In trying to give advice to someone who is just starting out working on AI welfare, I’ve been thinking about what papers have been most helpful to me in orienting to this complex issue, which sits at the intersection of many different disciplines.

What follows is a decidedly not comprehensive or representative, highly opinionated, list of papers that I have found especially helpful in my own intellectual journey.

[edited to add] They are also selected for readability; this consideration will exclude many classics.

Philosophy and science of consciousness

• Chalmers, "Consciousness and Its Place in Nature" (2002).

  • Foundational taxonomy of the different metaphysical views of consciousness.

  • Helpful things from this paper: it lays out the hard problem of consciousness; distills the most important arguments against materialism; makes the distinction between the epistemic gap and the ontological gap; and classifies different kinds of materialist views according to their stances on these (alleged) gaps.

  • Even though many issues in the metaphysics of consciousness can be bracketed as we do science, this is just good material to know for a variety of reasons:

    • Where you come down on the metaphysical issues can constrain the kind of scientific theory of consciousness we might expect. For example, some have argued that materialism should lead us to expect more indeterminacy: a mature scientific theory of consciousness might not divide entities fairly neatly into “conscious” or “not conscious”, but instead should have a lot of indeterminacy. (This in turn could have moral implications).

    • The difficulty of fitting consciousness into the material world might make you more sympathetic with illusionism about consciousness; if you buy the anti-materialist arguments but can’t bring yourself to be a dualist, you might conclude that consciousness doesn’t exist. If so, we shouldn’t be evaluating AI systems for it.

    • Where you come down on the metaphysical issues can also affect your ethics. Arguably, the more materialist you are, the less plausible consciousness looks as a basis of moral status.

  • Reading note: if you’re pressed for time, I recommend skipping Sect. 6, “The Two-Dimensional Argument against Type-B Materialism”.

• Chalmers, “How can we construct a science of consciousness?” (2013)

  • Lays out a methodological framework for consciousness science, and points out how it can be done as a distinct project from the metaphysics of consciousness.

  • Distinguishes between third-person data, which concerns behavior and brain processes, and first-person data, which concerns subjective experience; outlines

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