Anil Seth wins Berggruen Prize essay: consciousness is a property of life, not computation
sapinker · x · 2026-09-29
Neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at Sussex, won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition with "The Mythology of Conscious AI" in Noema Magazine.
Key arguments:
- Consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation. AI may already be intelligent in some ways and will keep getting smarter, but that doesn't imply it could become conscious.
- Drawing on a long, mostly unhappy cultural history of synthetic minds — from the Golem and Frankenstein to HAL 9000 and Ex Machina — Seth argues that creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming, AI is a bad idea.
- Steven Pinker, who shared the essay, notes he has long backed the computational theory of intelligence while conceding that no scientific theory explains subjective first-person experience; he finds Seth's case for biology's relevance persuasive.
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