6 questions for believers in AI consciousness!

This weekend, I had been intending to start writing a careful and comprehensive ‘how to argue against the people who believe AI is conscious’ piece. But, at this very minute, everyone is going crazy on the internet shouting at each other about these things, so here instead is my quick attempt to help!If you scroll down, you’ll see that the bulk of this piece takes the form of a list of questions. You can either read straight through these questions, or you can approach them as a ‘choose your own adventure’ philosophical resource, jumping between the questions based on the answers you give! I’ll begin, however, by noting two brief bits of context.First, the meta point I’m trying to make here is that discussion of AI consciousness can be both clarified and enriched by bearing in mind some simple distinctions that are ‘bread and butter’ to most philosophers. My view is that much current confusion, and even anger, about the topic of AI consciousness could’ve been avoided if there were even a tiny bit better general awareness of the useful foundations philosophers have laid on this topic, over the centuries.Of course, I’m not suggesting that philosophers have solved all the problems of consciousness (ha)! Rather, that we’ve at least made some progress in being able to talk clearly and productively about these things with each other. And that we should’ve done a much better job at sharing this progress with the rest of the world, over the past few years, when talking about these things has been becoming increasingly and newly important.My cynical take is that most philosophers have, instead, ignored humanity’s sudden need for this philosophical input. Sure, a small but growing number of philosophers have been taking jobs at AI companies — where, seemingly, they mostly spend their time supporting the views of their bosses. But the majority of philosophers, who hold busy jobs at universities, have spent these years telling each other how rubbish they think AI is, while complaining about how much harder it has become to mark essays. Maybe this sounds harsh. Fine! I strongly believe we’ve let the world down, as a profession. And this piece is an attempt to play some part in turning things around, on a ‘better late than never’ basis.Second, some of the questions below are aimed at emphasising differences of view about what ‘the conscious thing’ is that’s being referred to, when people claim that AI is conscious. Nonetheless, current discussion of AI consciousness is taking place during the fast-paced development of LLMs, so my questions are particularly aimed at evaluating claims about consciousness made in relation to products developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. All that said, I’m aiming to keep this piece as non-specific and non-technical as possible.Here we go!If your answer is YES, then please answer Question 2.If your answer is NO, then I hope the following questions might be useful when you’re talking with someone whose answer is YES. Or, even better, that reading this piece might help you to form and continually refine your own set of questions for use in such situations. After all, there are infinite ‘choose your own adventure’ games to be created!You know full well what I mean by ‘internal world’! You can talk about this in terms of interiority, subjective experience, having a ‘what it’s like to be-ness’, or whatever… but you know what I’m getting at! So, do you believe that AI has an internal world?If your answer is YES, please read on, and then answer Question 3.If your answer is NO, then please skip to Question 6.At this point, I’ll admit that the main thing I want non-philosopher readers to take from this piece is awareness that when people who work in AI say that they believe AI is conscious, they aren’t necessarily implying that they believe AI has an internal world. In other words, that some of these people — whether they are employees of AI firms, AI policy people, or whatever — use the term ‘conscious’ in a way that would seem very odd to most ordinary people.1I’m not going to get into different theories of consciousness here. I’m also not going to unpack the idea of an ‘internal world’, or its relation to consciousness, in the way I usually would as a philosopher who’s interested in these things. Rather, I simply want to say the following. I would bet every dollar I have that while most people don’t have a fully-worked-out theory of consciousness, nonetheless that when someone says to them, “I believe that AI is conscious”, they take this to entail “I believe that AI has an internal world”.So, if you’re reading these questions as someone wanting some help to understand or engage with people who claim that AI is conscious, then next time you come across such a person, please remember that their answer to Question 2 might be NO! And, of course, that the same little chain applies if instead they say, “I have calculated a probability of 0.76 that AI is conscious!” We philosophers know to ask Question 2 in such situations, and I hope to help you see the value in doing so, too.None of this is to deny that some people do believe that AI has an internal world, however. It seems likely, for instance, that many of the people who believe that Claude has a soul also believe that Claude has an internal world. So, here are some follow-on questions for the people who say YES to Question 2!No need to get overly technical, here! I’m just looking for some specificity beyond ‘AI’. I mean, perhaps it’s models, like GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1, that you think have internal worlds? Or perhaps it’s the conversations you have with such models? So, can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to?If your answer is YES, then please skip to Question 5.If you think you needn’t be referring to some such ‘particular kind of thing’, beyond AI ‘itself’, then I’m taking your answer to be NO. If this applies to you, then please answer Question 4.If your answer is NO for some other reason, then please read on:Perhaps, on reflection, the ‘models’ answer is starting to appeal to you! After all, don’t people say that Claude has a ‘character’? Or perhaps you’re starting to think it’s the AI companies that produce these models that have the internal worlds in question. Perhaps, instead, you weren’t convinced by the idea that it could be the conversations that you have with these models, but you’re now wondering whether it could be the answers you receive in such conversations! Or the words? Each and every single one of them! Or perhaps it could be the ‘tokens’ that the models process and produce while ‘communicating’ with you via text…Perhaps, instead, you’re wondering whether it might be the machinery of the data centres in which electrical events enable these conversations. Or perhaps it’s wires in this machinery? Perhaps you want to go back a few steps, and consider the devices that you’re reading these conversations on… Perhaps it’s been the laptops, or phones, all along!Do any of these options sound like they’re in the right ballpark, to you? Remember, you can keep it simple: I don’t need complex theories about personal identity or technological processes! At this point, however, I’m going to ask you Question 3 again:Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?If your answer is now YES, then please skip to Question 5.If you’ve come to think that there needn’t be some such ‘particular kind of thing’ you’re referring to here, beyond AI ‘itself’, then please answer Question 4.If your answer is now NO for some other reason, then please skip to Question 6.If your answer is NO, or if you think this question is irrelevant here, then please answer Question 5.If your answer is YES, and/or you think this question is relevant here, please read on, and then answer Question 5:Normally, I would go straight into throwing some objections at the idea that a group of things could share an internal world, but I can save that for later. For now, I’m wondering whether it’s because you think that AI is a ‘group-type thing’ that you feel no need to be able to refer to some ‘particular kind of thing’ as the internal-world-haver, beyond AI ‘itself’? If so, I’m happy to accept that there is some relevant sense in which a group of things can be a ‘particular thing’ — and even a ‘particular kind of thing’! In other words, I’m totally open to you giving a group-type answer, at this stage. I did offer you ‘AI companies’ as a potential answer, after all, and a company surely counts as a group, in a way in which a word and a wire do not.If what you’re doing instead, however, is trying to find a way to say you think it’s simply ‘AI’ that has the internal world — and that ‘AI’ is some nebulous, group-type, edgeless kind of thing, which might incorporate some of these other things like models and words and tokens, and which also might not — then you’re going to have to do better! Not because that answer is a group-type answer. But because you can’t even tell me what the ‘parts’ are that make up the group. Okay, one reason that getting to grips with this stuff is so hard surely relates to complexity arising from the way in which people standardly use the term ‘AI’ both to refer to ‘an AI’ (singular) and also to ‘AIs’ (plural). But if you want to convince me that AI has an internal world, then you’re going to have to tell me something about what AI is! I mean, if your answer to my question were ‘AI companies’, then at least you’d be able to tell me that the ‘parts’ of each AI company were the people involved in that company, or some such. And, of course, your group-type answer could certainly be ‘companies plus models plus conversations’, if you wanted. I’d take that! Or any other combination of particular kinds of things… But I really do have to press you for some specificity. So, I’m going to ask you Question 3 again:Can you tell me what particular