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Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person? After over twenty years researching the brain, world-renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth puts forward a radical new theory of consciousness and self. His unique theory of what it means to 'be you' challenges our understanding of perception and reality and it turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2020
About the author
Anil Seth
17 books257 followersProfessor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex
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September 7, 2021
The trouble with experts is they often don't know how to explain their subject well to ordinary readers. Reading Anil Seth's book took me back to my undergraduate physics lectures, where some of the lecturers were pretty much incomprehensible. For all Seth's reader-friendly personal observations and stories, time after time I got bogged down in his inability to clearly explain what he was writing about. It doesn't help that the subject of consciousness is itself inherently difficult to get your head around - but I've read plenty of other books on consciousness without feeling this instant return to undergraduate confusion.
There are two underlying problems I had with the book. One was when complex (and, frankly, rather waffly) theories like IIT (Integration Information Theory) were being discussed. As the kind of theory that it's not currently possible to provide evidence to support, this is something that in other fields might be suggested not to be science at all yet. But that's not the issue - it's that it is really hard to put across what these theories say and why someone thinks they are correct to a non-specialist, and for me, Seth fails to do so clearly enough.
The second problem is a lot more basic and straightforward - and it's the point at which I lost any enthusiasm for the book. This is when psychology comes up against physics - for me, physics has to win. Seth tells us 'colour is not a definitive property of things-in-themselves... When I have the subjective experience of seeing a red chair in the corner of the room, this doesn't mean that the chair actually is red - because what could it even mean for a chair to possess a phenomenological property like redness? Chairs aren't red, just as they aren't ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde.'
This is just putting psychology above physics, which simply doesn't work. Of course a chair can be red. If it absorbs white light and remits light with wavelengths of 650 nm, plus or minus around 30, it is red. Of course whether a human being perceives it as red, or assigns red associations to it is a subjective assessment. But that doesn't take away the fact that the chair is red. Seth refers to Kant's 'Ding an sich' concept explicitly in that quote above - admittedly Kant doesn't allow for us to know the 'thing in itself' fully, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Although I struggled on, and found some bits more interesting, it was reluctantly. Some people will love this book. And Seth clearly knows his stuff. He is indeed an expert in his field. But Being You just didn't work for me as someone who should have been solidly in its readership profile.
There are two underlying problems I had with the book. One was when complex (and, frankly, rather waffly) theories like IIT (Integration Information Theory) were being discussed. As the kind of theory that it's not currently possible to provide evidence to support, this is something that in other fields might be suggested not to be science at all yet. But that's not the issue - it's that it is really hard to put across what these theories say and why someone thinks they are correct to a non-specialist, and for me, Seth fails to do so clearly enough.
The second problem is a lot more basic and straightforward - and it's the point at which I lost any enthusiasm for the book. This is when psychology comes up against physics - for me, physics has to win. Seth tells us 'colour is not a definitive property of things-in-themselves... When I have the subjective experience of seeing a red chair in the corner of the room, this doesn't mean that the chair actually is red - because what could it even mean for a chair to possess a phenomenological property like redness? Chairs aren't red, just as they aren't ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde.'
This is just putting psychology above physics, which simply doesn't work. Of course a chair can be red. If it absorbs white light and remits light with wavelengths of 650 nm, plus or minus around 30, it is red. Of course whether a human being perceives it as red, or assigns red associations to it is a subjective assessment. But that doesn't take away the fact that the chair is red. Seth refers to Kant's 'Ding an sich' concept explicitly in that quote above - admittedly Kant doesn't allow for us to know the 'thing in itself' fully, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Although I struggled on, and found some bits more interesting, it was reluctantly. Some people will love this book. And Seth clearly knows his stuff. He is indeed an expert in his field. But Being You just didn't work for me as someone who should have been solidly in its readership profile.
February 20, 2022
Anil Seth is a British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience with additional degrees in Natural Sciences, Knowledge-Based Systems, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
And if this book is any indication, he’s a fucking cool, funny and all around likable fellah too.
Exactly the kind of guy you’d like to be friends with.
That is, if you’re into that type of thing.
Anyway…
Being You is probably my favorite book on the subject of…
Well…
Subjectivity.
It covers much of the same ground as The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms (see my review here - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...) but in a MUCH more accessible and relatable way.
Seth and Solms both fancy the Friston Free Energy Principle ( FFEP - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_...) as an organizing principle of consciousness.
However Seth is a little more upfront about the fact the FFEP is nearly inscrutable, even to him.
Seth and Solms also agree that subjectivity is all about affect, or rather feelings, or better the ‘felt sense of embodiment’ or even more precisely - interoception i.e. the perception of the body 'from within'.
Seth describes “embodied selfhood in terms of 'instrumental interoceptive inference' that emphasises allostatic regulation and physiological integrity”.
Seth borrows the “Beast Machine” language of René Descartes, but unlike Descartes, Seth is a monist (as opposed to dualist) and asserts that our experiences of embodied selfhood arise because of our nature as 'beast machines' or more plainly embodied, evolved animal beings.
If all of this sounds pretentious.
That’s me.
The book is actually really down to earth, really fun, really thought-provoking, and very very (double very) satisfyingly satisfying.
It explores and (almost) answers some real fucking philosophically and scientifically difficult questions.
WONDERFUL BOOK by COOL AF DOOD!
5/5
And if this book is any indication, he’s a fucking cool, funny and all around likable fellah too.
Exactly the kind of guy you’d like to be friends with.
That is, if you’re into that type of thing.
Anyway…
Being You is probably my favorite book on the subject of…
Well…
Subjectivity.
It covers much of the same ground as The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms (see my review here - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...) but in a MUCH more accessible and relatable way.
Seth and Solms both fancy the Friston Free Energy Principle ( FFEP - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_...) as an organizing principle of consciousness.
However Seth is a little more upfront about the fact the FFEP is nearly inscrutable, even to him.
Seth and Solms also agree that subjectivity is all about affect, or rather feelings, or better the ‘felt sense of embodiment’ or even more precisely - interoception i.e. the perception of the body 'from within'.
Seth describes “embodied selfhood in terms of 'instrumental interoceptive inference' that emphasises allostatic regulation and physiological integrity”.
Seth borrows the “Beast Machine” language of René Descartes, but unlike Descartes, Seth is a monist (as opposed to dualist) and asserts that our experiences of embodied selfhood arise because of our nature as 'beast machines' or more plainly embodied, evolved animal beings.
If all of this sounds pretentious.
That’s me.
The book is actually really down to earth, really fun, really thought-provoking, and very very (double very) satisfyingly satisfying.
It explores and (almost) answers some real fucking philosophically and scientifically difficult questions.
WONDERFUL BOOK by COOL AF DOOD!
5/5
December 28, 2021
One way to think about perception, probably the most natural way, is to compare it to a window, where your mind simply reads out reality exactly as it is. That chair over in the corner, for instance, is the exact shape, color, and texture that you perceive it to be, and your mind is simply capturing this object exactly as it exists in the world.
But if you think about it, this cannot be the case; your brain—enclosed as it is within your skull—is encased within a pitch-black environment. It has no direct access to light, sight, sounds, or anything else in the external world. The only thing the brain receives are electrical impulses from its sensory systems that push around chemicals. This flurry of electro-chemical activity somehow produces subjective experience, but this phenomenological reality is nothing more than an approximation, or, as neuroscientist Anil Seth puts it, a “controlled hallucination.”
In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, explains the latest science of consciousness and how all evidence points to the “controlled hallucination” view of consciousness. In this view—which in large part validates the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant—reality is not what it seems; the mind evolved for action and survival, not to perceive reality in an objectively “true” sense. We label as “reality” the shared world created by our minds, but as for what the world is like “in itself,” we can never really know, because our brains can never transcend the electro-chemical signals processed from within our “bony prisons.”
One example that drives home the point is the infamous phenomenon of “the dress.” As you’ll remember, the image of this particular dress was seen by some as black and blue (what it was marketed as) and seen by others as white and gold. Those that perceived the dress as white and gold were much more likely to assume the dress was in a shadow, while those that did not make this assumption perceived the dress as black and blue.
So you have two groups of people looking at the same image and perceiving two separate sets of colors. What makes this interesting is that it clearly shows that color is not a property of objects themselves; the dress is not, in itself, one color or the other. Rather, color is a subjective phenomenon that arises from the way the mind perceives the interaction of particular wavelengths of light bouncing off of particular objects.
What makes this example even more interesting is that it lends support to Seth’s hypothesis that the mind is essentially a prediction machine, creating its world from the inside-out and making corrections based on sensory input from the environment. I mentioned that those that perceived the dress as white and gold assumed that the dress was in a shadow. That means that for this group, their brains were making predictions about the dress, its environment, and its light source, and then “coloring in” the dress based on those predictions. Then, after examining the dress for a while, some members of this group started to see the dress slowly turn to black and blue, as their minds updated the relevant predictions. Color, therefore, is a subjective phenomenon crafted by the brain based on predictions from the inside-out and corrected by environmental cues (this ability to make corrections marks the difference between standard hallucinations and the “controlled” hallucinations of everyday experience).
Where things get trippy is that this doesn’t end with color, but applies to all sense modalities. Seth describes how the mind, by making these kinds of predictions, creates our entire perceptual world, including its associated colors and sounds and even our perceptions of space, time, causation, and our sense of self and free will. We truly live in a virtual reality created by our minds, and as to what lies beyond this inner world, we’re literally in the dark.
Counterintuitively, this recognition actually makes the science of consciousness more manageable. If we take phenomenological reality for what it is, we can then work on explaining, predicting, and controlling it, as has been done in the example of “the dress.” We can work on measuring consciousness and mapping its neural correlates without having to try to understand why consciousness exists in a philosophical sense or how exactly consciousness can arise from purely physical phenomena.
Which brings us to an important point: this book does not solve, in any way, the “hard problem of consciousness,” and the author makes no claims that it does. Seth does not show, for example, how the electro-chemical processing of light—a purely physical process captured in quantitative terms—can result in the actual phenomenological experience of, for instance, “seeing red.” This problem is, as the philosopher Colin McGinn has stated, beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. As Seth wrote (summarizing McGinn’s views but not necessarily endorsing them):
“Mysterianism is the idea that there may exist a complete physical description of consciousness—a full solution to Chalmers’s hard problem—but that we humans just aren’t clever enough, and never will be clever enough, to discover this solution, or even to recognize a solution if it were presented to us by super-smart aliens. A physical understanding of consciousness exists, but it lies as far beyond us as an understanding of cryptocurrency lies beyond frogs. It is cognitively closed to us by our species-specific mental limitations.”
I tend to agree. Despite all the advances in science—and in neuroscience specifically—we are not any closer to solving the hard problem, and it's difficult to see how more of the same neuroscience—which considers only correlations between brain states and experiences—could ever get us closer to an answer. Humans, representing one species of primate, are able to sense just a small sliver of total reality, and therefore cannot be expected to solve every mystery presented to us. Consciousness in the “hard problem” sense appears to be one of those mysteries that will remain unsolved.
However, all hope is not lost. Seth spends a majority of the book intentionally side-stepping the hard problem and focusing entirely on what he labels the “real problem” of consciousness. As Seth writes:
“This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness—which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take—relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds.”
This approach dissolves, rather than solves, the hard problem. Elsewhere, Seth writes:
“Dissolving the hard problem is different from solving it outright, or definitively rebutting it, but it is the best way to make progress, far better than either venerating consciousness as a magical mystery or dismissing it as a metaphysically illusory nonproblem.”
By taking this approach, Seth shows how the science of consciousness, far from being a mere philosophical curiosity, has major practical implications, from medical applications (measuring consciousness in nonresponsive patients) to the psychiatric treatment of hallucinations to approaches to the creation of artificial intelligence and even perhaps to consciousness in machines (although it’s questionable whether or not we should even attempt to go down this road).
In terms of creating consciousness in machines, Seth is more skeptical. His entire theory of consciousness incorporaters the biological and physiological realities of brains embedded within bodies and worlds. Brains cannot be conscious without these biological elements; the “controlled hallucinations” of the brain depend on multiple layers of complex interactions with the physical world and with the trillions of cells and chemical signals within the body. If you remove the biology—and replace it all with silicon chips—don’t be surprised if you end up with an intelligent machine that doesn’t experience anything at all (i.e., lacks consciousness).
As Seth correctly points out, there is no necessary correlation between intelligence and consciousness; they are separate phenomena. Relatively unintelligent animals probably have inner experiences and can feel pain, whereas highly intelligent machines playing games of chess almost certainly are not experiencing any sense of joy or accomplishment from winning a match.
And so despite being bombarded with sensationalistic predictions of machines taking over the world—and by countless books, movies, and television shows dramatizing how it will happen—the prospects of conscious machines coming into existence is, at least for now, very remote (although non-conscious AI systems that will replace jobs and entire industries are very much a risk worth talking about).
