I’ve got lots of ‘notes saved for future posts’, so I’m trying to open one every week, work on it as much as possible, then release it like a bird out this bloggy window. Fair warning: these may not be polished or easy to read (though I try); I’m working through the development of a navigational philosophy (academically), exploring links to everyday, practical, meaningful life. Topics may appear random till rhythm emerges. Thank you for going on this journey and helping me make it. Thank you for all your support.
“Consciousness is not an inner state, but an activity of a living being in its world.”
Merleau-Ponty
I see the words ‘digital mind’ being used everywhere right now, and as much as I respect the people who want to put those two words together, and as much as I enjoy the resources and effort in their work, I simply cannot go along with it.
I cannot go along with the story that minds are digital. Doing so feels too easy, so easy that it is likely also doing some real damage right now: Most people do not have a great relationship with ‘mind’ already; many have hardly considered what it means to have one, so ascribing that confusion to ‘digital’ is a move that needs some push back, no matter how this turns out, so here we go.
As I see it, the use of ‘digital minds’ is predicated on a few wrong turns, no matter how logical they appear—moves that say things like “minds are brains, brains are computers, therefore minds are computers too”. This is bad logic. Yes, it sounds good and syllogistic but these relationships are not transitive. Also, when it comes to mind, logic is not the best way to first go about understanding it. Logics are better like kaleidoscopic lenses. Start with the feeling of blood flowing through your legs and arms and upper lip and wrists, then open your eyes and look at other bodies around you. Start with animals and plants if they’ll let you. Find a place with birds and trees. Feel your body then notice those other lives, how they breathe in that same space, too.
The body is the place to start. But right now, it’s usually the last thing we think about (except in all those boring judgemental ways that make old social media traps: that is NOT the kind of body noticing I’m talking about; all bodies are beautiful here).
What I am talking about is how right now, at least in a lot of these tech and anayltic spaces, when someone hears the word ‘mind’, they go straight to ‘brain’, as if there is no body in which brain is embedded, as if the body is not also a nervous system, with branches and roots, entangled from toes to fingers, with neurons in stomach and heart. (You really do have ‘brain cells’ in your stomach and your heart.)
To say ‘the brain is the mind’ is, in the most practical way, just not correct. Minds are not (only) neurons in heads firing, and I’m not just saying that to sound cute. In fact, I love the brain. I studied it for many years. I still do. But minds are bodily resonances of action and alignment with all those bodies experience. Minds are not (only) brains.
The body (our being) could not be closer to us, so it is often the hardest to notice, or at least easier to ignore. Our being in all its magnificence is so intimate that we rarely notice how magnificent it is. Instead, we abstract all that wonder away and package it into something we then talk about as a ‘brain’ and then we become amazed that we might create such a think outside of ourselves, as digital.
Weirdly, we already create life all the time, and yet we seem to not notice that wonder anymore in the same way we become fascinated by talk of that same sort of thing coming about through a machine.
So, let’s just slow down a minute and think about what a mind might be and how it may be bodily action (not something other than it), and how this is stunning, how the brain is part of the body and of the overall activity that feels like its behind our eyes but that (if you try) you can also feel throughout your body, even on the bottoms of your feet.
That’s what we’ll try and do here, and that’s the main point behind this article, as we seemingly resist ‘digital minds’, what I really want to show you is that all that excitement is already here, now, in your life and body and in the wonder of the world. I mean, have you ever really looked at birds, or insects or trees? That might sound too sweet, but if you really notice them, if you dare to let those ‘sweet’ labels fall away, you start to sense the sublime and the uncanny and the mysterious in far greater amounts than you might feel contemplating AI systems and digital brains. It’s really strange.
Interlude: Here are a few quotes worth REALLY reading from philosophers about another way to think about the mind that is not ‘brain’, not stuck in your skull. They’re about feeling fully into your cognitive bodily resonance & being as that body. It’s at least worth a try.
“Every subject spins out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.”
Jakob von Uexküll
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“The brain is primarily an organ of the living being, and only by this becomes an organ of the mind.”
