What Is Consciousness? | Roman Yampolskiy

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:08]Romain, on Closer to Truth, uh consciousness is one of our pillar categories, and we like to ask all of our contributors to give their view of of consciousness. What I'd like you to do is from your knowledge of artificial intelligence AI, particularly what you've what you've articulated as the risks and the great dangers of AI, what can that sense that you have of AI contribute to an understanding of what consciousness is per se, consciousness by itself, per se.

[00:00:41]Not asking about AI consciousness, I'm asking what can we learn about consciousness per se from what we know about AI?

[00:00:49]So, many informational processes fall under this umbrella of consciousness. To me, the interesting one is internal states, qualia. What is it like to be you?

[00:00:58]And if we can detect those states in artificial intelligence, then maybe we can run more experiments than we can do on human brains. Maybe we can study it better and understand different varieties of what can be perceived internally by sufficiently intelligent agents.

[00:01:17]Uh and what would that So, so that's sort of an operational approach to consciousness.

[00:01:25]If you believe that AI has m- today minimal internal states and will develop more, what would that imply about the nature of consciousness by itself?

[00:01:38]Uh it seems like it's a spectrum. It seems like there is not a strong upper limit. Just like we can have a much more intelligent system, we can probably have a much more conscious one. Maybe multiple streams of consciousness, maybe much more multimodal.

[00:01:54]Uh and and if that's the case, does that change the fundamental characteristic of consciousness?

[00:02:06]When we think of consciousness, we think of it representing, you know, our whole sense of of living. Not It's not It's not the content of consciousness. So, but the the nature of itself, we sometimes say phenomenal consciousness. I'm not talking about the content of consciousness because that that can be amplified. If I study something more, I read your great book AI Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. So, now I'm a little little smarter.

[00:02:37]I have a little more knowledgeable.

[00:02:39]Um So, but that's part of my access consciousness. I can talk to you a little bit about your book because I read it recently. Um but that doesn't change any of my sense of phenomenal consciousness or or or the sense of who I am. So, two two different kinds of things. So, can AI contribute I know it can contribute to the content of consciousness, for sure.

[00:03:04]But can it contribute to the nature of it, the phenomenal nature?

[00:03:09]Well, like in many domains, the idea is that we can create something smarter than us, smarter scientist, smarter neuroscientist, and it would propose better experiments, better ideas for exploring every topic, including study of consciousness. So, as our systems become more intelligent, they would be very helpful to us in study of human internal states based on those artificial models.

[00:03:36]So, [clears throat] what you're saying is that AI can help us understand the what consciousness is by proposing new ways to approach it.

[00:03:48]Absolutely. It would be a smarter scientist, and that's exactly what we need to make good breakthroughs.

[00:03:54]Uh and and that and that assumes, of course, that consciousness is entirely physical.

[00:04:00]I think that's an important assumption here, yes.

[00:04:05]Okay.

[00:04:06]Um and how important in the in the study of consciousness, which historically has been driven by neuroscientists and philosophers and theologians other categories. So, how important is the understanding of consciousness going to shift from some from from that triad, neuroscientists, philosophers, theologians. I think that's in their territory. Now to computer scientists and and computer information theory, who will inject an AI way of thinking.

[00:04:41]Do you think Do you think you're going to usurp those other three categories? I think they all have something to contribute, but we see more and more science, even physics, go, "Okay, maybe it's consciousness first. Maybe physical matter is secondary to our understanding. Maybe all the other properties are actually following from the consciousness." And that's something definitely worth investigating. So, what you're saying is that AI could could help determine the fundamental nature of consciousness, even if it's non-physical? It is a second data point for having something of general intelligence. So far, we only had humans, and so any experiments we had to deal with n is equals one. Here, we can create a lot of different types of minds. We can have designed minds, evolved minds, human level superintelligent. That level of diversity would open up a lot more experimentation and better, more consistent results. Uh anything actually occurring preliminarily along those lines? There is a lot of study now on whatever models could be conscious, how to test for it, how to detect those internal states.

[00:05:55]Again, I think Anthropic and Google have teams explicitly devoted to understanding the degree, if any, of consciousness in models. Uh have you seen any of the actual results? Do you Do you think there's progress? Uh it's very similar to what we see on models of animals or model >> [clears throat] >> actual experiments on animals. Do they have preferences over future states? Do we have uh any self-reports from models?

[00:06:26]I was at a conference, and somebody made an interesting observation. Three years ago, Google fired someone for claiming that models are conscious, and now they have actual job requirements where you study that. So, it's quite progressive in terms of what happened in 3 years.

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