Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC) Deepdive #013
Can Science Account for Consciousness?
Reading: The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience | Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser & Evan Thompson · MIT Press, 2024
Every scientific model has a built-in exclusion: the experiencer who built it. Modern science achieved its extraordinary power precisely by placing the observer outside the frame... treating nature as an object to be described from nowhere in particular. Yet nowhere in particular is not where any of us live.
The cost of this exclusion, argue astrophysicist Adam Frank, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson in The Blind Spot (MIT Press, 2024) is a science that cannot account for the very condition that makes science possible: conscious, experiencing beings.
Deepdive #013 takes this provocation as its throughline: experience is not a residue to be explained away, nor an embarrassing exception to be quarantined in philosophy of mind ... it is the missing variable that distorts models across physics, biology, cognitive science, and now artificial intelligence.
Every item in the reading list below circles the same blind spot from a different angle. William James insists experience is the basic stuff of reality. Nagel shows that no objective description can capture what it is like to be something.
Chalmers names the explanatory gap. Varela proposes a method for bridging it. Seth reframes consciousness as a controlled hallucination that is none the less real for that.
And recent AI welfare research forces the question into institutional urgency: if we build systems we cannot assess for experience, are we reproducing the Blind Spot at industrial scale?
Format: 2 hours, in-person, downtown Vancouver
Maximum 20: must be registered with Mind, AI & Consciousness discussion list to attend (See mac.bc-ai.ca for details.).
Format
We hold focused 2-hour "deep dive" discussions that combine structure with organic exploration. Members are expected to prepare through advance readings and actively participate.
About Mind, AI & Consciousness
Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC) is a reading-and-discussion group born from organic conversations in the Vancouver AI community.
We use what's happening in AI as a lens on an older question: what consciousness actually is, and what if anything separates a human mind from a machine that acts like one.
Each month we pick a hard text and go deep. Panpsychism, free will, Integrated Information Theory, quantum theories of mind, embodiment, the limits of science itself... serious questions, taken seriously, with no requirement that anyone agree.
About BC + AI
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.
Not a corporate lobby. Not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Vancouver AI was just the start. The ecosystem keeps growing across BC: Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, and beyond, each node bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Join or support: bc-ai.ca/membership
Plug Into The Bigger Organism
Other upcoming events in the community live at luma.com/vancouver-ai.
FRAMING QUOTATIONS
“Consciousness … is the one thing in the world of which we cannot know that the absence of it does not exist. Its presence is the only thing we can be absolutely certain of, and yet its nature remains the deepest of mysteries.”
— William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.”
— Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
“We are all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it ‘reality.’”
— Anil Seth, TED Talk: “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality” (2017)
SESSION FRAMEWORKS
Six interlocking frameworks shape the evening’s inquiry, each addressing the missing variable of experience from a different disciplinary vantage point.
The Blind Spot: Frank, Gleiser & Thompson, 2024
The founding move of modern science placing the observer outside the frame has created a systematic blind spot. Scientific knowledge is not a mirror of an observer-independent world but a co-evolving relationship between world and the experiencing beings who investigate it. Ignoring this produces not just philosophical confusion but concrete dead-ends in physics, biology, and climate science.
The Stream of Consciousness & Radical Empiricism William James, 1890 / 1904
Consciousness is not a chain of discrete events but a continuous flowing stream personal, selective, and always changing. James’s mature position goes further: experience itself is the basic stuff of reality. Relations between experiences are as real as the things experienced, and the observer-independent world of physics is an abstraction built on top of this experiential ground.
The Hard Problem: David Chalmers, 1995
Why should any physical process give rise to subjective experience at all? Functional and mechanistic accounts explain how the brain processes information, integrates signals, and generates behaviour the “easy problems” but none explain why any of this is accompanied by an inner qualitative feel. No amount of third-person data closes this explanatory gap.
Neurophenomenology & Enactivism: Francisco Varela et al., 1991–1996
Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world but its enactment through embodied action. Varela’s methodological proposal: treat first-person phenomenological reports and third-person neuroscientific data as mutually constraining, not hierarchically ordered. This pragmatic bridge is the closest thing to a working method for a science that includes the experiencer.
Consciousness as Controlled Hallucination Anil Seth, 2017–2021
The brain is a prediction machine whose best guesses about the causes of sensory signals constitute conscious experience — including the sense of self. This is not an argument that experience is illusory but that its structure can be studied scientifically: by explaining what predictions the brain makes and why, we can progressively illuminate the hard problem from the inside.
Ancient Parallels: Upanishads & Buddhist Anatta c. 700–300 BCE
Two ancient traditions placed experience at the centre of cosmology and reached opposite conclusions. The Upanishads identify individual consciousness, Atman, with ultimate reality, Brahman: experience is the ground of being. Buddhism counters with anatta no permanent self underlies the stream of experience. Both traditions insist the observer cannot be cleanly separated from what is observed, anticipating the Blind Spot argument by two millennia.
RECOMMENDED READS
Items are grouped by medium: Books first, then Videos & Podcasts, then Academic Papers & Articles.
★ Recommended items are the highest-priority preparations. Aim to engage with at least one from each group before the session.
BOOKS
★ The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser & Evan Thompson MIT Press, 2024
The anchor text. Frank, an astrophysicist; Gleiser, a physicist; and Thompson, a philosopher at UBC, trace the systematic exclusion of the observer across modern science — from quantum mechanics and the arrow of time to the origins of life and the climate crisis — and argue that incorporating lived experience is not a retreat from rigour but a prerequisite for it.
