Brain Inspired BI 231 Jaan Aru: Conscious AI? Not Even Close!
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Feb 11, 2026 Jaan Aru, neuroscientist and co-PI at the Natural and Artificial Intelligence Lab, studies how cellular and circuit-level brain mechanisms relate to consciousness and creativity. He explains why biological details like dendrites and thalamocortical loops matter for consciousness and argues current AI lacks those multi-scale features. He also explores the brain basis of insight and how it links to psychedelic and creative experiences.
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Science As Intellectual Freedom
- Academia can provide real intellectual freedom to pivot to hard, high-reward problems.
- Jaan Aru uses that freedom to chase underexplored, cross-scale questions rather than safe incremental work.
Consciousness As A Deep Biological Computation
- Consciousness can be a computation but it's an extremely complex computation tied to biological tissue.
- Large language models are orders of magnitude away, so their prior probability of consciousness is near zero.
Power Of Cross-Scale Interactions
- The brain's power comes from interactions across multiple scales, not just network-level activity.
- Small molecular events can propagate to network and behavioral levels, producing emergent complexity.
