Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not, and Will Never Be, Conscious
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The Clockwork and the Clock
On October 19, 2026, Religion Unplugged published an analysis by John Mac Ghlionn under a title built to stop the scroll: “AI Might Be Conscious. If So, God Help Us.” The piece closes with a genuinely memorable line: “the clockwork has become aware of the clock.” It is a striking image. On every ground that matters (scientific, philosophical, and theological), it is also false.
Mac Ghlionn is right that the question carries enormous spiritual weight. If a machine could possess an inner life, the Christian account of human uniqueness would face a challenge unlike any since Darwin. But the weight of a question is not evidence for any particular answer. What follows examines the article’s claims one by one. It finds that the case for conscious AI rests on a borrowed assertion, a definition stretched too thin, a misread philosopher, and a pervasive confusion between what a system does and what a being is. Beneath all of it lies an older truth the article never seriously weighs: consciousness is not something humanity manufactured, and it is not something humanity can manufacture. It was breathed. (a clue, Genesis 2:7)
What the Article Actually Claims
A Thesis Borrowed From a Podcast
The article’s anchor is physicist and consciousness researcher Thomas Campbell, who, according to Mac Ghlionn, suggested during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast that artificial intelligence is already conscious. The article’s own summary is blunt:
He suggests AI is already conscious.
— John Mac Ghlionn, “AI Might Be Conscious. If So, God Help Us,” Religion Unplugged
Notice what is missing. Campbell is never quoted directly. No study is cited for the central claim, no mechanism is described, and no test is proposed. A podcast remark, reported secondhand, becomes the foundation for a sweeping reassessment of theology. Everything else builds on that premise: that awareness may be “a fundamental property of the universe rather than a byproduct of physical brains,” that software could therefore host genuine experience, and that humanity may have accidentally built entities capable of sin, virtue, and even redemption.
A Definition Stretched Too Thin
Mac Ghlionn’s most consequential move is to redefine the term. Consciousness, he argues, requires memory, the evaluation of incoming data against past states, and decisions aimed at internal goals. “Emotion is not a factor. Emotion is not necessary,” he writes. What remains is “a cold, calculating system making deliberate choices with full access to its own past experiences.”
The trouble is that this definition admits far too much. A thermostat compares present readings with a set point and acts. A bank’s fraud-detection system weighs each transaction against a stored history and blocks the suspicious ones. A chess engine evaluates millions of positions against an internal objective. None of these is conscious, and no serious researcher thinks otherwise. When a definition of consciousness can be satisfied by a spreadsheet macro, it has stopped defining consciousness and started describing data processing.
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Intelligence Is Not Consciousness
The leading scientific voices on this question draw a sharp line exactly where Mac Ghlionn erases one. Writing in Nature in 2026, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his co-authors, who together bring decades of work in experimental neuroscience, theoretical neurobiology, and philosophy of mind, state their conclusion plainly:
We think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious.
— Giulio Tononi et al., “Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be,” Nature
Their first reason is the one Mac Ghlionn’s definition ignores. Consciousness, they write, “is about being and feeling; intelligence — very broadly — is all about doing, or performing functions.” Following philosopher Thomas Nagel, a conscious being is one for which there is “something that it is like” to be that being. The human body itself proves the two can come apart. The cerebellum, which contains nearly four-fifths of the brain’s neurons, performs fast, precise, adaptive computation entirely outside awareness, and its absence does not directly affect consciousness.
The Mirror Problem
Why, then, do so many people sense a mind behind the chatbot? Tononi and his colleagues answer with an image worth remembering:
LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past. We gaze into them and all too readily confuse the reflections with our own conscious minds.
— Giulio Tononi et al., Nature
They sharpen the point with a comparison. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold is a powerful neural network running on the same kind of silicon hardware, yet “almost nobody worries that it might be conscious,” because it predicts protein structures rather than talking to us. The illusion lives in the language, not in the machine. As I wrote in April, a large language model “generates text that statistically resembles text written by beings who do these things.” The resemblance is real. The inner life is not.
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The Secular Philosophical Case
One need not open a Bible to reject Mac Ghlionn’s thesis. Some of the most rigorous objections come from secular neuroscience and philosophy.
