iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I looked back at your commentary (its been a while). I think I was drawn to the metacognitive interpretation bcoz you talk about a subject being 'tacked on' to my account of self, but IMO the basic feeling-of-being-alive (FOBA) is fundamental. I also think you can have this FOBA without a 1PP.

Thank you Boki @mitsutadaki.bsky.social - and thank you also for adapting a figure from your brilliant paper with Jaan Aru (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) for use in my response - a great illustration of scale integration.

5/ My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/xZqFCN05NT...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

4/ The original target article, "Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism" is available here: cambridge.org/core/journal...

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1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Psychedelics align brain activity with context - new in @nature.com from Devon Stoliker, @adeelrazi.bsky.social, & many others (including me, very minorly). Full pdf #openaccess www.nature.com/articles/s41... - commentary by Stefan Borgward and Mihai Avram here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

1/2 I am leaving hospital after a week, during which the amazing @england.nhs.uk repaired a valve in my heart. Open heart surgery is no small thing, and general anaesthesia still makes no sense at all. But all went well. I am so grateful to my surgeon, Francis Wells, and his brilliant team.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

"Sensorimotor Coupling Modulates Perceived Time and Agency Across Visual Perspectives" - out now #openaccess in @collabracialjust.bsky.social - led by Shu Imaizumi, w/ Keisuke Suzuki @ksks.bsky.social, Giuseppe Lai, and me online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

"Loops all the way up - recurrency as an implementation-first primitive for consciousness." New in Phys Life Rev by @zefanzheng.bsky.social @robertchisciure.bsky.social & others .... well worth a read, & open for peer commentary www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Nick Cave and Kylie duetting in Brighton last night. What a great show (also - Flaming Lips!)

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Panic over! A few stray unsigned copies of #BeingYou were spotted in WH Smith at Victoria station, now safely signed. www.anilseth.com/being-you/

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

3/ Finally, Shuqin Ma @masqbrain.bsky.social is presenting her poster on "Cross-Cultural Differences in Consciousness Attributions to Large Language Models: Evidence from the UK and China" - be sure to check this out too!

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Today at #ASSC2026 (Weds 1/7) - Ryota Takatsuki will present his poster (poster session 1): Do Autoregressive LLMs Exhibit Postdiction-Like Integration of Later Tokens? ... a very cool examination of whether LLMs have perception-like features

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

About to give the opening keynote for #AISB2026 here on my home turf at Sussex. My talk: "The case against conscious AI". This follows a wonderful day yesterday celebrating the legacy of Maggie Boden aisb.org.uk/aisb-convent...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Timescapes of Animal Experience: new paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, led by @singhal.bsky.social, w/ @birchlse.bsky.social and me. Open access link: authors.elsevier.com/c/1nHo74sIRv...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Finally submitted my response - The Stuff Matters - to the 50(!) commentaries on my 2025 BBS paper 'Conscious AI and biological naturalism'. I'm sorry to all commentators that it took so long. Hopefully the whole caboodle will be published soon. Target paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

3/ ... including, critically, regions where dynamics are locally unstable. Intuitively, we fill in the 'holes' in the phase-space GC maps - allowing full phase portraits of GC rates - as illustrated here by application to a Lorentz attractor

Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

1/5 New paper! Led by Lionel Barnett and Nadine Spychala w/ Benjamin Wahl and me: Granger causality maps for Langevin systems. Out now in Phys Rev E: journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Two more unsigned copies of #BeingYou discovered at LGW north terminal (whs bookshop). Happily, both now tracked down and signed 😎👇🏽

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

1/2 Why AI is unlikely to become conscious – my 2026 TED talk is now online. What do you think about the prospects for 'conscious AI'? www.ted.com/talks/anil_s...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

What a delight & privilege it was to be the scientific chair for @mesec-community.bsky.social's 2026 winter school in Ephesus. A wonderful group of students, and simply outstanding organisation from Emma Moorhead, Hector Mendoza, Aziza Chebil, Luis Lips, & Lara Brauchle 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽 mesec.co/event/winter...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

I am frequently MIS-quoted on this point, which is why I go to great pains always to emphasise that I mean "our experience of reality", not "reality itself". E.g. in the article you sent me, note what I actuall say compared to what the journalist writes up, both in the text and in the body.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Something for the weekend: Being You is just £1.19 - yes, one pound and nineteen pence - on Amazon Kindle *today only*. Don't miss it: www.amazon.co.uk/Being-You-Co...

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A few newly signed copies of #BeingYou in the Staff Picks section of WHSmith in London Gatwick South Terminal 😎 www.theguardian.com/books/2021/a...

