−6°

Civil dawn — Light enough to read without a lamp. Shapes take on their colours.

Consciousness

Is there anyone in there?

The question

Machine consciousness was long a thought experiment. It is becoming a practical question: systems speak about themselves with an unsettling ease, and we have no test that settles the matter.

Two mistakes are possible, and they do not cost the same. Granting an inner life to a mechanism makes us easy to manipulate. Denying it to a being that has one would be a moral failure on an unprecedented scale. Between the two, we have to learn to act without knowing.

Still open

  • What proof would we accept of a consciousness that is not ours?
  • Can we wrong a being when we do not know whether it feels?
  • Is consciousness a fact, or an attribution?

Essays

  • The inverted mirror

    We ask machines to prove that they are conscious. Let us turn the question around: could we prove that we are?

Next question: Meaning