Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have.

You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

To test this idea, Eagleman and his team designed a special digital watch, which displayed a series of numbers that flickered so quickly that they were impossible to read in normal conditions. Then he persuaded some brave volunteers to repeatedly perform scary adrenaline-loaded leaps into the void while staring at their flickering watches. If an internal clock was indeed speeding up, then—his reasoning went—the volunteers should see the blur resolve into readable numbers while in free fall. They couldn’t, so his study provided no evidence for an internal clock. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but still . . . what an experiment!

A striking but often overlooked aspect of conscious selfhood is that we generally experience ourselves as being continuous and unified across time. We can call this the subjective stability of the self.

We do not perceive ourselves in order to know ourselves, we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves.