Shanahan’s Embodied Insights from Disembodied Minds

Cognitive robotics scientist Murray Shanahan explores the conceptual boundaries of consciousness by examining the plausibility and coherence of disembodied ‘minds’—in particular, AI/LLMs in computers—‘minds’ that exist without bodies or sensory interaction with the physical world, and in doing so, he assumes and supports an embodied and enactive understanding of biological consciousness, where cognition is inseparable from embodiment (Shanahan, 2025).

Shanahan’s objective is not to develop a theory of consciousness per se, but rather to analyze which conceptions of minds (especially artificial or alien minds) are coherent, palatable, or intelligible, given our embodied and social human condition. He seeks to map “the space of possible minds” and investigate what it would mean for a mind to exist without embodiment or sociality. His central question: “Is it possible to articulate, or to evoke, a conception of consciousness that is compatible with the exotic characteristics of contemporary (disembodied) LLM-based dialogue agents, and that can stand up to philosophical scrutiny?”

Success in this endeavor, Shanahan surmises, “would illuminate an under-explored portion of the space of possible minds, a region of conscious exotica at the very edge of the void of inscrutability.” But to bring this about, he asserts, “will require the language of consciousness to be reconciled with some distinctly peculiar properties, including a profoundly fragmented sense of time and a radically fractured form of selfhood.”

Embodiment and the Limits of Disembodied Minds

Shanahan posits that much of our understanding of what a ‘mind’ is—including consciousness, intentionality, and selfhood—is tightly bound to embodiment and environment, and he draws on embodied cognition and enactivist ideas, suggesting that minds emerge through interaction with the world and that consciousness is not merely internal computation, but involves being in a world and arises from the brain-body-world nexus. Thus, a disembodied mind—e.g., a digital upload seeking virtual immortality—may lack the structure necessary to be conscious in any human-comprehensible sense.

Shanahan uses the metaphor of terra incognita to describe the conceptual unknowns in the vast ‘space of possible minds.’ While some corners (e.g., animal minds, AI agents) are being explored, he says, others (like truly disembodied minds) remain obscure and perhaps even inconceivable.

Warnings and Philosophical Implications

Shanahan warns against two errors: assuming human-like consciousness can exist without embodiment (e.g., virtual immortality-seeking mind-uploads), and assuming that computation alone is sufficient as well as necessary for consciousness, without acknowledging how body and world shape cognition. He suggests our intuitions about ‘minds’ are constrained by our own evolutionary, embodied, and social experiences—so we may project false coherence onto certain structures (like disembodied AIs). In other words, consciousness without embodiment and worldliness is either unintelligible or radically alien.

For example, Shanahan asks, “How would subjective time and selfhood show up for an entity that conformed to such a conception?” Trying to answer these questions, even metaphorically, he says, “stretches the language of consciousness to breaking point.” Ultimately, he concludes, “the attempt yields something like emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, and helps to undermine our dualistic inclinations towards subjectivity and selfhood” (Shanahan, 2025).