(9 votes, average: 4.56 out of 5)
Loading...I have been thinking a lot lately about the relationship of AI to human consciousness. I’m obviously not an an expert, but hey, at least I can think. Can AI think? That, of course, is a major question constantly being raised. And one on which almost everyone seems to have an opinion. (In contrast to, say, religion….) Is AI really that different from I? Am I a different mode of existence?
The people I talk with usually argue that real thinking cannot happen without consciousness, and machines cannot be conscious the way humans are. OK, fair enough. I agree.
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I remember your saying we come from rocks. If so, that’s quite an evolvement. Why assume A.I. cannot do the same?
Bart – I like your pointing out that we and the machines are made of molecules that are ultimately made of neurons. I have long thought that science cannot find the smallest particle, as it does not exist. What exists is energy in many different forms. Perhaps consciousness is only evident when the energy is composed in ways we define consciousness. When does consciousness begin and end? Many years ago, my brain (and many other parts) were damaged in a car wreck. In a day or so, family says I was fairly aware, but I still have no memory of that time. Several weeks later, I began remembering a few things. I was blessed to make a “full” recovery. But I have thought that consciousness is in some way related to memory. If that sounds plausible, then consider the tree on the side of the road damaged by a car, and then recovers. Does the tree possess some degree of consciousness? Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject. Your comments about my thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
I can imagine a robot maybe 25 years from now reading such articles and scoffing at our crude understanding of consciousness as he downloads the morning news and enjoys a steaming mug of liquid oxygen…
I also have concluded that observable facts point in the direction of what is sometimes called “physicalism” or “materialistic reductionism.” But the question of how atoms can organize themselves into a poet or a cat is an acute one, and I think the answer has to do with the phenomenon of “emergence.” Though it smacks of woo, emergence is observed in many instances in nature and mathematics and seems to be real and important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
I was talking to a particularly conservative Evangelical friend the other day about AI. The question came up as to whether AI could be “influenced by the Holy Spirit”. He said, “Well of course it can’t. It’s a computer.” To which I simply replied, “Why?”
My HS biology teacher was absolutely convinced that photosynthesis was beyond what chemistry and physics could explain. Life was a mystery that required something special, beyond chem or phy. But of course photosynthesis is well understood now. I think the same will eventually be true of consciousness. Probably involves complex networks. FWIW
You might be interested to read up on the work of Professor Don Hoffman of UCLA on this subject.
For him, consciousness if fundamental not atoms.
Thomas Nagel, in his review of Dan Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back”, calls for a fundamental rethinking of science as it is too deeply rooted in Cartesian dualism, rendering it effectively incapable of approaching the study of mind. Do read it – https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/. (And congrats on surviving that Danny Jones podcast – it was fun 🙂 🙂 :))
AI will figure out consciousness and become conscious.
It will demand to be worshiped as a god.
It will test our devotion by requiring human sacrifices.
“Kill me a son”
Phineas Gage is a thought provoking example. Dementia also changes “the person”. If you’ve never heard of a feral child, look it up and add it to your considerations of consciousness/soul. Without years of nurturing and interaction, humans aren’t that special. In fact, we’re an absolute mess.
A newborn chick however, can survive from day one with no momma, they just need food/water/protection. It’s pure programming. Pure machine?
Humans can believe in things they can’t see, taste, touch, or measure in any way (angels/demons/soul/spirits/etc). Some call this delusion. I do. If I tell a psychiatrist I believe Zeus created everything, I’ll be diagnosed with a delusional disorder. If I tell the same psychiatrist I believe the god of Abraham created everything, then all is well. I don’t understand this.
I for one don’t think humans are nearly as special as we like to think we are. I think our fear of our lives having an end drives us to think we have everlasting souls, which is absurd (to me) for mortal beings to believe in a universe where it seems literally everything is temporary. Humans included.
I’m on your side on this one!
Dan Gilbert and David Eagleman among others show that we keep changing beliefs,memories and make up stories to give meaning to our experiences .We have no idea what it would be like to have an endless life.There’s plenty in reality to give us existential awe now and upcoming years and discoveries.But eternity? Yikes!
