How Can You Tell if Someone (or Something) Is Conscious?

Pedro_P

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Researchers have ideas how to probe consciousness in a person or animal.
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▼ How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn't just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness? After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything else is inference. The nature of consciousness makes it by necessity a wholly private affair.
These questions are more than philosophical. As intelligent digital assistants, self-driving cars and other robots start to proliferate, are these AIs actually conscious or just seem like it? Or what about patients in comas — how can doctors know with any certainty what kind of consciousness is or is not present, and prescribe treatment accordingly?undefined
In my work, often with with psychologist Jonathan Schoolerat the University of California, Santa Barbara, we're developing a framework for thinking about the many different ways to possibly test for the presence of consciousness.
There is a small but growing field looking at how to assess the presence and even quantity of consciousness in various entities. I've divided possible tests into three broad categories that I call the measurable correlates of consciousness.
You can look for brain activity that occurs at the same time as reported subjective states. Or you can look for physical actions that seem to be accompanied by subjective states. Finally, you can look for the products of consciousness, like artwork or music, or this article I've written, that can be separated from the entity that created them to infer the presence — or not — of consciousness.
Neural correlates of consciousness
Over the last two decades, scientists have proposed various waysto probe cognition and consciousness in unresponsive patients. In such cases, there aren't any behaviors to observe or any creative products to assess.
You can check for the neural correlates of consciousness, though. What's physically going on in the brain? Neuroimaging tools such as EEG, MEG, fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), are able to provide information on activity happening within the brain even in coma and vegetative  patients.
Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaenehas identified what he calls four signaturesof consciousness — specific aspects of brain activity he deems necessary for normal consciousness. He focuses on what's known as the "P3 wave" in the dorsolateral cortex — the part of the brain behind the top of your forehead — because it seems to correlate most reliably with normal conscious states. He also focuses on long-range synchronized electric fields between different parts of the brain as another key signature of consciousness.
In tests which look for these signals in vegetative and minimally conscious patients, Dehaene and his colleagues have successfully predicted which patientsare most likely to regain more normal states of consciousness.
Sid Kouider, another cognitive neuroscientist, has examined infants in order to assess the likelihood that very young babies are conscious. He and his team looked for specific neural signatures that go along with subjective experience in adults. They looked specifically for a certain type of brain waves, similar to the P3 wave Dehaene focuses on, that are reliable indicators of consciousness in adults. They found clear analogs of the P3 wave in the brains of babies as young as five months old. Kouider concludes — unsurprisingly — that even young babies are  very likely consciousin various complex ways, such as recognizing faces.
Behavioral correlates of consciousness (▪ ▪ ▪)

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