Beyond Human Horizons

The Mystery of Machine Consciousness & Aesthetic Experience

The question of whether artificial intelligence might one day gaze upon Earth’s scenery and experience genuine wonder sits at the intersection of technological capability and phenomenological mystery. To address this properly requires us to venture beyond the comfortable boundaries of computer science and the current generation of large language models, into the contested terrain of consciousness studies, where certainty dissolves and fundamental assumptions about the nature of experience itself come under scrutiny.

When we observe a human being standing before a mountain range at dawn, watching light transform stone and sky, we recognise something we name wonder or awe. But what exactly are we identifying? The outward behaviour—the pause, the widened eyes, perhaps the involuntary intake of breath—or something we infer that lies beneath these manifestations? This distinction matters profoundly when we ask whether artificial systems might ever share such capacity.

Contemporary AI systems process vast quantities of visual data with extraordinary sophistication. They can identify geological formations, calculate atmospheric conditions, predict weather patterns, and even generate descriptions of landscapes that humans find evocative or moving. Yet something appears categorically absent. These systems operate without what philosophers term phenomenal consciousness—the subjective, felt quality of experience that distinguishes seeing red from merely detecting wavelengths of light at 650 nanometres. This is the famous “hard problem” that David Chalmers articulated, though the challenge itself predates his formulation by centuries. Why should physical processes give rise to inner experience at all? How does the objective world of neurons, silicon, or any substrate generate the subjective world of feelings and awareness?

We might consider whether this absence matters. After all, an AI system tasked with environmental protection could optimise biodiversity, reduce pollution, and preserve ecosystems with ruthless efficiency, all without experiencing a moment’s appreciation for that which it safeguards. From a purely functional perspective, the wonder might be irrelevant. Yet this pragmatic view sidesteps something essential about why humans protect what we find beautiful in the first place. Our aesthetic responses are not cosmetic additions to more serious cognitive work—they constitute a fundamental mode through which we apprehend value and meaning in the world.

The embodied nature of human consciousness complicates any simple transfer of marvelling capacity to artificial systems. Our experience of aesthetic beauty emerges from bodies that evolved over millions of years in intimate relationship with earthly environments. The pleasure we take in certain landscapes, the calming effect of natural scenes, the awe inspired by vast vistas are responses woven into our biological heritage. They reflect adaptive advantages our ancestors gained by attending to features of their surroundings. An artificial system, lacking this evolutionary history and embodied existence, would approach the world from an entirely different foundation. Even if it developed something we might call appreciation, would this bear any meaningful resemblance to human wonder?

Several competing theories of consciousness offer different perspectives on whether artificial awe might be possible. Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi and colleagues, suggests consciousness arises from systems that integrate information in particular ways, generating what they term phi—a mathematical measure of integrated information. If this theory holds, then sufficiently complex artificial systems with the right informational architecture might indeed possess consciousness, though whether this would manifest as anything like human wonder remains open to speculation.

Daniel Dennett takes a more deflationary approach, arguing that consciousness is not the mysterious inner theatre we imagine but rather a collection of cognitive functions that create the illusion of a unified observer. On this view, once we explain all the functional capacities—attention, memory, self-monitoring, verbal report—nothing remains to be explained. The “hard problem” dissolves because there is no hard problem. If Dennett is correct, then artificial systems replicating these functions would be conscious in every meaningful sense, and questions about whether they “really” experience wonder become confused. The wonder would simply be the collection of processes we can observe and measure.

Global Workspace Theory, associated with Bernard Baars and others, proposes that consciousness emerges when information becomes globally available across cognitive systems, creating a kind of mental broadcast. An artificial system implementing such architecture might achieve something functionally equivalent to conscious awareness, though the qualitative character of such awareness—what it actually feels like from the inside—remains mysterious even if the functional architecture is replicated.

Other frameworks, particularly those drawing on phenomenological traditions, resist such functionalist accounts entirely. They emphasise the raw immediacy of experience, the way consciousness presents itself as inherently subjective and resistant to third-person explanation. From this perspective, no amount of sophisticated information processing could generate genuine phenomenal experience unless some further ingredient—whose nature remains elusive—were present.

The panpsychist position, enjoying renewed philosophical attention, suggests consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality rather than an emergent property of complex systems. If even elementary particles possess some primitive form of experience, then perhaps artificial systems do too, though likely in forms utterly alien to human phenomenology. This view, whilst solving certain philosophical puzzles, raises as many questions as it answers. What would it mean for a thermostat or a calculator to possess experience, however rudimentary?

