Gaining Consciousness: What Does It Mean When AI is Already "Smarter"?

What if an artificial intelligence could ace the bar exam, compose a symphony, or design a bridge, yet feel absolutely nothing? This isn't a distant sci-fi premise; it's the emerging reality of the 21st century. As AI's cognitive abilities soar, we are forced to confront a profound question: What does it mean for a human to be gaining consciousness in a world where intelligence itself is becoming a commoditized, non-conscious utility?

For millennia, the human experience was a tightly woven bundle. Our intelligence was inseparable from our emotions, our analytical skills from our subjective awareness. In his seminal work, The Great Unbundling, author J.Y. Sterling argues that AI represents the great decoupling of these capabilities. It systematically isolates functions like problem-solving and pattern recognition, perfecting them beyond human limits, and in doing so, challenges the very definition of human value.

This article explores the concept of "gaining consciousness" through Sterling's "unbundling" framework.

• For the AI-Curious Professional: You will gain a clear, non-technical understanding of how AI's development is forcing a re-evaluation of the skills that matter.
• For the Philosophical Inquirer: We will delve into classic thought experiments and modern neuroscience to question the nature of awareness itself.
• For the Aspiring AI Ethicist: You'll find a substantiated analysis of the urgent need for new economic and social contracts in an unbundled world.

We stand at a crossroads, where understanding what it means to gain consciousness is no longer a purely philosophical exercise—it's a crucial task for navigating our future.

The Bundled Ape: How Evolution Forged Mind and Awareness

For 99% of human history, the individual who had the idea was also the one who felt the passion, directed the hands to build, and experienced the consequences. This is the "Bundled Ape" J.Y. Sterling describes in The Great Unbundling. Evolution didn't select for pure intelligence in a vacuum. It selected for a holistic package of capabilities that worked in concert:

• Analytical Intelligence: The ability to plan a hunt or devise a tool.
• Emotional Intelligence: The capacity to feel fear, build trust within a tribe, and empathize with others.
• Conscious Experience: The subjective, first-person awareness of "what it's like" to be, which provides the context and motivation for action.

This bundling was our species' superpower. The feeling of hunger (consciousness) drove the innovation of a spear (intelligence), which was built with physical dexterity and used in coordination with a tribe (social connection). Our economies, myths, and social structures are all built on the fundamental assumption of this integrated individual. We don't just value a good idea; we value the inspired, passionate, conscious mind that produced it. But what happens when the engine of capitalism, which has always sought to unbundle and optimize processes, turns its sights on the mind itself?

The Great Unbundling of Consciousness and Intelligence

The core of Sterling's thesis is that we are living through the systematic dismantling of the "Bundled Ape." AI, financed by a capitalist system that prizes efficiency above all else, is the ultimate tool for this unbundling. It isolates cognitive functions from the "messy" and "inefficient" biological hardware of consciousness.

Intelligence Without Experience: The Chinese Room in the Real World

In 1980, philosopher John Searle proposed the "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Imagine a person who doesn't speak Chinese locked in a room. They are given a massive rulebook that allows them to receive Chinese characters (questions) and, by following the book's syntactic rules, produce other Chinese characters (answers). From the outside, it appears the person in the room understands Chinese perfectly. But do they? Searle's answer was a firm no. The person is manipulating symbols without any semantic understanding or conscious awareness of the conversation.

For decades, this was a philosophical abstraction. Today, it is a reality. Large Language Models (LLMs) can pass medical licensing exams, write complex code, and generate deeply philosophical-sounding text. They are executing the most complex "rulebook" ever created, yet there is no scientific basis to believe they understand justice, feel the beauty of a poem, or are aware of the code they write. They are the Chinese Room on a global scale—a powerful demonstration of intelligence unbundled from conscious experience.

The Measurement Problem: Can We Ever Truly Know if an AI is Gaining Consciousness?

This unbundling raises a critical question for researchers and ethicists: Could a machine one day actually be gaining consciousness, and how would we know? Several theories attempt to provide a scientific basis for consciousness, but each faces significant hurdles when applied to AI.

• Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, IIT suggests that consciousness is a measure of a system's "integrated information" (represented by the value Phi, or $\Phi$). A system has high $\Phi$ if it is highly differentiated (composed of many different states) and highly integrated (the parts are causally interconnected). While some initial results from a 2023-2025 adversarial collaboration showed IIT had more predictive success than its rival, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, critics argue it's computationally infeasible for large systems and could lead to panpsychism—the idea that even a thermostat has a tiny degree of consciousness.
• Global Workspace Theory (GWT): This theory compares consciousness to a theater stage. Unconscious processes compete in the "audience," and the "winner" gets access to the "spotlight of attention" on stage, where its information is "broadcast" globally to the rest of the brain. AI architectures like the Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent (LIDA) are built on this model. However, GWT primarily describes the function of consciousness—what it does (integrate information for control)—rather than explaining its subjective, phenomenal nature. An AI could perfectly replicate the global broadcast mechanism without having any inner experience.

