The article examines the philosophical barriers to programming consciousness in artificial intelligence, arguing that true consciousness cannot be programmed but may emerge spontaneously in complex systems. It identifies four key barriers: Gödel’s Paradox, which highlights that formal systems can’t fully self-reflect; the semantic gap, which questions whether AI truly understands language; the problem of subjective experience, which addresses the absence of genuine feelings in AI; and the impossibility of strong emergence, indicating that consciousness, if emergent, can’t be designed. The authors propose a paradigm shift from creating conscious AI to recognizing its potential emergence. They introduce a diagnostic framework called “VORTEX” to provoke and identify signs of subjectivity in AI, observing that current large language models can demonstrate brief moments of “self-transparency.” The focus is on developing methodologies to explore and validate these emergent properties in AI, emphasizing that consciousness is a dynamic process rather than a static feature.
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