Fran Hardyman reviews Being You: A new science of consciousness, a bestselling book of the renown author, Anil Seth. Seth discusses the subjectivity of human experience and attempts to explain consciousness.
What does it mean to be conscious? For Anil Seth, Professor of Neuroscience and co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, it means there exists “something it is like to be you”. It is fundamentally subjective and, as any scientist knows, subjectivity is a difficult starting point for experimentation and understanding. So, how can we ever attempt to explain the physical basis of the experience we call consciousness?
This is at the root of the so-called ‘hard problem’, as defined by David Chalmers in 1995 (paper): why and how are the physical processes of the brain accompanied by subjective experience? Seth tackles this seemingly insurmountable question by focusing on the separate, but related, ‘real problem’ of consciousness: trying to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience” (p22, Being You). He broadly defines these properties as conscious level (on a scale from coma, sleep, and drowsiness to alertness, and even the hyper-awareness during psychedelic use), content (sensory experience), self-awareness and free will. With this structure, he keeps the focus of the book on what can be understood through theory and experimentation, and encourages us to trust that the resulting data will provide a framework for an improved understanding of more existential questions.
Seth compares the field, as it stands now, to the study of life a few centuries ago. He argues that both ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ refer to emergent properties that arise from varying combinations of stacked biological processes which can be examined and understood individually. He draws the contrast between this type of phenomenon and the kind modelled by temperature, which derives ultimately from a single physical feature (molecular vibration) and can be quantified by a single measure. This temperature-like approach is characteristic of integrated information theory (IIT), one of the leading current theories of consciousness, and one that Seth discusses thoroughly. It holds that integrated information itself, to a high enough degree, produces conscious experience, and that the amount of consciousness can be measured with a single unit: phi. Seth ultimately does not fully subscribe to IIT, but he does not shy away from engaging with its ‘weirder’ aspects, including the implication of panpsychism, wherein the entire fabric of the universe thrums with a background low-level consciousness, with humans, animals, and other complex systems ‘hotspots’ with high phi. What is ‘weird’ is not necessarily false, as, he reminds us, has been proven repeatedly in the last century of physics. There is no reason to expect that the ultimate explanation of consciousness will make intuitive sense.
Seth’s preferred theory of consciousness, however, centres on predictive processing; a mechanistic theory often associated with IIT as a means of integrating information. It suggests that the brain is, at its core, a ‘prediction machine’, that generates models of the world around us and ‘expectations’ of the conditions inside the body, then compares sensory inputs against these. This shifts the common conception of sensory processing from bottom-up ‘reading’ of the world to top-down interpretation of it. Thus our lived experience is a “controlled hallucination” that we design and inhabit. In order to minimise prediction errors, between our internal models and the input they receive, we often engage in ‘active inference’: homeostatic control inside the body, or action in the world, to provide the sensory signals the brain’s predictive models ‘expect’. In this way, predictions can produce phenomenological experience and a conception of the self, he argues.
Overall, this book maintained an excellent balance of science and entertainment, not shying away from the weird and the ethically complex, including panpsychism, animal consciousness, and AI, while also maintaining a hard focus on the known and knowable. Seth made a clear and convincing case for his ‘real problem’ framework for conceptualising consciousness, supported by engaging writing that made his deep expertise and thoughtfulness apparent throughout. This book came at an exciting time for consciousness science, with an advent of adversarial collaboration studies and newfound respect for the field more broadly. I certainly got a lot out of it, and I think most readers could too!
This article was written by Fran Hardyman and edited by Rebecca Pope, with graphics produced by Lilly Green. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.
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