Computational, emotional and physiological aspects of consciousness. How tight are mind-body links? Can animals or electronic AI have consciousness or ethics, or feel pleasure or pain? Is it safe to leave important decisions to machines?
Creators: name: Quoldslibet, Roger
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Consciousness
Hard Problem of Consciousness
Hippocampus
Self
Algorithm
Gödel's theorems
Pleasure
Pain
Suffering
Neurons
Neural network
Machine learning
Deep learning
Reinforcement learning
Reward
Generative AI
GenerativeTransformer
Evolution
Natural selection
Punctuated equilibrium
Soul
Strong AI
Strong Artificial Intelligence
Orch OR
Happiness
Ecclesiastes
Qohelet
Darwinism
Gödel's incompleteness theorem
AGI
Artificial General Intelligence
Reason
Addiction
Idiopathic diseases

description: It is widely known that the latest developments of the so-called artificial intelligence technology are not reliable as a source of information or a tool for decision-making, although they often provide spectacular results and may be useful for many purposes if used by people with appropriate maturity and competences. Anyway, a considerable number of people without specialized knowledge, together with many experts, think that this technology can be substantially improved, even to the point of becoming more powerful than the human mind for every practical purpose and achieving results of superhuman quality without the least human supervision. This article tries to answer some fundamental questions of practical interest about the so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technology and related domains like the mechanisms of the human mind and consciousness: Will machines ever be able to surpass the human mind in every aspect? What is consciousness? Can a machine be conscious, in terms of self-awareness, pleasure or suffering? What animals can be considered to have consciousness, if any? The main conclusions, drawn on the basis of purely scientific arguments, are the following:

A) Limits of artificial intelligence, with a high degree of likeliness:

- As it is already widely assumed, with today`s technology and in the foreseeable future, the practical use of these ‘AI’ tools has proved beyond doubt that they are not reliable and therefore must not be allowed to make important decisions without human supervision. In more technical terms, what has been developed so far is not real intelligence, but the machine equivalent of intuition or instinct.

- Because of the limitations of their human creators, these technologies will never be able to match, let alone surpass, human intelligence, even if they ever develop real intelligence instead of mere intuition or instinct. Technologies imitating phenomena like learning processes or sensations of live beings, management of abstract concepts, or natural selection of minds will be useless as long as they are designed by humans. The article includes discussions about, among other related subjects, the neural, physiological and computational modelling of concepts, Gödel´s theorems, and hypothetical artificial Darwinian selection, assisted or not, of machine computation models and simulation systems.

B) Hypothesis about consciousness, compatible with today’s scientific knowledge and everyone’s subjective sensations:

- With today’s electronic technology, it could perhaps be possible to build intelligent machines, but, for purely physical reasons, they would not be conscious, that is, they would not be aware of sensations or feelings. Consciousness, that is, awareness of one’s existence, apparently requires the full integration, not the mere coexistence, of two factors:

1) The sentient part, which produces sensations, emotions, pleasure, suffering, will, subjective feeling of ‘I’. This part is generally considered, when accepted at all, either of divine or transcendental nature (the ‘soul’), or of purely physical nature, though not clearly identified so far, probably because today´s theoretical physics does not include any phenomenon that could play this role in a way fully coherent with our own subjective experience, let alone with objective experiments. This article shows that this sentience may have a precise physical nature, unknown to today’s theoretical physics, and inevitably impossible to measure by scientific procedures, but open to subjective analysis. In principle, this phenomenon can occur anywhere. Of course, its physical nature does not prevent us from believing that it has ultimately a divine origin, like all other physical phenomena.

2) The cognitive or computational part, which is required to remember and be aware of the sentient part. It includes the concepts of reasoning, understanding, calculation, and memory. It can be considered purely algorithmic, pure information, and therefore in principle it can be developed by computing machines. The computing power of this part represents the main evolutionary advantage of consciousness. Although this part can be considered algorithmic in a broad sense, just as humans can be considered animals, in fact it is much more than that, it is a super algorithm, a generator of algorithms. However, it cannot produce subjective sensations by itself.

Some consequences of the above duality:

- Machines with a physical architecture similar to that of today's computers cannot be conscious, because their physical structue cannot represent the computational part of consciousness, for at least two reasons: first, because the human builders of these machines cannot understand the mechanism of this computational part, as explained in A); second, because this architecture cannot reflect physically the processes of the computational part, if only because the layout of this part is analogic and computers are digital, and because information is not an objective physical reality, but makes sense only when appropriatedly interpreted by an already existing consciousness. Therefore, in principle we can suppose that only biological organisms are capable of consciousness, though perhaps not all of them.

- Consciousness does not seem to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but a quantitative one. Human-level consciousness can occur when the cognitive part is fully integrated, bit by bit and in real time, with a compatible physical sentient part. A lesser degree of integration, or a less intense sentient part, or a less intelligent cognitive part, could result in a lower degree of consciousness. In consequence, we cannot be absolutely sure about when and to what degree a given physical dynamic system other than our human mind can develop consciousness, especially if this system is biological.

C) The following consequence of analysis A) and hypothesis B) has been extensively confirmed by practice:

- The combined properties of the sentient and cognitive parts imply strict limitations on the possible frequency and intensity of the sensations of pleasure that live creatures can experience. In humans, the possible strategies adequate to cope with these limitations have already been proclaimed by traditional wisdom, practically all major religions, and more or less directly by modern medical science: moderation, self-control, moral principles, empathy, reasonable diet and physical activity, etc. By contrast, behaviour intended mainly or exclusively to maximize the balance between physical pleasure and suffering can lead only to physical and mental degeneration, if not outright madness, because in the medium and long term this balance is physically limited, so the systematic search for physical pleasure is precisely the one and only possible goal of life that cannot be satisfied under any circumstance, except in the very short term and with an inevitable subsequent negative rebound.