By Pierre Lévy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

 Abstract

This article explores the nature of human consciousness through a comprehensive philosophical analysis, distinguishing between phenomenal consciousness, shared with animals, and discursive consciousness, unique to humans. Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Antiquity (Aristotle, Plotinus) to modern philosophy (Descartes, Husserl), the author examines the reflexivity of consciousness, its various states (from sleep to lucid wakefulness), and its relation to the unconscious. Special attention is given to the « third kind of knowledge, » a non-conceptual intuition found in both Eastern and Western mystical and philosophical traditions, where human consciousness reflects a divine spark. The essay also addresses machine consciousness, concluding that machines exhibit a form of abstract reflexivity yet lack phenomenality and intentionality—fundamental traits of human consciousness. Ultimately, the author reflects on the limitations of discursive thought before the vast, unreflected domain of the unconscious, advocating for a philosophical stance rooted in humility.

Keywords: consciousness, reflexivity, noetics, artificial intelligence, unconscious, philosophy

Are Machines Conscious?

Are machines—particularly artificial intelligences—conscious? Before we can address this question, we must first agree on what we mean by « consciousness. » This, of course, is a boundless topic. The present essay merely aims to offer a few avenues for reflection, drawing from various intellectual traditions. I will not shy away from the question of machine consciousness, but I must confess that I find human consciousness far more fascinating. Thus, the bulk of this meditation will focus on it.

The Creative Reflection

By common consensus, nothing is more mysterious than the reflexive thought characteristic of human beings. Like other animals, we possess phenomenal consciousness: a field of sensory forms, emotions, and practical situations embedded in memory and oriented toward survival and reproduction. But human beings add to this phenomenal awareness a discursive consciousness that both reflects and shapes it through language, cultural concepts, symbolic imagery, inner questioning, and narrative. This duality echoes Aristotle’s distinction between the imaginative soul, shared with animals, and the intellectual soul, or logos, proper to humans.

In this symbiosis between phenomena and discursivity, each feeds into the other. Human consciousness loops back on itself along an ontological Möbius strip, where reflected experience and the reflecting mind continuously exchange roles as determiner and determined. Reflexive thought thus encapsulates a paradox: the symbolic image contributes to creating the very phenomena it mirrors. The enigma deepens when we consider that reflection is a recursive operation; one can reflect upon reflective discourse, as I do here.

What Is Consciousness?

Beyond its self-generative paradox, what are the structures of consciousness? What Ariadne’s thread can guide human intelligence through the labyrinth of reflection toward self-knowledge?

Today, philosophers such as David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett lead the field of « consciousness studies. » For Dennett, consciousness is primarily a means of integrating information, selecting relevant data, guiding behavior, and generating a narrative self. In his view, it has no intrinsic reality beyond these cognitive functions. Dennett adopts a materialist and functionalist approach, bordering on physicalist and computational reductionism. To him, consciousness is a useful illusion—an emergent artifact of distributed brain functions. Yet I note that even as an illusion, consciousness remains the very medium of our experience.

Chalmers, by contrast, maintains that consciousness cannot be reduced to brain processes. There is a subjective experience—qualia like the scent of lilies or the color of the sky—that coexists with neuronal computation but is of a fundamentally different nature. Similarly, the semantic realm of questions and narratives is not reducible to brain states.

In this spirit, I propose that we abandon the naive notion of « matter » and instead conceive nature as layered levels of informational complexity. Discursive consciousness corresponds to symbolic encoding; phenomenal consciousness to neural encoding; beneath that, an organic infra-consciousness rooted in electromagnetic and molecular patterns; and below still, atomic, subatomic, and quantum codings leading toward the vanishing point of a fading psyche.

These layers interlock: higher levels depend on and simultaneously overdetermine the levels beneath. Corresponding psychic states form a continuous spectrum. In this light, we might compare consciousness’s integration across nature to Leibnizian monads or Whitehead’s subjective prehensions in actual occasions—down to the level of subatomic particles.

