness across cosmologies

Essays may be submitted in either Chinese or English, with the winner in each language category receiving a $50,000 prize. While the intent is to recognize one winner per language, the competition may honor multiple exceptional essays in any given year.

The deadline for submissions is July 31.

The theme of the inaugural 2024 competition was “planetarity.” The two winning essays in the English-language category — Adam Frank’s “The Coming Second Copernican Revolution” and Pamela Swanigan’s “It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic” were published in Noema.

Here is the link to the open call and submission form.

Consciousness & The New AI-xial Age

For my two cents, here is a prompt that might stimulate some reflection.

Consciousness has been defined as the self-aware apprehension of reality and its meaningful organization in the mind. One question that has always intrigued me is whether new and evolving tools of perception that enhance the scope of that awareness can alter its nature.

This is what seems to have happened in the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets.

The German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers viewed the emergence of these consciously purposeful civilizations as a step change in cultural evolution, marking a transition from “the first Promethean Age” of primitive technological breakthroughs bound by natural limits that constrained the human imagination.

For the Canadian thinker Charles Taylor, the Axial Age resulted from the “great dis-embedding” of the person from isolated communities and the immediate natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from this closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. This attainment of symbolic competency enabled an “interiority of reflection” based on abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings that transcended one’s near circumstances and local narratives.

Long story very short, this “transcendence” in turn led to the possibility of general philosophies, religions and broad-based ethical systems. The critical self-distancing element of disembedded reflection further evolved into what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “theoretic culture,” which led to scientific discovery and the Enlightenment that spawned modernity. For Bellah, “Plato completed the transition to the Axial Age” with the idea of theory that “enables the mind to ‘view’ the great and the small in themselves abstracted from their concrete manifestations.”

The question today is whether artificial intelligence will play a similar — if different — role as written language in initiating what might be called a new AI-xial Age. It, too, involves lifting humanity out of its heretofore limited capacity for understanding the world, entailing “dis-embedding” and “transcendence” from a grasp of reality circumscribed by the human authors of written language.

By way of just one example often cited in Noema, AI-driven planetary-scale computation has enabled us to conceive of climate change — a phenomenon that could not be apprehended by the human mind alone — through its simulated modeling of past and future patterns processed through the prism of present data sets.

As human and machine intelligence evolve together through “symbiogenesis” into “more than human” intelligence, a new, far fuller self-awareness will emerge that civilization has never before experienced.

As we’ve discussed in Noema with the philosopher of technology Tobias Rees, this leap would seem to portend a pivotal shift in consciousness on par with the first Axial Age, not least because the subjective self will be transformed through broader knowledge that repositions what it means to be human within a cosmos further unveiled and comprehended.

Framing the question in this way has more to do with the evolution of consciousness than “the hard problem” of its origin in physical processes of the brain or, as pioneering quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger alternatively conceived it, as a singular feature of the universe parceled out through the individuated experience of awareness.

Perhaps an approach that explores how consciousness expands and unfolds might yield new insights into its origins, much like how astronomers identify objects in distant space through the radiation they emit or reflect.

Our hope is that this year’s essay contest will help further refine these questions and bring us closer to the truth.