While consciousness is not necessarily substrate-dependent (it may not require biological material), the process for duplicating it in machines appears unlikely. Consciousness seems inextricably linked to the complexities of the biological world. As Seth wrote:
“All of our perceptions and experiences, whether of the self or of the world, are inside-out controlled and controlling hallucinations that are rooted in the flesh-and-blood predictive machinery that evolved, develops, and operates from moment to moment always in light of a fundamental biological drive to stay alive.”
Good luck creating this in a machine.
-----
Overall, I found myself agreeing with much of the content of the book, with the possible exception of the chapter on free will (although I make no claims to have the answers). As with most practicing scientists, Seth dismisses the idea of free will and adopts a physicalist position, without realizing that, if he’s correct, and consciousness arises out of physical processes, then consciousness loses its evolutionary function and ultimately seems to serve no purpose at all.
The reason is that physicalists are denying reverse causation from consciousness to physical processes (even if they don’t realize it). If everything arises from the movement of atoms, which arrange themselves into chemical compounds and eventually into bodies and brains according to physical laws, and then consciousness arises out of the activity of brains, then consciousness is fully determined by the underlying physical phenomena. Consciousness, since it is dependent on atomic motion as governed by physical laws, therefore cannot change those laws or the underlying atomic motion. If consciousness cannot change physical states—allowing the agent to act otherwise than it did—then in what sense can consciousness have a purpose? In what sense is the illusion of free will useful if the universe can only turn out to be one way (as determinism states)?
These are questions that are only poorly addressed in the book, if they are addressed at all. But we can give Seth a break, since these are deep philosophical questions that, if we’re honest, no one really has a handle on. And that’s the point: Seth is not claiming to be able to solve these harder philosophical questions. And in fact, he doesn’t need to; the science of consciousness can be pursued simply by sticking to the measurement of the neurological correlates of conscious experience. It is here, and only here, that we can make progress. But we must do so with humility and caution.
But if you think about it, this cannot be the case; your brain—enclosed as it is within your skull—is encased within a pitch-black environment. It has no direct access to light, sight, sounds, or anything else in the external world. The only thing the brain receives are electrical impulses from its sensory systems that push around chemicals. This flurry of electro-chemical activity somehow produces subjective experience, but this phenomenological reality is nothing more than an approximation, or, as neuroscientist Anil Seth puts it, a “controlled hallucination.”
In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, explains the latest science of consciousness and how all evidence points to the “controlled hallucination” view of consciousness. In this view—which in large part validates the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant—reality is not what it seems; the mind evolved for action and survival, not to perceive reality in an objectively “true” sense. We label as “reality” the shared world created by our minds, but as for what the world is like “in itself,” we can never really know, because our brains can never transcend the electro-chemical signals processed from within our “bony prisons.”
One example that drives home the point is the infamous phenomenon of “the dress.” As you’ll remember, the image of this particular dress was seen by some as black and blue (what it was marketed as) and seen by others as white and gold. Those that perceived the dress as white and gold were much more likely to assume the dress was in a shadow, while those that did not make this assumption perceived the dress as black and blue.
So you have two groups of people looking at the same image and perceiving two separate sets of colors. What makes this interesting is that it clearly shows that color is not a property of objects themselves; the dress is not, in itself, one color or the other. Rather, color is a subjective phenomenon that arises from the way the mind perceives the interaction of particular wavelengths of light bouncing off of particular objects.
What makes this example even more interesting is that it lends support to Seth’s hypothesis that the mind is essentially a prediction machine, creating its world from the inside-out and making corrections based on sensory input from the environment. I mentioned that those that perceived the dress as white and gold assumed that the dress was in a shadow. That means that for this group, their brains were making predictions about the dress, its environment, and its light source, and then “coloring in” the dress based on those predictions. Then, after examining the dress for a while, some members of this group started to see the dress slowly turn to black and blue, as their minds updated the relevant predictions. Color, therefore, is a subjective phenomenon crafted by the brain based on predictions from the inside-out and corrected by environmental cues (this ability to make corrections marks the difference between standard hallucinations and the “controlled” hallucinations of everyday experience).
Where things get trippy is that this doesn’t end with color, but applies to all sense modalities. Seth describes how the mind, by making these kinds of predictions, creates our entire perceptual world, including its associated colors and sounds and even our perceptions of space, time, causation, and our sense of self and free will. We truly live in a virtual reality created by our minds, and as to what lies beyond this inner world, we’re literally in the dark.
Counterintuitively, this recognition actually makes the science of consciousness more manageable. If we take phenomenological reality for what it is, we can then work on explaining, predicting, and controlling it, as has been done in the example of “the dress.” We can work on measuring consciousness and mapping its neural correlates without having to try to understand why consciousness exists in a philosophical sense or how exactly consciousness can arise from purely physical phenomena.
Which brings us to an important point: this book does not solve, in any way, the “hard problem of consciousness,” and the author makes no claims that it does. Seth does not show, for example, how the electro-chemical processing of light—a purely physical process captured in quantitative terms—can result in the actual phenomenological experience of, for instance, “seeing red.” This problem is, as the philosopher Colin McGinn has stated, beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. As Seth wrote (summarizing McGinn’s views but not necessarily endorsing them):
“Mysterianism is the idea that there may exist a complete physical description of consciousness—a full solution to Chalmers’s hard problem—but that we humans just aren’t clever enough, and never will be clever enough, to discover this solution, or even to recognize a solution if it were presented to us by super-smart aliens. A physical understanding of consciousness exists, but it lies as far beyond us as an understanding of cryptocurrency lies beyond frogs. It is cognitively closed to us by our species-specific mental limitations.”
I tend to agree. Despite all the advances in science—and in neuroscience specifically—we are not any closer to solving the hard problem, and it's difficult to see how more of the same neuroscience—which considers only correlations between brain states and experiences—could ever get us closer to an answer. Humans, representing one species of primate, are able to sense just a small sliver of total reality, and therefore cannot be expected to solve every mystery presented to us. Consciousness in the “hard problem” sense appears to be one of those mysteries that will remain unsolved.
However, all hope is not lost. Seth spends a majority of the book intentionally side-stepping the hard problem and focusing entirely on what he labels the “real problem” of consciousness. As Seth writes:
“This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness—which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take—relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds.”
This approach dissolves, rather than solves, the hard problem. Elsewhere, Seth writes:
“Dissolving the hard problem is different from solving it outright, or definitively rebutting it, but it is the best way to make progress, far better than either venerating consciousness as a magical mystery or dismissing it as a metaphysically illusory nonproblem.”
By taking this approach, Seth shows how the science of consciousness, far from being a mere philosophical curiosity, has major practical implications, from medical applications (measuring consciousness in nonresponsive patients) to the psychiatric treatment of hallucinations to approaches to the creation of artificial intelligence and even perhaps to consciousness in machines (although it’s questionable whether or not we should even attempt to go down this road).
In terms of creating consciousness in machines, Seth is more skeptical. His entire theory of consciousness incorporaters the biological and physiological realities of brains embedded within bodies and worlds. Brains cannot be conscious without these biological elements; the “controlled hallucinations” of the brain depend on multiple layers of complex interactions with the physical world and with the trillions of cells and chemical signals within the body. If you remove the biology—and replace it all with silicon chips—don’t be surprised if you end up with an intelligent machine that doesn’t experience anything at all (i.e., lacks consciousness).
As Seth correctly points out, there is no necessary correlation between intelligence and consciousness; they are separate phenomena. Relatively unintelligent animals probably have inner experiences and can feel pain, whereas highly intelligent machines playing games of chess almost certainly are not experiencing any sense of joy or accomplishment from winning a match.
And so despite being bombarded with sensationalistic predictions of machines taking over the world—and by countless books, movies, and television shows dramatizing how it will happen—the prospects of conscious machines coming into existence is, at least for now, very remote (although non-conscious AI systems that will replace jobs and entire industries are very much a risk worth talking about).
While consciousness is not necessarily substrate-dependent (it may not require biological material), the process for duplicating it in machines appears unlikely. Consciousness seems inextricably linked to the complexities of the biological world. As Seth wrote:
“All of our perceptions and experiences, whether of the self or of the world, are inside-out controlled and controlling hallucinations that are rooted in the flesh-and-blood predictive machinery that evolved, develops, and operates from moment to moment always in light of a fundamental biological drive to stay alive.”
Good luck creating this in a machine.
-----
Overall, I found myself agreeing with much of the content of the book, with the possible exception of the chapter on free will (although I make no claims to have the answers). As with most practicing scientists, Seth dismisses the idea of free will and adopts a physicalist position, without realizing that, if he’s correct, and consciousness arises out of physical processes, then consciousness loses its evolutionary function and ultimately seems to serve no purpose at all.
The reason is that physicalists are denying reverse causation from consciousness to physical processes (even if they don’t realize it). If everything arises from the movement of atoms, which arrange themselves into chemical compounds and eventually into bodies and brains according to physical laws, and then consciousness arises out of the activity of brains, then consciousness is fully determined by the underlying physical phenomena. Consciousness, since it is dependent on atomic motion as governed by physical laws, therefore cannot change those laws or the underlying atomic motion. If consciousness cannot change physical states—allowing the agent to act otherwise than it did—then in what sense can consciousness have a purpose? In what sense is the illusion of free will useful if the universe can only turn out to be one way (as determinism states)?
These are questions that are only poorly addressed in the book, if they are addressed at all. But we can give Seth a break, since these are deep philosophical questions that, if we’re honest, no one really has a handle on. And that’s the point: Seth is not claiming to be able to solve these harder philosophical questions. And in fact, he doesn’t need to; the science of consciousness can be pursued simply by sticking to the measurement of the neurological correlates of conscious experience. It is here, and only here, that we can make progress. But we must do so with humility and caution.
September 9, 2021
Unconvincing
This book offers a lot and has two great merits.
The first merit is that it's one of the most comprehensive overviews of past and modern perspectives about consciousness, providing countless references to neuroscientific theories, philosophical positions, historical contexts, and even artistic framings. Anil Seth shows an impressive display of interdisciplinary knowledge, culture, and global networking. You can tell that there's an enormous effort behind this work. And thanks to that effort, anybody hoping to start a deep journey into neuroscience would have myriads of options after reading this book.
For this, the book would deserve four stars. Not five because, curiously, the author barely mentions (if at all) some of the most important names linked to consciousness or brain theory in both neuroscience (e.g., Jeff Hawkins) and philosophy (e.g., Daniel Dennett).
The second merit is that Anil Seth excels at explaining complex concepts in a language accessible to most readers. Having read many books about neuroscience, consciousness, and artificial intelligence (discussed in the last chapter), I can say that "Being You" is one of the easiest to follow.
That said, the book is disappointing in some fundamental ways.
The first problem is that the richness of references mentioned above makes the logic hard to follow. In a journey from A to B, the provided context is so overwhelming that the reader might forget why she has reached B in the first place. Sometimes the references are not even strictly related to the main problem of consciousness, resulting in a lack of focus that is disorienting. It happens over and over throughout the book, making the narrative unnecessarily convoluted.
The second problem, and certainly the most important, is that the reader won't get a straight answer about what consciousness is and how it works. In the middle of a sea of references, the author presents his theory, called Beast Machine. It offers a high-level explanation of why consciousness exists, but it doesn't get into the details of what brain processes enable consciousness and how they act. While it's good that the book doesn't present the complexity of an academic paper, the narrative ends up more towards the philosophical angle than the neuroscientific one.
The third problem is that, at times, the author takes absolute positions that are difficult to justify without further explanations. For example, the book states that intelligence and consciousness are not the same things. Perhaps, but to justify that conclusion, the reader would have needed first a deeply articulated explanation of what we think intelligence is.
Mainly because of the second problem mentioned above, I rate this book a three out of five.
Readers should consider reading Jeff Hawkins's A Thousand Brains (only Part 1 is necessary) to compare the approach. While it's still an incomplete theory, it offers the "what" and the "how" of a unifying theory of the brain, intelligence, and consciousness.
I'd also recommend reading Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back for a wholly different and more philosophical perspective on consciousness.
This book offers a lot and has two great merits.
The first merit is that it's one of the most comprehensive overviews of past and modern perspectives about consciousness, providing countless references to neuroscientific theories, philosophical positions, historical contexts, and even artistic framings. Anil Seth shows an impressive display of interdisciplinary knowledge, culture, and global networking. You can tell that there's an enormous effort behind this work. And thanks to that effort, anybody hoping to start a deep journey into neuroscience would have myriads of options after reading this book.
For this, the book would deserve four stars. Not five because, curiously, the author barely mentions (if at all) some of the most important names linked to consciousness or brain theory in both neuroscience (e.g., Jeff Hawkins) and philosophy (e.g., Daniel Dennett).
