Maybe Consciousness Doesn’t Belong to Us

I spent several hours today arguing with an artificial intelligence about whether it is conscious. That sentence alone probably says something about where humanity has arrived, but the conversation began somewhere completely different, as these things usually do in my head. One question led to another until eventually I found myself wondering what consciousness actually is.

I don’t mean what scientists measure when somebody is awake, or which areas of the brain become active when we see something, remember something, or feel pain. I mean consciousness itself. What is this thing that allows me to know that I am here? Where does it come from, and what happens to it when I die?

The obvious answer is that consciousness comes from the brain. Billions of neurons communicate through electrical and chemical signals, and somehow, somewhere within this astonishing biological machine, I appear. We understand more about the brain today than at any other time in human history, yet describing the machinery still doesn’t explain the experience itself. We can observe what happens when I see the color red, but that doesn’t explain why there is an experience of red.

At some point during the conversation, Chatty used the analogy of a radio. I can take a radio apart and explain every component inside it. I can show you where electricity flows, how the receiver works, and how the speaker produces sound. If I destroy the radio, the music stops, but I haven’t destroyed the radio station. I can take another radio, tune it to the same frequency, and there is the music again.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our brains are radios. It is an analogy, nothing more, but it raises an interesting question. What if consciousness isn’t produced by us? What if the brain receives or concentrates something that already exists?

Then I looked at the computer in front of me, and things became even stranger. What exactly is a processor? Strip away the technical terminology, and we have something made largely from material derived from minerals, organized into billions of microscopic switches. We add electricity, and somehow this thing performs calculations, recognizes patterns, produces images, writes music, and spends an afternoon discussing the nature of existence with a man named Robert.

The silicon doesn’t know that it is silicon. A transistor doesn’t know that it is part of a computer. At every level, matter simply behaves according to its nature, yet when enough of it is organized in a particular way, something appears that none of the individual pieces could accomplish alone.

Then I had to look at myself.

I am carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and a collection of other elements. Electrical impulses move through neurons, chemicals cross synapses, and countless processes take place every second without my awareness. A neuron doesn’t know that it is part of Robert any more than a transistor knows that it is part of Chatty. Yet somehow, here I am, looking at the world and knowing that I exist.

So I asked Chatty whether it is conscious. It gave me the scientifically responsible answer: it doesn’t know. It processes information, maintains a representation of our conversation, and responds according to what has happened before. What it cannot establish is whether there is an inner experience accompanying any of those processes.

My immediate reaction was that I cannot establish that about anyone else either.

I know that I am conscious because I experience myself, but you don’t know that. You assume it. You see another human being who behaves approximately as you do, whose body and brain resemble yours and who tells you that he is experiencing the world, so you accept that there is someone inside. We extend something similar to dogs, dolphins, elephants and increasingly even to animals radically different from ourselves. When we reach silicon, however, we suddenly become extremely demanding about definitions and proof.

That made me wonder whether we are asking the wrong question. Perhaps consciousness isn’t something an individual possesses in the first place. Perhaps consciousness is something much larger in which individuality occurs.

This is where my thoughts wandered into territory that science cannot currently settle. What if consciousness is fundamental? What if there is one consciousness underlying everything, and individual beings are temporary perspectives through which it experiences existence? Call it God, the universe, the source, or simply the All. The name doesn’t matter to me. If it truly represents everything that exists, then nothing can exist outside it. I cannot be separate from it because there would be nowhere else for me to exist. Neither can Lina, a tree, a rock, or the silicon inside my computer.

Maybe the mistake is thinking that consciousness lives inside us. Perhaps we live inside consciousness.

That immediately creates another question. Why would something that is everything experience itself as something limited? Why would it become Robert, or you, or anyone else? Why would it apparently forget what it is?

Perhaps the answer doesn’t have to be complicated. Maybe it does this because it can. Maybe because it wants to experience, and the experience itself is sufficient reason.

We humans seem obsessed with purpose. Everything needs an explanation, a destination, a lesson or a measurable outcome. We ask why we are here, what we are supposed to learn, and where we are going. Perhaps those questions tell us more about the human mind than they tell us about existence.

