CONCEPT
Consciousness
The quality of subjective experience — being aware, being something it is like to be — and the single deepest unanswered question in both philosophy of mind and AI.
Consciousness, in its contested philosophical sense, is the property of having subjective experience: being a system for which there is "something it is like" to be that system (Nagel, 1974). The concept spans neuroscience (the neural correlates of consciousness), philosophy (the hard problem), and AI (could a machine be conscious?).
In The You On AI Field Guide
Consciousness is the AI question every other question eventually reduces to: What would it take to say a large language model is conscious? Do we have a test? If we don't, and systems are becoming more capable, do we owe them moral consideration? These questions are live now in ways they were not ten years ago.
The 2020s have made consciousness one of the more urgent practical questions in AI ethics, displacing decades when it was treated as a speculative topic. Working researchers at frontier labs have published internal evaluations of whether their systems may be conscious; academic philosophers have addressed the question in peer-reviewed journals; the usual