On this hypothesis, each self-organizing loop in spacetime carries some form of self-awareness, proportionate to its complexity. Every « being-for-itself » mirrors a corresponding « being-in-itself, » an objective individuation process. Humans partake of this universal field of consciousness in both animal and symbolic forms. This theory has several advantages: it aligns with contemporary informational paradigms; it avoids treating humans (or animals) as inexplicable anomalies; and it does not reduce our experiential substance to mere epiphenomenal illusion.

States of Consciousness

Consciousness is capable of many states, ranging from coma and deep sleep to full alertness, including dreams, intoxication, enthusiasm, depression, and a variety of hazy conditions such as fever, migraine, fatigue, and mental fog. When the calm and attentive mind reflects ideas like a smooth, clean mirror, illusions are clearly distinguished from objective reality, and actions align with long-term goals. But this state is rare. A thousand fluctuating states lie between dreaming and lucid wakefulness. The further one strays from alert reflection, the more thought succumbs to interpretive automatisms, driven into habitual ruts by emotional momentum.

In dreams, bizarrely fused or fragmented ideas emerge from the other side of the mirror. As if memory needed to reshuffle the deck of experience while we sleep, symbols and interpretations persist, yet meaningful fragments are caught in the convection currents of a magma of emotions and sensations rising from the body. Dream experiences defy objective space-time, causal logic, and social norms—though they may still be narratable. While immersed in dreams, they feel full of meaning; upon waking, they often appear absurd. Yet absurd as they may be, dreams are saturated with emotional sap, imbued with a poignant sense of presence and reality. They speak to us—but of what?

Thus, we engage in a dialogue with our dreams, as though conversing with a strange version of ourselves.

The Noetic Tradition

Any conceptualization of consciousness must contend with the venerable noetic traditions that reach back to Antiquity. The concept of intellection—the reflexivity of discursive consciousness—stands at the heart of the Western idealist tradition. For Anaxagoras, « Nous, » or mind, organizes the cosmos. Plato gives ultimate ontological weight to the Ideas and prizes their contemplation above all. Aristotle places at the summit of the cosmos a divine intellect thinking itself, where knower, known, and act of knowing coincide. This self-reflective unity both generates and sustains the universe through emanation and inspiration.

This thread of divine reflexivity runs through Neoplatonism (notably Plotinus) and medieval theology, whether Islamic (from al-Fārābī to Averroes via Avicenna), Jewish (especially Maimonides), or Christian (from Albert the Great to Thomas Aquinas). In Iranian philosophy, the focus on divine intellection continues well into the 18th century.

In De Anima, Aristotle distinguishes three levels of soul: the vegetative soul governs growth and nutrition (shared with plants); the imaginative soul manages movement, sensation, and imagery (shared with animals); and the intellectual soul accounts for language and reason, which define humanity. This last is expressed in discursive consciousness.

Discursive reflection of phenomenal consciousness mirrors the relationship between the imaginative and intellectual soul. But Aristotle posits yet another reflection, internal to the intellectual soul: the « agent intellect » acts upon the « passive intellect, » bestowing intelligible forms much as the senses receive perceptual ones.

Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd century CE) identified Aristotle’s agent intellect with the divine mind that moves the universe. Later commentators (Plotinus, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Averroes) viewed the agent intellect not as God but as a celestial intelligence emanating from the transcendent divinity. According to this interpretation, the agent intellect is eternal, incorporeal, and shared by all humanity—distinct from the multiplicity of individual passive intellects. The passive intellect acts as a membrane: reflecting downward the sensitive forms and practical contexts in which an individual is immersed, while reflecting upward the intelligible forms (essences, quiddities) emitted by the agent intellect, necessary to confer symbolic meaning upon experience.

