Consciousness and the Self
Kevin: Harris interviewed Anil Seth in an interview called “Consciousness and the Self” Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.
Harris says consciousness is the most important thing in the universe, because it’s the basis of all of our happiness and suffering. But he says all of our definitions of consciousness are circular.
Seth says there’s a certain circularity but some of the distinctions made are useful for interpreting experimental results e.g. access consciousness vs phenomenal consciousness.
Harris quotes from “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” and asks how Seth feel about the definition. Seth says he likes it very much. Then Harris asks about the Hard problem. Seth says its “one of the most influential philosophical contributions” but says he thinks conceivability arguments are weak because the more we know about a system, the less plausible it becomes to imagine a zombie alternative.
Opus: Seth’s position there is interesting and worth unpacking, because it’s a sophisticated middle ground that avoids some of the traps we’ve been discussing.
On the circularity point, he’s basically conceding what you identified earlier — that folk definitions of consciousness don’t do real explanatory work — but arguing that working scientists can still make progress by breaking the big question into smaller, operationalizable pieces.
Block’s distinction between access consciousness (information being available for reasoning, report, action control) and phenomenal consciousness (what it’s like) gives you something you can actually design experiments around, even if the deeper question remains open.
That’s the pragmatic scientific move: don’t solve the philosophy first, carve off the parts you can study empirically and see what happens.
His response to the hard problem is essentially the Dennett/Frankish line but stated more cautiously. The conceivability argument for zombies — that we can imagine a physically identical being without experience — is supposed to show that consciousness can’t be reduced to physical processes.
Seth’s counter is that conceivability tracks ignorance, not metaphysical possibility. The less you understand about how a system works, the easier it is to imagine it working the same way without consciousness. As neuroscience fills in the details, the zombie scenario becomes harder to coherently conceive. It’s not that the hard problem dissolves, but that the intuition pumping it relies on weakens as knowledge increases.
This is a more defensible version of what Dennett sometimes said with more bravado. Seth isn’t saying the hard problem is confused or that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist — he’s saying the philosophical argument for its irreducibility depends on a gap in our understanding that may close.
The Sackler Centre name is worth noting — that’s the same Sackler family associated with Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis, though the funding predates the controversy becoming mainstream. Another case of important research being sustained by complicated money.
What did Harris push back on, if anything?
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Kevin: Harris says for him the hard problem never rested on the zombie argument, and that
“the hard problem arises from the fact that no explanation of consciousness promises the same sort of intuitive closure that other scientific explanations do. Consciousness is not like life”
Seth replies
“I think its an open question whether the analogy to life will turn out to be false or not. Scientists and philosophers over the centuries have encountered things that have seemed inexplicable that have turned out to be explicable.”
Opus: That’s a genuinely good exchange because they’re disagreeing about something that matters and being precise about what they disagree on.
Harris is making a specific claim: even if we had a complete neuroscience of consciousness — every neural correlate mapped, every mechanism identified — we’d still be left with a residual “why does this physical process give rise to experience?” that wouldn’t arise for other scientific explanations.
When we explained life in terms of biochemistry, the mystery dissolved. Nobody feels there’s a remaining question about why those chemical processes are “alive” — the explanation feels complete. Harris is betting that consciousness won’t work that way. The explanatory gap is permanent, not a product of current ignorance.
Seth’s response is historically grounded and reasonable — vitalism was once a serious position, the idea that life required some extra ingredient beyond chemistry. It seemed genuinely inconceivable that mere molecules could be alive. Then biochemistry explained it and the inconceivability evaporated.
He’s suggesting consciousness might follow the same trajectory: it feels inexplicable now, but that feeling may be an artifact of not yet having the right explanatory framework.
The trouble is that both positions are unfalsifiable at the current moment, and they know it. Harris can always say “we haven’t found the right explanation yet, but when we do, the gap will remain.” Seth can always say “we haven’t found the right explanation yet, but when we do, the gap will close.”
Neither can prove their case until the explanation actually arrives, and if it never does, Harris claims vindication while Seth says we just haven’t looked hard enough.
But I think Seth has the slightly stronger position historically, for the reason he gives. The track record of “this seems fundamentally inexplicable” is poor.
Vitalism, the “special nature” of organic chemistry, the apparent impossibility of explaining heredity mechanistically — all felt like hard barriers and all dissolved.
Harris is essentially claiming that consciousness is the one case where the pattern breaks, that this time the apparent explanatory gap reflects a genuine metaphysical divide rather than limited understanding. He might be right.
But betting against the historical pattern requires strong justification, and “it feels like it won’t close” is precisely the kind of intuition that has been wrong before.
Seth’s framework is actually more useful for practical purposes. If you think the hard problem is permanent and irreducible, you’re somewhat stuck — you can map correlates but never truly explain, and you certainly can’t say anything definitive about AI consciousness because the explanatory gap applies everywhere.
