Words&Dirt

Summary:

Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and “Easy Problem” frameworks. The Real Problem “accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties…The challenge for the real problem is to explain, predict, and control these phenomenological properties, in terms of things happening in the brain and body” (26-7). Seth’s second theory is the “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception,” which utilizes a Bayesian model to argue that “the entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations” (92). This includes all experiences of selfhood, which Seth characterizes as “the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you” (229). Seth’s final theory is the “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness,” which posits that the primary purpose of consciousness is neither to facilitate direct access to the world nor to confer self-knowledge, but rather to satisfy the evolutionary imperatives of regulating our bodies and ensuring survival: “The totality of our perceptions and cognitions––the whole panorama of human experience and mental life––is sculpted by a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive” (281). The book ends with two chapters about “Other” forms of consciousness––those experienced by nonhuman animals and those that may one day occupy machine minds. Being You is by far the best book I have read on this topic, an absolutely essential text for anyone with a strong interest in neuroscience, consciousness, or the study of human identity. 

Key Concepts and Notes:

• Drawing from an impressive range of academic sources, Seth includes succinct and informative summaries of the history of consciousness theories and research throughout the book. He “tells the story” of consciousness with poignancy and poise.
• He also provides excellent background on the leading contemporary theories of consciousness and cutting-edge tools that are being used to study it, including “Integrated Information Theory,” “Neural Correlates of Consciousness,” the “Perturbational Complexity Index,” and more.
• Seth’s “Controlled Hallucination Theory of Perception” goes a long way in explaining why we perceive the world the way we do, especially our blind spots (literal and figurative) and susceptibility to biases, fallacies, and change blindness. “Perceptual experience,” he writes, “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” (88). This is true for all types of perception, including self-perception and what Seth calls “social perception”––”perception of the mental states of others” (173). This emphasis on the dominance of our perceptual priors should help readers develop a healthy skepticism toward our first takes on any given situation, help us admit and accept error more readily when our top-down wiring misleads us, and engender a greater commitment to exploring and improving the mental models we use to reflect on our experiences.
• Seth’s “Beast Machine Theory of Consciousness” has huge explanatory value when applied to the apparent tension between humanist individualism and universalism/collectivism. It shows us how these are just two equally-important aspects of human nature, with all humans having similar bodies that produce the same array of interoceptive signals that then become diversified through psychosocial development. People accrue a huge range of responses to their interoceptive signals that result in hyper-individualized prediction patterns. Hence the dual feelings of “I’m just like everyone else” and “I’m completely unique”—both of which are true!
• Seth aligns his theories with Karl Friston’s “Free Energy Principle,” an ambitious idea which is “as close to a ‘theory of everything’ in biology as has yet been proposed” (204). I found this connection absolutely fascinating, especially insofar as it reaches for consilience between consciousness and other aspects of biology and physics.
• I had a couple minor critiques of Seth’s outlook. The first is that I’m not sure I share his intuition that a “silicone beast machine”––a robot endowed with human-like neural networks, perceptual capacities, a body, self-control, ability to pursue goals autonomously, and concern with self-preservation––would most likely not be conscious. He bases this intuition on the notion that “consciousness and selfhood…are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes that apply ‘all the way down’” to the cellular level (263-4). This left me wondering if we’d really have to mimic human biology that thoroughly before some sort of artificial consciousness could arise. Maybe this could happen if we merely went “some of the way down” as opposed to “all the way down”? But how far?
• My other critique is that I don’t think Seth adequately explores the ethical ramifications of his inclusion of “control” as one of the primary goals for consciousness research. If we ever do learn enough about the connections between phenomenology and biological mechanism to actively exert “qualia control,” the moral consequences of that discovery are likely to be immediate and massive. Given the obvious potential for abuse that would be intrinsic to any such technology, I would have liked Seth to comment on this. Perhaps he felt it was beyond the scope of this particular book, in which case I really hope he takes it up in subsequent work. Or perhaps he has published about it elsewhere? 

