Bales

Authored papers (1)

• Artificial Minds, Human Disagreement: The Political Challenge of AI Consciousness

  Persistent societal disagreement about AI consciousness—not its resolution—is the central political problem this paper addresses, and the core claim is that deliberative mechanisms of overlapping consensus and reasonable compromise can prevent that disagreement from generating conflict or civic quiescence. The empirical backdrop is striking: Colombatto and Fleming (2024) found that 67% of surveyed participants attributed some possibility of phenomenal consciousness to ChatGPT, Caviola and Saad (2025) report that experts assigned a median 37.5% probability to AI rights becoming politically contentious in the US, and Anthropic has formally declared it 'genuinely cares about Claude's wellbeing' (Askell et al. 2026, 74–77). Against this landscape, the paper introduces a four-desideratum framework—overlapping consensus via mutual-benefit and error-sensitive models, reasonable compromise grounded in reciprocal sacrifice, procedurally fair deliberation to sustain democratic hope, and Waldron's burden-of-recognition civility as deliberative respect—as the institutional logic for navigating the 'political challenge of AI consciousness.' The mutual-benefit model identifies policies (e.g., AI alignment, abuse-exit affordances) that sceptics can endorse for human welfare reasons while advocates endorse them for AI welfare reasons; the error-sensitive model grounds precautionary consensus in all parties' acknowledged uncertainty. The paper argues that satisfying these four desiderata is necessary to keep disagreement from tipping into violence, schism, or apathy, and that the same framework generalises to any novel, fundamental disagreement AI generates in an era of accelerated technological change.

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