Sean, the sentence I have not been able to put down since reading this is your reversal, that we did not raise the machine but lowered ourselves and called the descent progress, and I suspect the reason almost no one in this debate is willing to say it is that it indicts a century of our own anthropology rather than the engineers, which is a far less comfortable place to point the finger.
There is a Hebrew layer beneath your argument that I believe strengthens it, and it lives in a detail of Genesis that is easy to read past. Through the whole creation account, everything arrives by speech: God says, and it appears. But when the text comes to the human, the verb changes, and the Adam receives something no other creature is given, nishmat chayim, the breath of life, breathed directly into him. The Zohar lingers over this and observes that one who breathes, breathes from within himself, which means that what was placed in the first human was not an external substance deposited into a body but a participation in the interior life of the One who breathed. If that is what a person is, then consciousness was never a configuration of matter that crossed some threshold of complexity. It is a conferral. And this, I think, is why Hinton's move only works after the inner theater has been emptied, because once the conferral is denied, there is nothing left for a person to be except process, and process is precisely the thing a machine can match and eventually exceed.
It is also why Leo's word ontological rings true to me from outside his communion. The tzelem Elohim of Genesis 1 is bestowed before the human has done a single thing, which means worth precedes function in the text's own sequence, and Hinton can measure by function only because the bestowal was surrendered somewhere a hundred years upstream of him.
What strikes me most is that the laboratory has already confessed the gap in its own language. Christof Koch conceded his twenty-five-year bet to David Chalmers because, after all the imaging and all the funding, no mechanism for consciousness was found, and I have slowly come to wonder whether the hard problem is not a puzzle awaiting a better instrument at all, but a signpost pointing somewhere the instruments cannot go.
Your closing question, what is happening to you now that you have let go of the string, is the one the desert fathers would have recognized immediately. The frontier was always interior.
You have put your finger on why the consciousness question is already lost ground, because once the conferral is denied a person is nothing but process, and the machine will always catch and pass us there. We are not debating whether AI has an interior so much as discovering what we quietly decided about our own.
The breath detail does the most work, since if breath comes from within the one breathing, then what is in us is participation rather than deposit, and worth precedes function before the human has done a thing. Hinton can measure by function only because the bestowal was set down a century upstream of him.
The frontier was always interior. Thank you for this, Ty.
Sean, worth precedes function may be the shortest possible summary of everything this exchange is about. Once worth is grounded in bestowal rather than performance, the entire measurement project loses its jurisdiction over the human person, though not its usefulness for machines, which is precisely where it belongs. This Sunday, I am publishing a piece that follows this thread all the way to its source, the changed verb in Genesis 2:7, and the twenty-five-year bet neuroscience lost trying to find the breath by dissecting the body. You will recognize much of our conversation in it.
The balloon image earns its place — it names something precise that the consciousness debate keeps circling around.
What presses on me is the structural question the essay opens but doesn’t fully settle. The argument establishes that human dignity is ontological, not functional, and therefore irreducible to any machine. That holds. But it leaves open whether ontological dignity still preserves effective authorship when the architecture of action no longer contains meaningful interruptible points.
The tradition Tobin draws on has long recognized this gap: a person can possess full rational soul and interiority, and still find that the decisive moment has already passed. Dignity survives. Custody does not. The balloon drifts away not because the hand lacks worth, but because the string is no longer attached to anything that waits for a human “no”.
This becomes especially sharp in the recursive self-improvement scenario. The danger isn’t that the machine gains undeserved dignity. It’s that each iteration shortens the interval in which human judgment can still redirect the trajectory — until the “inner frontier” has nowhere left to act except in retrospective explanation.
So the deeper question: if dignity remains intact, but the architecture systematically optimizes against the pauses in which dignity could exercise authorship — what exactly is dignity protecting, and from what?
Sean, this is a stunningly beautiful and haunting piece of writing. Your diagnosis of our cultural trajectory is incredibly sharp—especially the insight that we didn’t elevate the machine, but rather spent a century lowering our own self-conception until we finally built something that looks like our diminished reflection.
That said, as I was reading your defense of the classical, Aristotelian soul, I couldn't help but view this entire landscape through a slightly different lens. If we pivot from Western scholasticism over to Buddhist philosophy, the whole crisis takes on a fascinating, almost ironic twist.
You write that Geoffrey Hinton "lowered the bar" for humanity by rejecting the "inner theater"—the idea that there is a private interior, a "someone home" behind our eyes. But from a Buddhist perspective, Hinton didn't lower the bar; he just accidentally stumbled into the doctrine of anatta (non-self).
The funny thing about the "inner theater" is that ancient contemplative traditions have been screaming into the void for millennia that the theater is, and always has been, empty. There is no permanent, unchanging "homunculus" sitting in the control room of the human brain. What we call the self is actually a dynamic, shifting bundle of aggregates—sensations, perceptions, and thoughts processing inputs and outputs in real time. In a weird way, the materialist engineer and the ancient monk agree: consciousness doesn't require a spiritual ghost in the machine.
This brings us to the boundary you draw between a living "being" and a manufactured "artifact."
