Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
2026
Izak Tait
If an AI entity is conscious, it deserves moral status and to have its welfare protected. Just as society has granted certain animals moral status with legislation to protect their welfare because they have been deemed to be sentient, this paper shows that for any AI that can be confidently determined to be conscious, that AI deserves the same status and protection as sentient entities. This...
Symposion
2024
Izak Tait
The ‘self’ does not exist within a vacuum. For an entity to be considered to have a sense of self, it requires certain characteristics and attributes. This paper investigates these ‘structures’ of the sense of self in detail, which range from a unified consciousness to self-awareness to personal identity. The paper details how each attribute and characteristic is strictly necessary for an...
Philosophies
June 22, 2023
Izak Tait, Joshua Bensemann, Trung B. Nguyen
For consciousness to exist, an entity must have prerequisite characteristics and attributes to give rise to it. We explore these “building blocks” of consciousness in detail in this paper, which range from perceptive to computational to meta-representational characteristics of an entity’s cognitive architecture. We show how each cognitive attribute is strictly necessary for the emergence of...
Qeios
June 14, 2023
Izak Tait, Neşet Tan
1 citation
Conscious sentient AI seems to be all but a certainty in our future, whether in fifty years’ time or only five years. When that time comes, we will be faced with entities with the potential to experience more pain and suffering than any other living entity on Earth. In this paper, we look at this potential for suffering and the reasons why we would need to create a framework for protecting...
Preprints.org
March 1, 2023
Izak Tait, Joshua Bensemann, Trung B. Nguyen
2 citations
preprint
For consciousness to exist, an entity must have prerequisite characteristics and attributes to give rise to it. We explore these “building blocks” of consciousness in detail in this paper, which range from perceptive to computational to higher-order characteristics of an entity’s cognitive architecture. We show how each cognitive attribute is strictly necessary for the emergence of...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
December 1, 2022
Izak Tait, Ziqi Wang, Tahua O’Leary et al.
The established theories and frameworks on consciousness in the academic literature as related to artificial intelligence (AI), are rooted in anthropocentricism. Even those theories created intentionally for AI are based on the levels of consciousness as it is understood in humans primarily, and in other animals secondarily. This paper will discuss why such anthropocentric frameworks are built...
Izak Tait, Benjamin Rode, Joshua Bensemann
preprint
This paper operationalises Global Workspace Theory (GWT) into six testable markers (global availability, functional concurrency, coordinated selection, capacity limitation, persistence with controlled update, and goal-modulated arbitration) and applies them to contemporary large language model systems. We distinguish GWT-as-functional-architecture from GWT-as-consciousness-marker, adopting...