You might think a honey bee foraging in your garden and a browser window running ChatGPT have nothing in common. But recent scientific research has been seriously considering the possibility that either, or both, might be conscious.
There are many different ways of studying consciousness. One of the most common is to measure how an animal – or artificial intelligence (AI) – acts.
But two new papers on the possibility of consciousness in animals and AI suggest new theories for how to test this – one that strikes a middle ground between sensationalism and knee-jerk skepticism about whether humans are the only conscious beings on Earth.A fierce debateQuestions around consciousness have long sparked fierce debate.
That’s in part because conscious beings might matter morally in a way that unconscious things don’t. Expanding the sphere of consciousness means expanding our ethical horizons. Even if we can’t be sure something is conscious, we might err on the side of caution by assuming it is – what philosopher Jonathan Birch calls the precautionary principle for sentience.
The recent trend has been one of expansion.
