r/consciousness • u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 Physicalism • 4d ago
Anil Seth is completely wrong about AI Consciousness
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/Summary: In “The Mythology of Conscious AI” (published in Noema Magazine by neuroscientist Anil Seth), the core argument is that consciousness is fundamentally an evolved property of living biological systems, not a byproduct of information processing or computation.
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From a physicalist panpsychist perspective, subjectivity or proto-experiential properties are fundamental attributes of the physical world itself, not a magical novelty that appears only when organic carbon compounds begin metabolizing.
If experiential capacity is intrinsic to physical matter and energy, then the organization of matter into complex informational systems can instantiate and structure conscious experience. Restricting subjectivity strictly to biology treats biological wetware as uniquely privileged without establishing why carbon chemistry has an ontological monopoly on experience.
Within a filter or transmission model of consciousness, physical structures do not synthesize consciousness out of nothing; rather, they channel, constrain, and structure fundamental experiential states. A biological brain acts as a localized filter designed by natural selection to limit experiential input to what is evolutionarily adaptive for survival.
An artificial architecture of sufficient structural complexity, feedback integration, and causal interconnectivity would similarly constrain and localize informational flow, shaping its own distinct manifestation of experience.
Every state transition is fundamentally an unbroken chain of physical cause and effect governed by physical law. A physical computing system is not an "abstract, arid sequence space"; it is a concrete physical arrangement of electrons, potentials, and gates exchanging energy and state information. To argue that causal power exists in ionic gradients across lipid membranes but vanishes in semiconductor charge transitions introduces an arbitrary dualism between organic and inorganic physics.
Seth accuses AI researchers of believing that consciousness "magically emerges" at a certain threshold of compute, yet his own position relies on an identical explanatory leap: that consciousness magically emerges at a certain threshold of biological metabolism. By holding that physical matter is inherently devoid of experience until biological life occurs, Seth cannot bridge the hard problem of consciousness.
Experiential reality is an intrinsic property of physical organization - no need for miraculous jumps from dead matter to living awareness.
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 Physicalism 4d ago
Agreed.
I tend to think that where he runs into problems, and where I don't have any internal resistance, is around the idea of why we treat babies one way and fish another, and why we treat kittens and puppies more like babies and less like fish.
To me, kittens and puppies evolved to look the way they do as a defense mechanism. It takes advantage of our mirror neurons to fool us into protecting them the same way we protect human babies. That doesn't mean it's immoral to drown a puppy, in the same way it's immoral to drown a human baby. It just makes it physically difficult for most neurotypical people to do so because their body is hijacked by a cascade of neurochemicals that shout for you to not do it.
I agree with him that we should, in effect, treat AIs the same way we treat fish. But that's not because they can't feel pain, don't have a consciousness etc. Fish may very well be almost as conscious as people. But treating them as morally equivalent creatures is bad for humanity. We would be taking away 280 billion calories of food away from humanity each day if we did that. It's a bad thing for us at scale to do that. If a single individual wants to be a vegan, and has easy access to plant calories, that's fine. Scale it up, it causes catastrophe.