Consider applying to the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition on the philosophy of consciousness, and donating a portion of your winnings to effective charities

This looks like something up my readers' alley

I’m flagging that the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition offered to sponsor this post which I accepted. I’ll donate a portion of the money to effective charities. In general I won’t share any sponsored material here that I wouldn’t have shared anyway.

A few years ago Peter Singer won the $1 million Berggruen Prize in philosophy and donated half of it to effective global health charities, a third to charities focused on ending factory farming, and the rest to other causes. The impact of the giving to global health alone was probably on the order of 50-150 lives permanently saved. The farmed animal welfare movement has a stunningly small budget. The movement used around $220 million in 2021. This means that Peter Singer’s single donation accounted for 0.14% of the entire annual budget going to fixing what I and many of my readers consider to be one of the biggest moral catastrophes happening right now.

The same organization is running an annual essay competition with a $50,000 first prize award. I noticed that this year’s topic fits what I and many of my subscribers are interested in reading and writing about: the philosophy of consciousness, including animal and AI consciousness. Here’s the full description from their website:

2025 Theme

Consciousness

The nature of consciousness has enthralled philosophers for millennia. More recently, modern scientific approaches that seek to illuminate physical aspects of consciousness engender as many questions as they do answers. We seek original essays that offer fresh perspectives on these fundamental questions.

We welcome essays from all traditions and disciplines. Your claim may or may not draw from established research on the subject, but must demonstrate creativity and be defended by strong argument. Unless you are proposing your own theory of consciousness, your essay should demonstrate knowledge of established theories of consciousness that might reflect on, but by no means be 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

I’m writing something to submit and think I have a better-than-average shot at winning. I figured my readers would also want to know about this. I’d like to encourage you to submit something and make a plan to donate a portion of your money if you do win. If you chose to keep 90% of your winnings and just donated 10%, you could permanently save a human life, or contribute to ending the brutal suffering of animals on factory farms, or contribute to other important causes.

This is a roll of the dice, but I figured it’s worth a shot and that my audience would have a few people who are especially likely to win. If you do win and donate a portion of the money I’d be excited to shout you out! I’ll be excited to read the winning essay.