On one level, it’s a little disappointing that the winner of the (English-language) Berggruen essay prize for 2025 is Anil Seth, an extremely well-established philosopher and author of note; it might have been nice to see some new voice breaking through and winning what, for them, would be a life-changing sum of money, but for Seth will likely just go toward paying off the last of the mortgage.
My curmudgeonly anti-elitism aside, it’s hard to complain about the winning essay itself, which sits somewhat surprisingly at odds with the Berggruen Institute’s soft Singularitarianism. From Seth’s outro:
The cartoon dreams of a silicon rapture, with its tropes of mind uploading, of disembodied eternal existence and of cloud-based reunions with other chosen ones, is a regression to the Cartesian soul. Computers, or more precisely computations, are, after all, immortal, and the sacrament of the algorithm promises a purist rationality, untainted by the body (despite plentiful evidence linking reason to emotion). But these are likely to be empty dreams, delivering not posthuman paradise but silicon oblivion.
That said, it’s perhaps worth noting that—going purely on the titles, one of which is “The First Paradigm of Consciousness Uploading: Mechanisms of Consciousness Evolution in the AI Axial Age and a Prospect toward Web4”—the two Chinese-language winners seem rather more bullish on silicon sentience than does Seth1, to say the least. This tracks closely with the very different attitudes to “AI” in China, which is as much to do with ancient philosophies such as Confucianism and daoism as it is to do with that nation’s rather more recent techno-optimistic triumphalism (if not perhaps more so)—though China is not without its digital discontents, either.
I am aware (not least because some people seem to delight in pointing out to me) that in this matter I have quite consciously picked a position on the basis of emotional instinct as much as rational thought: I know that these machines are not and never will be conscious, because that knowing is a necessary condition of the sustainment of the world as I understand it, and of my sanity and sense of purpose therein.
However, I fail to see this as the gotcha it is so often claimed to be. If it possible for me to hold a conclusion on that basis, it is surely just as possible that those holding the opposite opinion are doing so for their own reasons of epistemological and ontological continuity. I do find it interesting, however, that the supposedly “unscientific” position in this argument is the one that still cleaves to the rational-sceptical view that, in this case at least, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
I’ve never tried to hide the fact that, back in the day—when I was a younger and even more stupid person than I am niw—I was very much a fellow-traveller of transhumanism, if never a card-carrying door-knocker for the creed. Back then I found it at least possible, if not necessarily plausible, that silicon sentience might quite literally emerge from the seemingly exponential churn of technological development.
I think what would most disappoint that younger, more Mulder-esque me is the shallow banality of the world in which it has become commonplace to claim that silicon sentience is a thing: that the Singularity would have to be reached by way of this miserable interregnum—during which the overwhelming impression is one of everything getting slowly shittier rather than exponentially better, and where the strongest advocates for a computational godhead are the sort of people you wouldn’t trust to feed your cat for afternoon while you were out of town—is about as strong a repudiation of the techno-utopian memeplex as I could possibly have imagined.
If these are the first days of a bright new future of human-machine collaboration, then honestly I’m glad I’m already in the latter half of my life. If this is truly the paradigm from here on out, you can fucking keep it.
- No, I haven’t read either of them, for much the same reason that I don’t read the leaflets that the Jehova’s Witnesses hand out in the high street. While I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of my ever being convinced that I’m wrong on this matter, it’s really not going to come as a result of reading essays with abstracts like that. ↩︎
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