I won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition for "The Mythology of Conscious AI" - read it now in Noema.
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.
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.
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:
New paper in PLoS Biology on the ethics of brain-computer interfaces for cognitive enhancment - with Emma Gordon.
The @berggruenInst Essay Prize award ceremony is *this evening* at 6pm, The Line. If you're in Austin (at @sxsw or otherwise) - do join us. Registration link is here:
2/3 Then tomorrow (17/3), it's the award ceremony (with some short talks and drinks/snacks) for the @berggruenInst Essay Prize, which I was honoured to win (English). The two winners of the Chinese Prize will be there too. 6pm at The Line: sign up here: https://philevents.org/event/show/146577
Tonight's @cphdox screening of @misssukichan's brilliant film #Conscious is now sold out (!) - don't miss your chance to grab one of the remaining tickets for the final screening, on Fri 20th at 16:45 at the Dagmar. @aconitedocs .@SciCocktailsCPH
Don’t miss the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition Award Ceremony exclusively at SXSW in Austin.
Join the ceremony honoring the 2025 winners and celebrating their winning essays. The English-language winner, Anil Seth, challenges prevailing assumptions about machine