Being You by Professor Anil Seth - A fascinating dive into the world of consciousness

Photo: Collected

"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness."
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
 

If you are reading this, it's highly unlikely that you are a bat, a cat or a zombie - (though some cats do stare at your computer screen seemingly to ponder philosophical questions - we will ignore them here). Because it's your moment to wonder: what does it feel like 'being you' and not somebody else? And how does this qualitative experience arise from the physical material (your brain)? And why does it have a certain subjective "flavour" to it?

In philosophy, these questions (widely known as the "hard problem" of consciousness) are millennia old, following René Descartes' mind-body dualism, and unfortunately, we still do not have any definitive answers. Until modern neuroscience attempts to elucidate consciousness with a more pragmatic approach. As the neuroscientist Anil K. Seth puts it, "It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be."

Let's explore how Dr Seth skillfully unravels the "hard problem" which has often been claimed to be unsolvable and dissolves it into something he calls the "real problem" of consciousness.

Dr Seth's thought experiments offer an alternative approach to demystifying the problem by considering the various aspects of consciousness, from mapping their phenomenological properties to identifying biological mechanisms. For example, studying conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Let's briefly understand each of them.
 

1. Conscious level refers to the idea of being conscious. Duh! Whether you are in dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) or fully awake and kicking, determine the level of your consciousness.
2. Your sense of sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs are the conscious content that you interact with on a daily basis, in other words, your inner universe of conscious experiences.
3. And within these conscious experiences lies one of the most unique sensations of being yourself.

    

The quest to measure the mind's elusive depth

It makes you a Himalayan hermit if you haven't heard of any scientific expedition toward measuring different levels of consciousness. At least you can agree that your philosopher cat and a fruit fly don't possess the same degree of consciousness. In the same way, neuroscientists have introduced promising new ways to measure it, such as through the "bispectral index" monitor, "perturbational complexity index" or PCI, and the most recent theoretical measure called "phi" (Phi quantifies the amount of information produced by a system in relation to the information created by its separate components) proposed in the Integrated Information Theory, or IIT. 

Please don't panic; I will not mess with this esoteric knowledge! But it should go without saying that all of them have their own inherent shortcomings and particularly Phi, which still lacks scientific testability.

The conscious contents are the byproduct of 'Controlled Hallucination'

Now that you've reached this point, get ready to encounter more crazy ideas about consciousness. If you hate being told that you're "overthinking," imagine how it would strike your nerves if I say you're "hallucinating" "all the time!" 

Calm down, and let me explain the second aspect of consciousness and introduce Dr Seth's "Controlled Hallucination" concept.

As we touched upon earlier, when we are conscious, our awareness encompasses visuals, auditory, and olfactory sensations, as well as our own thoughts and emotions, often experienced simultaneously, which are called "conscious content". It might seem reasonable to assume that we obtain these experiences straight from the external reality or what's out there, right? Wrong! Our brain doesn't function as a window to the world to perceive it objectively in an unfiltered manner. It is, in fact, blind, deaf and devoid of feeling. Our brain actually manages to do its best by interpreting the nerve signals received from our sensory organs.

That being said, instead of collecting signals from the external world and transmitting them to our brain for interpretation, the actual direction of the process is quite the opposite. Here Dr Seth borrowed the concept of the brain as a prediction machine from the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. This concept is based on the idea that our brains are constantly and actively generating hypotheses about the world around us through unconscious inference (think of it as an autocomplete mechanism of your brain to interpret sensory data and create perceptions). 

This predictive nature of our brain gives the impression of "hallucination," but fortunately, these are "controlled hallucinations." As our brain forms educated guesses drawing on prior experiences, it uses sensory inputs to continually fine-tune those predictions. On the other hand, in a real 'hallucination', the brain bypasses sensory inputs causing perception to be significantly swayed by the brain's pre-existing expectations.

In "visual hallucination" for instance, individuals experience this beguiling phenomenon of "seeing" something that isn't there, which can be associated with various conditions, such as neurological disorders, psychosis or psychedelic trips.

Our perceptual expectations heavily influence the speed of conscious recognition. And these same underlying beliefs form the bedrock of most of our cognitive biases.

Your invented sense of self

Consciousness is complex and can be chaotic too. However, the experience of "being you" is boldly accentuated within your inner universe. This idiosyncratic feeling of selfhood is ever-present and dynamic if you look closely into it. So far, we understand that most of our conscious experiences, including self-perception, are Controlled Hallucinations. But interestingly, selfhood is also not a single sensation but rather a collection of different aspects of consciousness.

1. Embodied selfhood: The experience of being a body or having a physical form. In some important ways, this sensation helps us to take control of our bodily movements.
2. Perspectival selfhood: The experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person unique viewpoint.
3. Volitional selfhood: This feeling encompasses that we have control over our actions and decisions. It is related to our ability to make choices and execute our intentions.
4. Narrative self: The narrative self is where the 'I' comes in. An experience of an ever-present sense of self that represents the ongoing development of our personal identity based on autobiographical memories.
5. Social self: This aspect of selfhood tells us about ourselves in the mind of others, shaped by our unique social interactions and roles.

Of course, these properties of selfhood are theoretically distinct and can be understood independently, but we practically perceive multiple aspects simultaneously, if not all at once. In fact, these types of selfhoods are not as stable as we perceive them, and in extreme cases, they can be compromised, dysfunctional or overpowering.

You must have heard that your friends are having an out-of-body sensation or dabbling in adventures under the influence of something crazy; make a guess, their perspectival self has taken a break!

Or in "Alien Hand Syndrome," people lose control of their hand movements as if it has a mind of their own. Here embodied and volitional selves have compromised. This is not funny until you just swiped right on your ex!

Final thoughts

"Being You" offers an intriguing and accessible journey into the realm of consciousness, skillfully unravelling the hard problem by dissolving it into digestible, practical concepts. Scientists have long understood how reality is constructed by our own deceptive brains, but Dr Seth's approach makes it a captivating exploration of this complex topic. If you only ignore the book's emphasis on idea judgments rather than idea generation, the overall contribution to the discourse is significant and compelling.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.