#152 Why AI Will Never Be Conscious
Within Reason
Alex J O'Connor
4.9 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 102 minutes
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Summary
Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack.Anil Seth is a British neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. A proponent of materialist explanations of consciousness, he is currently amongst the most cited scholars on the topics of neuroscience and cognitive science globally.Read Anil's essay, "The Mythology of Conscious AI". - TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - The Difference Between Intelligence and Consciousness
03:55 - What’s Stopping the Replication of Consciousness in AI?
17:01 - Can You Separate What the Brain Is From What It Does?
22:20 - Is Conscious Experience Just Predictions From the Brain?
26:48 - Why Do We Project Consciousness Onto LLMs?
37:27 - Can Consciousness Exist Without a Body?
42:25 - Why We Liken the Brain to a Computer
52:11 - Is There An Evolutionary Reason For Consciousness?
56:29 - Studying Unconscious Perception?
1:01:21 - Is Consciousness Unified? Split-Brain Patients
1:15:10 - Attention and Consciousness
1:19:04 - What Would a Conscious Chatbot Even Look Like?
1:25:13 - Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
1:34:19 - Do Scientists Actually Study “Consciousness” At All?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Anil Seth, welcome back to the show. |
| 0:01.7 | Thanks, Alex. |
| 0:03.0 | What is the difference between intelligence and consciousness? |
| 0:08.6 | Both resist the kind of precise consensus definitions, but I think intuitively they are |
| 0:14.1 | fundamentally different kinds of things. |
| 0:16.3 | If we think about intelligence, it's about doing something. |
| 0:20.1 | It could be about solving a complex problem or |
| 0:22.7 | solving any kind of problem. But in general, it's about the capability to do things, functionally, |
| 0:30.3 | behaviorally. Consciousness is primarily about feeling and being rather than doing. |
| 0:41.5 | It's in the words of Thomas Nagel, more than 50 years ago now. |
| 0:45.8 | He said, yeah, it's 1970, I think. |
| 0:49.7 | That for a conscious organism or a conscious anything, |
| 0:53.7 | there is something it feels like to be that organism. |
| 0:58.1 | And he doesn't mean feeling that it has to be necessarily emotional or anything like that, |
| 1:04.0 | simply the idea that there's some sort of interiority, there's some kind of experiencing going on. |
| 1:08.4 | It feels like something to be me, to be you, but probably not to be a chair. And I think this distinction between feeling and doing is intuitively right. |
| 1:15.2 | It doesn't mean they're unrelated. |
| 1:16.4 | I think they may very, they're certainly related in things that exist, in living creatures, |
| 1:22.1 | for instance, but they may not have to go together in general. |
| 1:27.1 | You just wrote an essay, a prize-winning essay. |
| 1:30.5 | Congratulations, by the way. |
| 1:31.9 | The mythology of conscious AI. |
... |
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