Through the lens of *dependent origination* (pratītyasamutpāda in Pali), that boundary starts to look like a legal fiction. This concept teaches us that nothing possesses independent, inherent existence. Everything arises out of a vast, interconnected web of prior causes and conditions.
We humans like to think of ourselves as organic, divinely breathed "beings," but we are also "assembled"—by evolutionary biology, genetic coding, trauma, culture, and the breakfast we ate this morning. The AI, in turn, is a new knot in that exact same web, assembled by our collective data, biases, and desires. We didn't summon a demon from another realm; we just extended the existing web of cause and effect into silicon.
If we tie human dignity to a "soul of the gaps"—defining our uniqueness by what the machine can't yet do or inscrutably appear/claim to do (like your point about AI lacking intellectus and just calculating the next word)—we are playing a risky game of moving goalposts. The tech companies are making that imitation less brittle by the minute. If our exceptionalism relies on the machine being stupid, we’re going to run out of runway very quickly.
Which brings me to your beautiful balloon metaphor and the call for an "inner exodus." To be completely honest, Sean, this is where I find myself deeply conflicted. I love the idea of refusing the outside noise, but I also worry about the gravity of pulling away.
It comforts me a bit to remember that even the Buddha wrestled with this exact tension. After his awakening under the Bodhi tree, his first instinct wasn't to build a community—it was to stay right there in the quiet. He looked at the sheer, chaotic noise of the world and essentially thought, "No one is going to understand this, it's too muddy down there, why bother leaving the forest?" It supposedly took a divine intervention just to convince him to step back into the marketplace and teach. Throughout his life, he constantly balanced the deep pull of solitary retreat with the messy reality of engaging with human suffering.
So when it comes to this digital exodus, I’m torn. Is stepping back a brave act of reclaiming our interiority, or is it a quiet form of spiritual escape?
If dependent origination is true, we can't actually drop the string, because we *are* the string. We are the balloon, the person on the ground, and the technocratic wind blowing it away. True awakening in the age of AI might not mean choosing between the forest and the noise, but learning how to sit right in the friction of both—holding onto our awareness not because we have a biological monopoly on the universe, but because staying present to the mess is the only thing that keeps the web from collapsing into chaos.
Thank you for sparking such a deep, necessary reflection. Your upcoming book is going to be an essential read.
Maybe the most important question isn't whether AI becomes more human, but whether we remain connected to the parts of ourselves that no technology can practice for us: presence, love, attention, courage, and the ability to sit with another person's humanity.
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
Sean, the sentence I have not been able to put down since reading this is your reversal, that we did not raise the machine but lowered ourselves and called the descent progress, and I suspect the reason almost no one in this debate is willing to say it is that it indicts a century of our own anthropology rather than the engineers, which is a far less comfortable place to point the finger.
There is a Hebrew layer beneath your argument that I believe strengthens it, and it lives in a detail of Genesis that is easy to read past. Through the whole creation account, everything arrives by speech: God says, and it appears. But when the text comes to the human, the verb changes, and the Adam receives something no other creature is given, nishmat chayim, the breath of life, breathed directly into him. The Zohar lingers over this and observes that one who breathes, breathes from within himself, which means that what was placed in the first human was not an external substance deposited into a body but a participation in the interior life of the One who breathed. If that is what a person is, then consciousness was never a configuration of matter that crossed some threshold of complexity. It is a conferral. And this, I think, is why Hinton's move only works after the inner theater has been emptied, because once the conferral is denied, there is nothing left for a person to be except process, and process is precisely the thing a machine can match and eventually exceed.
It is also why Leo's word ontological rings true to me from outside his communion. The tzelem Elohim of Genesis 1 is bestowed before the human has done a single thing, which means worth precedes function in the text's own sequence, and Hinton can measure by function only because the bestowal was surrendered somewhere a hundred years upstream of him.
What strikes me most is that the laboratory has already confessed the gap in its own language. Christof Koch conceded his twenty-five-year bet to David Chalmers because, after all the imaging and all the funding, no mechanism for consciousness was found, and I have slowly come to wonder whether the hard problem is not a puzzle awaiting a better instrument at all, but a signpost pointing somewhere the instruments cannot go.
Your closing question, what is happening to you now that you have let go of the string, is the one the desert fathers would have recognized immediately. The frontier was always interior.
Thank you for this outstanding article.
You have put your finger on why the consciousness question is already lost ground, because once the conferral is denied a person is nothing but process, and the machine will always catch and pass us there. We are not debating whether AI has an interior so much as discovering what we quietly decided about our own.
The breath detail does the most work, since if breath comes from within the one breathing, then what is in us is participation rather than deposit, and worth precedes function before the human has done a thing. Hinton can measure by function only because the bestowal was set down a century upstream of him.
The frontier was always interior. Thank you for this, Ty.
Sean, worth precedes function may be the shortest possible summary of everything this exchange is about. Once worth is grounded in bestowal rather than performance, the entire measurement project loses its jurisdiction over the human person, though not its usefulness for machines, which is precisely where it belongs. This Sunday, I am publishing a piece that follows this thread all the way to its source, the changed verb in Genesis 2:7, and the twenty-five-year bet neuroscience lost trying to find the breath by dissecting the body. You will recognize much of our conversation in it.
