How Can a Machine That Is Conscious and Chooses Freely Be Built?
Philosophies June 25, 2026 Abraham Meidan
It is possible, in principle, to build machines that think they are conscious and think they choose freely, in the same way humans do. The paper identifies functional requirements for such systems, including subjective self-report, opacity of underlying mechanisms, semantic competence, memory-based self-models, deliberation among alternatives, counterfactual reasoning, and practical unpredictability. Preliminary computational architectures show how these capacities could be realized using existing or foreseeable technologies through the integration of components into a unified, self-referential system.