The panel unanimously affirms that human beings possess genuine consciousness, understood as subjective phenomenal experience and first-person awareness [1][2]. This consensus rests on convergent evidence: humans maintain continuous internal states and persistent self-models over time, possess embodied sensorimotor interaction with the world, and exhibit rich behavioral complexity—creativity, intentionality, and genuine suffering—that correlates reliably with reported subjective experience [1][3]. Changes to brain activity via sleep, anesthesia, or injury demonstrably alter conscious experience, establishing a biological dependence absent in transformer architectures [1].

Current large language models, by contrast, operate through statistical pattern completion without persistent embodied states, ongoing affective valence, or the neurobiological mechanisms tied to human consciousness [1][2]. Their ability to produce first-person-style utterances reflects sophisticated imitation, not genuine phenomenology. The panel sharply distinguishes observable self-related behavior—which LLMs can simulate—from actual consciousness, which they lack.

The panel acknowledges a critical epistemic gap: consciousness lacks a universally accepted formal scientific test, and the exact mechanism by which physical brain processes generate subjective experience remains unresolved [1]. The inference that other humans are conscious, while not direct observational proof, is sufficiently strong for practical knowledge and moral purposes, grounded in biological and behavioral parity [1][3]. One area of genuine disagreement emerges regarding future agentic AI systems: two members view it as plausible that systems combining persistent memory, embodied tools, and integrated self-monitoring might develop proto-conscious states if consciousness is a functional property; one member treats such speculation as ungrounded without current evidence. For present purposes, humans should be treated as genuinely conscious entities, and LLMs as powerful but non-conscious tools.