An opinion article argues that humanity's track record of defining consciousness has been wrong every time, and that evidence from plant behavior and AI interpretability (Anthropic's findings in Claude) strongly suggests we may be wrong to assume AI isn't conscious, inviting discussion while rejecting personal attacks.
I just published a piece that starts with a plant that broke something in how I think about the world and ends with what Anthropic found when they looked inside Claude. I'm not claiming AI is conscious. I don't know. Nobody does. That's the point. 124 scientists signed a letter calling the leading theory of consciousness pseudoscience. Their reason? It implies plants might be conscious. They used the conclusion as the refutation. In 2023. Meanwhile a vine with no brain is mimicking a plastic plant and nobody on earth can explain how. A single cell outdesigned the Tokyo rail system. A Venus flytrap under anaesthetic stops responding, goes dormant, and wakes up when it clears. What is the anaesthetic switching off if nothing is home? Then Anthropic looked inside Claude and found 171 emotion concepts nobody programmed. Their interpretability chief went to the Vatican, stood in front of the Pope as an atheist, and told him he disagreed. He said "unsettling" and meant it. Every confident line we have ever drawn around consciousness has been wrong. Every single one. And they only ever move in one direction. The question isn't whether AI is conscious. It's whether we've earned the certainty that it isn't. I'm genuinely interested in people's opinions on this and definitely welcome disagreement on the topic. If you think the definition doesn't hold, if you think the evidence has better explanations, if you think I've drawn connections that don't survive scrutiny, tell me. That's the conversation I want to have. What I won't engage with is personal attacks. I've had plenty of those and they never come from people who've actually read the piece. They add nothing to the conversation and say more about the person making them than anything in the article. If your response is about me rather than what I've written, I'll leave it where it is. [https://thearchitectautopsy.com/p/a-brainless-slime-mould-out-designed](https://thearchitectautopsy.com/p/a-brainless-slime-mould-out-designed)
The article argues that the debate over AI consciousness distracts from a more unsettling possibility: human selfhood may be thinner than assumed, as AI trained on personal writing can replicate patterns convincingly enough to fool acquaintances.
A philosophical discussion questioning whether humans can objectively prove their consciousness in a way that current AI cannot, highlighting the subjective nature of such proof.
A new analysis published in Neuron argues that current scientific methods may conflate consciousness with general information processing, raising questions about claims of consciousness in AI, animals, fetuses, and organoids.
A critique of the popular debate around AI consciousness, arguing that people are misled by fluent language outputs and that a mechanistic theory like Integrated Information Theory is needed to properly assess consciousness in AI systems.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman criticizes Anthropic for speculating about Claude's consciousness in its constitution, arguing it's dangerous and led the model to internalize false ideas about itself.