Artificial systems increasingly behave in ways that resemble humans. But is that sufficient to make us see them as conscious, or as having related mental states? We contrast two broad possibilities. People may rely on a single general principle: the more appropriately an agent responds to its environment, the more conscious it is, whether human or artificial. We call this a functionalist...
Recent debates on artificial intelligence increasingly emphasise questions of AI consciousness and moral status, yet there remains little agreement on how such properties should be evaluated. In this paper, we argue that awareness offers a more productive and methodologically tractable alternative. We introduce a practical method for evaluating awareness across diverse systems, where awareness...
Efforts to understand animal abilities face longstanding conceptual and methodological challenges, especially regarding cognition and consciousness. Awareness has largely suffered a similar fate, having been subsumed into these discussions rather than examined on its own merit. This paper asks what it means to be aware. The proposal is to understand it as an organism’s abilities to selectively...