There are contradictory criteria here: "The theory has given rise to the construction of a consciousness-meter that is being tested in various clinics in the U

There are contradictory criteria here: "The theory has given rise to the construction of a consciousness-meter that is being tested in various clinics in the U.S. and in Europe. The idea is to detect whether seriously brain-injured patients are conscious, or whether truly no one is home... but the consciousness-meter tells us that about a fifth of them remain conscious, in line with brain-imaging experiments." The consciousness-meter observes the system they are trying to make an inference on - but as others have pointed out, is not categorically different than brain scans [1]. Further it's worth making a distinction between medical consciousness and the Qualia kind of consciousness - which I think this conflates. Largely because nobody knows how to measure the latter, and we are barely able to measure the former with "Level of Consciousness" and Grady Coma Scale being the standard. [2] "Our theory says that if we want to decide whether or not a machine is conscious, we shouldn't look at the behavior of the machine, but at the actual substrate that has causal power" This seems to only address the medical form of consciousness and does not tie it to the philosophical concept in any concrete way - while also contradicting the concept that observation is the key. It kicks the can and doesn't address the "Qualia" kind of consciousness, which in my opinion isn't something we have conceptualized how to measure. I wrote a bit about this in the past [3] I think what they are getting at is "don't look qualitatively at how the arms move, or the speaker/text generator outputs something" but rather, what are the mechanisms causing those actions. This I am in agreement with generally, but again, we don't really know if that maps to the qualia kind of "hard problem of consciousness" or not. I would argue it is impossible to actually measure whether a system has Qualia, it is inherently subjective - so it's possible that they are simplifying without stating that directly. I'd go further and ask, does it matter if it does? I have yet to see a compelling materialist argument that mandates the existence of qualia in any debate, ethics or otherwise. At a certain point people in these kinds of debates I've found that people start discussing non-material "souls" and at that point all bets are off. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integra... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK380/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK380/ [3] https://kemendo.com/intelligent-systems https://kemendo.com/intelligent-systems