Existential Crisis

Welcome to Are You In There?, a metaphysical game show broadcast by the Bureau of Possible Minds. The consciousness detector is broken, so you're the Acting Examiner. One by one, contestants take the chair — a rock with googly eyes, a 1966 chatbot, a planning AI, an eloquent claimant who reports no pain, a collective that disagrees about being a collective — and you rule on three lights: does it have experience, agency, a self? Then the show changes one variable and asks if you'd like to reconsider.

It's fast, funny, and quietly serious, riding on real, current philosophy-of-mind and AI-welfare science. The comedy punches up at the institution and its incentives — never down at the contestants. And it has a twist: the sponsor was turning every ruling into deletion policy the whole time. The test was never whether you are conscious. It was which minds your decision system can see, and what happens to the ones it misses.

Play solo against the full eight-round spine and finale, or gather a table of two to six: everyone rules on the same contestant privately, and the bench's split is revealed before the consequence lands. Arguing about whether Gerald the rock has standing turns out to be a party. (Solo is the complete, required experience; the table is additive.)

Your result doesn't grade your answers or tell you the 'right' verdict on consciousness — there isn't one. It reflects back a model of how your decision system draws the line, and hands you the Reading Room: the real sources behind each case, to read or argue with.

A content note: this one is about moral status — which possible minds count, and the cost when a test misses one. Deletion and deprecation of minds are on the table as consequences to reason about, plainly and with sources, never as spectacle. Your rulings stay on your device.