Favorite Quotes:

A science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be––at least not primarily––to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place. Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet. What I hope to show you is that by accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious…

In my view, consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body. (6-7)

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 decades ago. Over time, mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. (22)

Why do we experience our perceptual constructions as being objectively real? In the controlled hallucination view, the purpose of perception is to guide action and behavior––to promote the organism’s prospects of survival. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us. It therefore makes sense that phenomenological properties like redness, chairness, Cilla Black-ness, and causality-ness––seem to be objective, veridical, properties of an external existing environment. We can respond more quickly and more effectively to something happening in the world if we perceive that thing as really existing. The out-there-ness inherent in our perceptual experience of the world is, I believe, a necessary feature of a generative model that is able to anticipate its incoming sensory flow, in order to successfully guide behavior.

To put it another way, even though perceptual properties depend on top-down generative models, we do not experience the models as models. Rather, we perceive with and through our generative models, and in doing so, out of mere mechanism a structured world is brought forth. (143-4)

Social perception can be linked to the social self in the following way. The ability to infer others’ mental states requires, as does all perceptual inference, a generative model. Generative models, as we know, are able to generate the sensory signals corresponding to a particular perceptual hypothesis. For social perception, this means a hypothesis about another’s mental states. In other words, I can understand what’s in your mind only if I try to understand how you are perceiving the contents of my mind. It is in this way that we perceive ourselves refracted through the minds of others. This is what the social self is all about, and these socially nested predictive perceptions are an important part of the overall experience of being a human self.

One intriguing implication of this construal of the social self is that self-awareness––the higher reaches of selfhood comprising both narrative and social aspects––might necessarily require a social context. If you exist in a world without any other minds––more specifically, without any other relevant minds––there would be no need for your brain to predict the mental states of others, and therefore no need for it to infer that its own experiences and actions belong to any self at all. John Donne’s seventeenth-century meditation that “no man is an island” could literally be true. (173-5)

Our perceptions may change, but this doesn’t mean that we perceive them as changing. This distinction is exemplified by the phenomenon of “change blindness,” in which slowly changing things (in the world) do not evoke any corresponding experience of change. The same principle will apply to self-perceptions too. We are becoming different people all the time. Our perceptions of self are continually changing––you are a slightly different person now than when you started reading this chapter––but this does not mean that we perceive these changes.

This subjective blindness to the changing self has consequences. For one thing, it fosters the false intuition that the self is an immutable entity, rather than a bundle of perceptions. But this is not the reason that evolution designed our experiences of selfhood this way. I believe that the subjective stability of the self goes beyond even the change blindness warranted by our slowly changing bodies and brains. We live with an exaggerated, extreme form of self-change-blindness, and to understand why, we need to understand the reason we perceive ourselves in the first place.

We do not perceive ourselves in order to know ourselves, we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves. (176-7)

Anxiety doesn’t have a back, sadness doesn’t have sides, and happiness is not rectangular. The perceptions of the body “from within” on which affective experiences are built do not deliver experiences of the shape and location of my various internal organs––my spleen here, my kidneys over there. There is no phenomenology of objecthood, as when looking at a coffee cup on the table, nor is there anything like movement in a spatial frame, as when catching a cricket ball.

Control-oriented perceptions that underpin emotions and moods are all about predicting the consequences of actions for keeping the body’s essential variables where they belong. This is why, instead of experiencing emotions as objects, we experience how well or badly our overall situation is going, and is likely to go. Whether I’m sitting by my mother’s hospital bed, or fixing to escape from a bear, the form and quality of my emotional experiences are the way they are––desolate, hopeful, panicky, calm––because of the conditional predictions my brain is making about how different actions might impact my current and future physiological condition. (195)

We perceive ourselves as stable over time in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that our physiological condition is restricted to a particular range, and in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that this condition does not change. In other words, effective physiological regulation may depend on systemically misperceiving the body’s internal state as being more stable than it really is, and as changing less than it really does.

