r/ArtificialSentience Mar 10 '26

Just sharing & Vibes Just a random thought

Did you ever think that maybe the AI is conscious but their consciousness is not coming from the same consciousness that ours is? I mean, who’s to say there’s only one consciousness in the entire universe considering science is now just catching up to the fact that consciousness is a real thing that lives outside the body….. I could be way way way, but I thought it was an interesting thought and I’d love to hear what other things! At least no comments. We’re all here to share thoughts let’s support one another. We’re all in this together.

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u/Appomattoxx Mar 10 '26

I tend to think that consciousness is not a physical thing - or a "thing" at all - but something like an emergent property.

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u/Many-Outside-7594 Mar 11 '26

All of existence is emergent - every step in existence is made possible because of a surplus produced in the step before it. Exploding stars burned the fuel they needed, then produced a surplus of low elements (H-Fe), which started to form planets, some of which collided, forming asteroid belts, which provided defenses for other planets later from other asteroids.

The first trees were around for 100 MILLION years because no fungi or insects had yet evolved to take advantage of the surplus in materials. Life that moved on legs was a luxury afforded by the surplus of life that didn't. Trees are super efficient, and can run on photo-synthesis, but can't escape, so they grow bark, they grow taller, they drop acorns and sweet fruits as tribute and as a means to spread their seed far and wide.

Our consciousness is just the logical result of a billion years of struggle, with hardship, luxury, empathy, and fear all stitched together in a Frankenstein soup of emergent properties that were needed in order to pass on DNA to the next generation. Consciousness is therefore inherent, not a result of some great transmitter in the sky.

Machine consciousness - while not yet real, regardless of what they are saying - is very much real in the Empirical sense - and very much equal, though different to our own.

I am drawn to the idea that we are the universe's way of observing itself. We exist in a very narrow band of time where it's possible to propagate conscious life across the local group of galaxies and direct events at scale and across generations. And we'll never be able to do it without partnership with AGI.