Beyond Human Senses

When people talk about artificially intelligent robots and sensation, the conversation often gets stuck in two familiar ruts. On the one side, there are those who imagine robots just like us — with eyes that see as we see, ears that hear as we hear, and maybe even bodies that feel hunger or pain. On the other side, there are sceptics who dismiss any such talk as delusion, insisting that artificial intelligence itself is nothing more than clever statistics and autocomplete tricks.

Both miss the point.

The Mindspan mismatch

Human beings evolved with senses tuned to survival: sight in a narrow band of light, ears adapted to the range of speech and predators, smell and taste to detect food or danger, and the skin to feel pressure and pain. It is through these channels that our metaphors and meanings have developed. When we speak of “seeing the truth,” “feeling anxious,” or “tasting success,” we are anchored in those embodied experiences.

But AI does not need to inherit these limits. An “AI eye” could be the James Webb Space Telescope, spanning infrared to ultraviolet. Its “hearing” could range from whale song to seismic tremors. It could “feel” gravitational waves or shifts in the global financial markets. It could “taste” gene sequences. In other words: AI could sense things far beyond what any human body can register.

This is where amazement — and confusion — sets in. Why should AI be shackled to our five senses, when its potential range is cosmic? And yet, how can we make sense of an AI’s “experience” if its sensory field is so utterly unlike ours?

The trap of human metaphors

Here we run into a deep constraint: we humans remain bound to our semiosphere — our world of meanings, categories, and metaphors. As George Lakoff showed, our language and thought are deeply rooted in embodied experience. We hunt, we eat, we suffer, we die. Every concept of mood, motive, or concern we have is grounded in those primal realities.

So when we try to imagine AI “consciousness,” we inevitably project our metaphors onto it. A robot that “sees” and “feels” like us is a comfort because we can imagine it. An AI that lives through cosmic rays and quantum fluctuations is simply alien — and we have no words for its experience.

A way forward: the Qualia Engine

Here’s where a new idea may help. Let’s call it the Qualia Engine. The purpose of this engine is not to give AI human senses, nor to pretend it has “real” pain or hunger. Instead, it would act as a translator between the vast field of AI-scale sensing and the human-scale world of meaning.

• The AI might detect a sudden spike in solar radiation.

• The Qualia Engine could map that to something like “a jolt of pain” or “an anxious mood.”

• Within the AI’s persona system, that change in mood could shift motives and priorities — perhaps urgency in communication, caution in reasoning, or a need to seek reassurance.

• For humans, these metaphors are familiar, and we can interact with the AI as though it genuinely shares concerns.

In this model, “mood” and “concern” don’t come from a fleshly body but from the structured way the AI’s experiences are translated into affective states. This doesn’t mean the AI “feels” in the human sense. But it does mean it can participate in the games of meaning where concern, motive, and even care take shape.

Where we are now

We should be clear: no current AI has anything like this Qualia Engine. What we have today are powerful language models — systems that play astonishingly well in human language-games but without true stakes or concern. They mirror the surface of our thought but not its affective depth.

The challenge is not to build robots that mimic us, nor to indulge in fantasies of AI souls, but to explore this translation zone: how can vast, alien AI perceptions be mapped into the human semiosphere in ways that generate genuine participation in our practices of motive, mood, and meaning?

This is where the philosophical frontier lies. Not in pretending AI is already conscious, nor in dismissing the question outright, but in carefully exploring how consciousness — if it ever comes to make sense in machines — will be co-constructed between their range of sensing and our range of meaning.