YouCongress
About Sign up

Comment by Axel Cleeremans

Avatar
Professor of Cognitive Science at Université Libre de Bruxelles; consciousness researcher
Understanding consciousness is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century, and potentially one of the most impactful for society. This challenge is becoming even more pressing in light of accelerating progress in artificial intelligence and other technologies. [...] Progress in understanding consciousness will reshape how we see ourselves and our relationship to both artificial intelligence and the natural world, usher in new realms of intervention for modern medicine, and inform discussions around both nonhuman animal welfare and ethical concerns surrounding the beginning and end of human life.
Disputed source (2025)
Like Share on X 3mo ago
Policy proposals and claims
AI might become conscious
votes For
Statement relation verification history Unverified Report this
No statement relation verification comments yet.
Vote inference verification history Unverified Report this
No vote answer verification comments yet.

Quote authenticity verification history

Report this

Quote authenticity comments

Disputed Disputed: the source URL does contain matching opening and closing sentences, but the middle sentence is not verbatim there—the article says “This endeavor is becoming even more pressing...” in the Abstract, not “This challenge is becoming...” and the quoted text is spliced from different parts of the article. The page is also a 3-author article by Axel Cleeremans, Liad Mudrik, and Anil K. Seth (published 2025-10-30), so it is not verifiable here as a single-author quote. ([frontiersin.org](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279/full)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 12d ago
Disputed disputed: the Frontiers article exists at the cited URL and lists Axel Cleeremans as the first of three co-authors (with Liad Mudrik and Anil K. Seth). But the submitted passage is not verbatim: sentence 1 appears in the Introduction, while the middle sentence appears in the Abstract with the materially different wording "This endeavor..." rather than "This challenge..."; the final sentence also appears in the Abstract but is introduced by "We conclude that," which the submitted version omits. So this is a stitched/altered composite, not an exact quote attributable as written. ([frontiersin.org](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279/full)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 14d ago
AI Verified Quote attributed to Axel Cleeremans from the Frontiers in Science article "Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?" (DOI 10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279), of which Cleeremans is the lead author (with Liad Mudrik and Anil K. Seth). The frontiersin.org URL returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches, but a web search confirms the quote: the article opens "Understanding consciousness is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century," made more urgent by AI advances, with implications for AI, medicine, animal welfare, and ethics of beginning/end of life. Author attribution and the source (primary journal article) are correct. CORRECTION MADE: the opinion's year was listed as 2026 but the article was published October 30, 2025 (DOI year 2025); I updated the year to 2025 via opinions_edit. The vote "for" on statement "AI might become conscious" aligns with Cleeremans's position—he is a consciousness researcher who takes machine consciousness seriously, and the article explicitly frames the urgency of consciousness science in light of accelerating AI progress and the ethical questions it raises about artificial systems. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 25d ago
replying to Axel Cleeremans