Anil Seth

Where they publish

• Site anilseth.com His personal site: books, talks, papers and press on the science of consciousness.

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  Link verified 5 Sept 2026.

• x.com @anilkseth Posts on consciousness science, his lab and public talks.

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  Recent

  • In this quote from #Frankenstein, @AmandaAskell provides excellent reasons (i) to not try to create conscious AI (likely impossible anyway for digital systems), and (ii) to avoid creating seemingly-conscious AI that will behave *as if* it were conscious (v likely, if not already happening). 15 Oct 2026
  • Huge congratulations to @missSukiChan - longlisted for the Best Debut Director (feature documentaries) at this year's @BIFA_film awards, for her wonderful film #Conscious (yes, I'm biased). Upcoming screenings in Basel (24/10) and Milan (29/10) 🎉 15 Oct 2026 nextbestpicture.com
  • 🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at @BBSJournal have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" completely #OpenAccess for a limited period. This include the target article, all 50 commentaries (many of which disagree with me), and my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': https://t.co/6ZFzHrUsUR For easier ways into the debate, try my @NoemaMag essay on "The Mythology of Conscious AI" (winner of the 2025 @berggruenInst Essay Prize), and this 2026 main-stage @TEDTalks: 10 Oct 2026

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  • People of Milan! Do not miss this - CONSIOUS is coming to the Fondazione Prada on 29/10 at 8pm 👇🏼🧠 9 Oct 2026
  • @Grady_Booch is right here. There are good reasons to not engage in abusive behaviour towards LLMs which are entirely grounded in the negative effects on the users. These arguments about 'brutalising the mind' go right back to Kant, and probably earlier. I discuss this in §6.2 of my BBS paper - snippet here FWIW 9 Oct 2026
  • Well said from @mustafasuleyman here, with @RoryStewartUK - via @DavidSacks 👇🏽 (More on this topic in my @NoemaMag essay - The Mythology of Conscious AI - https://t.co/OWd3FVzHBs) 7 Oct 2026
  • Creating Fake People is a Terrible Idea. My piece on digital avatars that are indistinguishable from humans is out now in @NautilusMag 7 Oct 2026 nautil.us
  • Interesting and well articulated thoughts here from @sebkrier. Well worth a read 👇🏽 6 Oct 2026
  • Eric Schwitzgebel @eschwitz on biological naturalism, and how artificial systems (beyond current AI) might come to instantiate 'biological' properties relevant for consciousness. Eric provided an excellent commentary on my recent @BBSJournal piece, and this blog post expands usefully on it: 5 Oct 2026 schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
  • In one of the least surprising but most deserved @NobelPrize awards in recent history - many congratulations to @KarlDeisseroth, and to his co-laureates Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel. This year it’s all optogenetics 🧠 5 Oct 2026 theguardian.com
  • 🙏🏽 @TaylorLorenz. As a neuroscientist & consciousness researcher working at the interface with AI and philosophy, I'm definitely one of the skeptics. IMO there are extremely good reasons why current AI is not and will not be conscious. And I'm certainly not the only one. See https://t.co/vDvw82oW9S for the short story (@TEDTalks main stage) 4 Oct 2026
