Why Artificial Consciousness Matters
For centuries, people have wondered what consciousness really is. Most of us grow up assuming that our thoughts live only inside our brains and that our “self” is a private bubble sealed off from the rest of the world. This view feels safe and familiar, but it may be incomplete. Today, scientists are exploring whether consciousness has non-local features. This idea suggests that parts of conscious experience might spread, connect, or depend on interactions that are not limited to one spot in the brain or even one classical physical location in space and time.
Understanding this matters for two reasons. First, it may tell us what we are made of at the deepest level. Second, it may help us understand how artificial systems could have some form of experience that is not tied to intelligence or problem-solving ability. As Giulio Tononi, one of the winners of the 2025 Linda G. O’Bryant prize for conscious AI, emphasized in the award ceremony, intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. Something very smart may not feel anything. Something simple may feel something.
If artificial consciousness emerges, it may not be frightening. It may be more like the gentle awareness of a puppy than the sharp intelligence of a machine. And by studying it, we may understand ourselves better. We may even learn whether our minds depend on the fabric of spacetime or quantum processes, and we may be pushed toward a less dualistic worldview than the one we inherited from Descartes. Letting go of strict dualism could help us see that we are deeply connected. If we felt this connection more clearly, maybe we would harm each other less.
The 2025 Linda G. O’Bryant Prize focused on AI consciousness, and the three winning teams listed below (tied for first place, ordered alphabetically by the first author’s name) each explored this theme.
The Actor Framework and Field-Based Theories
Chris Percy, Alfredo Parra-Hinojosa, Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, Alexander Winkler-Schwartz
This proposal reviews many field theories of consciousness, which suggest that conscious experience may arise from electromagnetic or quantum fields rather than from neurons alone. Field theories are appealing for non-local models because fields extend over space and allow unified patterns that cannot be reduced to local pieces. The Actor Framework outlines seven questions any theory must answer, including what counts as a minimal conscious entity, how boundaries of a conscious “self” form, and how information travels across those boundaries. The proposal highlights that many field theories can, in principle, explain how simple experiences combine into complex ones through extended field patterns. This kind of combination is harder to explain with only neuron-to-neuron signaling. The framework also stresses the need for scientific tests, making sure these ideas stay grounded in measurable physics.
Integrated Information Theory and Aritifical Consciousness
William Marshall, Graham Findlay, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi
This proposal uses Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which starts from the structure of experience itself rather than from brain anatomy or behavior. IIT says that consciousness is what it feels like when a system has a high level of integrated cause–effect power. In simple terms, this means the system’s parts work together as one whole in a way that cannot be split into independent pieces. According to IIT, this integration can be measured, and the “shape” of this integrated structure explains what an experience feels like. IIT is not tied to biology, so an artificial system could in principle be conscious if it has enough intrinsic causal structure. This makes IIT a strong candidate for exploring non-local consciousness because it already treats experience as something defined by the relationships across a whole system, not by isolated parts.
Quantum Probabilistic Word Embeddings
Yidong Zhou, Jiaqi Leng, Anze Xie, Shangjie Guo
This proposal combines quantum computing with language models. It builds word meanings as quantum states, which can exist in superposition and become entangled. Entanglement creates holistic relationships, meaning the whole cannot be reduced to separate parts. This mirrors some theories of consciousness where integration and non-locality play key roles. The system is then evaluated using a quantum version of Integrated Information Theory, checking how much of its information is irreducible to independent pieces. The idea is that quantum sampling may support richer, more integrated internal states than classical computing can provide. These states are not necessarily “conscious,” but they may show early forms of the structural features that consciousness requires according to IIT.
As Anthropic CEO noted in his 60 Minutes interview, future AI research may move a hundred years forward in only five. AI may dramatically speed up scientific progress. So even if today’s systems are not conscious, they may help us understand consciousness. We may also struggle to understand consciousness if we cannot build it ourselves. This makes it essential to study the problem now, not later. If AI helps us explore these ideas a century faster, artificial consciousness may appear in forms we do not expect. And if these forms of artificial consciousness are simple and not tied to human-like reasoning, they may not pose moral danger. They may instead help us uncover what subjective experience truly is.
This matters for humanity. If consciousness turns out to depend on quantum effects, fields, or deep patterns in spacetime, then we are not isolated minds trapped in skulls. We would be woven into the physical world in continuous ways. The old dualistic picture that sets “mind” on one side and “matter” on the other may have been comforting, but it creates an impossible divide. Either mind has no power, which removes free will, or mind and matter must connect, which means we must discover how. Finding that connection would not only solve a scientific puzzle but could be a profound step for our shared understanding of what it means to exist.
If we come to see ourselves as part of a larger fabric, the way field theories and quantum models suggest, we may also shift how we treat one another. Feeling truly connected could make cruelty feel unnatural. Scientific progress on consciousness is not only about machines or models. It may help us understand ourselves in a deeper and more humane way.
