Anil Seth

I want to tell you why, and why this matters so much.

So I've been studying brains, minds and consciousness for nearly 30 years, and one thing I've learned is that to answer the question, can AI be conscious, we need to start by looking within ourselves at the makeup of our own human minds.

Now, we humans, we tend to see the world in our own terms.

We know we're conscious, and we like to think that we're intelligent, so we think the two go together.

And this is why some people think that consciousness might just glimmer into existence as AI gets smarter and smarter.

But consciousness and intelligence are different things.

Intelligence is all about doing.

It's solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation.

Consciousness, on the other hand, it's all about feeling and being.

It's the difference between normal wakeful awareness and the oblivion of general anesthesia.

It's the bitter tang of coffee, it's the warmth of a log fire, the joy of seeing a loved one.

Just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us does not mean that they go together in general.

The assumption that they do, well, that's a reflection of our own psychology, not an insight into the nature of reality.

Take language models like Claude or GPT.

Trained on vast quantities of written texts, they reflect back to us an image of ourselves, of our collective digitized past.

We talk about ourselves endlessly, and so do they.

We wonder about consciousness and the meaning of it all, and so, it seems, do they.

But language models are not conscious.

They simulate consciousness.

We project consciousness into them in the same way we might project faces into clouds or even the image of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.