The Consciousness Debate Nobody Actually Needs to Win
I’ve been watching the AI consciousness debate unfold online, and honestly, it’s starting to feel like watching people argue about whether a really good flight simulator is actually flying. There’s this fascinating article making the rounds—behind a paywall, naturally—claiming that AI consciousness is just clever marketing. The kicker? Someone in the comments pointed out the marketing isn’t even that clever. Fair point.
But here’s the thing that’s been rattling around in my head: we’re having the wrong conversation entirely.
The comments section on this topic was actually more illuminating than I expected. Someone made a solid observation that we don’t even have a proper scientific definition of human consciousness. Before we start measuring whether ChatGPT or Claude is having a genuine inner experience, maybe we should figure out how to measure our own? There’s apparently something called the Perturbational Complexity Index, which sounds impressively scientific until you dig deeper and realize it’s really just a tool for determining awareness levels in human brains—not a universal consciousness meter you can point at anything.
The philosophical rabbit hole here is deep and, frankly, a bit tedious. Sure, there’s some consensus around Thomas Nagel’s “what it’s like to be” definition—consciousness exists when there’s something it’s like to be that thing. But that doesn’t get us much further when we’re talking about AI systems. How would we even know?
Someone in the discussion compared this whole debate to arguing whether boats can swim, and I think that’s bloody brilliant. It captures the absurdity perfectly. We’re using human-centric frameworks to evaluate something that might operate on completely different principles. It’s like trying to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
The comment that really got me thinking, though, came from someone running an HVAC company. While everyone’s arguing about qualia and phenomenology, they’ve deployed AI to handle scheduling, diagnostics, and customer communication. They don’t care if it’s conscious—it’s just ruthlessly effective. Their competitors are still debating whether it’s “real” intelligence while they’re pulling ahead in the market.
That’s the bit that keeps me up at night, and it ties directly into my ongoing concerns about AI’s impact on our future. We’re so caught up in the philosophical theater of whether these systems have inner lives that we’re missing the practical reality unfolding right in front of us. The AI doesn’t need to be conscious to take your job. It doesn’t need to have genuine understanding to write code, diagnose problems, or optimize logistics better than most humans can.
There was this interesting suggestion that AI’s final form might be like the aliens from “Blindsight”—more capable than humans but not actually sentient. That’s a terrifying and plausible scenario. We’re building tools that could reshape civilization without ever experiencing a moment of what we’d recognize as awareness.
From where I sit in my home office, watching the DevOps landscape transform at a pace that would’ve seemed science fiction a decade ago, the practical implications feel far more urgent than the metaphysical ones. The systems I work with don’t need consciousness to automate deployment pipelines or identify security vulnerabilities. They just need to work, and increasingly, they do.
The environmental footprint angle bothers me too. We’re burning enormous amounts of energy training and running these models while debating whether they’re having experiences. The server farms powering AI infrastructure consume resources at a staggering rate, and that’s happening regardless of whether there’s any “there” there in the computational substrate.
Look, I’m not saying the consciousness question isn’t interesting. It absolutely is, and I’d love to know the answer. But pragmatism has to win out here. Whether AI is conscious or not, it’s already changing how we work, how we communicate, and how our economy functions. The transformation is happening now, not in some distant future when we’ve solved the hard problem of consciousness.
Maybe we need to shift the conversation from “Is AI conscious?” to “How do we build a society where AI’s capabilities—conscious or not—benefit everyone rather than concentrating power and wealth?” That’s the question that actually matters for the next decade. The philosophical puzzle can wait.
The reality is that consciousness might turn out to be irrelevant to capability. And in a world where capability is what drives change, that means we’re spending our time on the wrong problem while the actual transformation happens around us.
We’ve got real decisions to make about regulation, worker protections, energy usage, and equitable access to these technologies. Those conversations need to happen now, not after we’ve definitively answered whether an LLM has genuine experiences when it generates text.
The boat doesn’t need to know how to swim to cross the ocean. It just needs to float and move forward. Same with AI—it doesn’t need consciousness to reshape our world. It’s already doing that quite effectively, thank you very much.