BI 117 Anil Seth: Being You

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Anil and I discuss a range of topics from his book, BEING YOU A New Science of Consciousness. Anil lays out his framework for explaining consciousness, which is embedded in what he calls the "real problem" of consciousness. You know the "hard problem", which was David Chalmers term for our eternal difficulties to explain why we have subjective awareness at all instead of being unfeeling, unexperiencing machine-like organisms. Anil's "real problem" aims to explain, predict, and control the phenomenal properties of consciousness, and his hope is that, by doing so, the hard problem of consciousness will dissolve much like the mystery of explaining life dissolved with lots of good science.

Anil's account of perceptual consciousness, like seeing red, is that it's rooted in predicting our incoming sensory data. His account of our sense of self,  is that it's rooted in predicting our bodily states to control them.

We talk about that and a lot of other topics from the book, like consciousness as "controlled hallucinations", free will, psychedelics, complexity and emergence, and the relation between life, intelligence, and consciousness. Plus, Anil answers a handful of questions from Megan Peters and Steve Fleming, both previous brain inspired guests.

• Anil's website.
• Twitter: @anilkseth.
• Anil's book: BEING YOU A New Science of Consciousness.
• Megan's previous episode:
  • BI 073 Megan Peters: Consciousness and Metacognition
• Steve's previous episodes
  • BI 099 Hakwan Lau and Steve Fleming: Neuro-AI Consciousness
  • BI 107 Steve Fleming: Know Thyself

0:00 - Intro 6:32 - Megan Peters Q: Communicating Consciousness 15:58 - Human vs. animal consciousness 19:12 - BEING YOU A New Science of Consciousness 20:55 - Megan Peters Q: Will the hard problem go away? 30:55 - Steve Fleming Q: Contents of consciousness 41:01 - Megan Peters Q: Phenomenal character vs. content 43:46 - Megan Peters Q: Lempels of complexity 52:00 - Complex systems and emergence 55:53 - Psychedelics 1:06:04 - Free will 1:19:10 - Consciousness vs. life vs. intelligence