Seth, Block and Tononi argue in Nature AI isn't conscious

In a comment published in Nature, neuroscientists Anil Seth and Giulio Tononi, with philosopher Ned Block, argue that today's AI is not conscious and that current trajectories are unlikely to get it there.

The authors prise intelligence apart from consciousness. The human cerebellum holds nearly four-fifths of the brain's neurons but, as they note, performs "precise, adaptive, highly intelligent motor computations entirely outside conscious awareness." Intelligence is about what a system can do; consciousness is about what it feels like to be something. "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past," they write, and the sense of a mind on the other end is largely a projection.

Their second move is to reject computational functionalism, the view that running the right program on any substrate suffices for experience. "Brains are not… computers that are made of meat," they argue. On the integrated information account Tononi has long defended, consciousness depends on a system's components being wired together "in very specific, tightly interconnected ways" absent from the layered, feed-forward structure of today's deep-learning systems. AlphaFold does its biology at the frontier of pattern-matching without anyone imputing feelings to it; chatbots that talk back get read as minds.

The idea of conscious AI has drifted from fringe to mainstream, Seth, Block and Tononi note, with figures such as Richard Dawkins and Geoffrey Hinton having floated the possibility and Anthropic publishing research claiming to find computational signatures of consciousness in Claude. Two of the AI researchers we track shared the piece on day one. The authors' bottom line: today's systems are "smart tools, not smart people," and treating appearances of consciousness as the real thing risks pulling welfare attention from beings whose capacity to suffer is already certain.