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

paper

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

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

    paper

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

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    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
  3. The Mainstream Awakening: How Consciousness Is Taking Over Popular Media

    article

    This September we celebrate the birthday and legacy of IONS Founder Dr. Edgar Mitchell. Thank you to everyone who made a gift in his honor. As a pioneering astronaut (one of the few to walk on the moon!) he experienced an epiphany in space that changed the trajectory of his life, and continues to impact people worldwide. The post The Mainstream Awakening: How Consciousness Is Taking Over Popular Media appeared first on IONS .

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AIParapsychologyScience & psychologyUnexpected finds
  4. Does the Mind Shape Reality? A New Experiment Puts Quantum Consciousness to the Test

    article

    To achieve happiness, we need to understand what makes us happy and what brings us peace. One way to know if we are on the right path is “the happiness method” The post Does the Mind Shape Reality? A New Experiment Puts Quantum Consciousness to the Test appeared first on IONS .

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AIParapsychologyScience & psychology
  5. Calibration and transfer in indicator-based assessments of artificial consciousness

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    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
  6. How to Navigate Uncertainty About AI Consciousness

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    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

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI
  7. We Built a Mirror and Mistook It for a Mind: Causal Liability and the Fallacy of AI Consciousness

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    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
  8. What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness?

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    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
  9. Quantum Information Panpsychism: A Testable Gap — E8 Intelligence Research

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    FINDING: Panpsychism debate centers on whether consciousness is fundamental physics, with quantum-information formulations (Faggin/D'Ariano) proposing a non-computational, non-material basis — but no quantitative mathematical model or testable equation emerges from these sources. | MATH: No equations, constants, or ratios are presented in any of the listed sources. The closest to formal structure is the claim of "quantum information" as foundational, but no specific Hilbert space, operator algebra, or information-theoretic measure (e.g., von Neumann entropy S = -Tr(ρ ln ρ)) is given. | CONNECT

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyScience & psychology
  10. When theories become movements: the controversy in consciousness science from a sociological perspective

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    This article analyzes the ongoing controversy in consciousness science surrounding Integrated Information Theory (IIT) from a sociological perspective. Drawing on Frickel and Gross’s (2005) framework of Scientific/Intellectual Movements (SIMs), the study examines four key social processes that enabled IIT’s emergence and consolidation as a successful SIM: (i) the role of high-status actors rooted in ties to Nobel laureates, (ii) entrepreneurial resource mobilization through an adversarial collaboration program, (iii) sustained micromobilization within a major conference venue, and (iv) the str

    Original source ↗Consciousness & philosophyParapsychologyScience & psychology