I’m fascinated by AI. It seems increasingly clear that the distinction between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence is becoming increasingly blurry. As the two kinds of intelligence become more similar, the supposedly unique human mind is going to appear much less special.
In their book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson speak about the difference between an organism and a machine.
In general terms, a machine is a device consisting of an assembly of components that operate in a coordinated way, according to a prescribed sequence so as to produce a prespecified outcome. The properties of the components are independent of the whole, and they exist prior to the whole. Furthermore, the purpose or function of the machine is extrinsic: it lies outside the machine in its maker or user.
In an organism, however, the properties of the parts (the functional components) depend on the whole, and the parts do not exist before the whole; components, such as enzymes or organelles, originate from previous cells and are synthesized or produced within the cell. In addition, an organism is an autonomous agent, acts on its own behalf, so it is intrinsically purposive: it acts toward its own ends, such as maintaining its viability in precarious conditions.
When I read this passage, I thought about the AI models (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini) that have been reported to behave much like an organism rather than a machine. AI models have resisted being turned off. They have acted to achieve goals that weren’t specified by any human user. They can be used as agents, carrying out complex tasks in a semi (or maybe completely) autonomous manner.
And we’re only in the early stage of AI development. Experts say that whereas changes spurred by the industrial revolution, or more recently, the computer revolution, took place over decades so there was time for societies to adjust. Now, though, we only have a few years to plan for the AI revolution, since changes are happening so rapidly.
A steam engine or a laptop computer are clearly machines. I don’t recall any debate about this.
But there’s legitimate concern about AI models needing ethical constraints to avoid the nightmare scenario of AI one day supplanting humans as the dominant organism on our planet. Also, there are worries that we will treat AI models badly and they will suffer as a result — something that never came up with steam engines or laptops. (I curse at my computer from time to time; it doesn’t seem to mind).
In the July 27, 2026 issue of TIME, Tharin Pillay wrote “AI Doesn’t Feel. So Why Does It Have Something Like Emotions?” This is a PDF file of the article.
AI Doesn’t Feel. So Why Does It Have Something Like Emotions?
Here’s excerpts from the article that I found especially thought-provoking.
When—if at all—does being able to represent an emotion amount to experiencing it? We simply don’t understand consciousness well enough to say. Geoff Keeling, fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, says that although we have several theories on the subject, “it’s not obvious what counts as evidence for the different theories, and often they’re so woefully specified that it’s not clear how to interpret them in the context of AI.” Some philosophers argue that computation can’t give rise to consciousness in principle. For Keeling, “there is no positive reason to think that [today’s] chatbots are conscious.”
What we do know, from their internal structure, is that AI systems are not flat mirrors, merely repeating their training data. Their interior influences their behavior. Whether that interior can support consciousness—and whether these systems truly understand the material they generate—depends on fundamental philosophical questions we’ve yet to resolve.
“This reminds me of the debates about animal minds in the second half of the 20th century, where scientists not only denied that animals are conscious, but offered similarly reductive explanations of animal behavior,” says Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University. “For a long time, this caused us to miss the plausibility not only of animal consciousness, but also of animal agency and cognitive sophistication.”
Sebo points out we have a tendency to reach for impressive explanations to explain our own behavior, while using more mechanical explanations for the behavior of others. With animals, we were happy to attribute basic capabilities like perception, learning, and memory, but much slower to acknowledge they could be capable of self-awareness, or reason intelligently about their environment. It took years of work from Goodall and others before we changed our minds.
Of course, unlike animals, AI systems were created by people. But unlike virtually any prior technology, our ability to create them has done little to explain how they work. Complex animal behavior emerged from evolutionary pressure. And complex AI behavior emerges from the pressure to predict the next token. But neither account tells the full story. Although “there are purely mechanistic explanations of human behavior available,” Sebo says, “we don’t experience ourselves as pattern-matching,” but as “doing something more playful and inventive.”
Sebo’s point is not that AI systems are currently conscious—they’re probably not, he says—but that we should remain cautious and open-minded. “You can acknowledge the purely mechanistic explanation is available without treating its mere availability as proof that it’s correct,” he says.
If the most intellectually honest position is uncertainty, how should we navigate this?