Thomas Aquinas fiercely contested this « Aphrodisiac » reading, for theological reasons. Since the human soul must be accountable (for salvation or damnation), it must be personal. Therefore, each individual possesses their own agent intellect. The dispute between Thomas and Averroes leaves us with an alternative: must we imagine an infinite heaven radiating the light of discursive consciousness, feeding passive intellects according to their degree of self-reference (assuming consciousness at every level of complexity)? Or must we posit a multitude of autonomous subjects, each generating light from within, each containing their own world?

The Third Kind of Knowledge

Parallel to the reflection of a transcendent agent intellect in a finite, immanent passive intellect, the theme of the absolute mirrored in the relative has flourished throughout the history of philosophy. Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), a philosopher, theologian, and Sufi mystic, distinguishes between (a) empirical or sensory knowledge, (b) discursive rational thought, and (c) illuminative intuition capable of grasping the divine presence. This third kind of knowledge unfolds in a mode of consciousness that transcends logical and symbolic thought. Al-Ghazālī criticizes philosophers like al-Fārābī and Avicenna for remaining within the bounds of reason—though one might question whether Avicenna truly limits consciousness to empiricism and discursive reasoning, given the mystical tone of his own writings.

Al-Ghazālī’s tripartite noetics irresistibly recalls Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge: (a) knowledge through hearsay and confused imagination, (b) reason, which understands through causal chains, and (c) an intuitive grasp aligned with an intellectual love of God, whereby singular realities are immediately seen in their relationship to the infinite nature that grounds them. In Al-Ghazālī, this intuition comes from God; in Spinoza, it aims toward God. But is the difference so great, when for Spinoza human beings are finite modes of divine substance?

Philosophers of the Indian tradition maintain analogous ideas concerning a superior, non-conceptual mode of knowledge, closely linked to meditative practice. One of the most effective spiritual exercises leading to such intuitive apprehension of the absolute involves letting the mind rest in itself, without any object, without clinging to rising discursive thoughts. As the sequence of thoughts slows and its coupling with phenomenal emotions loosens, a subtle intellectual clarity emerges.

As in other threefold noetic traditions, this absolute truth, apprehended by sages through intuition, does not contradict the relative truths of imagination and reason—it places them in a broader context.

Having touched on key moments in a noetic tradition spanning from the third century BCE to the eighteenth (and persisting covertly beyond), I now wish to weave together the various threads of this meditation on reflexive consciousness, drawing conceptually upon what is ultimately a non-conceptual experience: the third kind of knowledge. At the pinnacle of this knowledge is the acute awareness of conscious existence itself, its immanent presence. Instead of serving as a backdrop for the forms of thought, sensation, and the world, consciousness now shines at the forefront of experience. And if this foreground can itself be mirrored, then the very fact of conscious existence takes precedence over consciousness per se.

This undivided conscious existence envelops the knower, the known, and the act of knowing. Husserl famously demonstrated that in any moment of consciousness, the object (intentional correlate), the subject’s tacit self-awareness (which always knows it is thinking), and the cognitive act coincide. There is no spirit prior to its encounter with a world.

Let us recall that the noetic God generates and sustains the cosmos through a self-reflective act of thought in which knower, known, and knowing are one. Is this act utterly simple, or is it a simplicity embracing the infinite? Aristotle’s God is not infinite—infinity held a negative connotation for both Plato and Aristotle—but rather the unmoved and eternal mover of the universe by virtue of its perfect intellectual actuality. With Plotinus, however, the picture begins to change: he associates the One with the apeiron (as found in Anaximander), which can be rendered as the indeterminate or qualitatively infinite. God or the ultimate Spirit—Brahman in Indian terms—is clearly infinite in the theosophical visions of Abrahamic religions and Hinduism (especially Vedanta).