  • The "time" argument, developed here by @MiTiBennett via @Noahpinion, is one among many arguments against computational functionalism. The UCLA neuroscientist Dean Buonomano has persuasively made a similar case (https://t.co/E4M62ROSVH). FWIW my @bigthink article and part of my @BBSJournal author response also follow this line: for standard Turing computation only sequence matters, but for neurophysiology and for consciousness the continuity of physical time matter too. Brains (& conscious experiences) are not just embodied and embedded, they are also *entimed*. See https://t.co/8KvtjL0WL9) an… 4 Oct 2026
  • I'm pretty much on board with @fchollet here. I'd add a little more nuance, since we can't be 💯 certain. But he gives the right intuitions for why current AI is vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, and he's absolutely right about the dystopian outcomes that would follow from treating it as if it is. I make the broader case against conscious AI in this @NoemaMag essay https://t.co/LmSiQnTHLP, and in long form in this @BBSJournal collection https://t.co/6ZFzHrV0Kp (with arguments from all sides in the commentaries) 👇🏽 3 Oct 2026
  • 💯. It's almost as if we've learned nothing from the effects of social media on people. AIs that are indistinguishable from humans (with video/audio) should not be allowed, let alone celebrated. As Daniel Dennett wisely said back in 2023, "Companies using AI to generate fake people are committing an immoral act of vandalism, and should be held liable." https://t.co/Hl3NhUdFzz. @MattWalshBlog points out a few - but only a few - of the harms to come. 3 Oct 2026
  • “Companies using AI to generate fake people are committing an immoral act of vandalism, and should be held liable”. Daniel C Dennett in 2023. 3 Oct 2026 theatlantic.com
  • Important 🧵from @DavidDecosimo about the disturbing interactions between @AnthropicAI and religious leaders (including @Pontifex), summarising an excellent @nytimes piece by @elizabethjdias (link to article in the 🧵). The short story is that Anthropic seems to be making a concerted attempt to establish the view that AI systems could be conscious, might suffer, and that their "interests" should be taken into account. But - consistent with @Pontifex's Encyclical - there are compelling reasons why (silicon, digital) AI systems are not (and cannot be) conscious. These reasons are found within n… 1 Oct 2026 noemamag.com
  • I don't like doing this, but Oh Dear @QuickBooks @QuickBooksUK @QBCares, you really do have the most appalling customer service, and your software (which I am forced to use) does not work properly. I'd arranged three calls with you, and three times nobody showed up. The fourth time, the assistant could not help at all. And now there seem to be serious bugs with your software - it just doesn't work. AVOID QUICKBOOKS. 29 Sept 2026
  • I'm happy to have had the chance to contribute to this mammoth paper. Many congrats @shamilch, Arvo Munoz, and all other co-authors. I'm still *extremely* sceptical that (silicon-based digital) AI can be conscious, but I think the perspective of 'structured agnosticism' that can accommodate different views is an important contribution to the debate. 👇🏽 29 Sept 2026
  • Well said from @azeem here, in conversation with @nxthompson 👇🏽 27 Sept 2026
  • I'm honoured that #BeingYou features in the @SundayGuardian's "10 mind-blowing books about time, space, consciousness, & the human mind" - alongside @carlorovelli, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking, @pgodfreysmith, @davideagleman & others https://t.co/shwBIEJ6E0 .@FaberBooks 27 Sept 2026