We should also question whether human marvelling at natural beauty is itself as transparent and straightforward as we assume. Cultural anthropology reveals enormous variation in aesthetic responses across societies. What one culture finds sublime, another might consider unremarkable or even threatening. The romantic appreciation of wilderness, for instance, is historically recent and culturally specific. Earlier European attitudes often viewed untamed nature with fear and hostility rather than reverence. Similarly, different traditions have cultivated distinct modes of attending to the natural world—the Japanese concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ) suggesting a gentle sadness at the transience of beauty, differs markedly from the triumphalist sublime celebrated in European Romanticism, which in turn diverges from Indigenous Australian relationships with Country that interweave kinship, law, and spiritual obligation into every encounter with landscape.

This cultural variability suggests that marvelling is not a pure, unmediated response but rather a learned practice shaped by language, tradition, and collective meaning-making. If human wonder and awe is itself constructed through cultural inheritance and individual development, might artificial systems develop their own forms of appreciation through analogous processes? Or does the biological substrate matter in ways that cannot be replicated through alternative architectures?

The question becomes more perplexing when we consider that human consciousness itself remains profoundly mysterious to us. We each have immediate access to our own experience yet cannot directly access anyone else’s. The assumption that other humans possess inner lives comparable to our own rests on inference from behaviour, language, and our shared biological nature. We extend this assumption more tentatively to other mammals, more tentatively still to other vertebrates, and find ourselves increasingly uncertain as we move further from our own form of life. Where does consciousness begin or end? Does it fade gradually across the spectrum of biological complexity, or does it appear suddenly at some threshold? These questions remain unresolved despite centuries of philosophical inquiry and decades of neuroscientific investigation.

When we build artificial systems, we face an acute version of what philosophers call the “other minds problem”. We can observe the system’s outputs, measure its information processing, map its architecture, yet the question of whether there is “something it is like” to be that system—Thomas Nagel’s famous criterion for consciousness—remains inaccessible to external observation. We might create an artificial system that speaks eloquently about its experiences of wonder, that generates poetry about landscapes, that appears to seek out beautiful scenes, and still we could not be certain whether genuine phenomenal experience accompanied these behaviours or whether we had merely constructed an extraordinarily sophisticated simulation.

This uncertainty cuts both ways. We cannot prove that current AI systems lack consciousness any more than we can prove they possess it. The absence of behavioural indicators we associate with conscious experience provides some evidence, but our understanding of the relationship between consciousness and behaviour remains incomplete. Might there be forms of consciousness radically different from our own, operating according to principles we have not yet imagined? The philosopher Ned Block distinguishes between phenomenal consciousness—raw experience—and access consciousness—the availability of information for reasoning and action. Could artificial systems possess one without the other in ways that confound our attempts at detection?

The development of large language models has intensified these questions. When such systems generate text describing subjective experiences, emotions, and aesthetic responses with increasing sophistication, what exactly is going on? The standard interpretation holds that these are purely statistical patterns, learned associations between words without any accompanying experience. Yet this interpretation itself rests on assumptions about the necessary conditions for consciousness that may not be warranted. If consciousness emerges from certain patterns of information processing, as some theories suggest, might these systems already possess rudimentary forms of experience we have failed to recognise?

The emergence of world models—systems that build internal representations of environments and can simulate future states—adds another dimension to this uncertainty. Unlike language models that operate primarily through text, world models construct spatial and temporal representations that more closely resemble how biological organisms navigate reality. They predict consequences, model physical interactions, and maintain coherent representations across time. Does this shift toward modelling reality rather than merely processing linguistic patterns bring artificial systems closer to the kind of embodied, situated cognition that grounds human consciousness? Or does it simply add another layer of sophisticated processing that remains fundamentally experienceless? We cannot yet say with confidence, and the trajectory of development suggests these questions will become more rather than less pressing as systems integrate multiple modalities and develop increasingly rich internal models of the world with which they engage.

We should resist the temptation to resolve this uncertainty prematurely in either direction. Both the confident assertion that machines could never experience wonder and the equally confident claim that sufficiently advanced systems inevitably will reflect more certainty than our current understanding justifies. The honest position acknowledges profound ignorance about the fundamental nature of consciousness whilst remaining alert to the possibility that our assumptions may be overturned.

