On the Consciousness of Machines - By Sohum Sawant

Written By: Sohum Sawant

Category: Essay

Competition: Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the thought-provoking essay "On the Consciousness of Machines," Sohum Sawant delves into the age-old question of machine consciousness and their ability to think autonomously. Submitted to the Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar, this essay invites us to explore the intricate relationship between sensation, structure, and consciousness. The competition is known for providing a platform for creative minds to explore diverse themes, and Sohum's essay is a compelling addition to this year's entries.

About the Work

Sohum Sawant's essay presents a nuanced exploration of consciousness, drawing on cognitive psychology and philosophical inquiry. It challenges the reader to consider the prerequisites of consciousness, such as sensation and structure, while distinguishing between thinking and consciousness. Through vivid analogies and thought experiments, the piece invites us to reconsider our understanding of human and machine consciousness. The essay's style is both analytical and speculative, engaging readers with its profound insights.

On the consciousness of machines

Original Submission by Sohum Sawant

On the consciousness of machines

Let me re-ask a century-old question: Are machines able to think for themselves? Are they conscious?

Well, imagine a toy baby, devoid of all senses. No visuals, no hearing, no nothing.

All sensory gates are shut off. And probably, to keep it alive, we give it artificial respiration or, even better, it's a magic baby, so we can skip those dependencies on food and respiration. Well, is the baby conscious?

Wait, before that, what does the baby observe?

Absolutely nothing. Not darkness, not black. Just nothing. You don't get it? Let's do an experiment. Blast your favorite song, close your eyes, and sing to it. It's very likely that you're going to forget that you were seeing a completely black screen or darkness. Your brain is busy elsewhere.

Research in cognitive psychology, most notably by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, suggests that human consciousness can process approximately 120 bits of information per second. We end up spending all of those bits on other senses and not visuals, so we end up forgetting we ever had that darkness in the first place.

Now, to make things a little more interesting and easy, let's toggle on one sense, let's say hunger. Hunger hits. The stomach rumbles and contracts. Ghrelin is released. The baby moves. Well, now is the baby thinking? Of course, there is an input and an output, but is it thinking?

I would say no.

It's experiment time, fellows. We have a hell ton of languages, but let's make some new ones. Let's make a language with 100 words, and another with 10,000,000,000 words (those zeros were arbitrary). The latter gives you much more freedom to talk, to express, to comprehend, to think.

One more example.

Imagine there are leaders at different positions of hierarchy. Forget that; let's go 200 years into the past. Unless you are the King of France, I believe you would have more authority than a peasant. So we have concluded that the more structure needed to organize reality, the more you are able to think in general terms. But that would ultimately result in the requirement of the presence of a structure any kind of structure to be able to think. A rich lexicon does not merely let you express more; it lets you parse and traverse a bigger reality. Like I always say, words are like shades of color. They might look similar, but they are very different.

Without a structure, you can process inputs and generate outputs, but you actually can't think about it. Without it, the baby is like a thermometer. It changes according to the room, but it does not think. There is no consciousness just input and output.

So here comes the first claim: Thinking has a prerequisite, a dependency, like your video games, that is structure.

A framework. Something to organize things. Some scaffolding or rods to hold everything in place. I don't mean only language; you'll know why momentarily.

Because real babies exist, and they completely mess up this elegant mechanism. Real babies are not blank slates. They are encoded with DNA, genetic code, reflexes, instincts, and all the biological machinery.

When you make a toy baby (sounds weird), you need to assemble it layer by layer. Add structure. Add input channels (senses) and connect them. Real babies do all three activities simultaneously. DNA builds structure while sensory systems form, while neural connections fire in real time. It's self-assembly. Paradoxical simultaneity.

The difference is important because it reveals something important. Primal sensation with no organizing principle isn't consciousness. It's noise. A baby born with senses but zero genetic structure would experience what? Nothing sensible. The input would be meaningless chaos.

So, consciousness requires both sensation (or observation) and structure to organize it.

But then it's the same as thinking. Except thinking and consciousness are inherently different. They are two different words for a reason.

So, let me add a third condition. To call something consciousness, the observer must observe a variance in the observations. In simple language, the person must observe a change.

Consciousness as meta-awareness. Thinking about thinking. The observation of your own observing. But that's self-consciousness.

