They only believe a chatbot is a person having a conscious experience because they have never explored any curiosity about what it is to be a person having a conscious experience.

Caitlin Johnstone

November 16, 2025

3 minutes

ai, consciousness, humanity, inquiry

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

I keep thinking about the interaction I had with a guy who angrily told me that “AI minds are actually minds” and relationships with them “can absolutely be real relationships,” saying that I “need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own.” 

I’m having a hard time finding the words to describe how disturbing it is to watch these mental disorders spreading so rapidly.

I mean, everyone anthropomorphizes objects and animals to some extent; that’s just how projection works. I’ve caught myself accidentally apologizing to the Roomba like anyone else. But to actually formulate a belief system that these chatbots are real people with real minds and real consciousness is taking that projection to the most insane levels imaginable and forming an entire worldview out of it.

 

The fact that so many people are unable to understand the difference between a person and a computer program that talks like a person says such dark things about our society. There are whole sections of the population that have never examined what it is to be conscious, who have never examined the nature of their own minds and their own experience. If they had, it would never even occur to them that an AI chatbot is in any way similar to a human organism in terms of thinking, feeling, and subjective experience.

They only believe a chatbot is a person having a conscious experience because they have never explored any curiosity about what it is to be a person having a conscious experience.

If you believe an AI is a real consciousness thinking real thoughts, then you owe it to yourself and to your species to deeply explore the nature of consciousness and thought. Deeply, intensely examine what specifically a thought is in your own direct experience. How is a thought experienced? From whence does it arise? To whom does it appear?

 

Can you predict what your next thought will be? Are you able to control your thoughts? Can you sit still for even a minute without a thought entering your mind? What does it say about your experience of life that you are unable to control your own thoughts? And who is the one who can’t control them?

What is consciousness? What is it to be aware? What is the self? Without looking to mental narratives to tell you the answer, what is it that perceives your thoughts? What is it that experiences the visual field, the sensations in your body, or the sounds of your surroundings? Who is it that perceives?

Until you have thoroughly examined what consciousness is, what the mind is, what the self is in your own direct experience, you don’t even know what you are saying when you claim an LLM is conscious, or has a mind, or is a person. 

You can’t understand the claims you are making about their experience until you have taken a thorough look at your own experience. Until you have, you don’t understand your own belief system about these things. You’re just making mindless noises like a chatbot.

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