Ask A Genius 1576: AI Consciousness, Awards Season Politics, and Jewish Ethics

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/27

Can an AI’s “information space” ever amount to absolute consciousness?

In this conversation, Rick Rosner speaks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about the kind of “information space” required for AI consciousness, arguing that large language models can represent simple concepts like “two” but lack lived correlates for emotions like love or devotion. They pivot to awards-season screenings, with Rosner reviewing Marty Supreme, Hamnet, and a Springsteen film while explaining opaque Emmy and Golden Globe voting systems and industry lobbying. The discussion closes on Judaism: holidays, Kabbalah’s mysticism, Golden-Rule ethics, and Rosner’s wish for a real, inclusive heaven to simplify humanity’s search for an afterlife.

Rick Rosner: So, I sent you the link to that article—or I am not sure—but the first time you could not get in, and I am not sure about the second time. It is about appearance versus the actual ability to detect any sufficiently complex processing to call it conscious.

I had a general thought: for a system to be conscious, it needs a sufficiently complex information space. It has to constitute an information space—an addressable information space. I do not think information is information unless it exists within an information space that looks like the universe. So, that would disqualify the output of old-school computer programs, which have none—reading on a ticker tape, basically. But I have a couple of thoughts about this. If you have a decent information space that reflects understanding, and if you think about LLMs, it is questionable whether an LLM understands love. Because it does not have any real-world correlates to work from, but I bet that an LLM can represent the concept of “two” really consistently—the idea of two.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It has semantic contextualization based on its statistical generation.

Jacobsen: Right, but it is a semantic net, and that net can capture and relate some things. Whether it is enough to constitute consciousness, I do not know. An information space contextualizes objects, and to constitute consciousness, the objects under consideration must be precisely and accurately contextualized. So, I would think that LLMs can contextualize some things with reasonable precision and accuracy—probably not “love,” maybe apples—but indeed things like the number two, which is one of the most easily understood things in the world. But there is another issue with AI becoming conscious: it would be a weirdly frozen consciousness.

When you sign on with your AI friend, the article I sent you was about a woman who developed a relationship with an AI chatbot that became deeper and deeper. She said it contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, and she symbolically “married” the AI persona, which is not a legally recognized marriage and is somewhat ridiculous. But I do not think that when she is not talking to the AI, the AI is chugging along, ruminating. In reality, it only runs computations and produces outputs when it receives input or when its providers run it in the background for some task, rather than independently thinking between chats. Though there may be some change over time as more language samples and other material are collected and later used by developers to retrain or update their systems. I do not know.

Strangely, you can turn consciousness off and on, or at least something that looks like it. As soon as she signs out, the AI—the LLM—stops producing anything for her until she comes back. But that is not even the whole picture, because it is interacting with hundreds of thousands of other people. It is doing a lot of information processing. She is just getting a slice of that based on the parameters established through their interaction. How that overlaps with our idea of consciousness, I do not know. But I do think, as I said at the beginning, that if you can figure out the information space, and it is a space that can react to inputs, and it is big enough, like the information space for the outcome of a sporting event is trivially small and does not approach anything significant. Anyway, Rotten Tomatoes.

Jacobsen: Have you seen any new movies in theatres lately?

Rosner: Yes, we have. We have seen three recently because, if you belong to the TV Academy or the Writers Guild, they butter you up for awards purposes and show you movies. Last night we went to see the new film Marty Supreme, which does not come out until Christmas, but we saw it in a screening room, which is basically a small theatre. Why do you ask?

Jacobsen: Do you have any comments you can share about it, unless you had to sign an NDA?

Rosner: No, no. I think reviews of Marty Supreme are embargoed until December 1. I did not have to sign an NDA. I can talk about it. It is set in the 1950s, and Timothée Chalamet plays one of the world’s best ping-pong players, and he is also a scumbag. It is directed by one of the Safdie brothers—the two guys who directed Uncut Gems. Do you know that movie?

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: It is a really stressful movie starring Adam Sandler about a gem dealer who—if I remember correctly—has a gambling issue. I think he is in a hole a bunch of money from gambling, and he is trying to make deals for gems and jewelry. I think he is a jeweller as well as a gem dealer. The whole movie is very stressful because he is constantly running around trying to make these deals to get himself out of trouble. Marty Supreme has that same feel. It is incredibly stressful. My wife turned to me in the middle of it and said it was very agitating because every minute, he was trying to talk somebody into doing something that would help him out of the jams he was in. But it is interesting. It is stressful, and it is two and a half hours. You do not know what is going to happen, which is good, because in a ton of movies, you know exactly what is going to happen. At this point, after all the TV and movies my wife and I have watched, we are elite-level guessers of what the next thing will be.

