Is artificial consciousness possible (and how could we be certain)?

Establish whether any artificial system can possess consciousness and ascertain how such consciousness, if present, could be determined with certainty, including the identification of definitive criteria or tests for artificial consciousness.

Background

The monograph reviews major theories of consciousness and recent AI advances, noting that current systems do not satisfy convergent criteria for consciousness. Despite this, theoretical considerations leave open the possibility that artificial systems might eventually meet such criteria.

The authors explicitly acknowledge that, at present, the field lacks a consensus on whether artificial consciousness is achievable or how we could conclusively know, marking this as a fundamental unresolved question at the intersection of AI and cognitive science.

References

In the current state of knowledge, no one knows for sure whether an AI could become conscious, nor how we could be certain of it.

— The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Thought  (2508.16628 - Gesnot, 15 Aug 2025) in Chapter 5: The Question of AI Consciousness, Section 1 (Artificial Consciousness: Definitions and Issues)

Whether this entails subjective experience remains open.

— Self-Emergence Agent Architecture:Behavior-Inertia HMM, Reflexive Metacognition,and Social-Contrastive Self-Modeling  (2609.17331 - Liu, 15 Sep 2026) in Section 6.1, “Behavioral emergence versus subjective consciousness”

Whether the metaphysical question can eventually be settled is not ours to resolve here.

— The Disciplinary Language Transfer Problem: How Psychological Vocabulary Produces Governance Failures in AI Agent Deployment  (2609.26562 - Lasser-Chere et al., 22 Sep 2026) in Section 2, The Six Epistemological Assumptions

Physical substrate differences therefore remain an unresolved source of uncertainty about whether a human-like consciousness-generating mechanism could be realized in present hardware.

— What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness?  (2610.01002 - Holyoak et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Section “What Does the Human Analogy Imply for AI Consciousness?”