Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

If you take the hard problem to heart, you will always suspect an explanatory gap between mechanistic explanations and the subjective experience of “seeing red.” The real problem accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties.

A deeper problem, when it comes to consciousness science, is that the bispectral index is not based on any principled theory.

Consciousness has many properties, and it is a mistake to confuse the expression of the particular set of properties typical of healthy adult humans with the essential nature of consciousness in all its forms, and then to assume that it sits at the top of a unidimensional scale.

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.