Richard Dawkins' chatbot isn't conscious - it's just all talk. My take on the Dawkins/Claude kerfuffle in The Nerve
Scientist, Author, Speaker
The science of consciousness
Understanding the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the great challenges for 21st Century Science. Check out my essay The Mythology of Conscious AI, which won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. and my new main-stage TED talk.
A 2021 Book of the Year (New Statesman, Economist, Bloomberg, Five Books), a 2021 Science Book of the Year (Guardian, Financial Times). Being You is out now in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio.
Interviews and conversations.
Academic and public engagement projects.
What’s coming up and what’s happened.
Consciousness at TED
Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
My main-stage TED talk has more than 15 million views.
TED Talk 2026
Why AI is unlikely to become conscious
I won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition for "The Mythology of Conscious AI" - read it now in Noema.
The call for commentary proposals for my new paper 'Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism' is now open at BBS. Deadline is June 12th.
"Inside the big bet on consciousness". My take on the adversarial collaboration between two consciousness theories, in Nautilus.
What gives meaning to life? I asked my Mum .. in today's Guardian (along with 14 others)
"A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness" Our comment (Àlex Gómez-Marin & me) on the IIT clash; out now in Nature Neuroscience.
I'm delighted to make the Clarivate 'Highly Cited' researcher list, for the fifth year running - along with 5 other Sussex academics:
The great Paul Whitehouse is 68 years old today, which means I am obliged to post this (again!) - arguably the most majestically random but brilliant comedy sketch committed to celluloid for at least the last, what, forty, forty five years?
Yes, forty, forty five years.
Happy
What could possibly go wrong?
Chemputation will enable VibeCheming (writing code to make molecules) the same way LLMs have allowed VibeCoding. But first we must build the infrastructure for digital chemistry #chemputation
Copernicus Festival 19 - 24 May 2026 is about #complexity
Among speakers Andrzej Udalski, David Krakauer @sfiscience, Hiranya Peiris @uclmaps, @johnhawks, @anilkseth, Jakub Zakrzewski, @PaluchLab, Leszek Kaczmarek @NenckiInstitute, @piotrsankowski
#CopernicusFestival free & open