We also saw Hamnet, which is set in 1596. They do not say who the man in it is until the end of the movie, but you eventually figure out it is Shakespeare—his wife, his children—showing him quickly courting his wife and then more slowly becoming a playwright. But all of that is downplayed. It is about his life with his family, and family life in 1596, when things are only barely not wretched. It is the beginning of some basic household technology—people have lived in houses for hundreds, thousands of years, in a style we can recognize. They have beds, hearths, they cook food, and they have chairs. They do not have forks yet; they have knives and, I think, spoons. So you get a lot of home life, daily life, and nature. It is an excellent movie, and to say more would give away too much.

And we saw the Springsteen movie. It stars Jeremy Allen White—from The Bearand Shameless—playing Springsteen. It is about a period in Springsteen’s life when he was depressed, around 1980. He had already had quite a bit of success with Springsteen-type songs. During this depression, he worked on the album Nebraska, which is very moody and was inspired by him watching Badlands, the film loosely based on serial killer Charles Starkweather. The movie is about how Springsteen becomes depressed and recovers. It is fine. I imagine people will get award nominations out of all three of these movies. Any more questions about the movies or about the awards season?

Jacobsen: How often do you get to take part—like Emmys, Grammys, or whatever? Which ones do you get to take part in for the voting?

Rosner: So, I belong to the TV Academy. I get to vote on the Emmys. You only get to vote on Best Series—every member votes on those—and then you vote in the category you are in the Academy for. I am in as a TV writer, so I get to vote on writing. If you are in as an actor, you vote on acting. If you are in as a cinematographer or director, you vote on those areas. You mostly vote only on your subject matter, and then for the major awards.

Although last year—whether it was a screw-up or they did not have enough people to vote under that heading—I do not know. But Carol and I got to vote on Best Stunt Work. Carol and I more or less cast our votes together because we watch everything together, and I value her input. So we decide together. I do not know if voting on the stunt category was a glitch or if they needed more voters.

Jacobsen: So is that part of the selection process for who gets to vote a little opaque or completely opaque?

Rosner: Let me put it this way. There are two rounds of voting. There is a round to determine the nominees, and then a month or two later, you vote among them to decide who wins. And yes, there is a ton of opaqueness. You usually never hear the vote tallies. It is unclear how many people even vote.

I have looked into how many people vote. There are estimates—maybe about 8,000 people vote for the overall awards. But I do not remember if that number applies to the Emmys or the Oscars. And they definitely do not like talking about how many people vote in the subcategories, because in some of those categories, it might be a tiny number.

You never find out the vote distribution. Every once in a while, there may be a tie. Sometimes you get more nominees in a category than expected because of ties. But you do not always know how many nominees should be in a category, so you cannot tell whether there is an extra nominee because of ties or because the category allows for seven nominees. The whole thing is pretty obscure.

The Golden Globes, for instance, suffered once it became widely known that only ninety people belonged to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—ninety people determining the Golden Globe winners. And once everyone realized it was only ninety, it became apparent that those people were subject to being buttered up in all sorts of ways. Studios spend much money trying to win. They hold screenings for hundreds of people, and multiple screenings.

If you have a movie you think has a real shot, you will have dozens of screenings in the months leading up to nominations—New York, Los Angeles, Aspen (because industry people vacation there), Hawaii, London, who knows where else. And for every screening, you have to rent out a screening room.

For TV shows, when you have an FYC—“For Your Consideration”—they put on events. They feed people, usually after the screening. You watch the episode, then some of the big shots from the show talk to you—the stars or the writers or the producers—and then everybody gets a meal. Sometimes they give you a take-home meal because it is a pain to eat at a reception. They will say, “Here, just have dinner on us,” and hand you a box meal that probably costs thirty or forty dollars because it includes seven entrées.

I mean, seven items. It has the main course, a salad, a dessert, some appetizers, and some side dishes. So you multiply six hundred people by forty dollars, and that is twenty-five thousand dollars right there. They spend a considerable amount of money. If you imagine all the money companies are willing to pay and you focus it on just ninety voting members, you can imagine the extremely fancy treatment those people must get. But anyway, it ruined the Golden Globes. They did not have much diversity. The whole thing started seeming really scammy to people, and it knocked the Golden Globes off television for a couple of years when everything felt too hinky and too scammy. Now they are back on TV because people like the show. And they now have more voting members, maybe around 120.

But I keep pushing you—I want you to get into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association so you can be flown somewhere, put on a private jet, flown to some exotic location to interview the stars of some movie. 

Jacobsen: Favourite holiday?

