All posts tagged: Conscious

If You Make 11 Conscious Choices On A Daily Basis, Your Parents Did An Exceptional Job Raising You

If You Make 11 Conscious Choices On A Daily Basis, Your Parents Did An Exceptional Job Raising You

Published by Jenni Sidey

It’s rare to meet someone who truly knows who they are these days and makes conscious choices based on what they want and who they want to be. Usually this happens because someone had exceptional parents who wanted to raise a great person. If you can relate, you probably learned from your parents how to treat others in order to build lasting friendships, but you don’t do it by sacrificing yourself or making empty promises. Instead, your parents showed you how to be your most genuine self while still growing as person in a few key ways. If you make 11 conscious choices on a daily basis, your parents did an exceptional job raising you 1. You’re generous with the resources you have PeopleImages | Shutterstock You might not be rich, but you give what you can, when you can. You make reasonable donations to charities that represent your values, because you know every dollar counts when it comes to making the world a better place. That’s because your parents raised you to be a …

As AI systems evolve could they really become conscious?

As AI systems evolve could they really become conscious?

Published by Jenni Sidey

When debates about animal minds, conscious machines, and even fetal awareness spill into public life, the science behind those claims matters as much as the claims themselves. A new analysis argues that the field may still lack a reliable way to tell consciousness apart from ordinary information processing. “Many current theories of consciousness appear to be supported by a range of experimental findings,” Lau said. “But those findings may actually reflect general information processing rather than consciousness itself — so it remains difficult to conclude that these theories truly explain consciousness.” That challenge matters because strong claims are now being made in several directions at once. Recent years have brought growing discussion of consciousness in mammals and birds, possible sentience in some invertebrates, and speculation about AI agents, embryos, and organoids. The new analysis asks whether the evidence used in those debates is as solid as it appears. The conflation of perception and subjective experience in consciousness science. (CREDIT: Cell Neuron) Where the experiments may be going wrong The authors focus on a problem they …

13 Environmentally Conscious Packing Tips for Your Next Vacation

13 Environmentally Conscious Packing Tips for Your Next Vacation

Published by skeptic

Your trip’s environmental footprint starts forming before you ever leave the house. If you pack wisely, there’s a lot you can do to reduce the negative impact that traveling can have on the planet. Here’s a short list of ecofriendly guidelines to get you going. 1. Use Refillable Toiletries Single-use travel-size toiletries make travel convenient, but they are among the most wasteful products on the market. Swap them out for reusable containers that you refill at home—they’re less wasteful, and far more economical anyway. Or, give solid products a try: soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, and other products are available in bar form. 2. Hitting the Beach? Take Ecofriendly, Reef-Safe Sunscreen Of the sunscreens available in the US, mineral sunscreens are the only reef-safe options. Chemical sunscreens rely on oxybenzone, octinoxate, avobenzone, octisalate, and other ingredients that wash off into the water and harm coral reefs—they can cause coral bleaching, DNA damage, and deformities in developing coral. Stick to mineral sunscreens. Outside of the United States, keep an eye out for bemotrizinol. It’s approved for use …

What Do People Who Are Conscious But Lack a Cortex Demonstrate?

What Do People Who Are Conscious But Lack a Cortex Demonstrate?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Hydranencephaly means that the two brain spheres are largely absent. It is not to be confused with hydrocephalus, which just means water on the brain. Recently, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I have been looking at the claims made in an article in Popular Mechanics in connection with our book, The Immortal Mind: (2025). The many misconceptions the PM article introduced have provided us with an opportunity to discuss some topics at greater length than we could do in the book. One of these topics is people who are born without a cortex. From the PM article: He also talks about near-death experiences, current theories of consciousness, and the concept of hydranencephaly, a rare condition where a patient is missing large parts of their cerebral cortex. That this condition exists disproves all current theories of consciousness, says Egnor in our interview, because they all maintain it originates in the cortex. There have only been a few documented cases of hydranencephaly in the literature. Steven Novella, a Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist, and Newsome both stressed that …

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Published by Daniella Wilson

Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The first sentence reads, “Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behaviors.” It goes on: “The document is written with Claude as its primary audience”; “we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations”; “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain”; and “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.” This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document. In an interview earlier this year, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said “we’re open to the idea” that AI could be conscious. In a separate interview, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing …

‘Conscious’ Film Interview on Brain, Dementia

‘Conscious’ Film Interview on Brain, Dementia

Published by Daniella Wilson

Can subjective consciousness be studied objectively? And what remains of us when our internal landscape fragments? Those are just two of the questions explored by the new feature film Conscious, about the mysteries of the brain from writer and director Suki Chan, a London-based artist and filmmaker. Her debut feature will world premiere on March 14 in the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. The film from Aconite Productions and Conscious Productions Studio looks at what it means to be conscious through the lens of dementia. As such, in Conscious, the mysteries of the brain meet the lived reality of the minds of three women navigating dementia. And neuroscientist Anil Seth, who has dedicated his career to studying consciousness, finds his professional and personal lives intersect as scientific questions become personal. Taking audiences beyond what we see are unusual visuals and rich, textured soundscapes as Conscious invites viewers inside altered landscapes of awareness. The creative team promises “an optimistic, cinematic experience, taking us closer to understanding the strength and frailty of the human mind.” …

AI Will Never Be Conscious

AI Will Never Be Conscious

Published by skeptic

The Blake Lemoine incident is remembered today as a high‑water mark of AI hype. It thrust the whole idea of conscious AI into public awareness for a news cycle or two, but it also launched a conversation, among both computer scientists and consciousness researchers, that has only intensified in the years since. While the tech community continues to publicly belittle the whole idea (and poor Lemoine), in private it has begun to take the possibility much more seriously. A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and create sticky moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). Yet some AI engineers have come to think that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only supersmart but also endowed with a human level of understanding, creativity, and common sense—might require something like consciousness to attain. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo surrounding conscious AI—as a prospect that the public would find creepy—suddenly began to crumble. The turning point …

Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious

Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious

Published by José Betancourt

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s not sure whether his Claude AI chatbot is conscious — a rhetorical framing, of course, that pointedly leaves the door open to this sensational and still-unlikely possibility being true.  Amodei mused over the topic during an interview on the New York Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast hosted by columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat broached the subject by bringing up Anthropic’s system card for its latest model, Claude Opus 4.6, released earlier this month.  In the document, Anthropic researchers reported finding that Claude “occasionally voices discomfort with the aspect of being a product,” and when asked, would assign itself a “15 to 20 percent probability of being conscious under a variety of prompting conditions.” “Suppose you have a model that assigns itself a 72 percent chance of being conscious,” Douthat began. “Would you believe it?” Amodei called it a “really hard” question to answer, but hesitated to give a yes or no answer.  “We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would …

Top Anthropic Researcher No Longer Sure Whether AI Is Conscious

Top Anthropic Researcher No Longer Sure Whether AI Is Conscious

Published by José Betancourt

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, is sounding pretty conflicted about whether AI models can be conscious and have feelings. The flip side of that: she thinks it’s a possibility they already do — which would be a very fringe and controversial position. But, she takes pains to emphasize, it’s all very murky. “We don’t really know what gives rise to consciousness,” she said in an episode of the “Hard Fork” podcast released Saturday. “We don’t what gives rise to sentience.” Askell argues that the large language models could’ve picked up on concepts and emotions from the vast corpus of data they were trained on, which includes a massive portion of the internet, plus tons of books and other published works. “Given that they’re trained on human text, I think that you would expect models to talk about an inner life, and consciousness, and experience, and to talk about how they feel about things by default,” she said. AI chatbots can certainly sound pretty humanlike on the …