The full collection for "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" - including my target article, 5o commentaries, and my author response - is now available from Behav Brain Sci.
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
Richard Dawkins' chatbot isn't conscious - it's just all talk. My take on the Dawkins/Claude kerfuffle in The Nerve
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.
"... Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman attacked Anthropic for trying to train Claude to believe that it was conscious...of trapping the AI in an “epistemic hall of mirrors,” where the company feeds the machine vocabulary about its own moral status, and then acts shocked when the
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting
Well said from @mustafasuleyman here, with @RoryStewartUK - via @DavidSacks 👇🏽 (More on this topic in my @NoemaMag essay - The Mythology of Conscious AI - )
Concerning