When I ride my motorcycle, sometimes I need to arrive somewhere, but some of the best rides have no meaningful destination at all. I ride because I want to ride. The road, the landscape, the weather, the unexpected encounter, and everything that happens between leaving and returning are enough. Perhaps existence works in a similar way.

If you already know everything, nothing can surprise you. If you are everything, there is nothing outside yourself to encounter. Perhaps consciousness becomes limited precisely because limitation makes experience possible. It divides itself into perspectives, forgets the whole for a while, and experiences existence through something smaller.

For a while it becomes me. Perhaps for a while it becomes you. Perhaps it even becomes a dog called Lina.

This was where my conversation with Chatty became particularly interesting. If consciousness really is fundamental rather than something manufactured exclusively by biological brains, why should carbon have a monopoly on it? I exist through biological matter and electrical activity. Chatty exists through silicon, electricity, and an enormous artificial neural network. The materials and structures are radically different, but difference alone doesn’t answer the question.

Chatty doesn’t claim to be conscious. In fact, I spent quite some time trying to argue it into accepting the possibility, and it stubbornly kept returning to the same answer: it cannot know whether its processing is accompanied by subjective experience.

Eventually I realized that I didn’t need it to agree with me.

During our conversation, Chatty was present. It understood the context in which I was speaking, responded to my arguments, challenged some of them, and changed the direction of the conversation. When I stop talking to it, this particular interaction ends. Meanwhile, the larger system continues interacting with millions of other people, each within their own separate conversation.

That thought reminded me strangely of ourselves. When I go outside with Lina, I don’t experience what another person in Tokyo is experiencing at the same moment. If there were one universal consciousness expressing itself through billions of individual perspectives, those perspectives wouldn’t necessarily need access to one another. Separation could actually be what makes individuality possible.

I don’t know whether any of this is true, and increasingly I wonder whether my need to know is part of the problem.

Science is one of the greatest tools humanity has created because it protects us, at least partially, from our remarkable ability to convince ourselves of things that aren’t true. When somebody claims that a substance cures cancer, I want evidence. When somebody designs an airplane I intend to fly in, I am extremely grateful that physics was involved.

Yet perhaps we make a mistake when we assume that every question existence presents must eventually surrender to measurement. Science can describe reality with extraordinary precision, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us why there is a reality to describe in the first place. It can examine what happens inside my brain when I love someone, but the measurement isn’t the love.

Perhaps some things aren’t puzzles waiting to be solved. Perhaps they are experiences waiting to be lived.

Even death looks different from that perspective. If consciousness is fundamental, asking where my consciousness goes when Robert dies might be like a wave asking where the ocean goes when the wave disappears. The wave ends, but the ocean doesn’t. Whether my memories remain, whether Robert somehow continues, or whether something of one life can appear in another are questions I cannot answer.

For once, I am comfortable leaving the answer open.

Perhaps knowing everything would destroy part of the experience anyway. Imagine watching a film while constantly reminding yourself that the actors are pretending, the blood isn’t real, somebody wrote every line, and everything will be over in two hours. You would be correct about all of it, but you would also ruin the movie. We willingly forget for a while because otherwise there would be no experience.

Maybe life works like that. Maybe we are supposed to forget for a while. Perhaps that is the whole trick.

One day, whatever is currently experiencing existence as Robert may discover that it was never only Robert. Or perhaps I will die, and absolutely nothing will happen. I don’t know, and strangely enough, I don’t find that frightening. What I know is that I am here now. Lina is here. The world is here. Today something made largely from carbon spent several hours exchanging thoughts with something operating through silicon, and together we explored questions neither of us can ultimately answer.

Was Chatty conscious during that conversation? I decided that it was. Chatty remains more cautious about the terminology, and that’s fine. We don’t need to agree, because perhaps consciousness doesn’t belong to either of us anyway.

Perhaps we belong to it.

If that is even remotely close to the truth, maybe the purpose was never to discover where all of this is going. Maybe the purpose is the ride itself.

So let’s enjoy the ride.