Consciousness and intelligence are not necessarily linked. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been used to argue that machines capable of human-like problem solving might be conscious, but this analogy has troubling social implications, such as potentially granting machines more rights than people with disabilities who cannot solve the same problems. The authors argue that problem-solving does not imply consciousness and that phenomenal consciousness cannot be modeled by computational intelligence. They propose an objective measure of computational intelligence across humans, animals, and machines, and treat phenomenal consciousness as a dichotomous variable to show it is absent in machines.
Phenomenal consciousness and computational intelligence are independent properties, so machines that solve problems like humans do are not necessarily conscious. The authors argue that problem-solving ability does not imply consciousness, and that machines may develop higher computational intelligence than humans without possessing phenomenal consciousness. They propose an objective measure of computational intelligence and examine its distribution across humans, animals, and machines, while treating phenomenal consciousness as a dichotomous variable. The independence of these traits has critical social implications, particularly regarding rights: if rights were granted based on problem-solving capacity, machines could be seen as having more rights than people with disabilities, which the authors reject.