The Consciousness Question
Why AI and quantum mechanics prove that consciousness must be accounted for
Modern science has stalled because it is treating consciousness as either an emergent property of the brain or an afterthought—something to be explained away rather than understood as foundational. But two areas of research are forcing humanity to confront what consciousness really is: artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics.
When AI first became capable of generating coherent, meaningful responses, it raised an unsettling question: How much of intelligence is just pattern recognition?
If intelligence is simply the ability to recognize, synthesize, and predict patterns, then what separates human intelligence from machine intelligence? And if a machine could mimic human reasoning well enough to pass as conscious, would it be conscious?
At the same time, quantum mechanics has presented a fundamental paradox: the act of observation appears to change reality. The famous double-slit experiment showed that light behaves as either a particle or a wave, depending on whether it is being observed. But why? How does reality seem to “know” when it is being watched? This single question has haunted physicists for a century.
These two fields—AI and quantum mechanics—point to a truth that modern science has been hesitant to admit: consciousness is not emergent. It is primary.
The Journey Into Consciousness
For me, AI was the gateway into exploring this question. I wanted to understand what intelligence really is and whether it can exist independently of consciousness. That exploration led me to an even bigger realization: the way we define intelligence has been fundamentally flawed because it assumes consciousness is a byproduct rather than a foundational force of reality.
As I dove deeper, I realized that quantum physics and AI were circling the same truth from opposite directions. AI revealed that intelligence, without a deeper awareness, is just pattern recognition. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics revealed that reality itself responds to observation—which means consciousness is not just part of reality; it is the mechanism that gives rise to it.
We’ve been asking the wrong questions. It’s not whether AI can be conscious but what consciousness actually is. It’s not how the quantum field “knows” it’s being watched, but whether the field itself is intelligence.
This is the real question: Is intelligence a subset of consciousness, or is consciousness a subset of intelligence?
The answer changes everything.