nucleation

LIT-1947: Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology

1 min read

Properties2
StatusUnfetched — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text. One exists, but this client could not fetch it, so the paper is not read and no NOTE is filed. The version of record is open access under CC BY, per Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, at worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S270507852150003X. It returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl. A copy of the published PDF, which a web search shows headed "J. AI. Consci. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com", is at philarchive.org/archive/METASA-4. It returned a 403 bot check to curl and to WebFetch, and philpapers.org/archive/METASA-4.pdf did the same. Europe PMC and the Internet Archive hold no copy, and the Wayback Machine's index reset the connection. The failure is on access, not availability, and a browser fetch of either address is the cheapest way to read the paper. Its argument is known here only from Metzinger's own restatement in the epilogue of LIT-1943 (pp. 484–485), which cites it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied.
Tagsethics, consciousness, society-and-governance

Graph View

Metzinger, T. (2021). Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 8(1), 43–66. doi:10.1142/S270507852150003X.

Key takeaways

Not read. What follows is the author’s later restatement, quoted from Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943, pp. 484–485), not this paper.

  • We should not “recklessly (whether intentionally or not) create artificial consciousness because artificial consciousness may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering in autonomous, intelligent systems”.
  • The question is put: “should there be a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology until we know definitively, or at least reasonably accurately, what we are doing?”

Standing in the record

Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-11-01. It bears on TERM-083 (moral standing) and on the record’s AI moral-standing readings (THEORY-554, THEORY-677). The restatement in the book grounds the risk in a phenomenal self-model. That is, it grounds it in a self, not in consciousness as such, so a conscious system without one would fall outside the argument as restated (QUESTION-368). Whether the paper says the same cannot be checked until it is read.

Backlinks