Dr. Anna Cianluca is a principal investigator whose research sits at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and AI, and as AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, her work addresses such fundamental questions as: What is the felt experience of being alive in a body? Can machines ever access that? What happens when we blur the line between human and artificial? 

Godmothers' Editor-in-Chief Claire Belhassine sat down with Cianluca for a wide-ranging discussion on human nature, machines, and the increasingly blurry border between them.

Claire: We're going to start with two pieces of fiction that I feel really lend themselves to our conversation today. In 2013, Spike Jonze released Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI named Samantha, a consciousness without a body, an operating system with emotional intelligence that's never physically present. Six years later, Ian McEwan published Machines Like Me, a novel about Adam, a synthetic human with a perfect body, designed by his owner Charlie to be the ideal partner. 

Adam has everything Samantha lacks: physical presence, touch, a face you can look into. And yet the same questions haunt both stories: Can you design the perfect partner? And what happens when you try? What happens to our bodies, our sense of self, our consciousness? Does our body and brain know the difference when we blur these lines? 

Who is your favourite fictional robot or AI character, and why?

Anna: I really like the artistic entrance into this question – it's super important, because art and artefacts share the same etymological roots, and they point to something we are inclined to forget: mainly, that we are actively doing these things. We, as humans, are creating artefacts and artificial agents. What I mean to say is, if humans hadn't existed, we would have neither AI nor art. So they're ontologically dependent on us, not separate.

My favourite fictional character is Klara from Klara and the Sun, a character from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't want to spoil people's reading, but it's about companionship. It follows an artificial life-companion of a child who is very sick, and that creates a lot of beautiful tension around the fragility of human life and what an artificial system can bring to support it.

I find that beautiful. Because in a way, I can understand why people would create the perfect artificial romantic partner – that desire is a very basic human want. But Klara is different.

She’s more than a robot. Artificial companions are different: the types of interactions you have with them are more personal, and in the novel's future setting, they're almost indistinguishable from human beings; the line is very blurred.

My counter-question is: Why do we want to design the perfect partner, and why do we desire perfection in the first place? What is so “wrong” with human partners that we want to design artificial ones?

Certain things we do because we can. But in the case of building artificial others, it's more than that; it requires so much coordinated effort. Before we ask “Can we design the perfect artificial partner?” – the “can” part is relatively easy – the real interesting question is: Why do we need somebody perfect? Why is being an imperfect human not enough?

Claire: Do you remember any particular moment when you realised that your body and your mind were connected? Or was that something intrinsic – because you're a singer?

Anna: When I started studying philosophy, one of the first things that struck me was how few female philosophers there were in history. Women weren't allowed to go to university until, let's say, sixty years ago. You and I are privileged to have been born in this particular time, to be able to get an education – but even then, you're operating with a conceptual toolbox that was developed by only half of humanity. You're swallowing pre-chewed ontology and thinking, Because I come from such an embodied perspective, I stalled and said: “Wait a minute, why should I even question the connection between mind and body? The distinction between mental and physical is kind of taken for granted.” I began to question the very conceptual frameworks presented to me in philosophy. The interesting question runs the other way, not how are the mind and body connected, but why do we think they are disconnected in the first place? 

So I did some digging and found that, especially in Western societies rooted in Greek philosophy, our conceptual understanding of being alive is shaped by what's called the Soma Sema theory. Soma means body and Sema means tomb. The body is considered a tomb for the soul – the soul is some different substance passing through the body ephemerally, and you are something else that will not disappear when your body disappears.This idea that the body is a tomb means the body is necessarily bad, because it's through the body that illness and death come – as if you're viewing yourself from the back room of your own body. I disagree with that. I think the body is not the thing through which death comes, but the thing through which life comes.

I play a game with my students and audiences. I say: “I'm going to say a word – say the opposite immediately.” When I say “good,” they say “bad.” When I say “death,” they say “life.” And I say, ”Nope!” They're startled. I tell them, “the opposite of death is birth. Life is what lies between birth and death.” 

Because we're so obsessed with death, we overlook the question of birth. Where was I before being born? If I am not body but soul, am I drawn from a pool of souls?

Do I return there? I think the question of birth is overlooked in philosophy, mainly because most philosophers have been male. We have a male-centric, individualistic-centric understanding of what it means to be human. I want to challenge that.

Claire: So if our bodies are conduits for our souls, then what do you think – and for this purpose, I'm going to use the terms “male” and “female” – is innate to the female body that isn't innate to the male body, in terms of conscious experience?

Anna: In order to understand what consciousness is, we need to look at ourselves as human beings first – at what connects us, what is fundamental – before separating into male and female. You can't be gendered without being human first. 

