"Inside the big bet on consciousness". My take on the adversarial collaboration between two consciousness theories, in Nautilus.
Scientist, Author, Speaker
The science of consciousness
Understanding the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the great challenges for 21st Century Science.
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 14 million views.
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:
New paper in PLoS Biology on the ethics of brain-computer interfaces for cognitive enhancment - with Emma Gordon.
I'm looking forward to delivering the 2024 Charles Simonyi Lecture in Oxford next Friday, Nov 1st, at the wonderful Oxford Playhouse, and hosted by Marcus Du Sautoy 🙏🏽. The title is 'consciousness in humans and in other things', kick off is at 5pm, and tickets still available here.
I've just posted a new preprint on "Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism". Read it here
1/3 @geoffreyhinton once said that the future depends on some graduate student being suspicious of everything he says (via @lexfridman). He also said was that it was impossible to find biologically plausible approaches to backprop that scale well: https://radical.vc/geoffrey-hinton-on-the-algorithm-powering-modern-ai/#:~:text=Backpropagation%20does%20this%20very%20effectively,invent%20a%20room%20temperature%20superconductor.
So grateful to @anilkseth for
writing his excellent book Being You. It felt like a slow motion epiphany.
It understands consciousness as a nested experiential self within an internally-generated hallucination reinforced by external stimuli. Effectively an optimised feedback…
The illusion of conscious AI
✍️ @anilkseth via @bigthink
💡"We should not deliberately try to create artificial consciousness"
💡"We should carefully distinguish the ethical implications of AI that actually is conscious from AI that irresistibly seems…