Consciousness and AI · Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
Consciousness is what distinguishes the familiar thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences of waking life from the processes that go on in our brains without our awareness. Conscious experiences feel some way for the subject and seem to afford the subject a distinctive form of first-person access. Consciousness is often seen as the mark of true intelligence and is also thought to be of great ethical significance, so it is natural to ask whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems could be conscious. Addressing this question is crucial to understanding the kind of change that might be brought about by progress in AI—on one perspective, consciousness would be the difference between systems that are merely sophisticated tools and ones that are our peers. The question also gives new focus to long-standing philosophical debates about the nature and grounds of consciousness. Early pioneers of AI were optimistic about building thinking machines, but the field’s founding documents largely s