Does Anil Seth commit any of the following philosophical missteps?

1. Fallacy of misplaced concreteness

Yes—arguably.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness refers to treating abstract concepts or models as if they were concrete or actual entities. Seth frequently uses computational metaphors—talking about the brain as a prediction machine or perception as Bayesian inference. While he often qualifies these as metaphors, there’s a tendency in his work to lean toward reifying the model, especially when discussing “perceptual predictions” as though they are literal operations rather than explanatory abstractions. This borders on misplaced concreteness, particularly when computational or algorithmic metaphors are taken as ontological descriptors.

2. Mistaking epistemology for ontology

Yes, to some extent.
Seth is grounded in the epistemological project of explaining how conscious experience arises from neural processes. However, his accounts often flatten the ontological distinction between the process of knowing (how we experience) and the being or becoming of experience itself. For example, the “controlled hallucination” framing presumes that the real world is a noise-corrected guess—an epistemic model—but this can slip into suggesting that reality is just that guess, conflating what we can know (epistemology) with what is (ontology). He often bypasses metaphysical questions by reducing them to scientific ones, implicitly assuming that epistemological access is enough for ontological claims.

3. Mistaking correlates for causes

Occasionally, though he’s cautious.
Seth is well aware of the “hard problem” of consciousness and doesn't claim to have solved it. However, his framing often treats neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) as if they are not just correlates but causal explanations. While he makes efforts to distinguish correlation from causation in his technical work, the popular framing (especially in Being You) tends to oversimplify this boundary, potentially overstating the causal sufficiency of predictive coding models for conscious experience.

4. Mistaking phenomena for their correlates

Yes—particularly in how he handles conscious experience.
Seth often emphasizes that what we experience is the brain’s best guess about the causes of sensory inputs. But in doing so, he risks equating experience itself with its neural correlates or processes, as if the phenomenon is the activity in the brain, rather than being co-arising or interdependent. This is a subtle but important conflation: instead of holding the phenomenon as primary and the neural activity as its correlate or expression, his framing often prioritizes the neural process and treats the experiential as derivative—which can sideline the richness and irreducibility of lived experience.

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Summary

Anil Seth is a rigorous thinker and does acknowledge many of the philosophical pitfalls of consciousness science. However, his popular work tends to commit or flirt with several philosophical confusions:

• He edges into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when he literalizes models and metaphors.

• He sometimes collapses the distinction between epistemology and ontology, especially in his treatment of perception.

• He risks treating correlates as causes, especially when explaining consciousness in terms of predictive processing.

• He often reverses the primacy between conscious phenomena and their correlates, thereby neglecting phenomenological or ontological nuance.