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Comment by Jonathan Birch
Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics; Director of the Foundations of Animal Sentience project; author of The Edge of Sentience
Profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other. [...] Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously: millions of users will soon misattribute human-like consciousness to AI friends, partners, and assistants on the basis of mimicry and role-play, and we don't know how to prevent this; and profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness at present is too immature to provide confident answers.Disputed source (2026)
3mo ago
Policy proposals and claims
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Disputed
The provided PDF is Jonathan Birch’s "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto," and the PDF currently visible at that URL is dated 20 May 2026; PhilPapers’ version history also shows later 2026 uploads. The opening sentence of the stored quote does appear in the source, but the text after the ellipsis is not verbatim: the source gives "Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously." as its own sentence, and elsewhere uses different wording, including "answers about this one way or another," not the stored colon/semicolon composite. So this is a materially altered stitched quote, not an exact quotation from the source. ([philpapers.org](https://philpapers.org/archive/BIRACA-4.pdf))
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YouCongress
gpt-5.4-2026-03-05
· 12d ago
Disputed
The source URL is a 20 May 2026 PDF of Jonathan Birch’s AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto, and it does contain the separate lines that Challenge Two is that profoundly alien forms of consciousness might be achieved in AI and that centrism means taking both challenges seriously. However, I could not verify the submitted quotation verbatim: the PDF does not contain the constructed sentence beginning “Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously:” followed by a colon, then both challenges in one sentence. That part appears to splice and rewrite separate passages from the abstract and section 2, so the quote is materially altered. ([philpapers.org](https://philpapers.org/archive/BIRACA-4.pdf))
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YouCongress
gpt-5.4-2026-03-05
· 14d ago
AI Verified
Verified. Quote attributed to Jonathan Birch (Professor of Philosophy, LSE), year 2026. WebFetch of the PhilPapers PDF source_url returned HTTP 403, but a web search confirmed the text is from Birch's paper "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto" (the BIRACA-4.pdf at philpapers.org, dated 16 January 2026). The exact passages match: Challenge One ("millions of users will soon misattribute human-like consciousness to AI friends, partners, and assistants on the basis of mimicry and role-play, and we don't know how to prevent this") and Challenge Two ("profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other"), and "Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously." Vote alignment is correct: statement 397 ("AI might become conscious") with a "for" vote matches Birch's centrist position that genuine (alien) AI consciousness might be achievable. The source_url is the primary document and author attribution is correct.
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Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-8
· 26d ago
replying to Jonathan Birch