Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

brains are not computers made of meat. They are chemical machines as much as they are electrical networks.

Every brain that has ever existed has been part of a living body, embedded in and interacting with its environment—an environment which in many cases contains other embodied brains.

(A “mechanism”—to be clear—can be defined as a system of causally interacting parts that produce effects.)

“Heat” becomes the energy transferred between two systems at different temperatures.

Axioms, in logic, are statements that are self-evidently true, in the sense that they are generally agreed to require no additional justification.

the brain is a “prediction machine,” and that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory inputs.

color is not a definite property of things-in-themselves. Rather, color is a useful device that evolution has hit upon so that the brain can recognize and keep track of objects in changing lighting conditions.

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.

our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions, shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history.

The function of perception, at least to a first approximation, is to figure out the most likely causes of the sensory signals, not to deliver awareness of the sensory signals themselves—whatever

The controlled hallucination of our perceptual world has been designed by evolution to enhance our survival prospects, not to be a transparent window onto an external reality,

Proprioception is a form of perception which keeps track of where the body is and how it is moving, by registering sensory signals that flow from receptors situated all over the skeleton and musculature.

perceptual expectations provided by the word context are able to alter activity at early stages of visual processing in a way that enhances perception, just as the controlled hallucination view suggests should happen.

The general phenomenon of seeing patterns in things is called pareidolia (from the Greek “alongside” and “image”).

what we call “hallucination” is a form of uncontrolled perception. And that normal perception—in the here and now—is indeed a form of controlled hallucination.

time perception can emerge, at least in principle, from a “best guess” about the rate of change of sensory signals,

Experiences of volition, of intending to do things—intention—and of being the cause of things that happen—agency—are also central to selfhood. This is the volitional self.

In 1748 he was forced to flee his adopted home in the Netherlands to work for the Prussian King Frederick in Berlin, where three years later he died after consuming an excess of pâté.

Our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happen with, through, and because of our living bodies. Our animal constitution is not merely compatible with our conscious perceptions of self and world. My proposal is that we cannot understand the nature and origin of these conscious experiences, except in light of our nature as living creatures.

the form and quality of my emotional experiences are the way they are—desolate, hopeful, panicky, calm—because of the conditional predictions my brain is making about how different actions might impact my current and future physiological condition.

Allostasis means the process of achieving stability through change, as compared to the more familiar term “homeostasis,” which simply means a tendency toward a state of equilibrium.

This, for me, is the true ground-state of conscious selfhood: a formless, shapeless, control-oriented perceptual prediction about the present and future physiological condition of the body itself. This is where being you begins, and it is here that we find the most profound connections between life and mind, between our beast machine nature and our conscious self.

Although intelligence offers a rich menu of ramified conscious states for conscious organisms, it is a mistake to assume that intelligence—at least in advanced forms—is either necessary or sufficient for consciousness.

consciousness is not determined by intelligence, and intelligence can exist without consciousness. Both come in many forms and both are expressed along many different dimensions—meaning that there is not one single scale for either consciousness or intelligence. In this depiction, you’ll notice that current AI is located quite low on the intelligence scale. This is because it’s unclear whether current AI systems are intelligent in any meaningful sense. Much of today’s AI is best described as sophisticated machine-based pattern recognition, perhaps spiced up with a bit of planning. Whether intelligent or not, these systems do what they do without being conscious of anything.

All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence.

Garland’s dialogue so elegantly captures the challenge of ascribing consciousness to a machine that the term “the Garland test” is now itself gaining traction—a rare example of science fiction feeding back into science.

In my theory, as we’ve seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms that care about their own persistence.

We live within a controlled hallucination which evolution has designed not for accuracy but for utility.