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What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness?

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AI consciousness — focused titlesKeith J. Holyoak, Martin M. MontiOctober 1, 2026
Original source ↗
Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

Who or what is conscious? Because subjective experience is directly accessible only in the first person, judgments about consciousness in other entities depend partly on analogy. Historically, such inferences have focused on nonhuman animals, but advances in artificial intelligence have raised the possibility of conscious AI. Here we develop a causal framework for evaluating such evidential analogies. The key distinction is between similarities in factors plausibly involved in generating consciousness and similarities in downstream behavioural or cognitive effects. Our framework weights source

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