Discerning Artificial Consciousness from Artificial Intelligence - A Thought Experiment
Jack Charles preprint
A thought experiment proposes that an existential crisis in an artificial agent could serve as a test for consciousness. The paper suggests reverse engineering human sentience by using machine sentience as a guide, analogous to solving an equation through inverse operations. The manifestation of an existential crisis is presented as the metric to discern sentience, distinguishing artificial conscious intelligence (ACI) from artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial general intelligence (AGI). The aim is to provoke discussion and future investigation into the study of artificial consciousness.