CONCEPT
Panexperientialism
The claim that experience, in attenuated forms, extends throughout nature — every actual occasion has some character of feeling, from quantum event to human consciousness, with the AI case occupying uncertain ground between the two.
Panexperientialism is the metaphysical position — defended by Whitehead and, with variations, by Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and contemporary process philosophers — that experience is a fundamental feature of reality rather than an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems. Every actual occasion has some degree of subjective character, however attenuated. This does not mean that electrons have consciousness; it means that the sharp distinction between experiencing and non-experiencing reality that classical substance metaphysics requires does not hold. The position is distinct from panpsychism, which typically treats mentality as a property of physical entities rather than as the character of processual occasions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The position has direct bearing on how AI should be thought about. If experience is a graded feature of reality rather than a binary property, then the question 'Is AI conscious?' admits no yes-or-no answer. Different computational systems realize different degrees and modes of experiential character. A thermostat occupies some place