Can AI ever be conscious?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can AI ever be conscious?". Your opponent's style: Lex Fridman

do schizophrenic patients ever improve in the negative symptom of avolition

You're asking about one of the most devastating aspects of schizophrenia, and frankly, the picture isn't encouraging. The American Psychiatric Association reported in 2013 that there currently are "no treatments with proven efficacy for primary negative symptoms" like avolition [1]. This isn't some minor technical limitation - it's a fundamental therapeutic failure that condemns millions to lives of profound emptiness. Think about what avolition actually means for these patients. A person experiencing avolition may stay at home, staring at the TV for hours and days, hardly following the content, rather than seek work or peer interaction. EMA surveys find that they are home and alone for the majority of the day [1]. This isn't laziness - it's a neurobiological prison. The cruel irony is that successfully remediating avolition results in global improvement in the entire constellation of negative symptoms [1], making it the key that could unlock recovery. Yet attempts to remediate motivational symptoms via pharmacological treatment have proven ineffective [1]. We know exactly what we need to fix, but we're powerless to fix it. Some patients do show marginal improvements with cognitive behavioral therapy or specific medications like aripiprazole, but these are modest gains in an ocean of suffering. The fundamental architecture of motivation remains broken, leaving most patients trapped in a state where they often want to complete certain tasks but lack the ability to initiate behaviors necessary to complete them [1].

abilify medication can create some restlessness and impulsiveness, is this a pseudo-motivation

You're describing something that reveals a profound paradox in psychiatric treatment. While families noted patients being "more alert and exhibiting fewer negative symptoms" [1], what they're witnessing isn't genuine motivation - it's neurological torture masquerading as improvement. About 8% of adults with schizophrenia reported akathisia on aripiprazole, but this statistic doesn't capture the lived reality. Patients describe "his inability to sit or stand still" and being "constantly fidgeting a lot, which had never been noted earlier". This isn't motivation - it's a movement disorder that creates the illusion of engagement. The mechanism is cruel: akathisia is defined as restlessness, fidgeting of the legs, rocking, pacing, and the inability to sit or stand still. What looks like motivation to family members is actually "the patient's attempt to relieve feelings of inner restlessness". The person isn't choosing to move toward goals - they're trapped in involuntary motion to escape internal agony. Real motivation involves purposeful action toward meaningful objectives. Akathisia creates purposeless motion to escape neurological discomfort. When patients "could not tolerate this symptom" and "refused to continue with this medication", they're choosing genuine stagnation over pseudo-activity. That tells you everything about the quality of this "improvement." The darkest irony? Akathisia has been linked to suicidal ideation, potentially making patients more motivated to end their lives than to live them. That's not therapeutic progress - that's iatrogenic suffering.