> The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability

> The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability to interrogate that entity about it. We have no other way of measuring this; we don't even know what we'd need to measure. You can't have any subjective experience of something unless that something exists in the first place, so interrogating about "how does it feel" seems rather secondary, as well as not being proof of anything. If LaMBDA says it's conscious, is that all the proof you want? Let's also note that IF we knew, for sure, that the bag of subjective phenomena we're calling "consciousness" is nothing more than an emergent experience based on a sensory/cognitive apparatus having access to it's own internal states, then it would be pretty clear what type of animals/systems are likely have this (and which ones certainly not), since without any sensory/cognitive apparatus it could not exist. It then would seem very likely that the guy in the next cubicle is conscious since he has the same brain architecture as us, and most animals too, unless you get down to the level of insects and below in terms of complexity of nervous systems. So, your assertion that the only way to assess whether something is conscious is to interrogate it, rests entirely on the above being incorrect and consciousness being some mystical/dualistic phenomena who's existence we can't deduce from a functional analysis of the "brain" of the thing in question. You may still be correct in a round about sort of way since I doubt most people will accept that AIs could be conscious until such things exist, and are common enough that people can spend considerable time interacting with them, and through the unreliable measure of interrogation eventually convince themselves that "yeah, well, I suppose it might be .. is does SEEM to be ..". It seems long due really ... first we had people denying Copernicus, then Darwin, and perhaps this will be the final step in people eventually accepting that there's really nothing much special about humans at all. Who knows, maybe we're too dumb as a species to realize it, and it'll be some more advanced future species writing textbooks about the odd beliefs of homo sapiens at this "emerging intelligence" phase of evolution.