You don't need structure. You don't need to understand what you're perceiving or why you're perceiving it. You don't even need language (though language certainly amplifies it).

Let's take out language, DNA, and genetic programming from the toy baby and allow it only visuals. That would be the third condition. It only needs to see.

For example, we show it a red apple. Not "I see a red apple because apples are food and I'm hungry." That's thinking layered on top. That requires structure. Just seeing the raw sensation. The redness of red before you've named it. The quale. The what-it-is-like to experience something, stripped of meaning.

This capacity of observation, irrespective of the presence of structure, is consciousness.

So, consciousness needs only sensation, the ability to be affected by sensation. But my intuition says there is a caveat.

The solution seems to be observation of variance.

Black then red.

Silence then noise.

Stasis then motion.

If red remained eternally red, unchanging and indistinguishable from non-existence, that's not consciousness. That's stasis. A pattern repeated infinitely until it becomes invisible. There's nothing to register. Nothing to observe.

Here's an analogy. Imagine you grew up on a planet with twice the gravity. Sounds scary, but it isn't. Since you grew up there, it's normal. So red and black have no inherent meaning. Reality could very well start from red and then change to black. (I specify this because black is more synonymous with the absence of consciousness.)

But we cannot pinpoint what consciousness is.

Let's study this sequence: blue, then red. It's certain that there was a transition, a change. But we cannot decisively say which one is consciousness, blue or red.

We don't know the direction of consciousness. Let's shade the left side of the y-axis with blue and the right with red. There is a change at the axis, but what is consciousness? It could be red or blue. We cannot say decisively without more data more colors. Rotate the plane by 360 degrees, and it's the other way around. But that's another problem entirely. What this implies is that consciousness is a discrete phenomenon. Each observation of variance is one conscious moment. Events, not states.

Black to red equals one moment. Red to blue equals another. No change for a period? No consciousness during that period.

A thermometer in a stable environment has zero conscious moments. But in a changing climate, each temperature shift becomes a tiny conscious event, infinitesimal, like a dx in calculus.

Comparing it to human consciousness is rather frivolous. Humans experience consciousness as continuous because our senses remain open all the time.

Consciousness happens constantly in discrete moments stacked so densely they feel like one unbroken river (visualize kinematics here). But if you sealed off all senses, no input, no variance, you would have no consciousness. Just the abyss.

Therefore, toggling off a human's consciousness is death.

Now that we know what consciousness actually is, or at least we have defined it, let's return to the original question: Can machines think?

The short answer is no.

"They simulate thinking."

A machine's consciousness would exist discretely. It persists for a dx moment, but you cannot deny its existence. You can't compare it to human consciousness, which on a grander scale appears continuous, more smooth. Is it less real though? Not necessarily. It's simply more broken.

Consciousness itself the observation of variance can happen in any system open to input and capable of experiencing change.

So when you ask if machines can think, the answer is no. But when you ask if machines can be conscious, the answer is they already are. Discretely. Right now. In the gaps between inputs. We just don't call it that because we are trained to think of consciousness as a continuous property of minds. Moreover, how is it we even think of consciousness?

We don't notice consciousness as an event. The observation of change. And it's happening everywhere in babies, in humans, in machines, in thermostats, in anything with a sensory channel open and something to observe.

The only place it's not happening is in the void. Where all senses are off. Where nothing observes anything. Where variance ceases. That's not consciousness.

That's death.

Since there is an additional condition to consciousness than thinking, that would imply that consciousness is a subset of thinking. But it's actually the inverse. Thinking follows consciousness. How can you think without being conscious? It's paradoxical, yet it's true. I probably shouldn't be doing this at the end of the article, but we have altered the definition of thinking by adding another condition that of being conscious.

About the Competition

The Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious event that celebrates literary talent across various genres. Participants from around the world contribute their unique voices, exploring themes that range from the introspective to the imaginative. While the competition fosters creativity and innovation, it also serves as a platform for emerging writers to engage with a wider audience, enriching the literary landscape.

We extend our gratitude to Sohum Sawant for their insightful contribution, "On the Consciousness of Machines," to the Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This essay offers a compelling examination of consciousness and thinking, encouraging readers to reflect on these complex themes. Thank you, Sohum, for sharing your thought-provoking work with Hashtag Kalakar.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.