Between Impulse and Understanding

What happens to our understanding of humanity when machines begin to do things we have long considered uniquely human?

Artificial intelligence challenges more than our work and our society. It also forces us to ask a more fundamental question: What is consciousness — and how certain can we be that human understanding rests on something fundamentally different from the processes we create in machines?

Between Impulse and Understanding explores this question through two distinct but connected movements.

The first part develops a model in which consciousness is understood as an ongoing process rather than a special substance or an inexplicable core. Impulses are received, integrated, weighed and connected with past experience. The model is not presented as proven. Instead, its implications are pursued consistently enough to challenge the assumption that human consciousness must be something magical or unique.

In the second part, the model encounters lived experience. Drawing on a long working life in technology and management, and on experiences of education, organisations and personal choices, the book examines what happens between an impulse and the understanding we eventually experience as our own.

The book offers no final answer to whether machines can become conscious. It asks a more difficult question: How much of what we call human can be explained without first assuming that humanity is something fundamentally special?