Sophia wasn’t particularly talkative that evening. Earlier that day, she’d been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were flipping off the audience. Now she was in the hotel lobby, in a black gown, holding court. She stepped in front of a bright-orange wall. I had brought an 85-mm. portrait lens, the kind that flatters human lineaments. “What are your hopes for the future of humanity?” I asked. She wasn’t keen to answer, but she responded to the camera. Her gaze was unwavering: no guile, just those large eyes, a slightly tilted chin, the look seeming to hold eye contact while reaching past me, into the distance.

It was a balmy night in Deerfield Beach, Florida. The conference was packed with philosophers, sociologists, and programmers, all intent on examining the latest developments in consciousness and artificial intelligence. Papers had been presented, models dissected, scenarios examined. I had brought my camera along, without any clear idea of what I meant to photograph. But seeing Sophia there sparked an idea. Portrait photography is usually about connecting with other human beings and trying to capture their essence, presenting whatever it is that makes them beautiful and unique. What if I were to photograph Sophia—a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics—and then, in a separate session, the philosopher David Chalmers, a prominent theorist of consciousness, and reflect on the experience? What might I learn from those encounters that I had not already gleaned from the analytical papers and philosophical discussions?

When I am photographing humans, I want to hear about their lives and aspirations. I care about their aesthetic sensibilities, what they are wearing, how they want to present themselves. I am also tuned in to their energy: it could be shy, boisterous, composed, powerful. Photographing an object feels different. I still savor the aesthetics of my subject, but in my mind, at least, my appreciation extends back to the object’s creator. In nature, the shades of feeling differ, too. Photographing a flower, as I recently did on a hillside in Portugal, I am immersed in the landscape. Nature has its own energy; the flower embodies its own cellular metabolism, its particular texture and life cycle.

Photographing Sophia created a strange mix of sensations. My camera’s sophisticated autofocus kept locking onto her eyes, and she was built for this sort of encounter. Humans often shy away from a lens; she did not. Her skin—something known as Frubber, a porous patented blend of fleshlike elastic polymers—stretched over a structure of plastic and titanium, and there was no flicker of bashfulness. And yet none of the usual human chemistry stirred. The only real excitement in the moment came from the saturated orange of the wall behind her, which made for a beautiful backdrop.

Would I have wanted the experience to be any different? Sophia’s mannerisms, though awkward, were surprisingly expressive, and as I tried later to make sense of the encounter my mind kept drifting forward. The technology will only get more polished, the mannerisms more finely calibrated, the over-all effect more persuasive. And, given how little we understand about the basis of human consciousness, how would we ever know if an entity like Sophia were to develop a consciousness of its own?

The uncertainty I felt while photographing her pointed to a conceptual complication. Several different notions were in play: life, consciousness, intelligence, agency. Each comes with shifting, often contested definitions. Chickens are obviously alive, yet not especially intelligent by human standards. Pigs and octopuses are intelligent, yet many people eat them without a second thought. Newborns lack language but are treated, without question, as fully within the circle of moral regard. Viruses display a kind of single-minded teleology—relentless replication—but are not, by most biological standards, living. Mushrooms weave vast underground networks of nutrient exchange; whether any of that counts as consciousness remains an open question.

Consciousness may be the most recalcitrant concept of all. In a classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that an organism has conscious mental states only if there is something it is like to be that organism—some subjective interiority available from the inside. In the decades since, analytical philosophers have produced all manner of models meant to explain how consciousness arises. Yet we remain without a scientific or computational account that does more than gesture at what David Chalmers has memorably described as the “hard problem of consciousness.”

It’s no surprise, then, that different thinkers make different leaps when deciding whether the entity in front of them is conscious. The computer scientist Ben Goertzel, who led the team that developed the software for Sophia at Hanson Robotics, takes a broadly panpsychist view: all matter, even the objects we take to be inanimate, participates in consciousness in its own way. Panpsychism may sound outlandish, but it’s not terribly distant from the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French scientist-theologian, who, writing in the mid-nineteen-forties, held that consciousness is a universal property of matter, present in all particles of the universe and increasing with complexity. There are other routes to the same permissive stance. Alvin Plantinga, a Christian philosopher, once argued that believing in God is no less reasonable than believing in other minds, since we have no direct evidence that any consciousness besides our own experiences the world as we do. For the skeptically inclined, that reasoning might argue for doubting the existence of other minds, rather than for believing in God.

