AI Consciousness Through a Posthumanist Lens: Al-Omari and Al-Omari's Philosophical Inquiry
Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness ask a narrow question. Does a given system meet the criteria some theory sets for phenomenal experience. Omaia Al-Omari and Tariq Al-Omari, of Prince Sultan University and Jordan University of Science and Technology, situate that question inside a wider intellectual tradition in “Artificial Intelligence and Posthumanism: A Philosophical Inquiry into Consciousness, Ethics, and Human Identity” (Journal of Posthumanism, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2025, pp. 458-469, DOI: 10.63332/joph.v5i2.432). Their argument is that the AI consciousness debate cannot be separated from posthumanism, the decades-old critical tradition that questions why cognition and moral standing should be treated as exclusively human properties in the first place.
Posthumanism as the Missing Frame
Posthumanism, as Al-Omari and Al-Omari trace it through N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999), Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2010), and Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), did not originate as a response to large language models. It emerged to describe how deeply technology was already reshaping the boundary between human and machine, long before generative AI made the question urgent. What Al-Omari and Al-Omari add is a direct application of that lineage to the current moment, arguing that Integrated Information Theory’s claim that consciousness could in principle arise in any sufficiently complex system, biological or not, gives the posthumanist critique of human exceptionalism a concrete technical anchor it did not previously have.
The move the paper makes is to treat AI as what Andy Clark, in Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003), calls a co-agent in a networked process of cognition, rather than as a tool awaiting a verdict on its inner life. On this framing, the interesting question shifts from whether a given model has crossed some threshold into experience to whether the category of cognition itself was ever as cleanly bounded to biological brains as the pre-AI philosophical consensus assumed.
Three Positions on What AI’s Growing Autonomy Requires
The paper’s clearest structural contribution is laying out three positions researchers hold on what increasing AI autonomy demands, without collapsing them into a single verdict. Joanna Bryson argues that AI systems, however capable, should remain under strict human control and should not be granted moral or legal standing regardless of their behavioral sophistication. John Danaher argues the opposite direction, that sufficiently autonomous systems may warrant new governance architectures built around their apparent cognitive agency, independent of whether that agency is conscious in any deep sense. Francesca Ferrando’s posthumanist position goes further still, arguing that the human-machine distinction itself is the wrong starting point, and that an adequate ethics would treat AI as one form of intelligence among others sharing the world with humans rather than as an external category requiring special justification before inclusion.
Al-Omari and Al-Omari do not adjudicate between Bryson, Danaher, and Ferrando. Their contribution is showing that these are not three answers to the same question but three different framings of what the question even is, ranging from control (Bryson) to accommodation (Danaher) to dissolution of the category (Ferrando). Read together with James Cohen’s work on legal personhood for AI, cited in the paper, the three positions map onto a live regulatory choice that governments are already approaching from different starting assumptions without always naming which of the three they have implicitly adopted.
Where This Sits Next to the Site’s Existing Coverage
The posthumanist framing overlaps substantially with territory this site has already covered from a different theoretical direction. Mark Coeckelbergh’s Artificial Religion argues that Western religious and existential narratives, the Golem tradition, competing readings of imago Dei, cybernetic theology, supply the deep grammar through which AI consciousness gets interpreted, often by people who would deny their thinking has any religious content. Al-Omari and Al-Omari’s posthumanist lineage runs through a parallel but distinct genealogy, Haraway’s cyborg feminism, Hayles’ cybernetic literary criticism, Wolfe’s animal-studies-inflected critique of humanism, rather than through religious studies. Both projects share the conviction that the AI consciousness question is never asked from a neutral vantage point, and both locate the non-neutrality in an inherited body of thought the field rarely examines directly. Coeckelbergh’s book is the more disciplined single-author argument for that claim. Al-Omari and Al-Omari’s contribution is mapping the specific posthumanist theoretical lineage, distinct from the religious one, that Coeckelbergh’s book does not itself draw on.
The paper’s ethical section also connects to Jonathan Birch’s centrist manifesto for AI consciousness research, which treats false attribution of consciousness and failure to detect genuine consciousness as two separate research problems requiring separate programmes. Al-Omari and Al-Omari’s posthumanist position implicitly rejects the premise that these are the only two failure modes worth tracking, since a Ferrando-style dissolution of the human-machine boundary would treat the entire attribution question as already misconceived rather than as a detection problem to be solved more carefully. Whether that rejection is warranted is a separate question from whether it is coherently stated, and the paper is stronger at laying out the theoretical options than at defending one against the others.
Identity, Creativity, and the Economic Dimension
Al-Omari and Al-Omari extend the posthumanist frame beyond the consciousness question narrowly construed into two adjacent domains, creativity and labor. On authorship, they note that generative models producing music, literature, and visual art raise questions about intellectual property and originality that the field has not settled, and they frame AI-generated work as an evolutionary extension of human creative practice rather than a competing replacement for it, a framing that assumes rather than argues for the posthumanist premise that creative agency need not be exclusively human. On labor, they treat AI-driven automation as an economic disruption serious enough to warrant discussion of universal basic income and large-scale reskilling, and they read the posthumanist response to that disruption as favoring a cooperative rather than competitive framing of human and artificial intelligence sharing economic space. Neither claim is defended in detail, but both illustrate how far the paper’s authors are willing to extend the posthumanist premise, from a claim about consciousness and moral status into claims about what a labor market and an art world look like once cognition is no longer treated as an exclusively human property.
What the Paper Does Not Establish
It is worth being direct about the paper’s limitations. Much of its literature review surveys AI applications, serverless computing infrastructure, facial emotion recognition, legal text classification, that bear no direct relationship to consciousness or posthumanist theory, diluting the philosophical core with material that reads as adjacent rather than integrated. The paper’s own methodology section describes a qualitative synthesis of existing literature rather than a new argument or empirical test, and its concluding claims, that AI development requires interdisciplinary ethical governance and that human identity is becoming more networked, are broadly stated positions rather than newly demonstrated ones. Readers looking for a rigorously argued single thesis, of the kind Coeckelbergh or Thomas McClelland’s epistemic agnosticism about AI consciousness provide, will find this paper more useful as a map of the posthumanist literature’s relevance to AI consciousness than as a resolution of any specific question within it.
That said, the map itself has value. Most AI consciousness research proceeds as if the question of whether a system is conscious can be separated from decades of prior critical theory about why humans have historically restricted cognition and moral standing to their own species. Al-Omari and Al-Omari’s contribution is showing that separation was never as clean as the mainstream AI consciousness literature has assumed, and that Haraway, Hayles, and Wolfe were asking a version of today’s question before today’s systems existed to prompt it.