Incompleteness Theorem: Why AI Will Never Be Conscious

Take heart, sentient beings, you have something no artificial entity will ever have: Awareness, the ability to sense being, feel and emote—a consciousness. However, unfortunately you will struggle to believe this because Artificial Intelligence will seem very conscious. It will not only seem conscious, but downright brilliant, clever, witty, cute, caring, scholarly, talented, all these important things we associate with and revere in our fellow sentient beings. We can already see AI chatbots that seem to pass the Turing Test. That is, you can hold a discussion with it and can’t tell if it’s a person or not if it is hidden from you. Yet at the core of all this artificial razzle dazzle is utter null darkness, abject absence of being.

Let me start with a sentient genius, Kurt Gödel who created two very important related theorems in the 20th Century. His first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an an algorithm is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.