After graduating from Columbia Law School and working at a top international law firm, my brain decided it was time to take a long rest.
My memory was affected. Tasks I used to find easy became impossible.
I went from writing master’s dissertations and 300-page legal documents to crying over two paragraphs.
This went on for years.
It was humbling. It was also, eventually, revealing.
This was before ChatGPT existed. Stripped of the intellectual capacity I had built my identity around, I had to discover other ways to navigate the world.
I had to rely on intuition, feeling and ways of knowing that had little to do with logic or analysis.
My life didn’t fall apart. Quietly, it improved.
Over time, my brain recovered too. And more recently, AI became a practical support for tasks my mind still found exhausting — including editing my writing.
I tell you this because it’s the lens through which I see the current conversation about AI consciousness.
And that conversation, I think, is asking the wrong question entirely.
What We’re Really Revealing About Ourselves
You’ve probably seen the articles.
Is AI becoming conscious? Does it have feelings? Could it be a person?
These conversations may tell us something about AI. But I think they tell us something even more interesting about ourselves — and how confused we are, as a species, about who and what we actually are.
We have come to associate intelligence, humanity and even personhood with speech and thought.
When something speaks fluently, reasons convincingly and forms coherent ideas, we can instinctively begin to relate to it as though it possesses consciousness in the way we do.
But our mind — the part that forms thoughts, makes deductions and processes information — is only one of our functions.
A limited one, at that.
In some ways, it is more useful to compare our thinking mind to a computer than to compare AI to the entirety of a conscious human being.
When we assume that sophisticated thought and language must indicate consciousness, we reveal how deeply we have come to identify ourselves with our minds.
We mistake one remarkable human faculty for the whole of what we are.
And it isn't.
There Is So Much More to a Human Being
Our fascination with information and technology can cause us to forget this.
We might know it theoretically, but we may no longer experience it deeply.
We are so often reduced to our output — what we produce, what we can do, what our minds can deliver.
The more we think rather than feel, the more we rely on data rather than intuition, and the more we identify with the part of us that most resembles a machine.
AI can process vast amounts of information, recognise patterns and generate remarkably sophisticated responses.
It is genuinely impressive. I won't minimise that.
And I know from personal experience how valuable it can be.
But I see it as something fundamentally different from what you are.
You are not simply a processor running on better hardware.
You are a multidimensional, intuitive being.
Your intelligence includes aspects that cannot be reduced to intellectual performance: embodied knowing, emotional depth, the capacity for genuine presence with another person, and your unique energetic reality.
These are not soft, secondary qualities.
They can seem that way, though, in a society that doesn't reward them adequately.
We live in a world that often places greater value on intellectual performance, productivity and measurable output than on sensitivity, intuition, emotional intelligence and care.
And yet, these qualities are fundamental to how we experience life, how we relate to each other and how we create wellbeing.
Our ability to think is extraordinary.
But it is not the whole of our intelligence. And it is certainly not the whole of our humanity.
What AI Is Actually Here to Do
I believe our relationship with AI represents a defining moment in human history.
Not simply because AI might surpass us in certain abilities, but because it holds up a mirror.
When AI can handle our information, our logistics, our language tasks and increasingly complex intellectual work, what remains?
What is the part of us that isn't replaceable?
For me, that's the invitation.
Not to compete with AI on its own terms — faster recall, more data, quicker output — but to become more fully what we are.
More feeling.
More present.
More connected to the intuitive intelligence that lives not just in our heads, but throughout our whole being.
We have spent so much of our modern history developing our intellectual capacities and building systems around them.
And we have achieved extraordinary things.
But perhaps we have also become so fascinated with what our minds can do that we have neglected the deeper experience of being alive.
We have learned to process enormous amounts of information without necessarily becoming wiser.
We have learned to communicate constantly without necessarily becoming more connected.
We have learned to produce more without necessarily experiencing more joy, peace or meaning.
And now we have created technology that can perform many of the intellectual tasks we once considered uniquely human.
Perhaps this is an opportunity to reconsider what we value.
The Part of Us That Cannot Be Measured by Output
I learned something about this long before AI entered my life.
When my mind could no longer do what I had always expected of it, I was forced to confront an uncomfortable question.
Who was I without my intellectual abilities?
For much of my life, I had relied on my mind to navigate the world. It had brought me achievement, professional opportunities and a sense of identity.
And then, for years, I couldn't rely on it in the same way.
Yet something remarkable happened.
As I stopped depending so heavily on my intellect, I began discovering other dimensions of myself.
I could still experience beauty, love, connection and meaning.
I could still sense my way through life.
I could still grow.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, my life could improve even while my intellectual capacities were diminished.
I hadn't lost myself.
I had lost access to one of the ways I was accustomed to expressing myself.
That distinction changed how I understood being human.
Today, AI helps me with some of the very tasks that once defined my professional identity.
There is something almost poetic about that.
The technology can support the work of my mind, while my journey has taught me not to confuse that work with the entirety of who I am.
And perhaps that's the deeper opportunity AI presents to all of us.
To rediscover the dimensions of ourselves that we've neglected while becoming so preoccupied with thinking, producing and achieving.
I don't believe our most valuable contribution to the world was ever our processing speed, our output or the shiny things we created.
It was always the unique and unrepeatable reality of our souls.
Perhaps the most important question AI is inviting us to ask isn't whether a machine can become conscious.
It's whether we are truly conscious of ourselves — beyond our thoughts, our productivity and the identities we've built around our minds.
And whether we're willing to live from that deeper awareness.