#649 - Anil Seth - Does Your Brain Hallucinate Conscious Reality?
Jul 3, 2023
01:19:45
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Quick takeaways
The problem of consciousness focuses on explaining the properties of consciousness, even if the hard problem of how consciousness arises from brain activity remains unsolved.
The self encompasses various levels of conscious experiences and continuously evolves and changes.
Our conscious perceptions are not direct reflections of objective reality, but rather the brain's interpretations and predictions based on sensory information.
Deep dives
The Real Problem of Consciousness
The real problem of consciousness focuses on explaining the properties of consciousness, such as what experiences feel like and the differences between various conscious experiences. By addressing this problem, progress can be made in understanding consciousness, even if the hard problem of explaining how consciousness arises from brain activity remains unsolved.
The Nature of the Self
The self is a complex and ever-changing entity that encompasses different levels of conscious experiences. It includes the basic sense of being a living organism, emotions, perceptions of the body, first-person perspective experiences, experiences of agency and free will, personal identity, memories, and social influences. While certain aspects of the self may persist over time, the self continuously evolves and changes.
Perception as a Controlled Hallucination
Our experiences of the world are not direct reflections of objective reality, but rather the brain's interpretations and predictions based on sensory information. The brain actively constructs our conscious perceptions by making the best guesses about the causes of sensory signals. This process allows for the regulation and control of perception, making it more useful for complex organisms like humans.
Perception as a User Interface to Survive
Perception is not a direct representation of the world but rather a user interface that helps us survive. This idea is similar to Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception. However, the metaphor of a mini-me inside our heads examining the interface is problematic. The self is actually part of the interface and there is no separate self from the flow of experience. Understanding perception is about solving the indirectness between how things are in the world and how the brain makes sense of them for survival.
Predictive Brain and Consciousness
The primary function of the brain is to control and regulate the body's survival. This is why the brain evolved to make predictions about sensory signals. By having predictive models, the brain can better control and regulate the body's responses, keeping it alive. Consciousness emerges from this predictive ability. While social predictions may be important, they are not fundamental to understanding consciousness. The goal is to understand how the brain works in generating predictions and making sense of the world.
Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and an author.
What is the Self? What does it mean that we are the same person we were 10 years ago? Why do we have a subjective experience of reality at all? Is consciousness created or perceived? These are fundamental questions that philosophers and neuroscientists have been trying to answer for centuries. So can a new science of consciousness give us the answers?
Expect to learn why answering the problem of consciousness is such a difficult challenge, why you wake up as the same person everyday, whether we know for a fact that animals are conscious, why perception often is divorced from objective reality, just how reliable our memories are, how to trust your brain even when it's incredibly fallible and much more...
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