Being You Quotes

“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.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“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

“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

“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

“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 unsatisfying but honest answer is that I don’t know for sure, but probably not. The beast machine theory proposes that consciousness in humans and other animals arose in evolution, emerges in each of us during development, and operates from moment to moment in ways intimately connected with our status as living systems. All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. My intuition – and again it’s only an intuition – is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness. One reason for this is that the imperative for regulation and self-maintenance in living systems isn’t restricted to just one level, such as the integrity of the whole body. Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down, even down to the level of individual cells. Every cell in your body – in any body – is continually regenerating the conditions necessary for its own integrity over time. The same cannot be said for any current or near-future computer, and would not be true even for a silicon beast machine of the sort I just described.”
― 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

“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

“We don’t perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us to do so.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Each experience reduces uncertainty with respect to the range of possible experiences by just the same amount. On this view, the ‘what-it-is-like-ness’ of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealised but possible things that it is not.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Our perceptual world alive with colors, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colorless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs. And”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“For a conscious creature, there is something that it is like to be that creature. There is something it is like to be me, something it is like to be you, and probably something it is like to be a sheep, or a dolphin. For each of these creatures, subjective experiences are happening. It feels like something to be me. But there is almost certainly nothing it is like to be a bacterium, a blade of grass, or a toy robot. For these things, there is (presumably) never any subjective experience going on: no inner universe, no awareness, no consciousness.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“At the end of this story, when life in the first person reaches its conclusion, perhaps it’s not so bad if a little mystery remains.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Animals could fail the mirror test for many reasons besides lacking self-recognition abilities. These include not liking mirrors, not understanding how they work, or even just preferring to avoid eye contact. Recognising this, researchers are continually developing new versions of the test that are tuned ever more astutely to different interior universes – different perceptual worlds. For example, dog self-recognition can now be tested with ‘olfactory mirrors’ – though they still don’t do very well (delightfully, cognition in dogs is known as ‘dognition’). It’s possible that as experimental ingenuity continues to develop, species currently on one side of the line will cross over into the light of mirror-certified self-awareness. But even if they do, the diversity of different mirror tests – and the inability of many animals to pass even heavily species-adapted tests – suggests the likelihood of dramatic differences in how mammals experience ‘being themselves’.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. 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.
The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Although making tea was fully consistent with my beliefs, values, and desires, I did not choose to have these beliefs, values, and desires. I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants. As nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it, ‘Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.’
I made tea. Could I have done otherwise? In one sense, yes. There’s coffee in the kitchen too, so I could have made coffee. And when making the tea it certainly seemed to me that I could have made coffee instead. But I didn’t want coffee, I wanted tea, and since I can’t choose my wants, I made tea. Given the precise state of the universe at the time, which includes the state of my body and brain, all of which have prior causes, whether deterministic or not, stretching all the way back to my origin as a tea-drinking semi-Englishman and beyond, I could not have done otherwise. You can’t replay the same tape and expect a different outcome, apart from uninteresting differences due to randomness. The relevant phenomenology – the feeling that I could have done otherwise – is not a transparent window onto how causality operates in the physical world.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“One implication of this connection is that the FEP licenses the idea from the previous chapter that living systems have – or are – models of their environment.”
― 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

“It must be information “for” the system itself—not for anyone or anything else.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“The definition of consciousness as “any kind of subjective experience whatsoever” is admittedly simple and may even sound trivial, but this is a good thing.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“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.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“This shouldn’t be taken to imply that individual cells are conscious, or that all living organisms are conscious. The point is that the processes of physiological regulation that underpin consciousness and selfhood in the beast machine theory are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes that apply ‘all the way down’. On this view, it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Fiorito’s lab was arranged with two rows of tanks lining a central walkway, one octopus in each tank. (Octopuses are generally not social creatures and can even be cannibalistic.) On this particular day, David had chosen a tank in the left-hand row, about halfway along. When I walked in to see what was going on, I was astonished to see all the octopuses on the other side of the walkway pressed up against the glass of their tanks, every one of them staring intently at David while he repeatedly lowered his objects into his chosen tank. The observing octopuses seemed to be trying to figure out what was going on for no other reason than the sheer interest of it.
Being among octopuses, even for a short time, left me with an impression of an intelligence, and a conscious presence, very different from any other – and certainly very different from our own human incarnation. This of course was a subjective impression, necessarily tainted by the biases of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, and open to the charge of taking intelligence as a sign of sentience. But the octopus is objectively remarkable too, and spending some time with them can push our intuitions about how different a non-human consciousness might be.
The most recent common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago. Little is known about this ancient creature. Perhaps it was some kind of flattened worm. Whatever it looked like, it must have been a very simple animal. Octopus minds are not aquatic spinoffs from our own, or indeed from any other species with a backbone, past or present. The mind of an octopus is an independently created evolutionary experiment, as close to the mind of an alien as we are likely to encounter on this planet. As scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith put it, ‘If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Besides conscious level, there will also be substantial differences in conscious contents across mammalian species. Much of this variation can be attributed to differences in dominant kinds of perception. Mice rely on their whiskers, bats on their echolocating sonar, and naked mole rats on their acute sense of smell – especially when meeting other naked mole rats. These differences in perceptual dominance will mean that each animal will inhabit a distinctive inner universe.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Let’s start with mammals – a grouping which includes rats, bats, monkeys, manatees, lions, hippos, and of course humans too. I believe that all mammals are conscious. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, but I am pretty confident. This claim is not based on superficial similarity to humans, but on shared mechanisms. If you set aside raw brain size – which has more to do with body size than with anything else – mammalian brains are strikingly similar across species.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Sam Harris put it on a recent podcast, ‘The problem is not merely that the problem of free will makes no sense objectively, it makes no sense subjectively, either.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“Instead of focusing, in the style of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) approach, on a single exemplary conscious experience—like the experience of “seeing the color red”—Tononi and Edelman asked what was characteristic about conscious experiences in general. They made a simple but profound observation: that conscious experiences—all conscious experiences—are both informative and integrated. From this starting point, they made claims about the neural basis of every conscious experience, not just of specific experiences of seeing red, or feeling jealous, or suffering a toothache. The idea of consciousness as simultaneously informative and integrated needs a little unpacking. Let’s start with information. What does it mean to say that conscious experiences are “informative”? Edelman and Tononi did not mean this in the sense that reading a newspaper can be informative, but in a sense that, though it might at first seem trivial, conceals a great deal of richness. Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computer monitors, and clouds—an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that are simultaneously present in the background of my inner universe. At any one time, we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is—mathematically—what is meant by “information.” The informativeness of a particular conscious experience is not a function of how rich or detailed it is, or of how enlightening it is to the person having that experience. Listening to Nina Simone while eating strawberries on a roller coaster rules out just as many alternative experiences as does sitting with eyes closed in a silent room, experiencing close to nothing. Each experience reduces uncertainty with respect to the range of possible experiences by the same amount. In this view, the “what-it-is-like-ness” of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealized but possible things that it is not. An experience of pure redness is the way that it is, not because of any intrinsic property of “redness,” but because red is not blue, green, or any other color, or any smell, or a thought or a feeling of regret or indeed any other form of mental content whatsoever. Redness is redness because of all the things it isn’t, and the same goes for all other conscious experiences.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness