The role of language in the evolution of human consciousness, and its implications for AI development and the question of consciousness in LLM AI systems

For decades, scientists and philosophers have been debating the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" — the mystery of how consciousness arises from matter. Almost all of this research looks at the problem through the lens of an assumption that remains unquestioned — namely, that matter is the fundamental substrate of reality, and consciousness somehow arises from matter when matter organizes into sufficiently complex neural networks. This assumption underlies nearly all

We can build machines that recognize faces, translate languages, and beat grandmasters at chess. We can create artificial neural networks that mirror the structure of biological brains. We can even develop large language models that engage in conversations sophisticated enough to fool us into thinking something's really there. But here's what we can't do: we can't explain why any of this should feel like anything from the inside. This gap—between observable behavior and subje