Biological naturalism about consciousness will, I predict, soon be hot. As AI systems start to look more and more like conscious or sentient entities, at least superficially, doubters will be increasingly drawn to arguments against their consciousness. Especially appealing will be arguments that characterize consciousness specifically as a biological phenomenon, one that can't occur in ordinary, non-biological computer systems. Accept biological naturalism, and it looks like you're safe from having to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously for at least a couple of decades.
(Non-naturalist views could also serve this purpose. One might hold, for example, that God installs conscious souls by miracle. But most mainstream philosophers and scientists prefer explanations in terms of purely natural phenomena.)
Searching for a Biological Property That Is Necessary for Consciousness
Biological naturalist arguments against AI consciousness can be expressed in two steps:(1.) Property X is a biological property, of the sort that cannot be instantiated in standard (non-living) AI systems.
(2.) Property X is necessary for consciousness.
Different versions of biological naturalism propose different candidates for X.
Peter Godfrey-Smith for example, appeals to metabolism. For this appeal to work as an argument against AI consciousness, two things have to be true. The relevant sort of metabolism must not be instantiable in standard AI systems, and a system without metabolism in this sense must necessarily lack consciousness. Given the first condition, drawing power from a solar panel can't count as "metabolic". Godfrey-Smith suggests that molecular-level spontaneous motion is crucial to metabolism in the relevant sense. The second condition requires that metabolism in this specific sense is necessary for consciousness. Godfrey-Smith suggests it might be necessary, but he offers little positive argument. The suggestion remains an intriguing possibility rather than a fully developed position.
In an already-influential article published last month in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Anil Seth proposes autopoiesis as the X. Autopoiesis -- a concept first developed in a 1972 book by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela -- occurs when a system continuously regenerates its own material components, actively maintaining a boundary between itself and its surroundings (Seth 2026, sec 4.1). For autopoiesis to serve as X, standard AI systems must be incapable of it, and consciousness must require it.
Neither claim is obvious. Regarding the first, it seems that we can, with a bit of creative engineering, design an AI system that regenerates its own material components and enforces a boundary between itself and its surroundings. Imagine a solar-powered robot that seeks out solar charge. It has redundant parts that it monitors for defects and which it can replace and rebuild by ordering shipments of snap-together components. For more details, see this post and my commentary on Seth's article.
Regarding the second claim, even if we grant that autopoiesis is limited to biological systems, it's not clear why consciousness should require it. Seth appeals to predictive processing and Friston's free energy principle, but these appeals are highly speculative. They do not establish the necessity of autopoiesis for consciousness, as several of the other commentaries emphasize.
There's substantial plausibility in the thought that consciousness requires using energy and some kind of stability over time. But even granting this, it remains unclear why consciousness should require metabolism or autopoiesis understood narrowly enough that no ordinary AI system could instantiate them.
Some of the replies to Seth's article suggest other candidates for X. For example, Cao, Gottlieb, and Moore propose evaluative states that are internalized and integrated. Again, the view is potentially attractive, but both premises are highly debatable.
First, it's not clear that a sufficiently sophisticated AI system couldn't meet Cao and colleagues' condition. It might have an optimization process that corrects deviations from a goal state, plus explicit representations of these processes, plus the capacity to integrate many factors in achieving one or more goals. This seems especially plausible for autonomous embodied robots who must negotiate complex situations in the wild. Second, it's not clear why consciousness requires valuing rather than simply registering. It might! But this is the type of proposed requirement for consciousness that I criticize in my recent book AI and Consciousness: broadly plausible, but difficult to defend rigorously.
Biologicity as a Matter of Degree?
In his reply to my commentary (section 5.2 here), Seth notes that my hypothetical robot depends on the environment for ready-made components. But this is arguably only a difference of degree from the human case, not a difference in kind. We humans don't manufacture all of our components from the atomic level up. We obtain some amino acids and vitamins from the environment because we can't produce them ourselves. And my robot does a little self-manufacturing: It snaps together components of a replacement leg.
Seth writes:
On the other hand, if a robot could indeed manufacture its own components from generic substrates under energetic constraints, then it might be truly said to be autopoietic, but it would also be considerably closer to a living system than any existing computer or robot.
So I think we should imagine a spectrum of biologicity, not a sharp divide between the biological and non-biological. If autopoiesis marks the biological, we can conceive of systems ranging from those that self-maintain in only the most limited sense, to those that do somewhat more, to those that self-construct at many levels at once, including their chemical components. AI systems might advance partway along this spectrum with no radical change in their underlying technology. But I'd agree with Seth that systems that manufacture even their own chemical components might merit the label "biological" -- perhaps as instances of artificial biology.
Maybe we can call systems in the middle of this range semi-biological. One might imagine semi-biologicity for other processes too: metabolism that somewhat but only somewhat resembles the kind highlighted by Godfrey-Smith, embodied goal integration of the kind highlighted by Cao and colleagues. Rather than thinking of the "biological" in a sharp-edged way, we might imagine ranges of artificial systems that have relatively more or less of various biology-like properties.
Of course, none of this addresses the second premise. Why should autopoiesis, or any other such biology-like property, be essential to consciousness? If we're inclined to reject near-term AI consciousness, requiring at least mid-grade autopoiesis or biologicity might yield intuitively the right results. But a rigorous defense of that requirement is still lacking.
