Anil Kumar Seth is a British neuroscientist and professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He works on the science of consciousness and, since 2025, has been cited in AI policy discussion as a leading exponent of the position that consciousness is unlikely to arise from computation alone.
Position and affiliations
Seth is director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science and co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford University Press journal Neuroscience of Consciousness from 2014 to 2024, conference chair of the 16th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in 2012, and a member at large of that association from 2014 to 2022. He is a patron of Humanists UK. His research has been funded by the EPSRC, the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and CIFAR (Source: anilseth.com).
Wikipedia records his birth as 11 June 1972 in Oxford, a BA in natural sciences from King's College, Cambridge, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Sussex, and describes him as a proponent of materialist explanations of consciousness (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Faber) was a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller and a book of the year for the New Statesman, The Economist and Bloomberg Business. He was a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2019 to 2025, received the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize in 2023, and was listed by Prospect among its top 25 thinkers for 2024 (Source: anilseth.com).
"The Mythology of Conscious AI"
Seth's essay "The Mythology of Conscious AI" won the English-language category of the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition and was published in Noema (Source: en.wikipedia.org; berggruen.org).
The essay's central claim is conditional rather than categorical: "A computational simulation of the brain (and body), however detailed it may be, will only give rise to consciousness if consciousness is a matter of computation" — a formulation Seth grounds in what he calls nomological possibility, meaning possibility given the laws of physics as they are (Source: noemamag.com). This is the passage Luiza Jarovsky quotes as the strongest available counter to the broad functionalism she attributes to AI industry voices (see \"Conscious AI\" as an AI Safety Issue — Luiza Jarovsky (April 2026)).
A second strand of the essay argues that collective belief about machine consciousness carries consequences independent of whether machines are in fact conscious. Seth writes that if people feel their AI companions really feel things, "our psychological vulnerabilities can be exploited, our ethical priorities distorted, and our minds brutalized," while treating conscious-seeming machines as though they lack feelings is itself psychologically unhealthy; and that endowing AI systems with rights may mean "we may not be able to turn them off, even if they act against our interests." He describes the mechanization of the mind as the most pernicious near-term consequence of the rush toward human-like AI, and argues that confusing ourselves with machine creations causes people both to overestimate the machines and to underestimate themselves (Source: noemamag.com).
The essay places Seth on the sceptical side of the debate covered at AI Consciousness, and its argument that public belief about machine consciousness is itself a policy-relevant harm connects it to Model Welfare and AI Personhood rather than only to philosophy of mind.
Reception
Jarovsky cited the essay approvingly in 2026, situating it alongside Gary Marcus's May 2, 2026 rebuttal of Richard Dawkins on Claude consciousness as part of a cluster of pushback against AI-anthropomorphism framings (see Luiza Jarovsky). The essay also drew published disagreement, including a response arguing that the framing misses a deeper point (Source: medium.com).
Relationships
- supports: AI Consciousness — argues consciousness is unlikely to follow from computation alone
- related: Model Welfare — the essay treats belief about machine sentience as a harm vector independent of the underlying fact
- related: AI Personhood — argues rights-conferral could foreclose shutdown
- related: Luiza Jarovsky — cites Seth as the strongest counter to broad functionalism
- related: \"Conscious AI\" as an AI Safety Issue — Luiza Jarovsky (April 2026) — quotes the essay's central conditional
- related: Mustafa Suleyman — advances the contrasting "seemingly conscious AI" framing at We must build AI for people; not to be a person — Mustafa Suleyman (mustafa-suleyman.ai, August 2025)
- related: Gary Marcus — parallel 2026 pushback against AI-consciousness claims