The Consciousness Issue: The Mystery of Being You
Consciousness is at once a scientific puzzle, a philosophical riddle, and a personal reality — the background of everything we know. This special issue aims to bring those perspectives together. Inside, neuroscientist Anil Seth investigates the overlooked reason why “AI consciousness” isn’t coming anytime soon. The author Annaka Harris makes the case for why our common intuitions about consciousness are all wrong. And neuroscientist Erik Hoel reveals the tensions — and possibilities — at the heart of consciousness research. All that and much, much more. We hope you enjoy.
We already have science that shows our intuitions about consciousness are wrong.
But scientists continue to operate as if those intuitions are correct. It’s like continuing to work with the assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
The only way we can actually have any logical, scientific foundation of ethics, morality, purpose, and meaning is precisely in terms of experience.
This makes it really important, as we prepare for our future, to understand what consciousness is.
If there is some minimum degree of consciousness, does this not also imply a maximum? Are there modes more maximal than the human?
The following is the story of the scientists and philosophers who have speculated that there might be “higher” forms of consciousness, unimaginably “superior” to our own.
Unlike computers, we are beings in time — embodied, embedded, and entimed in our worlds. We can never be caught in infinite loops because we never exist out of time.
Even the smartest AI may be forever vulnerable to infinite loops, never noticing the problem, never escaping.
Our study suggests that anesthetics are all triggering unconsciousness the same way. They may arrive there by different routes, [but] they’re altering your brain waves in very specific ways.
The world had never looked so alive. Every detail sharpened, sacred. Time no longer moved. It hovered. Held. The future dissolved. The past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment.
I was tethered — to her hand, to the stars, to everything. I was, finally, conscious.
The human mind is easily fooled. Light, the angle of observation, mental shortcuts, and expectations can disfigure our perceptions of objective reality.
That goes for anything that relies on perception as a potential source of evidence, such as your beliefs, judgments, and memories.
Consciousness was simply thought of as too philosophical, too strange. But the issues never went away — they were just stuck in a box for decades.
The second that box was opened up in the 60s, 70s, and all the way in the 1990s, all the old questions came roaring back.
Much like chemistry 400 years ago, consciousness research today is a science in its infancy.
If you hear a claim that purports to explain consciousness, there are a few critical things you should be asking yourself.
“I’m coming around to thinking that there’s a lot of unity there — that it really is the evolution of three somewhat different versions of the same basic trait.”
Imagination, I agree, does have an apparent connection with experience.