Constructing Consciousness

The winning essays from the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, published in both English and Chinese.

The Competition was created to foster fresh intellectual inquiry, encourage innovative thinking, and bring diverse perspectives into critical global conversations. This volume contains the three winning essays on the theme of consciousness, each published in both English and Chinese.

Anil Seth writes about why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation; Xin Huang analyzes tokens as a bridge between artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces; and Xiaoben Liu proposes a paradigm of digital consciousness that treats language as the representation of subjective experience.

Contributors

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.

Huang Xin is a graduate researcher in the integrated MA–PhD program in Philosophy of Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. He studies the philosophical and sociological questions emerging from brain-computer interfaces.

Xiaoben Liu completed both his B.A. and M.A. in the Department of Philosophy at Nanjing University.