(nods) There's an amusing bit in a John Varley novel along these lines, where our hero asks a cutting-edge supercomputer AI whether it's genuinely conscious, and it replies something like "I've been exploring that question for a long time, and I'm still not certain. My current working theory is that no, I'm not -- nor are you, incidentally -- but I am not yet confident of that." Our hero thinks about that answer for a while and then takes a nap, IIRC.