https://matthiasgruber.com/blog/tags/biological-naturalism/ Recent content in Biological Naturalism on Matthias Gruber — Blog Hugo en Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://matthiasgruber.com/blog/self-referential-simulation-commentary-seth/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://matthiasgruber.com/blog/self-referential-simulation-commentary-seth/ <p>Anil Seth&rsquo;s 2025 work on conscious artificial intelligence is one of the more honest positions in the field, which is exactly why it deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissal. I have written one. The full commentary is on Zenodo, and I will get to the link; first the disagreement, because a link without an argument is just advertising.</p> <p>Seth argues, in broad strokes, that consciousness is a biological phenomenon — that it is bound up with being a living system, and that computation or function alone is unlikely to be sufficient for machine consciousness. The label he borrows from Searle is <em>biological naturalism</em>. The intuition underneath it is a good one: consciousness probably depends on real causal powers, on the specific physical properties of the system that has it, and not merely on some abstract input-output profile that any sufficiently clever simulation could reproduce. On that last point Seth is right, and most functionalists are too quick to wave it away.</p>