Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way. On my theory, as we’ve seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature...

their own pers...

While I believe that intelligence can exist without consciousness, it could be that consciousness requires a non-zero level of intelligence.

These ideas relate closely to the concept of autopoiesis (pronounced ‘auto-poi-ee-sis’, from the Greek words for ‘self’ and ‘creation’), developed by Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana. An autopoietic system is one that is capable of maintaining and reproducing itself, which includes producing the physical components needed for its continued existence as a system. Although autopoeisis is first and foremost a theory of the cell, there are intriguing links between cellular autopoiesis and the free energy principle (see chapter 10). Both suggest a strong continuity between ‘life’ and ‘mind’, which in turn suggests that there is more to mind (and also to consciousness) than simply what a system ‘does’ (Kirchhoff, 2018; Maturana & Varela, 1980).

This term was coined by Murray Shanahan, whose book Embodiment and the Inner Life (2010) was one of the inspirations behind Ex Machina.

GPT stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ – a type of neural network specialised for language prediction and generation. These networks are trained using an unsupervised deep learning approach essentially to ‘predict the next word’ given a previous word or text snippet. GPT-3 has an astonishing 175 billion parameters and was trained on some 45 terabytes of text data. See https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ and for technical details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to developing

the CRISPR technique. The synthetic E. coli was created in the laboratory of Jason Chin; see Fredens et al. (2019).

These issues are being taken seriously. In the summer of 2020, I was invited – along with several other neuroscientists – to speak at a US National Academy joint committee convened to help establish regulatory and legal frameworks for research involving both organoids and chimeras (animals genetically modified to express specific human characteristics).

Carl Zimmer, ‘Organoids are not brains. How are they making brain waves?’,

Epilogue I want to have control, I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul. radiohead, ‘Creep’ (1992)

After all this time, gazing at the gently pulsing grey-white cortical surface, delicately threaded with dark red veins, it seemed again inconceivable that such a lump of stuff could give rise to an

inner universe of thoughts, feelings, perceptions – to a life lived fully in the first person. The profound sense of wonder I felt mixed uncomfortably in my mind with the old joke that a brain transplant is the only operation for which it’s better to be the donor than the recipient.

A hemispherotomy involves complete neural disconnection of the brain’s dysfunctional right hemisphere. The surgeon enters the brain through the right-hand side, removes (‘resects’) the temporal lobe, and then cuts through all the bundles of connections – the white-matter tracts – that link the right hemisphere with the rest of the brain and body. The isolated hemisphere remains inside the skull, and is still connected to its blood supply. It is a living but isolated island of cortex.

An extreme version of more familiar split-brain operation, the idea is that complete neural disconnection prevents electrical storms originating in the damaged right hemisphere from spreading to the rest of the brain. If the operation is carried out early enough, the young brain is often sufficiently adaptable that the remaining hemisphere can pick up most or all of the slack. Despite the radical nature of this surgery, and although every case is

different, outcomes are gene...

The brain was newly inscrutable, and I was left in awe both of the neurosurgeon’s skill and of the material reality of this most magical of objects. It felt almost transgressive. A curtain had been pulled back revealing something too intimate to be so openly on view. I was looking directly into the mechanics of a human self.

The surgery went according to plan. Some time after eight o’clock Michael left the trainee to finish stitching the scalp back together and took me along to meet the child’s family. They were grateful and relieved. I wondered what they would have been feeling had they seen what I’d seen that day.

Later, driving home through the winter darkness, my thoughts returned to David Chalmers’ description of the hard problem of consciousness: ‘It is widely agreed that

experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to such a rich inner life at all? It seems object...

Faced with this mystery, philosophy has provided a range of options, from panpsychism (consciousness everywhere, more or less) to eliminative materialism (no consciousness, at least not how we think of it) and everything in between. But the science of consciousness isn’t about choosing from a set menu, however swanky the restaurant or skilled the chef. It’s more like cooking with whatever you can find in the fridge, where various bits and pieces from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, comput...

This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds. Answers to these questions can begin by identifying correlations between this-or-that pattern of brain activity and this-or-that type of conscious experience, but they need not and should not end there. The challenge is to build increasingly sturdy explanatory bridges between mechanism an...

Historically, this strategy echoes how our scientific understanding o...

magical thinking of vitalism by individuating the properties of living systems, and then accounting for each in term...

Life and consciousness are of course different things, though I hope by now I’ve persuaded you that they are more intimately connected than at first they might seem. Either way, the strategy is the same. Instead of attempting to solve the hard problem of consciousness head on, and rather than sidelining the experiential qualities of consciousness altogether, the real problem approach offers g...

We then moved on to the nature of conscious content and in particular the experience of being a conscious self. I posed a series of challenges to the way things seem that in each case encouraged us to adopt new, post-Copernican perspectives on conscious perception.