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Lately, I’ve noticed this strange trend online where people assume artificial general intelligence would need consciousness in order to be developed and function. It keeps coming up in discussions, articles, even in comments under AI news. But here’s the thing — it’s a flawed assumption to think that consciousness is a prerequisite for general intelligence in artificial systems. Let me explain why consciousness matters for humans but is irrelevant for machines. For us biological creatures, subjective experience functions as a tool — a way to help us interpret, translate, and assign meaning to the world, especially in situations where logical reasoning is under development or in novel circumstances. However, this tool doesn’t just operate in early developmental age; it accompanies us throughout life. Why? Because human intelligence isn’t isolated. Our cognition is deeply entangled with experiencing sensations, emotions, feelings, fears, and even irrational behaviors — all of which stem from this underlying subjective layer. Qualia, our subjective experience, help us identify much faster and more efficiently than logical reasoning whether the object of interest or the entire context satisfies or not the requirements of our being at a given moment; subsequently, we are inclined to make a judgment and take a decision. But here’s where artificial intelligence is completely different. An AGI doesn’t need that compensatory mechanism. It doesn’t require augmented experience to make decisions or to understand concepts. When people say “but how can it truly understand without experiencing?” they’re making the classic mistake of assuming intelligence has to work like ours. But we humans aren’t just intelligent — we’re characterized by a rich mix of emotions, instincts, and social behaviors. Our intelligence is embedded in a broader biological and emotional context. In contrast, an artificial system is intelligence in isolation. AGI won’t be a new living creature — it will be a powerful tool, not a being. What AGI does need — and what often gets confused with consciousness — is the ability to adopt perspectives and interpret context. We can call this “subjective perception,” but it’s really just advanced information processing. There’s no internal experience behind it — just complex pattern recognition and inference mechanisms for current AI systems, and I argue, logical reasoning for future AGI platforms. So when you hear someone suggesting that consciousness is necessary for real intelligence, remember: that’s like worrying whether a calculator truly “understands” numbers. It doesn’t need to — it just needs to process them correctly. Whether they “experience” anything is irrelevant — what matters is what they do. Indeed, we can debate whether such artificial intelligent systems would develop the same knowledge richness as people. Richness, not in the sense that AGI won’t solve problems like humans, but richness in the sense of psychological foundation. In humans, qualia serve as a compensatory mechanism — enriching our knowledge and supporting the development of logical reasoning, especially when logical structures are not yet fully developed. They also provide fast, intuitive evaluations of our environment, enabling quicker behavioral responses than deliberate analysis often allows. However, I argue that with a well-implemented set of pre-logical, non-probabilistic conditioning, an artificial system could bypass the need for subjective experience and still arrive at logical reasoning — at least in principle. I’m sure such systems will surpass human capacity to reason at some point. It will be interesting if science could fully explain these concepts — “consciousness” and “intelligence.” But for AI’s primary purpose, that is, as company products, there is no need for these debates. submitted by /u/rendermanjim |
