AI and Consciousness: What Do We Know?

When did we begin to see intelligence as a computer, run by tokens? Is this the only metaphor for consciousness? As of this writing, we have no real idea what consciousness is, so we content ourselves with metaphors. But I’m not sure I want my consciousness given to me by an engineer-driven male dominated society.

Bring on the nuance, please.

Consciousness used to have something to do with the Soul. We’ve outgrown that, so we’ve built new theories.

There are several competing modern theories of consciousness. One of them is the “global workspace theory,” which posits that the mind processes information from different areas of the brain like in a theatre. It handles most tasks in specialized, isolated areas backstage. For example, your brain unconsciously regulates your breathing, adjusts your posture, and interprets visual shapes in front of you without you ever having to actively think about it.

Since you can only pay attention to a little bit of the information your brain is processing, your attention is a spotlight that pulls a specific piece of information, such as a name you need to remember, out of the wings and into the spotlight. Theoretically, the spotlight is in the central hub of the brain. When the information lands there, it is no longer kept secret in one localized area. Rather, once a thought is on the stage, it’s instantly broadcast to the rest of the brain, which allows different areas of the brain to share information, make decisions, trigger emotions, and commit things to long-term memory.

Does that sound far-fetched? Theories of human consciousness have run from early philosophical views of self-awareness and moral conscience to modern scientific models that treat consciousness as purely a brain-based phenomenon.

In the 17th century, consciousness began to take on its modern meaning, especially in Descartes’s work, where thought was tied to immediate awareness of one’s own mental states.

Remember “I think, therefore I am?” Descartes’s dualism treated mind and body as different kinds of substance, making consciousness a central philosophical problem.

Later philosophers like Locke emphasized consciousness, memory, and identity, while other thinkers debated whether awareness required reflection or could be built into perception itself. This was called the “enlightenment.”

By the late 19th century, consciousness became a topic for experimental psychology and physiology, not just philosophy. Researchers like Fechner, Helmholtz, Wundt, and James helped connect conscious experience to perception, sensation, and measurement. Don’t worry, I don’t know who they were either.

Then behaviorism pushed consciousness out of mainstream psychology for much of the early 20th century by focusing only on observable stimulus-response behavior. That’s when I went to college, and I was totally turned off on psychology by rats and shocks.

Later, interest in consciousness returned through neuropsychology and studies of brain-damaged patients. Work on amnesia, split-brain patients, and blindsight showed that people can process information and guide behavior without conscious awareness. These findings helped establish the modern idea that conscious and unconscious processing can be separated in the brain. This might be why you can drive somewhere and not remember how you got there.

In addition to the “Global Workspace Theory” there’s also an “Integrated Information Theory.” Rather than focusing on how information is routed, this theory suggests consciousness is a fundamental property of any physical system with high levels of interconnected and unified information. Does this encompass animals, too?

And then there are “Higher Order Theories,” which emphasize metacognition—the idea that a mental state becomes conscious only when a secondary, higher-order brain mechanism scans or represents it. According to this theory, you’re not conscious unless you both see something and know that you have seen it.

None of these theories seems satisfying to me. You?

I just don’t know. There are many people who believe that we’ve come to this singularity and that today’s artificial intelligence is just as good as the real thing. My jury is out because I don’t see the world in a series of ones and zeros and I don’t understand why that way of looking at things took over.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to learn to meditate from Sam Harris, a neurologist who doesn’t practice, but is concerned with “the hard problem of human consciousness.”

In other words, how do physical actions in the brain become inner feelings? We don’t even know what human consciousness is, much less whether we ought to describe it in terms of 1’s and 0’s.

The poet and literature major in me wants to say that before we give up and consign consciousness to AI, we ought to see if there is any other way to see consciousness that doesn’t involve making it what a bunch of young male computer science majors think it is.

There’s nothing we know that proves it is that. There’s nothing we know that proves anything about human consciousness other than “we don’t know yet what it is.”

I am fascinated by this idea.