Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

the phenomenology of volition is not so much about immaterial uncaused causes, it is a self-fulfilling controlling hallucination related to specific kinds of actions—those actions that seem to come from within. Seen this way, spooky free will is an incoherent solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

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.

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 color. 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 both contribute in important ways to guiding our behavior, and both are constrained by prior beliefs and sensory data.

Knowing that this projection is going on—to channel Wittgenstein one more time—both changes everything and leaves everything just the same.

We began with conscious level—the difference between being in a coma and being wide awake and aware—where we focused on the importance of measurement. The key point here is that candidate measures, like causal density and integrated information, are not arbitrary. Rather, they capture highly conserved properties of all conscious experiences, namely that every conscious experience is simultaneously unified and distinct from all other conscious experiences. Every conscious scene is experienced “all of a piece,” and every experience is the way it is, and not some other way.

We then moved on to the nature of conscious content and in particular the experience of being a conscious self. I posed a series of challenges to the way things seem that in each case encouraged us to adopt new, post-Copernican perspectives on conscious perception.

The first challenge was to understand perception as an active, action-oriented construction, rather than as a passive registration of an objective external reality. Our perceived worlds are both less than and more than whatever this objective external reality might be. Our brains create our worlds through processes of Bayesian best guessing in which sensory signals serve primarily to rein in our continually evolving perceptual hyp...

The second challenge turned this insight inward, to the experience of being a self. We explored how the self is itself a perception, another variety of controlled hallucination. From experiences of personal identity and continuity over time, all the way down to the inchoate sense of simply being a living body, these pieces-of-selfhood all depend on the same delicate dance between inside-out perceptual prediction...

The final challenge was to see that the predictive machinery of conscious perception has its origin and primary function not in representing the world or the body, but in the control and regulation of our physiological condition. The totality of our perceptions and cognitions—the whole panorama of human experience and mental life—is sculpted by a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive. We ...

This is my theory of the beast machine, a twenty-first-century version—or inversion—of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s “l’homme machine.” And it’s here that the deepest shifts in how to ...