How the Brain Constructs a Picture of the World Based on Slabs of Data?

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In psychology, there's this tradition of thinking about the brain as an inference engine. We don't have direct access to reality as it is. Everything we see are some sort of interpretation of something that is ultimately unknowable. The content of our perceptual experience at any one time is the brain's best guess. It's the posterior its combining sensory data with some prior expectation or belief about the way the world is. That all these prior expectations provide context for interpreting ambiguous sensory signals. And it's the interpretation that that is what we perceive.

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

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Anil Seth received his D.Phil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex. He is currently a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at Sussex, as well as co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has served as the president of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. His new book is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

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