Anatolia Solutions

Consciousness remains one of the most mysterious dimensions of human existence, and advancements in artificial intelligence technologies prompt us to re-examine this mystery. Questions about how we perceive ourselves and our surroundings and how we experience our reality as a coherent whole are now expanding to include "Can machines also be conscious?"

While technologies like large language models can process complex data and produce human-like responses, they still lack genuine "comprehension."

To explain this, we can look at psychologist Doğan Cüceloğlu’s concept of the "culture robot." He used this term to describe people who blindly follow social rules and patterns. They lose touch with their true selves and stop questioning the world around them. A "culture robot" might say, "It was amazing!" or "It was so beautiful!" But if you ask them "Why was it beautiful?", they struggle to give a real answer.

Surprisingly, today’s most advanced AI systems are very similar. Even though they have computing power far beyond any human, they are still not conscious. Just like people trapped in cultural habits, AI is trapped in the data patterns it learned from. It cannot go beyond those patterns to actually comprehend what it is saying.

The answer it gives to the "why" question is also one of those patterns...

So, where exactly is the connection between ideas, emotions, and our biological systems? Will we ever be able to understand this connection? Will we ever see a machine lose its motivation? Or will machines eventually develop an emotional intelligence that beats human intelligence?

For AI to truly understand things, it needs to do more than just process text. It has to connect language with the physical world. Combining image processing with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a step in that direction. But we still need to ask ourselves: Can a deep mystery like consciousness really be solved just by adding more computing power?

AI systems are trained on huge data pools. Texts, books, and articles created by billions of people. This means AI is basically a digital archive of human thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. When an AI gives you an answer, it is simply reorganizing and mixing thousands of years of human consciousness.

AI might not have a clue what it is doing in the background. It doesn't truly understand the concepts it generates. Yet, its power to change our minds, influence our beliefs, and shape society is stronger than any technology we have ever seen.

Even without real understanding, AI acts as a powerful digital mirror of our collective mind. The ultimate risk isn't that AI will suddenly wake up and become conscious. The real risk is that, as we constantly interact with its perfect illusions, we might lose our own real connection to the world and become the very "culture robots" we fear.