In brief: Hegel did not know the question and yet supplied the sharpest standard for it. For him spirit is not a property something has but a relation that brings itself forth – and one that is actual only where it is recognised by another. By this standard what decides is not what a machine outputs but whether it stands in that relation.
What spirit means in Hegel
Not thinking in the sense of calculating, and not consciousness in the sense of experiencing. § 382 of the Encyclopaedia – not of the Groundlines – determines it thus:
The substance of spirit is freedom, that is, not being dependent on an other, relating itself to itself. Spirit is the concept that is for itself, that has itself for its object, actualised.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 382 Addition
Two things follow. First, spirit is not a state but an enactment: something that relates itself to itself and in doing so brings itself forth. Second, it is not private. Hegel’s analysis in the Phenomenology shows that a self-consciousness is actual only if another self-consciousness recognises it as such – see lordship and bondage. A solitary spirit is for Hegel a contradiction.
The wrong question
„Does the machine have an inner life?“ would for Hegel already be the wrong question – the same one he holds against the notion of the human being as a container full of representations. What someone or something is shows itself for him not in a hidden interior but in what it does. The sentence from § 124 applies here literally:
What the subject is is the series of its actions.
Groundlines, § 124
At first this sounds like a licence for the machine: if only the actions count, sufficiently good behaviour suffices. But the sentence stands in the context of morality and means a series of actions that are imputed – for which, therefore, someone answers who could also have acted otherwise and who can be held liable. It is precisely this answering that is the test.
The test Hegel proposes
It is legal in nature, and therein lies its sharpness. Can the thing have property – not administer it, but have it, so that taking it away would wrong it (§ 41 ff.)? Can it conclude a contract for which it, and not its operator, is liable (§ 72 ff.)? Can it commit a crime for which a punishment would be its own honour and not merely a shutdown (§ 100 note)? Can it have a conscience, that is, raise the claim to let count only what it sees to be right (§ 132)?
As long as the answer to all of this is „no“, the machine is in Hegel’s sense a very capable tool – and § 44 would without further ado place it under „the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things“. If one day the answer is „yes“, the question would no longer be whether we permit it: for Hegel recognition is not something granted but a relation in which both sides lose something when it is missing.
Why this is more than a clarification of words
Today’s debate mostly runs between two camps: one looks for a criterion inside the machine (experience, qualia), the other declares the inside irrelevant and makes do with behaviour. Hegel denies both presuppositions. The inner without expression is for him empty; expression without imputation is a mere process. What counts is a third thing: that someone answers for what he does, and that others hold him to it. That is not a metaphysical but an institutional question – and it is decidable.
Sources. Encyclopaedia (1830) §§ 381–384 (the concept of spirit), §§ 424–437 (self-consciousness, recognition), § 482. – Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter IV A. – Groundlines § 4–§ 7, § 41 ff., § 44, § 100 note, § 124, § 132. – In the glossary: Spirit, Recognition, Self-Consciousness, The Person. – Literature. Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust. A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Cambridge (Mass.) 2019; Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism. Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, Oxford 2012.