Anil Seth
Can Machines Be Conscious? The Substrate Problem
The question of whether machines can be conscious is not a parlor trick for philosophers. It is the most consequential engineering question of the 21st century.
The LLM Consciousness Debate: Are Language Models Aware?
In June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine published transcripts of his conversations with LaMDA, Google's large language model, and declared that the system was sentient. Google fired him.
Artificial Neural Networks vs Biological Brains: Where the Analogy Breaks
The metaphor that launched the AI revolution is also its most dangerous distortion. When Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" in 1943, they proposed that neurons could be modeled as logical gates — binary switches that fire or...
Consciousness Science at the Crossroads: From the Hard Problem to the Engineering Era
In 1994, David Chalmers stood before an audience at the first Tucson conference on consciousness and articulated what he called the "hard problem" — why does subjective experience exist at all? Why is there something it is like to see red, feel pain, taste coffee?
Perception and Reality Creation
You are hallucinating right now. Not in the clinical sense — in the neurological sense.