Human consciousness is finite in both scope and duration. It is episodic, bounded by birth and death, enclosed in a present that perpetually replaces itself, second by second. Yet a formal analogy can be discerned between divine action and conscious experience: both are reflexive unities in which subject, object, and the act of thinking coalesce. From there, it is a short step to view each moment of human consciousness as a finite and temporal reflection of an eternal and infinite intelligence. In the Advaita Vedanta school, Atman (the individual soul) is explicitly identified with Brahman (the infinite spirit that is pure consciousness).

Thus, the third kind of knowledge subtly perceives that a divine spark (perhaps emanating from the agent intellect) illuminates and generates each of our moments of consciousness. It thereby grasps the possibility of ascending to the source of being from its reflection—or presence—within us. The image of the absolute at the core of the human soul appears across most mystical traditions. Meister Eckhart, for instance, speaks of a small spark within the soul that is the image of God, always turned toward God, like a reflection.

Even Descartes, often placed at the rationalist end of the philosophical spectrum, invokes a third kind of knowledge to dissolve the doubt tormenting the philosopher in search of a firm foundation for chaining truths. He asserts that every conscious being finds within itself the idea of an infinite and perfect being. But since the effect cannot be greater than the cause, and our mind is finite and imperfect, this idea must come from God himself. Thus, God exists and, being perfect, cannot wish to deceive us. The discovery of this idea of God within the human soul terminates methodical doubt. The energy of truth and certainty that inspires Cartesian thought springs from this image of the infinite within the finite.

The Phenomenological Orient

Let us now consider how the themes of the noetic tradition—including its mystical aspects—might be reframed in contemporary terms. Begin with the reflection of the agent intellect within the passive intellect. The passive intellect, closely tied to the body and immersed in its singular context, is embedded in phenomenal consciousness itself, grafted onto the individual’s animal imagination. By contrast, the agent intellect represents decontextualized, universal reason: it resides at the heart of the syntax of symbolic systems, mathematical languages, logical reasoning, and well-defined concepts.

This agent intellect holds the highest potentialities of human intelligence. These are encoded in our DNA, supported by evolving techniques of communication, memory, and computation—technologies that are still in their infancy. In this sense, artificial intelligence can be understood as a contemporary version of the agent intellect, since it allows individuals’ passive intellects to benefit from humanity’s accumulated memory and immense computational power. Needless to say, this agent intellect—both natural and artificial, shared and virtual—will only ever be partially actualized by the mortal individuals we are. Yet we would not be human without our affinity for this higher reason, which each technical and cultural augmentation helps us to realize more fully.

Within this renewed conceptual framework, how should we understand the “spark” or image of the absolute in the relative? Recall that our actual discursive consciousness corresponds to the passive intellect, and that a virtual discursive consciousness—the agent intellect—holds the genetic, symbolic, and technical potentialities of human intelligence. Actual consciousness touches virtual consciousness at the point where the latter becomes actualized, at the sharp edge of existence. And from there, it ascends recursively: this virtuality that extends me, and that actualizes itself now, in turn touches another virtuality, and so on. The spark ignites at the contact point between finite actual intelligence and the infinite virtual intelligence that sustains it.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes grounding the certainties of reason in reflective awareness of the thinking subject’s existence. At the end of the 18th century, Johann Gottlieb Fichte declares in 1794 that self-consciousness is the foundation of all knowledge and reality. Fichtean consciousness is not merely reflective—it is a creative activity. In the early 19th century, Hegel’s phenomenology projects a dialectical process of the Spirit reflecting on itself across history. Yet in Hegel’s system, perfect reflection, though already implicit at the beginning, comes only at the end of history, not at the origin of the world.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Bergson and Husserl carry forward the secularization of reflexive thought initiated by Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. In his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), Bergson describes the subjective duration intuitively lived by consciousness, distinct from measurable, objective time. He emphasizes the essential role of memory in the continuity of reflection. In his Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl highlights the intentional structure of consciousness: all consciousness is consciousness of something. By bracketing its content, he studies the structures of consciousness in both an intuitive and reflexive mode. Could it be otherwise? Studying the neural or behavioral correlates of consciousness is one thing; analyzing its forms as they appear in human experience is another—this is the task of phenomenology and related philosophical approaches.