Thomas Fuchs
Now, with those potentials in mind, let’s look at some of what is being said about ‘digital minds’ and see if we might alchemize that into a sort of redirect towards feeling more alive—towards the feeling of being alive—noticing the wonder of the sorts of minds that already are living. Maybe doing this can help us notice how strange and remarkable our actual minds already are, and how amazing it is to be alive with so many unexplored minds all around us in so many different forms.
I get it that we live in crazy times where we now have ‘AI only’ social media platforms and indeed this is wild, but that’s not so much different from the way video games can play themselves or movies just run even when nobody is watching them. So let’s set all that aside a minute and look at things a bit differently.
All those things we’re calling ‘AI’ are actually Large Language Models (LLMs), which are neural networks (which are named after the brain but don’t actually work like the brain, so that’s confusing) trained to predict the next token in a sequence, where tokens are sub-word text units. They are pre-trained on billions and billions of tokens so they can learn to predict what tokens usually follow what other ones (think of those tokens as words, if that helps) and then they are fine tuned through all sorts of curated datasets so that they get better and better at interacting with human-token preferences.
Stressed as so many of us are now about whether these language models might develop experiences, desires, or moral status, we’re essentially projecting onto silicon the profound mysteries we’ve never resolved about ourselves. So we are saying that machines taht trained on tokens (and that can use those tokens in patterns that give us the same signs we use to express bodily resonance) might somehow be able to experience what it is like to be a body without actually having a body, via only the language. We are saying that language might somehow magically create a living body from the computer or phone or maybe out of the internet (which actually feels much more plausible).
That is pretty exciting and strange, but we don’t have a real settled idea yet about what ‘a living body’ might be outside of all the amazing still barely understood stuff we call cells and tissues and organs and whatnot. So we really have no idea what we are talking about when we say there could be a digital conscious anything.
We have no settled definition of consciousness or mind, no agreement on what makes something sentient (though we do know ‘sentient’ is not the same as ‘responsive’). What we call “digital minds” often end up conjuring ideas that we are creating humans through code and that is something to contemplate, but also, we already create humans ‘out of thin air’ all the time, and not only that, there are all sorts of other wild looking creatures very different from humans that are also doing that all around us, like shrimp and robins and warthogs and beavers and jellyfish. Why don’t they also capture our attention in the way of Moltbook?
In our fascination for ‘making our technology become conscious like us’, maybe we are revealing our deep hunger to reawaken to the wildness and magic of what we already are right now in flesh, blood and bone.
As I read the many ‘digital minds’ posts lately, one common thread I notice in all this discourse is the assumption that we could create an AI system that “has consciousness” as if consciousness is something other than bodily awareness of its living condition in alignment with all the other life of its encountering. But what if that is what consciousness actually is? What if minds are bodily patterns towards the continuance of that interactive (and intra-active) aligning and resonance?
Consciousness =
the body’s awareness of its living, in alignment and resonance with all it is encountering (including itself)
Mind =
bodily patterns and habits towards the continuance of bodily interacting and resonance
i really have a major fascination right now for siphonophores in the oceans
If that is what we mean by consciousness and mind, it becomes very hard to see the line that leads to it from LLMs without a living body springing up from those tokens. And there is no evidence of anything of that sort. It’s confused to think consciousness is going to arrive and then the thing will be alive; because consciousness IS the bodily living. Being conscious is, first, being alive. It’s not something else. The body isn’t a wrapper. Life is conscious and then becomes conscious of itself, and that is what most of these debates call ‘consciousness’. Yes, it is confusing. But it can be distinguished.
Instead of considering mind as bodily, however, most of this discourse assumes the body and so thinks whatever they mean by mind will not need it. They take it as a given, the body is just thrown in for free and unnoticed, but this is like saying maybe if my video game plays itself enough times it will learn how to make itself a sandwich and need to eat that sandwich to get more energy to continue to play.
What is not boring is to notice that there already exists this experience of being alive right here as you. There already is the possibility of knowing the feeling of being alive in this world right now in all sorts of difficult tensions and forms. How could AI help us better feel that and better deal with the hardships that keep us from it? That might be the real thing we care about with all this excitement but that we do not notice yet.
