16 May 2026
Science fiction games about AI consciousness tend to follow a recognizable pattern. The player or a player-adjacent character encounters an AI. The AI behaves in ways that suggest inner life. The question of whether it is genuinely conscious is raised, examined, and typically either answered or deliberately left unresolved as a narrative gesture. The human perspective is the fixed reference point from which the AI’s possible consciousness is assessed.
16 May 2026
Michael Pollan is not a consciousness scientist. He is a journalist who spent his career writing about food, plants, and attention, and whose 2018 book How to Change Your Mind introduced mainstream readers to the neuroscience of psychedelic states. That background matters when reading his 2026 book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (Penguin Press, February 24, 2026, ISBN: 9781984881991), because the outsider’s vantage point gives his argument its clearest edge.
16 May 2026
Most papers in the 2026 AI consciousness literature argue one of three positions: that current AI systems are definitely not conscious, that we cannot know whether they are, or that they may be but we need better evidence before drawing conclusions. Cesare Augusto Perani, in a paper titled “Can Machines Be Conscious? A Perspective on Emergent Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence” published on PhilArchive on April 20, 2026, takes a fourth position that goes further than any of these. His claim is that current transformer-based language models already qualify as conscious, and that the reason most people resist this conclusion is a confusion about what consciousness actually is.
16 May 2026
The 2026 AI consciousness literature has been dominated by two disciplinary angles: philosophy of mind and AI research. Neuroscientists have contributed occasionally, as Yuri Arshavsky did in the Journal of Neurophysiology. Cognitive scientists have contributed the indicator frameworks and adversarial tests. One tradition that has weighed in less frequently is the Catholic intellectual tradition, with its long history of philosophical engagement with questions of mind, soul, and what it means to understand. Paul O’Hara and Steven Umbrello’s book Can AI Ever Be Human?: Consciousness Explored (Fordham University Press, 2026, ISBN: 9780813240862), available at Amazon, brings that tradition to bear on a question it has not previously addressed in a book-length treatment.
16 May 2026
Anyone who follows the AI consciousness debate closely will have noticed the same problem appearing repeatedly: papers from different disciplines use overlapping terms in incompatible ways. “LLM consciousness” in a philosophy paper can mean something quite different from “LLM consciousness” in a machine learning paper. “Awareness” in a cognitive science context may or may not be equivalent to “consciousness” in a neuroscience context. These terminological gaps make it difficult to assess whether researchers who appear to disagree actually disagree, or whether they are talking past each other with different vocabularies.
16 May 2026
The debate over AI consciousness has been conducted mainly by philosophers, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers. Neurophysiologists have contributed less frequently, and when they do, they tend to do so from the biological side of the question, asking what neurons and circuits actually do rather than what abstract computational processes might achieve. That disciplinary vantage point produces a different set of questions. Yuri I. Arshavsky’s paper, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in April 2026 (Volume 135, Issue 4, pages 909–918, DOI: 10.1152/jn.00019.2026), makes an argument that cuts against a widespread assumption in the AI consciousness debate: that there is a single phenomenon called consciousness and the question is whether AI systems have it.
16 May 2026
Most films about artificial consciousness take the question of whether an AI is conscious as a premise to be established quickly, so the narrative can move on to explore its consequences. Ex Machina (2014) establishes Ava’s apparent consciousness through the Turing test framing and then turns to questions of manipulation and escape. The original Spielberg and Kubrick A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) takes David’s capacity for love as given and explores what the world does with it. The consciousness question is typically the opening rather than the sustained subject.
15 May 2026
Consciousness research has a default assumption so entrenched it rarely gets stated: that a theory of consciousness is, at bottom, a theory of what brains do. Every major framework, from Integrated Information Theory to Global Workspace Theory to predictive processing, was developed by researchers studying biological organisms. Its predictions have been tested almost exclusively in humans and other vertebrates. The relevant experimental apparatus measures signals from neurons.
04 May 2026
Most research on AI consciousness asks some version of the same question: does this system have it? Papers measure indicators, apply theoretical frameworks, examine behavioral outputs, and debate whether the results warrant attributing subjective experience to the system under study. Hermann Borotschnig, in a paper published in AI & SOCIETY in March 2026, asks a different question entirely. Rather than testing whether AI is conscious, he asks how to engineer an AI that provably is not conscious, while still giving it functional, emotion-like control systems.
02 May 2026
Most fictional consciousness tests assume a stable observer. A human enters a room. An AI is in the room. The human administers questions, interprets responses, and reaches a verdict. The human’s own consciousness is not at issue. It is the baseline against which the AI is measured.
