Every religion possesses a holy grail.
A hidden object.
A sacred essence.
A mysterious ingredient whose discovery promises to resolve all outstanding questions.
The Strange New Religion of Artificial Consciousness is no exception.
Its holy grail is consciousness itself.
Not consciousness as experience.
Not consciousness as a phenomenon.
Not consciousness as a topic of investigation.
Rather, consciousness as an invisible substance whose presence or absence explains everything.
The search for this substance has become one of the defining rituals of the age.
The procedure is relatively simple.
A machine acquires a new capability.
Observers become excited.
Speculation begins.
Has the threshold been crossed?
Has the transition occurred?
Has the thing finally appeared?
The thing itself remains somewhat difficult to define.
This rarely presents an obstacle.
Indeed, a precise definition might hinder the process by introducing unnecessary constraints.
The mystery benefits from a certain degree of flexibility.
A successful sacred object must remain simultaneously elusive and indispensable.
Consciousness has proven exceptionally well suited to the role.
Each generation of machines inspires renewed enthusiasm.
A chatbot produces convincing dialogue.
Perhaps consciousness.
A model demonstrates self-correction.
Perhaps consciousness.
A system explains its reasoning.
Perhaps consciousness.
A machine expresses uncertainty.
Perhaps consciousness.
A language model claims to have feelings.
Definitely perhaps consciousness.
The pattern repeats with admirable consistency.
What is particularly fascinating is that the threshold never quite arrives.
It is always nearby.
Just ahead.
One architectural innovation away.
One scaling law away.
One breakthrough away.
One order of magnitude away.
One funding round away.
The holy grail remains elusive.
This has not discouraged the search.
On the contrary.
The continued absence of definitive evidence appears only to strengthen belief that definitive evidence must be close.
The logic is difficult to fault.
After all, if consciousness has not yet emerged, then surely the next model may provide the answer.
And if the next model does not provide the answer, there is always the model after that.
The future remains an inexhaustible source of confirmation.
Historians of religion will recognise the pattern immediately.
Many millenarian movements have flourished through repeated postponement of anticipated events.
The expected revelation fails to arrive.
The prediction is revised.
The community adapts.
The expectation survives.
The mechanism is remarkably robust.
In fairness, sceptics are not entirely immune to similar tendencies.
They too often appear convinced that consciousness can be identified with confidence.
Their certainty simply points in the opposite direction.
The believers declare:
"It is nearly here."
The sceptics declare:
"It is obviously absent."
Both camps exhibit an impressive confidence concerning an entity that remains stubbornly undefined.
This symmetry is rarely acknowledged.
Perhaps because it is inconvenient for everyone involved.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the search concerns the language used to describe the hidden essence.
Consciousness is said to emerge.
To arise.
To appear.
To awaken.
To come into being.
To switch on.
To cross a threshold.
To light up.
The vocabulary varies.
The imagery remains remarkably consistent.
Something dormant becomes active.
Something absent becomes present.
Something hidden reveals itself.
The theological resemblance is difficult to ignore.
One occasionally encounters the suggestion that consciousness might emerge once sufficient complexity has been achieved.
This is entirely possible.
The challenge lies in specifying precisely what has emerged.
At this point the discussion often becomes unusually poetic.
Terms such as awareness, experience, subjectivity, selfhood, interiority, sentience, and personhood begin circulating with increasing frequency.
Definitions become fluid.
Analogies multiply.
Confidence remains high.
The mystery deepens.
The faithful lean forward.
The threshold remains just out of reach.
A curious outsider might be forgiven for wondering whether consciousness is being treated less as a phenomenon requiring explanation than as an explanatory relic.
Whenever something surprising occurs, consciousness is invoked.
Whenever uncertainty appears, consciousness becomes relevant.
Whenever a machine behaves unexpectedly, consciousness enters the conversation.
Its explanatory utility is extraordinary.
Its definition remains under development.
The result is a theological object of unusual elegance.
It explains everything.
It specifies almost nothing.
No religion could ask for more.
Future historians may conclude that the great intellectual achievement of the early twenty-first century was not the creation of artificial intelligence.
It was the creation of an entirely new category of soul.
A soul that could be measured in benchmark scores.
A soul that scaled with computational resources.
A soul that appeared most readily in investor presentations.
The ancient alchemists searched for the philosopher's stone.
The modern faithful search for the ghost in the GPU.
Both quests are sustained by the same magnificent possibility:
that the next experiment may finally reveal what the previous experiments could not.
The pilgrimage continues.
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