WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS, AND WHY DO HUMANS HAVE IT BUT AI CANNOT? By Anna Ciaunica *** The Montréal Review, October 2026 |
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Why Consciousness is not a thing in the head but a journey
Close your eyes and imagine you’re starting to climb a mountain. After you have reached the peak, perhaps a bit out of breath, you look around, enjoying the view, the crisp beauty of the landscape. Perhaps you look inside yourself to catch what it is like to feel breathless or to feel the wind playing with your hair. However, if someone asks you what “climbing a mountain” means, are you going to describe to her only the joys of the top view and forget about the struggles and the humble first steps? Just because we celebrate the glorious view on top the mountain does this mean that the first step never existed or mattered? After all, we couldn’t reach the top without those forgotten early steps (Ciaunica 2026). Perhaps understanding consciousness is like understanding the process of climbing a mountain. Consciousness is more like a journey, rather than a thing. The key idea is that it takes every single cellular bodily step to get to the neural brainy top, and no step is more important or more fundamental than the other. When we start thinking about consciousness, we are already comfortably sitting on the top of the mountain so to speak, with a mirror in our hands. You and me, as adults, we use our brains and our sophisticated cognitive abilities to introspect how we feel when we see the sky or when we touch a green leaf versus a green snake, or what it is like to feel joy or pain. Discussions on consciousness typically start with the mystery surrounding the phenomenon of “what it is like” to experience this or that, something…anything. For example, Thomas Nagel famously argued that “for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism” (Nagel 1974). This ineffable phenomenal quality, i.e. “what it is likeness” of our subjective experiences famously resisted all attempts to explain it in purely material physicalist terms. Phenomenal consciousness is thus “what goes away under deep general anaesthesia or in dreamless sleep” (Seth & Tsakiris 2018). Physicalism is the view that at the bottom fundamental layer of reality physicalist properties, in one way or another, is all that exists – be it particles/waves, quarks, energy etc. This means that across our spectrum, mountains, brains, leaves and snakes are all made from physical stuff, and so too then is consciousness (Gillett & Loewer 2001). Functionalism is the view that it doesn’t matter what physical stuff you are made of (neurons, organoids, synthetic material, artificial architectures, information, clouds), what really matters instead is the functional organization that allows you to climb the mountain of consciousness (Putnam 1988, Buechner 2007). Computational functionalism is the view that sophisticated systems such as human brains implement conscious experiences via neural computations that can be functionally replaced by all sorts of substrates (e.g. synthetic), while keeping the conscious experience intact. Now, is physicalism and its respectable cousin, computational functionalism, the only game in town capable of keeping spooky supernatural ghosts at arms’ length? After all, the key appeal of physicalism is the ability to place consciousness within the naturalistic realm so that that consciousness can be operationalized, measured and modeled. In this sense, physicalism is widely viewed as the much-needed dam that prohibits dangerous metaphysics from introducing all sorts of elfs and fairies into our world view. Yet, physicalism also became the respectable framework allowing the simultaneous view that machines can be conscious while babies may not ( Bekkers & Ciaunica 2026). How did that happen? Do we really need to waive between machines and gremlins when it comes to understand the ontology of consciousness? Are our options that brutally stark? How do humans really become conscious? To answer this question, one needs to step back and look at the phenomenon of consciousness as an unfolding process or an embodied journey of living organisms.
Deadly Damocles’ sword makes conscious experiences necessarily embodied and alive
Can you be dead and conscious at the same time? Obviously not, but then this implies a link between consciousness and life, so what is that link? The oldest, most pressing and fundamental problem that all living systems had to solve billions of years ago is how to self-preserve one’s body, how to stay alive and reproduce as species. Some organisms succeeded in this task (e.g. cats); others went extinct (e.g. dinosaurs). Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum). Existing evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga (Pearce et al. 2018). Ontologically speaking, the smartest thing for a living system to do is stay alive. If this is so, then experiencing and learning in biological systems are necessarily related to the self-preservation of the body and cannot be addressed in isolation from it (Maturana & Varela 1980; Damasio & Damasio 2024). Hence, one must start with the “humble” yet fundamental constituents of biological life as they unfold. This is because, as Damasio (2021) pointed out, high level cognition is the result of an outgrowth of resources that originated to solve the ancient biological problem of homeostatic self-preservation of one’s body. As a consequence, bringing the body - and specifically the developing body - back into focus may help us address the link between life and conscious experiences in new ways (Maturana and Varela 1980; Damasio 2000). To better understand this framework in practice one needs to journey back to the humble roots of consciousness, and this entails the bodily experiences in early life and beyond of us humans. So let’s look at the following example: A human newborn may test the following two hypotheses: P1: If I cry, I will get food. P2: If I don’t cry, I will get food. Now, the baby that bets on P1 may stand a better chance of getting food and thus surviving. Yet, at any point in evolution living systems such as babies will not test the following hypothesis: whether it is good to stay alive or die. The very existence of living systems depends on the intrinsically validated hypothesis that being alive is inherently good, while dying is bad. Experiences are thus necessarily qualitatively valenced processes, geared towards self-preservation as a highly desirable ontological state. So because living systems have an end, they possess the basic goal of staying away from death. Two aspects are noteworthy here:
