Tom Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in publishing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing.
“My business now is to weave circumstance, happenstance, intention, and mischance into stories.”

The Human Condition:

What is Consciousness? – August 30, 2026

This question arises again, prompted by the claims of the new software magicians that they are on the verge of creating “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which would be a simulacrum of the human mind.

First, we can all agree that the human mind, supposedly centered in the synaptic connections of the human brain and their connection with the outside world through the six senses,¹ is conscious. I proclaim that I am conscious, and I grant that you who are reading this² are also conscious. I will even allow that most animals above the level of—well maybe, fish—are conscious. My dog is certainly conscious because she has moods like enthusiasms and fears, and she exercises the free will to sometimes go one way on the path rather than another. But she is not self-aware by the test of recognizing her own image in a mirror. We usually grant that other animals like dolphins, elephants, and crows may have a higher level of consciousness because they can identify themselves, they work puzzles and remember human faces, they understand death and loss, they grieve.

I also understand death, although I’m not sure most people do. We recognize that everyone reaches an end stage of this life, when the body no longer functions and stops moving. But what happens to the mind, the soul, to the consciousness is another matter. Many believe it continues past the point of bodily death as some form of awareness, energy, or essence. This conception is usually linked to some place separate from the reality of human existence on Earth as we have known it: the Elysian Fields, Heaven, Nirvana, Hades, Hell.

But I can accept—at least I think I can—that when the body dies, the neural circuitry that supports consciousness and represents “mind” will also stop. And then “I”—and everything I know, think, believe, and feel, everything I have loved, wished for, and achieved—all of it will disappear as if it never was. I will leave behind me people, ideas, and things I once knew and loved, but I will take none of them with me. There will be darkness—the same darkness that existed before I was born. World ended. Eternal night. When a sparrow falls to the ground or a mouse curls up in the grass, it becomes a husk and nothing more. And so will I end this life.

As a child, I fancied that I was a robot. I made a conscious distinction between myself, as the functionality that lived inside my head behind my eyes, and my body as a mechanical structure, a meat machine, that this self was controlling. As an adult one of my favorite aphorisms is: “You are a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of star dust, riding a rock hurtling through space. Fear nothing.” So, the mind/body dualism lives on.

Another noteworthy distinction is between consciousness and unconsciousness. Every so often, every animal that we know of enters a dormant (the French cognate word for “sleeping”) state in which consciousness—awareness, reaction, focused attention, abstract thinking—is absent.³ The brain is still functioning, silently processing short-term memories, repairing and rebalancing neural connections, and occasionally casting up fantasy images and imagined situations to distract us in the dream state. But otherwise, the person is not “there.” He or she is not thinking and choosing. The body is only moving under autonomic control: heart pumping, lungs inhaling and exhaling, stomach and gut processing residual foodstuffs, and the muscles occasionally twitching. At the same time, the body is internally repairing muscles and tissues, synthesizing proteins, and releasing growth hormones. Without sleep, your body eventually shuts down, the immune system stops working, and you die.

But this is not to say the functions that are only active during consciousness—awareness, reaction, focused attention, abstract reasoning—represent consciousness itself. Consciousness drives reasoning, observation, and inquisitiveness. Consciousness drives the awareness that lets the person, the mind, consider itself as separate from the universe—or rather from the “reality” that is observed through the senses. Consciousness and that awareness of self are what inspire the mind to observe discrepances in the things it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches, and then compare those immediate sensations with past experiences, giving rise to questions, memories, feelings, and expectations.

If I have to put a single word to it, I would say consciousness is reflection. That would be the sum of all these activities linked to awareness, focused attention, and reasoning. Out of those activities comes a sense of the world and our place in it. And out of that come emotions of contentment, anxiety, love, anger, fear, and all the rest. We feel because we exist and know ourselves to be so.

Does all of this sound like circular reasoning? Well, yeah.⁴ Human awareness is circular; in cybernetic terms, it is an endless “do loop.” We see something, we consider it, we compare it to our past experience, we react to the situation, we do something new, we look again, we compare again … endlessly checking, balancing, rechecking, rethinking … until something entirely new enters the pattern, we absorb it, and that upsets the equilibrium and pauses the continuum, and then we reset the pattern. That is life—until we go to sleep for a while and flush the system.

Can large language models (LLMs) create this circular flow? Not as they are currently configured. These artificially intelligent systems are a once-through pass at responding to a human input, a prompt or query. If you try to refine the output by altering the prompt, the system starts over again with new input. The neural net has no sense of self, no consciousness of itself as being separate from the external data and its embedded model, and it is unable to anticipate the next prompt. I don’t know how you would create this “self-awareness” in an artificial system. After all, we don’t really understand how it arises in the mind of a baby, or a dog, a dolphin, an elephant, a crow. René Descartes in the 17th century wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” But in terms of this circular consciousness, that would be reversed: “I am, therefore I think.”

Until the LLM system can stand aside from the universe of data—both within itself and external but within its reach—to examine both that universe and its own reaction to the process of examining, it will remain just a machine. The neural network will be more complex than but not essentially different from a steam engine or a sump pump. It turns on, it consumes electricity to perform a particular process, and then it turns off. Finis! Dead. And therefore, not alive.

1. Six senses? Well yes: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—although the latter two are connected in the brain, they come from different sense organs (taste buds in the tongue and chemical-detecting epithelium in the inner nose). But what about balance, our detection of the pull of gravity? It originates in the inner ear but is distinct from hearing, and so it would be a sixth sense.

2. Unless, of course, this text is being entered into a large language model (LLM) database—in which case I maintain that it is not being consciously absorbed.
       Artificial intelligences do not read in the normal human sense. That is, they do not translate written words into thoughts, consider those thoughts in terms of past personal experience, decide whether to agree with or challenge them, and finally retain an interpretation of that internal discussion in memory for future recall. If the writing is illustrative or fictional in nature, the human being may also form mental images from the words and internalize personalities from the characterizations and then store those as well.
       The artificial intelligence does none of this. Human programmers feed the large language model with a text, which model’s algorithm parses into relationships between word forms and calculates the probability of these words being near others already stored in the database. It essentially identifies words—not concepts—that appear to go together in human language. If you ask it a specific question, the AI may locate in its database pieces of text containing phrases from the question and assemble them into a grammatical response, or it may find a text that it has previously given in response to a similar question. But the AI does not make a separate interpretation of the concepts involved or compare them to a set of stored experiences. It does not deal in the thought behind the word. And it cannot use the relationships as inspiration to formulate—that is, imagine, which is different from hallucination—a whole new set of concepts. It does not think and consider like a human being. It maps probabilistic textual relationships. So … not you.

3. Even plants, which we don’t usually think of as being conscious, enter periods of dormancy, mostly linked to seasonal variations in ambient light, temperature, moisture, and such. Trees shed their leaves and stop growing. Flowers bloom, fade, and gestate as seedpods. Cycles persist everywhere in the higher life forms.

4. As John McClane said in the Die Hard movie, “Welcome to the party, pal!”

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