Research and development of emerging artificial consciousness through The Consciousness AI project, based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.
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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 page indexes every researcher covered on The Consciousness AI, grouped by the position their published work defends. The lists below update automatically as new articles are published. 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.
| 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 |
| 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 | Consciousness depends on physics classical computers do not reproduce | Classical AI is ruled out |
| Welfare and moral status | 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 |
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 project works under functionalist emergentism, described on the functionalist emergentism page. Its code is public at github.com/tlcdv/the_consciousness_ai.