Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

A science of consciousness is nothing less than an account of who we are, of what it is to be me, or to be you, and of why there is anything it is like to “be” at all.

The story I will tell is a personal view, shaped over many years of research, contemplation, and conversation. The way I see it, consciousness won’t be “solved” in the same way that the human genome was decoded or the reality of climate change established. Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single eureka-like insight—a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about how scientific understanding progresses.

In my view, consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis

The fact that people have such different experiences and report them with such confidence, for the very same image, is compelling evidence that our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions, shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history.

A large part of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portfolio investigates how our perception of objecthood depends on our first-person perspective. His paintings break down and rearrange objects in multiple ways, representing them from several perspectives at once. We can think of these paintings, and others like them, as exploring the principles of objecthood from the perspective of the beholder’s share.