The second merit is that Anil Seth excels at explaining complex concepts in a language accessible to most readers. Having read many books about neuroscience, consciousness, and artificial intelligence (discussed in the last chapter), I can say that "Being You" is one of the easiest to follow.
That said, the book is disappointing in some fundamental ways.
The first problem is that the richness of references mentioned above makes the logic hard to follow. In a journey from A to B, the provided context is so overwhelming that the reader might forget why she has reached B in the first place. Sometimes the references are not even strictly related to the main problem of consciousness, resulting in a lack of focus that is disorienting. It happens over and over throughout the book, making the narrative unnecessarily convoluted.
The second problem, and certainly the most important, is that the reader won't get a straight answer about what consciousness is and how it works. In the middle of a sea of references, the author presents his theory, called Beast Machine. It offers a high-level explanation of why consciousness exists, but it doesn't get into the details of what brain processes enable consciousness and how they act. While it's good that the book doesn't present the complexity of an academic paper, the narrative ends up more towards the philosophical angle than the neuroscientific one.
The third problem is that, at times, the author takes absolute positions that are difficult to justify without further explanations. For example, the book states that intelligence and consciousness are not the same things. Perhaps, but to justify that conclusion, the reader would have needed first a deeply articulated explanation of what we think intelligence is.
Mainly because of the second problem mentioned above, I rate this book a three out of five.
Readers should consider reading Jeff Hawkins's A Thousand Brains (only Part 1 is necessary) to compare the approach. While it's still an incomplete theory, it offers the "what" and the "how" of a unifying theory of the brain, intelligence, and consciousness.
I'd also recommend reading Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back for a wholly different and more philosophical perspective on consciousness.
December 14, 2021
Excellent stuff, and dovetails rather nicely with my natural phenomenological leanings, which certainly makes me an already-primed target audience. Personally I am convinced that that his ideas are going in the right direction.
Nice review here
https://www.ft.com/content/9462f557-e...
Nice review here
https://www.ft.com/content/9462f557-e...
September 9, 2021
Being You is a fascinating, accessible and highly readable exploration of consciousness, and Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science I feel I have encountered. Consciousness is the great unsolved mystery in our scientific understanding of the brain. Somewhere, somehow, inscribed in the brain is everything that makes you you. But how do we grasp what happens in the brain to turn mere electrical impulses into the vast range of perceptions, thoughts and emotions we feel from moment to moment? Anil Seth, one of Britain's leading neuroscientists, charts the developments in our understanding of consciousness, revealing radical interdisciplinary breakthroughs that must transform the way we think about the self. Drawing on his original research and collaborations with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards, mathematicians and philosophers, he puts forward an exhilarating new theory about how we experience the world that should encourage us to view ourselves as less apart from and more a part of the rest of nature.
Seth's revolutionary framework for consciousness will turn what you thought you knew about yourself on its head. An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. This book is a life-changing existential insight into being you. Rich in anecdotal evidence and full of intriguing information from cover to cover, Seth has written a riveting book on an invariably intriguing philosophical subtopic and brings it bang up to date. Highly recommended.
Seth's revolutionary framework for consciousness will turn what you thought you knew about yourself on its head. An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. This book is a life-changing existential insight into being you. Rich in anecdotal evidence and full of intriguing information from cover to cover, Seth has written a riveting book on an invariably intriguing philosophical subtopic and brings it bang up to date. Highly recommended.
March 27, 2022
“The way I see it, consciousness won’t be ‘solved’ in the same way that the human genome was decoded, or the reality of climate change established. Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single eureka-like insight – a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about how scientific understanding progresses. For me, a science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be – at least not primarily – to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place. Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet. What I hope to show you is that by accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious”
He skips the '‘hard problem’’ (how physical stuff creates a conscious experience) and instead focuses on describing the properties of consciousness. On the self, like many others in the field (and the original consciousness scientists: the Buddhists), he describes it as a transitory illusory object for the purpose of self-regulation of the body by the brain i.e. when under anaesthesia you may cease to exist if the brain’s electrical activity is quietened ( which never happens in normal life when we’re awake or asleep). The self is generated by the brain which he describes as a prediction machine based on all the input it’s receiving mixed with existing information which results in a controlled hallucination that we experience otherwise known as reality. It’s tricky language but what he is saying here is that human experience may not be exactly what it seems like. Now, everything that’s meaningful about selfhood in our lives persists and matters, but the notion of a fixed unchanging conscious self at the centre of our experience, free will, or the colour red—may not be objective reality and actually exist, but rather they are illusory perceptions that the human brain creates. The essence of selfhood being a biological process instead of that of a 'soul'. It’s interesting stuff with language that will give you vertigo at times, but ultimately it makes a lot of sense if you really observe your experience mindfully—however, there’s still much to be understood and some of this may very well be wrong as physicalism is not universally accepted by consciousness researchers. All in all, this is a decent book particularly for philosophy lovers. There is a lot of recycled research so don't expect anything new, despite the title, if you're familiar with consciousness studies.
Lastly, the notion to dissolve the 'unsolvable' hard problem by understanding these properties of consciousness that can be observed and studied--to frame things as phenomenology should be primary and emphasized is essentially a form of quitting to me because you're stumped, which isn't the right spirit for a scientist. He describes to explain, predict, and control the properties of consciousness as the 'real problem', but that sounds like the 'easy problem' to me...
3/5
He skips the '‘hard problem’’ (how physical stuff creates a conscious experience) and instead focuses on describing the properties of consciousness. On the self, like many others in the field (and the original consciousness scientists: the Buddhists), he describes it as a transitory illusory object for the purpose of self-regulation of the body by the brain i.e. when under anaesthesia you may cease to exist if the brain’s electrical activity is quietened ( which never happens in normal life when we’re awake or asleep). The self is generated by the brain which he describes as a prediction machine based on all the input it’s receiving mixed with existing information which results in a controlled hallucination that we experience otherwise known as reality. It’s tricky language but what he is saying here is that human experience may not be exactly what it seems like. Now, everything that’s meaningful about selfhood in our lives persists and matters, but the notion of a fixed unchanging conscious self at the centre of our experience, free will, or the colour red—may not be objective reality and actually exist, but rather they are illusory perceptions that the human brain creates. The essence of selfhood being a biological process instead of that of a 'soul'. It’s interesting stuff with language that will give you vertigo at times, but ultimately it makes a lot of sense if you really observe your experience mindfully—however, there’s still much to be understood and some of this may very well be wrong as physicalism is not universally accepted by consciousness researchers. All in all, this is a decent book particularly for philosophy lovers. There is a lot of recycled research so don't expect anything new, despite the title, if you're familiar with consciousness studies.
Lastly, the notion to dissolve the 'unsolvable' hard problem by understanding these properties of consciousness that can be observed and studied--to frame things as phenomenology should be primary and emphasized is essentially a form of quitting to me because you're stumped, which isn't the right spirit for a scientist. He describes to explain, predict, and control the properties of consciousness as the 'real problem', but that sounds like the 'easy problem' to me...
3/5
February 16, 2022
This is a worthy addition to the pantheon of popular neuroscience books, although I would not elevate it to the highest tier. Seth is an engaging guide to the question of how consciousness correlates to neural architecture, and his "beast machine" theory provides a useful framework. Seth is eager to set up his pet theory in opposition to the many other candidates out there: specifically, he spends time here trashing panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory. I wasn't terribly taken by his counter-arguments, but he moves on relatively quickly and it's a respectful disagreement. He's clearly more focused on describing his own view than rehashing battles with others.
So what's his theory? He wants us to view perception, both exteroceptive and interoceptive, as Bayesian best-guess processes fundamentally driven by an active inference process where the brain manipulates percipient variables in an effort to confirm its predictions to further the ultimate goal of self-perpetuation. Seth believes the perception of "being a self" emerges from (or is) this very same process. Obviously, this theory has some advantages: it decenters the naïve realist position that perception is a passive process of receiving signals from "out there" in the world; it highlights the participatory, top-down influence of the brain on building a picture of the world; and it weaves us into the patterns of nature by showing that human consciousness is part of a continuum of strategies deployed by life to maintain its little island of low entropy. Seth sees his work as furthering the project of dismantling human exceptionalism, which is probably a worthy goal.
Seth walks through a number of enlightening subjects in laying all of this out, with helpful excurses into experimental psych lab findings and the history of philosophy along the way. He's not a philosopher but he's better at handling philosophical concepts than many scientists. He tells interesting personal stories about his own brushes with anesthesiologic oblivion, his mother's temporary hospital-induced delirium, and his visits to labs studying cephalopod cognition and pediatric neurosurgery ORs. All this stuff is fun to read and Seth tells it well.
Where the book falters, in my opinion, is in its lofty aspirations. Seth offers his account not as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, but an effort to sidestep it into what he terms "the real problem of consciousness." He's hoping that we'll see that consciousness is a multifactor phenomenon like life, not likely susceptible to a reductive single cause, and that this viewpoint coupled with the discoveries of modern neuroscience will lead the hard problem to evaporate into... a shrug that that's just how consciousness be sometimes, I guess? I honestly don't understand how he thinks we can dodge the hard problem, because it certainly seems exacerbated to me by all of his harping on the nature of conscious experience as definitionally integrated. If that knit-togetherness is a chief feature of consciousness, it's all the more puzzling that it's composed from a welter of neural modules performing discrete processing in parallel!
I think Seth wants to believe that consciousness is just a better way to stay alive so it's not mysterious that it emerged. But setting aside any qualms I may have with that assumption (seems like consciousness is just as often a hindrance as a help in the ol' natural selection department), it still doesn't address the nub of Chalmers' problem: why does integrating experiences to adapt to the world have the feeling of interiority? You can conceive of a species of being that responds to perceptual stimuli as if it is consciously integrating best-guess predictions, which nonetheless lacks the first-person experience of qualia. I'm left questioning (i) what that phenomenology of qualia adds, from a natural selection perspective, and (ii) why that difference seems so qualitative to us. Maybe the experience of being a conscious self is an illusion (or controlled/controlling hallucination in Seth's terms), but it's one that is almost impossible to shake. Even if we understood all of the neural correlates of how it arises and what evolutionary purpose it serves, it still seems to me that there's a mysterious element to being inside a subjectivity that isn't captured by describing how it's constituted structurally. Even if you can answer "how consciousness arises" that isn't the same thing as answering "what is consciousness."
I think Seth is still uncomfortable with this too, because he goes to great lengths to avoid his theory being taken as a solution to the hard problem. Maybe he recognizes the problem's intractability in the face of earlier forays like IIT or NCC, and foresees the same challenges to his own. He seems hesitant to sign on to strong eliminativist arguments like those proposed by Daniel Dennett, but that seems philosophically the closest to what he's proposing. In other words: you've been tricked by your tricksy brain into thinking you're conscious right now by its incomplete Bayesian inferences about its own states. And never you mind who that "you" is that's being tricked.
These are hard problems indeed, so Seth can hardly be faulted for failing to fully find a path out of the maze. He is an able guide for most of the material along the way. He doesn't much get into the nitty-gritty of specific neuroanatomy, but his high-level descriptions of how brains work are informative and insightful. His descriptions of Bayesian inference and the Free Energy Principle are a little confusing, but that's not fatal to the project, and they become clearer in his examples. I loved his insight that consciousness and intelligence are distinct phenomena and his application to questions of animal consciousness was excellent. I also enjoyed his skepticism about strong AI and the assumption that consciousness is substrate-independent. This isn't my favorite neuroscience book but it's definitely worth a read.
So what's his theory? He wants us to view perception, both exteroceptive and interoceptive, as Bayesian best-guess processes fundamentally driven by an active inference process where the brain manipulates percipient variables in an effort to confirm its predictions to further the ultimate goal of self-perpetuation. Seth believes the perception of "being a self" emerges from (or is) this very same process. Obviously, this theory has some advantages: it decenters the naïve realist position that perception is a passive process of receiving signals from "out there" in the world; it highlights the participatory, top-down influence of the brain on building a picture of the world; and it weaves us into the patterns of nature by showing that human consciousness is part of a continuum of strategies deployed by life to maintain its little island of low entropy. Seth sees his work as furthering the project of dismantling human exceptionalism, which is probably a worthy goal.
Seth walks through a number of enlightening subjects in laying all of this out, with helpful excurses into experimental psych lab findings and the history of philosophy along the way. He's not a philosopher but he's better at handling philosophical concepts than many scientists. He tells interesting personal stories about his own brushes with anesthesiologic oblivion, his mother's temporary hospital-induced delirium, and his visits to labs studying cephalopod cognition and pediatric neurosurgery ORs. All this stuff is fun to read and Seth tells it well.
Where the book falters, in my opinion, is in its lofty aspirations. Seth offers his account not as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, but an effort to sidestep it into what he terms "the real problem of consciousness." He's hoping that we'll see that consciousness is a multifactor phenomenon like life, not likely susceptible to a reductive single cause, and that this viewpoint coupled with the discoveries of modern neuroscience will lead the hard problem to evaporate into... a shrug that that's just how consciousness be sometimes, I guess? I honestly don't understand how he thinks we can dodge the hard problem, because it certainly seems exacerbated to me by all of his harping on the nature of conscious experience as definitionally integrated. If that knit-togetherness is a chief feature of consciousness, it's all the more puzzling that it's composed from a welter of neural modules performing discrete processing in parallel!
I think Seth wants to believe that consciousness is just a better way to stay alive so it's not mysterious that it emerged. But setting aside any qualms I may have with that assumption (seems like consciousness is just as often a hindrance as a help in the ol' natural selection department), it still doesn't address the nub of Chalmers' problem: why does integrating experiences to adapt to the world have the feeling of interiority? You can conceive of a species of being that responds to perceptual stimuli as if it is consciously integrating best-guess predictions, which nonetheless lacks the first-person experience of qualia. I'm left questioning (i) what that phenomenology of qualia adds, from a natural selection perspective, and (ii) why that difference seems so qualitative to us. Maybe the experience of being a conscious self is an illusion (or controlled/controlling hallucination in Seth's terms), but it's one that is almost impossible to shake. Even if we understood all of the neural correlates of how it arises and what evolutionary purpose it serves, it still seems to me that there's a mysterious element to being inside a subjectivity that isn't captured by describing how it's constituted structurally. Even if you can answer "how consciousness arises" that isn't the same thing as answering "what is consciousness."
I think Seth is still uncomfortable with this too, because he goes to great lengths to avoid his theory being taken as a solution to the hard problem. Maybe he recognizes the problem's intractability in the face of earlier forays like IIT or NCC, and foresees the same challenges to his own. He seems hesitant to sign on to strong eliminativist arguments like those proposed by Daniel Dennett, but that seems philosophically the closest to what he's proposing. In other words: you've been tricked by your tricksy brain into thinking you're conscious right now by its incomplete Bayesian inferences about its own states. And never you mind who that "you" is that's being tricked.
These are hard problems indeed, so Seth can hardly be faulted for failing to fully find a path out of the maze. He is an able guide for most of the material along the way. He doesn't much get into the nitty-gritty of specific neuroanatomy, but his high-level descriptions of how brains work are informative and insightful. His descriptions of Bayesian inference and the Free Energy Principle are a little confusing, but that's not fatal to the project, and they become clearer in his examples. I loved his insight that consciousness and intelligence are distinct phenomena and his application to questions of animal consciousness was excellent. I also enjoyed his skepticism about strong AI and the assumption that consciousness is substrate-independent. This isn't my favorite neuroscience book but it's definitely worth a read.
February 14, 2023
Твърде много увъртане около мъгляв, все още не добре проучен (и трудно поддаващ се на стандартно проучване) обект като съзнанието. Все още липсва единна дефиниция що е съзнание, експериментите с психеделици и други методи върху мозъка дават някоя и друга насока, но и тя е само неизяснена линия.
А текстови похвати от сорта на “Представете си, че сте мозък” не са улеснение, а само раздразнение. Става ясно, че почти нищо не е ясно.
А текстови похвати от сорта на “Представете си, че сте мозък” не са улеснение, а само раздразнение. Става ясно, че почти нищо не е ясно.
June 19, 2023
Anil Seth é professor de neurociências computacionais, com uma formação de base em ciências naturais e um doutoramento em ciências da computação. O seu trabalho no domínio das ciências da consciência tornou-se uma referência nos últimos anos, sendo não só altamente citado pela academia, como seguido pelos média tradicionais. Para esse reconhecimento terá contribuído a TED que realizou em 2017, “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”, que conta com 14 milhões de visualizações, e pode ser vista como uma síntese de tudo aquilo que nos apresenta neste livro “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness” (2021).
Nota: os primeiros capítulos são um pouco densos, podem fazer pensar em desistir, mas depois entra num registo mais acessível e lê-se muito rapidamente.
Texto completo no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Nota: os primeiros capítulos são um pouco densos, podem fazer pensar em desistir, mas depois entra num registo mais acessível e lê-se muito rapidamente.
Texto completo no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
June 25, 2022
I doubt if there is a greater intellectual challenge facing humankind than the problem of understanding our own minds. Some philosophers even believe this is a problem that cannot ever be solved because how can a system of a given complexity figure out the complexity of itself. This problem can be broken down into two, potentially interrelated, problems -- that of understanding human general intelligence and understanding consciousness. Of these two, the first one is significantly easier because there are functional descriptions of what intelligence does. However, when it comes to consciousness, we don't even have a way to describe it precisely. I cannot prove to anyone that I am conscious, as the experience is purely subjective. Yet, none of us have any doubt that there is a conscious world within us, and we feel it most when we temporarily lose it, as in during anesthesia.
In the 20th century, a new branch of philosophy evolved out of the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl that dealt with the conscious experience of phenomenon, and Phenomenology was born. However, at the other end of the spectrum, neuroscientists and cognitive researchers were also trying to understand consciousness, and they were trying to find neural correlates of consciousness. During the last couple of decades, a number of candidate theories of consciousness have been proposed. At one end are ideas that completely disregard phenomenology and try to view consciousness as essentially an illusion that the mind creates. There are other theories that want to view consciousness as a natural outcome of a very complex system that develops some self-reflexive properties.
In this book researcher, Anil Seth is proposing a very different approach. In fact, this is the first idea I have come across where consciousness is not minimized by calling it an illusion or treated as a necessary outcome of a very complex system, but rather accept the basic precepts of phenomenology and explain how a living system can develop such a quality. To do this he is bringing together a number of powerful ideas that have rarely been applied together -- Cybernetics, Free Energy Principle (FEP), and Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
Cybernetics was popular during the mid 20th century as the science of control but lost its glamor as traditional computer science and information theory grabbed center stage. On a personal note, I got interested in AI only after reading a brilliant book by W. Ross Ashby called "A Design for a Brain", and later did my Ph.D. under a direct student of Ashby. Cybernetics shows how a complex system, like any living being, can maintain certain essential variables, like body temperature, heart rate, etc. within a tight boundary.
Free Energy Principle applies basic ideas of thermodynamics and entropy to explain how a living system can take action to maintain itself in a low entropy state they expect to be in. The author uses this mathematically rich theory to connect to his idea of what he calls controlled hallucinations. Here he claims that all living systems encounter a wide array of possible scenarios through their sensory mechanisms, and then apply Bayesian techniques to actually perceive the most likely version of these hallucinations. Incidentally, I remember reading a book by Terence Deacon called Incomplete Nature where he was also bringing in the notion of entropy and thermodynamics to understand the emergence of Consciousness.
Integrated Information Theory is also mathematically rich and defines a measure of consciousness based on how such a system is more than the sum of its parts. To have a high value of this quantity, the system as a whole must have high information (that is rule out a large number of possible goal states), but it must also have the property that the sum of information of its constituent parts must be less than the information as a whole.
The author has been able to integrate these three areas of research to come up with a plausible theory of Consciousness. If he is correct then only living things that try to control a huge set of parameters to keep them in a narrow band, and do it at every level of its structure (including at the cellular level) can experience what we call consciousness. That does not preclude machines to have intelligence, as he is separating the two. In this approach, something can be intelligent without having subjective consciousness. It also does not rule out the possibility of a machine that is designed like a living entity, that tries to control a large number of internal essential variables, may develop intelligence. It just says that a very complex intelligent machine will not automatically develop consciousness, even though it may fake it perfectly well.
I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in Consciousness. One may or may not agree with what he is saying, but there is no doubt it is a significant milestone in this field of research. However, one word of caution -- even though it is written for layperson readership, it may be a little difficult to follow unless the reader is somewhat familiar with this area of research.
I revisited this review after reading David Chalmers book on Consciousness. Wonder what was his reaction to this book. Will he continue to say that anyone who do not completely agree with his duality view is not taking consciousness “seriously”?
In the 20th century, a new branch of philosophy evolved out of the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl that dealt with the conscious experience of phenomenon, and Phenomenology was born. However, at the other end of the spectrum, neuroscientists and cognitive researchers were also trying to understand consciousness, and they were trying to find neural correlates of consciousness. During the last couple of decades, a number of candidate theories of consciousness have been proposed. At one end are ideas that completely disregard phenomenology and try to view consciousness as essentially an illusion that the mind creates. There are other theories that want to view consciousness as a natural outcome of a very complex system that develops some self-reflexive properties.
In this book researcher, Anil Seth is proposing a very different approach. In fact, this is the first idea I have come across where consciousness is not minimized by calling it an illusion or treated as a necessary outcome of a very complex system, but rather accept the basic precepts of phenomenology and explain how a living system can develop such a quality. To do this he is bringing together a number of powerful ideas that have rarely been applied together -- Cybernetics, Free Energy Principle (FEP), and Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
Cybernetics was popular during the mid 20th century as the science of control but lost its glamor as traditional computer science and information theory grabbed center stage. On a personal note, I got interested in AI only after reading a brilliant book by W. Ross Ashby called "A Design for a Brain", and later did my Ph.D. under a direct student of Ashby. Cybernetics shows how a complex system, like any living being, can maintain certain essential variables, like body temperature, heart rate, etc. within a tight boundary.
Free Energy Principle applies basic ideas of thermodynamics and entropy to explain how a living system can take action to maintain itself in a low entropy state they expect to be in. The author uses this mathematically rich theory to connect to his idea of what he calls controlled hallucinations. Here he claims that all living systems encounter a wide array of possible scenarios through their sensory mechanisms, and then apply Bayesian techniques to actually perceive the most likely version of these hallucinations. Incidentally, I remember reading a book by Terence Deacon called Incomplete Nature where he was also bringing in the notion of entropy and thermodynamics to understand the emergence of Consciousness.
Integrated Information Theory is also mathematically rich and defines a measure of consciousness based on how such a system is more than the sum of its parts. To have a high value of this quantity, the system as a whole must have high information (that is rule out a large number of possible goal states), but it must also have the property that the sum of information of its constituent parts must be less than the information as a whole.
The author has been able to integrate these three areas of research to come up with a plausible theory of Consciousness. If he is correct then only living things that try to control a huge set of parameters to keep them in a narrow band, and do it at every level of its structure (including at the cellular level) can experience what we call consciousness. That does not preclude machines to have intelligence, as he is separating the two. In this approach, something can be intelligent without having subjective consciousness. It also does not rule out the possibility of a machine that is designed like a living entity, that tries to control a large number of internal essential variables, may develop intelligence. It just says that a very complex intelligent machine will not automatically develop consciousness, even though it may fake it perfectly well.
I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in Consciousness. One may or may not agree with what he is saying, but there is no doubt it is a significant milestone in this field of research. However, one word of caution -- even though it is written for layperson readership, it may be a little difficult to follow unless the reader is somewhat familiar with this area of research.
I revisited this review after reading David Chalmers book on Consciousness. Wonder what was his reaction to this book. Will he continue to say that anyone who do not completely agree with his duality view is not taking consciousness “seriously”?
October 28, 2023
You can tell that Anil Seth is a scientist and not a philosopher. He does a good job at describing the state of consciousness research, the experiments, the data and the models. But as soon as he turns to the more philosophical questions, his reasoning is lacking.
The data does not show what consciousness is. The models do not explain how it arises or how it works. He tries to argue that consciousness is made up of a few simple ingredients, but in the end it does not become clear, how they connect and why this is all there is (apart from that the author feels like that’s all).
And after he fails at explaining human consciousness, he moves on to try and solve the question of animal consciousness - where his arguments can be reduced to ‘I feel like this is how it should be’. And even though he keeps saying you have to be careful of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism when talking about other animals, he keeps falling back on arguments based in both of these.
But by far the best part was the end, where he turns on to non-organic consciousness and cites fiction as his major evidence.
Combine all this with a very clunky execution of ‘I should add personal anecdotes to motivate my ideas and set this book apart from a textbook’ and you get a dissatisfying book about the history of consciousness research trying to mask as the big explanation of everything.
The data does not show what consciousness is. The models do not explain how it arises or how it works. He tries to argue that consciousness is made up of a few simple ingredients, but in the end it does not become clear, how they connect and why this is all there is (apart from that the author feels like that’s all).
And after he fails at explaining human consciousness, he moves on to try and solve the question of animal consciousness - where his arguments can be reduced to ‘I feel like this is how it should be’. And even though he keeps saying you have to be careful of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism when talking about other animals, he keeps falling back on arguments based in both of these.
But by far the best part was the end, where he turns on to non-organic consciousness and cites fiction as his major evidence.
