Dr. Tom McClelland argues that there is no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious, and that this uncertainty may never ...

The universe has no brain. It has no gray matter, no nervous system, no neurons firing electrical impulses—and yet, that ...

It happens as often as 16% of our conscious lives: the mind simply goes blank. There is nothing inside, no verbal thinking, ...

Consciousness may emerge not from code, but from the way living brains physically compute.

Consciousness research in 2025 has shifted from abstract philosophy to concrete lab results, with competing theories now ...

A new theoretical framework argues that the long-standing split between computational functionalism and biological naturalism misses how real brains actually compute.

Walk into consciousness labs, and you will mostly find studies on humans relying on verbal reports. This evidence is then ...

The origins of consciousness date back about 540 million years ago, when animal bodies became more complex. Feelings like ...

Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational ...

If you don’t know anything about neuroscience, that’s okay — one researcher’s striking theory might send us all back to the start anyway. Consciousness is typically defined as immediate awareness of ...

The familiar fight between “mind as software” and “mind as biology” may be a false choice. This work proposes biological computationalism: the idea that brains compute, but not in the abstract, symbol ...

Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an expert on the philosophy of mind who draws heavily on empirical psychology and ...