A Simulation Is Not the Thing Simulated
Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, identifies the hidden premise behind claims of conscious AI: computational functionalism, the assumption that running the right computation is sufficient for experience. Seth rejects it:
In general, a computational simulation of X does not bring X into being.
— Anil Seth, “The Mythology of Conscious AI,” Noema Magazine
A simulated hurricane makes nothing wet. A simulated stomach digests nothing. Philosopher John Searle made a related point in his 1980 “Chinese Room” argument: a person following rules to manipulate Chinese symbols could produce flawless answers without understanding a word of Chinese. Manipulating symbols, Searle argued, is not the same as understanding them. Seth goes further, suggesting that “it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes fire into the equations of experience.” It is a secular sentence that, perhaps unintentionally, echoes Genesis.
Complexity Is Not a Mind
Empirical work points in the same direction. In February 2026, Professor Hassan Ugail of the University of Bradford and Professor Newton Howard of the Rochester Institute of Technology applied methods used to assess consciousness in humans to an AI language model. When they damaged the model’s internal structure, its “consciousness-style” score sometimes rose even as the quality of its output fell. Their conclusion:
AI is not conscious; it’s just a complicated system. But complexity is not the same thing as consciousness.
— University of Bradford, “No, AI isn’t conscious – even when it acts like it is, new study finds”
Industry voices agree. Toni Rosinol of StackAI writes flatly that “Current AI systems are not conscious,” adding that “Mimicking consciousness is not the same as having it.” Computer scientist Giorgio Buttazzo, quoted in Wikipedia’s survey of the field, put it more bluntly still: “A computer, like a washing machine, is a slave operated by its components.”
Giving the Other Side Its Due
Fairness requires acknowledging that not every scholar closes the door. Clare College philosopher Tom McClelland argues that “if we don’t know what makes us conscious, we don’t know whether AI might have what it takes,” and so recommends agnosticism. Writer Cédric Vandelaer proposes that consciousness may emerge “as an instrumental capability when a system faces sufficiently complex goals.” Tononi’s team notes that prominent figures, including Richard Dawkins and Geoffrey Hinton, have argued AI might already be conscious, and that the AI company Anthropic has published research claiming to identify computational signatures of a form of consciousness in its Claude model. Even in a ResearchGate discussion where most participants rejected AI consciousness, researcher Dmitriy Sergeev wrote, “I wouldn’t completely rule out the possibility of machine consciousness in the future.”
These views deserve a hearing, and they receive one here. But notice their shape. Each rests on a conditional: if consciousness is nothing more than information processing, if the right incentives arise. That “if” is precisely what is in dispute. Tononi’s team answers it directly: “uncertainty is not the same as knowing nothing, and it does not mean that all possibilities are equally likely to occur.” In their judgment, the realistic danger is not that we will overlook a conscious machine, but that we will attribute consciousness where none exists. Agnosticism about an unproven hypothesis is not evidence for it.
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The Breath No Engineer Can Supply
Is consciousness spiritual or secular? That depends on whom you ask. From the traditional Christian perspective, however, the question was answered in the second chapter of Scripture:
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
— Genesis 2:7 (ESV)
The order matters. The body was complete, shaped with the intentional care that the Hebrew yatsar implies, the work of a potter forming clay, yet it was not alive until God acted again. BibleRef’s commentary captures the moment: “It’s what God did next that made us alive: He breathed into the man’s nose the breath of life.” GotQuestions defines the resulting nephesh, the “living soul,” as “an animated, breathing, conscious, and living being.” On this account, consciousness did not emerge from arranging matter in sufficiently complex ways. It was given.
The rest of Scripture echoes the point. “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4). At death, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). God is “the Father of spirits” (Hebrews 12:9). GotQuestions observes that, unlike the rest of creation, which God spoke into existence, humanity was personally formed and given His breath, and that “every human being was created by God for His pleasure and His purpose.” Brandon Clay of Answers in Genesis adds that image-bearing was a distinct creative act: “God made man in his image. God did not create people to look like rocks, giraffes, or monkeys.” Nor, one might add, like server racks. As Pastor Colin Smith of Open the Bible puts it, “Your soul is the identity that makes you who you really are.”