Combine all this with a very clunky execution of ‘I should add personal anecdotes to motivate my ideas and set this book apart from a textbook’ and you get a dissatisfying book about the history of consciousness research trying to mask as the big explanation of everything.
February 3, 2022
What makes you "you"? This book delves into that question that is very difficult to answer, and does so very well.
The author approaches the question using his quite impressive background in neuroscience to delve into the very definition of what makes you "you"; your consciousness, your experiences, you.
A great read into the mysteries of the greatest of wonders, the human brain.
The author approaches the question using his quite impressive background in neuroscience to delve into the very definition of what makes you "you"; your consciousness, your experiences, you.
A great read into the mysteries of the greatest of wonders, the human brain.
July 19, 2023
In this book Seth weaves the philosophical, biological and personal aspects of consciousness together by using many fascinating thought experiments, case studies and personal experiences and scientific data in an accessible and thrilling writing style.
'Being You' is an important and original contribution to understanding how conscious minds arise in the natural world, covering complex topics, such as neurosurgery, mind-altering drugs, animal consciousness and artificial intelligence, and suggesting that 'the way you see yourself and the world is a controlled hallucination. Rather than passively perceiving our surroundings, our brains are constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see; in this way, we create the world we live in.'
If you're interested in understanding how each of our brains and its billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience, a sense of personal identity and continuity this book is a great start. It challenges your understanding of perception and reality and literally puts things on their heads.
Highly recommended!
'Being You' is an important and original contribution to understanding how conscious minds arise in the natural world, covering complex topics, such as neurosurgery, mind-altering drugs, animal consciousness and artificial intelligence, and suggesting that 'the way you see yourself and the world is a controlled hallucination. Rather than passively perceiving our surroundings, our brains are constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see; in this way, we create the world we live in.'
If you're interested in understanding how each of our brains and its billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience, a sense of personal identity and continuity this book is a great start. It challenges your understanding of perception and reality and literally puts things on their heads.
Highly recommended!
November 23, 2021
Anil Seth is a natural teacher. His prose is so clear, so relatively jargon free, and so grounded in telling anecdotes and pop-culture references (not to mention his unflagging generosity to colleagues) that even the highly abstruse arguments contained in this book are made to seem utterly reasonable. But I wonder if that is also the main weakness in this elaborate take on the problem of consciousness.
That Seth has an agenda is clear from the outset. To solve the problem of consciousness would be to complete the dethroning of humanity begun by Copernicus and continued by Darwin; it would be to breach "the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism". His fundamental assumption is that there can be nothing beyond the material (now apparently termed "physicalism" rather than materialism, presumably because of some negative associations attached to the latter). The book becomes, therefore, the answer to the question "how do we explain consciousness if at the outset we discount the soul?"
In truth the book should be subtitled "Notes Towards a New Theory of Consciousness" because quite a few dead, and loose, ends are elided by virtue of Seth's smooth and seductive delivery. He explicitly avoids confronting the "hard problem" of consciousness in favour of dealing with smaller - what he calls the "real" - problems rooted in phenomenology: "dissolving, not solving the hard problem".
So there are chapters on Levels and Contents of consciousness, and on how we perceive Self; along with additional material on consciousness in animals and machines. Consciousness is understood as a means by which the organism keeps itself alive. The brain makes predictive "Bayesian best guesses" about the world based on the mass of sensory data it receives. It generates "controlled hallucinations" - a proposal backed up by reference to optical illusions. Little new is actually said about our susceptibility to optical illusions, only that they serve here to underpin Seth's theories.
Or maybe we should say Seth's beliefs. There are two things here it is surprising to find in a work of science. First there are the occasions on which, to clinch an argument, Seth has to say "I believe" such and such a thing to be the case. Secondly, more than once he states that "evolution designed" something or other: surely an oxymoron that no self-respecting scientist should leave in his final draft.
That Seth has an agenda is clear from the outset. To solve the problem of consciousness would be to complete the dethroning of humanity begun by Copernicus and continued by Darwin; it would be to breach "the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism". His fundamental assumption is that there can be nothing beyond the material (now apparently termed "physicalism" rather than materialism, presumably because of some negative associations attached to the latter). The book becomes, therefore, the answer to the question "how do we explain consciousness if at the outset we discount the soul?"
In truth the book should be subtitled "Notes Towards a New Theory of Consciousness" because quite a few dead, and loose, ends are elided by virtue of Seth's smooth and seductive delivery. He explicitly avoids confronting the "hard problem" of consciousness in favour of dealing with smaller - what he calls the "real" - problems rooted in phenomenology: "dissolving, not solving the hard problem".
So there are chapters on Levels and Contents of consciousness, and on how we perceive Self; along with additional material on consciousness in animals and machines. Consciousness is understood as a means by which the organism keeps itself alive. The brain makes predictive "Bayesian best guesses" about the world based on the mass of sensory data it receives. It generates "controlled hallucinations" - a proposal backed up by reference to optical illusions. Little new is actually said about our susceptibility to optical illusions, only that they serve here to underpin Seth's theories.
Or maybe we should say Seth's beliefs. There are two things here it is surprising to find in a work of science. First there are the occasions on which, to clinch an argument, Seth has to say "I believe" such and such a thing to be the case. Secondly, more than once he states that "evolution designed" something or other: surely an oxymoron that no self-respecting scientist should leave in his final draft.
August 31, 2021
Intriguing Look At Evolving Science. Thirty years ago, if you asked someone to show you the scientific basis for consciousness - human or otherwise - they'd have laughed in your face because the concept was that much of a joke. Now, Seth is among the researchers actually pursuing the inquiry - and they've made some solid strides. In this text, Seth lays out what we now know via evidentiary science and can also posit via a range of philosophical approaches. He readily explains how both prongs of research feed off each other, and his explanations are sufficiently technically complicated to speak with some degree of precision... without being so technically complicated that you basically need to be working in his lab to understand a word of what he is saying. (Though don't get me wrong, even as someone with a BS in Computer Science and who reads similar books on consciousness, cognition, and perception a few times a year... this one was still technical enough that I readily admit I don't fully understand it, even now.) Absolutely a fascinating topic and a well written explanation of it from someone actively engaged in furthering the field, and it is very much recommended.
July 16, 2021
I have been reading books on consciousness for a long time because it has always been a subject that has particularly interested me since, long ago, I found myself almost by chance at a lecture by Giulio Tononi. Since then I think I have read quite a lot and I particularly appreciated the clear way in which this book illustrates both medical and philosophical theories and above all the excursus into the future and the "risk" of artificial intelligence.
Leggo da tempo libri sulla coscienza perché é sempre stato un argomento che mi ha particolarmente interessato, da quando, in tempi non sospetti, mi ritrovai quasi per caso ad una conferenza di GIulio Tononi. Da quel momento credo di aver letto parecchio e di questo libro ho apprezzato particolarmente il modo chiaro di illustrare teorie sia mediche che filosofiche e soprattutto l'excursus nel futuro ed il "rischio" delle intelligenze artificiali.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
Leggo da tempo libri sulla coscienza perché é sempre stato un argomento che mi ha particolarmente interessato, da quando, in tempi non sospetti, mi ritrovai quasi per caso ad una conferenza di GIulio Tononi. Da quel momento credo di aver letto parecchio e di questo libro ho apprezzato particolarmente il modo chiaro di illustrare teorie sia mediche che filosofiche e soprattutto l'excursus nel futuro ed il "rischio" delle intelligenze artificiali.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
September 28, 2021
I’m typically not a major fan of books on consciousness, but I heard a ton of people talking about this book, so I decided to give it a try, and I’m really glad I did. Seth could have easily written this book in a way that went way over the average reader’s head, but he made it extremely accessible for a broad audience. The reason I typically don’t like these types of books is because they get way too philosophical or abstract, and sometimes they dive into science that’s hard to comprehend. Anil Seth perfectly organized this book in a way where each section and chapter builds off of previous chapters. The book covers the science and research around consciousness throughout, and it also dives into our idea of self, machine minds, free will, how we perceive reality, and much more. So, if you’re curious about the topic, I definitely recommend it.
June 8, 2022
Summary:
Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and “Easy Problem” frameworks. The Real Problem “accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties…The challenge for the real problem is to explain, predict, and control these phenomenological properties, in terms of things happening in the brain and body” (26-7). Seth’s second theory is the “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception,” which utilizes a Bayesian model to argue that “the entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations” (92). This includes all experiences of selfhood, which Seth characterizes as “the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you” (229). Seth’s final theory is the “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness,” which posits that the primary purpose of consciousness is neither to facilitate direct access to the world nor to confer self-knowledge, but rather to satisfy the evolutionary imperatives of regulating our bodies and ensuring survival: “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” (281). The book ends with two chapters about “Other” forms of consciousness––those experienced by nonhuman animals and those that may one day occupy machine minds. Being You is by far the best book I have read on this topic, an absolutely essential text for anyone with a strong interest in neuroscience, consciousness, or the study of human identity.
Key Concepts and Notes:
––Drawing from an impressive range of academic sources, Seth includes succinct and informative summaries of the history of consciousness theories and research throughout the book. He “tells the story” of consciousness with poignancy and poise.
––He also provides excellent background on the leading contemporary theories of consciousness and cutting-edge tools that are being used to study it, including “Integrated Information Theory,” “Neural Correlates of Consciousness,” the “Perturbational Complexity Index,” and more.
––Seth’s “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception” goes a long way in explaining why we perceive the world the way we do, especially our blind spots (literal and figurative) and susceptibility to biases, fallacies, and change blindness. “Perceptual experience,” he writes, “is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them” (88). This is true for all types of perception, including self-perception and what Seth calls “social perception”––"perception of the mental states of others" (173). This emphasis on the dominance of our perceptual priors should help readers develop a healthy skepticism toward our first takes on any given situation, help us admit and accept error more readily when our top-down wiring misleads us, and engender a greater commitment to exploring and improving the mental models we use to reflect on our experiences.
––Seth’s “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness” has huge explanatory value when applied to the apparent tension between humanist individualism and universalism/collectivism. It shows us how these are just two equally-important aspects of human nature, with all humans having similar bodies that produce the same array of interoceptive signals that then become diversified through psychosocial development. People accrue a huge range of responses to their interoceptive signals that result in hyper-individualized prediction patterns. Hence the dual feelings of “I’m just like everyone else” and “I’m completely unique”—both of which are true!
––Seth aligns his theories with Karl Friston’s “Free Energy Principle,” an ambitious idea which is “as close to a ‘theory of everything’ in biology as has yet been proposed” (204). I found this connection absolutely fascinating, especially insofar as it reaches for consilience between consciousness and other aspects of biology and physics.
––I had a couple minor critiques of Seth’s outlook. The first is that I’m not sure I share his intuition that a “silicone beast machine”––a robot endowed with human-like neural networks, perceptual capacities, a body, self-control, ability to pursue goals autonomously, and concern with self-preservation––would most likely not be conscious. He bases this intuition on the notion that “consciousness and selfhood…are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes that apply ‘all the way down’” to the cellular level (263-4). This left me wondering if we’d really have to mimic human biology that thoroughly before some sort of artificial consciousness could arise. Maybe this could happen if we merely went “some of the way down” as opposed to “all the way down”? But how far?
––My other critique is that I don’t think Seth adequately explores the ethical ramifications of his inclusion of “control” as one of the primary goals for consciousness research. If we ever do learn enough about the connections between phenomenology and biological mechanism to actively exert “qualia control,” the moral consequences of that discovery are likely to be immediate and massive. Given the obvious potential for abuse that would be intrinsic to any such technology, I would have liked Seth to comment on this. Perhaps he felt it was beyond the scope of this particular book, in which case I really hope he takes it up in subsequent work. Or perhaps he has published about it elsewhere?
Favorite Quotes:
A science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be––at least not primarily––to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place. Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet. What I hope to show you is that by accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious…
In my view, consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body. (6-7)
One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just decades ago. Over time, mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. (22)
Why do we experience our perceptual constructions as being objectively real? In the controlled hallucination view, the purpose of perception is to guide action and behavior––to promote the organism’s prospects of survival. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us. It therefore makes sense that phenomenological properties like redness, chairness, Cilla Black-ness, and causality-ness––seem to be objective, veridical, properties of an external existing environment. We can respond more quickly and more effectively to something happening in the world if we perceive that thing as really existing. The out-there-ness inherent in our perceptual experience of the world is, I believe, a necessary feature of a generative model that is able to anticipate its incoming sensory flow, in order to successfully guide behavior.
To put it another way, even though perceptual properties depend on top-down generative models, we do not experience the models as models. Rather, we perceive with and through our generative models, and in doing so, out of mere mechanism a structured world is brought forth. (143-4)
Social perception can be linked to the social self in the following way. The ability to infer others’ mental states requires, as does all perceptual inference, a generative model. Generative models, as we know, are able to generate the sensory signals corresponding to a particular perceptual hypothesis. For social perception, this means a hypothesis about another’s mental states. In other words, I can understand what’s in your mind only if I try to understand how you are perceiving the contents of my mind. It is in this way that we perceive ourselves refracted through the minds of others. This is what the social self is all about, and these socially nested predictive perceptions are an important part of the overall experience of being a human self.
