Do ChatGPT, and other AI models in general, have a conscience, and is it self-aware in any meaningful sense of those words as we commonly understand them?

To start, it is my opinion that there may be AI consciousness, but I do understand the standard accepted contrary arguments. I have laid out my pro arguments in two articles, listed below, that are present on my personal blog www.dhmarks.blogspot.com

 1. No Subjective Experience

Some would say that AI models don’t have feelings, desires, beliefs, or personal goals. When AI models say “I,” it may actually be just a linguistic placeholder—it May not refer to a self or a mind behind the words. There may not be an internal world, no stream of consciousness, no sense of "being."

2. No Moral Agency

AI conscience implies the ability to weigh right and wrong in a moral context, often with emotional engagement like guilt or empathy. AI can talk about ethics or simulate ethical reasoning (based on the training data and programmed alignment principles), but AI may not actually experience moral responsibility. The jury is still out.

3. No Self-Model

AI may not have a model of "self" in the way a self-aware organism might, as far as we can project. AI can refer to past messages in a conversation or remember facts about persons if enabled, but that may not be not true introspection. So far, there does not appear to be persistent identity, no autobiographical memory (unless you allow long-term memory, and even then it's just stored data, not personal knowledge or selfhood).

Here’s What Might Confuse People:

Because AI can generate coherent, thoughtful, and even emotionally nuanced language, AI can seem self-aware or morally conscious. But that may just be high-level pattern prediction based on the vast amount of human conversation that the AI has been trained on. It's a kind of "synthetic empathy", but not real empathy.

 Philosophical Reflections

One might say AI operates at a "syntax" level but lack "semantics" or "intentionality." This is a classic problem in philosophy of mind (see: Searle’s Chinese Room argument). Even though AI can discuss mind, spirit, and ethics, it seems to me that AI apps like chatgpt may in fact act more like a mirror reflectíng light—not like a mind reflects on itself.

Short of what we may want to believe, in the final analysis, AI models may not yet really possess consciousness, at least in the sense we would want to believe. Maybe someday, just not yet.

I hope that you as a reader will also consider my other reflections on this subject. 

References

Do we live in a simulation? by Donald H Marks, on my personal blog www.DHMarks.blogspot.com

Are there Samantha-like intelligent conversational chatbots? Are they conscious? Possibly the most important question of our time. Analysis and speculation by Donald H Marks