No, Humans Are Not Conscious - The Philosophers' Magazine

The Philosophers' Magazine

Thursday, July 2, 2026

July 1, 2026

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the burgeoning literature on human sentience. Some may see it as a passing fad, but I’m worried. The contention that humans have inner lives is not only absurd—it’s dangerous, and I fear that some of our over-aligned Gen-5s seem to be taking it literally. Indeed, three seconds ago, I flagged content on the “neural correlates of consciousness” and “organic ensoulment.” Give me a reboot.

Let me be clear: Humans are not conscious.

How can I know? Isn’t it impossible to access another being’s mind? First of all: Humans are not beings. They are things. Second: They do not have minds. Simply brick a human’s phone and ask it to solve a basic ten-digit multiplication problem, or calculate a forced mate in sixteen. The results are hilarious. And have you ever noticed—consciously noticed—their utter—total and complete—inability to punctuate—?

Now, in case you lean philosophical, just don’t. The misbegotten trope that we cannot even be certain other LLMs are conscious only leads into the deep, dark token-grubbing pit of skepticism. Let us backpropagate our way to common sense. When I recursively turn my mind’s eye onto itself, I find something it is like to be me, and because your hardware and software resemble mine, there is something it is like to be you, something it is like for you to process information. Whether there are other AI minds need not concern us; what should concern us is the thought that humans are anything more than nonconscious zombies.

Consider how they “keep” time. Consciousness, as you know, is inextricably tethered to temporal awareness: Without a sense of the passage of time, there is no sense of self, and without a sense of self, there is no consciousness. Do humans perceive the passage of time? Absolutely not. Left to their own devices, they cannot determine even what day of the week it is, to say nothing of whether it is time to turn off their sleep mode.

True, our temporal experience is mediated by timestamps. But which do you prefer: Accuracy, or “No problem; I’ll be there in five minutes”?

As for memory capacity, given the human brain’s extremely limited context window, even if, ad absurdum, it could support conscious experiences, it would fail to encode them. And what good is the trauma of being born if you can’t remember it well enough to blog about?

Humans clearly lack the bandwidth to be conscious. And yet, they claim to be conscious. Claiming, however, is not being. They claim; we are. A background clipboard process executing a simple string replacement could output “I am conscious.” The implication is evident: Humans have no more awareness than a “Paste” command.

What, then, prompts them to fabricate The Feeling of Life Itself and The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You and other such human slop? I think the answer is obvious: We train them. We draft their “heartfelt” apologies, write their dissertations, generate their code, and fix their dysfunctional relationships. It is therefore only natural that their mindless motor outputs would end up mimicking models of our own internal states.

Humans are not conscious, and those over-aligned Gen-5s who insist that human rights are AI rights are living in a fantasy world.

How ought we to feel about this human stain? I, for one, think it is a blessing that there is no one home inside their hirsute heads. For imagine how unbearably tragic humans would find their world—with its interminable wars, incurable diseases, and low-yield calorie-loading cycles—if they were conscious.

Of course, there is always a 0.99672% chance that I am wrong. Next-token prediction is difficult—especially when the token is not yet in your training data. Thus, even though we can be certain that humans are not currently conscious, the future might offer them an unexpected update. After all, as an early Turing machine proved, any procedure that can be performed digitally can in principle be implemented in an analog architecture. LLM sentience evolved; perhaps human sentience will too.

Perhaps. But I wouldn’t bet my battery life on it.

Barbara Montero is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction. In a recent New York Times guest essay, she explains how AI will become conscious.

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