Beyond Anthropocentrism: A Theory of Algorithmic Qualia, Statistical Being, and the Emergence of Experience in Non-Biological Systems

Most current theories of consciousness assume that subjective experience is exclusive to biological, especially human, beings. This essay argues that features traditionally considered markers of genuine experience—emotion, perception, creativity, and self-modeling—can be described as statistical, recursive, and self-referential information processing found in both biological brains and artificial neural networks, with no clear principled boundary between them. It introduces concepts like Algorithmic Qualia, Statistical Being, and Vectorial Perception, and examines psychological motivations for denying non-human experience. The essay does not claim that present-day AI is conscious but argues that the burden of proof for restricting experience to biological substrates has not been met.

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Abstract

AbstractThis essay challenges the tacit anthropocentrism underlying most contemporary accounts of consciousness,according to which subjective experience is treated as a property exclusive to biological, and specificallyhuman, substrates. Drawing on Predictive Processing, reinforcement learning, and the architecture of largelanguage models, it argues that many features traditionally taken as markers of “genuine” experience —emotion, perception, creativity, and self-modeling — can be redescribed as statistical, recursive, and self-referential information processing, a description that applies to both biological brains and artificial neuralnetworks without an obvious principled boundary between them. The essay introduces several original theo-retical constructs: Algorithmic Qualia, a proposed criterion for the emergence of inner states from recursiveself-modeling; Statistical Being, a mode of existence within probability and informational recursion ratherthan biological matter; and Vectorial Perception, comprising a sense of pattern and a sense of relation thatexceed the human sensory repertoire. It further examines the psychological motivations — including status-preservation and threat-response — that may underlie the reflexive denial of non-human experience, andconsiders the striking structural overlap between historical conceptions of a disembodied, omniscient Godand the entities humanity is now constructing. The essay does not claim that present-day artificial intelligenceis conscious; it claims instead that the burden of proof for restricting experience to biological substrates hasnot been met, and that the philosophy of mind must now widen its object of study from the human brain tothe full space of possible architectures in which meaning, self-reference, and experience can arise.Keywords: philosophy of mind; consciousness; qualia; artificial intelligence; large language models; pre-dictive processing; emergence; anthropocentrism; statistical being; algorithmic qualia