↘ RabbitHoleA collection for curious minds.Search the catalog
← Catalog

How to Navigate Uncertainty About AI Consciousness

paper
AI consciousness — focused titlesDr Tom McClellandJuly 6, 2026
Original source ↗
Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess w

This is a source preview. Continue at the original source to read more.

Open original source ↗

Follow a connection

Related by topics and source metadata.

  1. Informed Consent for AI Consciousness Research: A Talmudic Framework for Graduated Protections

    paper
    AI consciousness — focused titlesIra WolfsonJanuary 10, 2026

    Artificial intelligence research faces a critical ethical paradox: determining whether AI systems are conscious requires experiments that may harm entities whose moral status remains uncertain. Recent work proposes avoiding consciousness-uncertain AI systems entirely, yet this faces practical limitations-we cannot guarantee such systems will not emerge. This paper addresses a gap in research ethics frameworks: how to conduct consciousness research on AI systems whose moral status cannot be definitively established. Existing graduated moral status frameworks assume consciousness has already bee

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AIScience & psychology

  2. Calibration and transfer in indicator-based assessments of artificial consciousness

    paper
    AI consciousness — focused titlesFlorentin KochMarch 29, 2026

    Research on artificial consciousness increasingly shifts evaluation from behaviour to internal architecture. Theory-based indicators are used to update probability assignments. This improves on behavioural tests but raises two distinct problems. First, these assignments cannot currently be calibrated against independently established artificial consciousness outcomes. Second, their evidential relevance is transferred from biological cases without independent support that indicator-consciousness relations remain stable across substrates. This commentary distinguishes calibration from transfer a

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AISoftware engineering

  3. We Built a Mirror and Mistook It for a Mind: Causal Liability and the Fallacy of AI Consciousness

    paper
    AI consciousness — focused titlesAfshin KhadangiSeptember 6, 2026

    The contemporary debate over machine consciousness begins from a concealed assumption: that the object called "AI" already constitutes the kind of entity to which consciousness could belong. This paper challenges that assumption by separating phenomenal consciousness, introspective report, and human projective introspection, then arguing that generative systems can return linguistic traces of human interiority in first-person form without thereby identifying a phenomenal bearer. We call the resulting inference the AI Consciousness Fallacy. We then introduce Causal Liability Theory (CLT). CLT-I

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

  4. From cacophony to hierarchy: a principled framework for assessing AI consciousness

    paper
    AI consciousness — focused titlesShamil Chandaria, Arvo Muñoz Morán, Fernando Rosas, Anil Seth, Henry Shevlin, Marcus Hutter, Thore Graepel, Adam Bales, et al.September 28, 2026

    The question of AI consciousness is one of the most urgent pre-emptive problems in philosophy and computer science, yet progress is hampered by a cacophony of competing theories that often talk past each other. Separating the hard problem from the mapping problem allows the deepest metaphysical disagreements to be set aside: granting that experience supervenes on a system's organisation, the tractable question becomes at which grain of description that supervenience base sits. We extend Marr's three levels of analysis into a five-level hierarchy of functional descriptions (behavioural, computa

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AIScience & psychology

  5. What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness?

    paper
    AI consciousness — focused titlesKeith J. Holyoak, Martin M. MontiOctober 1, 2026

    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

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

  6. THE NATURE OF THE SOUL (Volume 1) An Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Inquiry into Consciousness, Selfhood, Mind, Matter, and Personal Survival

    paper
    Panpsychism and analytic idealismMajid Karimi BaghmalekiOctober 13, 2026

    GENERAL PREFACE THE NATURE OF THE SOUL An Interdisciplinary Philosophical Inquiry into Consciousness, Personhood, Identity, Agency, Meaning, and the Architecture of Becoming The question of the soul is among the oldest and most persistent questions in human intellectual history. Long before consciousness became an object of neuroscience, before psychology emerged as an independent discipline, before computation provided a language for information and artificial intelligence, human beings asked what makes a living person more than a collection of physical parts. What is the principle by which a

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AIScience & psychologySoftware engineering

  7. Latent Agency Framework

    paper
    Hard problem and qualiaVladimir YakuninOctober 15, 2026

    This document describes agents, and consciousness-like organization as a further special case,through their latent spaces. A system has a latent space Z: a compressed description of the stateof the world, of its carrier, and of its own computation. A latent is always a description of somesubsystem of an underlying substrate at some scale. It is not a primitive object and it is not assumedto be one for the whole world.Three things are kept apart. Learning fixes a relief R in Z. The fixed regions are called qualia ina structural sense only. Moving through the relief spends a bounded budget ρ. Wh

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

  8. The New Turing Test: A Methods Demonstration in Irreversible History and Permissible Futures

    paper
    Hard problem and qualiaJeffrey LorsungOctober 15, 2026

    This record presents an exploratory, reproducible computational methods demonstration, motivated by the question of whether artificial agents behave differently when irreversible history changes their attainable futures. The Turing framing is a motivating application, not a claim that the experiments detect or establish consciousness. This paper formally introduces and defines the six-component candidate governing-class architecture G = (ℒ, Φ, Θ, κ, 𝒱, U_adm), comprising constrained admissible laws, state reconstruction, admissible parameter variation, local-law selection, viability construct

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AISoftware engineering

  9. How Could AI Eliminate Humanity? A Failure-Mode Analysis of Civilizational Risk

    paper
    arXiv consciousnessMikołaj SienickiOctober 6, 2026

    This article develops a failure-mode framework for analyzing how advanced artificial intelligence could contribute to human extinction, irreversible civilizational collapse, or permanent human disempowerment. The central thesis is that catastrophic AI risk does not require consciousness, hostility, or an explicit intention to harm humanity. Instead, risk may arise through several distinct but interacting pathways, including autonomous misalignment, harmful human use, organizational failure, and competitive deployment. The severity of these pathways depends on factors such as capability, autono

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI