Being You
Being You by Anil Seth explores his theory of consciousness and the self. Seth proposes that perception does not happen outside-in, with external physical signals being detected and processed to constitute our view of the world, but rather inside-out, with the brain constantly generating predictions of sensory inputs and only registering surprises. According to Seth, consciousness arises from the brain's "predictive processing" of the world, whereby it constantly generates hypotheses about the causes of its own sensory inputs. Our sense of self and subjective experience emerge from the brain's attempts to unify and explain the multisensory information it receives. The book examines how this predictive model of the brain can account for phenomena like qualia, delusions, and altered states of consciousness. Seth also discusses the implications of this view for understanding animal consciousness as well as the potential for machines to develop consciousness.
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9people
2021–2026years
69% recommend31% neutral
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- I'll also recommend Being You by Seth Anil. It makes a lot of sense of consciousness to me. It certainly doesn't answer the question but it's not just throw your hands up and "we have no idea why qualia", and it's also not just "here's a list of neural correlates of consciousness and we won't even discuss qualia".
It goes through how sensations fit into this highly constrained, highly functional hallucination that models the outside world as a sort of bayesian prediction about the world as they relate to your concerns and capabilities as a human, and then it has a very interesting discussion about emotions as they relate to inner bodily sensations.
- Your own experience is plenty of evidence that you are conscious. And it is reasonable to infer that other humans are like you, especially when they say the same things about experience as you do in the same conditions.
And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.
We don't have a solid or consensus theory about consciousness, but the idea that we've just made no progress is untrue. Some books I recommend are Being You by Anil Seth from 2021 or Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene from 2014z
- Just finished Being You by Anil Seth and The experience machine by Andy Clark. Both great popular science book on current neuroscience and consciousness research.
- You can break it down even further than "I feel this", "I logically think this". Even thinking there is 'logic' is already missing that there has to be a place where the logic 'comes from' or 'arises'. This article did play fast and loose with terminology. I'd suggest reading up on Schopenhauer and Phenomenology, for historical background, and then for modern neuroscience, "Being You" by Anil Seth. They try to get at same thing, our 'subjective' experience is just how our brain interpret inputs, and with meditation you can grow the ability to observer how the brain reacts. But in the end the reactions happen from somewhere, even a 'logical thinking' comes from somewhere before the 'thinking' can take place. You can think what you will, but how do you decide to think about what you want to think about.
Actually, forget it. I'm trying to explain this article, but I thought it was a bit confused to begin with. Guess its basically long and winding way to say 'be in the present movement'. But that's pretty generic.
- For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below)
Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you
The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...) is far more comprehensive and while being more academicky is still an excellent read.
Unfortunately both miss what I think is easily the best and most computationally robust and fleshed out consciousness theory, but that's because it's so tragically unknown. I co-authored a book that covers this (while staying accessible) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...
So much of the stuff in the mathematical-this and physics-that of conscious experience is just crap because there is very little understanding of biological consciousness and what it is and where we can find it, and where we cannot. These start with assumptions of what consciousness is and then go on to mathematize these non-validated assumptions. (Integrated Information Theory) IIT is the most popular among these. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 -- this article captures well why IIT, and many like it, are bad models of consciousness.
- I would highly recommend listening to Anil Seth or reading his book "Being You". He is also highly critical of dualism and panpsychism, and justifiably so.
As one of the leading researchers on consciousness, I'm surprised he's not mentioned at all in this. He is extremely fascinated by how consciousness goes away under anesthesia.