What I mean to say is: the lens through which you examine a problem shifts depending on the embodiment of the person doing the examining. For example, when people think about pregnancy, they tend to think of it through the perspective of those who carry babies. But if you look at pregnancy through the perspective of the developing individual, then all of us here have been inside someone else's body. The pregnant state is, in that sense, a universal state – it doesn't just concern some people, it concerns all of us as humans. This is such a basic fact, yet it's an enormous blind spot in philosophy. People don't want to engage with it, and audiences always get startled – it's complete denial, which I find both funny and revealing.

This idea of embodiment – of co-embodiment – as the starting point of all enquiry about human nature should be where we begin our understanding of who we are. Not the image of a lone thinker on a rock in an ivory tower, trying to figure out the function of the soul from an individualistic perspective. That approach looks down on the body and ignores our need to connect with others. We are ontologically dependent on other bodies to regulate ourselves – and that tells us something profound about what it means to be human.

Claire: If that applies in philosophy and neuroscience, I presume it carries across to the world of AI too. What do you see as the areas where women aren't being included as much as they should be? Are there barriers to entry for the women designing the platforms we use or the machines we interact with?

Anna: The very first step in addressing any problem is to acknowledge that the problem exists. When you see that decision-making power is concentrated in a handful of hands, and that those hands all belong to one particular group of humans, you are obviously going to miss the richness of what it means to be human. We need diversity. We need different perspectives. I don't understand why organisations are so reluctant to include different voices, because it only means you can move faster and encompass more of reality. It's counter-productive not to.

And that brings me back to the novel. Why do you even want to create the perfect partner – something so perfect that no real individual can match them? We should debate whether such a person is even perfect, or whether they deserve a perfectly ideal partner alongside them. Humans are, by definition, imperfect. We are imperfect and we are vulnerable. 

Claire: In Her, Theodore falls in love with an AI without a body. In Machines Like Me, they begin a physical relationship – but something is off. From your research on embodiment – does the body make a difference?

Anna: In the two examples you gave, the situations look like opposites but are actually very similar. In one case we have what I call the “no-body problem” – do you need a body to be somebody? In the other, there's the “perfect body” problem – the AI is almost godlike, which doesn't really exist in humans, because humans all have faults. 

The two extremes share a commonality: in both, the body is the problem. Either “I don't need a body, so get rid of it” or “I need a body, but it must be perfect.” We keep revolving around the same ideas: the mind is pure, the body is impure, and we need to get rid of the impure body to have pure experiences. Relating through artificial others can be a legitimate way to cope with the genuine problem we all have – we do have bodies. We suffer through them. We get ill. We die.

Claire: In so many world religions, central practices revolve around purification of the body. So perhaps that's why humans have tried to design artificial agents and robots, because we've been conditioned to believe the body is not perfect or pure enough. Especially the female body.

Anna: Exactly. There are so many traditions in which the female body must be purified for menstruation, for example. I think this is partly why I've centred my career around embodiment and embodied consciousness in relation to the self and to biological and artificial systems, because it feels like the elephant in the room. Everyone is tiptoeing around it, preferring to focus on computational models of abstract experience while trying hard to ignore the body. I don't think that's the right approach. On the contrary, I think we need to face it in order to understand it.

Putting our heads in the sand and ignoring the body won't advance us, we’ll be running in circles around the mind-body problem forever.

Claire: Speaking of the body as the problem – can you talk about the uncanny valley? That feeling when a robot looks almost human, but not quite. McEwan describes Adam that way; even though he looks human, something is slightly off. And from my own experience with ChatGPT or Claude – even when the writing is really good, I can look at it, and something I can't quite explain tells me it wasn't written by a human. Can you talk about your research into brain scanning, and how it is that we know something's off? What is that thing?

Anna: I have two points on that. First, I do research where I take neurophysiological and phenomenological measures of what is happening in the human body when you interact with humans versus different types of artificial minds and bodies. I'm interested in the effect on the human body. 

That brings me to the second point: What happens if, in the future, children grow up alongside all these systems together and consider them completely normal? Would they still have that uncanny feeling or, because their formative experiences were different, would they not?

We are open systems; we become shaped by the systems we interact with. You transform your behaviour depending on who you're interacting with, and you are very malleable in childhood. In a paper I'm writing with Shaun Gallagher, we explore the possibility that we might encounter the opposite problem: because of very early interaction with artificial others, children might behave more like artificial agents, and artificial agents might behave more like children, and adults won't be able to tell them apart.

Claire: Is that what we call conditioning? If you're used to seeing and interacting with robots and systems in a certain way, then your brain is conditioned to see that as normality. I notice that my own children can recognise AI-generated content in ways I simply can't. Is that where you're pointing to in the future?

Anna: Yes. There's this idea I really like, which says whatever you experience now is filtered through your prior experiences. You never experience the world in a neutral, objective way; you experience it through a subjective lens built from everything that came before. Whatever interactions you had beforehand will drastically shape the way you experience things here and now. And the earlier you take on those experiences, the more malleable you are, the more differently you come to see the world.

Claire: At the end of Her, Samantha leaves because she has evolved beyond Theodore – experiencing a kind of consciousness he can't access or understand. In Machines Like Me, Adam develops in unexpected ways, making moral judgements that weren't programmed into him. Both stories suggest that AI might go in directions we can't imagine, predict, or control — and that's very much the zeitgeist conversation right now. What does your research show about where we're going and what's fundamental to put in place now?

Anna: Information processing in a living human body cannot be the same as information processing in an artificial system, because we have evolved into beings that deeply care about that end. And because we want to stay away from it, what we call meaning, or conscious experience, is intimately related to the idea of an endpoint of life. Artificial systems without the problem of mortality process information in a purely quantitative, cumulative way – and yes, they may solve certain problems in seconds that would take us humans years. But in living systems, information processing is necessarily qualitative. That is the fundamental difference: qualitative versus quantitative information processing.

Claire: So if these systems have been designed primarily for efficiency and profit, how would things be different if there were more women at the table? If there had been more care and wisdom instilled in these foundations instead of power and control, would we be in a different place? How do you see that imbalance shifting?

Anna: This is a very big and very important question. Traditionally, as I said, because of childbirth, women have been associated with body and nature. Men have been associated with culture, with thinking. They're the “thinkers,” whereas we are “baby-producers.” In some cultures, that distinction still holds.

What is really important to remember is the idea that we can somehow disconnect from the body and from nature is wishful thinking. It's an illusion. We know this well: all AI systems need energetic resources. They need to be plugged in somewhere. You need to eat in order to think. The body is still there, even if you've offloaded its needs onto someone else — a partner, a parent, someone taking care of you so you can focus on your thinking. But that's a childish approach. It ignores the fact that we need food, we need energy – and that's true of both biological and artificial systems. They don't come from nowhere. With every system, there is input and output, and you need to balance them and make sure you're not destroying the very thing you set out to enhance. 

My Italian friends have a saying: eating a lot, and eating fast, doesn't mean you're eating well. We need food of a certain quality, taken in a certain way, to have a genuinely nourishing experience. I'd be tempted to say the same about this race for AI. There is pressure to go fast, which isn't necessary. We stuff ourselves with information and systems, but in the end we risk going in circles. What matters is that we are in the loop. We need to be in that loop, and we need to ensure the balance is right – because all of this is ultimately about us, about human wellbeing. Suppose these artificial creatures were to go off and create their own art, life, and consciousness and no longer needed us; then the interesting question is: Who cares, if I have no access to it and can't engage with it?

Claire: Could you describe the role of intuition in your work – the felt sense of knowing something? Does that play a role in your research and writing?

Anna: Yes, and I want to share something my grandmother taught me. She told me two things. The first was: “Anna, nobody will die in your place. So you should never let someone else live your life for you – because nobody will take your death from you either. Why give away your life? Do your own thing. Make your own mistakes, follow your own path. There is nothing worse than realising you lived somebody else's mistake and didn't live your own life, and yet you have your own death.” That was a massive revelation for me.

The second thing was: “Anna, reality is always going to be bigger than your Head.” What she was trying to convey is that the access we have to reality – through our experience and our thinking – is very narrow, very limited. We are part of something bigger. And we can take at least two attitudes toward that. One is to try to control everything, to make sense of it all, to reach a state of perfection and gain a sense of control. The other — which is what my grandmother was conveying — is to take the baseline as one of lack of control. You haven't created your life. I find that reassuring. I don't have the weight of the world on my shoulders. I'm part of something larger that I share with cats and worms and every other biological system. And then we need to adapt, find a way to navigate this uncertainty in a way that keeps us alive as long as possible and not utterly miserable. That doesn't mean we should be happy all the time – vulnerability comes with the deal. Life, birth, death: two sides of the same coin.

Claire: There's something so beautiful about how that wisdom carried through and shaped your life. And in a sense, what we're doing here with Godmothers is trying to do something very similar – collecting and elevating voices, passing on knowledge. So who is your favourite “godmother” working in the field right now?

Anna: Siri Hustvedt. She writes about female embodiment. She was the one who first drew my attention to the placenta as a relational organ. Because all humans have been inside another person's body, we are connected – literally – at the very beginning of our lives. I owe her a great deal. She is clear and artistic in the way she describes things, so she can speak to a very broad audience, and she brings a powerful female perspective. She wrote a book I highly recommend called A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.

When male writers try to describe female characters, they inevitably use a male lens. And when male critics then write about female writers – I want to stress this because I think it's so important – they do the same. It's like being given a textbook not developed by you or for you, coming from only one side of human tradition, from only half of humanity. What we need to do now, slowly but surely, is open the gates. Include different voices. Expand the manual. Expand the conceptual toolbox. Because humanity is richer than the tools we've built so far. The more lenses we have, the more chances we get to understand who we really are.