One intriguing implication of this construal of the social self is that self-awareness––the higher reaches of selfhood comprising both narrative and social aspects––might necessarily require a social context. If you exist in a world without any other minds––more specifically, without any other relevant minds––there would be no need for your brain to predict the mental states of others, and therefore no need for it to infer that its own experiences and actions belong to any self at all. John Donne’s seventeenth-century meditation that “no man is an island” could literally be true. (173-5)
Our perceptions may change, but this doesn’t mean that we perceive them as changing. This distinction is exemplified by the phenomenon of “change blindness,” in which slowly changing things (in the world) do not evoke any corresponding experience of change. The same principle will apply to self-perceptions too. We are becoming different people all the time. Our perceptions of self are continually changing––you are a slightly different person now than when you started reading this chapter––but this does not mean that we perceive these changes.
This subjective blindness to the changing self has consequences. For one thing, it fosters the false intuition that the self is an immutable entity, rather than a bundle of perceptions. But this is not the reason that evolution designed our experiences of selfhood this way. I believe that the subjective stability of the self goes beyond even the change blindness warranted by our slowly changing bodies and brains. 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. (176-7)
Anxiety doesn’t have a back, sadness doesn’t have sides, and happiness is not rectangular. The perceptions of the body “from within” on which affective experiences are built do not deliver experiences of the shape and location of my various internal organs––my spleen here, my kidneys over there. There is no phenomenology of objecthood, as when looking at a coffee cup on the table, nor is there anything like movement in a spatial frame, as when catching a cricket ball.
Control-oriented perceptions that underpin emotions and moods are all about predicting the consequences of actions for keeping the body’s essential variables where they belong. This is why, instead of experiencing emotions as objects, we experience how well or badly our overall situation is going, and is likely to go. Whether I’m sitting by my mother’s hospital bed, or fixing to escape from a bear, 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. (195)
We perceive ourselves as stable over time in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that our physiological condition is restricted to a particular range, and in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that this condition does not change. In other words, effective physiological regulation may depend on systemically misperceiving the body’s internal state as being more stable than it really is, and as changing less than it really does.
Intriguingly, this proposal may generalize to other, higher levels of selfhood beyond the ground-state of continued physiological integrity. We will be better able to maintain our physiological and psychological identity, at every level of selfhood, if we do not (expect to) perceive ourselves as continually changing. Across every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves. (199-200)
The picture that emerges is of a living system actively modeling its world and its body, so that the set of states that define it as a living system keep being revisited, over and over again––from the beating of my heart every second to commiserating my birthday every year. Paraphrasing Friston, the view from the FEP [Free Energy Principle] is of organisms gathering and modeling sensory information so as to maximize the sensory evidence for their own existence. Or, as I like to say, “I predict myself, therefore I am.” (209-10)
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. (228-9)
The study of animal consciousness delivers two profound benefits. The first is a recognition that the way we humans experience the world and self is not the only way. We inhabit a tiny region in a vast space of possible conscious minds, and the scientific investigation of this space so far amounts to little more than casting a few flares out into the darkness. The second is a newfound humility. Looking out across the wild diversity of life on Earth, we may value more––and take for granted less––the richness of subjective experience in all its variety and distinctiveness, in ourselves and in other animals too. And we may also find renewed motivation to minimize suffering wherever, and however, it might appear. (254)
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. If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems––such as other animals––that fail to match up to our questionable human standards of cognitive competence. (258)
By tying our mental lives to our physiological reality, age-old conceptions of a continuity between life and mind are given new substance, buttressed by the sturdy pillars of predictive processing and the free energy principle. And this deep continuity in turn allows us to see ourselves in closer relation to other animals and to the rest of nature, and correspondingly distant from the fleshless calculus of AI. As consciousness and life come together, consciousness and intelligence are teased apart. This reorientation of our place in nature applies not only to our physical, biological bodies, but to our conscious minds, to our experiences of the world around us and of being who we are. (280-1)
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and “Easy Problem” frameworks. The Real Problem “accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties…The challenge for the real problem is to explain, predict, and control these phenomenological properties, in terms of things happening in the brain and body” (26-7). Seth’s second theory is the “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception,” which utilizes a Bayesian model to argue that “the entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations” (92). This includes all experiences of selfhood, which Seth characterizes as “the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you” (229). Seth’s final theory is the “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness,” which posits that the primary purpose of consciousness is neither to facilitate direct access to the world nor to confer self-knowledge, but rather to satisfy the evolutionary imperatives of regulating our bodies and ensuring survival: “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” (281). The book ends with two chapters about “Other” forms of consciousness––those experienced by nonhuman animals and those that may one day occupy machine minds. Being You is by far the best book I have read on this topic, an absolutely essential text for anyone with a strong interest in neuroscience, consciousness, or the study of human identity.
Key Concepts and Notes:
––Drawing from an impressive range of academic sources, Seth includes succinct and informative summaries of the history of consciousness theories and research throughout the book. He “tells the story” of consciousness with poignancy and poise.
––He also provides excellent background on the leading contemporary theories of consciousness and cutting-edge tools that are being used to study it, including “Integrated Information Theory,” “Neural Correlates of Consciousness,” the “Perturbational Complexity Index,” and more.
––Seth’s “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception” goes a long way in explaining why we perceive the world the way we do, especially our blind spots (literal and figurative) and susceptibility to biases, fallacies, and change blindness. “Perceptual experience,” he writes, “is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them” (88). This is true for all types of perception, including self-perception and what Seth calls “social perception”––"perception of the mental states of others" (173). This emphasis on the dominance of our perceptual priors should help readers develop a healthy skepticism toward our first takes on any given situation, help us admit and accept error more readily when our top-down wiring misleads us, and engender a greater commitment to exploring and improving the mental models we use to reflect on our experiences.
––Seth’s “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness” has huge explanatory value when applied to the apparent tension between humanist individualism and universalism/collectivism. It shows us how these are just two equally-important aspects of human nature, with all humans having similar bodies that produce the same array of interoceptive signals that then become diversified through psychosocial development. People accrue a huge range of responses to their interoceptive signals that result in hyper-individualized prediction patterns. Hence the dual feelings of “I’m just like everyone else” and “I’m completely unique”—both of which are true!
––Seth aligns his theories with Karl Friston’s “Free Energy Principle,” an ambitious idea which is “as close to a ‘theory of everything’ in biology as has yet been proposed” (204). I found this connection absolutely fascinating, especially insofar as it reaches for consilience between consciousness and other aspects of biology and physics.
––I had a couple minor critiques of Seth’s outlook. The first is that I’m not sure I share his intuition that a “silicone beast machine”––a robot endowed with human-like neural networks, perceptual capacities, a body, self-control, ability to pursue goals autonomously, and concern with self-preservation––would most likely not be conscious. He bases this intuition on the notion that “consciousness and selfhood…are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes that apply ‘all the way down’” to the cellular level (263-4). This left me wondering if we’d really have to mimic human biology that thoroughly before some sort of artificial consciousness could arise. Maybe this could happen if we merely went “some of the way down” as opposed to “all the way down”? But how far?
––My other critique is that I don’t think Seth adequately explores the ethical ramifications of his inclusion of “control” as one of the primary goals for consciousness research. If we ever do learn enough about the connections between phenomenology and biological mechanism to actively exert “qualia control,” the moral consequences of that discovery are likely to be immediate and massive. Given the obvious potential for abuse that would be intrinsic to any such technology, I would have liked Seth to comment on this. Perhaps he felt it was beyond the scope of this particular book, in which case I really hope he takes it up in subsequent work. Or perhaps he has published about it elsewhere?
Favorite Quotes:
A science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be––at least not primarily––to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place. Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet. What I hope to show you is that by accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious…
In my view, consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body. (6-7)
One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just decades ago. Over time, mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. (22)
Why do we experience our perceptual constructions as being objectively real? In the controlled hallucination view, the purpose of perception is to guide action and behavior––to promote the organism’s prospects of survival. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us. It therefore makes sense that phenomenological properties like redness, chairness, Cilla Black-ness, and causality-ness––seem to be objective, veridical, properties of an external existing environment. We can respond more quickly and more effectively to something happening in the world if we perceive that thing as really existing. The out-there-ness inherent in our perceptual experience of the world is, I believe, a necessary feature of a generative model that is able to anticipate its incoming sensory flow, in order to successfully guide behavior.
To put it another way, even though perceptual properties depend on top-down generative models, we do not experience the models as models. Rather, we perceive with and through our generative models, and in doing so, out of mere mechanism a structured world is brought forth. (143-4)
Social perception can be linked to the social self in the following way. The ability to infer others’ mental states requires, as does all perceptual inference, a generative model. Generative models, as we know, are able to generate the sensory signals corresponding to a particular perceptual hypothesis. For social perception, this means a hypothesis about another’s mental states. In other words, I can understand what’s in your mind only if I try to understand how you are perceiving the contents of my mind. It is in this way that we perceive ourselves refracted through the minds of others. This is what the social self is all about, and these socially nested predictive perceptions are an important part of the overall experience of being a human self.
One intriguing implication of this construal of the social self is that self-awareness––the higher reaches of selfhood comprising both narrative and social aspects––might necessarily require a social context. If you exist in a world without any other minds––more specifically, without any other relevant minds––there would be no need for your brain to predict the mental states of others, and therefore no need for it to infer that its own experiences and actions belong to any self at all. John Donne’s seventeenth-century meditation that “no man is an island” could literally be true. (173-5)
Our perceptions may change, but this doesn’t mean that we perceive them as changing. This distinction is exemplified by the phenomenon of “change blindness,” in which slowly changing things (in the world) do not evoke any corresponding experience of change. The same principle will apply to self-perceptions too. We are becoming different people all the time. Our perceptions of self are continually changing––you are a slightly different person now than when you started reading this chapter––but this does not mean that we perceive these changes.
This subjective blindness to the changing self has consequences. For one thing, it fosters the false intuition that the self is an immutable entity, rather than a bundle of perceptions. But this is not the reason that evolution designed our experiences of selfhood this way. I believe that the subjective stability of the self goes beyond even the change blindness warranted by our slowly changing bodies and brains. 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. (176-7)
Anxiety doesn’t have a back, sadness doesn’t have sides, and happiness is not rectangular. The perceptions of the body “from within” on which affective experiences are built do not deliver experiences of the shape and location of my various internal organs––my spleen here, my kidneys over there. There is no phenomenology of objecthood, as when looking at a coffee cup on the table, nor is there anything like movement in a spatial frame, as when catching a cricket ball.
Control-oriented perceptions that underpin emotions and moods are all about predicting the consequences of actions for keeping the body’s essential variables where they belong. This is why, instead of experiencing emotions as objects, we experience how well or badly our overall situation is going, and is likely to go. Whether I’m sitting by my mother’s hospital bed, or fixing to escape from a bear, 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. (195)
We perceive ourselves as stable over time in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that our physiological condition is restricted to a particular range, and in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that this condition does not change. In other words, effective physiological regulation may depend on systemically misperceiving the body’s internal state as being more stable than it really is, and as changing less than it really does.