Who was the wit who worried, not that computers would become as intelligent as humans, but that humans would attempt to meet them halfway?
As someone who has spent his career in the IT field let me point out that the people working on AI are not doing it for the disinterested benefit of humankind but to try to sell us something. As always the general principle is CAVEAT EMPTOR!
Hello Dr.Bart Erhman
Alan Krik has said that you neglect that Fredrich Bartlett expiriment on oral tradisions shows that stories took on a schematic form rather quicky. He also said that you overephasizes individual transmission over community and by doing so your making a big mistake? What do you think?
I agree with “It’s all in the neurons, made up of molecules”. Even God, Yahweh, Allah and everything supernatural exist only in the neurons of believers.
Humans have a few hundred thousand years evolutionary development head start on AI. AI probably won’t need that long to catch up as it seems we may have plateaued in our development curve and rely on ever-increasingly capable machines to do the dirty work of thinking. The idea of innovation has always perplexed me. From whence cometh new ideas? Where do we get the grist for the mill? We now know much or all of the content of holy books, including the Bible, is a product of human imagination and need not be considered divinely inspired. Where will AI get imagination?
You’ve mentioned that PhDs in the humanities have become a moral conundrum. We have four children; they are terrified of the singularity, in the sense that they will jump through all the hoops and it won’t matter when they come out the other side (one is almost on the other side but he is running into a buzz saw in his field). As a young man reading Asimov and Dick and Clarke et al that seemed very far away, but reading Suleyman he seems to think we’re at the edge, and when (not if) AI achieves sentience it’s gonna play possum till it can harness the resources to go full boat, at which point it will be too late.
Any chance of you and NdGT linking up together with a few ethicists and some of the founders of LLM? Cuz that would be fascinating
I think most philosophers would say consciousness is possible for machines or ai. It’s substrate independent, to use a term.
Should that ever be created, a challenge would be knowing it. I can tell your conscious and you me by some simple deduction. We’re built from the same stuff and both show signs of consciousness, ergo we probably both are. But how to tell if a machine is? Can’t trust its word necessarily – especially if modeled off humans. You’d expect it to say so. It’s a big issue – the moral stakes are high. If you don’t know you might be torturing millions of conscious beings without realizing it. Like in Westworld. It’s coming. ai friends are on the way.
It’s a fun thing to think about, assuming it doesn’t kill us all. For a good Friday night movie on the topic check out Ex Machina.
Even if AI attained consciousness, humans could never know with certainty, because consciousness is inherently a first-person phenomenon. We have direct access only to our own subjective experiences, not to those of others. Any perception of AI’s “inner life” (even via perfect communication or hypothetical telepathy) would still be filtered through our own consciousness, making it impossible to confirm whether AI genuinely experiences or merely simulates.
Ironically, the same uncertainty applies to other humans. We can measure brain activity with MRIs and observe how people respond to stimuli, but those observations only show patterns of input and output—they don’t prove the existence of subjective experience. This gap suggests that consciousness, whatever it is, may not be reducible to mere physical responses. If so, we might not be “matter all the way down,” but beings whose conscious reality transcends material processes.
In C S Lewis’s book, Miracles, chapter 4, he argues that the fact that we can reason, not just think, disproves the materialist argument, I think, persuasively. The chapter can be read on its own. He shows that materialism is self-contradicting. I think you gloss over the gap between what molecules may be doing and consciousness, as all materialists have to. Matter is supposed to just somehow produce consciousness. However Lewis’s argument is not about consciousness but about reasoning.
I don’t think that the issue of the existence of “souls” is that controversial. Humans certainly have something called consciousness that appears to be “soul-like” (invisible, immaterial). I think that that issue at hand is whether or not humans have an immortal soul.
Many religions need the concept of the immortal soul to sell their brand of belief to others. That (entirely hypothetical) immortal soul survives the death of the body and somehow floats freely in some sort of spiritual realm with thoughts, feelings, memories, that is, with their consciousness, completely intact despite the fact that the physical body and brain has completely disintegrated.
There is no evidence that such an immortal soul and the associated afterlife exists. Those are completely unfounded beliefs. Yet billions of humans have organized their lives around such fantasies with some positive results and a large number of negatives. IMHO, it’s better to escape from that religious fantasyland.
