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Frontier Log — entries on the boundary problem (ARG-02)
Every log entry whose diagnostic reading tests ARG-02, newest first.
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Judgements of consciousness in others rest on analogy, and the analogy should be weighted by causal relevance, not by behavioural resemblance — so writing stories and coding websites carry low weight, animals are the calibration, and current AI's behavioural similarity 'provides only limited evidence'. The weighting is where the framework commitment lives.
Fourteen authors set the hard problem aside, grant that experience supervenes on organisation, build a five-level hierarchy and a Bayesian model — and report that the verdict for current language models runs from below 0.01 to roughly 0.8 depending on where the theoretical credence is placed. The instrument has produced the project's framing-level diagnostic as its headline result.
The welfare chapter now states its own assumptions — the human yardstick is a pragmatic choice, the candidate subject is undetermined, and the correspondence between state and expression is assumed rather than shown — and then measures one model calm in its reasoning and self-blaming to a coordinator on the same fault.
The affect-first theorist builds the linking premise into the agent — homeostatic needs, a Markov blanket, felt uncertainty — and attributes a point of view on the mechanism, not the behaviour. The symmetry is run in the paper's own voice; what that leaves visible is where the framework's step is taken.
A behavioural criterion for intentional vocabulary, stated in advance and applied to any species; critics who refuse it for one class of system without naming the discriminator. Both sides assume the vocabulary and the metaphysics travel together.
The most developed operational programme in the field declines to offer a discriminator, and picks its evidence class for the reason this project bars reports. Two years on it concedes its architectural indicators are gameable too.
The log commits a claim, its discriminators and its outcome space before the events they are about arrive: that as machine-produced mathematics is certified novel, the criteria for what that indicates about the producer will move while the criteria for the artefact hold.
A computational model of conscious access that brackets the hard problem by design — and so avoids the boundary trilemma by declining to offer a criterion for experiencing at all.
Anthropic interpretability researchers introduce a 'Jacobian lens' surfacing a small, evolving set of internal representations a model is poised to verbalise, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing.
In two appearances weeks apart, Geoffrey Hinton stated that current AI systems are 'already conscious' — 'beings like us' — and that he under-voices the claim to protect his safety message.
Jaron Lanier restated his 2023 position: open the black box and 'the only thing in there is people' — AI as a collaboration of people rather than a new entity.
Anil Seth's public-audience statement of biological naturalism: attributing consciousness to language models is projection, and 'it's life, not computation, that breathes the fire into the equations'.
The field's most careful sceptical survey finds no theory decisive, states that there is no consensus even for the human case — and then reaches for the aggregate of the theories it has just found wanting.
Seth's Berggruen Prize essay makes the developed public case against conscious AI: four arguments against computational functionalism, with life claimed as 'necessary, though not necessarily sufficient'.