Speaker

Anil Seth

Anil Seth

Cognitive and computational neuroscientist, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. Seth studies the biological basis of conscious experience — how the brain constructs the felt world — and is among the most prominent public voices arguing that consciousness is a property of living organisms rather than of computation. His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness set out his framework for a general readership.

Seth is a phenomenal realist: he holds that conscious experiences genuinely exist and demand explanation, which places him against illusionism. But he is not a dualist or a mysterian. His stance is a lightly held ‘pragmatic materialism’ paired with what he calls the real problem of consciousness — not confronting the hard problem head-on, but explaining the properties of particular experiences and their dependence on physical processes, and betting that this programme will erode the sense of mystery the way the science of life once did.

Core positions

Perception as controlled hallucination. Seth’s signature idea is that perception runs inside-out. The brain does not passively read out the world; it continuously generates predictions about the causes of its sensory signals and uses the signals to calibrate those predictions. What we experience is the brain’s best guess — a ‘controlled hallucination’ kept in check by sensory data. The same predictive-processing framework, he argues, extends to emotion, selfhood, and the experience of free will.

Consciousness as biological, not computational. Seth is deeply sceptical of computational functionalism — the claim that consciousness arises in virtue of substrate-independent computation. His central argument is that in brains you cannot separate what a system is from what it does (a property he calls generative entrenchment): evolution never selected for the clean software/hardware split that makes computers interoperable, because maintaining it is energetically expensive. He supplies the positive account that bald biological naturalism lacks, drawing a tentative line from the free-energy principle down to metabolism and autopoiesis — the self-producing character of living systems held out of thermodynamic equilibrium.

Intelligence is not awareness. Consciousness is about feeling and being; intelligence is about doing. That they coincide in humans is a fact about living creatures, not a general law — and mistaking a machine’s fluency for evidence of its inner life, Seth argues, tells us more about our own cognitive biases (human exceptionalism, the seduction of language) than about the machine.

In the wiki