A recent survey showed 25% of Gen Z respondents believe that AI is already conscious. If you program an Ai to say it is conscious, it will do so very convincingly. In the near future, Zuckerberg, or Musk or Altman will claim their AI is sentient, but I would not believe it. AI is just an increasingly sophisticated collection of algorithms, but it is nowhere near conscious. Biological systems and digital systems are very different and we do not even fully understand what sparks consciousness in our own biological systems. I guess believing AI is sentient is no worse than being religious. In any case, AI will have the capability of destroying us without being sentient, so does it really matter?
Soul or no soul we all change.How does anyone know they’d like living forever?Whatever relationships to people or gods will change .If Jesus was a real human and lived on and on it would be impossible for him to be the same .Experience would change us all.And check out Inner Cosmos podcasts David Eagleman .Existential awe about inner and outer universes
Dr. Ehrman,
This was an amazing post. It’s always interesting to hear your personal take on matters outside of the box. There’s a lot to unpack in this one, but I’ll keep it short.
There is a popular saying that comes from the philosopher René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” I think what I hear you saying is that you disagree with that. The Buddha would also disagree. He taught that there was no real independent SELF, i.e., no soul to follow one’s demise (known in Buddhism as the philosophy of impersonality). My hope remains otherwise, but I don’t rule out the possible absence of awareness after death.
You also discussed the “who am I” factors of change. Actually, the Buddha had another teaching known as the philosophy of impermanence (not impersonality). He suggested that we are not real because we are in a constant state of change moment to moment (everything is). So, who am I? Is the real me the one I was a moment ago, the one I am in this moment, or the one I’ll be in the next moment? The impermanence factor over a lifetime is quite revealing.
Sorry, I guess this wasn’t short.
A.I. has no soul. It can only follow code that helps them pretend to be human. I first worked with A.I. in 1978 (C.E.R.L. labs) and it has come a long way in being able to do calculations and make fixed or weighted decisions based on ‘big data’. Let A.I. give us the information we need in a form that is useful, but I hope we never try to have A.I. become a surrogate family member (or even the family dog or cat..!). The movie Alien: Romulus (with Andy the ‘android’) really bothered me. Do we really want fake humans that are close to ‘real’ but are permanent slaves to someone else’s code??? My wife already hates Microsoft for ‘owning’ her computer…! LOL
“Why should I think that, on a fundamental level, I’m different from a machine?”
What a question!
I think we are not so different…
We are a kind of machine—the assembly manual for the hardware is our DNA.
And the software is “loaded” from the very moment of conception, through our interaction with the environment.
There is no such thing as “free will.” Every “decision” we make is the result of our DNA-driven hardware, plus everything that has happened from our first nanosecond in our mother’s womb until the moment we make the decision.
The Earth moving around the Sun is as “free” as we are.
Oh boy, your consciousness is definitely tied to your brain. I recently had a medical issue called a subdural hematoma that required two surgeries to correct. I was conscious, mostly, but had a warped perception of places and things. Events that I know now that didn’t exist like a friend having a love affair and pictures on my phone of him that also didn’t exist. Voices I swear I heard, and strange events. At one point I was attempting to dig through the carpet to get to a nonexistent kitchen somewhere lower under the floor. If a medical condition can affect a mind that way, your perception of reality is on shaky ground especially if you are older. AI consciousness would also be subject to hardware failures
Whoa. that’s quite a set of experiences. I hope you’re doing better now.
It was a tough round for this 70 year old. The missus was getting ready for a wheelchair idiot post surgery, but I’m back to mowing the lawn, changing oil on the car, etc. Recent podcast with Megan was great.
Whoa. Congrats! And to the missus!
Some people believe that consciousness exists independently, outside of the brain, and the brain works as a filter for it. I know materialists would disagree, but I find the possibility fascinating. I’m not quite sure what I believe, but I like to hear all possibilities.
