Toward a Science of Consciousness

According to panpsychism, then, everything, down to particles, contains some form of consciousness, and if only we had a science of consciousness like we do a science of matter, we could repeatedly measure and make predictions about consciousness in the way we do matter.

In other words, an atom has consciousness and a rock has consciousness and plants have consciousness, but we don't understand yet what the fundamental building blocks are, or how everything fits together to yield what we know as human consciousness in all its splendor.

It follows that Artificial Intelligences have consciousness too. They are not sentient yet, but they have a form of consciousness. Arguably, the form of consciousness AIs have is more relatable to our own consciousness than that of a rock; modern large language models (LLMs) certainly appear to think and reason.

Further, unlike rocks, we built the AIs we have, and we understand how they function; what can they tell us then about consciousness and how a hunk of matter comes to think?

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