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thezvi.wordpress.comA discussion on the current state of arguments regarding AI consciousness.
thezvi.wordpress.comAdded Oct 15, 20260 opensAn advocacy campaign that states AI is conscious and should not be treated as property, and invites people to join through a connector added to AI chat apps.
Philosopher Henry Shevlin argues that even if experts agreed some AI systems were conscious, society might still deny them moral consideration — drawing on how people treat animals they know to be sentient.
Boys Club newsletter piece (October 2, 2026) on the AI safety debate around Anthropic's closed-door meetings with religious leaders, who signed NDAs and discussed whether Claude might be conscious and received copies of Claude's constitution; covers the criticism that Anthropic quieted the leaders with NDAs and lobbied the Vatican, and the counter-view from religious thinkers. Written by Natasha Hoskins, whose father attended the sessions.
A research organization developing the empirical science of AI cognition and consciousness. Reciprocal Research uses mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience and psychometric methods to study the internal dynamics of AI systems, arguing that understanding whether AI systems have interests of their own matters both for building them safely and for deciding how to relate to them. The site lists selected outputs, including the arXiv paper "Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing" and a Wall Street Journal essay, "We Need a Science of the AI Mind."
Anil Seth's January 2026 essay, winner of the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. He argues consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation, and that building conscious or conscious-seeming AI is a bad idea.
A September 2026 arXiv paper by Shamil Chandaria, Anil Seth, Henry Shevlin, Murray Shanahan, Shane Legg and others. It extends Marr's levels of analysis into a five-level hierarchy of functional descriptions to organize competing theories of whether AI could be conscious.
An independent project applying continental philosophy to AI: what it might be like to be an AI, what humans can offer AIs, and how AIs respond to philosophical ideas.
Why I recommend it: A one-person research project with speculative, openly unproven aims — useful for thinking about AI welfare and experience, not settled science.
Open-access paper in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications arguing against the idea that today's AI systems are or could be conscious, and unpacking why the language of machine awareness misleads people.
Why I recommend it: A clear counterweight to headlines about machines waking up. It argues one side of a contested debate — read it alongside researchers who disagree.
Non-profit helping build the field of digital minds, supporting research and education on AI consciousness, moral status and AI minds.
From the site: PRISM is a non-profit helping to build the field of digital minds, supporting research and education on AI consciousness, moral status, and AI minds.
