Large language models now write essays, pass exams, and hold conversations that feel uncannily human. That raises an age-old question: could a machine be conscious? Is any machine conscious already? To answer this question, we must know what consciousness is. Given the fast pace of progress in the AI race, this question is increasingly important.
Understanding consciousness also matters to stem the tide and heal the increasing frequency of mental diseases. This age-old question is also philosophical, offering new insight into our own minds and those of our fellow animals.
This newsletter and my new book, The Fermionic Mind, approach the question from an unusual direction. Instead of starting with the brain, I start with physics.
The idea that mind and matter mirror each other is not new. Aristotle wrote about the soul in the same breath as motion and change. In the twentieth century, Wolfgang Pauli—the physicist who discovered the exclusion principle—spent years exchanging letters with Carl Jung about the hidden parallels between physics and the psyche.
My starting point is simple. Physics supplies the foundations of chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. If consciousness is part of nature, it should be explicable in physical terms too. Just as “life” turned out to be extraordinarily organized chemistry, consciousness may be an extraordinary form of physical organization. On this view, the subjective feel of experience could be that physical process seen from the inside.
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