Hanna BAKHASH

“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

“The self is not an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body as a pilot controls a plane. The experience of being me, or of being you, is a perception itself – or better, a collection of perceptions – a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared towards keeping your body alive. And this, I believe, is all we need to be, to be who we are.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Taking spooky free will off the table means we can also put to rest a persistent but misguided concern about whether or not determinism is true. In physics and in philosophy, determinism is the proposal that all events in the universe are completely determined by previously existing physical causes. The alternative to determinism is that chance is built into the universe from the ground up, whether through fluctuations in a quantum soup or through some other as yet unknown principles of physics. Whether determinism matters for free will has been the topic of endless debate. My former boss Gerald Edelman summed it up well with a provocative one-liner: Free will – whatever you think about it, we’re determined to have it.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“It may seem as though the self – your self – is the ‘thing’ that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind. From the sense of personal identity – like being a scientist, or a son – to experiences of having a body, and of simply ‘being’ a body, the many and varied elements of selfhood are Bayesian best guesses, designed by evolution to keep you alive.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness