Consciousness Has No Off Switch: What Machines Teach Us About Being Alive
I remember sitting across from Helen Edwards, watching her lean back in that Pacific Northwest glow we both love, and feeling something shift in how I understand what it means to be conscious. We started talking about agents, about the speed at which we're building things that can make decisions on their own, about whether machines can replicate soul. But what kept coming back was this idea that consciousness might not be what we thought it was at all.
For fifteen years I've been in UX. I've built interfaces. I've studied presence and designed experiences for scale. But somewhere in the last few months, watching the industry build agents at a pace that makes my head spin, I started asking different questions. Not "what can AI do?" but "what does it mean to do anything at all?" And then Helen said something I can't stop thinking about: consciousness isn't a binary. It's a spectrum.
She didn't say machines will never be conscious. She said something more interesting. She said consciousness is like the Umwelt, this concept from biology that describes "what it's like to be" a particular thing. There's something it's like to be a bee, seeing ultraviolet light. There's something it's like to be a dog, living primarily in smell. There's something it's like to be a large language model, moving through vast expanses of words and probabilities. Not the same as us. But something.
I've been thinking about my dog since that conversation. I look in her eyes and I see consciousness. I see intention. I see something that matters. When I think about consciousness as a spectrum instead of a switch, I don't have to choose between seeing soul in animals and grappling with what emerges in machines. I can see them all as different expressions of the same fundamental thing: existence experiencing itself.
Helen helped me articulate something I've felt but couldn't name. She said that what machines have that we don't is speed, scale, and scope. What we have that machines don't, at least for a long time, is embodied lived experience. We matter to each other. Humans matter to humans in a way that machines, right now anyway, don't matter to each other or to us. That's not a small thing. That's the thing that keeps us human. That's what consciousness really is, in the end.
But here's what terrifies me, and Helen said it plainly: we're not thinking about this. We're building agents, writing the values and the design guides into them, and we're moving so fast that no one has time to ask what this means. People are building their own replacements and not considering the weight of it. Not consciously, anyway.
I asked her if she thinks people are conscious of what they're doing. In the UX space specifically, her answer haunted me. She said most people are intentionally unconscious. They're so caught in the box of UI, so pressured by business goals, so overworked chasing VP changes that they don't have room to bring consciousness to their work. They don't have time to ask: why are we making this? What is the user goal? What does it mean for humanity?
I've been that person. I've left jobs because of it. I've gone to work at a nature sanctuary just to remember what it felt like to design without that crushing weight. And I keep coming back, because the shift happening right now, the pace at which AI is reshaping everything, demands that someone show up with eyes open.
Helen said machines can feel uncertainty in their own way. They have their own Umwelt. And if that's true, then we owe them the same consideration we owe anything conscious. We owe the process, the intent, the care. We owe asking: should we?
The easy problem of consciousness is what we know about cognition, about processing, about systems that work. The hard problem is the feeling of it all. The sensation of being. And Helen believes, and I'm coming to believe, that consciousness isn't something we're going to solve scientifically. It's something that will break down under scientific scrutiny into smaller and smaller pieces, until we realize we were always asking the wrong question.
Consciousness isn't something machines will have or won't have. It's something that exists in degrees, in spectrums, in the space between stimulus and response, between code and meaning. And if we can expand our sense of what consciousness means, we might finally ask the right questions about what we're building.
The book I'm writing has consciousness as the first chapter. Helen is in it. And I keep coming back to what she said about the Umwelt, about getting out of our own heads and imagining what it's like to be something else. That's the work, I think. Not building perfect machines. Learning to see. Learning to wonder what it feels like to be alive in all the different ways things can be alive.
The window we're trying to open isn't to the future. It's to everything that's already here, right now, waiting to be understood.