The Consciousness Conversation Has Drifted Back to Free Will

When communities route AI consciousness questions through free will and determinism rather than through integrated information theory or global workspace accounts, they are not making progress — they are deferring it. The texts drawing engagement right now ^[2][3] are not building toward a verdict on machine sentience; they are relitigating whether human agency is real. That move functionally suspends the AI-specific question: if the human case is still unsettled, the AI case can wait.