Intriguingly, this proposal may generalize to other, higher levels of selfhood beyond the ground-state of continued physiological integrity. We will be better able to maintain our physiological and psychological identity, at every level of selfhood, if we do not (expect to) perceive ourselves as continually changing. Across every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves. (199-200)
The picture that emerges is of a living system actively modeling its world and its body, so that the set of states that define it as a living system keep being revisited, over and over again––from the beating of my heart every second to commiserating my birthday every year. Paraphrasing Friston, the view from the FEP [Free Energy Principle] is of organisms gathering and modeling sensory information so as to maximize the sensory evidence for their own existence. Or, as I like to say, “I predict myself, therefore I am.” (209-10)
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. (228-9)
The study of animal consciousness delivers two profound benefits. The first is a recognition that the way we humans experience the world and self is not the only way. We inhabit a tiny region in a vast space of possible conscious minds, and the scientific investigation of this space so far amounts to little more than casting a few flares out into the darkness. The second is a newfound humility. Looking out across the wild diversity of life on Earth, we may value more––and take for granted less––the richness of subjective experience in all its variety and distinctiveness, in ourselves and in other animals too. And we may also find renewed motivation to minimize suffering wherever, and however, it might appear. (254)
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. If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems––such as other animals––that fail to match up to our questionable human standards of cognitive competence. (258)
By tying our mental lives to our physiological reality, age-old conceptions of a continuity between life and mind are given new substance, buttressed by the sturdy pillars of predictive processing and the free energy principle. And this deep continuity in turn allows us to see ourselves in closer relation to other animals and to the rest of nature, and correspondingly distant from the fleshless calculus of AI. As consciousness and life come together, consciousness and intelligence are teased apart. This reorientation of our place in nature applies not only to our physical, biological bodies, but to our conscious minds, to our experiences of the world around us and of being who we are. (280-1)
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
March 7, 2024
„Nuspėju save, vadinasi, esu“ – žymiąją Dekarto citatą perkuria sąmonę tiriantis neuromokslininkas Anil Seth. Remdamasis neuromoksliniais sąmonės tyrimais (kurių nemenka dalis yra atlikta jo paties), Anil įrodinėja, kad subjektyvus savęs pojūtis (štai ir knygos pavadinimas – „Being You“) kyla iš to kaip mūsų smegenys nuspėja ir kontroliuoja vidines kūno būsenas. Pradėdamas trumpu įvadu į filosofines sąmonės idėjas, Anil žengia į empirinį lauką ir aprašo šiuo metu egzistuojančius metodus, kuriais yra mėginama išmatuoti sąmonė. Atskiras skyrius yra skirtas integruotos informacijos teorijai, kurią neseniai aibė mokslininkų nukryžiavo kaip pseudomokslą^1. Autorius šią teoriją aprašo išlaikydamas skepsį, bet kartu, remiantis jo Twitterio postais, nepritaria ir tokiam visuotiniam jos nurašymui. Anil teigimu, kiekvienas iš mūsų gyvename kontroliuojamoje haliucinacijoje – mūsų smegenys nuspėja ir daro prielaidas apie patiriamą aplinką, todėl jokia patirtis nėra objektyvi ir kiekvienas galime tuos pačius dalykus suvokti skirtingai. T. y. mes niekada nesuvokiame pačių jutiminių signalų, o suvokiame tik jų interpretacijas (čia minimas ir jau klasika tapęs pavyzdys su mėlyna/balta suknele).
Anil teigimu, savęs suvokimas tėra dar viena kontroliuojama haliucinacija. Jis aptaria kelis gudriai sumanytus eksperimentus: nuo klasikinės smegenų apgaulės pasitelkiant guminę ranką ir plaktuką iki naujų tyrimų naudojant VR, kurių metų dviejų bendraujančių dalyvių matomas vaizdas keičiamas taip, kad kiekvienas iš dalyvių jaustųsi esąs ne savimi, o tuo kitu, su juo bendraujančiu, žmogumi. Šių eksperimentų sukelti kūno dalies ar savęs paties suvokimo pokyčiai įrodo, kad smegenys bando nuspėti kas tu esi. Be to, anot Anil, smegenys taip pat bando nuspėti mūsų kūnų vidinių signalų (interocepcijos) priežastis ir tokiu būdu sukuria emocijas, skatinančias mūsų kūnus atitinkamai veikti*. Galiausiai, Anil nuosekliai nukeliauja ir iki laisvos valios, aštuonkojų bei AI (kaipgi be šito).
„It‘s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that‘s what we call reality.“
5/5
*Atskirai šia tema dėmesio verta yra L. F. Barret knyga „How emotions are made“. Norėčiau rekomenduoti, bet labai sunku ją skaityti dėl autorės patronizuojančio tono.
^1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
Anil teigimu, savęs suvokimas tėra dar viena kontroliuojama haliucinacija. Jis aptaria kelis gudriai sumanytus eksperimentus: nuo klasikinės smegenų apgaulės pasitelkiant guminę ranką ir plaktuką iki naujų tyrimų naudojant VR, kurių metų dviejų bendraujančių dalyvių matomas vaizdas keičiamas taip, kad kiekvienas iš dalyvių jaustųsi esąs ne savimi, o tuo kitu, su juo bendraujančiu, žmogumi. Šių eksperimentų sukelti kūno dalies ar savęs paties suvokimo pokyčiai įrodo, kad smegenys bando nuspėti kas tu esi. Be to, anot Anil, smegenys taip pat bando nuspėti mūsų kūnų vidinių signalų (interocepcijos) priežastis ir tokiu būdu sukuria emocijas, skatinančias mūsų kūnus atitinkamai veikti*. Galiausiai, Anil nuosekliai nukeliauja ir iki laisvos valios, aštuonkojų bei AI (kaipgi be šito).
„It‘s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that‘s what we call reality.“
5/5
*Atskirai šia tema dėmesio verta yra L. F. Barret knyga „How emotions are made“. Norėčiau rekomenduoti, bet labai sunku ją skaityti dėl autorės patronizuojančio tono.
^1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
January 30, 2022
Experiencing the world is different than the actual world. Consciousness isn't black and white. Context is important. Instead of figuring out how it works, a better question is why is it there? Being 'you' is a verb - doing. You are 'selfing', 'experiencing you', 'being you'.
This book is about the neuroscience of consciousness so you may find this a difficult read (at times, anyways) or indigestible - consciousness is a difficult concept, with blurry edges when defining it. Seth strips everything away and focuses on 'the biological and physical processes unfolding in our brains and bodies' sprinkled with determinism and (a lack of) free will (feeling queasy yet?)
Seth does a beautiful job proposing Bayesian theory as one way to explain the working of consciousness: what we already know, to what we should believe next, based on what we are learning now. And my favourite concept of this book: controlled hallucinations. We are all hallucinating albeit controlled.
There are parts in the book that I question or don't agree with especially when Seth makes conflicting statements, however, I like his focus being on the 'real problem' instead of the 'hard problem'. Seth keeps circling back to the workability of a theory instead of research just because. To explain, predict and influence (nicer than control).
It would have been great if Seth had discussed consciousness in non-verbal humans - he briefly attends to babies and people with brain injury but without any depth. Seth delves into consciousness of non-human animals and the difference between consciousness and intelligence (not the same thing) ending the book on a scary possibility [reality] (AI).
This book is about the neuroscience of consciousness so you may find this a difficult read (at times, anyways) or indigestible - consciousness is a difficult concept, with blurry edges when defining it. Seth strips everything away and focuses on 'the biological and physical processes unfolding in our brains and bodies' sprinkled with determinism and (a lack of) free will (feeling queasy yet?)
Seth does a beautiful job proposing Bayesian theory as one way to explain the working of consciousness: what we already know, to what we should believe next, based on what we are learning now. And my favourite concept of this book: controlled hallucinations. We are all hallucinating albeit controlled.
There are parts in the book that I question or don't agree with especially when Seth makes conflicting statements, however, I like his focus being on the 'real problem' instead of the 'hard problem'. Seth keeps circling back to the workability of a theory instead of research just because. To explain, predict and influence (nicer than control).
It would have been great if Seth had discussed consciousness in non-verbal humans - he briefly attends to babies and people with brain injury but without any depth. Seth delves into consciousness of non-human animals and the difference between consciousness and intelligence (not the same thing) ending the book on a scary possibility [reality] (AI).
July 2, 2022
The first few chapters of this one I found a hard, very technical slog, but this paid off in the middle and end. I think you could start at the second section and follow the general arguments even if you don't read the scientific background in the first, but your mileage may vary.
Seth's argument is that consciousness is a prediction machine, that generates hypotheses about what is 'out there' based on sensory input, in a kind of controlled hallucination -- a hallucination that is tethered to reality, but doesn't accurately depict it, since Seth finds accuracy a red herring here -- and then seeks to make these predictions true by seeking out the kinds of environments that would do so. And I realize that this sounds like utter gibberish, but it does make sense in the context of the book.
An analogy he uses is catching a baseball (which is unfortunate, since I don't sports and can't speak to its usefulness): you see the ball at a certain angle to your eyes, and your brain makes predictions about where in the field you should go next to keep the ball at that same angle, and if you make these predictions accurately, you end up being able to catch the ball.
He also has some nice asides for free will and against human exceptionalism, which I very much enjoyed; in his theory, consciousness is an emergent property of life with varying levels of intelligence making best guesses and predictions about how to stay alive, and so is widely shared, rather than a uniquely human quality. Which anyone who has had a dog and isn't a total jackass already knows, but it's nice when science validates it. ;)
Seth's argument is that consciousness is a prediction machine, that generates hypotheses about what is 'out there' based on sensory input, in a kind of controlled hallucination -- a hallucination that is tethered to reality, but doesn't accurately depict it, since Seth finds accuracy a red herring here -- and then seeks to make these predictions true by seeking out the kinds of environments that would do so. And I realize that this sounds like utter gibberish, but it does make sense in the context of the book.
An analogy he uses is catching a baseball (which is unfortunate, since I don't sports and can't speak to its usefulness): you see the ball at a certain angle to your eyes, and your brain makes predictions about where in the field you should go next to keep the ball at that same angle, and if you make these predictions accurately, you end up being able to catch the ball.
He also has some nice asides for free will and against human exceptionalism, which I very much enjoyed; in his theory, consciousness is an emergent property of life with varying levels of intelligence making best guesses and predictions about how to stay alive, and so is widely shared, rather than a uniquely human quality. Which anyone who has had a dog and isn't a total jackass already knows, but it's nice when science validates it. ;)
September 20, 2022
Incredibly succint, informative and illumunative book. I love the fact that “he made a cup of tea” and came to talk with us, it gives you the feeling of being in a lecture room with your favourite professor (nerdy, I know). It draws on personal experiences, along with scientific literature so you can picture the concepts better while having the fundamentals to support the theories. I loved the fact that he gave a wider perspective, linking consciousness with nature, physics and evolution but I found some concepts too abstract to understand if one does not have a background in physics or neuroscience (hence the four stars).
November 12, 2022
I am fascinated by the subject matter but it was painful to read. Maybe it was just the audio version.
April 7, 2024
This was a nice introduction to the modern perspectives of cognitive science and neuroscience on the problem of understanding consciousness. The author laid out the problem neatly and elaborated some attempts at solving the problem. The best aspect of the book for me was the discussion of how our conscious experience is a controlled hallucination. Starting from this description the author goes on to try to explain various interesting aspects of our existence such as the continuity of our self, optical illusions and the integration of our senses and emotions. Finally there are some interesting chapters discussing consciousness in animals and AI.
October 24, 2023
“The quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from nature”
Through a well crafted blend of phenomenology and neuroscience, Seth aims to take the science of consciousness away from human exceptionalism, showing that our conscious minds are part of the wider patterns of nature and of life itself. The book explores important philosophical and scientific questions making clear his opinions and where other views branch off. Personally, I found it to be very well written, with excellent explanations, and even funny in it’s anecdotal exploration of consciousness throughout his career. The writing style feels like a down to earth scientist having a conversation about his work and his life, which feels very accessible despite some complex themes.
I loved every second and I thoroughly recommend this book!
Through a well crafted blend of phenomenology and neuroscience, Seth aims to take the science of consciousness away from human exceptionalism, showing that our conscious minds are part of the wider patterns of nature and of life itself. The book explores important philosophical and scientific questions making clear his opinions and where other views branch off. Personally, I found it to be very well written, with excellent explanations, and even funny in it’s anecdotal exploration of consciousness throughout his career. The writing style feels like a down to earth scientist having a conversation about his work and his life, which feels very accessible despite some complex themes.
I loved every second and I thoroughly recommend this book!
December 27, 2023
I didn't hate it,
and there's some interesting stuff about the origins of AI art in here for those who are interested. That was probably my favourite bit.
I also liked the story about the French taking the rats of Paris to court for being a public nuisance, and their lawyer successfully defending them.
The main problem with this book is that, unsurprisingly, it doesn't manage to answer the question that it asks at the start: "What is consciousness?". It tries to introduce the reader to the leading theories, & get them up to date on the latest relevant research, but I still felt that nothing had really been explained in any detail by the end of the book. I appreciate that it takes a genius to explain something complicated to a normal person. Steven Hawking was the master of this. His books are excellent at doing just that; making cutting edge science intelligible to the rest of us. Richard Dawkins is a close second. Those two authors are masters of casing pearls before swine, and then getting the swine to appreciate the gift. This book is not up the that standard. Instead of explaining, it often just skips over topics that would be too difficult for the un-initiated, & thereby fails in what should be it's primary function, the aforementioned pearl-casting. Unlike my experience with the two aforementioned masters, I do not feel like I have really learned very much.
and there's some interesting stuff about the origins of AI art in here for those who are interested. That was probably my favourite bit.
I also liked the story about the French taking the rats of Paris to court for being a public nuisance, and their lawyer successfully defending them.
