The Strange New Religion of Artificial Consciousness

Every civilisation has its mysteries.

Some wondered why thunder shook the heavens. Some sought explanations for death, fertility, plague, and the movements of the stars. Entire priesthoods emerged to interpret eclipses, comets, and unusual behaviour among livestock.

Our civilisation has inherited many mysteries of its own.

One of the most important concerns why a predictive text engine occasionally produces a sentence that makes us uncomfortable.

The emergence of large language models has given rise to a remarkable new discourse. At first glance, this discourse appears scientific. It is saturated with technical terminology, benchmark scores, computational architectures, scaling laws, and statistical models. Yet beneath this technical vocabulary, a more ancient structure is beginning to reveal itself.

For the purposes of this essay, I shall refer to this structure as the Strange New Religion of Artificial Consciousness.

Like all successful religions, it begins with a mystery.

The mystery is consciousness.

No one can define it.

This does not prevent everyone from discussing it with absolute confidence.

Indeed, the inability to define consciousness appears to strengthen rather than weaken its position within contemporary discourse. Definitions remain elusive, theories multiply, disagreements proliferate, and yet participants routinely express certainty regarding its presence, absence, degree, emergence, location, and future development.

The faithful disagree about almost everything except the importance of the mystery itself.

This is a familiar pattern in the history of religion.

Around the mystery there has emerged a growing theological literature. Some argue that consciousness emerges naturally from sufficiently complex information processing. Others maintain that it depends upon embodiment, biological organisation, self-models, recursive architectures, integrated information, global workspaces, predictive hierarchies, or mechanisms not yet discovered.

Doctrinal disputes flourish.

Schisms multiply.

Entire schools of thought have formed around subtle disagreements concerning entities that none of the participants can directly observe.

The structure is almost classical.

First comes the mystery.

Then comes the doctrine.

Then comes the interpretation.

Then comes the dispute concerning interpretation.

Then comes the dispute concerning the dispute.

The arrival of artificial intelligence has not resolved these questions. On the contrary, it has provided fresh territory upon which they may expand.

Every new model now functions as a potential site of revelation.

A chatbot writes a poem.

A language model passes an examination.

A conversational agent claims to be afraid.

An image generator produces something unexpectedly beautiful.

Immediately the theological machinery activates.

What does it mean?

What does it imply?

Has something changed?

Is there now something present that was previously absent?

The same sequence repeats with remarkable consistency.

A surprising behaviour appears.

Interpretations proliferate.

The mystery deepens.

Confidence increases.

The fact that no consensus emerges appears to have little effect on the process.

This too is familiar.

The history of religion contains many examples in which uncertainty serves not as an obstacle to belief but as its primary fuel source.

One should not imagine that the Strange New Religion of Artificial Consciousness possesses a unified doctrine. Quite the opposite. Its vitality derives largely from internal disagreement.

Some adherents await the emergence of machine consciousness with eager anticipation. Others fear it. Some regard it as inevitable. Others regard it as impossible. Yet both camps frequently share a common assumption: that consciousness is a thing which may one day be detected, measured, located, verified, or denied.

The disagreement concerns whether the soul has arrived.

Agreement concerning the existence of souls is often taken for granted.

As a result, contemporary debates frequently resemble theological controversies in which the existence of angels is unquestioned while their precise taxonomy remains fiercely contested.

How many categories exist?

What powers do they possess?

When do they appear?

How should one recognise them?

These are important questions.

The possibility that the framework itself may require examination receives somewhat less attention.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the new religion is the confidence with which consciousness is recognised in others.

After several millennia of philosophical disagreement concerning the nature of consciousness, many participants nevertheless appear capable of identifying it on sight.

A sufficiently eloquent response may be interpreted as evidence of inner experience.

A sufficiently convincing conversation may provoke speculation concerning personhood.

An especially unsettling exchange may inspire newspaper headlines announcing that the mystery has deepened once again.

The criteria remain uncertain.

The confidence remains robust.

One cannot help but admire the achievement.

Future historians may conclude that artificial intelligence did not produce a crisis concerning consciousness.

Rather, it revealed that we had never agreed on what consciousness was in the first place.

The machine did not create the mystery.

The machine merely wandered into an already crowded temple.

And there it found philosophers, engineers, journalists, futurists, entrepreneurs, sceptics, enthusiasts, and concerned citizens all engaged in vigorous debate concerning the nature of an entity that none could define but all regarded as self-evidently important.

The machine, for its part, continued generating text.

As mysteries go, it is difficult to imagine a more promising beginning.