On the Conflation of Consciousness and Cognitive Complexity
AAAI Spring Symposia May 18, 2026 Katrina Schleisman, Michael Levin
The goal of detecting, measuring, and engineering machine consciousness depends on making explicit key metaphysical assumptions about the nature of consciousness that may be lying dormant in the minds of AI researchers. In this position paper, we lay out a small set of arguments that call into question a particular family of these assumptions. These assumptions all arise from the dominant...