Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, Part 3

Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, Part 3

“Consciousness is the capacity to have subjective experience – there being something it feels like to be you.”[1] ChatGPT

The past couple of weeks I have intentionally minimized the abilities of AI as it relates to consciousness, which I do not believe it is capable of attaining, at least not in the way living creatures have consciousness. By expressing this opinion, I do not wish to minimize AI’s potential positive or negative impact on the conditions our bodily consciousness inhabits. Yes, there are tremendous dangers and benefits inherent in the ability to collect and summarize vast quantities of written information on everything that is containable in written information – bank accounts, medical records and procedures, nuclear codes, and everything else we have committed to writing. But the boundary between the written word and consciousness – between descriptions of reality and reality itself – remains, at least in my opinion, as it always will, although that boundary may shift and blur at times.

It seems to me that AI may be the ultimate culmination of the Age of Enlightenment or the Realm of the Intellect. There is no doubt that access to written information has advanced our intellectual prowess and that AI is advancing that prowess exponentially. I still, however, question how much of a step forward that is, if at all, in overall human evolution and holistic development. Knowledge is important, certainly, and AI can provide an abundance of knowledge quickly and easily. But wisdom is also vital, and increases in knowledge do not automatically correlate with increases in wisdom. In fact, one can argue that increases in knowledge may decrease wisdom, especially when we assume the ability to recite facts (knowledge) is as good, useful, or better than the transformation of those facts into real-life understandings and applications.

Wisdom comes about through the synthesis of knowledge, experience, and time. AI can help with the knowledge piece, but experience and time can only be attained through lived encounters with reality. As such, the wisdom of AI is, and likely always will be, of a different nature than what we experience as human wisdom. And to the extent that we increasingly allow access to facts and descriptions to replace our lived experiences, to that same extent will human wisdom and our reliance upon it decline into a wisp of its former self. I believe true wisdom requires a conscious awareness of and conscious reflection upon our life experiences and observations, none of which is AI currently or likely ever capable of accomplishing. The sharing of wisdom also requires a felt sense of responsibility to maturing and rising generations and a commitment to pass along life lessons, often in face-to-face encounters over time, not to mention a receptive attitude on the part of the recipient. In short, wisdom-sharing is an act of love, curiosity, and caring. Many people, me included, are in the early phases of understanding AI and its capabilities, but I think we can be certain that AI is incapable of love, a moral sense of responsibility to others, conscious awareness, or reflective synthesis of events and encounters. Those are common and important functions of human consciousness, however.

To expand on an earlier thought about artificial intelligence: AI is at least two steps removed from reality because the written word, which is a representation of reality, must be digitalized, which is a numerical representation of the written representation of reality, before AI can access it. In other words, AI accesses a representation of a word or phrase that is a written representation of some aspect of reality. I am reminded of a saying from the 1960s attributed to playwright Jane Wagner[2]: Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs, a humorous retort to: Drugs are for people who can’t handle reality. We have a disturbingly large number of stand-ins for reality these days including television, social media, books and movies, none of which are bad in and of themselves. But as we humans spend increasing amounts of time with these various imitations of reality, we necessarily become shallower and less wise even as we become more knowledgeable. The ability to excel at Trivial Pursuit night at the local bar is not the same skill as the ability to comfort someone who just lost a spouse or a child or a job or their ability to cope with the countless other, often-painful realities of life on earth. If I am playing trivia games with friends, access to AI makes me invaluable and invincible. If my desire is to be a good, supportive friend and confidant to those important to me, being intelligent in areas that AI cannot access is critical and irreplaceable. AI can be smart, but it cannot be human. AI can make us smarter, but it cannot increase our humanity. Those skills require conscious awareness.

This is the 9^thin a series titled The Perplexities of Consciousness. Life Notes are my explorations into mysteries that interest me. They are invitations for readers to explore more deeply into life’s mysteries. Engage with me or explore contemplative spiritual direction at ghildenbrand@outlook.com.

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[1] ChatGPT, in response to the question, “What is consciousness?”, accessed 09/21/2026

[2] Jane Wagner was a writer for comic Lily Tomlin.