Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

I made tea. Could I have done otherwise? In one sense, yes. There’s coff...

so I could have made coffee. And when making the tea it certainly seemed to me that I could have made coffee instead. But I didn’t want coffee, I wanted tea, and since I can’t choose my wants, I made tea. Given the precise state of the universe at the time, which includes the state of my body and brain, all of which have prior causes, whether deterministic or not, stretching all the way back to my origin as a tea-drinking semi-Englishman and beyond, I could not have done otherwise. You can’t replay the same tape and expect a different outcome, apart from uninteresting differences due to randomness....

The third defining feature is that voluntary actions seem to come from within rather than being imposed from somewhere else. This is the ...

reflex action, like the rapid withdrawal of my foot when I accidentally stub my toe, and its voluntary equivalent – such as when I deliberately swing my ...

Altogether, we perceive an action as being voluntary – as being ‘freely willed’ – when we infer that its causes come predominantly from within, in a way that is aligned with one’s beliefs and goals, detached from alternative potential causes in the body or in the world, and that suggests the possibility of having done otherwise. This is what experiences of volition feel like from the inside, and also what voluntary actions look like from the outside.

In engineering and mathematics, a system has degrees of freedom to the extent that it has multiple ways of responding to some state of affairs. A rock has basically no degrees of freedom, whereas a train on a single track has one degree of freedom (go backward or forward). An ant might have quite a few degrees of freedom in how its biological control system responds to its environment, while you and I have vastly more degrees of freedom thanks to the spectacular complexities of our bodies and our brains.

Voluntary behaviour depends on the competence to control all these degrees of freedom, in ways that are aligned with our beliefs, values, and goals, and that are adaptively detached from the immediate exigencies of the environment and body.

This competence to control is implemented by the brain not by any single ...

resides, but by a network of processes distributed over many r...

Following the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard, we can think of this network as implementing three processes: an early ‘what’ process specifying which action to make, a subsequent ‘when’ process determining the timing of the action, and a late-breaking ‘whether’ process, which allows for its last-minute cancellation or inhibition.

The ‘what’ component of volition integrates hierarchically organised sets of beliefs, goals, and values together with perceptions of the environment, in order to specify a single action out of many possibilities. I move my hand to the kettle because I am thirsty, I like tea, it is the right time of day, the kettle is within reach, no wine is available – and so on.

These ...

perceptions, beliefs, and goals involve many different brain regions, with a concentration in the mor...

These interwoven processes play out in a continual loop spanning the brain, body, and environment, with no beginning and no end, implementing a highly flexible ongoing form of goal-oriented behaviour.

This network of processes funnels a large array of potential causes into a single flow of voluntary actions – and at times their inhibition. And it is the perception of the operation of this network, its looping through the body, out into the world, and back again, that underpins subjective experiences of volition.

The perceptual experience of volition is a self-fulfilling perceptual prediction, another distinctive kind of controlled – again perhaps a controlling –

hallucination.

There’s one further reason why we experience voluntary actions the way we do, a reason that puts even more clear air between volition as perceptual inference and volition as dualistic magic. Experiences of volition are useful for guiding future behaviour, just as much as for guiding current behaviour. As we’ve seen, voluntary behaviour is highly flexible. The competence to control large numbers of degrees of freedom means that if a particular voluntary action turns out badly, then the next time a similar situation arises I might try something different. If on Monday I attempt a shortcut on my drive to work but arrive late because I get lost, then on Tuesday I may choose a longer but more reliable...

goals. I mentioned earlier that our sense of free will is very much about feeling we ‘could have done differently’. This counterfactual aspect of the experience of volition is partic...

The feeling that I could have done differently does not mean that I actually could have done differently. Rather, the phenomenology of alternative possibilities is useful because in a future similar, but ...

If every circumstance is indeed identical on Tuesday as on Monday, then I can do no differently on Tuesday than on Monday. But this will never be the case. The physical world does not duplicate itself from day to day, not even from millisecond to millisecond. At the very least, the circumstances of my brain will have ch...

consequ...

This, by itself, is enough to affect how my brain can control my many degrees of freedom when setting out to work again on Tuesday.‡ The usefulness of feeling ‘I could have...

And who is the ‘you’? The ‘you’ in question is the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you. Experiences of volition themselves can now be seen as an essential part of this bundle of selfhood – the...

Altogether, the ability to exercise and to experience ‘free will’ is the capacity to perform actions, to make choices – and to think ...

Daniel Wegner

The Illusion of Conscious Will,

When people talk about being ‘in the moment’ or in a ‘state of flow’ – when deeply immersed in an activity they have extensively practised – the phenomenology of volition may be entirely absent.

Much of the time, our voluntary actions, and our thoughts – well, they ‘just happen’.

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity

to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are.

Einstein stated in a 1929 interview that because he didn’t believe in free will he

took credit for nothing.

It is also a mistake to call the experience of volition an illusion. These experiences are perceptual best guesses, as real as any other kind of conscious perception, whether of the world or of the self. A conscious intention is as real as a visual experience of colour. Neither corresponds directly to any definite property of the world – there is no ‘real red’ or ‘real blue’ out there, just as there is no spooky free will in here – but they bot...

Whereas colour experiences construct features of the world around us, experiences of volition have the metaphysically subversive content that the ...

We project causal power into our experiences of volition in just the same way that we project redness into our perceptions of surfaces. Knowi...

channel Wittgenstein one more time – both changes everything and leaves ev...

Experiences of volition are not only real, they are indispensable to our survival. They are self-fulfilling perceptual inferences that bring about voluntary actions. Without these experiences, we would not be able to navigate the complex environments in which we humans thrive, nor would we be abl...

In Schopenhauer’s distinction one can see the roots of all addiction.

‘I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune.’

In terms of brain wiring, the primary neuroanatomical features that are strongly associated with human consciousness are found in all mammalian species. There is a six-layered cortex, a thalamus that is strongly interconnected with this cortex, a deep-lying brainstem, and a host of other shared features – including neurotransmitter systems – which are consistently implicated, in humans, in the moment-to-moment flow of conscious experience.

Seals and dolphins sleep with half their brain at a time, koalas sleep for about twenty-two hours each day while giraffes get by on less than four, and newborn killer whales do not sleep at all in the first month of life.

Nearly all mammals have periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – though seals do so only while sleeping on land, and dolphins apparently not at all.

These differences in perceptual dominance will mean that each animal will inhabit a distinctive inner

In humans, this ‘mirror self-recognition’ ability tends to develop some time between eighteen and twenty-four months of age. This doesn’t mean that younger infants lack consciousness – only that their awareness of themselves as an individual, as separate from others, may not have fully

formed before this age.

Who passes the mirror test? Among mammals, some great apes, a few dolphins and killer whales, and a single Eurasian elephant.

A

parade of other mammalian creatures, including pandas, dogs, and various monkeys, have...

There is no convincing evidence that any non-mammal passes the mirror test, although manta rays and magpies may come close, and there is currently some controversy about the cleaner wrasse.