Marina Zilbergerts

Can one of humanity’s oldest texts contribute to one of the hardest scientific and philosophical problems of our time? While neuroscientists, philosophers, and AI researchers continue searching for the nature of consciousness, this paper turns to an unexpected source: the biblical book of Genesis. It proposes a new framework for understanding consciousness through a fresh reading of the creation narrative. Long understood as an account of the physical origins of the universe, Genesis, this paper argues, is better read as a story of the emergence of consciousness. Rather than focusing on the things the text describes as created, I argue that its primary concern is the process by which subjective experience and its fundamental capacities emerge and take shape. Drawing on close literary analysis of the Hebrew text together with ancient mystical and philosophical interpretations, I argue that the narrative’s ten creative acts (“And God said, ‘Let there be…,’” “And God saw…,” “And God separated…,” “And God set…”) encode the fundamental operations of conscious awareness: volition, subjective perception, boundary formation, the experience of time, and other essential structures of consciousness that distinguish human subjective experience from machine cognition. Bringing this ancient literary tradition into conversation with contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, the paper places Genesis in dialogue with Turing's theory of computation, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, Nagel's account of subjectivity, Chalmers's hard problem, and Penrose's arguments for non-computational mind. It argues that Genesis is best understood as a phenomenology of consciousness that both anticipates contemporary debates about qualia and offers an original conceptual framework for thinking about consciousness today.

Drawing on training in quantum computing, Dr. Marina Zilbergerts is a philosopher of consciousness and scholar of religion whose research explores consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the Hebrew Bible. She is the author of the forthcoming Genesis in the Age of AI: How Consciousness Became Human (Routledge, 2026), a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa, an expert advisor with AI & Faith, and received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She also writes The Inner Light on Substack, where she explores consciousness, philosophy, literature, and spirituality.