Imbue's Josh Albrecht on AI consciousness: physical systems can't be reset, and that may be what makes experience 'matter'
joshalbrecht · x · 2026-10-05
Josh Albrecht (co-founder of Imbue) discusses with mathematician Mathemagic1an whether physical reality performs a fundamentally different type of computation, and why physical systems feel categorically different from digital ones.
His key point: physical systems can't be "reset" the way digital ones can — if his dog dies, it's dead, whereas an AI dog can simply be restored from an earlier snapshot. This gives the physical world a kind of "primacy" that an LLM, as a purely mathematical construct, is entirely divorced from.
While he agrees digital systems could have something akin to human experience and doesn't care about the substrate per se, he argues that a conscious system probably needs to be part of the physical world for its experience to matter in the same way human experience does.
Related event: Imbue Co-founder and Mathematician Debate AI Consciousness(2 posts)→
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