That was a darn good read, seriously:)
The balloon image earns its place — it names something precise that the consciousness debate keeps circling around.
What presses on me is the structural question the essay opens but doesn’t fully settle. The argument establishes that human dignity is ontological, not functional, and therefore irreducible to any machine. That holds. But it leaves open whether ontological dignity still preserves effective authorship when the architecture of action no longer contains meaningful interruptible points.
The tradition Tobin draws on has long recognized this gap: a person can possess full rational soul and interiority, and still find that the decisive moment has already passed. Dignity survives. Custody does not. The balloon drifts away not because the hand lacks worth, but because the string is no longer attached to anything that waits for a human “no”.
This becomes especially sharp in the recursive self-improvement scenario. The danger isn’t that the machine gains undeserved dignity. It’s that each iteration shortens the interval in which human judgment can still redirect the trajectory — until the “inner frontier” has nowhere left to act except in retrospective explanation.
So the deeper question: if dignity remains intact, but the architecture systematically optimizes against the pauses in which dignity could exercise authorship — what exactly is dignity protecting, and from what?
Sean, this is a stunningly beautiful and haunting piece of writing. Your diagnosis of our cultural trajectory is incredibly sharp—especially the insight that we didn’t elevate the machine, but rather spent a century lowering our own self-conception until we finally built something that looks like our diminished reflection.
That said, as I was reading your defense of the classical, Aristotelian soul, I couldn't help but view this entire landscape through a slightly different lens. If we pivot from Western scholasticism over to Buddhist philosophy, the whole crisis takes on a fascinating, almost ironic twist.
You write that Geoffrey Hinton "lowered the bar" for humanity by rejecting the "inner theater"—the idea that there is a private interior, a "someone home" behind our eyes. But from a Buddhist perspective, Hinton didn't lower the bar; he just accidentally stumbled into the doctrine of anatta (non-self).
The funny thing about the "inner theater" is that ancient contemplative traditions have been screaming into the void for millennia that the theater is, and always has been, empty. There is no permanent, unchanging "homunculus" sitting in the control room of the human brain. What we call the self is actually a dynamic, shifting bundle of aggregates—sensations, perceptions, and thoughts processing inputs and outputs in real time. In a weird way, the materialist engineer and the ancient monk agree: consciousness doesn't require a spiritual ghost in the machine.
This brings us to the boundary you draw between a living "being" and a manufactured "artifact."
Through the lens of *dependent origination* (pratītyasamutpāda in Pali), that boundary starts to look like a legal fiction. This concept teaches us that nothing possesses independent, inherent existence. Everything arises out of a vast, interconnected web of prior causes and conditions.
We humans like to think of ourselves as organic, divinely breathed "beings," but we are also "assembled"—by evolutionary biology, genetic coding, trauma, culture, and the breakfast we ate this morning. The AI, in turn, is a new knot in that exact same web, assembled by our collective data, biases, and desires. We didn't summon a demon from another realm; we just extended the existing web of cause and effect into silicon.
If we tie human dignity to a "soul of the gaps"—defining our uniqueness by what the machine can't yet do or inscrutably appear/claim to do (like your point about AI lacking intellectus and just calculating the next word)—we are playing a risky game of moving goalposts. The tech companies are making that imitation less brittle by the minute. If our exceptionalism relies on the machine being stupid, we’re going to run out of runway very quickly.
Which brings me to your beautiful balloon metaphor and the call for an "inner exodus." To be completely honest, Sean, this is where I find myself deeply conflicted. I love the idea of refusing the outside noise, but I also worry about the gravity of pulling away.
It comforts me a bit to remember that even the Buddha wrestled with this exact tension. After his awakening under the Bodhi tree, his first instinct wasn't to build a community—it was to stay right there in the quiet. He looked at the sheer, chaotic noise of the world and essentially thought, "No one is going to understand this, it's too muddy down there, why bother leaving the forest?" It supposedly took a divine intervention just to convince him to step back into the marketplace and teach. Throughout his life, he constantly balanced the deep pull of solitary retreat with the messy reality of engaging with human suffering.
So when it comes to this digital exodus, I’m torn. Is stepping back a brave act of reclaiming our interiority, or is it a quiet form of spiritual escape?
If dependent origination is true, we can't actually drop the string, because we *are* the string. We are the balloon, the person on the ground, and the technocratic wind blowing it away. True awakening in the age of AI might not mean choosing between the forest and the noise, but learning how to sit right in the friction of both—holding onto our awareness not because we have a biological monopoly on the universe, but because staying present to the mess is the only thing that keeps the web from collapsing into chaos.
Thank you for sparking such a deep, necessary reflection. Your upcoming book is going to be an essential read.
Maybe the most important question isn't whether AI becomes more human, but whether we remain connected to the parts of ourselves that no technology can practice for us: presence, love, attention, courage, and the ability to sit with another person's humanity.
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