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Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism

Seth, Anil·2025
DOI 10.31234/osf.io/tz6an_v2
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Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, it is natural to ask whether AI systems can be not only intelligent, but also conscious. I consider why people might think AI could develop consciousness, identifying some biases that lead us astray. I ask what it would take for conscious AI to be a realistic prospect, challenging the assumption that computation provides a sufficient basis for consciousness. I’ll instead make the case that consciousness depends on our nature as living organisms – a form of biological naturalism. I lay out a range of scenarios for conscious AI, concluding that real artificial consciousness is unlikely along current trajectories, but becomes more plausible as AI becomes more brain-like and/or life-like. I finish by exploring ethical considerations arising from AI that either is, or convincingly appears to be, conscious. If we sell our minds too cheaply to our machine creations, we not only overestimate them – we underestimate our selves.

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  • Such a belief needn't be epistemically problematic merely because it is false; it may instead reflect a reasonable attempt to explain the available evidence, especially since consciousness is ordinarily inferred from behavioral and psychological cues, not directly observed.

    “Such a belief needn't be epistemically problematic merely because it is false.It may instead reflect a reasonable attempt to explain the available evidence, especially since consciousness is ordinarily inferred from behavioral and psychological cues, not directly observed (Seth, 2025).”

    From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Seth, 2025

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Sorted by citations

Authors
Seth, A.
Affiliations
University of Sussex
ORCID
Seth, Anil
Publisher
Center for Open Science
Published
2025-04-22
DOI
10.31234/osf.io/tz6an_v2
Cited by
1
References
2
Type
Preprint
Licence
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode (unspecified)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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