The philosophy of consciousness has entered deep waters thanks to neuroscience. The Creation of the Self (Sexto Piso, 2023) by Anil Seth is both a synthesis of numerous investigations and his own approach that understands consciousness as a kind of evolutionary prediction machine. The difficult problem of consciousness is still almost intact (the why and how), but there are other aspects that have become clearer and we are getting closer to the real problem of consciousness (its properties); we know that information and its integration are important, although consciousness is not equivalent, according to Seth, to mere integrated information. The book contains a huge amount of information that requires some integration and analysis by the reader. The effort, and this is a prediction made by my conscience, is worth it.
ANDRÉS LOMEÑA: Addressing the real problem of consciousness implies accepting the contributions of other psychologists, neurobiologists and philosophers. In this sense, your new science of consciousness is very eclectic. Now, I would appreciate knowing if we can exclude some theories and ideas about consciousness, such as those that locate this phenomenon in non-biological substrates or see it as quantum effects that would occur in microtubules.
ANIL SETH: Yes, I believe that important progress has been made in understanding the foundations of consciousness, and I feel fortunate to have pursued my research career in this area at such a vibrant time. I have learned a lot from psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists, but also from mathematicians, physicists and psychiatrists. This field is truly multidisciplinary. One consequence of this progress is that some ideas are losing their relevance. The proposal that consciousness depends on quantum interactions in microtubules is one such idea. It doesn’t explain anything and there is no real evidence anywhere. It is losing strength because we have many other theories (including my own ideas) that increasingly explain the properties of consciousness and that promote experiments that can be tested in a laboratory or clinic.
When it comes to non-biological consciousness, there are many expectations… and even more disagreements. Some ideas, such as the Integrated Information Theory (ITI), predict that consciousness can occur in any system, whether biological or not, as long as it has a correct form of internal structure. To accept this, you have to accept the theory, and there is no consensus on this. Most of the hype out there has to do with Artificial Intelligence. New technologies like language generation are pretty good at a conversation. It still seems easy to catch the machine, but it is not hard to imagine that in the future it will be possible to give a very convincing impression that you are speaking with a conscious mind. If this occurs, that would indicate more human credulity than artificial consciousness. There are many reasons why I say this, but the most important one is that, in my opinion, consciousness probably depends on our nature as living beings. It must necessarily be a biological phenomenon.
AL: We are predictive machines and consciousness is a controlled hallucination, so in the end what matters is not so much reality as such, but the possible use that we assign to our environment. mentions Karl Friston, for whom predicting the future is useful to save energy. I don’t finish watching it. I remember the evil genius of Descartes and our innumeracy. Our brains look like bad predictive machines.
AS: The idea of the brain as a predictive machine is central to my approach to human perception, cognition and consciousness. That’s right, we don’t see the world as it is, but as it is useful for us to do it (“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”, said the well-known novelist Anaïs Nin). I agree with Karl and others that the main reason brains are predictive machines is to keep the body alive. Saving energy is part of the story, but the principle is much more complex. Prediction (of the future and present) is a great way to control a system, to keep it stable in the face of disturbances. This fundamental biological life-sustaining device is, according to my theory, at the heart of why brains use predictions to perceive (and control) both the body and the world. This is why the self is also best understood as a form of perception. None of this means that our conscious thought processes are always reliable. Evolution has ensured that brains are very good at certain kinds of predictions, but not so good at others.
AL: Emergentism seems to me like a kind of escape valve from the two usual visions: monism and dualism. The emergentist explanation is ambiguous and I don’t know if it explains something really different.
AS: Emergency is indeed a slippery concept. Basically, it is saying that the whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. I doubt this concept will solve anything on its own. If you use it mathematically, then it can give you useful tools to understand how many low-level parts there are, and how the individual behavior of neurons can be related to the global (with the properties seemingly unified, like in a conscious experience). In my opinion, measuring emergence mathematically can help to understand the real problem of consciousness, giving us testable explanations that link the properties of the brain with the properties of conscious experience in a way that should be falsifiable. For example, we might predict that brain dynamics will be less emergent when consciousness is lost. My colleagues and I are now working on a few ways to measure emergency. We are not alone in this. The crossover between physics, mathematics, and biology is becoming a hot topic (by the way, my preferred emergency measures use the information in purely statistical terms, as a way of providing the most general measures possible when describing neural interactions). .
AL: In the book it suggests that we don’t have an internal clock. scientists like David Eagleman They have tried to find it without much success. So circadian rhythms do not intervene in our consciousness? Is this a victory for empiricism against rationalism?
AS: I don’t think so! Our lived experience will always be a mixture of both approaches. Speaking of time perception, I have to say that I have been fortunate to work with someone as brilliant as Warrick Roseboom, who has tried for years to show that our experience of time cannot be explained with metaphors like the internal clock and the like. Sure, we have circadian rhythms, and these can affect different aspects of our biology, including conscious experiences of fatigue and so on; I have had jet-lag almost all of last week, so I’m sure of it. Warrick and I, along with others in the lab, have shown how our experiences of duration, on short scales ranging from one second to one minute, are explained by the fact that the brain keeps track of changes in perception. Put very simply: when a lot of things happen (things here means perceptual changes that the brain detects), we experience time as longer lasting. We have tested this idea in many experiments, using brain imaging and computer models, and it works every time.
AL: Consciousness is more related to being alive than intelligence and requires a social context to exist. I like when he quotes John Donne: “No man is an island.” Does more socialization bring more awareness?
AS: Indeed, consciousness is closely related to our nature as living beings and intelligence is not the same as consciousness. Although social context is important to us as humans, it is not necessary for consciousness in general. The way I see it, social media contributes to our experience of the self: part of how I experience being me is how I perceive others’ perceptions of me. There are many non-human animals that are probably conscious, but don’t have very rich social lives. Octopuses serve as an example.
AL: It has made me more aware of everything.
AS: There has always been a lot of skepticism about whether consciousness can be explained with science and philosophy. Although it is difficult to be sure, I believe there are many reasons for optimism. A better understanding of consciousness need not be a threat to our conception of who we are. A scientific explanation of consciousness will help us feel closer to the rest of nature, and not more apart.
There are also many practical consequences. One is the idea of perceptual diversity. Just as we all differ on the outside, such as skin color or height, we will all differ on the inside as well, as our experiences of the world are brain-based predictions and we all have different brains. Not much is known about the extent of this inner diversity and we are now trying to fix it with ambitious research called The perception census. If any of your readers would like to help with this research, as well as learn more about their own perceptual powers, please recommend this website: https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world
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This interview is sent to us Andrés Lomena Cantos (@andresitors). He studied journalism and specialized in literary theory and comparative literature. He works as a philosophy teacher at a secondary school and does research on the imaginary worlds of novels..
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