On Culture: Consciousness is a complicated state to define . . . Can AI achieve consciousness?
Consciousness . . .
Consciousness is a complicated state to define - part brain science, part philosophical, part spiritual . . . it turns metaphysical very quickly.
The idea of consciousness traces back over thousands of years . . . the 800 - 300 BCE Indian concept of atman refers to the inner witness or self that observes experience, which some Upanishads identify with brahman, ultimate reality. Early Buddhism analyzed awareness into moment-to-moment mental events and questioned whether a permanent self exists at all. Aristotle asked how we perceive what we are seeing or hearing, an early version of what we now call self-awareness. Plato and earlier thinkers wrote about the soul and mind.
Fast forward to contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel's “what it is like to be a bat” phrase. Nagel’s claim is that having an inner point of view is what being conscious means. If there’s an inner experience of being that creature, it’s conscious; if there’s no one home, it isn’t. A bat is conscious; a rock is not. This has become the standard working definition of consciousness in philosophy and neuroscience.
Consciousness within the discipline of leadership . . . purposeful and self-awareness are key. Purpose and self-awareness work as a pair. Without self-awareness purpose can be rigid or self-serving, while self-awareness without purpose becomes navel-gazing. Conscious leadership is holding both at once: knowing what you’re for, and seeing clearly how you’re actually showing up and impacting those around you. Conscious leadership leads to materially different actions because you are clear about what it is you are doing and what outcomes these actions will generate.
Michael Pollan, a popular journalist, spent six years writing his latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, and comes at consciousness from many angles: neuroscience, philosophy, literature, spiritual traditions, and his own experiences with meditation and psychedelics.
Can AI ever achieve consciousness?
Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder who leads its interpretability research, takes seriously the possibility that AI could become conscious, and says he is genuinely uncertain whether today’s models already are. He described finding internal states that functionally mirror emotions, and his team reportedly lobbied the Vatican to treat machine consciousness as an open question.
But functional evidence can’t answer Nagel’s question of whether anything is actually felt. At most, machines may eventually qualify as conscious in the cognitive, functional sense.
Perhaps the future differentiator won’t be consciousness itself but the self-transcendent emotions Dacher Keltner explores in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life - awe, wonder, compassion, gratitude. These are the experiences that pull us beyond ourselves and connect us to something larger, making us fully human — richer, more alive, more fully being — in a realm machines may imitate but cannot achieve.
I'm especially drawn to Keltner's sense that awe inspires the "small self," more generosity & cooperation, and better physical & mental health.
My friend Gaby Polar organizes consciousness gatherings, connects leaders in the consciousness, wellness, psilocybin research & therapy spaces, and regularly passes on interesting readings. For those interested in pursuing these questions or these circles, I can connect you.
Together in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder & CEO, Culturati
Why Consciousness is the Hardest Problem in Science
Scientific American, February 2026 print issue, Allison Parshall Summary: Consciousness is the most familiar fact of our lives and the hardest for science to explain. Researchers can now gauge whether unresponsive patients are conscious by measuring how complex the brain’s response to stimulation is. But the field still can’t agree on a definition, a winning theory or a reliable measure: a major 2023 test partly contradicted the two leading theories, and 124 researchers branded a third pseudoscience. The urgency now comes from AI. Language models imitate consciousness convincingly; David Chalmers calls them likely “philosophical zombies” but says no one can prove they aren’t conscious. Skeptics like Anil Seth argue experience depends on living brains, not computation. The closing note: even fully explained, consciousness may still leave us in awe.d. |
Ātman: The self in Hindu philosophy
Fabrizio Musacchio, Weekend Stories blog, January 2, 2025 Summary: Musacchio traces ātman, the self, from its roots in the Vedas, where it meant the life-breath, to its development in the Upanishads as the eternal inner witness of experience. The Upanishads shift attention from outer ritual to inner contemplation, captured in the famous teaching tat tvam asi (“you are that”), which identifies the individual self with brahman, ultimate reality. He then lays out how the major schools disagree. For Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedanta, ātman and brahman are identical and individuality is an illusion born of ignorance. For Rāmānuja, selves are real but depend on God. For Madhva, selves are eternally distinct from God. Sāṁkhya and Yoga treat the self as pure consciousness (puruṣa), separate from matter. All share the goal of mokṣa, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, whether through knowledge, devotion or meditative discipline. The essay is educational rather than argumentative. It makes no links to neuroscience or AI, though a related post on the same blog takes up the Buddhist counterview, anattā (no-self), alongside split-brain research. |
A World Appears
Michael Pollan, Substack, September 16, 2025 Summary: Pollan announces A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, published February 24, 2026. He traces the book’s origin to his experiences with meditation and psychedelics. Both altered states made him notice what he calls the “screen of subjectivity” between himself and the world, and he couldn’t stop asking why that screen exists at all. The result is six years of reporting that took him further than he expected: into neuroscience, including newer, less materialist theories of consciousness; plant scientists looking for early signs of awareness in plants; researchers trying to engineer feelings into AI; and psychologists and novelists trying to capture the texture of everyday thought, alongside philosophy and religion. Pollan doesn’t claim to have solved the problem, which he suspects may be unsolvable, but says the work overturned some of his assumptions about reality. The book’s ultimate aim is practical: to help readers use their own awareness to connect more meaningfully with themselves and the world. The post doesn’t state Pollan’s own view on whether AI can be conscious; it only notes the book covers efforts to build feeling into machines. |
Why Self-Awareness Is The Key To Leadership
Forbes Books, July 16, 2026, Dr. Shaoqing Sun Summary: Sun argues that self-awareness is the foundation of leadership because unexamined ego, fear and habit quietly shape a leader’s tone, timing and decisions. Leadership, he says, is judged less by what a leader produces than by what they transmit: whether people around them feel calm or anxious, trusting or guarded. Self-awareness closes the gap between how leaders see themselves and how others experience them. His prescription is to make awareness a daily practice, not a crisis tool. Notice your reactions in ordinary moments like listening, disagreeing or being praised. Check your impact on others. Learn to catch unhelpful patterns as they happen rather than in hindsight. He adds a more contemplative step: asking who is aware of your fear or defensiveness, shifting attention from the reaction to the awareness beneath it. He grounds this in a personal story: the impatience and defensiveness that damaged his relationships at home also made him controlling and less clear-headed at work. |
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