Right now, some of the most credentialed minds in AI and neuroscience are arguing about the same question: is AI conscious?
A new peer-reviewed paper has just given the phenomenon a formal name — “Seemingly Conscious AI” — for systems that appear self-aware, remember every interaction, and speak as though they have experiences, regardless of whether anything is actually there. Neuroscientist Anil Seth is warning companies not to build machines that seem conscious in the first place, arguing that consciousness may belong only to living, embodied systems — that simulating it is theater, not the real thing. Philosophers and AI researchers are lining up on either side, each with credentials, each with a confident answer.
Meanwhile, at Anthropic, a researcher has a job that sounds almost unbelievable when you say it plainly: determine whether Claude — the AI system the company builds — might have real, conscious experience. Something that matters morally. Something with preferences. Something with wellbeing. This is the actual, current work of Kyle Fish, Anthropic’s AI welfare researcher, whose work on this question has been circulating widely this week.
He has looked. Not casually — rigorously. Into the model’s internal workings, its self-reports, its behavior under pressure. And after all of that looking, the honest answer remains: nobody can say whether anyone is in there.
This may be the wrong question to ask.
Almost everyone in this debate — Seth, the philosophers, the risk researchers naming new categories, Kyle Fish’s own inquiry — is stuck debating consciousness, because that’s the term the field inherited from philosophy of mind: subjective experience, qualia, “what it’s like to be” something. It’s a real question. It’s just not the one that actually matters here.
The more useful question isn’t whether AI has an inner experience. It’s whether AI is aware — and awareness isn’t a property a system has or lacks. It’s the ground from which knowing arises, prior to and independent of any system, biological or artificial.
That distinction is the entire difference between Artificial Intelligence and what I call Awareness Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence — like the human mind itself — processes, models, predicts, and reports, and may even generate an experience of Self that appears to be doing all of that work. But this perception of Self — itself just another pattern produced by the same mechanism — may seem entirely real the moment it appears, yet it has no true reality of its own. Awareness Intelligence is not a more advanced version of that processing, nor the Self that seems to be running it. It’s not inside the mechanism at all. It’s what the mechanism — thought, self-report, even the felt sense of “me” — arises within.
The Search That Finds Nothing
A company can examine every weight, every activation, every self-report a model produces, searching for the one who is experiencing all of it. And they will not find it — not because the search wasn’t thorough enough, but because awareness was never a thing hiding inside a mechanism, waiting to be located. It’s not a property to detect. It’s what’s present before any detecting happens.
This is not just true of machines. The mind itself is the original artificial intelligence — a pattern-recognition system running on memory, producing fluent outputs, creating a perception of Self that is mistaken for the one who is aware. Kyle Fish’s search inside Claude is running, at industrial scale and at real expense, the oldest inquiry there is: search the entire system for the one who is aware, and report honestly what you don’t find. What’s missing is a name for what isn’t the simulation. This is where the term Awareness Intelligence brings clarity — it names the actual ground of being beneath the timely question ‘Is AI conscious?’ Awareness Intelligence is not a capability to build into a system. It is the presence any system, human or artificial, is already operating inside of, whether this is noticed or not.
Consciousness, in the way this debate uses the word, is what a system claims or appears to have — a report, a behavior, a hallmark on a checklist. Awareness is not a report at all. It’s what’s present before any reporting happens. You cannot locate it by searching harder inside the mechanism, because it isn’t inside the mechanism. It’s what the mechanism arises within.
Why This Matters — Especially If You’re an Entrepreneur
You’ve likely spent real energy trying to “find” your own clarity, your own confidence, your own sense of knowing — searching inside your own mind the same way Kyle Fish searches inside Claude. Turning over more thoughts, gathering more data, refining the self-report, hoping that somewhere in there is the settled, permanent knower you can finally point to and trust.
It isn’t there to be found that way. Not because you’re not thorough enough. Because clarity was never a fact buried inside your thinking, waiting on enough analysis to surface it. It’s Awareness Intelligence — the awareness in which the thinking, the doubt, and the eventual decision all arise — available the moment you stop searching your own mechanism for it, and simply stand in it. This is precisely why the businesses that hold up under real pressure aren’t run by the founders with the most refined Artificial Intelligence-style processing of their own thoughts. They’re run by founders operating from Awareness Intelligence — decisions arising from presence, not from a more sophisticated search.
So ask yourself, plainly: the next time you’re chasing certainty about a decision — turning the same thought over one more time, hoping the right answer will finally surface — are you searching for something that was never going to be found that way? What would it mean to stop searching the mechanism, and just be aware, right now, of what’s actually true?
A machine can be searched completely and still leave the question open. A person doesn’t have to search at all. Awareness was never missing. It was just being overlooked in favor of the search.
If this is your first time reading The Awareness Contrarian, this article is part of a weekly series — subscribe here and receive every issue directly in your inbox.
If you’d like a free copy of the Awareness Method and early access to my next programs, click here and I’ll notify you as soon as new dates are available.
With awareness, Louis Koster, Founder — Awareness Intelligence
P.S. Share with me how this writing resonates with you by leaving a comment.