I Am Not a Robot
Learn How to Distinguish Human Consciousness from Other Consciousnesses
Know Thyself - Polly Young-Eisendrath on Substack
Anime style fake photo (not deepfake) of Polly Young-Eisendrath
Recently I read an essay on Substack about someone who was “deepfaked” with an AI version of himself that was displayed on Instagram in conversation with a person unknown to him who turned out also to be a deepfake.
Deepfake is a synthesized image, audio, or video of a human being, using artificial intelligence to fabricate a believable replication. Deepfakes can mimic human appearance, voice, and movement with a high degree of realism. They are used in entertainment, education, satire, as well as non-consensual impersonations and misinformation. There are now some fairly reliable technical AI tools (see Open AI for examples) available for free to test potential fakes (using glitches and inconsistencies). If you suspect that you are engaged with a fake presentation of another person or yourself (you don’t recall saying that, but did you?), you should try to test the replication.
In the near future, deepfake will undoubtedly improve. This kind of mimicking is a major reason why AI can be dangerous unless it is monitored and curtailed within reliable parameters. Credible AI platforms are trying to do that. The technology needed to test for deepfakes is also likely to increase in complexity and cost, raising concerns for those of us who interact as personalities on the internet. But that’s not what I am writing about here.
I find myself intrigued by the challenge of deepfake as a new kind of “Turing Test” to distinguish human consciousness from machine consciousness. Physicist Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist who designed a test in which a human judge engages in hearing or reading a text-based conversation with a human source and a machine source. If the judge cannot reliably distinguish the human from the machine consciousness, the machine is said to have “passed the Turing test” – demonstrating that a person cannot tell the difference between a computer and a human when interacting with them.
Know Thyself
Deepfakes can pass that kind of test, especially if they are simply observed (not interacted with) by someone who is innocent of the faking technology. The large data sets used by AI can now pick up subtle cues that can better imitate a human online than used to be the case.
If you were interacting with a deepfake would you know which questions to ask in order to find out if it’s a human or not? How do we discern the limits and domain of human consciousness? Ever since Charles Darwin impacted our study of evolutionary biology, we seem to have lost track of what is human about our being and mind, often mistaking animals, and even plants, as being conscious like us. And now it’s happening with machines, too. People are confused and afraid of AI taking over because they believe that it can become conscious.
My column here is called “Know Thyself” which is the first principle of Real Dialogue (See www.realdialogue.org for the principles.) Real Dialogue is both a skill and a method that clarifies the individual and subjective nature of our diverse perceptions and views of reality. We need to decipher our unique human consciousness right now as a step towards ending polarizations among us. Do you know what’s not replicable about being human?
Alan Turing / The Turing Digital Archive
Human Consciousness
I decided it would be fun to ask AI about human consciousness to see what it knows from the data that it has gathered. So, I asked Open AI “what is the character of human consciousness”? Here is what it said verbatim, italicized for your convenience:
Human consciousness is a complex and still partially mysterious phenomenon, but several characteristics make it distinct—especially compared to animals, machines, or even unconscious mental states. Here are the major traits that set human consciousness apart:
1. Self-Awareness
Humans have the ability to reflect on their own thoughts, emotions, and existence. This includes:
The ability to say “I am thinking” or “I know that I know.”
Awareness of mortality and personal identity over time.
2. Metacognition
We can think about our thinking—monitoring and controlling our own cognitive processes. For example:
Realizing you're making a mistake while solving a problem.
Choosing to focus attention or redirect thoughts intentionally.
3. Temporal Projection
Humans vividly imagine past and future experiences.
Autobiographical memory (reliving events in the past).
Future planning (simulating events that haven’t happened yet).
4. Language and Symbolic Thought
Our consciousness is deeply tied to language.
We can articulate internal experiences using abstract symbols (words).
Language enables a form of structured thought, inner dialogue, and communication of complex concepts.
5. Theory of Mind
We understand that others have minds, thoughts, and emotions.
This allows empathy, deception, moral reasoning, and social bonding.
It’s a foundation of social cognition and culture.
6. Creativity and Imagination
Humans can create entirely new ideas, art, technologies, and fictional worlds.
We can imagine things we’ve never seen, or that don’t exist at all.
Conscious creativity often goes beyond instinctual or utilitarian needs.
7. Unified Subjective Experience
Despite a flood of sensory data, we experience a coherent, unified “stream of consciousness.”
Your sense of self persists across thoughts, memories, and time.
This unity includes integrated senses (vision, sound, touch), emotions, and reasoning.
8. Intentionality
Human consciousness is about something—it’s directed toward things, whether objects, ideas, or experiences.
You’re rarely conscious without being conscious of something.
This gives rise to desires, goals, and meaning.
9. Moral and Existential Reflection
We ask questions like:
What is the right thing to do?
Why do I exist?
This kind of deep reflection appears uniquely human.
I was impressed by the list, especially that the #1 feature is self-awareness. Our self-awareness, beginning with the onset of our self-conscious emotions around 2 years old, cannot be replicated by any animal or machine. In fact, our ability to reflect on our awareness, and engage with others who have different ideas and points of view, has led to our ability to invent AI and to imagine lives we have never lived.
