Constructing Consciousness. Berggruen's Prize Essays on Mind and Computation
Constructing Consciousness
Berggruen Press collects the 2025 prize competition's winning essays by Anil Seth, Huang Xin and Xiaoben Liu on the properties and conditions of consciousness.
Berggruen Press published Constructing Consciousness on March 20, 2026, a small volume with a large pedigree. The book collects the winning essays from the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, the competition whose first prize went to Anil Seth, and its stated territory is the properties and conditions of consciousness, intelligence, and computation. Editor Peter Mellgard, the press’s Executive Editor, has brought together exactly three essays, by Seth, by Huang Xin of Tsinghua University, and by Xiaoben Liu of Nanjing University, which makes the volume less a survey than a snapshot of where one major funder thinks the consciousness question now lives.
This site has covered Seth’s prize essay at length already, in the analysis of The Mythology of Conscious AI, including its companion paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. What the volume adds is context and company, and the company is the interesting part.
The three essayists
The verified records behind each contributor sketch three different territories.
| Contributor | Background | Question territory |
|---|---|---|
| Anil Seth | Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex | The biology of consciousness, and why belief in conscious machines persists |
| Huang Xin | Graduate researcher, integrated MA-PhD programme in Philosophy of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University | Philosophical and sociological questions emerging from brain-computer interfaces |
| Xiaoben Liu | B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy, Nanjing University | Philosophy of mind and technology, including the uploading literature |
Seth’s territory is the one this site tracks in depth. His prize essay argues that conscious experience is tied to biological metabolism rather than to computation alone, the position his BBS companion paper formalizes and his public writing popularizes. Huang Xin’s entry point is different, and the difference carries weight. Brain-computer interfaces raise philosophical and sociological questions that neither pure neuroscience nor pure philosophy of mind generates on their own, and a prize competition on the properties and conditions of consciousness choosing that angle says something about where the field’s funders see new work coming from. Liu’s background places the volume inside the mind-uploading literature that the site’s chronological bibliography coverage traces back to 1929, the same tradition that runs from J. B. S. Haldane’s era through Parfit to the present emulation debates.
What the volume signals
The 2025 competition asked essayists to explore the properties and conditions of consciousness, intelligence, and computation, and the three winners answer from three distinct disciplinary bases, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of mind. That spread is the volume’s argument by construction. The consciousness question in the mid-2020s is not owned by one discipline, and the institutions funding it are commissioning across the boundary between the sciences of the brain and the humanities of technology.
For the AI consciousness debate specifically, the volume’s existence sits next to the institutional developments this site tracks. The Berggruen Prize itself went to Seth for work that argues against near-term AI consciousness, and the competition’s publication arm giving a platform to brain-computer interface philosophy and to the uploading tradition alongside it shows the same funder holding the skeptical and the speculative ends of the field in one catalogue. The site’s coverage of Seth’s TED argument and of the reservoir-computing work with his name on it shows how wide that spectrum runs even within one researcher’s output, and the flagship field survey indexes where these institutional efforts sit across the field.
What this review cannot do
An access limit states itself here. The essays’ contents beyond the publisher’s description and the contributors’ public records were not available at writing time, so this article does not summarize any essay’s argument beyond what Seth’s already-published materials support. The volume is listed at ISBN 9798991410236 through standard booksellers. A follow-up update once the essays are accessible is the honest next step, and until then the volume earns its place on this site for what it verifies, a major philosophy-and-culture funder publishing a three-essay answer to the consciousness question, with a brain-computer interface philosopher and a mind-uploading scholar sharing a cover with the field’s most prominent biological naturalist.
Constructing Consciousness, edited by Peter Mellgard, was published by Berggruen Press on March 20, 2026.
