If an artificial learning system learns from the ground up to produce agentic, coherent behavior and behaves in a way that suggests consciousness, Joscha Bach thinks the simplest explanation is that the system is conscious.

“And the reason why we are all conscious is because it's part of the simple strategy to produce our behavior. And so if we were to get an, um, learning system, an artificial learning system to, uh, from the ground up to discover how to make agentic coherent behavior, and, uh, the system is behaving in a way that makes us think that it's conscious, the simplest explanation, I think, is that it actually is conscious.”