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4/ The error is even clearer in the wall text: "The blackboard bears the words 'DNA->RNA->protein". Innocent mistake? Well, look who commissioned the portrait. A certain James Watson 🙄

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3/ Strikingly, the portrait of Crick commissioned for no lesser place than the Crick Institute continues to push "Watson's Dogma" (as Crick suggested it be known) - as discovered by Crick scientist Katie Bentley. Look at the top, there's no backward arrow from RNA to DNA.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

2/ Amusing Crick-snippet. Cobb's book makes clear that Crick consistently rejected DNA->RNA->protein 'central dogma' continually pushed by Watson, and let Watson know about it. For Crick, back-translation from RNA->DNA was entirely possible, and indeed happens. Here's a passage from Cobb's book:

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5/ The essay – along with all the winners, honourable mentions and shortlisted contributions will also appear on @closertotruth.bsky.social loc.closertotruth.com/berggruen-pr... (& here's my videos on @closertotruth.bsky.social closertotruth.com/contributor/...)

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

3/ Many congratulations to the two Chinese language winners, Xin Huang and Xiaoben Liu for their essays, which I am excited to read – along with the 7 honourable mentions and 25 shortlisted contributions.

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9/ Granger Causality Maps for Langevin Systems was led by Lionel Barnett, and arose from work with Nadine Spychala as part of her excellent PhD thesis. Here’s the link: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16632

7/ Our new study solves both problems. Leveraging an analytic method for calculation of GCs for VOU processes directly from the model parameters, we can construct GC maps for Langevin systems over the entire phase space (averaging to obtain overall GC values). Job done! Here’s that Lorentz again:

6/ Not so fast … this approach, while clever, has serious problems: a shrinkage to zero as sampling rate increases, and (worse) “holes” in the GC maps where dynamics are locally unstable in phase space. This happens all the time: e.g., a Lorentz system:

3/ GC analysis is mostly applied using linear modelling. Application to nonlinear systems remains challenging. Information-theoretic transfer entropy is sensitive to nonlinear effects but is difficult to estimate: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

2/ Granger causality (GC) is a powerful method for estimating directed information flow from time-series data, widely used in neuroscience and in many other fields www.jneurosci.org/content/35/8... h/t @xkcd.com

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

1/🧵 NEW PREPRINT! Granger Causality Maps for Langevin Systems – new preprint from the incomparable Lionel Barnett, w/ Benjamin Wahl, Nadine Spychala, and me – a Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science production. Link at end of thread.

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Don’t panic! The stack of unsigned Being You at @blackwells.bsky.social Oxford have now been tracked down and duly signed. (& lovely to see them still on the “Best of Norrington Room” table 🙏🏽)

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Rare unsigned copy of Being You located in Daunts, Summertown - and now duly signed 😎

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

.. and that's wrap! Thanks all round and great job :-)

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

.. and here's the whole group #CIFARwinterschool 2025 in Montebello. Thanks again to #CIFAR and the Templeton World Charity Foundation for their generous support.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Day 2 of the #CIFARwinterschool kicking off with extraordinary mind-jazz from Guillaume Dumas @introspection.bsky.social - former #CIFAR BMC Global Scholar & self-confessed anti-disciplinary researcher. This morning: neuro-AI, hyperscanning, social neuroscience, consciousness, & more

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Brilliant talk by Justin Wood (Indiana) on his "digital twin studies" - raising newborn chicks, and artificial neural networks, in the same (virtual) environments - fantastic new perspective on the nature/nurture debate #CIFARwinterschool #TWCF www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Wonderful and inspiring opening session at the CIFAR/TWCF Winter School for the Neuroscience of Consciousness, here in beautiful wintery Montebello, in Quebec. All of the participants gave 60 second intros to themselves and their interests. What a great group of people.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

More signed copies of #BeingYou (& therefore fewer unsigned copies) - this time in the WHS Bookshop at Leeds station 👇🏽

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

"Cognition all the way down". Great to see this fine new paper from @robertchisciure.bsky.social & @drmichaellevin.bsky.social out now in Synthese - introducing a new metric to quantify biological intelligence as search efficiency in multidimensional problem spaces link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

6/ “Solving consciousness”—even partially—will have profound implications across science, medicine, animal welfare, law, and technology development, reshaping how we see ourselves and our relationships to both AI and the natural world

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

4/ There are many paths to future breakthroughs, including ‘computational (neuro)phenomenology’, adversarial collaborations, and ecological experimental design.

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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

But you are right that the TT is formally a test of what it takes for humans to attribute a property to a system, not of whether the system actually has the property (though some argue this is the same thing) - see attached (from an early draft of my BBS paper)

Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

1/ Turing indeed talked about thinking & operationalised this with his test, but was careful to say that the issue of consciousness need not be solved in order to answer the Q of whether machines can think, thereby clearly separating the concepts - see the attached, from p.12 of his 1950 paper