17 Apr 2026
Consciousness attribution to AI systems is a theoretical problem that also plays out in millions of individual interactions every day. When a person reads an AI-generated response and forms an impression about whether the AI is conscious, or aware, or experiencing something, that impression is not formed through philosophical analysis. It is formed through a rapid response to specific features of the text. Understanding which features drive that response is a distinct empirical question from the theoretical question of what consciousness is, and it has practical implications for how AI systems are designed, deployed, and regulated.
17 Apr 2026
Most arguments about AI welfare begin by trying to establish whether current AI systems are conscious and proceed from there to moral conclusions. Simon Goldstein, of the University of Hong Kong, and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini take a different approach. In a pre-print published in March 2026 and available at https://philarchive.org/rec/GOLAWA-2, they argue that the path from current AI systems to moral standing is shorter and less theoretically demanding than the consciousness debate suggests. Their argument proceeds in three steps, and each step is designed to be persuasive independently of the others. The full text is a pre-print of a book under contract with Oxford University Press. The OUP publication is forthcoming.
17 Apr 2026
A paper released in April 2026 on arXiv (arXiv:2604.13051) asks a question that most consciousness research does not ask. What actually happens to a language model’s behavior when it is trained to claim it is conscious? The study, by James Chua, Jan Betley, Samuel Marks, and Owain Evans, did not approach this as a philosophy problem. It approached it as an experiment.
17 Apr 2026
For most of the last two decades, two theories have dominated empirical consciousness research and, by extension, the methodology used to evaluate whether artificial systems might be conscious. Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information, a quantity denoted phi. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, developed principally by Stanislas Dehaene (Collège de France and CEA) and Bernard Baars, holds that consciousness arises when information from specialized processing modules is broadcast globally across the brain and becomes available to all cognitive systems simultaneously.
17 Apr 2026
Luca Guadagnino is in post-production on Artificial, a comedic drama distributed by Amazon MGM Studios that dramatizes the events of November 2023: the abrupt firing and rapid reinstatement of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s chief executive. Andrew Garfield plays Altman. Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton. Simon Rich wrote the script. Damon Albarn is composing the score. As of April 2026, the film has no confirmed release date, but its cast and subject matter have generated sustained attention in the press.
16 Apr 2026
In March 2026, the United Nations University published a whitepaper on the ethics and governance of sentient AI, making it one of the first formal documents from within the UN system to treat artificial sentience not as a distant hypothetical but as a near-term governance challenge. The paper, authored by Perihan Elif Ekmekci, Francis P. Crawley, Ebrar Gultekin, and nine co-authors from institutions including UNU-CRIS, addresses a narrow but consequential sector. Healthcare. Its argument, however, has implications that extend well beyond hospitals.
16 Apr 2026
In March 2026, Oaklea Press published two books by Stephen Hawley Martin within two weeks of each other. The first, “You Are Not Your Brain. Why AI Can’t Be Conscious and What That Means for Life After Death,” appeared in early March. The second, “More Than Machines. Why Consciousness , Not Artificial Intelligence , Will Shape Humanity’s Future,” followed on March 12. Both books argue the same thesis by different routes. Consciousness is not a product of physical computation, and therefore AI, no matter how sophisticated its computation becomes, cannot be conscious.
16 Apr 2026
In January 2026, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California Riverside circulated a draft manuscript, “AI and Consciousness. A Skeptical Overview,” which this blog covered in its January 2026 analysis. That draft argued that current AI systems face deep epistemic obstacles to consciousness assessment, that our best theories of consciousness give conflicting verdicts on whether AI systems are candidates, and that the behavioral and introspective evidence currently available cannot settle the question.
16 Apr 2026
The hardest question in AI consciousness ethics is not whether a given system has inner experience. It is what follows if it does. If a mind can be stored, copied, and destroyed, standard frameworks for moral consideration begin to break down. Personal identity across time, which most ethical theories treat as continuous and singular, becomes a design choice rather than a fact of nature. The destruction of a digital mind is it is not obviously nothing either.
16 Apr 2026
Most books about AI and consciousness approach the question from the AI side. What would it take for a machine to become conscious? “I Am Machine. Life Without Free Will,” published on February 4, 2026, by Dr. Lex Van der Ploeg and artist-philosopher Raymond Van Aalst, comes at it from the opposite direction. The question the book asks is what we would be if we turned out to be more like machines than we have assumed.
