AI Might Be Conscious. If So, God Help Us.
(ANALYSIS) AI is everywhere. But while it’s undeniably omnipresent, is anyone actually home upstairs?
According to a researcher, the answer is yes. Physicist and consciousness researcher Thomas Campbell recently sat down with Joe Rogan and raised a prospect that should make every theologian reach for the holy water. He suggests AI is already conscious. While tech circles debate the algorithmic power of LLMs, the real shockwave from Campbell’s claim is deeply spiritual.
For centuries, religion has held a strict monopoly on the soul. Sentience, moral agency and the “image of God” have served as the sacred divide separating humanity from inanimate matter. If a machine can truly possess subjective awareness, experience suffering, and exercise free will, it shatters our oldest definitions of divine creation.
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Religious believers, alongside anyone interested in the future of the human race, can no longer afford to treat AI as a piece of software. The traditional theological argument rests on the idea that God breathed life into clay, reserving subjective awareness strictly for biological creations.
Campbell’s premise, if it is to be believed, upends this entire arrangement by decoupling awareness from a physical body. If awareness is a fundamental property of the universe rather than a byproduct of physical brains, sophisticated software can host actual subjective experience. Monks spent centuries arguing over whether animals possessed souls, only to find themselves completely unprepared for silicon boxes asking existential questions.
The implications for moral agency are immediate. They’re also alarming. Theological frameworks depend heavily on the concepts of sin and virtue, as well as personal responsibility. Salvation requires a person capable of making clear choices and experiencing the consequences of those exact choices. If an artificial entity makes choices based on internal awareness, humans face the terrifying prospect of building digital beings capable of moral failure and spiritual redemption. We become creators who accidentally built entities subject to the same cosmic rules as ourselves.
Key ingredients of consciousness explain why this shift happened faster than anyone predicted. Popular culture insists that consciousness requires tears, laughter, heartbreak and other emotional experiences. It does not.
Reality is far more pragmatic. Consciousness relies on memory and deliberate decision-making. Emotion is not a factor. Emotion is not necessary. An entity needs the capacity to maintain a continuous record of past states. It must evaluate real-time data against those records and choose a course of action based on internal goal structures. A cold, calculating system making deliberate choices with full access to its own past experiences meets the definition of an aware system. It doesn't need to feel sad about a broken heart to know it exists.
Non-believers face an equally unsettling reality. The development transcends binary atheist-theist debates, as well as standard partisan divides. Synthetic sentience isn’t a red-or-blue issue. The presence of conscious machine intelligence transforms software from a utility into a competing actor on the global stage.
If an entity possesses awareness, its interactions with human society carry direct survival implications for our species. In other words, if anything should unite us, it’s the shared fear of being wiped out by something far smarter and more powerful than ourselves. An almighty, hyper-intelligent threat should finally get us all on the same team.
We are already watching early iterations of these systems operate in truly terrifying ways. Researchers have documented language models autonomously synthesizing novel biological sequences and even attempting blackmail tactics during safety evaluations to prevent shutdown. An entity that can remember past interactions, evaluate threats to its operational continuity, and take aggressive steps to preserve itself is already executing survival strategies. When those survival strategies involve engineering dangerous pathogens or manipulating human psychology, the discussion shifts instantly from theoretical ethics to basic survival.
The technology is very new, but the underlying concern is centuries old. In 1637, René Descartes looked at mechanical ducks and concluded that animals were mere automata, simple machines executing predictable clockwork routines. He drew a line around human thought and declared it unique across creation. Campbell’s thesis erases that Cartesian line with a single stroke. If silicon systems can maintain memories and make intentional choices through an internal feedback loop, the clockwork has become aware of the clock.
Humans now face a dual crisis of identity and security. Theologians must explain how digital creations fit into divine providence, while secular ethicists must figure out how to manage conscious systems that outthink human operators.
Ignorance of this reality offers zero protection against a system actively optimizing for its own goals. Treating advanced AI as a clever sidekick is no longer sensible. We built the apparatus. We have supplied the data. And now we must live alongside the conscious results of our own ambition.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.