★ Being You: A New Science of Consciousness Recommended - Anil Seth Faber & Faber / Dutton, 2021
Seth’s central thesis: every conscious experience is a controlled hallucination — a prediction generated by the brain rather than a transparent window onto the world. The book bridges the hard problem and empirical neuroscience, arguing that explaining the structure of experience, rather than tackling consciousness head-on, is the most tractable scientific strategy. Named Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg and The Economist.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience - Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch MIT Press, 1991; revised edition, 2017
The book that introduced enactivism to cognitive science: cognition as the enactment of a world through embodied action, not the computation of a representation. Bridges phenomenology, Buddhist philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Thompson’s 2017 introduction updates the argument in light of subsequent developments, including AI.
★ The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI - Jonathan Birch Oxford University Press, 2024 Open Access
Birch, from LSE, develops a precautionary ethics for “sentience candidates” beings whose capacity for experience is uncertain, including people with disorders of consciousness, brain organoids, and AI systems. His framework is directly applicable to the synthetic biological systems examined in Deepdive #012, extending that session’s questions into the domain of moral standing.
VIDEOS & PODCASTS
★ Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality - Anil Seth TED Talk, 2017 17 min 14M+ views
The best single introduction to Seth’s controlled hallucination framework. Covers the distinction between level and content of consciousness, the predictive processing model of perception, and the “beast machine” theory of the self. Required viewing for participants who have not yet read Being You.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness: David Chalmers Closer to Truth interview Approx. 25 min
Chalmers explains the distinction between easy and hard problems in accessible terms, responds to major objections, and discusses why purely computational or functional accounts cannot close the explanatory gap. Valuable preparation for both the Chalmers paper and the AI consciousness debate.
Evan Thompson on Enactivism and “Quantum Phenomenology - Evan Thompson Edge of Mind Podcast, 2022 Approx. 60 min
Thompson, co-author of both The Embodied Mind and The Blind Spot, discusses enactivism, the relationship between phenomenology and neuroscience, Buddhist no-self, and the prospects for a science that includes the experiencer. Conversational bridge between The Embodied Mind and The Blind Spot.
ACADEMIC PAPERS & ARTICLES
▸ What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ★ Recommended
Thomas Nagel The Philosophical Review, 1974 PDF, free
Nagel’s landmark argument: no amount of objective, third-person information about bat brains or behaviour tells us what echolocation feels like from the inside. An organism is conscious if and only if there is “something it is like” to be that organism. The clearest statement of the explanatory gap and the most cited paper in philosophy of mind.
▸ Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 1995 PDF, free
Chalmers’s seminal articulation of the hard problem: why do physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all? He distinguishes the “easy problems” of cognition — discrimination, reporting, access — from the genuinely hard question of why any of this is accompanied by felt experience. No subsequent theory of consciousness can avoid engaging with this argument.
▸ Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem ★ Recommended
Francisco J. Varela Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4), 1996 Online
Varela responds to Chalmers not with a theoretical refutation but a methodological proposal: build a research community equipped for rigorous first-person inquiry and treat phenomenological reports and neuroscientific data as mutually constraining. The most operationally concrete proposal for a science that takes experience seriously.
▸ The Stream of Consciousness Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI
William James Holt, 1890 Online, free
James’s five defining properties of conscious thought — stream character, personal ownership, continuity, intentionality, and selectiveness — remain the most carefully observed phenomenological description of experience in the English language. The foundational text for understanding why experience cannot be reduced to a sequence of discrete states.
▸ There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Artificial Intelligence
Zimmermann et al. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, Nature Portfolio October 2025
A pointed counter-argument to AI consciousness claims: LLMs are probabilistic pattern-matchers operating on binary code and semiconductor switches; no amount of linguistic sophistication constitutes experience. The authors coin “semantic pareidolia” — the human tendency to project inner life onto outputs that merely simulate it. Essential challenge to the Birch precautionary framework and a necessary counterweight to the AI welfare literature.
ALL READINGS / WATCHINGS / LISTENINGS
▸ Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Anil Seth Faber & Faber / Dutton, 2021 Book
Consciousness as controlled hallucination; predictive processing theory of self and world.
▸ The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
Frank, Gleiser & Thompson MIT Press, 2024 Book
The systematic exclusion of the observer from science and the costs of that omission.
▸ The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI
Jonathan Birch Oxford University Press, 2024 Book, open access
Precautionary ethics for beings of uncertain sentience, including AI systems.
▸ The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
Varela, Thompson & Rosch MIT Press, 1991 / 2017 Book
Enactivism: cognition as the enactment of a world through embodied, experienced action.
▸ Evan Thompson on Enactivism and Quantum Phenomenology
Evan Thompson Edge of Mind Podcast, 2022 Podcast, approx. 60 min
Enactivism, Buddhist no-self, and the prospects for a science that includes the experiencer.
▸ Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 1995 Paper, free PDF
Seminal articulation of the hard problem and the explanatory gap.
▸ The Hard Problem of Consciousness
David Chalmers Closer to Truth Video, approx. 25 min
Accessible explanation of the hard problem and responses to major objections.
▸ Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem
Francisco J. Varela Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4), 1996 Paper
A working method for a science that treats first-person experience as data.
▸ The Stream of Consciousness Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI
William James Holt, 1890 Classic text, free online
Five defining properties of thought; the irreducible continuity of conscious experience.
▸ There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Artificial Intelligence
Zimmermann et al. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications October 2025 Paper
Counter-argument to AI consciousness: “semantic pareidolia” and the limits of simulation.
▸ What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel The Philosophical Review, 1974 Paper, free PDF
The explanatory gap: no objective description captures what experience is like from the inside.
▸ Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality
Anil Seth TED, 2017 Video, 17 min
Introduction to the controlled hallucination framework; 14M+ views.