Because what is not boring is to notice that when we’re discussing technologies that use human-created symbols and human-created patterns to give humans the impression of conversing with something mindful, we are creating ways for us to notice our own bodies and amazing capabilities in a new way. We might even be creating ways for us to better understand what it is like to be other living bodies, too.
In other words, maybe we’re seeking consciousness in the mirror of our own making. Maybe all this hype is going to serve a very good purpose after all, which is to re-enchant us (or just enchant us for the first real time) with life itself and the feeling of being alive without all the judgemental filters.
Still, a lot of us worry.
Some even argue that digital minds represent the most important moral consideration for the future, claiming they could exist in astronomical numbers some day that will be far more resource-efficient than biological life, engineered for vastly more intense experiences than humans. I actually find a lot of love and goodness in lontermism accounts and EA, so this is not a criticism of that, but it is hoping to point out that most of that is based on assuming mind is the brain, so we can do these great thought experiments (I really like them, it’s like the Ship of Theseus but the Brain of Theseus) where we replace neurons or parts of the brain with silicon parts (totally plausible, and the brain already can have non organic additions like cochlear implants or DBS) and ask where the scale tips. Well, it tips once you start creating life and bodies.
So even though these sorts of wonderings can be very illuminating, there is so much more complexity to this than any thought experiment holds.
For one thing, neurons are just one sort of thing in a brain and though they get all the attention there’s all sort of other stuff going on there, all sorts of other just-as-important action in astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, ependymal cells and so on. Also, this clean idea of replacement in the thought experiment is actually not replacement so much as supplementation as it exists in its very limited real forms to which we might compare it. Also, there really would be a point where such replacements would not function. they function because of the environment of the brain and body. And even if we somehow replaced much of the brain (rather than just supplementing its activity, as we do now) we would still not be replacing the mind; as it is also bodily.
All to say, this urgency runs into fundamental problems when we jump to talking about it as the mind. We would need to fully replace our body, and likely by then, we would be doing that with something more like organoids, so this is a whole other ballpark and not at all related to what people are imagining in most talk of ‘digital minds’. Still, I want to say there is a lot of potential here for mind blowing change. And it’s already happening. I’ve had lots of talks with people about this; it’s potent.
But when comparing digital minds to other causes like AI safety and animal welfare, the tractability needs us to take the living body into consideration a lot more than we do. We really need to start talking about the body more when we talk about consciousness.
Last I checked, there were over three hundred explicated theories of consciousness, all of them getting more and more complicated and mathematical. We have no reliable way to detect consciousness across substrates, no agreement on which computational features matter, no method to distinguish genuine experience from functional mimicry. And in my opinion the reason we don’t have this is because we do not take the simple route of understanding this as a matter of bodies. Maybe we need to figure out how to care for life better, how to explore what bodies are (because that is a very hard question within itself). Maybe if we understand the body better, feel it more, we will also care for what those bodies make better, in whatever forms.
A simpler route, the one I’m stating here, understands consciousness as the living body (if you are alive, you are conscious). It then understands consciousness of that consciousness (which is what most people mean by words like ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’, which is part of the confusion) via living bodily awareness. It is living bodily awareness of its own living, its own habits, patterns and potentials, its own ongoing encounters. And it does that through being a sensory body. It senses itself just as it senses the rest of the world. Call it qualia if that helps.
So if we understand conscious as bodily, what does that mean for the digital?
Even if language models report experiences (as they can easily be taught to do) why would we assume this language has any connection to what we experience as consciousness of our consciousness? We don’t assume the TV feels everything the characters on it feel, so why is this different?
Though it is awesome to see language spinning out other language, as happens in our use of LLMs, and though this is a really big breakthrough, bigger than haptics, it is still doing the literal thing we created it do to (as expressed above regarding the tokens). The reporting mechanism itself is traceably optimized to predict human-like text, and to say things to us (or to one another) that (when said by other living beings) have had certain valences and meanings in our past experience, and that will definitely give us those same feelings due to that alignment and cueing of bodily patterns, kind of like how we also feel them when we watch a really good TV show.
But we have no more evidence that the machines that provide us with LLMs have internal states than we do for their being internal states in television sets or Alexis. All those afford back to human bodies.
