Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

existence – or non-existence – of the ‘soul’. And – perhaps surprisingly – there are echoes of the soul to be found in the beast machine story too. This soul is not an immaterial quiddity, nor a spiritual distillation of rationality. The beast machine view of selfhood, with its intimate ties to the body, to the persistent rhythms of the living, returns us to a place liberated from conceits of a computational mind, before Cartesian divisions of mind and matter, reason and non-reason. What we might call the ‘soul’ in this view is the perceptual expression of a deep continuity between mind and life. It is the experience we have when we encounter the deepest levels of embodied selfhood – these inchoate feelings of ‘just being’ – as really existing. It seems right to call this an echo of the soul because it revives even more ancient conceptions of this eternal notion, conceptions – such as the Ātman in Hinduism – which contemplated our innermost essence more as