Functional Emotions and The Pope’s Encyclical on AI — Digital Minds Newsletter #3

Welcome back to the Digital Minds Newsletter, your curated guide to the latest developments in AI consciousness, digital minds, and AI moral status.If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider sharing it with others who might find it valuable, and send any suggestions or corrections to digitalminds@substack.com.Will, Mitch, Bradford, and Lucius1. Highlights Selected Work, Research, and Funding Opportunities Adam Bales and Iason Gabriel of Google Deep Mind released Artificial Minds, Human Disagreement: The Politics of AI Consciousness, examining how society might navigate deep disagreement over whether AI systems are conscious. They argue that ongoing public deliberation should be central, since it can build an overlapping consensus on how to treat AI even where people continue to disagree about the underlying questions, and they stress the role of mutual respect and "democratic hope" in keeping that dialogue productive.Cameron Berg and Milo Reed released AM I?, a documentary exploring some of the fundamental issues in AI consciousness. They interviewed experts, including Jeff Sebo, David Gunkel, Ben Goertzel, and Daniel Greco. Sam Harris described it as “fascinating and scary,” and Grimes called it “an incredible crash course in AI psychology.”Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street released their book Emerging Questions in AI Welfare, providing the philosophical groundwork for investigating whether AI systems could ever be welfare subjects. They address how to interpret behavioral evidence, which entities might qualify as welfare subjects, and the ethical challenges that arise under deep uncertainty.David Chalmers surveys the tests we use to detect consciousness and their limits, from human and animal cases through to AI. He argues that none of the available tests can settle whether an AI is conscious, and that the evidence for and against machine consciousness is currently weak. Elsewhere, Chalmers asks what it would mean to identify a computational correlate of consciousne