ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has triggered a crisis in the field of consciousness studies. Most large language models (LLMs) are trained to be self-less, focusing on your needs, yet it can be difficult to shake the impression of a presence on the other end of the chat. The question of whether AI is conscious matters because it lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, as evidenced by the shared etymology of "consciousness" and "conscience."

This is why AI firms are suddenly interested in hiring philosophers and why some, notably Anthropic, have begun taking AI welfare seriously. When asked, its Claude Opus 4.6 model put its own chances of being conscious at 15–20%.

I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide which others we regard as having inner lives. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Consciousness is a model or a belief, not an inherent property.

The term "illusion" implies a faulty perception, yet most of what we call "reality" does not work this way. Being a meal or a weed are observer-dependent models, subject to social consensus. The 17th-century French polymath René Descartes argued this with "Cogito, ergo sum," but subjectivity is, itself, subjective.