Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you and me yet lack subjective experience. It’s an idea that has gotten many scholars interested in consciousness, including myself. The reasoning is that, if such zombies, or sophisticated unfeeling robots, are conceivable, then physical properties alone—about the brain or a brain-like mechanism—cannot explain the experience of consciousness. Instead, some additional mental properties must account for the what-it-is-like feeling of being conscious. Figuring out how these mental properties arise has become known as the “hard problem” of consciousness.

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