Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?
When he was just a kid, Anil Seth wondered about big questions. Why am I me and not someone else? Where was I before I was born? He was consciousness-curious before he knew the name for it. This drew him initially to physics, which he thought had the ideas and tools to understand everything. Then experimental psychology seemed to promise a more direct route to understanding the nature of mind, but his attention would again shift elsewhere. “There was a very long diversion through computer science and AI,” Seth told me recently. “So my Ph.D., in fact, is in artificial intelligence.” Though it wasn’t like that was going to confine his curiosity: AI led him to neuroscience and back to consciousness, which has been his focus, he said, for “the best part of 20 years or so.”
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