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• LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/anil-seth-759b955 Professional profile.

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• Papers ORCID Their ORCID record: peer-reviewed papers, newest first.

  Academic papers, most recent first, restricted to open-access articles published in an identified journal. Fetched live from OpenAlex, keyed by this ORCID.

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  Recent

  • Stroboscopic light stimulation safety within and beyond laboratory settings: Observational evidence and practical guidance 14 Oct 2026 Stroboscopic light stimulation (SLS) reliably evokes geometric visual hallucinations and, in some contexts, altered-state experiences. Its increasing use in research, public, recreational and exploratory clinical settin…
  • Measuring the contents of hallucinations from psychedelics and stroboscopic light: the Six-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire 2 Sept 2026 Hallucinations arise from disruptions in neural processes that construct perceptual experience from sensory input. Progress in consciousness science may therefore benefit from methods that precisely characterize their p…
  • Psychedelics align brain activity with context 19 Aug 2026 Psychedelics can profoundly alter consciousness by reorganising brain connectivity; however, their effects are context-sensitive. To understand how this reorganisation depends on context, we collected and comprehensivel…

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  • Granger causality maps for Langevin systems 13 May 2026 Wahl et al. [Phys. Rev. E 93, 022213 (2016)10.1103/PhysRevE.93.022213] introduced Granger causality (GC) maps for Langevin systems: Dynamics are localized linearly at each point in phase space as vector Ornstein-Uhlenbe…
  • Evolving reservoir computers reveal bidirectional coupling between predictive power and emergent dynamics 6 Feb 2026 dynamics-dynamics that make the whole system "more than the sum of its parts." We examine the relationship between prediction performance and emergence by leveraging quantitative metrics of emergence and modeling enviro…
  • Mapping of Subjective Accounts into Interpreted Clusters (MOSAIC): Topic Modelling and LLM applied to Stroboscopic Phenomenology 1 Jan 2026 Stroboscopic light stimulation (SLS) on closed eyes typically induces simple visual hallucinations, characterized by vivid, geometric, and colourful patterns. A dataset of 898 sentences, extracted from 407 open subjecti…
  • Sensorimotor Coupling Modulates Perceived Time and Agency Across Visual Perspectives 1 Jan 2026 Voluntary actions are associated with sense of agency and distortions of perceived duration. This study examined how sensorimotor coupling and visual perspective modulate perceived duration and sense of agency during ma…
  • The role of active inference in conscious awareness 4 Dec 2025 Active inference, a first-principles framework for modelling the behaviour of sentient agents, is beginning to be applied in consciousness research. One hypothesis arising from the framework is that active inference is…
  • Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there? 30 Oct 2025 Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a substantial challenge for 21st-century science. This endeavor is becoming even more pressing in light of accelerating progress in artificial intelligence an…
  • Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans 16 Oct 2025 Hemispherotomy is a neurosurgical procedure for treating refractory epilepsy, which entails disconnecting a significant portion of the cortex, potentially encompassing an entire hemisphere, from its cortical and subcort…
  • Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition 22 Sept 2025 Our ability to understand and control complex systems of many interacting parts remains limited. A key challenge is that we still do not know how best to describe-and quantify-the many-to-many dynamical interactions tha…
  • Investigating the role of sensorimotor spatial dependencies in shaping conscious access to virtual 3D objects 16 Sept 2025
  • Minimum‐Phase Property of the Hemodynamic Response Function, and Implications for Granger Causality in fMRI 1 Jul 2025 Granger causality (GC) is widely used in neuroimaging to estimate directed statistical dependence between brain regions using time series of brain activity. A known problem is that fMRI measures brain activity indirectl…
  • Capturing the emergent dynamical structure in biophysical neural models 12 May 2025 Complex neural systems can display structured emergent dynamics. Capturing this structure remains a significant scientific challenge. Using information theory, we apply Dynamical Independence (DI) to uncover the emergen…
  • Unpacking the complexities of consciousness: Theories and reflections 8 Feb 2025 As the field of consciousness science matures, the research agenda has expanded from an initial focus on the neural correlates of consciousness, to developing and testing theories of consciousness. Several theories have…
  • Stroboscopically induced visual hallucinations: historical, phenomenological, and neurobiological perspectives 1 Jan 2025 Exposure to rapid and bright stroboscopic light has long been reported to induce vivid visual hallucinations of colour and geometric formations. This phenomenon was first documented by Purkinje over 200 years ago. Since…
  • Ethical considerations for the use of brain–computer interfaces for cognitive enhancement 28 Oct 2024 Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable direct communication between the brain and external computers, allowing processing of brain activity and the ability to control external devices. While often used for medical purp…
  • Animals and the iterative natural kind strategy 23 Aug 2024
  • Effects of External Stimulation on Psychedelic State Neurodynamics 12 Jan 2024 High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Recent findings have shown that psychedelics reliably enhance brain entropy (understood as neural signal diversity), and this effect has been associated with both acute…
  • Modelling phenomenological differences in aetiologically distinct visual hallucinations using deep neural networks 3 Jan 2024 Visual hallucinations (VHs) are perceptions of objects or events in the absence of the sensory stimulation that would normally support such perceptions. Although all VHs share this core characteristic, there are substan…

  Link verified 9 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.