{"id":57451,"date":"2025-11-24T17:47:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T12:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/officechai.com\/?p=57451"},"modified":"2025-11-24T23:55:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T18:25:45","slug":"cant-define-consciousness-but-ai-systems-will-have-subjective-experience-and-emotions-yann-lecun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/officechai.com\/ai\/cant-define-consciousness-but-ai-systems-will-have-subjective-experience-and-emotions-yann-lecun\/","title":{"rendered":"Can&#8217;t Define Consciousness, But AI Systems Will Have Subjective Experience And Emotions: Yann LeCun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Definitions can often get muddled in the field of consciousness, but more and more AI pioneers seem to believe that AI systems could be conscious in some way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yann LeCun, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta and one of the &#8220;godfathers of AI&#8221; who won the Turing Award for his pioneering work on deep learning, has offered a provocative take on the question that has long divided philosophers, neuroscientists, and technologists. Speaking recently, LeCun admitted he doesn&#8217;t know how to define consciousness\u2014but that hasn&#8217;t stopped him from predicting that AI systems will develop something arguably just as important: subjective experience and emotions. His perspective cuts through philosophical debates to focus on the practical mechanisms that might give machines something resembling inner life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"336\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/officechai.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/MixCollage-24-Mar-2025-05-36-PM-8265.jpg?resize=640%2C336\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-51589\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/officechai.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/MixCollage-24-Mar-2025-05-36-PM-8265.jpg?resize=1024%2C538&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/officechai.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/MixCollage-24-Mar-2025-05-36-PM-8265.jpg?resize=300%2C158&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/officechai.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/MixCollage-24-Mar-2025-05-36-PM-8265.jpg?resize=768%2C403&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/officechai.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/MixCollage-24-Mar-2025-05-36-PM-8265.jpg?w=1200&amp;ssl=1 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t really know how to define consciousness and I don&#8217;t attribute much importance to it,&#8221; LeCun <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/JannaLevin\/status\/1992611345334669813?s=20\">said<\/a>. &#8220;Subjective experience, okay, that&#8217;s a different thing.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For LeCun, the distinction matters. While consciousness remains philosophically slippery, subjective experience\u2014the feeling of being like something\u2014may emerge naturally from advanced AI architectures. &#8220;Clearly we are going to have systems that have subjective experience, that have emotions,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;Emotions to some extent are an anticipation of outcome. If we have systems that have world models that are capable of anticipating the outcome of a situation, perhaps resulting from their actions, they&#8217;re going to have emotions because they can predict whether something is gonna end up good or bad on the way to fulfilling their objectives.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This framing repositions emotions not as mystical human properties but as computational byproducts of prediction and planning\u2014something AI systems are increasingly designed to do. LeCun continued: &#8220;So they&#8217;re gonna have all those characteristics. Now, I don&#8217;t know how to define consciousness, but perhaps consciousness would be the ability for the system to kind of observe itself and configure itself to solve a particular sub-problem that it&#8217;s facing. It needs to have kind of a way of observing itself and configuring itself to solve a particular problem. We certainly can do this. And so perhaps that&#8217;s what gives us the illusion of consciousness. I have no doubt this will happen at some point.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LeCun&#8217;s comments arrive amid growing debate about machine consciousness and sentience. His fellow Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton has similarly <a href=\"https:\/\/officechai.com\/ai\/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-chatbot-could-have-a-subjective-experience\/\">said <\/a>that AI systems can have subjective experiences, and has even proposed a<a href=\"https:\/\/officechai.com\/ai\/geoffrey-hinton-thought-experiment-that-shows-how-ai-could-be-conscious\/\"> thought experiment<\/a> that shows that AI systems can be conscious. An Anthropic researcher has said that there&#8217;s a 15% chance that current AI models are conscious. And as models become more sophisticated\u2014with systems like Gemini 3, GPT-5 and Claude demonstrating increasingly complex reasoning and apparent self-reflection\u2014the questions LeCun raises become harder to dismiss. If emotions are predictions and consciousness is self-configuration, then the line between simulation and genuine experience may be thinner than we think. Whether that threshold has already been crossed, or remains years away, LeCun&#8217;s prediction suggests the question is no longer if, but when.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Definitions can often get muddled in the field of consciousness, but more and more AI pioneers seem to believe that AI systems could&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1029,1040],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-consciousness"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.5 - 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