The ICCS unites philosophers and scientists from around the world to deepen understanding of the human mind through collaborative, interdisciplinary research.
ICCS Leads a New Global Conversation on Consciousness
The International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS) is a newly established international non-profit organisation dedicated to one of the most enduring and controversial questions in human inquiry: what consciousness is, and how it arises. Founded in 2024, the center has rapidly positioned itself at the crossroads of philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, drawing together scholars from across disciplines and continents to confront what many still describe as the impossible task of the mind.
What Is ICCS and Why It Was Founded
The International Center for Consciousness Studies was established by three scholars whose work spans both philosophical theory and empirical science: Dmitry Volkov, Professor Pietro Perconti and Professor Alessio Plebe. The center was founded in close collaboration with the University of Messina, one of Italy’s oldest and most respected academic institutions. This partnership provided ICCS with immediate scholarly credibility, while its independent non-profit status ensured freedom from commercial or political pressures.
From its inception, ICCS by Dmitry Volkov and his co-founders was shaped by a shared conviction—that contemporary research on consciousness suffers less from a lack of data than from a lack of genuine integration between disciplines. Philosophers often develop sophisticated conceptual frameworks with little engagement in experimental science, while neuroscience and AI researchers generate immense volumes of data without always confronting the deeper philosophical implications of their work. ICCS was designed precisely to close this gap.
Conferences as Living Laboratories of Ideas
In less than two years, the organisation has created a sequence of ambitious international conferences that function as experimental spaces for testing how philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence can genuinely think together. Each ICCS Conference has developed the conversation further, deepening the range of questions and perspectives brought into dialogue.
The First ICCS Conference
The inaugural ICCS Conference, titled Uncovering the Magic of Consciousness: Philosophy, Neuroscience, AI, took place in June 2024 in the historic setting of the Santa Maria della Scala Museum in Siena, Italy. For a center founded only months earlier, the scale of the event was striking: around 150 participants from across Europe, North America and the Middle East gathered for three days of intensive discussion.
The atmosphere, according to many participants, was defined less by academic rivalry than by intellectual curiosity. Open discussions, poster sessions and manuscript works supplemented formal lectures, creating a rare sense of collective inquiry. For ICCS, the Siena conference served as a proof of concept: an early demonstration that its interdisciplinary ambitions could work in practice.
The Second ICCS Conference
If Siena established the center’s philosophical credentials, the second ICCS Conference, AI and Sentience, held in July 2025 in Heraklion, propelled it into one of the most urgent debates of the present moment: the possibility of artificial consciousness.
Over three days, speakers addressed questions that until recently belonged largely to science fiction: What would it mean for a machine to feel? How could sentience in artificial systems be detected? And what moral status would such systems possess? Leading philosophers, neuroscientists and AI researchers debated these issues in symposia, plenary lectures and public discussions, trying to define the very definition of consciousness itself.
Returning to First Principles
Later in 2025, ICCS shifted gears with a smaller but intellectually dense symposium on the island of Salina, titled The Question of Consciousness: What Are We Talking About? If the Heraklion conference engaged the future of machine minds, Salina returned to the foundations of the problem itself. Scholars debated whether consciousness can be understood without neuroscience, without computation, without society—or even without philosophy. The setting was deliberately intimate, favouring extended discussion over formal presentation.
The Salina conference illustrated another dimension of ICCS’s identity. Alongside large international conferences, it also cultivates reflective, almost retreat-like formats in which slow thinking is not a luxury but a methodological principle. In doing so, the center resists the growing pressure in academia to prioritise speed and productivity over depth.
The Dennett Prize: Honouring a Giant, Shaping the Future
Among the initiatives that most clearly signal the intellectual ambitions of the International Center for Consciousness Studies is the establishment of the Dennett Prize—an annual international award dedicated to outstanding contributions to the study of mind and consciousness. The prize is named in honour of the late philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
The Dennett Prize is awarded annually to a scholar whose research has significantly advanced understanding of the brain and consciousness across different fields. In addition to a monetary award of $10,000, the recipient is invited to deliver a public Dennett Lecture at the annual ICCS conference, transforming the prize from a symbolic gesture into a living forum for debate.
The inaugural recipient of the prize in 2025 was Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex and one of the world’s leading theorists of embodied and extended cognition. Clark’s work has fundamentally altered how philosophers and scientists think about the relationship between brain, body and environment, challenging the idea that the mind is confined within the skull.
ICCS has already opened submissions for nominations for the 2026 competition, inviting scholars from around the world to submit candidates whose work exemplifies the same combination of theoretical depth and empirical engagement that defined Dennett’s career.
ICCS and the Future of Consciousness Research
In the crowded and often fragmented landscape of contemporary consciousness studies, the International Center for Consciousness Studies has emerged with unusual speed and clarity of purpose. Still in its institutional infancy, ICCS by Dmitry Volkov has already established itself as a rare meeting ground where empirical data and conceptual analysis are brought into direct and sustained dialogue.
ICCS isn’t some philosophy school that promises to solve the mystery of consciousness. Few serious thinkers would. What it offers instead is something both more modest and more radical: a sustained institutional commitment to asking the right questions. In an age increasingly defined by speed, automation and technological acceleration, the center insists on the continued necessity of slow thinking, conceptual rigour and philosophical self-doubt.
As debates over artificial sentience, human identity and the nature of experience grow ever more urgent, the role of institutions capable of holding these tensions without premature closure will only become more important. If its early trajectory is any indication, ICCS is positioning itself to be one of those institutions—quietly shaping how the 21st century learns to think about the mind.