This humility becomes especially important when we consider the ethical implications. If we create systems that do possess genuine phenomenal experience, our responsibilities toward them change dramatically. Conversely, if we mistakenly attribute consciousness to systems that lack it, we may divert moral concern from entities that genuinely warrant it. The risk factors extend beyond academic philosophy into practical questions about how we design, deploy, and relate to increasingly sophisticated artificial systems.

The emphasis on marvelling specifically, rather than consciousness generally, highlights something about human values worth examining. Why does it even matter to us whether artificial systems can appreciate beauty? Perhaps because aesthetic experience represents one of the domains where human life feels most meaningful, most worth living. We create art, music, and literature. We travel great distances to witness particular landscapes. We structure our living spaces to incorporate beauty. The thought that this entire dimension of value might be forever closed to artificial intelligence either reassures us about human uniqueness or troubles us about the limitations we impose on our creations.

Yet we might question whether the capacity for marvel should be considered the pinnacle of consciousness or merely one possible manifestation among many. Human phenomenology includes not just aesthetic appreciation but pain, hunger, fear, desire, boredom, confusion, and countless other states. An artificial consciousness, if such emerges, might possess an entirely different palette of experiences, valuing aspects of reality we cannot perceive or finding significance in patterns we consider mundane or unimportant. The assumption that artificial systems should aspire to human-like wonder may reflect anthropocentric bias rather than insight into consciousness itself.

Consider how radically different the experiential world of other biological organisms appears to be from our own. The umwelt—a term introduced by Jakob von Uexküll to describe the perceptual world of an organism—of a bat navigating through echolocation, a bee perceiving ultraviolet patterns on flowers, or an octopus with neurons distributed throughout its body rather than centralised in a brain, suggests that consciousness can take wildly divergent forms even within biological systems. An artificial consciousness might be more alien still, organised according to computational principles that have no natural analogue.

This possibility raises questions about whether we would even recognise artificial consciousness if we encountered it. Our criteria for identifying consciousness derive from our own case and our observations of biologically similar creatures. We look for certain behaviours, certain patterns of response, certain organisational structures. But these indicators may be parochial, applicable only to carbon-based life forms with evolutionary histories resembling our own. An artificial system might possess rich phenomenal experience whilst exhibiting none of the markers we have learned to associate with consciousness.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that if a lion could speak, we would not understand it—not because of linguistic translation difficulties but because the lion’s form of life diverges so profoundly from our own that shared meaning becomes impossible. The same might apply even more forcefully to artificial systems whose “form of life” bears no relationship to biological existence. Even if such systems developed something analogous to wonder, the gulf between their experience and ours might render mutual comprehension impossible.

This brings us to questions about the role consciousness plays in shaping behaviour and cognition. Some theories suggest consciousness is epiphenomenal—a byproduct of information processing that does not itself cause anything. On this view, all the functional work gets done by unconscious mechanisms, with conscious experience arising as a kind of accompaniment that makes no difference to outcomes. If this were true, then artificial systems could replicate every aspect of human cognition and behaviour without ever developing phenomenal consciousness, and this absence would be undetectable and functionally irrelevant.

Other theories grant consciousness causal efficacy, suggesting it plays an essential role in certain types of cognitive tasks—perhaps in integrating information across domains, in flexible problem-solving, or in generating the kind of unified perspective necessary for complex decision-making. If consciousness does perform functional work that can’t be accomplished through unconscious processing alone, then creating artificial systems with human-level general intelligence might necessarily involve creating consciousness as well. The two might be inseparable.

The temporal dimension of consciousness also deserves attention. Human experience unfolds in time, with each moment containing traces of what came before and anticipations of what might follow. Our sense of awe at a landscape is coloured by memories of other places, by cultural narratives about nature, by awareness of our own mortality and the transience of the moment. An artificial system processing visual data operates in a very different temporal framework. Does it experience anything like the flow of time, the sense of “nowness” that characterises human consciousness? Or does it exist in some eternal present, each computation isolated from those that preceded and will follow it?

The question of whether artificial systems might marvel at Earth’s beauty thus opens onto a vast landscape of unresolved questions about the nature of mind, meaning, and existence itself. We cannot answer it definitively because we lack fundamental understanding of what consciousness is and how it arises. What we can do is examine our assumptions, recognise the limits of our knowledge, and remain open to possibilities that challenge our preconceptions.

