The physics of sentience

Consciousness in the age of mechanical minds

We are now clearly entering a new age in our relationship with machines. The power of AI natural language processors and image generators has rapidly exceeded the expectations of even those who developed them. Serious questions are now being asked about the extent to which machines could become — or perhaps already are — sentient or conscious. Do AI machines understand the instructions they are given and the answers they provide? In this talk I will consider the prospects for conscious machines, by which I mean machines that have feelings, know about their own existence, and about ours. I will suggest that the recent focus on information processing in models of consciousness, in which the brain is treated as a kind of digital computer, have mislead us about the nature of consciousness and how it is produced in biological systems. Treating the brain as an energy processing system is more likely to yield answers to these fundamental questions and help us understand how and when machines might become minds.