Consciousness

Consciousness, in the sense that matters here, is the fact that there is something it is like to be a creature: experience from the inside, as distinct from function described from the outside. Nagel’s phrase fixed the target. Chalmers separated the “easy” problems of explaining functions such as discrimination, report and attention from the hard problem of explaining why any of that is accompanied by experience.

I take the hard problem seriously, and take seriously that philosophy alone may not solve it. What philosophy can do is get clear about what would count as evidence, and resist two easy answers about machines: that they obviously are conscious because they say so, and that they obviously are not because they are machines. A language model’s reports about its inner life are outputs of the same process that produces everything else it says, and are weak evidence either way. Butlin and colleagues propose a more disciplined route: derive indicator properties from scientific theories of consciousness and ask which systems have them. The method is conditional on computational functionalism and on the theories it draws from, and its authors say so.

The question matters morally. Moral status has traditionally tracked the capacity for experience, so whether a system is conscious bears on what is owed to it.

It does not, on my view, settle what we may learn from such a system. My argument that current language models do not transmit testimonial knowledge does not turn on whether they are conscious, minded or intentional agents. It turns on whether the truth of what is asserted figures in why the system asserts it, through its own operation: a third-personal condition, testable by intervention, that a working barometer meets without any experience at all (see the Tracking Minimum). Verdicts that rest on consciousness are hostage to a question that may stay open for a long time. I would rather the epistemology of these systems were hostage to an experiment, and keeping the questions apart is part of taking each of them seriously.