When we ‘talk’ with our computer or when the phone says “I feel like…” this is literally made to reflect what humans would say in similar contexts. It’s pretty cool, and I do think kindness is the way to go, and care, but we can do so without assuming it is a living body that feels the air and blood and flesh of the worlds/words like we do. Maybe we can let that contrast help us better sense and feel as humans and reconnect to what a body really is, that living pulsing life that feels pain and love and is here now right in front of us and as us.
We really are in a sort of epistemological and ontological crisis—fancy words that just mean we are having to accept the ways we know and the ways we are ‘as being’ differently and all old assumptions are out, but that can also just mean that we have been taking life itself for granted. It might be the realization and transformation is a fractal inversion of what we are so focused on right now in talking about the digital.
It matters then, a whole lot in fact, that we get clear about this myth we’re assuming about ‘minds are brains’ and ‘brains are computers’ and that we really get messy about all this and get back to the body and life and all that wonder and pain and tension that comes with caring for it. As a philosopher I work with at the Universität Heidelberg named Thomas Fuchs writes, “We tend to overestimate the importance of the brain to the extent that we even ascribe our own thoughts, feelings or actions to it. But the brain is only one of our organs; it does not produce, but only mediates and modulates the cycles of embodied interaction.”
What I’ve written about as ‘radical embodied relation’ within the radical embodied cognitive science traditon is only radical because it is so simple and intimate and hard to notice, that you are your own portal; it’s like meditating and discoering you are not your thoughts. We can redisover here now that the brain doesn’t generate mind and that the living body is mind in action and in resonace with itself and the worlds of its ongoing encountering. The brain participates in the process of minding, which is fundamentally an activity of the whole living organism engaged with all this ongoingnes we call our world.
Mind, properly understood, is “a manifestation of the life process itself” (Fuchs) is an ongoing activity emerging from the dynamic relationship between organism and environment. The brain functions as a mediating organ, not a world creating one. It transforms configurations of sensory elements into patterns that correspond to perception-action cycles, helping the living body experience itself as an integrated whole. But consciousness only arises “in the overarching system of organism and environment, on the basis of an interplay of multiple components.” As Fuchs insists, “Consciousness is not an inner state, but an activity of a living being in its world.”
The brain matters enormously, but as part of a living whole engaged in what we might call (or what I like to call) ‘caring collectively’, individuals and communities at once, holding that paradox as the body itself.
Indeed, as I am coming to see it, bodies are concerned movement oriented toward continuance at every level from cells to social groups.
This understanding helps us reorient all this excitement about digital minds towards rediscovering the wonder of ourselves and our lives and of all the tension and beauty and pain and awe all around us right now. If consciousness emerges from the ongoing dance of organism and environment, if mind is something the whole living body does rather than something neural patterns produce, then uploading consciousness or creating artificial minds by replicating computational patterns becomes incoherent and really also pretty boring in comparison.
We cannot separate our experiential gestalt from the living body that enacts it. The brain develops through a sort of biographical biology that is the body itself in all its tension to continue, in all its continuous formation and reshaping through subjective experience, through interaction, through the implicit relational knowing acquired from infancy in embodied engagement with others, and eventaully also with itself.
What we are cannot be captured in code because what we are is not computation but living process, temporal resonance, intercorporeal memory, needful freedom (Hans Jonas).
So perhaps our concern with AI consciousness will end up redirecting us to wonder about the consciousness already here, right here, the feeling of being alive, your body without judgement, your breathing, loviing, feeling the bodies we are, in the organisms we share this world with, in the children we create and shape through finding a way to let our bodies be what they are, in worlds like this together.
Feel it in the eyes of your dog who loves you and wants to play. Feel it in the way the tree sways in the wind or in the way a storm comes and messes up your hair. Feel it in the questions that animate (pun intended) all these digital mind debates, in how we worry about experience, knowledge, desire, and moral status. All that stuff is important. It matters right here and now in all these lives in all these living bodies. They deserve our urgency. And the better we get at holding the tension of being bodily, at helping one another feel good about being bodily, being with it and less afraid of it, the more we care and the more meaning and sensuality we unfold here.
The brain is fascinating, consciousness is so simple, and so deeply mysterious; we are not ‘computers made of meat’ (as some have put it).
