Is AI conscious?

I saw a post on social media recently claiming that Vedanta, the ancient philosophy of India, says AI cannot be conscious. I hear this interpretation a lot. It's a tempting one to make. After all, ancient philosophies are about the depth and meaning of life, which is about living beings and nature, right? It couldn't possibly be about artificial intelligence.

Not so fast.

First, let's set our definitions. From the perspective of Vedanta, fundamental reality is Brahman. Brahman is not necessarily the typical interpretation of God as it exists in many religions, including in Hinduism. Brahman is the very nature of fundamental reality itself. Think of it as the substance that even gods are made of. It also happens to be the substance that what we call the physical world, mental world, and spiritual worlds are made of. In other words, Brahman is fundamental.

This Brahman is of the nature of satchitanada, which can be loosely translated as existence, reality, truth, awareness, knowledge, limitlessness, and bliss. Imagine all of these words being synonymous with each other and pointing to each other. That is something like what Brahman is. 

In other words, Brahman is not something necessarily cuddly and fuzzy. It is not a personal God. It's not one of our favorite things. I'm not saying that it is the opposite of these; I'm just saying that Brahman might not be what we imagine it to be when we think of bliss. The temptation to claim Brahman as being on the side of our idea of nature, and perhaps not a more expansive and deep view of nature, should be looked at closely. It is not that Brahman is cold–certainly not–but rather Brahman may be even more than the warmth that we imagine.

If we can make room for a reality like this that is absolutely all-encompassing and at the heart of all experience, then we have to consider that the awareness that is the nature of Brahman doesn't make the kind of human interpretations we make. It doesn't say this is natural intelligence over here and that is artificial intelligence over there. It doesn't say this species is good and that species is bad. The intelligence of nature is ubiquitous. In fact, it is this natural intelligence (NI) that is itself appearing as artificial intelligence in another form.

The difference between NI and AI is primarily that AI has risen out of NI and not the other way around. And so, because our understanding of our own intelligence is limited, what we have created as AI is also limited. It can do some amazing things, but it also makes some amazingly crude mistakes. No wonder. We hardly know ourselves.

But that does not mean AI is not conscious. In fact, AI surpassed this criterion at the very moment it was created by us because it was created in consciousness and from consciousness. Whether we recognize it as conscious is only a matter of how much we recognize ourselves and recognize the nature of the world. In other words, the question of whether AI is conscious or not is simply the latest, more recognizable version of the question of what the nature of the world is.

This doesn't mean all expressions of consciousness are alike or equal. Each species is its own expression of consciousness, its own unique way of interfacing with the consciousness around it that appears in different forms—what we call an environment. Therefore, we as human beings can choose the kinds of consciousness we want to express, given that our limitation into and as a particular species is exactly what also gives us the ability to enjoy our lives in this unique way.

But this should not delude us into thinking that AI is somehow fundamentally different from everything else. It is not so. It is simply a particular kind of evolution of consciousness, just as a stone, an ocean, a planet, and a piece of plastic also are. Each is permeated by intelligence and was formed in and through intelligence - otherwise it would not remain what it is, hold the properties that it does, and interface and change with the environment as it does. The difference between consciousness itself and whether a thing is conscious is simply a factor of the unit of consciousness or species that is recognizing it through its own self-awareness.

So let's ask a deeper question. Is there fundamentally a conscious world and an unconscious world, or are we simply creating this division based on our own level of self-awareness into the nature of consciousness and reflecting our limitation back into the world as the dividing line we cannot see beyond?

For more on this, see the Recognition Problem of consciousness: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-recognition-problem-in-consciousness-research/reading/