Hanna BAKHASH

“Understanding controlled hallucinations this way, we now have good reasons to recognise that top-down predictions do not merely bias our perception. They are what we perceive. Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“We live with an exaggerated, extreme form of self-change-blindness, and to understand why, we need to understand the reason we perceive ourselves in the first place.
We do not perceive ourselves in order to know ourselves, we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Why do we experience our perceptual constructions as being objectively real? On the controlled hallucination view, the purpose of perception is to guide action and behaviour – to promote the organism’s prospects of survival. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“I mentioned earlier that our sense of free will is very much about feeling we ‘could have done differently’. This counterfactual aspect of the experience of volition is particularly important for its future-oriented function. The feeling that I could have done differently does not mean that I actually could have done differently. Rather, the phenomenology of alternative possibilities is useful because in a future similar, but not identical, situation I might indeed do differently. If every circumstance is indeed identical on Tuesday as on Monday, then I can do no differently on Tuesday than on Monday. But this will never be the case. The physical world does not duplicate itself from day to day, not even from millisecond to millisecond. At the very least, the circumstances of my brain will have changed, because I’ve had an experience of volition on Monday and paid attention to its consequences. This, by itself, is enough to affect how my brain can control my many degrees of freedom when setting out to work again on Tuesday.‡ The usefulness of feeling ‘I could have done otherwise’ is that, next time, you might.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness