Agency emerges from a continuous interaction with the physical world, a process refined over billions of years of evolution. Current AIs, operating in a discrete digital environment, lack the necessary architecture and causal history to ever develop genuine agency or free will.

The leading theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory, posits a central "stage" where different siloed information processors converge. Today's AI models generally lack this specific architecture, making them unlikely to be conscious under this prominent scientific framework.

AI intelligence shouldn't be measured with a single metric like IQ. AIs exhibit "jagged intelligence," being superhuman in specific domains (e.g., mastering 200 languages) while simultaneously lacking basic capabilities like long-term planning, making them fundamentally unlike human minds.

The core argument of panpsychism is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, not an emergent one that requires complexity. In this view, complex systems like the brain don't generate consciousness from scratch; they simply organize fundamental consciousness in a way that allows for sophisticated behaviors like memory and self-awareness.

The debate over whether "true" AGI will be a monolithic model or use external scaffolding is misguided. Our only existing proof of general intelligence—the human brain—is a complex, scaffolded system with specialized components. This suggests scaffolding is not a crutch for AI, but a natural feature of advanced intelligence.

We often think of "human nature" as fixed, but it's constantly redefined by our tools. Technologies like eyeglasses and literacy fundamentally changed our perception and cognition. AI is not an external force but the next step in this co-evolution, augmenting what it means to be human.

Consciousness isn't an emergent property of computation. Instead, physical systems like brains—or potentially AI—act as interfaces. Creating a conscious AI isn't about birthing a new awareness from silicon, but about engineering a system that opens a new "portal" into the fundamental network of conscious agents that already exists outside spacetime.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that even advanced AI like ChatGPT is fundamentally a powerful statistical analysis tool. It can process vast amounts of data to find patterns but lacks the deep intelligence or a theoretical path to achieving genuine consciousness or subjective experience.

Challenging the binary view of free will, a new mathematical model could show that individual agents (us) and the larger conscious systems they form can both possess genuine free will simultaneously, operating at different but interconnected scales.