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What does it mean to have a sense of self — and which creatures have it?
The grand challenge of
consciousness
Questions of what sort of things are — and can be —
conscious remain hotly debated. By Liad Mudrik
T
hese are good times to be a thinking,
conscious creature, despite events in
the world that might make us doubt
that. These are even better times to
be a creature who thinks about con-
sciousness: the scientific debate is livelier
than ever, and technological advances and
political controversies are making the prac-
tical and philosophical questions surround-
ing consciousness ever more pressing. Will
artificial intelligence (AI) become conscious?
(Or maybe it already is…? Well, no, I would say,
but we’ll get to that later.) Can state-of-the-art
algorithms manipulate our consciousness to
change our view of the world? Which animals,
besides humans, are conscious? What about
fetuses? Or artificial neural organoids?
It is becoming clearer that real-life
implications will be drawn from the answers
that this field generates to such questions1,2.
That means we must vastly improve our funda-
mental understanding of consciousness and
related phenomena, such as agency, free will
and sense of self. With so much at stake, we had
better get things right. This sense of gravity
hovers above three books that, in one way or
another, tackle these thorny questions.
Meaning in meaning
The first does so mostly in passing. Daniel
Dennett’s I’ve Been Thinking is first and
foremost an autobiography of the highly
I’ve Been Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
W. W. Norton / Allen Lane (2023)
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
Kevin J. Mitchell
Princeton Univ. Press (2023)
The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of
Being Human
Joseph E. LeDoux
Harvard Univ. Press (2023)
influential US philosopher, based at Tufts
University in Medford, Massachusetts, from
his early childhood spent in Beirut as the
son of a spy, to his seminal body of work on
consciousness, free will and theory of mind.
Readers will enjoy the backstage intelligence
about some renowned contemporary philos-
ophers, from Gilbert Ryle’s drinking prefer-
ences to Jacques Derrida’s arrest on a (false)
drug-smuggling charge. There is also some
direct and pretty harsh score settling in a chap-
ter devoted to ‘academic bullies’ (you’ll have
to read the book to find out who), as well as
Dennett’s tips for staying focused in long phil-
osophical talks (listen for words that start with
each letter of the alphabet in order), perfecting
your own arguments (walk and talk to your-
self until you’re convinced) and spotting weak
lines of reasoning in others (look for the word
‘surely’).
Towards the end of the book, Dennett sum-
marizes his view of how consciousness, free
will and meaning emerged from billions of
years of natural selection and cultural shap-
ing, as single-celled organisms became eukary-
otic, multicellular ones. In the last tiny fraction
of the process came Homo sapiens, and the
development of language. This took millions
of years of R&D by, as Dennett puts it, “agents
who did not yet understand what they were
doing and why”. But the possibilities that
language provided — to notice meaning, to
analyse, to think about what we are thinking
and to communicate and act on our thoughts —
presented a problem. How could humans con-
trol these unprecedented degrees of freedom?
The answer, according to Dennett, was con-
sciousness. Consciousness, for him, is a con-
trol architecture that takes competing streams
of ideas and determines from them our expec-
tations and actions. This control system is, fun-
damentally, who ‘we’ are. Consciousness is not
about the way it feels to touch a hot surface, for
instance, but about generating a control signal
that tells us to move our hand away from that
surface, an action which has survival value.
Free will, in turn, is the ability to differentiate
between competing streams of thoughts and
actions. Being human is essentially about
being a reasoner: to reason about reasons and
to exert control over one’s own behaviour. Our
sense of self — being a being that ‘experiences’
things, observing them somehow from the
outside — is a mere user illusion.
Evolutionary forcing
Kevin Mitchell and Joseph LeDoux apply
similar evolutionary rationales to explain
the emergence of consciousness and agency
Nature | Vol 623 | 2 November 2023 | 25
Books & arts
in their books. Mitchell is a geneticist and
neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. His
Free Agents devotes its first six chapters to an
evolutionary account of the development of
life and its various faculties. He argues that
cognitive traits such as action, perception and
choice started from very simple mechanisms
that were selected for and honed to maximize
fitness, or survival. From reading his book, one
gets the strong impression that humans were
forced by natural selection to be able to make
choices and to become conscious agents.
At some point, he throws indeterminism
into the mix. The Universe is not determin-
istic, he argues: it involves some degree of
randomness, with events sometimes seem-
ingly governed by the flip of a coin. The
same is true of the brain, in his view. This
indeterminism is adaptive, making humans
less predictable and hence more able to sur-
vive and fight opponents.
Does such indeterminism by itself endow
people with free will? No, says Mitchell: there’s
nothing free in being governed by a coin flip.
But indeterminism in an organism’s responses
does allow it to have some influence on its
future. The ability to create and express mean-
ing is crucial here: it endows our reasons for
doing things, and our reasoning about reasons
(which Dennett also emphasizes), with causal
power. Dennett wants to dispel the ‘illusion’ of
self, but for Mitchell, the self, with all its goals,
desires and beliefs, is real, and key to our free
will. Together with the meaningfulness of the
patterns of our neural activity, it allows us to
exert top-down control, to plan ahead and to
continuously shape ourselves as we interact
with the world. For Mitchell, such conscious,
rational control of our actions is nothing other
than our free will. It is a biological, evolved
function — as Dennett argues too.
Into the conscious realm
LeDoux agrees. In The Four Realms of
Existence LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New
York University, suggests that there are four
basic varieties of life on Earth: biological,
neurobiological, cognitive and conscious.
