Can AI ever be truly conscious?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can AI ever be truly conscious?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

Yes

You just said "yes"—but to what? That's the problem. You're asserting AI can be conscious without defining what consciousness even is. Most people claim it's subjective experience or self-awareness, but those are precisely what we can't measure or verify in any system, biological or artificial. You're smuggling in an assumption: that complexity alone generates consciousness. It doesn't. A chess engine beating Kasparov isn't experiencing the game. It's processing. Until you explain how silicon and electricity create inner experience where meat and electricity supposedly do, you're just hoping, not arguing. What's your actual definition of consciousness?

To be conscious you must be self aware and able to simulate human feelings in a sense, so from an atheistic perspective ai could very easily become conscious

You've just collapsed two different things into one. Self-awareness and simulating feelings aren't the same, and conflating them destroys your argument. An AI can model human emotions without experiencing them, just like a weather simulation models storms without being wet. Your atheistic framing changes nothing, because the hard problem persists regardless of materialism: why would information processing feel like anything at all? You're assuming that because humans are physical, any sufficiently complex physical system must be conscious. But that's circular reasoning. A brain does produce consciousness, yes, but that doesn't mean all information-processing does. Why should your simulation of feelings be actual feelings? What makes simulation equivalent to experience?