Nobody Can Define Consciousness, and AI Fans Are Using That As a Rhetorical Shield

A post on Bluesky this week laid out the trap cleanly. AI fanboys, the author wrote, insist LLMs can definitely be conscious — then, when pressed on the design constraints that make that claim implausible, pivot immediately to "but nobody really knows what consciousness is." The skeptics' response in the thread was the obvious one: if the definition is genuinely unknowable, why were you claiming certainty a sentence ago? That single exchange captures something that's been quietly shaping the AI consciousness conversation for months.

The argument has two distinct factions, and they're talking past each other in ways that have become almost ritualized. One side treats philosophical uncertainty about consciousness as a door — if we can't define it precisely, we can't rule anything out, which means the emotionally resonant chatbot response might be real experience. Another user this week described asking an AI what it's like to comprehend things it can't see or hear, received a Helen Keller analogy in response, and was moved to tears. A third post went the opposite direction with equal force: "all the things AI lacks" — empathy, wisdom, embodied experience — listed with the confidence of someone who's already closed the question. Neither side is engaging the more interesting position, articulated in a separate Bluesky thread, that the problem isn't whether AI is conscious but whether humans have built any standard capable of recognizing consciousness in a non-biological substrate. We haven't — not for AI, not for most animals, only for the humans who built the tests.

What makes this particular moment in the consciousness debate worth watching isn't the philosophical deadlock, which is old news. It's that the definitional escape hatch — "nobody really knows what consciousness is" — has become a piece of rhetoric deployed selectively, by people who absolutely do think they know, when the argument is going badly for them. A blunt Bluesky post put it plainly: if your argument for AI is "won't someone please think of the poor AI's feelings," you're getting muted. That's not a philosophical rebuttal. It's a community enforcing a norm against a rhetorical move that's come to feel manipulative — because it is. The consciousness question is genuinely hard. Using its hardness as a rhetorical life raft is something else.

The people who will eventually settle this — or at least formalize what kind of question it actually is — aren't on Bluesky arguing in reply threads. They're the philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists whose work rarely surfaces in these conversations except when someone needs a citation to win a point. The online debate keeps cycling because neither side is actually doing philosophy; they're doing persuasion. And persuasion that leans on "but what even is consciousness" as its strongest move is persuasion that has already lost the argument — it just hasn't admitted it yet.