Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

According to the real problem, the primary goals of consciousness science are to explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience. This means explaining why a particular conscious experience is the way it is—why it has the phenomenological properties that it has—in terms of physical mechanisms and processes in the brain and body. These explanations should enable us to predict when specific subjective experiences will occur, and enable their control through intervening in the underlying mechanisms. In short, addressing the real problem requires explaining why a particular pattern of brain activity—or other physical process—maps to a particular kind of conscious experience, not merely establishing that it does.