What happened: Anil Seth's public-audience statement of biological naturalism: consciousness is not intelligence; attributing consciousness to language models is projection ("Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun"); a simulation of a hurricane makes no wind; "it's life, not computation, that breathes the fire into the equations of experience"; and even seeming consciousness is politically dangerous.
Diagnostic reading: the substrate position at full strength, delivered by its most careful proponent — and the reference case for the symmetry-unacknowledged category. The talk's "looking within ourselves" opening operates as a diagnosis of human projection-bias, not as a symmetric assessment: at no point is the evidential standard applied to AI (show that the mechanism-class can generate experiencing) applied to the biological case, where consciousness is treated as given. The hurricane analogy quietly settles the very question at issue — whether experiencing is the kind of thing for which the simulation/instantiation distinction holds — and the boundary problem (ARG-02) waits for the life-as-condition criterion: which life, at what scale, and at what cost in the middle ground. The project's full response is in preparation.
Source: Anil Seth, 'Why AI isn't going to become conscious', TED2026
Overlaps Seth's Noema piece (January 2026), which the project engages separately.