The Hard Problem of Consciousness Testing

Melissa O'Neill — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:56:45 GMT

People often like to speculate about whether future AIs might be conscious, a discussion that presumes that the ones we have today almost certainly aren't. But today I'd like to ask a different question: Are you?

I mean, you might say you are, but then today's AIs, absent RLHF and system prompts that tell them not to say certain things, would also say they are, so it hardly seems right to take you at your word.

No, what we need is a test for consciousness. A test that tests the good stuff, the things human beings ought to have if they're really conscious. A test that can reliably distinguish between those who are conscious and those who aren't.

And so I made one. It's available here, and I encourage you to take it. It'll provide an assessment based on a reasonable standard for consciousness.

If you do not do well on the test, that may be concerning. You may also want to check out my post about the story “C-Score” for some thoughts on the implications of failing a consciousness test. But in any case, I hope you find it interesting to take the test and see how you do.

Fear of Mechanism Is Failure of Wonder

Melissa O'Neill — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:49:21 GMT

Before you dive into reading this post, I invite you to read a short story I wrote called “Dismissiveness and Mystification — Four Tales of Emergent Complexity”. It's a set of four parables that illustrate a common pattern I see in how people think about complex systems.

Specifically, the pattern is a double-failure mode where people simultaneously dismiss mechanisms as trivially simple while demanding mysterious essences to explain what those mechanisms actually do. In each of the four parables, a character encounters a complex system, and their response is either to declare “this is nothing!” because they see the mechanism, or to demand some kind of magical essence because they can't accept that the mechanism suffices.

In each case, we as the reader know better. We can see how flawed our characters' intuitions are—and the final story also serves to mirror reductionist claims made about AI systems by showing that the very same claims can be made about humans—yet the logic seems completely erroneous when applied to us.

The parables highlight a deeply human intuition that's wrong—and wrong in a way that matters. We struggle to accept that simple rules can produce genuine complexity. We look at the parts and refuse to see the whole. In the rest of this blog post, I want to zoom into one particular manifestation of this failure mode: how ignorance of key ideas from computer science and fear of mechanism lead to flawed perspectives on free will and agency.

Reflections (Posts about philosophy)

The Hard Problem of Consciousness Testing

Fear of Mechanism Is Failure of Wonder