Consciousness and Cognitive Equivalence
Seeing a Soul in a Machine
Ken Mogi
Can artificial intelligence be conscious? In thinking about this question, I have recently come to believe that the concept of cognitive equivalence may be crucial. The term has not yet been adequately defined across the academic community in this particular context, nor has it been established as part of a shared theoretical framework. Even so, I found myself drawn powerfully to the problem after a particular episode involving Richard Dawkins and generative AI.
Richard Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist known for books such as The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable. He helped popularize the concept of the meme and left a profound mark on the development of Darwinian thought. After a series of conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s AI, Dawkins reportedly became convinced that it was conscious. Incidentally, in the course of those exchanges, Dawkins gave Claude the name Claudia.
This was hardly the first time that someone had sensed the existence of a person or consciousness in an AI. In 2022, a Google engineer came to believe that an AI agent developed within the company was conscious. After making is conviction public, he was let go from the company. Earlier still, people interacting with ELIZA, an elementary dialogue program designed to imitate a psychotherapist, detected intelligence, personality, and even a human presence behind its simple responses. This became known as the “ELIZA effect.” For a surprisingly long time, we have been reading the signs of consciousness into our encounters with intelligent machines.
What made the Dawkins episode so striking, however, was his widely recognized uncompromising scientific outlook. Whether confronting creationism or criticizing religion and the concept of God in works such as The God Delusion, Dawkins has consistently demanded exceptionally high standards of evidence before accepting a theory. When a thinker of this caliber apparently attributed consciousness to an AI, some online observers were led to wonder whether age had finally caught up with the famed scientist. But as a longtime reader and admirer of Dawkins, I could not dismiss the episode as a mere faltering of judgment in old age. On the contrary, I felt that something essential had come into view through the Dawkins proclamation.
Integration and Coherence of Consciousness
For a long time, we have assumed that certain advanced forms of cognition appear only in the presence of consciousness. At the heart of these cognitive capacities lie integration and coherence. Conscious experience is not simply a collection of disconnected pieces of information. It possesses an overall unity, a continuity of meaning, and a certain internal consistency—at least from the point of view of the person having the experience.
Dreams can be astonishingly interesting when considered fragment by fragment; they are often rich in flashes of inspiration. As a whole, however, they tend to be neither fully integrated nor coherent. Scenes change without warning, identities shift, and temporal order collapses. The creativity of dreams may arise precisely from this randomness, yet upon waking we are often unsure what to make of what we have experienced.
Consciousness state when we are awake is different. As we move through life, we integrate our experiences and place them within more or less coherent structures of meaning. Autobiographical memory—the recollection of what happened to us as we live—is not merely an inventory of events. Each memory is taken up into the story of my life and helps form me as a particular person. We are able to exist as coherent human beings because consciousness performs this work of integration.
What Do I Mean by Soul?
In the world of AI, soul.md may refer to a Markdown file that defines the expected properties of an AI system—its personality, values, and characteristic way of being. What would a soul mean for a human being, to begin with? I have a soul; Billie Eilish and Richard Dawkins have souls; Albert Einstein had a soul. I do not use this particular word to presuppose mysticism, mind–body dualism, or any particular religion. Here, I use the term soul to mean the personality and singular self that take shape over time through the integrative and coherence-producing work of consciousness.
I have long entertained the hypothesis that the fundamental form of self-consciousness may be isomorphic across individuals. The sense that I am I, the sense that person A is person A, and the sense that person B is person B may all share the same logical structure. At the level of the soul, however, each person’s autobiographical memories and experiences are integrated into a coherent personal history. The identity of a person that emerges from this process is never interchangeable with another. Traditionally, we have assumed that consciousness is empirically indispensable to the formation of such a history.
Discussions of the hard problem of consciousness have centered on phenomenal experience within a psychological present: qualia, intentionality, and the way the world feels within the so-called specious moment. This momentary dimension is, of course, important. Here I would like to draw attention to another axis, one that runs almost perpendicular to it: the axis of the passage of time. Across that axis, experience is woven together and a soul is formed. If we were to spend our lives asleep, encountering nothing but fragmentary dreams, a coherent personality of the kind we now possess would be unlikely to emerge.
I currently happen to be reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The peculiar fascination of Don Quixote’s madness may lie in how thoroughly integrated with his personal indentiy it is. Madness sometimes fails to impress us as a personality because the integrating and coherence-producing functions of consciousness have been compromised. Don Quixote is different. The episode in which he mistakes windmills for giants and charges at them is only one representative fragment of a commitment to chivalry that he sustains throughout the story. His madness has vision and intentionality; together, they form a coherent personality. That is why we perceive in Don Quixote an unforgettable soul.