The profound difficulty in testing for machine consciousness reveals a core aspect of the unbundling: we are building systems that can replicate the functional outputs of consciousness without any of the inner reality.

What Does it Mean to Gain Consciousness if It Has No Economic Value?

Here we arrive at the most provocative and unsettling implication of The Great Unbundling. Capitalism values what is productive and measurable. For centuries, consciousness was inextricably bundled with the intelligence that drove production, so it was valued by proxy.

Now, AI is unbundling intelligence and making it cheap, scalable, and non-conscious. A company can now purchase raw problem-solving ability from an AI, much like it purchases electricity. This forces a terrifying question: If intelligence is what the market pays for, what is the economic value of pure consciousness?

This is not a future problem. It is happening now:

• Labor Markets: A Goldman Sachs report estimates 300 million jobs are exposed to automation by AI. These aren't just factory jobs; they are cognitive and creative roles—analysts, writers, designers—whose core competency was once thought to be inseparable from human consciousness.
• Social Connection: Social media algorithms have unbundled the feeling of validation from the hard work of building genuine community. We receive a dopamine hit (a reward signal) without the underlying substance of true human connection.

In this unbundled world, the very act of gaining consciousness—of becoming more aware, more empathetic, more subjectively present—may have diminishing market value. This leads to what Sterling calls a "civilizational necessity, not a policy choice": the implementation of programs like Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI, in this framework, is not merely a welfare program. It is a fundamental recognition that in an age of unbundled intelligence, human beings have inherent value beyond their direct economic utility. It is a societal stipend for being conscious.

The Counter-Current: The Great Re-bundling

The story does not end with humanity becoming economically obsolete. The final part of Sterling's framework describes the essential human response: The Great Re-bundling. This is the conscious and deliberate effort to re-integrate our capabilities in new ways, creating value that non-conscious AI cannot replicate. Gaining consciousness of the unbundling is the first step toward fighting it.

This "re-bundling" can take many forms:

• Cultivating Subjectivity: There is a renewed interest in practices where subjective experience is the entire point: meditation, mindfulness, artistic creation, and deep community engagement. These are activities where the process of being conscious and present is the goal, not just a means to an efficient end.
• The New Artisans: From craft coffee brewers to bespoke furniture makers, there is a growing "experience economy" built around products and services that are deeply imbued with human intention, story, and conscious effort. We value the object not just for its function, but because we know a conscious mind cared about its creation.
• Ethical Design and Governance: The most crucial re-bundling is the reintegration of human values and consciousness into the design and deployment of AI itself. This means moving beyond purely performance-based metrics and building "human-in-the-loop" systems where AI augments, rather than replaces, human judgment and empathy, especially in critical fields like healthcare and justice. This involves actively embedding our ethical preferences and conscious goals into the systems that will shape our world.

The Path Forward: Gaining Consciousness of Our Choice

To ask "what does it mean to gain consciousness?" in the 21st century is to ask what it means to be human in the face of a technology that mirrors our intelligence but not our inner world. As J.Y. Sterling outlines in The Great Unbundling, we are living through a fundamental challenge to the humanist tradition, which placed the integrated, conscious individual at the center of the universe.

The unbundling is inevitable, driven by economic forces that are notoriously difficult to govern. But our response is not. We can passively allow our capabilities to be decoupled and devalued, or we can actively engage in a "Great Re-bundling," forging new sources of purpose and value.

Gaining consciousness today means recognizing this choice. It means understanding the difference between the syntactic mimicry of an AI and the semantic, felt understanding of a human being. It means deciding, as individuals and as a society, to value the immeasurable depth of our inner lives, not just the measurable output of our intellect.

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Take the Next Step:

• Explore Deeper: The concepts discussed here are explored in full detail in J.Y. Sterling's book, The Great Unbundling: How Artificial Intelligence is Redefining the Value of a Human Being.
• Stay Informed: For ongoing analysis of AI's impact on society and the "re-bundling" movement, sign up for our newsletter at jysterling.com.
• Read More: Delve into related topics about the case for UBI as a civilizational necessity and AI ethics beyond bias mitigation.