AI Specialist Explains Why AI Can’t Replicate Human Experience
A profound recent experience crystallized the difference for him between brain and machineAt LinkedIn, Australian AI specialist Alberto Chierici recounts a recent experience that gave him insight into why the brain is not a machine, and therefore that AI can’t simply replicate the brain:
Artificial General Intelligence is the promise of machines that can think, learn, and adapt like humans do. What if the $500B AI race is built on a myth?
Hear this out. There could be a devastating philosophical flaw.
Wednesday morning, as I was wrestling with these questions, something happened that put everything in perspective.
At 5:45 AM, my room slowly filled with the most extraordinary light. The sunrise painted my walls in shades of amber and rose that no digital screen could capture. I got up from my bed, drawn to the window, and took a photograph.
In that moment, something crystallized for me:
A machine learning algorithm can analyze millions of sunrise photos, generate stunning images, even predict the exact time the sun will peek over the horizon. But it cannot feel that quiet awe, that spontaneous urge to capture beauty, that deeply human moment of connection with the world around us.
Perhaps that’s the most important problem of all:
In our rush to make machines more like us, we are forgetting what makes us uniquely human. “,” January 25, 3034

As part of his goal of “Helping leaders build human-centric AI,” he and Erik J. Larson, author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (2021) will be discussing this in the first episode of the Honest AI podcast, launching in February. Check back here for more details.
Note: Many researchers honestly believe, of course, that the human mind can be reduced to mere brain functions that they can pinpoint. Indeed, so far as they are concerned, the only purpose of a discipline like cognitive psychology is to do so.
I wrote about this recently in “Scientists wrestling with human consciousness are in for the win.” Yet they can’t win because what they are doing amounts to a form of shadow boxing. They are using human consciousness to define human consciousness, which becomes a form of circular reasoning.
As Michael Egnor and I argue in The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), the specifically human elements of consciousness — reason and moral choice — are immaterial. A scientific explanation must address and include that fact. Otherwise, David Chalmers’ famous “Hard Problem of Consciousness” becomes an impossible one. Not that that will prevent anyone from writing arcane theories about it.