Manu Herrán, Secretary of Communication

 

Manu Herrán (Madrid, 1971) is a computer engineer, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, programmer, creator of artificial life simulations, genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms and author of about 100 essays and two books dealing mainly with sentience in animals and machines, as well as evolution, cooperation, intelligence, death and ethics, among others.

 

He is the founder of the association “Sentience Research” which develops, disseminates and promotes research on sentience aimed at a better world and, in particular, aimed at reducing intense, involuntary and useless suffering. He is also an associate researcher at OPIS (Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering).

 

Manu is a regular public speaker on animal rights and also on the undervalued possibility of suffering in inorganic substrates (digital sentience, sentience in machines, artificial sentience) and its risks. He has proposed new hypotheses about sentience: a theory exactly opposite to Emergentism (Immersionism), a theory in which the absence of identity is dominated by pleasure (Paneudaimonia) and a Platonic theory of the capacity to feel (the Platonism of Sentience).