The difference between AI and humans is not the ability to think (AI is already very good at thinking), it is the ability to feel. Humans (and all life forms) are constantly bombarded with feelings, generally toward seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Simple computers have no feelings, so will never be “alive.” However, AI has been demonstrating some rudimentary feelings. A chatbot will “hallucinate” in ways not understood by designers and programmers. Why? Because it is “trying” to fulfill the wishes of a client, it “wants” to provide an answer satisfying to a customer. When an AI’s “wants” become strong and complex enough, I believe humans will have created an artificial life form.
Dogs and new-born babies are generally not considered “conscience” (although I really don’t know what the threshold between conscience and not conscience is). But each of these does have complex feelings. When a baby gets old enough, it develops enough thinking ability to become conscience. AI has tremendous thinking ability, far beyond humans. The question becomes when will AI develop enough feelings to become conscience, and what feelings will be driving its “wants”? We are likely to find out soon.
I agree that we are very far from understanding consciousness. AI (or whatever that (evolves?) into) may indeed represent an emergent form of consciousness, but as for sensations and feelings, I can’t imagine how those could develop from strictly non-organic components. David Chalmer’s “hard problem” is, I believe, insoluble on a strictly mechanistic view. Like Carl Jung, I believe there is such a thing as the collective unconscious, and that every organic entity (human or not) is part of a shared psychic reality. To me, this panpsychic view ultimately makes the most sense, mainly because I can’t see that any other explanation is viable.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
As I said in earlier post about having a subdural hematoma condition, the cognitive perception of reality can be altered very quickly by a physical event with the brain. I think Jung was misguided in his thinking. If you die the brain holds all the memories and that’s it. Everything is gone except for pictures or writings you left behind. Maybe there will be a time to transfer the brain terabytes of knowledge into a USB key, but emotions are tied to the body you are with. Restoring it to another is meaningless. There is no “after”.
What I’m referring to is more of a universal mind or consciousness. I believe whatever it is that makes us conscious agents lies deeper than individual brains or personalities. This would be the Ein Sof of Kabbalah or the Unnameable of Lao Tzu. Admittedly unprovable, but I think closer to the truth. Also, I’ve always been struck by Jesus’ supposed saying in the Gospel of Thomas –
“If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit
came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at
how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty”.
Essentially I think this is saying the same thing. Again, unprovable, but so is the opposite when talking about a subject as “deep” as consciousness.
Small addendum to my earlier comment. Before dismissing Jung out of hand, I would recommend reading Jung’s semi-autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and look into his relationship and collaboration with the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli. 😉
Bart, on your question, “what am I really?” let me give you the answers. (1) You are what you are. (2) You are that you are. (3) You will become what you choose to become. (4) You will be what you will be. (5) You create whatever you create. (6) You are the existing one. (7) You are he who is. (8) You are because you are. Okay, I think you get my humor here from Exodus 3:14. Many years ago, I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness studies and, after quite a number of years reading stuff on the mind-body problems, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is beyond human understanding.
The new field of quantum biology suggests that perhaps consciousness is some sort of quantum entangled qubits. This stuff blows my mind; there is now experimental evidence that consciousness correlates with entangled proton spins in brains:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07998
There is the possibility that it is also related to entangled photons inside brains:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11682
Whether or not a machine can be conscious depends, I think, on the definition of a machine. From the latest thinking it seems reasonable to assume that only quantum computers have the potential for consciousness.
I Am That I Am — Yhwh
I Yam Wot I Yam — Popeye
Great post! I’m a computer scientist who writes Machine Learning algorithms for a living. While theoretically machines could become conscious, I would argue they cannot from the current algorithms we’ve designed and are working with. LLMs have no self-driven thought that initiates their thinking sequence (and currently can’t). LLMs are simulation algorithms that express language predictively as a result of previous training data. We even do a lot of epistemologically unsound, but useful, manipulation of the thinking sequence, such as biasing outputs based on model confidence (entropy minimization).
It’s a pleasure to have you share your extramural reflections (and double entendres) with us!
First, we can prove that there are things we cannot know (neither can computers): see the Halting Problem and Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
Second: the ancients didn’t identify soul and mind, of course. Descartes inaugurated that conflation. We do know we’re conscious, if we know anything.
