Scientists on 'urgent' quest to explain consciousness as AI gathers pace (erc.europa.eu)

A Frontiers in Science review by Axel Cleeremans, Liad Mudrik and Anil Seth warns that recent advances in AI, brain–computer interfaces and lab-grown neural tissue are outpacing our scientific and ethical understanding of consciousness, making it an urgent research priority. The authors argue we need theory-driven, evidence-based work that can eventually produce reliable tests for consciousness—tools that would identify awareness in unresponsive patients, fetuses, animals, brain organoids or even AI systems. They stress this is not merely philosophical: accidental creation or misclassification of conscious systems would have profound ethical, legal and possibly existential consequences. Technically, the paper maps the field’s current impasse—competing frameworks such as global workspace, integrated information, higher-order and predictive-processing theories—and points to concrete moves to break the stalemate: adversarial collaborations that pit rival theories against each other in jointly designed experiments, renewed attention to phenomenology (first-person experience) alongside functional measures, and cross-disciplinary team science. The review notes practical signs of progress (e.g., metrics inspired by integrated information and global workspace revealing residual awareness in some unresponsive patients) but emphasizes deep open questions—whether computation alone can produce consciousness and how any validated sentience tests would reshape medicine, animal welfare, law and neurotechnology policy.