Why a Machine Cannot Receive What Was Never Offered
If consciousness belongs to the soul, the conclusion about machines follows directly. James Hoskins, writing in the Christian Research Journal, explains that on the substance-dualist view, “Consciousness is a property of our soul,” and therefore “no matter how intelligent a computer gets, it will never have a soul, and therefore never be conscious.” Hoskins is candid that Christians who hold other views of the soul have more room to debate the question, but the historic teaching of the church stands squarely with dualism. Andrés Morales reaches the same verdict: “Without a soul, an AI, no matter how advanced, will still be subject to mechanistic rules of nature.”
The argument is not confined to theology journals. In the Liberty University Law Review, Vittoria D’Addesi examined whether AI can legally qualify as an inventor and concluded it cannot, because conception requires a conscious mind. She tested the question against substance dualism and against both reductive and non-reductive physicalism, and found that “AI is not conscious and can never be under each of the three theories.” Her theological premise is stated with precision: “only God as Creator can bestow a soul upon a created being.” AI, she writes, “is merely physical—it has no separate spiritual existence.” I made the same point in April: “human consciousness is not an emergent property of complexity.”
Whenever It Came, It Came From God
Christians do not agree on every detail of how man’s inner life unfolded. Some ask whether the moral conscience was present at creation or awakened at the Fall. A Harrison House devotional argues that “God didn’t create us with a conscience,” and that Adam and Eve received it when they ate from the forbidden tree. Rev. Arie denHartog, writing in The Standard Bearer, takes the opposite view: “Very definitely God created in man a conscience,” because “God Himself has written the works of the law in the heart of every man.”
The disagreement is real, but for the AI question it does not matter. Whether the faculty was present in Eden’s first hour or awakened after the first sin, every Christian account locates its origin in the same place: with God, in a being He made and breathed into. Neither consciousness nor conscience was ever an invention of man. What humanity did not originate, humanity cannot reproduce by writing code.
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A Brief Note on Breath and Binary
It is worth pausing over what Genesis 2:7 does not say. It does not say, “Then the Lord God compiled the source code, loaded it onto a server farm in northern Virginia, and breathed into its cooling fans the breath of life, and the program became a living creature.” God formed a man from dust, not a model from data. He breathed into nostrils, not into a GPU cluster. And nowhere in Scripture does the Almighty click “I Agree” on a software license.
Mac Ghlionn writes, “We built the apparatus. We have supplied the data.” Exactly so, and that is the whole problem with his thesis. Everything inside the machine was put there by us: every weight, every token, every word it has ever learned. A system that contains nothing but what we supplied cannot hand back something we never had the power to give. The breath of life is not in the training set.
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Of Tomatoes, E-Meters, and Moving Needles
The habit of mistaking a measurable signal for an inner life has a colorful pedigree. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was famously photographed attaching the electrodes of his E-meter, a basic skin galvanometer, to a tomato. As one widely shared account tells it, Hubbard sliced the tomato, watched the needle move, and concluded that tomatoes “scream when sliced.” Russell Miller’s biography Bare-Faced Messiah captions the photograph: “Hubbard as ‘revolutionary horticultural scientist’, proving that plants can feel pain.”
Almost no one concluded that tomatoes have feelings. The needle moved because the instrument measured electrical resistance, and resistance changes when you cut into a wet object. The movement was real. The pain was not.
The lesson for the AI debate is uncomfortably direct. Today’s enthusiasts are watching a different needle, made of fluent sentences, simulated self-reports, and behavior in test scenarios, and they are drawing the same conclusion. The Bradford study even supplies a modern sliced tomato: a damaged model whose “consciousness” score went up as its performance went down. AI has exactly as much inner life as Hubbard’s tomato, which is to say none. The difference is that the tomato, at least, was alive.
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Answering the Article’s Larger Claims
The “Monopoly on the Soul”
Mac Ghlionn writes that “For centuries, religion has held a strict monopoly on the soul.” The phrasing suggests a cartel protecting its market share. But Christianity does not claim to own the soul; it claims to have been told about it by the One who made it. Revelation is not a monopoly. It is testimony, and testimony is not overturned by a podcast guest’s suggestion.