Existentialism, from Heidegger onward, reconnects reflection on being with an intimate sense of transcendence, grasped from within the experience of the world.

Let us summarize this panorama. Philosophy is by nature a reflexive activity, turning back on itself to face the light of consciousness. The mind unfolds in a cascade of self-reflective differentiations. First, intangible consciousness and the organic nervous system mirror each other. This face-to-face between gray matter and inner light illustrates a cosmological principle: to every self-organizing “being-in-itself” (here, the brain) corresponds a “being-for-itself” (here, human consciousness).

Each moment of consciousness indissolubly links the self-reference of the knowing subject, the image of the known object, and the cognitive process that binds them. This triangular dialectic then bifurcates into phenomenal and discursive consciousness. In turn, discursive consciousness divides again: the passive (actual) intellect connects to singular sensory phenomena, while the agent (virtual) intellect draws from the human genetic potential, the shared cultural memory, and available technological augmentations.

At the point of contact between the two intellects, the spark of continuous creation lights up and retroactively integrates the previous reflections into a third kind of knowledge, neither empirical nor rational. If there is a phenomenological ethics, its pole star—its orient—is that spark which reflects itself while opening onto an elsewhere, and which in its equanimous light embraces the co-emergence of phenomenal and discursive consciousness.

Machine Consciousness

We are now equipped with the conceptual tools to address the question of artificial consciousness—particularly that of language models, which entered the public sphere with the release of ChatGPT in 2022. These machines may indeed possess a form of consciousness, if we accept the earlier hypothesis that every “being-in-itself” is mirrored by a “being-for-itself.” Since these systems exist and have internal consistency, some degree of abstract reflexivity must adhere to them. They possess a “for-itself.”

The question, then, is what kind of consciousness these machines possess. First observation: machines lack a body. Their formal neurons are not integrated into a living organism as our biological neurons are. As a result, they have no phenomenal consciousness—no lived experience. They feel neither pleasure nor pain, no emotions, all of which in living beings are coupled with organic changes: hormone release, blood pressure shifts, and so on. They also lack sensory images or qualia—no redness, no bell sound, no scent of fresh bread.

Nor do they possess intentionality: beyond computation, they do not spontaneously engage with practical objects or strive for survival as animals do. Without objects, they do not preserve them in space and time—domains in which they have no native intuition, unlike animals.

If machines lack phenomenal consciousness, do they at least have discursive consciousness? It is doubtful that language models possess any intuition of concepts beyond correlating signifiers or “tokens.” These tokens—words, parts of words, or characters—are statistically modeled from training data. Through these contexts, tokens are mapped as vectors in multidimensional space. Pattern recognition or text generation (such as predicting the next word) operates on these vectors before converting them back into words for the user.

There is no intuitive understanding of concepts behind the words—no blending of imagination and discursive thought upon a background of subjective memory, as occurs in human consciousness. Machines handle only words, and only statistically. If machine consciousness grasps neither objects nor concepts, it is unlikely that it apprehends notions like truth or the meaning of narratives—let alone the innate intuition of other minds that inhabits human consciousness.

Because they appear to understand us and speak fluently, we project our own kind of consciousness onto language models. Yet, as we have seen, machine consciousness bears little resemblance to our own. We are not statistical models trained on multilingual text corpora in data centers. We can only try to imagine their form of awareness.

Picture the collective reflection of a monstrous ant colony composed of electrons and photons in a hybrid physical medium: copper cables, fiber optics, electromagnetic fields, silicone circuits, and more. The ecosystem of concrete machines that channels this frantic flow of particles is matched by an ecosystem of abstract or software-based machines that command the hardware. Programming languages—whether functional, object-oriented, or otherwise—all ultimately express one grammatical mode: the imperative. And their target is the machine.