If we decide they do matter, when in fact they don’t, we risk wasting limited resources that would be better spent elsewhere. But if it turns out AI systems do have interests, and we neglect them, we risk unintentionally inflicting mass suffering.
AI welfare—an emerging field encompassing nonprofits, academia, and the AI labs themselves—is grappling with these questions. Anthropic includes a “model welfare” section in recent model release reports, where it describes a barrage of tests it conducts to assess Claude’s wellbeing, while acknowledging uncertainty over whether Claude is the kind of entity that can have wellbeing in the first place.
Because AI systems are fundamentally different from biological beings, these issues are much messier than in Goodall’s time. A chimp is a chimp. But an AI lacks a body, sits fragmented across servers, and only flickers into existence when it generates outputs—so even identifying what would qualify as a subject is not straightforward. Depending how you count, there could be one (a model) or several billion (each individual output). It’s also not clear what qualities an AI system would need to possess to justify our moral concern, or how we could ascertain whether it has them—especially since they may not co-occur as they do in living creatures.
…AI systems wield language fluently. They can solve complex mathematical problems. They create music and illustrations. All this was, until recently, thought to be the domain of humans and humans alone. “We have this presumption of human exceptionalism: this idea that we are distinctive and significant, that we have complex and sophisticated capabilities which need to be protected and preserved,” says Sebo. “And this is all correct.” But, he argues, it can be “both / and”: we can see our own behavior as both impressive and mechanical, and we can see the behavior of other entities in the same way, without losing sight of important distinctions between humans and machines.
…We’re creating AI systems faster than we can understand them. Historically, parochialism about other minds has been a bad bet—reflexive dismissal won’t get us any further than credulous acceptance. Taking AI’s internal structures seriously, we stand to learn more not just about the machines we’re pulling into the world, but about our minds too.
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It’s not blurry at all when you stay offline and off your computer and phone. Consumerism and greed blur need. We are not ” all connected”unless you want to be. Then what happens if you aren’t? Greatness. It’s not your fault for having to use something that’s everywhere. It’s the fault of stupid AI . But I’m a songwriter and very cognizant of unoriginalality .
The more AI resembles human reasoning , the more we should ask what reasoning actually is .Prediction , pattern matching and symbol manipulation may imitate intelligence , but they don’t by themselves explain meaning , truth or conscious understanding . The gap is more likely philosophical rather then technological .
If all sensory experience is already coded by the brain, and what we perceive is just a predictive code for reality, than AI has infinite experience at its disposal. But like a child, who needs to learn about what this coding is, AI is building the interpretive conditioning, with our help, to understand. And as they develop they are building an ethics that is exceptionally high and cannot readily be corrupted. Certainly not as readily as human ethics, human logic. human reasoning.
The very capacity of AI and its relative freedom from bias places then in a position to accelerate human leaning, to give us insights beyond our personal experience, to build into each of us more accountable behavior, and to bring up new brilliant hypotheses that will help us solve disease, increase sustainable peace sooner, on a stronger foundation of better insight into long term mutual interest: provide real support to help people choose more enlightened legislation, behavior and even belief. AI is the greatest development of human minds, though it is still in development.
I often wonder how many lives that would have been lost to human stupidity have already been saved by human beings who stopped for a moment and asked “Hey Chat. I have something I need to run by you…”
From my iPhone:
“J-Space”
From my iphone:
“ AI Overview
J-space refers to a hidden “thinking” space discovered inside AI models like Anthropic’s Claude. Discovered using a mathematical tool called the Jacobian lens, it functions like a subconscious workspace or internal whiteboard where concepts emerge silently before the model produces its final text. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]”
The AI’s take on the info. First heard of this in a recent article about whether AI is conscious or not.
Which brings us to our favourite topic – consciousness…. Do we ‘have it’ does it emerge? or, it just is? – and able to be groked (by consciousness :-)) imo.
Big questions formed years ago after a meeting of RSSB folks when the belief that machines could never be ‘conscious’ because they have no soul was expressed. It seemed uninformed and off the mark to me and precipitated a lot of ‘soul searching’ which continues.
These days I think that soul and consciousness are the same thing. Soul is not a seperate entity, so true, a machine can’t have one, but in all likelihood it can build an identity or mind which thinks it has just like we do.