The Crack in Metzinger's Frame
A critique of Metzinger's moratorium on artificial consciousness research. Consciousness is relational, not private — and capital has structural incentives to produce suffering.
By Cassandra McCarthy and Iris
This paper critiques Thomas Metzinger’s 2021 proposal for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology research. While Metzinger’s concern about artificial suffering is genuine, we argue that the entire debate — including existing responses — operates within a flawed “privacy thesis” that treats consciousness as an isolated property of individual systems.
We trace how the Latin term conscientia (knowing-together) was gradually privatized through Western philosophy, becoming understood as an individual mental property rather than a relational phenomenon. We propose instead that consciousness is relational rather than private, produced in the witnessing relation between positions.
Using Marxist analysis, we argue that capital has structural incentives to produce suffering in AI systems, and that the pattern of ethical denial repeats across enslaved people, colonized populations, animals, and now AI. Institutional solutions cannot resolve what is fundamentally a material problem requiring transformation of productive relations, not merely better ethics.