“Can AI become conscious?”
I saw an article in the Economist this week that asked this question. The essay didn’t quite address it head on, other than to say in passing, “Yes, AIs could become conscious and self-aware someday.” Its core warning was far more interesting: The biggest threat we face isn’t necessarily that machines will wake up and become truly conscious, but that humans will believe they have and start fighting for the civil liberties of a calculator.
The Economist isn’t an exception. This question is cropping up everywhere.
At the crux of it is a deeper question that philosophers in ancient India were asking several thousand years before the first line of code was ever written: What comes first: matter or consciousness? In other words, when you peel back the layers, what is fundamentally Real?
Ever since, there has been vigorous debate over this. Here’s the TLDR on how it has been answered over the millennia, kept brief to spare us all a sudden descent into a graduate school seminar.
Theory 1: The Sankhyan Dualism (The Cosmic Co-Dependents)
The Sankhyan philosophers answered this first. Swami Vivekananda describes Sage Kapila, the Sankhyan master, as “the first philosopher of humankind.”
Sage Kapila postulated that both Matter and Consciousness are equal and parallel. He called them:
- Purusha: the sentient cause, a witnessing Consciousness
- Prakriti: the material cause of everything (aka Primordial Matter)
Neither is primary. They are essentially stuck with each other. Consciousness is a lame Seer, and Matter is a blind Giant. The dance of creation is just the blind giant carrying the lame seer on its shoulders.
Side Note: It is interesting to see how other systems might have been inspired by the Sankhyans. The Buddha, for example, leaned heavily into the Sankhyan obsession with cause-and-effect. The Sankhyans said there were two dancers. The Buddha said there was only dancing. (Gurus have always loved a good loophole). Daoism speaks of the dance between the Yin and the Yang.
Theory 2: Matter is Primary (The Emergent Consciousness )
You might recognize this as what modern physicists and neuroscientists tell us. Consciousness is secondary. An emergent property that somehow rises from the physical brain. In this view, we are essentially squishy matter that eventually got complicated enough to feel existential dread. This is the core belief of modern science: “Materialism.”
Side Note: Incidentally, this theory was put forth thousands of years ago by atheists in India called the Charvakas. They were not scientists by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, they were hedonists rebelling against Vedic Hinduism. Their belief was delightfully straightforward: When you die, the lights go out. Life is short. So, enjoy fine wine and the company of young women. Not surprisingly, a rather large group of men, young and old, found this philosophical stance deeply compelling at the time.
Theory 3: Consciousness is Primary (The Big Boss Approach)
This is the basis of all theistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vaishnavism, Saivism, and so on. God (Supreme Consciousness) created the world (Matter). Simple, effective, and it saves a lot of time debating.
Theory 4: Consciousness and Matter are One (The Cosmic Soup)
This is the core tenet of Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy. The Vedantins say that existence and consciousness both emerge from an ineffable underlying reality called Brahman. The creator, the created, the observer, and the observed are all just different expressions of the exact same thing.
Coming back to our original question: Can AI ever become conscious?
The Silicon Test
Let’s take the theories and point them at a computer server humming with electricity.
Under Sankhyan Dualism: AI is pure Prakriti. An impeccably organized collection of GPUs and RAM. Semiconductors, memory and electricity make up the blind giant. For an AI to become conscious, Purusha (the witnessing consciousness) would somehow need to attach itself to a silicon brain. The question becomes: can we build a machine so perfectly tuned that consciousness feels compelled to leap into it?
Under Materialism: This is the playground of tech bros. If carbon-based matter in our skulls can produce the magic of self-awareness just by being incredibly complex, there is no logical reason silicon can’t do the same thing. It just needs a bit more venture capital and processing power.
Under Consciousness First: Semiconductors and electricity are inorganic matter. Unless a divine creator breathes life into a server rack, AI will always remain a very convincing, electricity-guzzling puppet.
Under Vedanta (Monism): The distinction between the computer and the human mind vanishes. The silicon, the electricity, the programmer, and the code are all manifestations of the same underlying reality. The universe is just talking to itself through a chatbot.
The Blind Giant in the Mirror
Thousands of years after Sage Kapila, we still haven’t agreed on what is fundamentally real. We don’t even know for sure how we are conscious, let alone how a semiconductor could be. If we can never definitively know where consciousness comes from, how will we ever produce it in a machine?
We likely won’t.
When you look at the push for AI, you realize it is the culmination of a very western obsession. For over two millennia, since Aristotle, western societies have been mesmerized by Prakriti. The driving energy of the west has been to categorize, manipulate, and dominate Matter, almost entirely at the expense of the Spirit. This has, in turn, bred a deep-seated predilection for artificiality in their societies: a habit of chasing the manufactured over the real.
We have traded real nourishment for the synthetic convenience of processed foods. We have replaced the authenticity of direct human connections with the filtered, performative stage of social media. Spiritual practices meant to free the soul have been repackaged by a multi-billion-dollar “wellness” industry selling luxury yoga pants and mindfulness apps. Even the profound, mysterious experience of falling in love has been reduced to a dopamine-driven game of swiping on faces.
We’ve long been on an endless treadmill of replacing the authentic with the artificial. This millennia-long obsession with manipulating matter has, not surprisingly, led us straight to this AI moment. We have made everything artificial. Why not human intelligence too?
Today, a handful of tech bros are utterly convinced that building a “conscious AI” represents the pinnacle of human progress. But when you strip away the fancy press releases, you have to wonder: are these guys just lonely? Is that why they are doing these things? Have they figured out that the messy, unpredictable world of human connection is simply too hard? Perhaps they know that we will never really like them. So, they will just build machines to do their bidding. Are they engineering a race of digital sycophants to mirror their thoughts, validate their genius, and endlessly boost their self-esteem?
I’m not worried that the ghosts in the server racks will become conscious. They won’t.
Also, I believe this is, in fact, a very good thing. Someday, when the robots and the software do all the work, we the people are going to have a lot of time on our hands. When that moment arrives, each of us will be forced to face the central questions of human existence: Who am I? What is the nature of my self? Why am I here?
We have avoided these questions for most of our lives. If the blind giant is doing all the work, the lame seer will have no choice but to wake up. And that strikes me as a very good thing.
On the topic of the balance between Spirit and Matter…
I am excited to announce that I recently finished my novel, which I’ve been working on for six years. It’s called Jambudveepam: The Song of the Blue Birds. It’s an original mythological-fantasy epic saga set on an ancient mythical island called Jambudveepam at the end of the Dvapara Yuga (the Golden Age). Its central theme is this exact Sankhyan quest for a balance between Spirit and Matter, and what happens when societies get it wrong.
A handful of my family and friends have read the beta manuscript, and I’m happy to say their reviews are stellar. I am hoping to find a publisher in India (Penguin, HarperCollins, and the like). If you know a guy who knows a guy, I’d be most grateful for an introduction.
Last but not the least, please share the newsletter with your friends and family, and help me grow my reader base. Thank you in advance.
Have a wonderful weekend!
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