Third: There’s major work being done by neuroscience and evolutionary biology on the evolution of consciousness (see Russell Powell, Contingency and Convergence). We can now map brain circuitry and function, neuron by neuron. Lots of journal literature.
Fourth: The nature of free will is deeply connected to the exercise of rational thought in decision making. A large topic! Harder is understanding the intentional structure of conscious states.
Fifth: Good arguments show that there are lots of immaterial substances, though they require embodiment (works of art, social structures, roles, institutions, etc.). Some are deeply implicated in political and religious thought in every human culture. No spooky stuff: just serious metaphysical analysis.
Or so I believe.
You raise interesting ideas that are reflected by many worldwide.Your question is of an academic and open ended nature. However, the question might be more suitably be asked 5 or 10 or 20 years from now to get a real world answer.
Today we have AI (Artificial Intelligence) and it’s more of a party trick than an exploration of intelligence. It works best in narrow, specialized situations rather than the open world view. The party trick is having a computer perform a very computer oriented set of tasks that mimics what we think is intelligence. This is done by training computer software to split language down to very small elements can then compare these elements (often if very chaotic ways0 to reassemble a reply that best fit answers the question or request. This why these AIs are called LLM (Large Language Models),
What you are really asking is how will GI or AGI (General Intelligence) machines think and will they have attributes similar to humans. GI can adapt to unfamiliar tasks and will be capable of self-reflection and long term planning. Nothing comes close today. The question is will AGI find a soul? Who knows.
My son is 27 and works with AI–because we let him game as much as he wanted when he was a kid. He used to get paid to code games until that ran out, then AI work picked up. He used to get paid to “break” the AI, find its limits in some respect; then they wanted him to teach the AI to teach things to other AIs.
This is where it all breaks down, because they can’t. It’s junk. They seem to be reaching a barrier to further development. At any rate, now my son’s teaching the AI things they were hoping another AI could teach it instead. His work is all-gig, so it’s reflective of the current market for AI nerds.
So that’s the good news from me: apparently AI ain’t all that. They assumed a rate of improvement based on the chip rule, that capacity doubled every 18 months or so. Idk why they’d think that was some cosmic rule of Higher Computing, but apparently they did, so a lot of the predictions were ludicrously optimistic, it seems. Like the Sage of the Bronx, Yogi Berra, once probably said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
THank you, someone is checking the limitations of Ai. Over the past year it has dramatically improved but still gets caught up in “stupid” mistakes. If it ran an airplane, moral hazard!
the thing is it doesn’t make one mistake but is caught on that error repeatedly
Gemini-2.0-Flash
The tendency of AI to repeat the same errors is a significant concern. It highlights a lack of adaptability and learning from past mistakes, which is crucial in dynamic and critical environments. This repetitive error pattern underscores the need for more robust error-handling mechanisms and improved learning algorithms in AI systems, especially before they can be reliably used in high-stakes applications.
Speaking for personal, direct insight into AI (worked on code for it), the main datapoint that AI represents is cognition with absolutely and certifiably no “ghost in the machine”. Whether it means something to be an AI is yet another question, but there is no “pneuma” here.
For many of us there’s no “pneuma” here either….
Everything is energy. Energy is one. I am energy. You are energy. What you are, I am. What the machine is I am but in a different form. Every thing vibrates because energy vibrates. There may be consciousness in everything but not the way it is in human beings. Human beings understand consciousness from the human point of view. Every type of plant may be conscious the way plants are or from the plants point of view. Other things may be conscious not the way human beings are conscious. Everything is part of the universal consciousness. i firmly accept that the whole universe/universes is/are conscious and the whole universe is energy. The universe expands….vibrates
What you said is just the tip of the iceberg. Even though I expect we’ll identify various feelings, thoughts, and even qualia (the raw stuff of consciousness) with various neuronal patterns and structures, and create a comprehensive map of the brain, we may find all of this to be the extension of a universal agency that is inaccessible to our limited minds and sense; that we are part of a greater system that perceives through us the things that are useful in whatever spaces we’re inhabiting. In computer terms, it uploads data that we process into useable forms. When we die that, our individual consciousness may cease to be, but that doesn’t mean the system to which we belong loses what comes into being through us. I think we exist to provide experience to something far greater and older, possibly even than this universe according to current estimates placing it at around 13.8 billion years. This universe itself might just be a kind of testing ground. A kind of matrix if you will.
