The Undecidability of Consciousness (and Its Scary Implications)¶
Written 14/05/2026
Let me begin by asking you a question: How do you know that you're conscious1? "Of course I am conscious! What do you mean?" you say. Well, that's fair, I'll believe you. Let me ask you another question: How do you know that anyone else you interact with is conscious? Normally, we just take this as a given, but how do you actually know? You might say that you extrapolate from your own experience, but that doesn't get us very far. One, you're extrapolating a single data point (yourself) and two, it doesn't work for anyone who isn't human! How would you go about determining that your dog or cat is conscious, that your parrot isn't just a robot sent by the government to spy on you. How do you find out? It turns out that this is actually an impossible task! There is no rule that you could come up with to determine whether something is conscious. The only way for you to know that something is conscious, is by trusting it when it claims as such!
The Undecidability Problem¶
The problem with identifying "things with consciousness" is that to be able to come up with a rule that says something like "if thing has symptom X, it is conscious", you need to know the symptoms of consciousness. How does one figure out the symptoms of consciousness? You would need to observe something that you know to have consciousness... hang on that's a catch-22!
Think about how we create rules for diagnosing infections. Take Polio as an example. Somewhere in history, for the very first time, a doctor saw the symptoms of paralysis in a person, extracted and observed the Polio virus for the very first time, and established that Polio causes paralysis (okay, it was probably more complicated than that, but you get the idea).
There is, however, no "consciousness-virus" known to science. We have a pretty good sense for what the symptoms of consciousness should look like, but they're all based on trust that other humans are conscious, that other animals are conscious. We can, however, never know as an absolute fact that something's symptoms of consciousness are genuine vs when they are being faked. This leaves us with the only option: "trust me bro".
Humans Are Not Special¶
If you've read my previous post, you're already familiar with this idea, but I'll state it from a different perspective here. We like to believe that humans (and to a lesser extent, other earthly life forms) are somehow special. This "human-bias" as I'm going to call it, is not based in any evidence or fact, but rather a figment of our own egos. We want to believe that we are somehow special. But if humans are not special, it implies that it may be possible to create artificial life, at the very least, via simulating actual life.
It gets scarier, because this implies that sufficiently advanced AIs2 will be indistinguishable from humans! Or put in another way, humans are sufficiently advanced AIs. This raises a big ethical question: Should a conscious AI get to have the same rights and freedoms as a human?