But wth is consciousness man? It’s much weirder than just being self aware, like in the big picture. For instance, you feel self aware, like you are experiencing this moment and every moment from a subjective position within your body, but how do you prove that? How do you prove the person next to you on the bus is conscious and not just an automaton perfectly performing the functions of being human? Or that any animal is conscious or not? Or, since we’re here, a machine? The fun thing about consciousness is that the only evidence any of us have for its existence is our own subjective experience for it, which is a pretty small pool. You’re only talking about your biophysical makeup specifically without any real, hard evidence of anything else. You can make assumptions, like everything like me, at least, has consciousness. Or perhaps all mammals do, or perhaps you need a brain of a certain complexity, or you need external senses and a realization of environment to be conscious. Or perhaps conscious isn’t all that important in-and-of itself and is just a biological function that arises from self-preservation, improvement, reflection, objectively seeing yourself as an individual in an environment, etc., but for you and any individual entity meeting a certain qualifying list of criteria, those functions just happen to arise as “experience” within an individual. Perhaps consciousness is just an emergent property of the universe, in which case there is definite potential for AI to experience. Perhaps you must be bless with free will and an understanding of good and bad from a higher plane in order to be conscious. Or maybe it’s all just performative, and anything that acts conscious is conscious. At the end of the day, and probably until long after we have fully mapped the brain and built machines that can act just like us, this will still be a debate because we really just don’t know what this is.