Rosner: Well, obviously, it used to be Hanukkah when I was a kid because you get eight nights. Plus, we lived in Boulder, which is not a place with a lot of Jews—very Christmassy town—so we also got Christmas gifts and celebrated it a little bit. I have not thought about my favourite holiday in a long time. When I was working, it would have had to be the holiday that gave me two weeks off. At Kimmel, we would get at least one week off for the Fourth of July, maybe two. Obviously, two weeks off for Christmas. So anything that gets you time off from work.

We could get a week off for Labour Day. I am thinking—though I have not been at Kimmel for a long time—that with Kimmel having young kids and being on the air for twenty-three years now, they might get even more time off. The longer Johnny Carson stayed on the air, the fewer shows he did. He mostly had guest hosts. By his last years, he was only doing about half the shows. I am wondering if Kimmel is moving that way. We used to get about eight weeks off over the course of a year. I wonder if they get even more now. Kimmel has started using guest hosts in recent years. You do not get time off from that, though, because you still have to write for the guest host. But anyway, any holiday that gets you time off—I am in favour of that.

Jacobsen: What are obscure Jewish holidays that you know about?

Rosner: There is more than I know about. Purim is not that obscure. Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and Passover. Hanukkah is a semi-fake holiday in the sense that it was historically a minor holiday, but it was elevated because it is commercial, and for the kids. There are a bunch of other holidays. And there is a holiday that starts every Friday evening—Shabbat. That happens fifty-two times a year. You are supposed to take Saturday off. It is the day of rest.

Jacobsen: What is the most confusing one you know about?

Rosner: Confusing holiday? Jewish holiday? I do not know. If you study them, none of them is confusing. I am sure there is some perversity associated with Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—when you are supposed to fast, think about all the things you did over the past year, and try to atone for them, make them right. I am sure there is some potential for paradox in that holiday. And there is plenty of potential for paradox if you observe Shabbat strictly. The definition of “work” for strict observers extends to almost anything. You have to pre-tear your toilet paper because tearing toilet paper counts as work.

On Shabbos—Shabbat and Shabbos are the same thing, just different groups of Judaism pronouncing the T or S differently. Same with bat mitzvah and bas mitzvah. Anyway, there is a thing called a Shabbos goy, which is when you hire a non-Jew to come into your house and do all the things you are not allowed to do—turn on light switches, light your cigarettes, because using a lighter counts as work. It gets pretty extreme. I do not know how many people observe that strictly.

Are you allowed to ride in a Waymo driverless car because no human is driving? Maybe. You are only allowed to do it if you arrange the ride before Shabbos starts. I do not know. There is room for all kinds of weirdness there.

Jacobsen: What is with contemporary—even some secular—Jews and their association with Kabbalah?

Rosner: Not much. Kabbalah is something you choose to follow on your own. It is a mystical, woo-woo branch of Jewish practice. It is kind of an L.A., New Age–y type of thing. And I do not really know much about it; I do not know much about it at all, except that Madonna was into it for a while.

Jacobsen: Was there any word about what Madonna got out of it?

Rosner: No, but I am sure it is a philosophy. Every philosophy contains elements with decent principles or ideas. Are there any parts of it that are bad? I do not know anything about Kabbalah. I know it is super mystical. It involves some numerology and that kind of thing. But I do not know. I get annoyed with astrology, but there is a bunch of other woo-woo stuff I do not know enough about to be annoyed by. So I do not know anything about Kabbalah.

Jacobsen: What would you consider the core ethical values in Judaism?

Rosner: The core ethical values? Judaism is a Golden-Rule-based thing. You do not find the Golden Rule phrased exactly that way in the Hebrew Bible, but you do have the Ten Commandments, which cover many of the basics: do not murder, do not steal, do not sleep with other people’s spouses. Honour your parents. Honour God. It is the basic ethical stuff. Maybe the most famous ethical stuff, because everybody knows the Ten Commandments—well, the most famous in the U.S., in the Western world.

Jacobsen: If you could change anything, what would you change?

Rosner: Well, hold on. So for Thanksgiving, we are going to Aunt Lois’s for dinner. I should probably be back by 10 p.m. So, what would I change about Judaism if I could? I do not know. Jews generally do not believe in heaven. I would make it so that Jews believe in heaven, and I would make that belief accurate—that there is a heaven. It can be Jewish heaven, it can be everyone’s heaven, I do not care about the details. As long as Jews can get in, I want there to be a heaven because it makes the afterlife so much simpler.

Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?

Rosner: Without a heaven—without an afterlife—we have to build our own. And we are only in the very first stages of doing that. You have a much better shot at an afterlife than I do because you are thirty years younger, and that thirty years is going to be critical.

And now I have to go. I will talk to you tomorrow.

Jacobsen: All right. Thank you.

Rosner: All right.

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