The Consciousness Conundrum
by Steven Gussman Author's Note: This article was originally published to the now-defunct Areo Magazine on 5/30/23 . What appears below is pulled from a version I archived on 11/7/23 (though I don't believe changes were ever made to this article). C onsciousness is among the greatest outstanding scientific mysteries. We have no direct way of telling whether a given being is conscious and therefore have to rely on basic induction. We know that we ourselves are conscious—as Descartes said, “I think therefore I am”—but to avoid solipsism, we must also reason that other people are conscious as well (that it is a feature of our species), and even that many other animals are conscious (judging by their complex behaviour, and the fact that their minds were generated by the same process of evolution by natural selection that generated our own). Would it be possible to build an artificial human that could fool anyone who met it, but that would nevertheless be a mindless machine wit