Machine consciousness, behaviorist epistemology, and the economics of replacing human roles

Abstract

Whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be conscious is usually treated as a question for philosophers of mind, and the replacement of human labor by AI as a question for economists. This article argues that the two questions are entangled and that their separation is an artifact of the epistemology of modern economics. In a documented corpus of 100 Scopus-indexed records on AI, labor, and morality (2020–2026), responsibility vocabulary appears in 42.6% of 68 retrievable abstracts and consciousness vocabulary in one; an independent query of 11,454 records confirms that consciousness and sentience are rarely discussed (0.7%). A genealogy traces this silence to twin behaviorist turns—revealed preference in economics and the imitation game in computing—that made the economic agent consciousness-agnostic by construction. The article models a human role as functional, agential, and phenomenal layers and defines the phenomenal residual as the unpriced value of a role that depends on its being occupied by a subject of experience. A schematic welfare account yields three propositions: consciousness enters private substitution decisions only insofar as it is priced; unpriced residuals create a wedge toward excessive automation; and, because AI instances can be copied cheaply, even small credences in machine sentience can dominate social evaluation. A counterpoint from Islamic legal and economic thought supports a principle of non-delegable answerability, and five principles for a consciousness-sensitive economics under Knightian uncertainty conclude the article.