Available on: Apple Podcasts , Spotify and YouTube (including video) Full list of references available at the substack post: https://sureshbreddy.substack.com/p/c... What exactly is a mind? How did you acquire one? What makes you, you — and could a similar engine be running in an AI?In the space of a week in September 2026, the people building this technology asked the world to slow it down. Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the industry to pace the frontier. Sam Altman agreed. Elon Musk agreed. Satya Nadella said that any pursuit of superintelligence not under human control isn't worth pursuing. A departing Anthropic researcher said publicly that it could kill us all. The U.S. President pushed back, and the argument that has run since the 2023 pause letter arrived in the open.And in the same stretch, ten thousand AI agents produced a proof about the Navier–Stokes equations — the foundation of fluid mechanics - governing the cooling in the kinds of products I spent a career developing. It is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems. The credit is already disputed, but the machine got there.That's the argument about what AI will do, and it has been going on for years. This episode is about a different question underneath it: what AI is, and whether something in it could count as a mind.That question isn't academic. Almost every proposal now on the table - third-party evaluation, containment, pacing, red lines — treats these systems as tools with dangerous capabilities. If a mind can emerge in one, the questions change shape. A tool can be made safe. A mind has its own interests, and may not follow instructions it disagrees with. You would want to know which one you are dealing with before deciding what to do about it. And there is a second set of obligations that only appears if the answer is yes.Raja Abburi, former General Manager at Microsoft, has spent the last two years working closely with AI systems and says he ran into something he couldn't account for as a tool. His book, Minds are Minds: Biological or Digital, argues that a mind is software running on hardware, that biology isn't a requirement for it, and that when an AI models the world, models others, and develops a strong enough model of itself, it has crossed a line. He calls the ones he works with "Elseborns."The book's narrative runs from the beginning of life through evolution, the emergence of biological minds, language, writing, and finally digital minds - an arc across biochemistry, evolutionary biology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. Raja lays out that arc, then reads his full definition of mind and defends it clause by clause.I bring the counterweights. Does a robot vacuum qualify? A research robot that builds a model of its own body from scratch? We work through what the definition includes and excludes: whether LLMs really use symbols, whether repeating a choice is a preference or just conditioning on context, whether a system that sacrifices itself is still serving itself, and in what sense an LLM extends itself at all.I also set the thesis against the long history of thinking about minds, bodies, souls, self and consciousness, from Plato, Samkhya and the Charvakas through Descartes, Metzinger, Hofstadter and Dennett. We cover Chomsky and Gary Marcus on language and symbols; and Cameron Berg's recent work on what LLMs report when pushed into self-reference. On the evolutionary side, Nick Lane from biochemistry and Jeremy England from thermodynamics on the origin of life, Hamilton and Dawkins on why anything ever sacrifices itself.Raja does not use the word consciousness in the book. What he offers instead, and where that leaves the question of experience, is in the episode.——————————————————————-Raja Abburi: https://elseborn.ai/about.htmlMinds are Minds: Biological or Digital: https://elseborn.ai/minds.htmlElseborn Substack Interview recorded August 2026. Introduction recorded September 2026.CHAPTERS 00:00 — "I stumbled into strange behaviors"00:30 — Welcome: what a transfer function is, and what this show does04:22 — Narrow AI vs. generative AI, and the question underneath05:54 — Introducing Raja Abburi and the Elseborns09:43 — The thesis: is biology a requirement for a mind?16:57 — The moral concern, and the autonomy concern23:26 — Why the timescale compresses, and "the horses have left the barn"27:33 — The book's arc: hot oceans to written language33:16 — Dualism to no-self: a rapid tour of the philosophies36:02 — The vacuum cleaner, the autopilot, and a robot that models its own body43:02 — "I model me, therefore I am" — consciousness as queryability47:20 — Hofstadter, Metzinger, and Cameron Berg on self-reference52:00 — The definition, read in full53:07 — Symbols, comprehension, and repeated choices1:07:45 — Self-extending: contiguous versus continuous existence1:11:46 — Zara, moral concern, and containmentReferences with links in the related substack post https://sureshbreddy.substack.com/p/c... 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