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.
Anil Seth's essay on biological naturalism (in opposition to the possibility of AI consciousness) is an interesting counterpoint, which of course drew lots of commentary and disagreement. A large collection of responses is now available with the article:
Very good company for "Other Minds" in this list of 10 by the @SundayGuardian. Classics by Hawking, Dennett, @kahneman_daniel. @bgreene gets 2!
Newer books also by @carlorovelli, R. Sapolsky, @davideagleman & @anilkseth.
"AlphaFold and Claude are very similar, but we don't worry that AlphaFold will become conscious . . . the fact that we worry about it for Claude says more about us than about it."