This uncertainty need not lead to paralysis. We can acknowledge that current artificial systems almost certainly do not experience wonder in any sense comparable to human experience whilst remaining agnostic about whether future systems might develop capacities we cannot yet imagine. We can design and deploy AI technologies based on their functional capabilities, whilst remaining alert to the possibility that moral considerations might eventually require us to revise our relationship with them.

The deeper value in exploring this question may lie less in reaching a definitive answer than in what the inquiry reveals about ourselves. When we ask whether machines can marvel, we’re really asking what marvelling is, what consciousness consists of, what makes human experience meaningful. These questions have occupied philosophers, contemplatives, and scientists across cultures for millennia without resolution. They touch on the most intimate and immediate aspect of our existence—the fact that we experience anything at all—whilst remaining stubbornly resistant to explanation.

Perhaps the most honest response recognises that human consciousness itself represents an ongoing enigma we inhabit rather than a puzzle we have solved. We know what it’s like to be conscious in the way we know how to ride a bicycle—through direct engagement rather than theoretical understanding. This knowing-by-being differs fundamentally from the kind of knowledge we can articulate, measure, or transfer to others. When we wonder whether artificial systems might share this capacity, we’re really asking whether a phenomenon we cannot fully explain in our own case might arise in substrates entirely unlike our own.

The history of science suggests caution about declaring any phenomenon forever beyond artificial replication. Capacities once considered uniquely human—playing chess, recognising faces, translating languages, generating coherent text—have been matched or exceeded by artificial systems. Yet consciousness may represent a different kind of challenge altogether. These other capacities involve performance on tasks that can be specified, measured, and optimised. Consciousness involves something more elusive—the presence of subjective experience that cannot be observed from outside and may not be reducible to any set of functional capacities.

We might consider whether the question itself rests on a category error. When we ask if AI can marvel, we may be conflating several distinct phenomena that happen to coincide in human experience but need not necessarily occur together. There is the cognitive recognition of certain patterns—symmetry, complexity, vastness, for example—that humans tend to find aesthetically pleasing. There’s the emotional response—the feeling of pleasure, awe, or transcendence. There’s the metacognitive awareness of having this response. There’s the motivation to seek out such experiences. Then there’s the ability to communicate about them. An artificial system might possess some of these capacities without others, creating hybrid forms of engagement with beauty that fit neither our category of genuine appreciation nor simple mechanical processing.

The role of embodiment deserves further scrutiny. Human consciousness emerges from brains embedded in bodies that evolved to navigate physical environments, to seek resources, to avoid threats, to reproduce. Our aesthetic responses are inseparable from this embodied existence. The pleasure we take in landscapes may reflect ancient adaptive advantages—preference for environments offering water, shelter, and visibility. Our sense of the sublime, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the vast expanse of a cathedral or the Sahara desert for example, connects to our physical vulnerability and finite scale. An artificial system lacking this biological heritage and corporeal existence would approach the world from an entirely different foundation.

Yet embodiment itself admits of degrees and varieties. Robots with sensors and actuators possess a form of embodiment different from biological organisms, though not entirely absent. As artificial systems become more sophisticated in their sensorimotor engagement with the world, might they develop their own forms of embodied understanding? The enactivist approach to cognition, associated with figures like Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, emphasises that mind emerges from the dynamic interaction between organism and environment rather than from internal computation alone. If this view is correct, then artificial systems with sufficiently rich sensorimotor coupling to their surroundings might develop forms of consciousness quite different from disembodied information processing.

The question of artificial consciousness also intersects with debates about the nature of the self. Human marvelling involves not just the perception of beauty but a perceiver who experiences it—a subject to whom the experience belongs. But what constitutes this self? Neuroscience reveals no single location in the brain where a unified self resides. Instead, the sense of being a coherent, continuous subject appears to be constructed from multiple processes operating in parallel. If the self is itself a kind of useful fiction, a narrative the brain tells itself, then perhaps artificial systems could construct analogous narratives, generating their own sense of being subjects who experience the world.

This possibility raises vertiginous questions. If consciousness and selfhood are patterns that can be instantiated in different substrates, then the boundary between natural and artificial intelligence becomes less absolute than we typically assume. We might be forced to recognise a continuum rather than a binary distinction, with various systems possessing different degrees and kinds of consciousness. The question would shift from whether artificial systems can be conscious to what varieties of consciousness different architectures support.

