How Do You Think About Consciousness?

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The real problem of consciousness is to explain why conscious experiences are the way they are, in terms of things happening in brains and bodies. The kind of consciousness that iam interested in explaining is the consciousness that we are familiar with in our everyday life. I'm a little agnostic about how consciousness will turn out to be part of our overruled story of the universe. And maybe this apparent mystery will evaporate as people get better at explaining living systems. So i call it a bit of tongue and cheek. It's not guaranteed but hopefully by pursuing that nosy no-nonsense approach you'll become less mysterious.

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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