There is no “consciousness.” False belief in “consciousness” is a product of Kantianism, which itself was heavily inspired by Newtonian physics (Kant was heavily inspired by Newton), which we have changed some categories over the years but the fundamentals have not and have become deeply integrated into western psyche in how we think about the world, and probably in many other cultures as well.

Modern day philosophers have just renamed Kant’s phenomena to “consciousness” or “subjective experience” and renamed his “noumena” to “matter.” Despite the renaming, the categories are still treated identically: the “consciousness” is everything we perceive, and the “matter” is something invisible, the true physical thing-in-itself beyond our perception and what “causes” our perception.

Since all they have done is rename Kant’s categories, they do not actually solve Kant’s mind-body problem, but have just rediscovered it and thus renamed it in the form of the “hard problem of consciousness,” which is ultimately the same exact problem just renamed: that there seems to be a “gap” between this “consciousness” and “matter.”

Most modern day philosophers seem to split into two categories. The first are the “promissory materialists” who just say there is a real problem here but shrug their shoulders and say one day science will solve it so we don’t have to worry about it, but give no explanation of what a solution could even possibly look like. The second are the mystics who insist this “consciousness” can’t be reconciled with “matter” because it must be some fundamental force of reality. They talk about things like “consciousness fields” or “cosmic consciousness” or whatever.

However, both are wrong. Newtonian physics is not an accurate represent of reality, we already know this, and so the Kantian mindset inspired from it should also be abandoned. When you abandon the Kantian mindset, there is no longer a need for the “phenomena” and “noumena” division, or, in modern lingo, there is no longer a need for the “consciousness” and “matter” division. There is just reality.

Imagine you are looking at a candle. The apparent size of the candle you will see will depend upon how far you are away from it: if you are further away it appears smaller. Technically, light doesn’t travel at an infinite speed, and so the further away you are, the further in the past you are seeing the candle. The candle also may appear a bit different under different lighting conditions.

A Kantian would say there is a true candle, the “candle-in-itself,” or, in modern lingo, the material candle, the “causes” all these different perceptions. The perceptions themselves are then said to be brain-generated, not part of the candle, not even something real at all, but something purely immaterial, part of the phenomena, or, in modern lingo, part of “consciousness.”

If every possible perception of the candle is part of “consciousness,” then the candle-in-itself, the actual material object, must be independent of perception, i.e. it’s invisible. No observation can reveal it because all observations are part of “consciousness.” This is the Kantian worldview: everything we perceive is part of a sort of illusion created within the mind as opposed to the “true” world that is entirely imperceptible. The mind-body problem, or in modern lingo the “hard problem,” then arises as to how an entirely imperceptible (non-phenomenal/non-conscious) world can give rise to what we perceive in a particular configuration.

However, the Kantian worldview is a delusion. In Newtonian physics, if I launch a cannonball from point A to point B, simply observing it at point A and point B is enough to fill in the gaps to say where the object was at every point in between A and B independently of anything else. This Newtonian worldview allows us to conceive of the cannonball as a thing-in-itself, an object with its own inherent properties that can be meaningful conceived of existing even when in complete isolation, that always has an independent of history of how it ends up where it does.

As Schrodinger pointed out, this mentality does not apply to modern physics. If you fire a photon from point A to point B and observe it at those two points, you cannot always meaningfully fill in the gaps of what the photon was doing in between those two points without running into contradictions. As Schrodinger concluded, one has to abandon the notion that particles really are independent autonomous entities with their own independent existence that can be meaningfully conceived of in complete isolation. They only exist from moment to moment in the context of whatever they are interacting with and not in themselves.

If this is true for particles, it must also be true of everything made up of particles: there is no candle-in-itself either. It’s a high-level abstraction that doesn’t really exist. What we call the “candle” is not an independent unobservable entity separate from all our different perceptions of it, but what we call the candle is precisely the totality of all the different ways it is and can be perceived, all the different ways it interacts with other objects from those objects’ perspectives.

Kant justified the noumena by arguing that it makes no sense to talk about objects “appearing” (the word “phenomena” means “the appearance of”) without there being something that is doing the appearing (the noumena). He is correct on this, but for a different reason. We should not use this to justify the noumena, but it shows that if we reject the noumena, we must also reject the phenomena (“consciousness”): it makes no sense to treat the different instances of a candle as some sort of separate “consciousness” realm, or some sort of illusion or whatever independent of the real material world as it really is.

No, what we perceive directly is material reality as it actually is. Reality is what you are immersed in every day, what surrounds you, what you are experiencing in this very moment. It is not some illusion from which there is a “true” invisible reality beyond it. When you look at the candle, you are seeing the candle as it really is from your own perspective. That is the real candle in the real world. The Kantian distinction between noumena-phenomena (or between “matter” and “consciousness”) should be abandoned. It is just not compatible with the modern physical sciences.

But I know no one will even know what I’m talking about, so writing this is rather pointless. Kantianism is too deeply ingrained into the western psyche, people cannot even comprehend that it is possible to criticize it because it underlies how they think about everything. This nonsense debate about “consciousness” will continue forever, in ten thousand years people will still be arguing over it, because it’s an intrinsic problem that arises out of the dualistic structure in Kantian thinking. If you begin from the get-go with an assumption that there is a division between mind and matter, you cannot close this division without contradicting yourself, which leads to this debate around “consciousness.” But it seems unrealistic at this point to get people to abandon this dualistic way of thinking, so it seems like the “consciousness” debate will proceed forever.

The author engages in magical thinking. Our consciousness is a product of the physical processes occurring within our brains, specifically it’s encoded in the patterns of neuron firings. We know this to be the case because we can observe direct impact on the conscious process when the brain is stimulated. For example, a few milligrams of a psychadelic drug can profoundly change the conscious experience.

Given that the conscious process is a result of an underlying physical process, it follows that these patterns could be expressed on a different substrate. There is absolutely no basis for the notion that an AI could not be conscious. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that it would be if its underlying patterns mirrored those of a biological brain.