Can Artificial Intelligence Be Conscious? | Psychology Today
It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.
In the last few years, there has been an explosion of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in AI’s ability to engage in conversational style text such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude models. This sudden increase in ability is due to recent developments in transformer architecture, which started with the release of Google’s seminal paper called “Attention is All You Need” in 2017 [1].
Transformer Architecture in AI
The transformer architecture is a type of deep learning neural network, with the key innovation being the “attention mechanism,” which allows it to weigh the importance of different parts of the input data dynamically. The model starts by converting input data (such as text) into embeddings, which are numerical representations of words or tokens. These embeddings capture semantic information and context about the words. Since transformers do not have a built-in notion of the order of words, positional encodings are added to the embeddings to provide information about the position of each word in a sentence. This helps the model understand the sequence of the input data.
The core of the transformer model is the attention mechanism, specifically "self-attention." Self-attention allows the model to focus on different parts of the input sequence when producing an output. It computes a weighted sum of input values, where the weights are determined by how relevant different words are to each other.
Philosophical Implications
Given these innovations, several philosophers and researchers have asked whether AI can achieve human-level intelligence called artificial general intelligence (AGI), and even become conscious. Alan Turing in 1950 devised one of the first AI tests for intelligence called the imitation game, more commonly known as the Turing Test [2]. The problem with this test is that it is an intelligence test, not a consciousness test.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers referred to the easy problem of consciousness as neural correlates of consciousness, and the hard problem of consciousness as finding an explanation of how physical neurons give rise to consciousness.
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Observer-Centric Universe
Recent experimental findings in physics suggest that non-local realism (a physicalist Einsteinian realism based on a Riemannian manifold) is false at the fundamental level. This has led to some profound conclusions about our ontological reality, proposing a context-dependent observer-centric universe ontology. This novel observer-centric universe ontology is consistent with experimental data not just of Bell’s inequalities but also of the quantum eraser effect, and recent physics experiments which show humans collapsing the quantum waveform via their conscious mental awareness.
My own recent research suggests that when adopting an observer-centric reality, then consciousness causes the collapse of quantum phenomena. This implies that the hard problem of consciousness, or matter, simply disappears when assuming an observer-centric reality.
