Anil Seth claims the brain is too complex to simulate, gets pressed live by Brian Greene
yeastsplainer · x · 2026-10-12
On stage with David Chalmers, consciousness researcher Anil Seth argued the brain is too complex to simulate by computer — despite having conceded elsewhere that physical processes are simulatable by Turing machines. Host Brian Greene pushed back on the dodge: "Isn't that just complexity? Doesn't that just make it difficult?"
A screenshot of Seth's clarification tweet is attached: simulating and instantiating are not equivalent. You can simulate anything with Turing computation, but a brain simulation only instantiates consciousness if computational functionalism is true — which he calls "a Very Big Assumption." The crux: opponents need a principled argument beyond "too complex," otherwise the objection just defers to an unproven computational functionalism.
Related event: Anil Seth's Claim That Brains Can't Be Simulated Challenged Onstage(3 posts)→