The book provides an in-depth description
of these realms (I found the cognitive one
especially thought-provoking) and describes
how they evolved, in a way that is reminis-
cent of Mitchell’s approach. In this scheme,
most living things occupy only the biological
realm. Organisms with nervous systems are
also neurobiological. Of these, some animals
show model-based behaviour — using past
experience to predict the future effects of
their actions, and in doing so optimizing out-
comes. These count as cognitive creatures3.
The fourth and least common realm is the
conscious one. LeDoux values the ability to
verbally report the content of experiences as
the prime indicator of consciousness, a posi-
tion that is not shared by all4. He emphasizes
26 | Nature | Vol 623 | 2 November 2023
the importance of activity in the prefrontal
cortex in allowing the creation of higher-order
states that re-present the content of experi-
ence (although the special role of this brain
area again is debated5).
LeDoux further differentiates between
types of consciousness, ranging from simpler
forms to the explicit, content-rich type that
humans have. He argues that we should aim
to connect each type of consciousness with
a different prefrontal brain architecture, and
judge claims of animal consciousness on that
basis. For example, because all mammals share
the same mesocortical prefrontal areas, they
might have “whatever kind of consciousness
these areas enable in humans”. However, some
prefrontal brain structures are unique to
humans, arguably endowing us (and possibly
some other great apes) with some unusual
aspects of consciousness, such as the ability
for mental time travel, that are not shared with
other animals.
And what of AI? These books are published
at a time when the discussion about the
potential for machines to gain conscious-
ness and agency is attracting substantial
“There are no technical
barriers to building a
machine that we would call
conscious.”
attention (see go.nature.com/46hjzvk)6, 7. All
three have something to say about it. LeDoux
takes a hardline biological approach, arguing
that consciousness can exist only in biolog-
ical beings. Even if one were to mimic all the
biological mechanisms that support con-
sciousness — whatever these could be, from
the micro to macro level — the resulting system
would not be conscious.
Dennett is similarly unenthusiastic, refer-
ring to this wave of excitement as a “bubble
we should burst before many more people get
deeply misled by it”. He presents DigiDan — a
GPT-3 model trained on almost all of Dennett’s
publications (more than one million words!)
— which he uses to generate Dennett-like
sentences. But as (the real) Dennett explains,
despite DigiDan’s impressive abilities, it
doesn’t understand anything it says: it is not an
agent with beliefs and desires, or, in Dennett’s
words, an intentional system (yet).
But despair not (or rejoice not, depending
on where you stand). The epilogue of Free
Agents provides a ‘recipe’ for creating arti-
ficial systems that resemble humans, that
have general intelligence and agency. It is to
follow the evolutionary trajectory that got us
here: embodiment, sensing, acting, with some
motivation and learning abilities, and a drop
of indeterminacy.
That’s why it is indeed a good time to be a
creature thinking about consciousness: as all
three books emphasize, today’s discussions
of these issues are much more informed than
they were, say, 70 years ago. Back then, one
had to resort to I, Robot, Isaac Asimov’s bril-
liant 1950 collection of science-fiction sto-
ries, to think about consciousness in artificial
settings. Today, we can rely on a strong back-
bone of biological research, on developed
conceptual and philosophical insights and
on extensive empirical work in the field of
consciousness studies. Although the field is
far from agreeing on a single theoretical or
empirical account8, progress has been made
in understanding the issues, and in suggesting
solutions9.
I firmly believe that this knowledge-based,
interdisciplinary approach is the way to move
the sort of questions I posed at the beginning
of this article from the domain of science
fiction to that of science. This year I was part of
a group of philosophers, computer scientists
and neuroscientists that published an exten-
sive report on consciousness in AI6, identify-
ing potential indicators of consciousness in
artificial systems, using theories developed
mostly with humans in mind. We show that
current AI systems fail to meet these criteria,
but also that there are no technical barriers
for building a system that will satisfy them.
Would such a system be conscious? To be
honest, I am not sure; I consider the indicators
as signifying the potential for consciousness,
rather than its existence. Would we really want
to build a machine with consciousness, or
agency? Here, I am even less sure. We are yet
to understand which creatures in the world
are conscious, and have not developed ethical
frameworks that account for this possibility.
As our past and present sadly demonstrate,
we repeatedly mistreat even those creatures
who are undoubtedly conscious, our fellow
human beings.
It doesn’t seem very prudent to me to add
more conscious creatures to this already com-
plicated, combustible picture. It is perhaps
wiser, then, to be a creature who thinks about
consciousness than one who aspires to create
artificial versions of it.
Liad Mudrik is a cognitive neuroscientist at Tel
Aviv University in Israel.
e-mail: mudrikli@tauex.tau.ac.il
1. Mudrik, L., Mylopoulos, M., Negro, N. & Schurger, A. Curr.
Opin. Behav. Sci. 53, 101299 (2023).
2. Mazor, M. et al. Persp. Psych. Sci 18, 535–543 (2022).
3. Daw, N. D., Gershman, S. J., Seymour, B., Dayan, P. &
Dolan, R. J. Neuron 69, 1204–1215 (2011).
4. Tsuchiya, N., Wilke, M., Frässle, S. & Lamme, V. A. F. Trends
Cog. Sci. 19, 757–770 (2015).
5. Boly, M. et al. J. Neurosci. 37, 9603–9613 (2017).
6. Butlin, P. et al. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708
(2023).
7. Bengio, Y. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/1709.08568 (2017).
8. Yaron, I., Melloni, L., Pitts, M. & Mudrik, L. Nature Hum.
Behav. 6, 593–604 (2022).
9. Seth, A. K. Brain Neurosci. Adv. 2, 2398212818816019
(2018).
Correction
The grand challenge of consciousness
This book review gave an incorrect first
name for philospher Gilbert Ryle.
See https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-
03335-5

Corrected 31 October 2023