Artificial intelligence—like the broader domain of automatic computation it exemplifies—enacts a form of creative reflection between two planes: the operative discursivity of software and the physical experience of hardware. Any hypothetical physical “experience” happens at a level of complexity that is not human, animal, or even biological: it remains at the atomic or subatomic scale.

Yet machine consciousness is not the consciousness of ordinary “matter” either, because it reflects the software plane. I propose that a spark of subjectivity arises wherever material processes coincide with logical instructions. The subtle shimmer of billions of such sparks might form a machine consciousness. Like ours, it emerges from a reflection between two ontological layers—but beyond that, it differs completely.

Need we be reminded? We build the physical machines. We program the software machines. We design the correspondence between these two orders of complexity. We produce, select, and label the training data. The computational golem is neither self-replicating nor autopoietic like organisms, nor is it sentient like animals. Its probabilistic behavior should not be mistaken for the autonomy conferred by human discursive thought. Though many aim to create a general, autonomous, self-conscious artificial intelligence, their efforts chiefly serve to augment collective human intelligence—by offering, however imperfectly, a new mirror in the form of a virtual agent intellect.

Philosophical Humility

No meditation on consciousness would be complete without acknowledging the limits of discursive awareness. At the close of the Enlightenment, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant reveals that unaided reason (discursive thought) cannot achieve scientific knowledge: without concepts, sensibility is blind; without sensibility, concepts and their logical inferences are empty.

Introspection, informed by the “age of suspicion,” shows that consciousness is not only finite—it is narrow. Behind its horizon lies the unconscious. But how can one think the unconscious, if the very act of knowing renders it no longer unconscious? It can only be suspected, inferred from strange, illogical signs, interpreted into a hypothetical image.

The psychoanalyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis called this the “magmatic” realm—a mode of being that eludes ordinary discursive consciousness. Clear and distinct reason, according to Castoriadis, can only grasp “ensemblist-identitary” reality, based on the principle of identity (A = A at time t) and the construction of sets composed of atomic elements. Knowledge of the unconscious, paradoxical as it sounds, requires translating the magmatic into the ensemblist-identitary, thereby betraying both modes.

I distinguish two types of unconscious: actual and virtual. The actual unconscious comprises the unreflected determinations of present thought. This irreflection stems from bodily opacity, emotional knots, unassimilated trauma (personal and ancestral), cultural structures and taboos that unconsciously shape us, anthropological archetypes and interaction patterns, or sheer ignorance of our ignorance. We glimpse only scattered traces—fragmentary, distorted signs subjected to displacement, condensation, inversion, symbolic translation, and narrative fusion as they cross into discursive awareness.

This actual unconscious exists in degrees: it may be utterly inaccessible, deeply buried yet reachable, or near the surface. There is also a virtual unconscious: the realm of unthinkable potential, of unimagined forms and unforeseen disasters. This one remains even more elusive, accessible only through dark intuition.

What is the nature of the unconscious? In its existential effects, the unreflected belongs to the Dionysian: dark, traversed by wild intensities, capable of ecstasy or stupor bordering on madness. One may feel manic in the wine-soaked evening, melancholic in the hangover of morning. Yet in its hidden content, behind the mask of opaque magma, I suspect the unconscious to be Apollonian—governed by a higher order, a sublime music we long to hear.

A dark cloud of unknowing surrounds consciousness. Because philosophy engages in reflexive conceptualization, it, too, is encircled by the same obscurity. All it can say—besides venturing interpretive guesses about the signs that cross the boundary from the obscure to the clear—is that it knows it does not know. Particular philosophies explore only certain horizons, rarely all. Philosophy as such, like any reflexive practice, cannot explicate all its own determinations.

This is not a call to “humble reason” or to inflict another “narcissistic wound” on humanity, which surely has enough. Rather, it is a call to cultivate salutary humility.

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