But it represents a real shift, from asking whether machine experience is conceivable to asking how, concretely, one would go looking for it. The theory-driven approachIn 2023, a group of nineteen researchers spanning neuroscience, philosophy, and machine learning took a deliberately indirect route to the problem. Global workspace theory contributes some; recurrent processing theory, higher-order theories, and theories of agency and embodiment contribute others. The intuition is that valenced learning, learning driven by signals that function like reward and penalty, better and worse, may not be a neutral computational process but one that, in biological creatures, is bound up with feeling. The researchers learning how to ask machines what they experience make no claim to have heard an answer.