Anil Seth

Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex · Biological

Anil Seth Photograph by Carlos Figueroa Rojas, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Anil Seth is the strongest intellectual opponent of the position this project works from, which makes him worth reading closely rather than around. His beast machine hypothesis holds that consciousness is not a computation a body happens to run. It is what a living system’s continuous effort to regulate itself feels like from inside. Perception on this account is controlled hallucination, a prediction the brain issues and corrects against sensory evidence, and the deepest predictions are about the body’s own condition.

The consequence for artificial systems is a rejection in principle. If experience is constituted by metabolic self-maintenance, a system with no metabolism and nothing at stake in its own persistence has nothing for consciousness to be made of, however capable it becomes. Seth is explicit that this is not a claim about current limitations that better engineering will overcome.

He is also one of the clearest voices against the inflation of the topic, arguing that treating language models as candidate minds distracts from tractable questions and from the animals whose sentience is far better evidenced. That criticism lands whether or not the substrate argument holds, and it is separable from it.

Known for. The beast machine hypothesis, and controlled hallucination as an account of perception

Coverage on this site

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.