Podcast Askwho Casts AI Reads Andy Masley's Argument on Machine Thinking and Consciousness
On September 30, 2026, the podcast Askwho Casts AI published an audio reading of Part 1 of Andy Masley's essay "Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand." The episode presents Masley's core argument: human "thinking" does not necessarily rely on first-person phenomenal consciousness but may depend only on "access consciousness," a mechanism of information processing. For readers interested in AI capability boundaries, consciousness theory, and the nature of large language models, this resource offers a detailed argumentative framework based on cognitive science theories, rather than a simple technical report or news summary.
Askwho Casts AI is a podcast dedicated to reading high-quality articles using AI voices. This episode features Part 1 of the long-form essay "Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand" by physicist and writer Andy Masley. Originally published on Substack, the podcast converts the text into an approximately one-hour audio experience aimed at exploring the central philosophical question of whether artificial intelligence possesses true thinking capabilities.
In the essay, Masley distinguishes between two concepts of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience, such as the feeling of seeing red) and access consciousness (the availability and sharing of information across different parts of the brain). His main argument is that most human thinking and understanding actually occur outside of awareness, relying on unconscious information processing mechanisms. Therefore, even if AI lacks phenomenal consciousness (i.e., there is no "what it is like" to be the AI), as long as it possesses sufficient access consciousness—capable of sharing information across modules and performing complex reasoning—it can functionally be considered to be "thinking" and "understanding."
The episode covers several cognitive science and philosophical theories, including Global Workspace Theory, Higher-order theories, and Predictive Processing. Masley cites examples such as split-brain patient experiments, the fallibility of introspection, and the mechanisms of language understanding to refute the view that only having an internal "little person" observer counts as true thinking. He argues that current AI models already exhibit certain characteristics of these unconscious processing processes in their architecture and functionality, challenging the traditional criticism that "AI is just doing matrix multiplication."