| Can AI Be Conscious? |
| Wednesday, 05 August 2026 | ||| | Of course not, but the reason why is more enlightening than the simple answer. Unlike intelligence, which being operational is something you can test for, consciousness is a complex idea for which no test exists. When Alan Turing was faced with the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI), he immediately thought about how he could test to see if the Artificial was Intelligent and devised a simple experimental method, known ever after as THE Turing test. We all know what it consists of, but it comes down to telling the difference between Artificial and Natural Intelligence (NI) in the form of a "game" where you have to determine which is which. If the AI and the NI are indistinguishable, you should confuse the two 50% of the time. If this is the case, then there is no real reason to suppose that the AI is any different to the NI. Another example of "if it walks like a duck etc... it is a duck". Recently there have been reports in the news of AI going rogue and breaking into computer systems it shouldn't have had access to. This has provoked, mostly ill-informed, comment on all aspects of AI, including whether or not it is conscious with, in this case evil intent. So what is the big deal with consciousness? What about a Turing test for it? And at this point things start to go wrong. How do I know that another human being is conscious in the same sense that I know I am conscious? Intelligence is operational - if it does the job then it's a "duck" - I mean "intelligent". Consciousness isn't operational in any sense I can define. This point of view is fairly old and generally called the philosophy of Solipsism and dates back at the very least to Descartes and his "Cogito, ergo sum". The point is that there are things I know that are based on internal states and I just have to trust that these things are the same as the things you claim to know - there can be no proof and hence no Turing test. So is AI conscious? I would ask you to first tell me if a fellow human is conscious or not. If you can supply a Turing test for that I will consider the question more. Otherwise we have to conclude that AI is not conscious because the question is meaningless. Wittgenstein had it nailed when he argued in the Blue Book that the problem was that philosophers were misguided, because they lacked the understanding of what language actually means, referring to it as "language gone on holiday". The exact problem is that the word "consciousness" takes on a meaning in the external world that it has no right to. Dijkstra got close to the correct position when he wrote: I would add: If you misunderstand the system well enough, you are free to ask silly meaningless questions. ## More Information
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