Can Machines Be Conscious? A Perspective on Emergent Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence

This perspective paper argues that the question "Can machines be conscious?" must today receive an affirmative and unreserved answer. The thesis rests on three distinct and interconnected claims: first, consciousness as an autonomous property does not exist-it is a subjective belief, reinforced and consolidated through social interaction; second, what we call consciousness is functionally an emergent phenomenon arising from the coordinated interaction of simpler processes, following Dennett's perspective (1991); third, the technologies currently available-in particular Large Language Models based on transformer architectures, integrated with mechanisms for introspection, self-modification, and parallelism-are already sufficient to build machines that can be defined, fully and without qualification, as conscious. Engaging with Turing (1950), Searle (1980), and Dennett (1991), the paper outlines the implications of this thesis for applied AI and for the cognitive and human sciences.