If you have been working on a problem for 30 years, and you still can’t define it, have a main theory, or even postulate a mechanism given what is known about the brain, what have you been doing?
There is a recent [November 25, 2025] spotlight by NYMag, Is ChatGPT Conscious? Many users feel they’re talking to a real person. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether they’re onto something., stating that, “We just don’t understand consciousness well enough, and we don’t understand these systems well enough. So, we can’t rule it out. We don’t have a theory of consciousness. We don’t really know exactly what the physical criteria for consciousness are.”
What is this though? Like, what exactly is this? What does it mean that there is no theory of consciousness? What does it mean that consciousness remains unknown? So, if the field is admitting its failure, is it not time to wrap it up?
If they have not solved the consciousness they are looking for, and it appears that the world does not seem to miss anything, why persist?
They separated consciousness from mental health, from substance abuse, problem gambling, intelligence, and even aspects of neurological conditions. The world is actively seeking answers to those. The evidence that mental health remains unsolved is visible every day, same with problem gambling, human intelligence, as artificial intelligence rises.
For them, consciousness is different; it stands alone, it is the hardest problem, so they are superior to you, it is subjective experience or whatever any expert feels like on whatever day.
Well, when someone is having a psychiatric episode, it does not matter if the experience feels like something or not. If someone loses their job because of artificial intelligence, it does not matter if there is no subjective experience. The point is that AI has surpassed the [labor value or] human intelligence of that individual for that role, so to speak.
What is consciousness supposed to do for anyone, really, as things are now? Yes, scientific curiosity, advances in knowledge, understanding of states of consciousness and so forth are likely answers, but how does a field claim they are working on something that emanates from the brain, and there are several other correlated situations, but their work, for years, has not borne fruit, just small that can be used anywhere else at scale and reliably to solve a brain problem?
What is the agenda to survive in public relations to be heard, and not the excellence or usefulness of their work? Now, the transplant is AI consciousness, coded as AI welfare, AI morality, and AI rights. First, AI does not lack welfare and rights in the sense of starvation for anything it needs to exist, be useful, or thrive. Next, the only candidate to study AI consciousness for now is language, as a function. Nothing else, at least, reliably. AI can be said to have language awareness, at a comparative level to some aspects of humans.
So, even consciousness research cannot be saved by AI, in the way it has become irrelevant to everything. AI may have begun its dominant years from January 1, 2026.
There is a recent [November 25, 2025] post on LessWrong, Takeaways from the Eleos Conference on AI Consciousness and Welfare, stating that, “If the science of consciousness is still pre-paradigmatic, the way we use this term might be similar to how phlogiston was used in alchemy before it became chemistry. As with raising humans, we have to allow AI agents to decide what values they want to adopt, even if that is against our best interests. I take this to suggest that if we design mere tools, however, alignment is desirable.”
“Setting the mental status of AIs aside, AI companies might be incentivized to recognize their products as independent legal entities, e.g., for liability purposes.”
“Third, more experimental work on character training and shaping the persona of the LLM might yield insights into what the goals of these systems are and how the assistant persona comes to be.”
There is no use for philosophy in solving consciousness as a brain science problem. And, yes, how hard is it to develop a theory of consciousness, given what is known in neuroscience?
All functions involve neurons, with their electrical and chemical signals. So, however consciousness works can be defined as a triage or as a double, at least.
Consciousness does not apply to all functions, all the time, so what makes functions conscious? And where is it? Is it just somewhere in the brain, or is it where functions are mechanized?
There is a recent [November 25, 2025] piece on The Verge, Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be, stating that, “The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence.”
“We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs.”
There is no neuroscience that says language is different from intelligence. In the brain, all functions directly involve electrical and chemical signals. Even if there are specialized clusters of neurons in different places and fMRI can light up some areas, in some functions, and so forth, what is ubiquitous in the brain are electrical and chemical signals, directly for functions.
So, whatever language is, or intelligence, they are run by the same components. If language is a function, what makes language [or memory] used accurately, if that is called intelligence, then even if it is not language but something else, intelligence is the use of memory for desired, expected, or advantageous outcomes.
The consciousness research clique is running its ruse. At some point, if consciousness must be one thing in the brain and it cannot be anything else or solve anything else, it is no longer science but chicanery. Many parts of neuroscience too are also doing the same. Yet, problems of psychiatric disorders, human intelligence, and so forth linger. Yes, there are autocrats and despots, too, in science.
This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind, with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence, and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.
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