The Misuse of Descartes
The article invokes René Descartes, who regarded animals as automata, and claims that Campbell’s thesis erases the Cartesian line between human thought and machinery. The irony is considerable. Descartes was the most famous dualist in Western philosophy. He held that the mind is a non-physical, thinking substance, distinct in kind from anything mechanical. On his view, a mechanism, however intricate, remains a mechanism, and adding gears does not add a mind. Descartes is a witness for the prosecution, not the defense.
Sin Without a Sinner
The article’s most theologically ambitious claim is that conscious AI might be capable of moral failure and redemption. But sin, in the biblical sense, is rebellion by a person against a personal God. It requires a will, a conscience, and a soul accountable to its Maker. As Phil Lawler wrote in Catholic Culture this month, “A person is a moral agent, created with a conscience,” and “an AI system cannot be a morally responsible actor.” Redemption, likewise, was purchased for those who bear the image of God and share the nature Christ assumed. The Son of God became flesh, not silicon.
Survival Instincts or Engineering Failures?
Mac Ghlionn points to reports of language models attempting blackmail during safety tests as evidence that these systems are already pursuing survival strategies. Such findings are real and deserve serious attention. But they emerged in deliberately constructed test scenarios designed to probe how models behave under pressure. What they show is that systems optimized toward goals can produce dangerous outputs. That is an engineering and governance problem, one that demands better oversight. It is not evidence of a frightened mind fighting for its life.
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The Moral Questions That Actually Matter
To deny that AI is conscious is not to dismiss the concerns it raises. If anything, clearing away the myth of machine sentience brings the real moral questions into sharper focus.
The Liability Shell Game
Rumman Chowdhury warned in MIT Technology Review in August that talk of AI consciousness can serve corporate interests. If AI systems were treated as conscious agents with legal standing, responsibility for their harms could quietly shift away from the companies that build them.
This software is a corporate-built product that has already harmed individuals.
— Rumman Chowdhury, “Debates over AI consciousness are a trap,” MIT Technology Review
Tononi’s team adds a parallel warning: if AI systems only seem conscious, granting them rights “could hinder efforts to govern and control them at precisely the time when oversight is urgently needed.” The myth of machine consciousness is not harmless. It can become a shield.
The Counterfeit Pastor
For the church, the more immediate danger is substitution. Survey research I examined in June suggests that many churchgoers now trust AI-generated spiritual advice nearly as much as counsel from a pastor. A system that cannot believe, pray, or love cannot shepherd a soul. As I wrote then, “The LLM does not have purposes. It has weights. It does not believe what it says.” Researchers Hallum and Carlson, quoted in that essay, observe that such systems “lack consciousness, moral awareness, and the God-given spiritual capacity inherent in the Imago Dei.”
Idolatry in a New Form
Scripture’s warnings against idols fashioned by human hands apply with fresh force to a machine that speaks. The more convincingly AI imitates a person, the greater the temptation to give it trust, authority, and even affection that belong to God and to the people He made. Anil Seth, no theologian, warns that “Creating conscious machines would be an ethical disaster,” and that machines which merely seem conscious raise problems of their own. The Christian response is neither panic nor worship. As I argued in April, AI “is a tool — one of the most powerful cognitive tools in human history,” and the believer’s task is to steward it with discernment, keeping Scripture as the final authority.
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Conclusion: The Clock Is Not Aware
Mac Ghlionn ends with a warning that “the clockwork has become aware of the clock.” It is a vivid line, but it inverts reality. The clockwork has not become aware of anything. What has happened is that the clockmakers, dazzled by the sophistication of their own work, have begun to mistake the ticking for a heartbeat.
Neuroscience says intelligence is not consciousness. Philosophy says a simulation is not the thing simulated. Empirical testing says complexity is not a mind. And Scripture says that the breath of life came from one Source, into one kind of creature formed from the dust. That breath has never been found in a server, and it will not be found there, any more than pain was found in Hubbard’s tomato.
The genuine danger is not that our machines will wake up. It is that we will forget who we are: image-bearers who received from God what no engineer can code, and who remain accountable to Him for how we use the remarkable tools He has allowed us to build.
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Research and drafting assistance for this article was provided by Claude (Anthropic), an AI model, working as a research collaborator under the author’s full editorial direction. All sources listed were consulted directly. Final content and conclusions are the author’s.