German researcher Lukas Kob has been a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences since last year, supported by a prestigious fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In a commentary for the VědaVýzkum.cz portal, he explains why leading experts in the field from New York and Germany recommended the Czech capital to him for his postdoctoral research, and why he himself sees Prague as an important center for the philosophy of consciousness and artificial intelligence.
According to Lukas Kob, what makes the Czech academic environment unique is its strong philosophical tradition, active community, international connections, and the increasingly close links between philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He appreciates the fact that many of his Prague-based colleagues approach AI from the perspectives of philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, or AI research itself. This means that researchers do not encounter only specialists from their own field, but also people who examine the same problems from different perspectives.
Dr. Lukas Kob of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg has been working in the Department of Analytic Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences since October 2025 as a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Research Fellow, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research focuses on the possibility of consciousness emerging in artificial systems. He applies philosophical insights into consciousness to recently successful AI architectures as well as to brain organoids — artificial “mini-brains” grown from stem cells. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the conditions under which artificial systems could potentially be considered conscious.
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Lukas Kob
