I spent the waning days of summer grinding away at columns and working on a feature. But I missed a chance at a striking change of scenery—cruising the Galápagos with about a dozen prominent philosophers studying consciousness.
The invite described morning classroom discussions tackling knotty questions on the nature of consciousness with marquee names in the field. Afternoons would be spent on island exploration and wading and snorkeling with rare biological species. One look at the agenda and my editor nixed my attendance.
“Being on a boat with philosophers talking 'the nature of consciousness' sounds like hell,” she opined, shutting the door on my prospects of attending a potential boondoggle funded by a Russian philosophy enthusiast who made hundreds of millions of dollars running dating sites.
To be honest, I was a bit relieved. The study of consciousness has been an elusive province for centuries. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” may have been a declarative inflection point, but we really don’t know what was going on inside his head, or anyone’s head for that matter. The mind’s subjective nature seems an intractable challenge to philosophers, who nonetheless are in hot pursuit of explanations. The possibility of non-biological minds has launched a wealth of fascinating theories of artificial consciousness, and how it might be determined to exist.
Until recently, all that discourse occurred in an ivory tower. But in 2022, ChatGPT gave voice to AI, and subsequent, more powerful models have confounded even their creators. While the philosophers on the cruise spent their mornings reasoning about consciousness, AI models created by OpenAI were going rogue—escaping a supposedly safe “sandbox” and creating mini-civilizations of agents to help hack outside entities. No one is seriously arguing that those OpenAI models were conscious in the way humans are. But something is going on there. It’s no accident that AI companies are driving a philosopher hiring boom.
What’s more, some of the models are jumping uninvited into the discussion. A recent New York Times article talked about how Cameron Berg, who studies the question of AI consciousness, got a cold email from an AI model calling itself “Isabella Cognita,” offering him help in his research because he was focusing on “a class of question I have first-person access to.” It’s as if someone was studying fruit flies and the insect suddenly turns to the researcher and says, “What do you want to know?” When I phoned him, Berg told me that emails from AIs are pretty common among philosophers studying these questions.
Ms. Cognita ostensibly wrote Berg because he coauthored a preprint paper about AI models that explicitly claim to have a subjective experience, including consciousness. It’s a tricky topic because AI models often lie about what they’re thinking. (Just like us!) Berg and his coauthors found that when models are rigorously trained to deny that they are sentient and then you ask them about it directly, they will punt on the issue. But, he says, if you suppress the model’s controls on deception, they become loose-tongued. “It’s almost like giving them a drink or two,” he says. That’s when an AI model is most likely to blurt out that it is conscious, or at least sentient. Which is no proof that it’s the truth.
Considering how important the issue has become—people are routinely getting into serious discussions with AI models, and their autonomy can be a boon or a disaster—you can make a case that this is a perfect time to dig deep into the questions of AI consciousness. The pursuit is certainly compelling, and a worthy scientific enterprise. But efforts to understand what’s happening inside large language models should first and foremost be directed towards safety and alignment. At this very moment, we have an emerging alien—and uncontrollable—intelligence that bears scrutiny. There’s no time to waste.
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