The main problem with this book is that, unsurprisingly, it doesn't manage to answer the question that it asks at the start: "What is consciousness?". It tries to introduce the reader to the leading theories, & get them up to date on the latest relevant research, but I still felt that nothing had really been explained in any detail by the end of the book. I appreciate that it takes a genius to explain something complicated to a normal person. Steven Hawking was the master of this. His books are excellent at doing just that; making cutting edge science intelligible to the rest of us. Richard Dawkins is a close second. Those two authors are masters of casing pearls before swine, and then getting the swine to appreciate the gift. This book is not up the that standard. Instead of explaining, it often just skips over topics that would be too difficult for the un-initiated, & thereby fails in what should be it's primary function, the aforementioned pearl-casting. Unlike my experience with the two aforementioned masters, I do not feel like I have really learned very much.
Read
October 28, 2021Challenging read (in fact, I read it twice) and fascinating at the same time. If you like neuroscience, or philosophy of mind, I highly recommend the book.
March 27, 2022
I'm usually leery of reading articles or books on consciousness, because the science is so poorly developed. But this book had amassed such positive reviews…
Unfortunately, Seth does not spend much time describing his own experiments testing aspects of consciousness. There is much more philosophizing, much of it unsupported and going nowhere.
> Can you imagine an A380 flying backwards? Of course you can. Just imagine a large plane in the air, moving backwards. Is such a scenario really conceivable? Well, the more you know about aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, the less conceivable it becomes. In this case, even a minimal knowledge of these topics makes it clear that planes cannot fly backwards. It just cannot be done. It’s the same with zombies. In one sense it’s trivial to imagine a philosophical zombie. I just picture a version of myself wandering around without having any conscious experiences. But can I really conceive this?
> Not so long ago, life seemed as mysterious as consciousness does today. Scientists and philosophers of the day doubted that physical or chemical mechanisms could ever explain the property of being alive. The difference between the living and the non-living, between the animate and the inanimate, appeared so fundamental that it was considered implausible that it could ever be bridged by mechanistic explanations of any sort. This philosophy of vitalism reached a peak in the nineteenth century. It was supported by leading biologists like Johannes Müller and Louis Pasteur
> the rubber hand illusion might be largely or entirely driven by suggestion effects. Unless studies of embodiment illusions take individual differences in suggestibility into account, which by and large they haven’t, it is difficult for them to say anything specific about the mechanisms involved. This holds whether we’re talking about rubber hands, out-of-body-like experiences, body swap illusions, or any other situation in which people are led – implicitly or explicitly – to expect a particular body-related experience.
> Imagine a system subject to an entirely new form of suffering, for which we humans have no equivalent or conception, nor any instincts by which to recognize it. Imagine a system for which the distinction between positive and negative feelings does not even apply, for which there is no corresponding phenomenological dimension. The ethical challenge here is that we would not even know what the relevant ethical issues were
Unfortunately, Seth does not spend much time describing his own experiments testing aspects of consciousness. There is much more philosophizing, much of it unsupported and going nowhere.
> Can you imagine an A380 flying backwards? Of course you can. Just imagine a large plane in the air, moving backwards. Is such a scenario really conceivable? Well, the more you know about aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, the less conceivable it becomes. In this case, even a minimal knowledge of these topics makes it clear that planes cannot fly backwards. It just cannot be done. It’s the same with zombies. In one sense it’s trivial to imagine a philosophical zombie. I just picture a version of myself wandering around without having any conscious experiences. But can I really conceive this?
> Not so long ago, life seemed as mysterious as consciousness does today. Scientists and philosophers of the day doubted that physical or chemical mechanisms could ever explain the property of being alive. The difference between the living and the non-living, between the animate and the inanimate, appeared so fundamental that it was considered implausible that it could ever be bridged by mechanistic explanations of any sort. This philosophy of vitalism reached a peak in the nineteenth century. It was supported by leading biologists like Johannes Müller and Louis Pasteur
> the rubber hand illusion might be largely or entirely driven by suggestion effects. Unless studies of embodiment illusions take individual differences in suggestibility into account, which by and large they haven’t, it is difficult for them to say anything specific about the mechanisms involved. This holds whether we’re talking about rubber hands, out-of-body-like experiences, body swap illusions, or any other situation in which people are led – implicitly or explicitly – to expect a particular body-related experience.
> Imagine a system subject to an entirely new form of suffering, for which we humans have no equivalent or conception, nor any instincts by which to recognize it. Imagine a system for which the distinction between positive and negative feelings does not even apply, for which there is no corresponding phenomenological dimension. The ethical challenge here is that we would not even know what the relevant ethical issues were
April 21, 2024
I have to confess, I will need to read this again. I also want to. For two reasons. First, the subject is something I feel is important - understanding consciousness through the lens of a scientific method. Second, grasping all of the material in Anil Seth's fascinating exploration, I feel, is impossible with a single read. Having said that, the first read is indeed enlightening.
Being ourselves is not something we are always conscious of.* Anil Seth sets out to explore how billions of neurons within the brain end up creating a conscious experience - a uniquely personal, first person experience. The book is divided into four sections - defining the 'problem' and showing the approach to the scientific exploration of consciousness, looking at it through how it relates to 'content' and external phenomena, and then going inwards to the experiences of conscious selfhood, and finally applying the learning to non-human entities - animals and AI.
In the first section, Seth brings up the 'hard' and 'real' problems of consciousness. The first (David Chalmers) is focused on how consciousness happens, how it is related to our biophysical machinery and how it is connected to the universe at large. On the other hand, the 'real' problem is how the 'primary goals of consciousness science is to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.' i.e. why is a particular experience the way it is, and what is its relation with what is happening with the brain and body. In other words, deeply understanding the connection between mind and matter. The latter approach would need measurement.
This begins with understanding 'conscious levels' - complete absence (e.g. coma) to light sleep to waking states. Conscious content is what we are conscious of - sights, smells, emotions, moods, thoughts, beliefs - all sorts of perception. There is a very interesting part on how psychedelic states are at a conscious level well above waking state, and have the maximum algorithmic complexity (a measure of the diversity of signals). Another interesting proposal is how all conscious experiences are informative and integrated, (red ball vs red and ball separately) leading to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, an axiomatic approach that starts with theories and use them to support claims on what properties the mechanisms underlying the experiences will have.
The next section is about conscious content and then the experience of a conscious self. Here's where the idea of perception gets upturned. Perception is a 'controlled hallucination' (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain's various hypotheses. Perception is a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides).
Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. 'We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.' A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! There is the fascinating part on colour - an object is not objectively 'red', redness is just the way in which it reflects light, and how the brain perceives it. And this applies to all of our perceptions. Mind effing bending! A great distinction here (John Locke) is on why that train is not just a perception and you shouldn't jump in front of it. Objects have primary qualities that exist independently of an observer (e.g. space it occupies, movement, solidity), and secondary qualities that depend on the observer (e.g. colour)
The self, as shown in the next section, is also a perception, a controlled hallucination. To begin with, selfhood is divided into an embodied (being a body), perspectival (having a first-person perspective), volitional (having 'free will') and narrative (personal identity and deep emotions), social (how I perceive others perceiving me). The link between perception and the body and its physiological processes exist in all these forms. When we flip the learning from the previous section inwards, we understand that we do not perceive ourselves to know ourselves, we do it in order to control ourselves'. The entire panorama of experience and the mental life and thus its perceptions and cognitions stems from a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive.
I found the part on why we think we are stable and unchanging over time, very interesting. Perceptual inference is about finding out things about the outside world. Interoceptive inference is about controlling things - physiological regulation. In the latter, the prediction error minimisation happens by acting to fulfil top-down predictions of the brain. The brain, for survival, desires predicted ranges of physiological viability and thus the need for strong, precise and self-fulfilling predictions. And if it comes to that, the brain will (and does) systematically misperceive.
The end of the section also brings in the complex but fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this - being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Free energy here approximates sensory entropy, and apparently, it amounts to the same thing as prediction error. Broadly, that connection with physics and the universe, and the brain's regulation of the perception of the worlds outside and inside! Appealing, but they're still ironing out many wrinkles.
I found the last parts - free will, and consciousness in animals and AI to be areas which are still under much (more) debate, and therefore more descriptive than insightful. That is not to say that it does not merit a read! It is just that the 200+ pages before were so rich and intense that on a purely relative scale, this seemed less so.
As I said, this is most definitely not an easy book, but it does such a fantastic job of providing that glimpse and promise that we might actually get answers to our most basic and profound questions that one automatically cheers for the understanding that each chapter provides. Also the kind of book that makes me wish I were smarter - to really grasp the entirety of it! It also made me think of how science and spirituality seem to converge - the latter's approach to reducing wants and desires, and increasing mindfulness as a means to prediction error minimisation. :)
Notes and Quotes
"The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process.."
"Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology, wherever there is phenomenology there is consciousness."
Deductive (reaching conclusions by logic), inductive (extrapolating from a series of observations) and abductive reasoning (the best explanation from a series of observations)
*now that I have read the book, I am analysing this sentence!
Being ourselves is not something we are always conscious of.* Anil Seth sets out to explore how billions of neurons within the brain end up creating a conscious experience - a uniquely personal, first person experience. The book is divided into four sections - defining the 'problem' and showing the approach to the scientific exploration of consciousness, looking at it through how it relates to 'content' and external phenomena, and then going inwards to the experiences of conscious selfhood, and finally applying the learning to non-human entities - animals and AI.
In the first section, Seth brings up the 'hard' and 'real' problems of consciousness. The first (David Chalmers) is focused on how consciousness happens, how it is related to our biophysical machinery and how it is connected to the universe at large. On the other hand, the 'real' problem is how the 'primary goals of consciousness science is to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.' i.e. why is a particular experience the way it is, and what is its relation with what is happening with the brain and body. In other words, deeply understanding the connection between mind and matter. The latter approach would need measurement.
This begins with understanding 'conscious levels' - complete absence (e.g. coma) to light sleep to waking states. Conscious content is what we are conscious of - sights, smells, emotions, moods, thoughts, beliefs - all sorts of perception. There is a very interesting part on how psychedelic states are at a conscious level well above waking state, and have the maximum algorithmic complexity (a measure of the diversity of signals). Another interesting proposal is how all conscious experiences are informative and integrated, (red ball vs red and ball separately) leading to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, an axiomatic approach that starts with theories and use them to support claims on what properties the mechanisms underlying the experiences will have.
The next section is about conscious content and then the experience of a conscious self. Here's where the idea of perception gets upturned. Perception is a 'controlled hallucination' (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain's various hypotheses. Perception is a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides).
Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. 'We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.' A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! There is the fascinating part on colour - an object is not objectively 'red', redness is just the way in which it reflects light, and how the brain perceives it. And this applies to all of our perceptions. Mind effing bending! A great distinction here (John Locke) is on why that train is not just a perception and you shouldn't jump in front of it. Objects have primary qualities that exist independently of an observer (e.g. space it occupies, movement, solidity), and secondary qualities that depend on the observer (e.g. colour)
The self, as shown in the next section, is also a perception, a controlled hallucination. To begin with, selfhood is divided into an embodied (being a body), perspectival (having a first-person perspective), volitional (having 'free will') and narrative (personal identity and deep emotions), social (how I perceive others perceiving me). The link between perception and the body and its physiological processes exist in all these forms. When we flip the learning from the previous section inwards, we understand that we do not perceive ourselves to know ourselves, we do it in order to control ourselves'. The entire panorama of experience and the mental life and thus its perceptions and cognitions stems from a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive.
I found the part on why we think we are stable and unchanging over time, very interesting. Perceptual inference is about finding out things about the outside world. Interoceptive inference is about controlling things - physiological regulation. In the latter, the prediction error minimisation happens by acting to fulfil top-down predictions of the brain. The brain, for survival, desires predicted ranges of physiological viability and thus the need for strong, precise and self-fulfilling predictions. And if it comes to that, the brain will (and does) systematically misperceive.
The end of the section also brings in the complex but fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this - being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Free energy here approximates sensory entropy, and apparently, it amounts to the same thing as prediction error. Broadly, that connection with physics and the universe, and the brain's regulation of the perception of the worlds outside and inside! Appealing, but they're still ironing out many wrinkles.
I found the last parts - free will, and consciousness in animals and AI to be areas which are still under much (more) debate, and therefore more descriptive than insightful. That is not to say that it does not merit a read! It is just that the 200+ pages before were so rich and intense that on a purely relative scale, this seemed less so.
As I said, this is most definitely not an easy book, but it does such a fantastic job of providing that glimpse and promise that we might actually get answers to our most basic and profound questions that one automatically cheers for the understanding that each chapter provides. Also the kind of book that makes me wish I were smarter - to really grasp the entirety of it! It also made me think of how science and spirituality seem to converge - the latter's approach to reducing wants and desires, and increasing mindfulness as a means to prediction error minimisation. :)
Notes and Quotes
"The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process.."
"Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology, wherever there is phenomenology there is consciousness."
Deductive (reaching conclusions by logic), inductive (extrapolating from a series of observations) and abductive reasoning (the best explanation from a series of observations)
*now that I have read the book, I am analysing this sentence!
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