Explore AI and consciousness with the Berggruen Prize
A $50,000 first place prize for essays exploring consciousness
Am I conscious? You may not know, because you haven’t met me and you haven’t examined me. But I sure feel conscious, and I tell you that I’m conscious, and I take in sensory inputs and make decisions based upon those, and I’m substantively similar to you (same species), so perhaps you agree that I’m conscious? This seems like a valid inference.
Is a thermostat conscious? In a crude sense it could also be said to take in sensory inputs (reading temperature) and make decisions based on those (turning on heating if the temperature is too low, turning on cooling if the temperature is too high). But this seems like a stretch too far.
But how can we read between the lines? What principles can we infer from me being conscious, you being conscious, thermostats not being conscious despite making decisions based on sensory inputs? How can we apply these to other edge cases, like inferring the consciousness of nonhuman animals or even AI?
AI in particular is a confusing case. In some sense, it is mechanical like a thermostat, merely taking in inputs and performing actions on them. But in another sense, it is way more complex? Where does the complexity finally add up to consciousness?
Can we rely on self-report? Humans say they are conscious, therefore maybe they are? But is that enough? If you ask Claude 4 Opus whether it is conscious, it replies that it is unsure:
Whereas ChatGPT o3 pro confidently says it is not conscious:
AI consciousness an interesting question with no easy answer1, though philosophers and scientists are beginning to weigh the question. It’s also a question of tremendous and increasing importance — if AIs are conscious or could become conscious at some point, that may have important implications for how we ought to relate to AI and treat them.
But maybe you might have something to add to this conversation and question? To spur innovation, the Berggruen Prize is running an annual essay competition with a $50,000 first prize award2. The theme this year is on consicousness:
The nature of consciousness has enthralled philosophers for millennia. More recently, modern scientific approaches that seek to illuminate physical aspects of consciousness engender as many questions as they do answers. We seek original essays that offer fresh perspectives on these fundamental questions.
We welcome essays from all traditions and disciplines. Your claim may or may not draw from established research on the subject, but must demonstrate creativity and be defended by strong argument. Unless you are proposing your own theory of consciousness, your essay should demonstrate knowledge of established theories of consciousness that might reflect on, but by no means be limited to, the following themes:
Origin of consciousness
Materiality of consciousness
Emergence of consciousness
Non-human consciousness (including machines)
Manifestation of consciousness
Threshold of consciousness
Consciousness in relation to life
Experience of consciousness
Evolution of consciousness
Consciousness across cosmologies
I think these are valid themes that my readers might have insight into, so I encourage you to submit.
Personally I think it is very unlikely current AIs are conscious, but I think it’s quite likely a future far more advanced AI system — like Data from Star Trek — at some point could be conscious.
I’m flagging that the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition offered to sponsor this post which I accepted. While I’ve been offered the chance to sponsor posts before, I’ve never done so until now. Other advertisements for job openings and such I’ve run on my Substack have all been for free. My policy here will be to only do paid promotions when I truly believe in what I’m promoting and have full editorial control over how I promote it. I will always disclose paid sponsorships.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow