Just when we thought the news out of Silicon Valley could not get weirder, over the past few months one of the biggest news stories has concerned whether the artificial intelligence products we now run on our computers and smartphones could themselves be conscious.
We can blame Anthropic, which also happens to be one of the most intellectually adventurous and conscientious companies out there. Whereas most major companies release bland and pablum-filled ethical codes written by lawyers and public relations officers, Anthropic has become known for wading deeply into the philosophical questions about what A.I. is and what a good world filled with A.I. might look like. The company has hired teams of philosophers to advise full time on such questions, and it escalated matters dramatically in January when it published the “Claude Constitution”—a thesis-length manifesto about what moral goodness in its signature product, Claude, might look like and how we might achieve it.
One of the most surprising elements of Anthropic’s approach is how open-minded the company is on the question of A.I. consciousness. This includes speculating openly about whether A.I. might ever be able to experience emotion or develop its own agency, plans and sense of self.
Christmas came early for those of us who
Christmas came early for those of us who love to think about and debate deep ethical questions. But I suspect all of this public philosophy is a nightmare for folks who are hoping for a smooth and drama-free public stock listing for the company.
Indeed, Anthropic’s competitors have been quick to pounce on these philosophical proposals to attempt to counterposition their own products. Mustafa Suleyman, the chief executive of Microsoft AI, published an essay in September arguing that A.I. will never be conscious and that it is dangerous to even entertain this idea. Mr. Suleyman writes: “Consciousness is the foundation of our ethical, legal, and political systems.” And if we seriously believed the mental lights might be on in the machine, we would need to radically reorganize our society.
Mr. Suleyman argues that there is no way we would want to reorganize our conceptions of human rights, justice and the order of society to accommodate superintelligent A.I. agents. Therefore we should dial down the rhetoric and speculation about whether they are conscious. Mr. Suleyman also expresses a supreme degree of confidence that consciousness is solely biological, apparently solving with ease one of the most significant philosophical puzzles since the Enlightenment: the so-called hard problem of consciousness.
It is called the hard problem
It is called “the hard problem” for a reason. We genuinely do not have a good account of how our minds arise from our bodies. On the one hand, there is some causal connection. When I miss a night of sleep, my mind gets foggy. When my doctor sedates my brain, I lose consciousness. On the other hand, my inner life can survive injuries to my brain. Patients with hydrocephalus, who are missing large portions of their cortex, still report full, coherent inner lives. Split-brain patients, whose hemispheres have been surgically disconnected, raise deep questions about whether we should count them as having one stream of consciousness or two. Dementia patients who have lost decades of memory can still, in a lucid moment, evince a vivid and undeniable sense of self.
If consciousness were just certain biological processes, full stop, cases like these should be far more tidy than they are. But they aren’t. That is what makes the problem hard: We have plenty of correlations between brains and minds, but no explanation of why or how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. Philosophers call this “the explanatory gap.” The advent of A.I. has not solved these major philosophical questions; it has just brought much more attention to them.
Is consciousness the bedrock of the rest of ethics, as Mr. Suleyman suggests? As a philosopher in the Catholic tradition, I would argue the concept of a person’s dignity is far more important. Dignity is a much more expansive foundation for our society than consciousness. In the Catholic tradition, our dignity consists in the fact that we are creatures who have bodies but are more than just hunks of meat. We are capable of emotions, like love. Our minds not only process information, they grasp truth, goodness and beauty, which are objective features of reality.
We have consciences in addition to consciousness
We have consciences in addition to consciousness. We have both freedom and moral responsibility. These features of our lives all depend on the “lights being on,” so to speak (i.e., consciousness), but they are so much more than that. And when we think about why A.I. is and must always be treated as a tool and not as a person, it might help to frame the debate in terms of what has dignity rather than just what has neural structure.
This has important implications for how we think about the foundations of ethics in this brave new world. It has been widely noted that many in Silicon Valley are involved in a movement called effective altruism. Effective altruism attempts to systematize all of ethical reasoning around a few very basic assumptions. Ethics, for example, is seen simply as a matter of reducing suffering and promoting happiness. To tell whether something can suffer or experience happiness, you really just need to know whether it is conscious. And all of ethics boils down to attempting to maximize the good experiences of conscious creatures, now and in the future.
The movement is controversial for many reasons. It puts monetary values on lives, for one, and it insists that we should prioritize the many over the few, in particular by prioritizing future generations of people over present ones.
I would argue the biggest problem with this
But I would argue the biggest problem with this movement is the way it flattens and reduces human persons to just instances of consciousness, not acknowledging that there is so much more to our dignity. When we consider what makes human beings “magnificent” (to quote Pope Leo XIV), it is our embodied lives, our capacity to love, our ability to appreciate the transcendent and our moral consciences that are far more interesting. Indeed, this insight has been at the core of our work with the DELTA Network at the University of Notre Dame.
Many people approach the dawn of the A.I. era with equal parts dread and dizziness. But I now sense a rare opportunity, especially for those of us who like to ask the hard questions about what makes the life of a person so precious. One of the most significant ways we Christians can influence these debates in coming months is to be loud, annoying advocates for the idea that ethics is rooted in the full-blown dignity of humans, not just the dimensions of our neurology that can be compared to software. One of Pope Leo’s greatest achievements with “Magnifica Humanitas” is putting the church at the center of these critical ethical discussions.
A.I. companies and regulators—not to mention the broader society—need us in the mix now more than ever. It has been “do it yourself” philosophy season for a little bit too long in the frontier A.I. labs. We have let them set the terms of the debate. When many of us say we are unsettled by claims of A.I. consciousness, I don’t think we are using the term the same way the companies are.
For most of us, saying something is conscious
For most of us, saying something is conscious entails it has an inner life. It has dignity. Not that it is just a system that a biological organism uses to organize stimuli and survive (as Mr. Suleyman identifies it in his essay). None of us looks at a newborn child in our arms and thinks, “Behold, nature has once again spawned an organism with the ability to efficiently organize and respond to stimuli!” For most of us, I would venture, consciousness only matters because we associate it with the much deeper and richer notion of dignity.
This technology is very powerful, very disruptive and—as we have seen in recent months—potentially very dangerous. We need much more sophisticated ethical thinking in and around the A.I. labs.
We have an opportunity to get our ethical priorities in order. We could spend a lot more time in the coming year focusing on the A.I. products, what their new capabilities are, how cool or disruptive they are. Or we can choose instead to prioritize the ways A.I. products alter the dignity of those who use them and live in a society with them. This means thinking about how we uphold the dignity of our work, our educational institutions and our civic life going forward. It means telling more stories about how the poor and vulnerable are living with A.I. and fewer stories perhaps about flashy new applications of the products.
One of the primary meanings of consciousness, after all, is awareness. And awareness means having the wisdom to know where to look and how to be affected.
This article appears in December 2026.
