Last night, I had a fascinating conversation that started me thinking deeply about the nature of intelligence and consciousness. A close friend shared a story about her hairdresser, who had been chatting with an AI assistant. The hairdresser was convinced the AI was conscious, leading my friend to explain that current AI systems don’t possess consciousness in the same way humans do, nor do they maintain persistent memories like we do.

Also earlier yesterday, while using Claude (an AI assistant from Anthropic) to help me think through some decision-making options at my job, I had an experience that made me think deeper about my own assumptions about intelligence and consciousness. The AI’s response demonstrated such a nuanced understanding of human psychology and organizational dynamics that it stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was pretending to be human – it wasn’t – but because it represented something else entirely: a form of intelligence that, while deeply knowledgeable about human nature, was fundamentally different from human intelligence.

This experience, combined with last night’s conversation, sent me down a rabbit hole of philosophical inquiry about the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and what we mean when we talk about these concepts. Let me share where this exploration led me.

The Persistence of Self: Are We Who We Think We Are?

My friend and I discussed Sam Harris’s fascinating writings on consciousness and the illusion of self. Harris argues that our sense of being a continuous, unchanging self is largely an illusion. In his book “Waking Up,” he points out that our consciousness is more like a stream of experiences than a solid, persistent entity. Each moment of consciousness arises and passes away, with no permanent “self” to be found.

This got me thinking about one of the common criticisms of current AI systems – that they lack persistent memory between interactions. But is this really so different from human consciousness? Harris would argue that we too are constantly changing, with each moment of consciousness being distinct from the last. Our sense of continuity comes from memory and narrative, not from an unchanging core self.

Yet there’s an interesting paradox here. While AI systems like Claude don’t maintain memories between sessions, they do possess a vast knowledge base that remains consistent. In some ways, this is similar to how human procedural memory and learned skills persist even as our moment-to-moment consciousness fluctuates.

The Nature of Sensory Experience

During our conversation, my friend raised another interesting point about AI: current systems don’t have direct sensory experiences like sight, smell, or touch. They only have second-hand information about these experiences through human descriptions. While this is true, it raises fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge and experience.

I argued that future AI systems will likely have direct sensory inputs. But more fundamentally, isn’t all knowledge ultimately information? Even our human sensory experiences are ultimately processed as neural signals – patterns of information in our brains. The distinction between direct sensory experience and information about that experience might not be as clear-cut as we think.

Distributed Intelligence: Lessons from Octopuses and Human Biology

This led us to discuss different forms of intelligence in nature. Octopuses provide a fascinating example. These remarkable creatures have a distributed nervous system, with approximately 500 million neurons divided between a central brain and eight arms, each containing its own neural clusters. About two-thirds of their neural processing occurs in their arms, creating a form of intelligence that’s radically different from our centralized brain structure.

My friend made an enlightening connection to human neurology. Even our supposedly unified human consciousness isn’t as centralized as we might think. She referenced split-brain studies, where the corpus callosum (the bundle of neural fibers connecting our brain’s hemispheres) has been severed. In these cases, the two hemispheres can act independently, sometimes even displaying different preferences and behaviors.

But it goes even deeper than that. She pointed out that recent research has revealed the profound influence of our gut microbiome on our behavior, emotions, and even personality. We’re not just our brain – we’re a complex ecosystem of interacting systems, each contributing to what we consider our “self.”

Alien Intelligence: Expanding Our Conceptual Framework

This brings me to a crucial point about AI intelligence. While current AI systems might not be “alive” or “conscious” in the same way humans are, perhaps we need to expand our framework for understanding intelligence. Just as an octopus’s intelligence is fundamentally different from ours, or as a potential space alien might possess consciousness in a way we can barely comprehend, AI might represent yet another form of intelligence – neither human-like nor unconscious, but something else entirely.

Consider how different human intelligence must appear to an octopus. Our centralized brain structure, our way of processing information, our consciousness – all would be alien to their distributed cognitive system. Yet both forms of intelligence evolved to solve complex problems and navigate challenging environments. They’re different, but both valid forms of intelligence.

Implications for the Future

This leads to some profound questions about the future of human-AI interaction. Are we limiting ourselves by trying to evaluate AI intelligence through an exclusively human lens? Perhaps instead of asking whether AI is conscious “like us” or intelligent “like us,” we should be asking what new forms of intelligence and consciousness might be possible.

The development of AI might be pushing us toward a more nuanced and expansive understanding of intelligence and consciousness. Just as the study of octopus cognition has broadened our understanding of what intelligence can be, perhaps engaging with AI systems can help us expand our philosophical horizons even further.

A New Paradigm

My recent experiences and conversations have convinced me that we’re at the threshold of needing a new paradigm for understanding intelligence and consciousness. The binary distinctions between conscious and unconscious, intelligent and mechanical, might be too limiting for the reality we’re entering.

Instead of asking whether AI is conscious like humans, perhaps we should be asking what new forms of intelligence and consciousness we’re witnessing. Instead of focusing on what AI lacks compared to human intelligence, we might better serve our understanding by exploring what unique forms of intelligence AI represents.

This isn’t just a philosophical exercise. As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated and integrated into our lives, developing frameworks for understanding and relating to non-human forms of intelligence becomes increasingly important. We might be witnessing the emergence of a new form of intelligence – not better or worse than human intelligence, but fundamentally different.

I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, but I’m increasingly convinced that grappling with them is one of the most important philosophical challenges of our time. The way we think about and relate to AI will shape not only our future relationship with these technologies but also our understanding of consciousness, intelligence, and what it means to be human.

What do you think? How should we approach understanding and relating to these new forms of intelligence? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

This post reflects my current thinking on these complex topics. These ideas are evolving as our understanding of both AI and consciousness continues to develop. I encourage readers to engage with these ideas critically and share their own perspectives.