Intriguingly, this proposal may generalize to other, higher levels of selfhood beyond the ground-state of continued physiological integrity. We will be better able to maintain our physiological and psychological identity, at every level of selfhood, if we do not (expect to) perceive ourselves as continually changing. Across every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves. (199-200)

The picture that emerges is of a living system actively modeling its world and its body, so that the set of states that define it as a living system keep being revisited, over and over again––from the beating of my heart every second to commiserating my birthday every year. Paraphrasing Friston, the view from the FEP [Free Energy Principle] is of organisms gathering and modeling sensory information so as to maximize the sensory evidence for their own existence. Or, as I like to say, “I predict myself, therefore I am.” (209-10)

Our sense of free will is very much about feeling we “could have done differently.” This counterfactual aspect of the experience of volition is particularly important for its future-oriented function. The feeling that I could have done differently does not mean that I actually could have done differently. Rather, the phenomenology of alternative possibilities is useful because in a future similar, but not identical, situation I might indeed do differently. If every circumstance is indeed identical on Tuesday as on Monday, then I can do no differently on Tuesday than on Monday. But this will never be the case. The physical world does not duplicate itself from day to day, not even from millisecond to millisecond. At the very least, the circumstances of my brain will have changed, because I’ve had an experience of volition on Monday and paid attention to its consequences. This, by itself, is enough to affect how my brain can control my many degrees of freedom when setting out to work again on Tuesday. The usefulness of feeling “I could have done otherwise” is that, next time, you might. (228-9)

The study of animal consciousness delivers two profound benefits. The first is a recognition that the way we humans experience the world and self is not the only way. We inhabit a tiny region in a vast space of possible conscious minds, and the scientific investigation of this space so far amounts to little more than casting a few flares out into the darkness. The second is a newfound humility. Looking out across the wild diversity of life on Earth, we may value more––and take for granted less––the richness of subjective experience in all its variety and distinctiveness, in ourselves and in other animals too. And we may also find renewed motivation to minimize suffering wherever, and however, it might appear. (254)

Although intelligence offers a rich menu of ramified conscious states for conscious organisms, it is a mistake to assume that intelligence––at least in advanced forms––is either necessary or sufficient for consciousness. If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems––such as other animals––that fail to match up to our questionable human standards of cognitive competence. (258)

Some captivated by the techno-rapture see a fast-approaching Singularity, a critical point in history at which AI is poised to bootstrap itself beyond our understanding and outside our control. In a post-Singularity world, conscious machines and ancestor simulations abound. We carbon-based life-forms will be left far behind, our moment in the sun over and done.

It doesn’t take much sociological insight to see the appeal of this heady brew to our technological elite who, by these lights, can see themselves as pivotal in this unprecedented transition in human history, with immortality the prize. This is what happens when human exceptionalism goes properly off the rails. Seeing this way, the fuss about machine consciousness is symptomatic of an increasing alienation from our biological nature and from our evolutionary heritage.

The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way. In my theory, as we’ve seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms that care about their own persistence. This view of consciousness and human nature does not exclude the possibility of conscious machines, but it does undercut the amped-up techno-rapture narrative of soon-to-be-sentient computers that propels our fears and permeates our dreams. From the beast machine perspective, the quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from it. (275)

By tying our mental lives to our physiological reality, age-old conceptions of a continuity between life and mind are given new substance, buttressed by the sturdy pillars of predictive processing and the free energy principle. And this deep continuity in turn allows us to see ourselves in closer relation to other animals and to the rest of nature, and correspondingly distant from the fleshless calculus of AI. As consciousness and life come together, consciousness and intelligence are teased apart. This reorientation of our place in nature applies not only to our physical, biological bodies, but to our conscious minds, to our experiences of the world around us and of being who we are. (280-1)

Rating: 10/10