The University of Cape Town (UCT) Neuroscience Institute’s Professor Mark Solms has been awarded a prestigious Oppenheimer Memorial Trust grant of R1.9 million that will enable a new line of inquiry into proof-of-concept research endeavours that seek to understand how and why consciousness works by using an artificial agent.

This catalytic grant awarded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, a charitable organisation that is deeply committed to education in South Africa and has a long history of supporting UCT research programmes, will support an exciting new research avenue into consciousness and artificial intelligence (AI). Funding of this nature allows for high-risk, high-reward research that is often passed up in favour of research that meets immediate needs or is disease focused. But this research has the potential to yield answers about what it fundamentally means to be human.