Does learning require feeling? The new science of asking machines what they experience, if anything

Machine consciousness was a question for philosophers because no one could think of an experiment to test it. That is starting to change.

For a long time, the question of machine consciousness belonged to philosophers, and it stayed there for a good reason: no one could think of a way to test it. You could argue about whether a sufficiently sophisticated computer program might have inner experience, but the argument bottomed out in intuitions, because the one thing consciousness, the “what...