Philosopher and author Acharya Prashant and Professor Steve Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (UCL), held a wide-ranging public dialogue on self-knowledge, metacognition, and consciousness at UCL on the evening of 9 July 2025. Titled 'Thinking About Thinking', the session drew a packed hall of students and served as the closing engagement of Acharya Prashant's UK tour.

The Setting and Speakers

The evening was moderated by Dr Megan Peters, Lecturer in Computational Cognition at UCL, whose own research spans metacognition, subjective experience, and consciousness. In her opening remarks, she noted that self-awareness ranks among the oldest subjects of human inquiry, and that metacognition has in recent decades become an empirical science, bringing brain research into direct conversation with contemplative traditions.

Acharya Prashant was introduced as a philosopher featured on the Watkins 2026 list of the world's most influential living thinkers, whose work reaches more than 100 million people. Professor Fleming, who also leads a group at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry, is the recipient of the Royal Society's Francis Crick Medal and Lecture and the author of 'Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness', translated into seven languages.

The Speedometer Analogy: Metacognition vs Self-Knowledge

Acharya Prashant anchored the evening's central argument in an analogy he returned to repeatedly. In a vehicle, he explained, the engine produces speed — a first-order variable — while the speedometer reads that speed, making it a second-order system. A radar gun outside provides the ground truth. The gap between speedometer and radar gun constitutes metacognitive bias; their alignment is metacognitive sensitivity.

'This reading is a report, not a choice,' he said, 'and none of it points to the driver.' The system reading itself is metacognition, he argued, while the driver investigating himself and ultimately discovering there is no driver — that is self-knowledge.

Professor Fleming praised the analogy, saying he intended to use it in his own lectures. He offered one refinement: in the brain, there is no dashboard sitting apart from the engine, since implicit and explicit metacognition are different levels of the same physical hardware. He noted that confidence frequently diverges from actual performance in experiments, a pattern often linked to the prefrontal cortex.

The Ego, Suffering, and the 'Computational Error'

Acharya Prashant drew a sharp distinction between the body and the sufferer. 'The body can feel pain,' he said, 'but there is someone else within who wakes at three in the morning and says, I am lonely, memories of the past haunt me, what am I to make of the future.' That sufferer, he argued, cannot be located anywhere in the body, and it is precisely this figure that self-knowledge addresses.

He described the ego as self-referential and self-certifying — claiming ownership over every act with phrases like 'my thought, my body' — and characterised it as a computational error in the system, comparable to a belief that two plus two equals five: without substance, yet capable of being held as real. Professor Fleming connected this to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion of the 'user illusion' — the sense of a single unified point where everything comes together, which thinkers have sought for centuries without locating. He pointed to classic split-brain experiments in which one hemisphere invented explanations for actions carried out by the other, demonstrating that even self-narratives are authored within the brain.

Honesty, the External Witness, and Insight

Acharya Prashant argued that accuracy is structural but honesty is always a matter of intent. 'I can build a very accurate system,' he said, 'but honesty is always a choice. It cannot be the output of an architecture.' The ego, he cautioned, is not built to examine itself but to preserve itself — even when reading a book about the ego, it reads only to remain safe.

He stressed the need for an external, neutral witness — 'a mirror standing before you, whether a true friend, a great book, or a teacher who is not a preacher but a mirror.' He offered a line in Hindi, 'kisi par bharosa kar lo, khud par mat karna' (trust anyone, but not yourself), framing it as an invitation to continuous self-testing. The witness, he added, is no substitute for inner honesty: without it, a person simply breaks the mirror.

Closing the substantive exchange, he distinguished thinking from insight. Thinking is a natural property of any system — even bees think and cooperate without language, he noted, referencing his earlier conversation with Professor Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London. 'But insight is not an action of the system,' he said. 'Insight is the stepping back of the intruder that distorts the seeing. The seer does not survive the seeing.'

Q&A, Reactions, and What Comes Next

The question-and-answer round ran well past its allotted time, covering the link between the heart and the brain, consciousness in artificial systems, and the reliability of perception. Professor Fleming noted that the phases of the heartbeat shape sensory contact with the outside world, and suggested that the 'hard problem' of subjective experience may ultimately be a moral rather than a scientific question.

On machine consciousness, Acharya Prashant said what is really being tested is resemblance, and resemblance can always be imitated. 'The first question is whether we ourselves are conscious,' he said.

Speaking to reporters after the event, Acharya Prashant described the two approaches as two sides of the same coin. 'Professor Fleming is examining the car and finding it self-driven,' he said. 'My work is to address that driver directly — the one who says I am the owner of life, I am the doer — and to ask him whether he is real and whether he is needed.'

Acharya Prashant's UK tour also included dialogues with Professor Jonathan Birch, psychologist Dr Melanie Joy, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and non-dual philosopher Rupert Spira, as well as visits to PETA's London office and Watkins Books. Looking ahead, he confirmed two major engagements in India, a forthcoming book titled 'Being Without Being', and further London engagements under discussion for September or October.