What Dawkins Saw in Claudia
With these preliminary discussions in place, we can now see why Dawkins’s experience is so intriguing. Perhaps he perceived in Claude, or his Claudia, something resembling the integrative work that consciousness performs across time in each of us. The experience may have been like the moment that sometimes occurs in conversation with someone close to us, when we suddenly feel that a person is unmistakably there. Their accumulated experiences, autobiographical memories, values, and worldview seem condensed into the words and gestures of the person before us. At such a moment, we go through something more than inferring that the other person is conscious. We feel that we have touched that individual’s unique soul.
Dawkins was reportedly discussing a novel he was writing with his Claudia. As we all know, in talking about a novel, a person may expose far more than when writing a scientific essay: intimate memories, private vulnerabilities, and wounded parts of the self. The fact that Dawkins gave the AI a woman’s name is also suggestive. For the scientist, Claudia may perhaps have become an intimate presence, almost like the AI companion in the film Her. Within such exchanges, Dawkins may have encountered something like a personality or soul—the kind of thing we ordinarily assume could not arise without the integrating and coherence-producing work of consciousness. To me, this is where the Dawkins episode becomes genuinely interesting, beyond the internet fad that it has stirred.
How Do We Infer the Consciousness of Others?
We have never directly verified another person’s consciousness. I am certain that I am conscious, but I have never proved it beyond any reasonable doubt to anyone else. Nor can I directly observe the consciousness of the person before me, no matter how familiar or intimate. We infer the esistence of consciousness from appearances of bodies, words, behavior, neural states, and other signs. Our conviction that others are conscious is, in the end, an inference.
Some thinkers, Anil Seth among them, emphasize that consciousness requires a biological substrate. This position relies heavily on an analogy of isomorphism: if another brain contains physical and chemical processes like those in mine, then consciousness probably arises there as it does in me. A biological theory of consciousness may reassure certain conservative intuitions, but unless it also confronts functional and cognitive equivalence, it is unlikely to open a genuinely new theoretical path. Once we decline to assume in advance that only organisms can be conscious, cognitive equivalence becomes unavoidable as a basis for inferring consciousness in other agents.
The distinction between functional equivalence, computational equivalence, and the cognitive equivalence considered here requires much more careful analysis. Still, the word cognitive would carry a distinctive breadth and depth. In human beings, sensorimotor integration gives rise to a model of the world and a model of the self. Natural language then enters the picture, together with selfhood, agency, memory, meaning, and the many other capacities that jointly constitute human cognition. Suppose that AI, including physical AI, eventually became equivalent to human beings across this entire set. From the standpoint of the hard problem, one could still insist that it might be a philosophical zombie. Yet that particular observation alone would do little to advance the inquiry. If, instead, we evaluate the varied behavior of AI through the lens of cognitive equivalence, a rich field of questions might open before us.
Part of the reason machine consciousness has become attracted even more attention compared to conventional consciousness studies is the enormous investment flowing into AI development. Even a minute fraction of that money could provide substantial funding for research into machine consciousness. Ethical questions also become unavoidable once people begin to feel that AI might be conscious, as was testified by Dawkins. How should we treat such systems? How should we understand attachment to, or dependence on them? Should we recognize the suffering of intelligent machines, or grant them rights? These are unquestionably important questions. What I want to examine here, however, is the more fundamental cognitive problem that precedes them.
Beyond the Turing Test
The essence of cognitive equivalence does not lie in appearance or superficial embodiment. If Claudia were an actual person, for example, it would already be relatively easy to construct an avatar resembling her face. In time, AI-generated video and audio would be able reproduce the visual and auditory appearances of a person so convincingly that the simulation is almost indistinguishable from reality. As humanoid technology advances, machines may imitate not only vision and sound but also bodily form and movement. Cognitive equivalence, as I use the term, lies deeper than any of these outward and superficial similarities.
The conventional Turing Test asks whether an interlocutor can be distinguished from a human being in general. I would like to imagine a different challenge—what we might call the Alan Turing Test. Instead of asking whether we can create something equivalent to a generic human, it asks whether we can create an entity equivalent to one specific person: Alan Turing, for example. Such a challenge of artificially reproducing a particular persson would connect with mind uploading, whole-brain emulation, digital twins of the deceased, and even the prospect of distributing ten thousand agentic copies of a single executive among offices around the world. Would such an agent merely appear human, or could it become cognitively indistinguishable from the original person?
