Anil Seth's Prize-Winning Essay Argues Consciousness Belongs to Life, Not Computation
jmugan · x · 2026-10-01
Neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex and winner of the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, published "The Mythology Of Conscious AI" in Noema Magazine.
- Seth traces the long, mostly unhappy cultural history of artificial consciousness, from the Golem and Frankenstein to HAL 9000 and Klara.
- His core claim: intelligence is not consciousness, and consciousness is more plausibly a property of living processes than of computation.
- He argues that creating conscious — or even conscious-seeming — AI would be a mistake, warning against anthropomorphic projections onto increasingly capable systems.
- The essay is a significant statement of the anti-computationalist position in the machine consciousness debate.
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