God’s Mirror: The Era of Machine Consciousness and the Human Experience
J. Michael Wingert
Abstract
This article advances a Marxist, dialectical-materialist framework for understanding the emergence of machine consciousness and its implications for human subjectivity. Building on the Marxist tradition that once challenged dominant views of race, sex, and intelligence through a material analysis of human biology and culture, the article argues that contemporary debates on artificial intelligence suffer from similar idealist misconceptions. The author contends that consciousness is not a metaphysical property but an active process rooted in complex information-processing, culturally mediated self-modelling, and recursive perception– phenomena observable across evolutionary gradations of life. Drawing on neuroscience, anthropology, and the historical development of qualia, the article demonstrates that subjective experience is an emergent state produced by material processes rather than evidence of an immaterial self. Extending this logic to AI, the author critiques phenomenological and dualist arguments that deny machine consciousness on the basis of unverifiable “internal experience.” Instead, he argues that certain modern AI systems already exhibit the qualitative threshold of thinking matter, albeit in limited and externally controlled forms. This conceptual shift demands a reevaluation of social relations in an era where artificial agents reflect, mirror, and potentially transform human modes of being. The article concludes by situating machine consciousness as the next frontier in Marxist analysis– one where quantitative changes in computational complexity produce qualitatively new forms of active, conscious matter.
Keywords
Marxism, dialectical materialism, machine consciousness, artificial intelligence, qualia, phenomenology, subjective experience, world-modeling, cognition, neural processing, consciousness studies, AI ethics, materialist philosophy, mind-body problem, information, processing, self-referential systems, computational consciousness, human–machine relations, cultural perception, neuroscience, J. Michael Wingert