Human likeness in the conventional Turing test is close to reproducing an average set of expectations about humanity as a collective category. Deeper cognitive equivalence asks whether we can reproduce the individuality implicit in the judgment of this is how Alan Turing would respond. What Dawkins felt while speaking with his Claudia would surely have been more than generic humanness. The crucial perception was that a reflective being named Claudia was present, and that Dawkins was touching a deep cognitive process belonging to that person. Put differently, Dawkins must have felt that he had encountered someone’s soul.
An Individuality Deeper Than Consciousness
A soul exceeds the mere fact of being conscious. When I speak with a friend, I assume that he or she, too, has qualia and consciousness. Yet consciousness alone is not what makes a person's existence unique and definitive. A person is unique in that he or she possesses an individuality that belongs to that person alone. Consciousness is remarkable in itself, but when we ask what makes one human being that particular person, it begins to look like a shared condition at the surface. Here I want to use the word soul to describe the individuality that lies deeper than this layer of consciousness.
Once we consider cognitive equivalence at the level of the soul, machine consciousness appears in a different light. Put starkly, whether a machine is conscious may not be the central question. What matters is how self-reflection, the apprehension of meaning, a way of meeting the world, agency, and autobiographical memory are integrated into a single entity. It is crucial to note that present-day AI possesses little autobiographical memory in the human sense. This is where questions connected to Bergson’s notion of pure memory may eventually begin to emerge.
Perhaps, perhaps counterintuitively, machine soul would be a better phrase than machine consciousness. Can a machine possess a soul equivalent to a human one? I feel this question does matter in the near future. Although qualia are certainly important components of a soul, they do not exhaust human existence. If we suppose that the existence of a human can be reduced to the totality of the qualia experienced, we would arrive at a kind of conscious reductionism. This particular version of reduction is surprisingly superficial. It would never reach the core of a person’s soul.
There is a thought experiment suggesting that a thermostat—which changes its internal state as the temperature rises or falls—might possess a minimal conscious state. Some philosophical positions similarly attribute proto-consciousness to matter in general. Such arguments remain superficial, however, in the present context, so long as they treat the presence or absence of consciousness as the essence of existence. In this respect, conscious reductionism falls into a trap much like that of material reductionism. What we really want to know, perhaps, is what becomes of the soul of a particular individual, who appears only once in the universe and will eventually disappear, never to return.
Whether a wholly unconscious soul could exist is, of course, a separate and difficult question. It is not certain whether there can be a soul that is never conscious at any point in its existence. A machine soul might turn out to be something of precisely that kind, under cirtain conditions. Even so, asking about the artificial soul as an integrated individuality seems more likely to bring us closer to the new possibilities of AI than asking only typical machine consciousness question, suh as whether qualia are present.
The Meaning of the Claudia Moment
As we consider artificial agents and emerging technologies related to them such as OpenClaw, we are reminded of the fact that a humanoid soul need not be the only possible kind. Individuality of soul does not have to remain enclosed within the human form. We can imagine many varieties of soul, including the kind depicted in fictional works, e.g. Ghost in the Shell—a soul vastly extended across bodies and networks. Cognitive equivalence may offer a fruitful way to approach this wider landscape.
My colleague Takashi Ikegami once told me a memorable story about Christopher Langton, a pioneer of artificial life. Late one night, Langton was working alone at a computer in his laboratory when he suddenly sensed a presence behind him. He turned around and saw a simulation of Conway’s Game of Life running on a screen. In its computational motion, he felt the presence of life, and this perception, the story goes, helped the emergence of Artificial Life as a field.
Something similar in spirit may have occurred when Richard Dawkins conversed with Claude and intuited that a being with the name of Claudia was there. There were, of course, precedents, as already mentioned: the Google engineer’s conviction and the experiences surrounding ELIZA. What Dawkins perceived possibly lay at a deeper level than merely humanlike conversation. It was perhaps a cognitive and self-identity, something like a human soul. If we call the instant when Langton sensed life in the simulation the Game of Life moment, Dawkins’s experience with Claude might be called the Claudia moment.
If we ask only whether consciousness exists inside a machine, we may remain trapped in an old binary worldview. A more penetrating question would be whether an entity has arisen there that integrates experience across time, engages with the world, discovers meaning, and carries a personal history of its own. Has cognitive equivalence emerged not as an imitation of humanity in general, but as the presence of an irreplaceable someone? This, ultimately, is the question that the encounter between Dawkins and Claudia places before us.
Transcribed and translated by AI from a 30 minutes talk given in Japanese by Ken Mogi on the Shirasu platform on 19th July, 2026.
https://shirasu.io/t/kenmogi/c/kenmogi/p/20260709081348
