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Consciousness Researchers and Where Each One Stands on AI

The question of whether an artificial system can be conscious is argued by a small field, and the disagreements track the person as much as the evidence. Knowing who holds which position makes the literature far easier to read. This directory has one profile per researcher, grouped by the position their published work defends, and each profile links to every article on this site covering their work. The lists below update automatically as profiles are added. For the positions themselves, see the index of consciousness theories and what each predicts about AI, and for where the evidence stands, the current scientific consensus on AI consciousness.

Each position below also has its own page, with the same list filtered down and a short explanation of what unites the researchers in it.

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The nine positions, in short

Position	What it holds	Where it lands on AI
Functionalist and computationalist	What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material	An artificial system can be conscious
Integrated information theorist	Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information	Feedforward architectures are ruled out. Simulations are ruled out
Biological naturalist	Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware	Silicon systems are ruled out
Illusionist and eliminativist	Phenomenal consciousness as usually described does not exist	The question as posed is malformed
Quantum theorist	Consciousness depends on physics classical computers do not reproduce	Classical AI is ruled out
Welfare and moral status researcher	Whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations	Act now, under uncertainty
Critic and skeptic	Current evidence and current methods do not support the claims being made	No verdict is currently available
Cosmist	Mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it	Consciousness can and should leave Earth
Builder	The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open	No verdict offered. The instrument is the contribution

Functionalists and computationalists

Integrated information theorists

Biological naturalists

Illusionists and eliminativists

Quantum theorists

Welfare and moral status researchers

Critics and skeptics

Cosmists

Builders

How to read the disagreement

A researcher’s position on AI consciousness is usually downstream of their position on what consciousness is in the biological case. Anil Seth rules out silicon because he holds that experience depends on a living body regulating itself. Giulio Tononi rules out most current architectures because feedforward networks carry almost no integrated information. Joscha Bach accepts artificial consciousness because he treats the mind as a self organising software process. None of these are conclusions about AI. They are conclusions about consciousness that AI inherits.

The welfare researchers cut across the whole set. Jonathan Birch, Robert Long, Jeff Sebo and Patrick Butlin argue that the correct response to unresolved metaphysics is a precautionary framework rather than a verdict, which is why their work appears in policy documents while the theoretical dispute continues.

This directory is incomplete on purpose. It grows as articles are published, because every new article names the researchers it covers and any name without a profile gets one. If someone working in the field is missing, they have not been covered here yet rather than judged unimportant.

These profiles describe published work. They do not claim that anyone listed here supports, endorses, or is involved with this project, and none of them has been asked to be. Any researcher who wants their profile corrected or removed can write to [email protected] and it will be done.

This project works under functionalist emergentism, described on the functionalist emergentism page. Its code is public at github.com/tlcdv/the_consciousness_ai.