Highlights from Being You by Anil Seth
Highlights from this book
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One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery 20after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. If we take mysterianism as a serious option we might as well all give up and go home. So, let’s not.
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The real problem accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties.
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The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity. This is the same flaw that lies at the heart of the zombie argument.
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Equally important, it pushes back against the limiting idea that consciousness is just ‘one thing’ – a single intimidating mystery that might elude scientific explanation altogether. We will instead see how different properties of consciousness come together in different ways, across species and even among different people. There are as many different ways of being conscious as there are different conscious organisms. Eventually, the hard problem itself may succumb, so that we will be able to understand consciousness as being continuous with the rest of nature without having to adopt any arbitrary ‘ism’ stating by fiat how phenomenology and physics are related. This is the promise of the real problem.
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At any one time we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is – mathematically – what is meant by information.
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This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.
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It’s important to recognise that these challenges – including that of measuring intrinsic information, rather than observer-relative, extrinsic information – are only problems for us as scientists, as external observers, trying to calculate Φ. According to IIT, any particular system would just have a Φ. It would go about its business integrating information in just the same way that when you throw a stone, it traces an arc through the sky without needing to calculate its trajectory according to the laws of gravity. Just because 68a theory is difficult to test doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means it’s difficult to test.
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More than a thousand years later, but still a thousand years ago, the Arab scholar Ibn al Haytham wrote that perception, in the here and now, depends on processes of ‘judgement and inference’ rather than providing direct access to an objective reality.
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The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them. Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world is revealed directly to our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection – a ‘reading’ of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.
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When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light. There is no redness-as-such in the world or in the brain. As Paul Cézanne said, ‘colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’
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In statistics, the essence of prediction is in catering for the absence of sufficient data. Whether this is because predictions are about the future – one can think of the future as ‘insufficient data’ – or about some current but incompletely unknown state of affairs, doesn’t matter.
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Thinking about action in this way underlines how action and perception are two sides of the same coin. Rather than perception being the input and action being the output with respect to some central ‘mind’, action and perception are both forms of brain-based prediction.
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Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs.
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The concept of the beholder’s share cries out to be connected with predictive theories of perception – like the controlled hallucination theory. As Kandel put it: ‘The insight that the beholder’s perception involves a top-down inference convinced Gombrich that there is no “innocent eye”: that is, all visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpreting visual information. One cannot perceive that which one cannot classify.’
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I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants.
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The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise. When I experience an action as voluntary, the character of the experience is not only that I did X, but that I did X and not Y, even though I could have done Y.
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This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds