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Can AI ever be conscious? The question stems from a misconception
Brief published August 25, 2026 ยท Original source published August 24, 2026
Original reporting by Abeba Birhane at nature.com.
Automated brief. Verify important details at the original source.
What happened
A book by Anthony Chemero, published by Columbia University Press, argues that AI, psychology, and philosophy have collectively neglected a key factor in understanding consciousness: the body. The work draws on embodied cognitive science to reframe debates about whether AI systems can be conscious, suggesting the question itself rests on a misconception about what consciousness requires. The book positions the omission of bodily experience as a foundational error across multiple disciplines engaging with consciousness research.
Why it matters
Builders and researchers designing AI systems with claimed awareness or sentience-adjacent properties may be working from a flawed conceptual baseline. If the embodied cognitive science framing holds, evaluations of machine consciousness that ignore physical embodiment could be systematically misleading, affecting how the field sets benchmarks and interprets results.
What to watch
Whether the embodied cognition argument gains traction among AI researchers specifically, and whether it shifts how consciousness-related claims in AI systems are evaluated or challenged in peer-reviewed work.