Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness

If we aren’t sure what consciousness is, how can we be sure we haven’t already built it? In this article I speak from the perspective of someone who routinely builds small-scale machine intelligence. I begin by discussing the difficulty in finding the functional utility for a convincing analog of consciousness when considering the capabilities of modern computational systems. I then move to considering several animal models for consciousness, or at least for behaviours humans report as conscious. I use these to propose a clean and simple definition of consciousness, and use this to suggest which existing artificial intelligent systems we might call conscious. I then contrast my theory with related literature before concluding.