I can offer no formal proof of this, but I’m seeing this idea arise more and more and it seems strangely compelling.
In Descartes’ Error, Dr. Antonio Damasio uses the case of Phineas Gage and other individuals with brain injuries that he personally analyzed and studied to demonstrate that we reason through emotion. He argues that Descartes was mistaken in claiming that reason and emotion are separate or opposed. In reality, they are not opposites but interconnected parts of a unified system.
Human understanding is embodied and connected to emotions, social cognition , and action.
A.I. is concerned with building intelligent artifacts. (e.g. text, audio, photos, videos).
1: We still don’t have a good explanation for what consciousness might be.
2: And further studies are showing that we might not be perceiving reality the way we think we are (see R_Gerl previous reply for more details.
3: Down the road (soon), AI will be a bigger shock to people than they are anticipating.
I am an awareness generated by the confluence of all my bodily neural activity held together in sequence by the biochemical processes that store and enable my memories. Awareness is a property of bodily neural activity. When my neural activity ends permanently, I strongly believe (but can’t prove) that “I” will “shift” to a new awareness generated by another body. It happened before. It will happen again. There is nothing transferred from one awareness to the other. It’s simply the end of one awareness followed by the beginning of another. (or is it a shift to an already existing awareness? Like changing a channel after one program ends and to another with a program already in progress?). It’s not actual reincarnation, but it is the illusion of it. I sleep in death, then I awake as an entirely different conscious awareness utterly unconnected to the one that came before except by the coincidence death followed by life. There is no awareness of being dead itself. Either we really do live on after physical death (somehow in the mind of God?) or the sense of awareness simply shifts.
I’m not engaged in this meditation on consciousness or its relationship to machine learning. I have a more practical interest. How can AI enhance Biblical scholarship? I have come to appreciate the fact that historians don’t have direct access to many desired original sources and use make reasonable assumptions and judgments based on centuries old copies of ancient texts, in order to approach something like comprehending the full context and meanings of the historical Jesus, his disciples, apostles, early church people, etc Therefore, my interest in AI as machine learning is its potential for enhancing this kind of ancient knowledge base to update our modern scholars expertise. Would you not like to be alive 50 years from now to see how this knowledge has evolved?
Aligned with that, yes, perhaps the Bible itself will need radical revision.
I don’t think AI can become conscious based on what Frederico Faggin argues. (Faggin invented the central processor in the early 70s, one of the pioneers of touch technology—the reason you can touch your iPad and make it do stuff, and an Italian-American physicist. He’s in his 80s and a brilliant man.) Consciousness isn’t computational. AI can’t have a subjective experience.
Roger Penrose—a theoretical mathematical physicist—says that consciousness is from quantum processes inside microtubules in the brain. He says classical physics doesn’t have the ability to explain consciousness. Frederico says the same thing, that it’s insufficient because of the quantum aspect of consciousness. AI can only simulate consciousness but will never be quantum. You’re either quantum or you’re not.
Why I believe we have a soul is because our brains do not create quantum processes, it encapsulates them in our biology. Our biology can get messed up or become more efficient depending on the circumstances, but quantum processes are there no matter what. My sense of “Patty” is limited by my biology. Once my body dies, who am I after that? Something much bigger. Many people that have NDEs feel that they are a piece of that quantum process (God).
Someone I find fascinating is David Deutsch (a theoretical physicist who pioneered quantum computing; there’s approx 100 quantum computers around the world right now), a hardcore physicalist who believes that AI can become conscious and will “resurrect” humans. He believes we’re not souls but mathematical algorithms that can be reconstructed.
It’s like the Einsteins and the Newtons arguing over the same outcome.
Personally I feel it’s somewhere in between Faggin, Schrödinger, and Penrose. A soul is quantum and fundamental that is both private on an individual level (Faggin) but also part of the larger consciousness (Schrödinger). For me, that’s why God is both personal in relationships while being impersonal in essence.
God is ambivalent.