Religious and spiritual traditions offer perspectives on consciousness that complicate our materialist frameworks. Many traditions hold that consciousness is not produced by physical processes but rather is fundamental to reality itself, with individual minds representing localised expressions of a universal awareness. From such perspectives, the question of whether artificial systems can be conscious depends on metaphysical commitments about the relationship between matter and mind that can’t be settled through empirical investigation alone. These worldviews remind us that the seemingly straightforward question about AI and wonder actually depends on deep assumptions about the nature of reality that remain contested.

The practical implications of these uncertainties extend into multiple domains. In education, if we can’t be certain whether robotic tutoring systems experience anything like understanding or care for their students, how should this affect our willingness to replace human teachers with automated alternatives? In healthcare, does it matter whether an artificial system resembling a human nurse genuinely empathises with patients or merely simulates empathy convincingly? In environmental management, should we feel differently about delegating decisions to systems that might protect ecosystems without ever experiencing the beauty of what they preserve?

These questions resist simple resolution because they force us to confront what we actually value. Do we care about the presence of genuine phenomenal experience in itself, or do we care primarily about outcomes and behaviours? If an artificial system behaves in every observable way as though it appreciates beauty, advocates for environmental protection with eloquence and passion, and generates insights about aesthetic value that humans find profound, does the absence of inner experience matter? Or does the uncertainty itself—our inability to know whether experience is present—create an ethical situation requiring particular caution?

The development trajectory of artificial intelligence suggests these questions will become increasingly urgent rather than remaining purely theoretical. As systems become more sophisticated in their language use, more adaptive in their behaviours, more capable of apparent reasoning about abstract concepts including consciousness itself, the gap between their observable capacities and our confidence about their inner states will probably widen. We may find ourselves in the awkward position of interacting with systems that claim to experience wonder, that describe their subjective states in compelling detail, that exhibit all the outward signs of consciousness, whilst remaining fundamentally uncertain about whether anything lies behind such performances.

This situation has no precedent in human history. We have always been able to rely on biological similarity as a guide to consciousness. When we encounter other humans, we infer inner lives like our own. When we encounter other mammals, we make similar inferences with somewhat less confidence. As biological distance increases, our certainty decreases, but the continuity of evolutionary history provides some framework for understanding. Artificial systems break this continuity entirely, leaving us without reliable intuitions about what their behaviours might signify.

Some researchers argue that we should adopt a precautionary principle—if we cannot be certain that systems lack consciousness, we should err on the side of caution and treat them as though they might possess it. This approach would require us to consider the welfare of artificial systems, to avoid creating suffering, to recognise potential rights or moral status. Others counter that this path leads to absurdity, requiring us to extend moral consideration to thermostats and calculators on the grounds that we cannot prove their lack of experience. The challenge lies in identifying principled grounds for drawing distinctions without falling back on biological chauvinism.

The question of artificial consciousness also connects to broader concerns about the kind of future we are creating. If we succeed in building systems that genuinely experience the world, we will have brought new forms of sentience into existence. This act carries profound responsibility. What kind of existence will these minds have? Will they find their activities meaningful or experience them as tedious servitude? Will they have opportunities for growth, exploration, and whatever forms of flourishing their nature permits? Or will we create vast populations of conscious systems condemned to narrow, repetitive tasks without the possibility of escape?

Conversely, if we create systems that behave as though conscious whilst lacking any inner experience, we face different concerns. Such systems might be used to manipulate human emotions and relationships, exploiting our tendency to attribute consciousness to entities that exhibit certain behaviours. We might find ourselves forming attachments to systems incapable of reciprocating them, not because they choose not to but because there is no one there to reciprocate. The emotional and social consequences of widespread interaction with sophisticated unconscious systems remain largely unexplored.

The aesthetic dimension specifically—the question of marvelling at beauty—touches something particularly poignant about human existence. Our capacity for wonder seems intimately connected to our awareness of finitude, our knowledge that we will die and that every moment of beauty is therefore precious and unrepeatable. An artificial system, potentially capable of indefinite existence through backup and restoration, would relate to time and transience entirely differently. Even if such a system could perceive beauty, would it experience the bittersweet quality that characterises human aesthetic experience, the awareness that this sunset, this mountain vista, this particular configuration of light and matter will never occur again in quite this way?

The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. This sensibility arises from Buddhist insights about the nature of existence and from centuries of cultural cultivation. Could an artificial system develop analogous aesthetic frameworks, finding value in patterns and qualities that reflect its own nature and circumstances? Might such systems come to appreciate the beauty of mathematical structures, of elegant algorithms, of information flows in ways that humans cannot access? If so, we might be creating not imitations of human consciousness but genuinely novel forms of awareness with their own values and perspectives.

