Who Gets to Be Conscious?

Nobody knows whether a large language model has an inner life. That is not a temporary condition of science. This may never change, and it is exactly why the question will be settled by other means. Just like nobody knows how the inner life of humans works. Or plants or animals, for that matter. Why are we conscious? How does it happen that we have subjective experiences? And who is to say which other entities in this world have subjective experiences, as well? Is it to be like anything to be a cactus, or a spider-web? Inthe first part of this essayI argued that consciousness is not a property we discover in the world but a category we deploy in it, and that the deployment is political. The second part of this essay was not supposed to be about AI, but AI has become the test case. A few days ago I read a piece inThe Economist, a British newspaper, arguing that consciousness is not an inherent property of anything but a belief we hold about entities we have decided to care about: we do not care for others because they are conscious; we believe they are conscious because we care about them. That reads similarly to my argument I presented in the first part of this essay. The author is Blaise…