What does this mean for physicalism and computational functionalism when it comes to consciousness? It means AI cannot be conscious because it’s not Dostoievskian: it cannot be born, suffer or die! We are finite beings with a limited metabolic budget and resources for navigating the environment. We cannot process all signals that the environment sends us. Importantly however, the first steps in processing self-related signals in humans are carried necessarily in relation to the metabolic budget of the mother’s body, and fundamentally dependent upon it. Crucially, while not all humans will have the experience of being pregnant or carrying a baby, the state of growing within another person’s body is universal. In other words, we first exist by co-existing (Rochat 2009; Ciaunica et al. 2021). Neurons are one type of cells and cells develop before neurons, in relation to another’s body cells. Human life journey starts with embryonic cells negotiating energetic resources with maternal cells in order to secure survival. There can be no developing fetal brain without the constant and careful orchestration of multilayered cellular and metabolic mechanisms operated in tandem in the uterine living system Consequently, there can be no effective understanding of the nature of early sensory experiences in utero without turning the spotlight towards the two bodies working in tandem to achieve the vital goal of growing life by staying alive. Our first experiences are fundamentally relational. Living organisms experience their inner and outer world thorough their bodies, but how exactly embodied experiences are related to life in biological and artificial systems? What does it mean to experience something? As new generations of artificial intelligence-based systems continue to develop at fast pace, with claims of becoming alive, understanding the relationship between biological and artificial systems and bodily experiences becomes more pressing. Yet, without a clear understanding or definition of the very notion of experience, debates around biological and artificial life risk missing their targets. Experiences, I suggest, are ontologically relational states via which living organisms actively create their own self-existence and prepare for action (Maturana & Varela 1988, Damasio 2021). Can we build conscious machines? No because AI cannot get from the womb to the tomb. AI consciousness can only chase the ideal of immortality and infinity and not actual biological life itself. This is because computational functionalism with its substrate independence relies upon Plato’s dichotomy between invariant forms and malleable matter, i.e. one can change the latter by keeping the former invariant. Yet precisely because the distinction between decaying mortal “impure” bodies and “pure”, abstract minds tacitly permeates the roots of our Western thinking, the making up of artificial versions of living systems followed the same dichotomy: artificial bodies on the one hand, artificial minds on the other, with the ultimate goals of creating artificial life forms. After all, platonic ideal forms are attractive because they lay outside the laws of thermodynamics and its dangers: hence it is very tempting to conceive that AI systems can be in principle eternal and infinite, i.e. obeying the pure laws of abstract forms, sheltered from the corrosive effects of homeostatic self-maintenance, which is literally energy and time consuming. But perhaps Mother Nature played us a trick: our most sublime facet (i.e. consciousness) may tighten up with its most dangerous and terrifying one (i.e. death) as the two faces of the same coin.
The limitations of physicalism and AI when it comes to consciousness
Crucially, pending death is not the only problem that living systems face. The resources that organisms have at their disposal to solve this problem are limited. Living systems must ignore the infinite signals to save their finite being in order to survive. Infinity and eternity may be available in formal mathematical worlds but they are not available to real living and dying systems. It is therefore important to distinguish between linear and cumulative (i.e. quantitative) information processing and qualitative information processing when it comes to artificial and biological self-organising systems (Benett et al. 2024; Ciaunica 2025). Specifically, I suggest that because living systems face significant time and energy constraints due to impending death (i.e. homeostasis failure), they must first learn to carefully strike a qualitative balance between what information is worth processing for their bodily survival and what information the system must discard. Artificial systems on the other hand process rapid, quantitatively exponential information in a purely accumulative way, as if eternity and unlimited energetic resources were available to them. By having a ‘no body problem’, these systems have a ‘no death problem’. But not having the daunting death problem is still a problem. In our real world (i.e. Earth) as opposed to formal (i.e. abstract) worlds, eternity and endless energetic resources are not available to artificial systems either because they depend on earthly and human resources and so they too face resource constraints (Bekkers & Ciaunica 2026). Endless resources and ideal forms may exist in Plato’s world of abstraction but in our world there is an end. Bodily and earthly resources, however, can be measured with high precision in the survival game and one can quickly learn what the limits are and their consequences. Here I suggest that consciousness may be deeply grounded in the developing, embodied organism taken as a whole and not just in the brain and its neural correlates. Radically speaking, there is no such “thing” as consciousness. One should avoid talking about consciousness as a “thing”, as a reified noun referring to an object that one can move from brain A to brain B or upload from body A to body B. Instead, consciousness should be understood as a verb - conscious experiencing - something that living organisms, and only embodied living organisms, do. I see yet another major issue with the traditional views of consciousness that promises us conscious AI if we subscribe to the physicalist path. As adults we can do all sorts of complex introspections and write books and essays on consciousness. Does this mean that consciousness appears by magic only once we start thinking and look inside our minds/brains? Where is consciousness disappearing when our “inner lamp” goes off (e.g. when I’m asleep or I’m under anaesthesia or I’m a baby)? Imagine Mother Nature trying to figure out when to switch on or off our consciousness lamp depending on the reaching of a mountain peak. That wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do, and Nature is smart. The focus on experiencing as a process rather than on consciousness as a thing may allow us a more natural, biological understanding of this phenomenon. By putting the ‘impure’ and vulnerable body at its core as opposed to the infinite power of eternal ‘pure’ mind, who knows, maybe we will get closer to understanding real consciousness in humans rather than hypothetical consciousness in elfs, gremlins and machine gods.
THE MIND SERIES
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Art Note: Hope, II, Gustav Klimt, 1907–08. A pregnant woman stands with her eyes closed and her head bowed, wrapped in gold ornament. Below her, three women lower their heads as if in mourning, and a skull sits at the base of her swollen belly. Life is being made inside a body that already carries its ending. Oil, gold, and platinum on canvas, 110.5 × 110.5 cm. Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public domain; image via Google Art Project / Wikimedia Commons.
