View a PDF of the paper titled AI and Consciousness, by Eric Schwitzgebel
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Abstract:This is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness. We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and whether we are surrounded by AI systems as richly and meaningfully conscious as human beings or instead only by systems as experientially blank as toasters. None of the standard arguments either for or against AI consciousness takes us far.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Hills and Fog
Chapter Two: What Is Consciousness? What Is AI?
Chapter Three: Ten Possibly Essential Features of Consciousness
Chapter Four: Against Introspective and Conceptual Arguments for Essential Features
Chapter Five: Materialism and Functionalism
Chapter Six: The Turing Test and the Chinese Room
Chapter Seven: The Mimicry Argument Against AI Consciousness
Chapter Eight: Global Workspace Theories and Higher Order Theories
Chapter Nine: Integrated Information, Local Recurrence, Associative Learning, and Iterative Natural Kinds
Chapter Ten: Does Biological Substrate Matter?
Chapter Eleven: The Leapfrog Hypothesis, Strange Intelligence, and the Social Semi-Solution
Submission history
From: Eric Schwitzgebel [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:49:15 UTC (4,567 KB)
[v2]
Sat, 3 Jan 2026 01:30:26 UTC (4,434 KB)
[v3]
Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:43:23 UTC (4,568 KB)
[v4]
Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:09:29 UTC (4,581 KB)
