If there is no fact about consciousness beyond a system's functional organisation, which animals and artificial systems are conscious becomes an empirical question, best asked capacity by capacity. We assembled 305 findings from human clinical and experimental work, comparative and animal-welfare research, and research on language models and agents; organised them by five families of capacities...
This paper defends an illusionist view of consciousness and draws out its consequences for moral status. The thesis is that consciousness involves no further fact: once a system's functional organisation is fixed at the grain that makes a difference to the phenomena consciousness is invoked to explain, nothing further about whether or how it is conscious remains open. The main argument develops...