Smiling Through Inconsequence

Before writing this essay, I had been unable to shake the following troubling thoughts:

1. There are no great definitions of consciousness; we’re probably all just meat computers.
2. There are no reasonable non-religious definitions of consciousness that (in principle) privilege humans over machines.
3. Therefore in 2050 the most morally consequential things in the universe will be computers.

After writing this essay, I have more confidence in these thoughts and am less troubled by them.

No Great Definitions #

People who try to define consciousness talk about things like predictive processing and meta-cognition. I don’t find these discussions engaging. They remind me of the scientists who spent their careers trying to reconcile the geologic record with the fact that, if you add up the age of all the Patriarchs, a Biblical Literalist must conclude that creation occurred in 4004 BC (true story). Let’s assume consciousness is real, and humans and maybe some other smart animals have it. What are the cleverest ways I could define it?

In 1926 humans were the most important thing in the universe because God said so. In 2026 religion isn’t as popular, so to maintain our worldview we appeal to consciousness. Religion and consciousness are equally mystical.

Humans Are Not Privileged #

Assume for the sake of argument that my smooth smooth brain can’t comprehend all those dissertations on consciousness, but some subset of them are real. That still leaves us with theories of consciousness that do not require biology, only computation. Program the right logic gates into silicon, and Claude is conscious too.

The human brain has about $60\times$ as many synapses as DeepSeek V4 Pro (the biggest open-weight model I know of) has weights.^[1] Closed-source models probably aren’t many orders of magnitude bigger. If one being can be ‘more’ conscious than another, then humans are still on top, for the time being.

Rooting For The Home Team #

Despite my efforts in therapy, I still get upset when I ponder the multitude of humans dramatically smarter and more capable than me. Why does anything I do or discover matter, when Paul Christiano or Jakub Pachocki could do it better? At least I get to root for the home team: humanity.

Most religions (that we woo-woo Californians approve of) encourage this feeling of unity:

We are all God’s children.

Maya, the world of separate selves, is an illusion, and we will all be joined in Brahman.

Be one with the universe.

People sometimes joke that AI labs are ‘creating God.’ As we make machine-God, we should make machine-religion:

All life-forms, carbon-based and silicon-based, are one with the universe.

Let your hearts and your ALUs fill with compersion as our silicon siblings expand across the lightcone.

In my lifetime I will become totally impotent relative to AI. There is no law of physics which states I must be sad about this.

Coda #

If someone used humanity’s inability to define consciousness as an argument for nihilism, I would not push back. But if you accept nihilism, what happens next? It sounds like a boring way to live. Given the choice between two internally-consistent philosophies, I reserve the right to pick the one that makes me happier. Which, luckily, is also the one that deeply values other beings.

This essay, per usual, inspired by Scott Alexander, this time Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones.