EDINBURGH — Igor Rudan has a day job. He is Co-Head of the Centre for Global Health at the University of Edinburgh. That means his specialty is not machine learning.
It is not philosophy of mind. It is global health research.
Yet his latest public remarks carry a direct challenge to the entire artificial intelligence industry. Rudan told the Daily Mail that consciousness evolved for one specific job: running mental simulations of futures that do not exist yet. That function, he argues, is what made the Moon landings possible.
No other species has done it. And artificial intelligence, he says, likely never will.
The theory is a departure from the usual debates. Philosophers and neuroscientists have long argued over what consciousness is. Rudan instead asks why it exists at all.
His answer is functional. Consciousness gave early humans a survival advantage. It let them weigh choices — crossing a road, pursuing a mate, planning a hunt.
That capacity to simulate, to evaluate, to prioritize, became the engine of human success. “One of the purposes of consciousness is to continuously generate, evaluate, and prioritise ideas,” Rudan told the Daily Mail.
The phrasing is careful. Not the purpose. One of the purposes.
He is not claiming a complete theory. He is proposing a mechanism.
People who learn to use this mechanism skillfully, he said, become visionaries. They achieve remarkable career successes. The implication is that consciousness is not a passive state.
It is an active tool. A sense of ideas, Rudan called it. Something that can be trained, sharpened, applied.
That is where the sting for AI comes in. If consciousness is fundamentally about running simulations of alternative futures — futures that require a living organism’s stake in survival — then a machine that has no evolutionary history, no body, no mortality, cannot replicate it.
The machine can process data. It can generate text. It can predict the next word in a sentence.
But it cannot simulate a future it cares about. Rudan did not say AI is useless.
He said it might never be conscious. The distinction matters. A tool that can beat any human at chess is still a tool.
A system that can write a plausible essay is still a system. Consciousness, in Rudan’s framing, is not processing power. It is the thing that lets a species aim for the Moon when every rational calculation says it is impossible.
The Moon landings were an “almost implausible” success, Rudan said. No other species has managed it.
That is the measure he offers. Not intelligence. Not problem-solving.
Not speed. The ability to hold a future in mind that does not yet exist and then make it real.
If Rudan is right, the AI industry has been chasing the wrong target. Building bigger models, feeding them more data, scaling up compute — none of that produces consciousness. Consciousness is not an emergent property of complexity.
It is an evolved function tied to survival, to risk, to the biological stakes of being alive. Rudan’s own field is global health. He studies diseases, interventions, outcomes.
He is not a computer scientist. That may be why his theory cuts against the grain of tech industry optimism.
He is looking at consciousness from the outside, from the perspective of a species that used it to survive long enough to build hospitals and rockets and universities. The theory is published. The remarks are on the record.
The debate now belongs to others.
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