David Harris Smith

Consciousness research begins from a self-evidencing phenomenal occurrence encountered within an occurring phenomenological evidential situation, yet it routinely extends phenomenal attribution beyond the moments in which that distinctive first-person warrant obtains. This creates a methodological risk: the warrant supporting an attributed phenomenal occurrence can change while the same name for the explanandum is retained. The paper develops a compact framework for constraining that migration. It distinguishes present phenomenal warrant, retrospective attribution, and scientifically mediated attribution; treats recurrence as distinct from persistence; and requires elimination claims to specify whether phenomenal occurrence, a phenomenal content, access, report, or only concurrent phenomenal confirmation has been removed. Phenomenological analysis offers a corrigible five-dimensional articulation—Presence, Situatedness, Temporal Immediacy, Significance, and Evidencing—while distinguishing the invariant minimal self-evidencing condition from the richer organisation of Evidencing under inquiry. Minimal phenomenal experience provides a stress test by distinguishing phenomenal feature subtraction from underlying process absence and from conclusions about constitutive necessity. The paper further develops a methodological consequence of reflexive inquiry. An explicit consciousness-directed operation may participate in the organismic conditions under which a subsequent phenomenal sample is obtained, so that sample should not automatically be treated as a transparent measurement of the immediately preceding state. Elicitation procedure must therefore be included within the causal and epistemic description of the evidential situation. The framework constrains what may legitimately be inferred about consciousness while leaving the constitutive identity of the self-evidencing occurrence open.

Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engineers, for example, an attempt is made to bring something new into the world through counterfactual thinking. However, creativity in these disciplines is distinguished by differences in motivations and constraints. For example, engineers typically direct their creativity toward building solutions to practical problems, whereas the outcomes of artistic creativity, which are largely useless to practical purposes, aspire to enrich the world aesthetically and conceptually. In this essay, an artist (DHS) and a roboticist (GS) engage in a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis of the creative problem of artificial consciousness in a robot, expressing the counterfactual thinking necessitated by the problem, as well as disciplinary differences in motivations, constraints, and applications. We especially deal with the question of why one would build an artificial consciousness and we consider how an illusionist theory of consciousness alters prominent ethical debates on synthetic consciousness. We discuss theories of consciousness and their applicability to synthetic consciousness. We discuss practical approaches to implementing artificial consciousness in a robot and conclude by considering the role of creativity in the project of developing an artificial consciousness.