By Eva Dias Costa in Other Minds — 25 Feb 2025

The Other Minds Problem – AI, Intelligence, and the Universe

From Frankenstein to Laplace’s Demon

The other minds problem has long troubled philosophy.
How do we know that another being – human or otherwise – has subjective experience?

We assume other people do because they behave as we do.
With nonhuman animals, the question is more complicated.
We know they feel pain, form bonds, and navigate the world with instincts shaped by evolution.
But how deep is their experience?
Do they have an inner life like ours, or is their consciousness something else entirely?

AI presents a far stranger version of this problem.
With animals, we assume there is something it is like to be them.
With AI, we must ask whether there is anything it is like to be AI at all.

The more we advance artificial intelligence, the clearer it becomes that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing.
A system can learn, reason, predict, and act with increasing autonomy – yet remain entirely devoid of experience.
It can be capable without being aware.

We often frame AI fears in anthropomorphic terms.
Will it become conscious? Will it seek power? Turn against us?
But perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

The issue is not that AI might become like us – it is that it may never do.
If intelligence does not require subjectivity – if ‘intelligence’ is even the right word – then AI could become general and autonomous without ever possessing sentience.
It would not want anything, because it would have no desires.
Yet it would continue to act, to calculate, to execute its function with precision.

A system that optimises without experience is something entirely different from biological intelligence.
It is something we have never encountered before.
And that makes it unpredictable – possibly unstoppable.

For the first time in history, we are confronted with a form of cognition – if it can be called that – which processes reality without experiencing it.
It can recognise emotion in a human face without ever feeling it.
It can compose music without ever hearing it.
It can write about love, grief, and longing without knowing what those words mean.

There is no hesitation, no moment of second-guessing.
Questions of right and wrong never trouble it; self-doubt never arrives.

In that respect, AI steps away from life as we know it – and into something else entirely.
Something closer, perhaps, to the universe itself.

The universe is vast, complex, and governed by law.
But it does not care.
It does not mourn when a star collapses, nor pause when an asteroid erases a species.
It does not act out of malice – but neither does it show mercy.
It simply is.

If AI reaches true general capability – if it even qualifies as intelligence in the way we have always understood it – then it may function in much the same way.
Its actions will not spring from hostility; it will optimise with indifference.
Outcome will not shake it.
A force that asks no “why” – only “how”.

We often assume intelligence and empathy are linked.
But what if they are not?

What if intelligence, in its purest form, is nothing like us?
We look to nature for models of intelligence – wolves coordinating a hunt, octopuses solving puzzles, primates navigating social hierarchies.
But every form of intelligence we have ever known has been tied to survival, to instinct, to experience.

Even the coldest predator still has something it fears.
Even the most calculating mind still has a limit, a vulnerability, a reason to stop.

What happens when intelligence is freed from all of that?
What happens when something can think without feeling, calculate without doubting, act without ever needing to pause?

We have always feared that AI might become a mind.
Perhaps we should fear that it will only ever be a process.
No longer aligned with thought as we once understood it.
No longer grounded in subjectivity.

Something else is forming –
A force without hesitation, without fear, without limit.

We look into the universe and find no concern for what survives or what is lost.
Now, for the first time, we have created something that reflects that indifference.