Within Reason #152 Why AI Will Never Be Conscious
254 snips
Apr 20, 2026 
Anil Seth, British neuroscientist and professor studying consciousness and perception as controlled hallucination, joins to argue why intelligence is not the same as feeling. He questions whether silicon can reproduce biological neurons, probes why we project minds onto language models, and explores consciousness as a bodily, metabolic phenomenon rather than mere computation.
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Core Experience Feels Like Being Alive
- Stripping sensory and cognitive content suggests the residual core of consciousness is the 'feeling of being alive' — a minimal persisting, embodied sense.
- Seth ties this to meditation, flotation, and states where body-bound sense quietens but persistence remains.
Turing Analogy Masks Noncomputational Brain Features
- The Turing/computation analogy encouraged substrate-independence but overlooks non-algorithmic, continuous, and entangled brain processes.
- Seth notes computation can't account for everything brains do, pushing back on equating brains with Turing machines.
Evolution Favors Entangled Brain Dynamics
- Evolution didn't design brains for substrate-independence; insulating computational layers is energetically expensive and evolution favors entangled, scale-integrated dynamics.
- Such entanglement may offer functional benefits unavailable to modular digital systems.
