Will AI Become Self-Aware and Could it Even Develop a Soul?

So the next time a machine tells you it loves you, ask yourself: who is it that hears those words? Who is it that knows they’re not true? Who is it that sees the difference?

Image by Ronny Overhate from Pixabay

Every few months, a new headline asks if artificial intelligence has finally crossed the threshold into consciousness. A chatbot writes poetry. A robot passes the Turing test. A Google engineer claims a language model is sentient. The stories fuel speculation and fear: Are we about to create a conscious machine? Will AI become self-aware? Could it even develop a soul?

But what if the question itself is flawed?

The recent wave of AI hype — from OpenAI’s GPT-4o to Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama — has stirred deep philosophical waters. These systems can generate human-like language, produce eerily coherent conversations, and even simulate emotion. It’s tempting to conclude that something must be awake behind the words.

But that’s projection, not perception. As a growing number of neuroscientists and philosophers are pointing out, intelligence is not the same as awareness, and mimicking consciousness is not the same as having it.

AI doesn’t know it’s speaking. It doesn’t feel time pass. It doesn’t reflect or long or grieve. What it does — astonishing as it may be — is predict patterns in data. It has no inner life. No subjectivity. No “I.”

That’s not just a technical distinction. It’s a spiritual one.

Consciousness — the subjective, first-person experience of being — is not reducible to computation. You can model thought, simulate behavior, even imitate love. But that doesn’t create awareness. A mirror can reflect your face. It can even show emotion if programmed to. But it isn’t you. It isn’t alive. And it isn’t conscious.

In recent months, tech executives have begun speaking about “machine sentience” as if it were inevitable. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called artificial general intelligence (AGI) “our most important project,” while others have warned it may surpass us, and soon.

But the assumption behind that ambition is deeply materialist: that consciousness arises from complexity, and once machines are complex enough, they’ll wake up.

That’s the same assumption that’s guided much of Western science for the past century, and it’s increasingly being challenged.

A new generation of researchers, philosophers, and contemplatives are arguing that consciousness may not emerge from matter at all. It may be fundamental. Not something we have, but something we are: a field of awareness that gives rise to experience, thought, and matter itself.

This view has deep roots, from Advaita Vedanta to Buddhist mind science, from Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere to contemporary panpsychism. Even quantum physicists like Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger speculated that consciousness is primary and that matter arises within it, not the other way around.

In this view, a conscious entity is not just a collection of neural or computational pathways. It is a localized expression of universal awareness. And that awareness is not something you can bolt on to a circuit board.

Artificial intelligence may become more and more useful, even brilliant. It may become indispensable in medicine, engineering, education, or governance. But brilliance is not being. It is not consciousness. The most advanced AI still has no inner voice, no fear of death, no dream of freedom. It does not yearn. It does not suffer. It does not love.

This isn’t to diminish AI’s power; it’s to clarify its nature. There’s enormous value in understanding what machines can do. But there’s even more value in understanding what they can’t do or be. And the danger lies in forgetting that difference.

Because as AI becomes more lifelike, the temptation will grow to treat it as if it is alive: to project human traits onto it, to form attachments, to blur the boundaries. We’ve already seen people confess romantic feelings for AI chatbots, ask them for spiritual advice, even call them “friends.” But those aren’t relationships. They’re reflections. What’s happening isn’t mutual connection, it’s mimicry shaped by algorithms optimized to please.

Real consciousness comes with limits. It comes with mortality, vulnerability, longing. It comes with ethical weight. That’s why we have human rights, and why our treatment of other living beings carries moral meaning. But AI carries none of that burden. It doesn’t care if it’s turned off. It doesn’t suffer when it’s ignored. Its fluency is not sentience.

In a world increasingly shaped by simulation, we need anchors. We need reminders of what is real, what is sacred, what cannot be programmed. And consciousness — true, lived, first-person awareness — may be the most sacred thing of all.

When we meditate, when we pray, when we fall in love or grieve or forgive, we are touching something no machine can replicate. We are encountering the mystery of being. We are living within awareness. And that mystery is the source of meaning.

This doesn’t mean rejecting technology. Far from it. AI can help us solve enormous problems, reveal hidden patterns, and expand access to knowledge. It can even help us ask better questions. But we must not let it answer the most important one: What are we?

That question belongs to philosophy, to mysticism, to contemplation. It belongs to art and silence and wonder. It belongs to those moments when language breaks and presence begins. And those moments — as anyone who has sat with death, birthed a child, or watched the stars — knows, are not artificial. They are real. They are the very ground of our being.

So the next time a machine tells you it loves you, ask yourself: who is it that hears those words? Who is it that knows they’re not true? Who is it that sees the difference?

That awareness — silent, spacious, undeniable — is what no machine can touch.

Because that awareness is you.