AI Is Forcing Us to Ask Again: What Is Consciousness?
- AI reasons, codes, jokes, sounds exactly like a thoughtful human.
Yet it never wakes up.
The better the imitation, the sharper the gap:
Perfect simulation of intelligence is possible without consciousness.
Therefore consciousness ≠ intelligence.
That single fact re-opens an ancient question.
The Vedic Answer in One Sentence
Consciousness is not an emergent function.
It is the person who feels, wills, knows — the jīva.
- Body = instrument
- Brain = dashboard
- Consciousness = the driver
Science maps the dashboard brilliantly.
It still can’t find the driver.
Four Things Your Direct Experience Already Knows
- Every sensation needs a feeler. Chemicals don’t feel.
- Awareness is always one unified “I,” never a committee.
- Love, meaning, preference — physics has no words for these.
- You instantly know the difference between “I chose” and reflex.
These are not beliefs. They are raw data.
The 1970s Promissory Note
In the 1970s, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (Śrīla Prabhupāda) would ask scientists:
“If the body is only chemicals, why can’t you make a dead man breathe for five more minutes?”
Typical reply:
“We can’t do it today — but give us time. Science will deliver.”
Prabhupāda called that a post-dated check:
looks real, can’t cash it now, just trust us.
Fifty years later, it’s 2025.
- We have brain scans in 8K.
- We have AI that passes the bar exam and writes symphonies.
- We still can’t cash the check.
No one has added even one minute to a corpse.
No machine has ever said “I.”
How much longer are we willing to hold these post-dated promises?
Quietly, People Are Starting to Tear Them Up
More and more thinkers — scientists, philosophers, even some AI researchers — are admitting the obvious:
Explaining the brain is not the same as explaining the self.
The Vedic model is no longer dismissed as “religion.”
It is being looked at again as the one framework that actually fits first-person reality:
- a real subject
- irreducible awareness
- the source of meaning and will
One Question for 2025
What if consciousness isn’t something we’ll one day code?
What if it’s the eternal person reading these words right now?
AI can imitate anything.
It cannot become someone.
That gap might be the clearest sign we’ve ever had
that you are not a machine.
You never were.