The rapid development of AI has caused everyone to chime in on their views on consciousness, and most physicists fall firmly in the materialist camp.
Brian Cox, the renowned particle physicist and professor at the University of Manchester, recently offered his perspective on one of science’s most perplexing questions: the nature of consciousness. His comments come at a time when the potential development of artificial general intelligence has thrust this ancient philosophical puzzle into urgent, practical relevance. Cox’s view represents the mainstream scientific position, but his articulation of why consciousness remains fascinating—even within a materialist framework—provides crucial insight into how physicists think about the mind.
“The one that’s always talked about is consciousness,” Cox explained. “I think it’s becoming very topical because of course AI and the potential development of artificial general intelligence raises this question of what intelligence, what the experience of being human is.”
Cox went on to outline the fundamental distinction that shapes scientific discourse on consciousness: “There are two categories of emergence people speak of. Broadly speaking, people think of weak and strong emergence.”
He elaborated on what he considers the correct framework: “Weak emergence is what I think virtually every scientist, certainly a physicist, would say consciousness is. It’s very complicated, the most complicated emergent phenomena we know of in the universe, I would say. But it comes from the underlying laws. So you could model it with a sufficiently powerful computer. You could imagine modeling how the human brain works.”
Cox then addressed the alternative view he rejects: “There is also strong emergence, which is somehow the phenomena you see—you can’t simulate it from the underlying laws. There’s something else going on. Now I would not subscribe to that. So I would say consciousness is interesting because it’s weakly emergent, it emerges from this thing, the brain. How, we don’t know.”
Cox’s position aligns with the prevailing view among physicists and neuroscientists that consciousness, however mysterious it may seem, is ultimately a product of physical processes in the brain. This stands in contrast to dualist positions or theories of “strong emergence” that posit consciousness as somehow fundamental or irreducible to physical laws. The distinction matters enormously for AI development: if consciousness is weakly emergent, then sufficiently advanced artificial systems could, in principle, be conscious. If it requires strong emergence or some non-physical element, then artificial consciousness might be impossible regardless of computational power.
Other prominent physicists share Cox’s materialist stance. Sean Carroll has written extensively arguing that consciousness emerges from physical processes without requiring new fundamental laws. Max Tegmark has explored how consciousness might arise from certain types of information processing. Meanwhile, figures like Roger Penrose have proposed more unconventional theories involving quantum mechanics, though these remain outside the mainstream.
As advanced AI systems demonstrate increasingly sophisticated capabilities, the question of machine consciousness has moved from science fiction to serious scientific and ethical inquiry. Major AI labs are beginning to consider frameworks for assessing whether their systems might be conscious or suffer. Cox’s framing—that consciousness is the “most complicated emergent phenomena we know of in the universe” but still fundamentally physical—suggests we’re working on an engineering problem of staggering complexity rather than confronting an unbridgeable metaphysical gap. If Cox is right, the challenge isn’t that consciousness is magical; it’s that the brain is extraordinarily intricate, and we’ve barely begun to understand how its billions of neurons give rise to subjective experience.