Thanks @sapinker - much appreciated 🙏🏽👇🏽

Three reasons why AI is extremely unlikely to be conscious - and why this matters. Joint opinion in @nature with Giulio Tononi and Ned Block @De_dicto

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 (philarchive.org/rec/BUOTIO-2). 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 bigthink.com/neuropsych/anil…) and pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4275… - snippet attached 👇🏽

"I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization." This is very far from the truth. There are many (IMO compelling) arguments against (silicon, digital) machine consciousness that in no way depend on human exceptionalism, or even on carbon chauvinism. To get a good sense of the current debate in academia, have a look at this just-out @BBSJournal paper, along with 50 commentaries (from all perspective), and my response. You'll see a much richer debate than you describe. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

💯. 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." theatlantic.com/technology/a…. @MattWalshBlog points out a few - but only a few - of the harms to come.

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 neuroscience and philosophy of mind, not in the techo-chambers of the frontier firms where the mythology of conscious AI is deeply entrenched. Claude is vanishingly unlikely to be conscious. To think otherwise could be catastrophic for AI regulation, leaves us psychologically defenceless, is profoundly dehumanising, and plays straight into corporate incentives to keep the AI bubble inflated. More here, in this @berggruenInst prize winning essay: noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…

People matter more than AI. A manifesto for Humanist AI. 👇🏽

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing. Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything. “they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out. “A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.) “On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive. Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer. Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way. For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…. For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…. And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.) Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

Whatever the answer (& my best guess is tilts very much No) we should all agree that the question is important noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…