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# Is your AI navel-gazing or just number-crunching?
- URL: https://www.thedigitalspeaker.com/is-your-ai-navel-gazing-or-just-number-crunching/
- Published: 2023-12-18T03:54:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-27T05:35:25.000Z
- Description: Researchers have thrown caution to the wind and embraced "the C-word"—consciousness—to explore whether AI can actually experience existence. But even as they piece together a rubric to identify 'presence' in a machine, they're left grappling with the "hard problem" of consciou...
- Author: Dr Mark van Rijmenam, CSP
- Tags: News, #seo-post-1

Researchers have thrown caution to the wind and embraced "the C-word"—consciousness—to explore whether [AI](https://www.thedigitalspeaker.com/ai-keynote-speaker/) can actually experience existence. But even as they piece together a rubric to identify 'presence' in a machine, they're left grappling with the "hard problem" of consciousness and the inherent ambiguity of what it means to 'be'. After all, pondering if your chatbot is sentient might seem like asking if a pinball machine dreams.

Read the full article on [NY Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/science/ai-computers-consciousness.html?ref=thedigitalspeaker.com).

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