Nature review flags misconception in AI-consciousness debate

A Nature review argues that the debate about whether large language models could ever be conscious rests on a shaky picture of what a human mind actually is.

The piece takes up Anthony Chemero's Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Other, published by Columbia University Press, and uses the book to push back against a computational reading of consciousness. "Much of the buzz around the consciousness of artificial intelligence is built on, at best, reductive notions of cognition and consciousness," the reviewer writes, and at worst, on a misconception of what human minds are and do.

Chemero, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, casts the mind as embodied, dynamic and social, inseparable from the body, the environment, and the people "who provide us with the warmth, food and love required to keep us going." Real thinking, in his account, unfolds through ongoing engagement with the environment rather than as a hidden inner process. Imagination and creativity emerge through situated action, not through some interior computation waiting to be reproduced in silicon.

That reframing has an edge for the AI conversation. Because language models have no body to keep alive and no relationships to preserve, the review argues, they "do not need to navigate interpersonal interactions to maintain their existence and do not have the capacity to care." Two of the researchers we track put the Nature review into our feed shortly after it appeared, which is roughly the audience this argument seems pitched at: readers already fluent in the AI-consciousness discourse who might otherwise take its framing for granted.