Book Review: Being You

– A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

“… the notion that there is a single unique conscious self (a soul?) that persists over time may be grossly mistaken.”

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness is a book by Anil Seth, a British neuroscientist and professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. The book explores the nature of consciousness and self, and how our brains create our conscious experiences.

Click to see the Ted Talk

Our brain gives us two abilities. One is the ability to learn and adopt – intelligence. The other is the ability to experience the world subjectively- consciousness.

Intelligence is not the same as consciousness. You don’t need intelligence to suffer, but you cannot suffer without being conscious. Some animals are highly intelligent but not conscious, and some people are severely intellectually disabled but still conscious.

So what is consciousness?

Instead of trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness, Anil Seth focuses on how to think about it in a meaningful and scientific way. He compares this to the way that the question “What is life?” has evolved from being an intractable philosophical (magical vital force of life) problem to a field of scientific knowledge (metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis).

We have a feeling that we are perceiving the world as it is. But, there is no light to see or sound to hear in the brain. This jelly-like lump of fat and protein, locked inside the dark bony skull, is trying to guess what’s out there from the electrical impulses acting as a rough proxy of what could be out there.

The brain is constantly making predictions about the world based on its past experiences. This is why our world view is often prejudiced.

These predictions are then compared to live sensory input, and the brain updates its predictions accordingly. This process of prediction and updating is known as Bayesian inference. These models are what give rise to our conscious experiences.

The brain is a Bayesian “best guesser” and the necessary for the brain to generate a world model rather than simply receive the world through the senses.

The same input is interpreted differently by different people. We all have our own unique model. This is true not only for subjective things like morality, likes and dislikes but also for things like Color. This is a good example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

The same simulation makes us see faces in random things like the picture below.

This is Seth’s “beast machine” theory of consciousness. It is a radical departure from traditional views of consciousness, and challenges the idea that consciousness is a special property of the mind, and instead suggests that it is an emergent property of the brain’s predictive coding system.

Seth argues that consciousness is not a single thing, but rather a collection of biological processes that work together to create our sense of self and the world around us as well as inside us.

We simply predict ourselves to existence.

Why is the brain spending so much energy to predict the world?

Our brains constantly try to make sense of the world by predicting what will happen next, in order to keep us alive. The world model does not need to be perfect, but just useful enough to keep us alive. A perfect model that cannot keep the species alive will be eliminated by natural selection.

How is consciousness related to free-energy?

The free-energy principle states that biological agents resist a natural tendency towards disorder in a constantly changing environment. Life is a fight against entropy.

Oganisms exists in a low entropy state. To stay alive they have to maintain that state. Organisms do that by minimising free energy. The model judges whether the information from its sense organs is statistically surprising. It then acts to bring its system to what it expects it to be. The model is live and keeps updating based on new information and prediction errors.

Self-recognition arises as a result of the brain’s attempts to minimise the amount of free energy (or ‘surprise’) in sensory systems to be in states where the environment is highly predictable.

To maintain the expected state the organism has to maintain its internal state to what is expected (homeostasis of essential variables, for example, blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse rate etc.). To maintain the expected state that allows the organism to survive it needs to move, eat and perform other necessary activities.

Does this mean we are hallucinating the world?

This way of viewing consciousness leads to Seth’s somewhat provocative notion of consciousness as a “controlled hallucination.” In other words, consciousness is not simply a passive reflection of the world, but rather an active process of creating a model of the world that is consistent with our expectations. Reality is a shared hallucination… when one’s hallucination is consistent with others. It is controlled because there is some dependency on the external world which makes it consistent, unlike dreams.

The brain cannot simply receive the world through the senses, because there is too much information in the world for the brain to process. Instead, the brain must generate a simplified model of the world that is easier to understand and manipulate. This model is known as the brain’s “world model.”

How do we measure consciousness?

Measuring conscious level in humans is not the same as deciding whether someone is awake or asleep. Consciousness (awareness) and wakefulness (arousal) are often correlated, but they can come apart in various ways. When you are dreaming you are asleep, but you are having rich and varied conscious experiences. At the other extreme, people in a vegetative state cycle through sleep and wakefulness, but show no behavioural signs of conscious awareness. To track the conscious level, we need to ask what in the brain underlies being conscious, as opposed to merely being awake.

Some scientists try to measure it with a parameter called Phi (Φ), a mathematical measure of integrated information, which is a proposed physical correlate of consciousness.

Theoretically, a system with high integrated information would be more conscious than a system with low integrated information. However, there is no single agreed-upon way to measure integrated information, and Φ is just one of several possible measures.

Φ is calculated by taking into account the number and strength of the connections between the components of a system, as well as the degree to which these connections are organized hierarchically. Systems with high Φ have a large number of connections between their components, and these connections are organized in a way that allows the system to maintain its own identity and to interact with its environment in a meaningful way. For higher Φ means a higher conscious state.

What is Integrated information theory of consciousness?

Seth talks about the Integrated information theory (IIT), a theoretical framework for understanding consciousness developed by Dr. Giulio Tononi and collaborators at the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

IIT attempts to provide a framework capable of explaining why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious, why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky), and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole Universe be?).

IIT does this by proposing that consciousness is an intrinsic property of physical systems that have a certain kind of information-processing structure. This information processing structure is characterized by two key properties:

Integrated information: The system must be able to integrate information across its parts. This means that the parts of the system must be able to influence each other in a meaningful way and that the system must be able to act as a whole.

Distinctiveness: The system must be able to distinguish itself from its environment. This means that the system must have a unique identity and that it must be able to interact with its environment in a meaningful way.

This is a revolutionary idea that brings consciousness into the domain of mathematics. If IIT is true, even non-living things can be conscious as long as it fulfils the criterion of integrated information and distinctiveness.

Conclusion:

Being You is a fascinating and thought-provoking book that offers a new perspective on the nature of consciousness. Seth’s work is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of consciousness.

The book has more like what is it like to be a leg of an octopus. Why do we experience life in the first person? Is there free will? Can intelligent machines be conscious? Who are you?

It is a must read for all inquisitive minds.