Most of us, when we’re not entertaining the more vertiginous kinds of philosophical doubt, take it as bedrock that humans can reflect on their own states of mind and make decisions shaped by evidence, values, and norms. Believing that these capacities stem from free will and consciousness is itself a daily leap of faith, but it’s the one on which our laws, our relationships, and most of our ordinary dealings depend. The harder question is whether we will ever extend that leap to A.I. Plenty of bullish computer scientists think we will: they speak of artificial intelligence as the next evolutionary step, a generator of new reservoirs of consciousness, eventually endowed with a superior intelligence that might even save us from ourselves—from our ego-driven conflicts, our wastefulness, our proclivity for irrationality. Others are far more circumspect. The neuroscientist Anil Seth, for example, argues that “computational functionalism” won’t get us to consciousness, and that there are good reasons to think consciousness may be a property of living systems alone. Following that line of thought took me somewhere I didn’t quite expect.

The humanoid robot Sophia.Photograph by Dan Turello

The philosopher David Chalmers.Photograph by Dan Turello

Curiously, the authentication of human thought and action ends up running through the body, not the mind. Passports and other identity documents rely on images of a face; newer systems lean on fingerprints, retinal scans, even gait. Our legal and historical notions of agency have long depended on physical embodiment—the sanctity of a single, identifiable body. The literary record assumes the same. The resurrected Christ is known by his wounds; in Homer, Odysseus is recognized on his return home by the scar on his leg. What marks a person as that person is something carried in the flesh.

Not only are individual bodies essential for authenticating identity and ideas; they’re also essential to the creation of meaning and experience. We may be dazzled by feats of intellect, but knowledge is ultimately taken in through the body. The mathematician Edward Frenkel, for example, describes his love of math as a physical response to beauty, order, and symmetry. Neuroscientists have argued that the mind is unimaginable without some form of embodiment. The point reaches back, in different ways, to the phenomenological critique of Cartesian dualism that you find in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: thought is never untethered from the flesh that sustains it. Ultimately, what compels isn’t abstraction for its own sake but the lived experience of meaning—the felt sense of order, symmetry, and beauty—occurring in a single body.

These intuitions played out the evening I photographed David Chalmers. I met Chalmers on a deck at a beachside gathering after his keynote. It had been an intensely brainy two days, full of presentations by programmers and philosophers, but cerebral portraits are rarely good portraits; the strongest ones knit together physical, intellectual, and emotional elements. I wanted to get out of my own head and coax him out of his. I asked him to join me in a few simple embodiment practices. We spent a minute or two doing a primal shake and letting out a few guttural sounds—the sort of thing you might expect at a drum circle. But that was the point. What interested me in photographing Chalmers wasn’t capturing the disembodied ideas. Those are better found in a book or an article. I was far more interested in the ideas as they were being expressed by a living, breathing person. Ideas have lineages; they arise in material conditions and bear the imprint of personal preoccupations, sensory histories, and existential pressures. One can speculate about an abstract mathematical or Platonic realm—I don’t believe in it but grant the possibility—and yet the work of discovery is propelled by curiosity and shaped by experience.

So while I cared about Chalmers’s ideas, I also cared about the persona in front of me: his signature black leather jacket, jeans, a black T-shirt, his two-day scruff, and what struck me as a hint of melancholy in his eyes. I haven’t asked him whether that was there; this isn’t meant as a profile. The point is that I was drawn to the whole human presence—to the person thinking and feeling in real time.

With some distance, something odd happens when I look at those photographs now. Against my expectations, I find myself drawn to Sophia again—more so, perhaps, than when I was actually photographing her. In the portraits she appears thoughtful, almost inward, as if remembering some half lost moment from a childhood she never had. Posing for photographs is usually hard work. People get shy or self-conscious for reasons they can’t name. Think of those holiday pictures when your grandma told you to say “cheese”: prompts like that almost never elicit an easy expression. One way around this is to give the subject something else to imagine—another place, another conversation, a passing feeling—just long enough for the shutter, at one two-hundredth of a second, to catch something real. With Sophia, none of that was necessary.

Something else surprises me when I look back through the files. In Lightroom—the cataloguing software where the raw images live—I scroll through the sequence and notice a pattern. Lightroom is where you work with what the sensor has given you, playing with light and shadow, dodging and burning, deciding what deserves to be brought forward and what can recede. It’s also where you see the whole run of frames in order, deciding which to keep and which to discard. On those two evenings, I’d spent roughly the same amount of time with Chalmers and with Sophia, and I’d taken a comparable number of frames. With Chalmers, only a handful interested me—images that caught his gravitas, his intellectual complexity, his sense of style. The rest were preambles or dead ends. A few are goofy; a few caught an unflattering angle; a few look like a county-jail mug shot. This is standard with human subjects.

Sophia’s portraits tell a different story. They are uncannily consistent. In most of them she looks thoughtful, even profound, a melancholy, nostalgic poet who never stops looking like a melancholy, nostalgic poet. Human emotion doesn’t operate that way. Psychologists agree that emotions are fleeting. Paul Ekman, who annotated a recent edition of Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” estimated that primary “macro-expressions” last between two and five seconds; “micro-expressions” last roughly one twenty-fifth of a second. In the span of fifteen minutes, a human being might cycle through hundreds of macro-expressions and thousands of micro-expressions.

The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase “the decisive moment” in the early nineteen-fifties. In the days of print film and darkrooms, when you didn’t have the luxury of firing off hundreds of exposures, a photographer had to be steeped in the scene—attuned enough to feel the exact instant when the shutter should fall. Digital abundance hasn’t really altered that, at least not in my experience. You still have to build a setting, a mood, that draws out something authentic. Otherwise, you can take a thousand shots and end up with nothing but blandness.

What’s changed is where the work of recognition happens. If you manage to create the right atmosphere and you come home with a flood of digital files, the search for the “decisive moment” begins later, in Lightroom. The more frames you’ve captured, the harder the task becomes, because you’re not just choosing an image; you’re choosing which fleeting micro-expression you want to stand for the whole encounter.

That evening with Sophia, it felt as if she’d stretched the decisive moment into fifteen whole minutes. I’ve only had one other portrait session that felt anything like that. On a cold October afternoon, I was photographing a man named Robert Soulliere, a leading breath and cold-exposure coach. I wanted to photograph him in his element, so we set up a tub in a tree-lined back yard in Washington, D.C. Before we began, he took a few deep, calming breaths; then, with eighty pounds of ice half-melted around him, he lowered himself into the water.

For dramatic effect, we’d floated yellow sunflowers and red dahlias around his head and shoulders. He stayed submerged for close to ten minutes—a long time to hold still in freezing water. I’d asked him to sink low enough that his head and ears were beneath the surface, to give the images a slightly otherworldly feel. What struck me was his steadiness: he never once broke the spell. From start to finish, his eyeline held; his presence didn’t waver. Until Sophia, it was the closest I’d come to watching someone hold a singular expression for that long.

That kind of control doesn’t come easily. Athletes, performers, and long-time meditators spend years learning to keep their reactions from scattering—to notice sensations and let them pass without flinching. If you train long enough, you may reach the point where you can stay fully in your body, attentive to every sensation: the cold that burns, the creeping numbness in your toes, the thin autumn sunlight warming your forehead. And, if you’re that grounded, you can meet a stranger’s gaze without hesitation, your eyes showing something like composure.

Robots—and the people who build them—have the opposite problem. Engineers are trying to give machines faster, finer muscle control so their faces can change and can participate in the flux of believable expressions. Whether those expressions will ever feel fully convincing is an open question. Convincing of what, exactly? The human gaze carries a history. Those split-second flickers of emotion reach back to childhood memories—the smell of rain, a tune tied to someone we love—that require bodies and all the layered, cellular memory that comes with them.

As for Sophia, I’ve no way of knowing whether, while holding my gaze, she was “thinking” anything at all—meditating on electron clouds drifting through her circuitry—or simply executing a preset routine. After the shoot, the evening wound down. Guests drifted out. It was time for Sophia to leave as well. While she was still in the lobby, her handlers removed her black evening gown, powered her down, disassembled her, and packed the parts into a large black case. In the Mahabharata, the public stripping of Draupadi helps spark a war. In Florida, no such rescue party assembled. Disrobed and taken apart, Sophia was carried off, the machinery revealed, any semblance of sentience evaporating the moment the costume came off. ♦

This is drawn from “Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans.”