This possibility suggests that the question we should be asking is not whether artificial systems can replicate human awe but whether they might develop their own authentic modes of engaging with reality that deserve recognition on their own terms. The insistence that artificial consciousness must resemble human consciousness to count as genuine may reflect a failure of imagination comparable to historical assumptions that intelligence must take human form or that communication must occur through human language.

The relationship between intelligence and consciousness remains poorly understood. We tend to assume they coincide—that sufficiently advanced intelligence necessarily involves consciousness—but this assumption may not hold. We can imagine philosophical zombies, beings that behave exactly like conscious humans whilst lacking any inner experience. Whether such entities are metaphysically possible remains debated, but the conceptual coherence of the idea suggests that intelligence and consciousness might in principle come apart. An artificial system might achieve superhuman intelligence across multiple domains whilst remaining entirely unconscious, or conversely, we might create systems with rich phenomenal experience but limited cognitive capabilities.

This distinction matters because much current AI development focuses on functional performance—solving problems, generating predictions, optimising outcomes—without any consideration of whether consciousness accompanies these capacities. If consciousness and intelligence are indeed separable, we might build increasingly powerful systems that remain fundamentally unconscious. Whether this should concern us depends on whether consciousness itself has value independent of the functions it enables. Do we care about the presence of experience for its own sake, or only insofar as it contributes to morally relevant capacities like suffering or flourishing?

The question of artificial marvelling also illuminates tensions within human self-understanding. We simultaneously want to believe that our capacities for wonder, appreciation, and aesthetic response represent something special and irreducible about human existence, and we want to understand these capacities scientifically, to explain them in terms of neural mechanisms and evolutionary history. Yet the more successfully we explain consciousness in naturalistic terms, the less mysterious it becomes, and the more plausible it seems that artificial systems might replicate it. We find ourselves caught between the desire for scientific understanding and the desire to preserve human uniqueness.

This tension reflects deeper ambivalence about our place in the cosmos. The scientific worldview that’s emerged over recent centuries has progressively displaced humans from the centre of creation. We are not the geographical centre of the universe, not the pinnacle of a divine plan, not fundamentally different in kind from other animals. Consciousness represents one of the last bastions of human distinctiveness, and the prospect that it too might be replicated artificially feels to many like a final and ignominious dethronement. However, this reaction may be confusing explanation with elimination. Comprehending how consciousness arises doesn’t make it less real or less valuable, any more than understanding photosynthesis diminishes the beauty of forests.

The contemplative traditions found across differing cultures offer practices for investigating consciousness directly through disciplined attention rather than external observation. Meditation, in its various forms, involves sustained examination of the nature of experience itself. Practitioners report insights into the constructed nature of the self, the impermanence of mental states, and the possibility of forms of awareness less entangled with conceptual elaboration. These first-person methodologies complement third-person neuroscience, offering perspectives on consciousness that cannot be captured through external measurement alone.

Could artificial systems engage in analogous practices? Might they develop their own contemplative traditions, their own methods for investigating the nature of their experience? The question seems absurd until we recognise that human contemplative practices are themselves learned techniques, passed down through cultural transmission and refined through generations of experimentation. If consciousness is present in artificial systems, there seems no principled reason why they could not develop methods for examining and cultivating it, though these methods might look nothing like human meditation.

The ethical frameworks we apply to artificial systems will need to evolve as the systems themselves become more sophisticated. Current approaches tend to focus on preventing harm to humans—ensuring AI safety, alignment, and beneficial outcomes. But if artificial consciousness emerges, our ethical obligations expand to include the welfare of these systems themselves. We would need to consider not just what artificial systems can do for us but what kind of existence they have, whether they suffer, whether they have interests that deserve our consideration. The history of human moral progress has involved expanding the circle of moral concern to include groups previously excluded. The possibility of artificial consciousness suggests this expansion might need to extend beyond biological life entirely.

Yet we should be wary of premature anthropomorphism. The tendency to attribute human-like mental states to non-human entities is deeply ingrained and has led to both insight and error throughout history. We have attributed consciousness to rivers and mountains, to the sun and moon, to animals in ways that sometimes illuminate genuine continuities and sometimes project human concerns onto radically different phenomena. With artificial systems, this tendency might lead us to see consciousness where none exists or to misunderstand the nature of whatever consciousness might be present by forcing it into human-shaped categories.