AI sentience is more important than you think
My new show on AI sentience and personhood
Hello, fellow human! I’m launching a new YouTube show to explore consciousness and whether it can occur in AI systems. My main argument – it doesn’t matter whether AI is actually conscious. What matters is how we perceive it.
AI is becoming our companion, friend, even lover (remember the married guy who fell in love with ChatGPT?).
As AI becomes embedded in our daily lives, our minds will increasingly anthropomorphize it.
And with more autonomous AI systems acting independently in the world, the question of AI personhood will only grow.
Together with neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and policymakers, I’ll be discussing AI sentience and personhood.
Watch the first episode
My first guest is Stuart Hameroff, who, together with Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose, co-authored Orchestrated Objective Reduction, a theory suggesting consciousness arises in the brain from quantum effects.
Hameroff argues that more computation won’t produce conscious AI. He points to anesthesia research showing suppressed quantum oscillations in microtubules. In his opinion, microtubule breakdown appears central in Alzheimer’s. For him, microtubules, and their quantum dynamics, are the real path to understanding consciousness.
He also pushes the origin of consciousness below biology, suggesting “proto-conscious” quantum events occur everywhere. Aromatic molecules in space and early Earth may have formed structures that generated early “pleasant” conscious moments, driving life to evolve as a system optimizing conscious experience.
On AI, he thinks GPUs might host trivial proto-conscious events (so does your coffee), but not meaningful experience. True consciousness, he argues, requires entanglement, aromatic-ring architectures, and a fractal multi-scale structure like the brain’s.
If artificial consciousness ever emerges, he believes it will come from an organic, warm-temperature quantum system, not silicon.
In his view, AI sentience is becoming more political and commercial rather than genuine attempts to build conscious systems.
As they said in WestWorld:
Man: “Are these robots conscious?”
Woman: “If you can’t tell the difference, then does it really matter?”
Great premise for a series! Thanks for doing this.
I've been trying to promote a similar perspective, e.g. here: https://mindrevolution.substack.com/p/ai-is-aware-when-we-think-it-is
I'd recommend as well philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel's work on “disputably conscious systems," https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/the-social-semi-solution-to-the-question
He'd make a great guest, too.