The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of phenomenal consciousness in that system as an epiphenomenon or as a consequence of the behavioral or internal complexity of the system surpassing some threshold. As a consequence, a huge amount of literature exploring the possibility of machine consciousness and how to implement it on a computer has been published. Moreover, common folk psychology and transhumanism literature has fed this hypothesis with the popularity of science fiction literature, where intelligent robots are usually antropomorphized and hence given phenomenal consciousness. However, in this work, we argue how these literature lacks scientific rigour, being impossible to falsify the opposite hypothesis, and illustrate a list of arguments that show how every approach that the machine consciousness literature has published depends on philosophical assumptions that cannot be proven by the scientific method. Concretely, we also show how phenomenal consciousness is not computable, independently on the complexity of the algorithm or model, cannot be objectively measured nor quantitatively defined and it is basically a phenomenon that is subjective and internal to the observer. Given all those arguments we end the work arguing why the idea of conscious machines is nowadays a myth of transhumanism and science fiction culture.

翻译：有意识机器的假说自人工智能概念诞生以来便备受争议，其核心假设在于：系统实现的运算智能会引发该系统中现象意识的涌现——这种涌现要么作为附带现象，要么源于系统的行为或内部复杂性超越某个阈值。由此，大量探讨机器意识可能性及其计算机实现方法的文献被发表。此外，大众心理学与超人类主义文献借助科幻文学（其中智能机器人常被拟人化并被赋予现象意识）的流行度进一步助长了这一假说。然而，本文论证这些文献缺乏科学严谨性，无法证伪对立假说，并列举一系列论据表明：机器意识文献中已发表的所有方法均依赖于无法通过科学方法验证的哲学假设。具体而言，我们同时证明现象意识不可计算——无论算法或模型的复杂度如何——它既无法被客观测量也无法被量化定义，本质上属于观察者内在的主观现象。基于上述论证，本文最终阐明为何有意识机器这一理念在当代实为超人类主义与科幻文化的迷思。