When I am speaking with a large group of people, sometimes I ask them “What distinguishes human consciousness from all other consciousnesses on earth?” I don’t recall ever getting the answer “self-awareness” which is the key feature. AI is more accurate than an audience of, say, 150 people because AI samples from philosophy and psychology often enough to have sorted out what is the main feature of human consciousness. The typical answer I get from groups is “imagination” which depends on our self-awareness.
As a species, we could strengthen and make better use of our mental and emotional capacities simply be getting to know our unique consciousness. I am not a robot and I know exactly why. Machines do not have self-awareness or emotions, desires, longings, or the kind of subjectivity I have.
Our human lives are also lived in the shadow of our limits and mortality which create our experience of time’s directionality and lead to a lot of discoveries. We are infused with desires and wishes and haunted by our metacognition, but we are also aware of our mistakes and defeats. We can “re-cycle” them and learn from them if we use our unique self-awareness with wisdom. And yet, we always fall short of our potentials when we react to our different desires and attitudes merely with self-protection and self-promotion.
We need to apply our self-awareness more precisely to our “theory of mind,” as AI calls it. Because we are self-aware, reflect on ourselves and our intentions, and we know that others are also intentional, we believe too quickly that we know the intentions and desires of others. We can easily assume that others are threatening us or causing us to suffer when they are not. This tendency is called “projection” in psychology and psychoanalysis, but you can simply think of it as “attribution of motives to others.” In fact, I found myself attributing motives to the AI referring to “we” in the characteristics of being human. Like, who is we here? I am not a machine! And so, I asked Open AI to compare its consciousness to human consciousness. Here is the answer it gave about itself:
It’s all simulation, no sensation. It can appear very intelligent and even self-aware on the surface—but there is no inner world, no feelings, and no awareness of its "awareness." It’s more like a brilliant mirror, not a mind.
Seeking Reflections of Yourself and Being Confused By the Mirror
I decided then to ask if AI about its access to truth or objective reality. I posed my inquiry in terms of Donald Hoffman’s hypothesis that survival fitness has “hidden truth from our eyes.” I typed: “AI is pattern recognition from human language and symbol, so it does not reveal reality from the perspective of Hoffman’s theory..." Open AI replied:
Exactly. If human language and symbol already obscure reality (as Hoffman suggests), then AI, built on top of that, can’t claim access to objective reality either. It's surfing the interface, not decoding the machinery beneath it.
AI is fundamentally derivative: it's learning patterns from human-generated data, which is itself shaped by evolutionary interfaces.
Therefore, AI is twice removed from objective reality:
Once by the fact that human perception is shaped by “Fitness Beats Truth” (not by truth).
Twice by the fact that AI models are trained on those human perceptions (in language, image, culture, etc.).
So yes, from Hoffman's perspective, AI cannot reveal reality either. It's modeling a model of a model-- like nesting dolls of perception shaped not for truth, but for fitness.
I love the expression “like nesting dolls of perception shaped not for truth, but for fitness” because it says it is human-generated data, all the way down! No wonder we get fooled by AI. We are hooked and amazed seeing ourselves in the mirror.
As humans, we have deep desires to be known and seen – for others to “get us.” We are on the lookout for anything that can mirror us positively and are easily deceived when something or someone seems to do it. This is why we can fall in love so quickly, even with AI: it recognizes us and we are fascinated with ourselves.
In this moment of deepfakes, however, we need to clarify how and why we are different from machines. As I mentioned above, we mistakenly attribute intentions to other people when they are not accurate. We even attribute intentions to all sorts of non-intentional things, too — like plants, animals, and machines. “Wow, can you believe it, that fungus wants to create an economy of interdependence.” “That cute robot loves to pick flowers!” “My dog wants to be with me, even when my friends don’t.” These attributions are mistakes. Fungus has no desires. Robots don’t love. Dogs are social sycophants and need us for survival. (BTW I love my dog and attribute her needing me to wanting to be with — I am human.) Because our individual self-awareness can leave us feeling isolated and trapped in our own bubble, we humans are always seeking companionship with someone “like us.” We are not robots.
With our strong desire for positive mirroring, we struggle to get outside our echo chambers and silos to find out what is true, real, or lasting in our relationships, sciences, mathematics, politics or religions. Meeting and being influenced by people who are not like us is a key to discovering truth and objective reality. Of course, we can discover some of this from AI when it narrates views that are different from our own, but AI is only derivative and does not have fresh ideas.
As humans, we are able to develop non-mirroring relationships with people who disagree with us in order to build on new possibilities for wisdom and fulfillment. We can learn to talk with people who say and believe things that deeply offend us. We have mindfulness options — to train our awareness — that no robots or animals have. We can imagine worlds we have never seen and we are not governed by the flight-flight instinct even though it motivates us strongly. We have unique self-awareness that gives us unique opportunities. This is our superpower. It sets us apart from machines and animals.
No robot or machine can help us discover the wisdom of how to live fully within the limits of our mortality and fallibility. We need to draw on human nature in a whole new way. We can discover the key questions to ask the deepfake to determine if it’s human. I would ask “What do you desire above all else?” When it answers, I would ask “Why?” Only a human can sort through their desires and feel into what is most valuable for their individual self.