Anil Seth

should not be taken for granted, that there's more going on both in the world and in our minds.

But of course, we should be very careful too with any of these mind-altering substances.

These are powerful interventions.

And I think in many ways, previous societies had embedded within them the sorts of rituals and structures and cultural practices

that made the consumption of these substances more of a positive thing than happens when they get pushed underground.

viewpoints so what's real what's conscious what's just because my brain sees that doesn't make it so no that's that's right just seeing something does not make it so and i think when on psychedelics the bowl of soup turns into a flower or i can't remember what the example was but things turn into things that they aren't that is quite good evidence

that the way we perceive things is not just a direct readout of what's there.

I think part of the experience of a hallucinogen is this recognition that the experiences that we have

are partly due to what's out there in the world and partly due to what's happening inside our brains.

And by altering the brain's contribution to this process and seeing how it shapes and changes and melds our experience, that can really foster this recognition that what we see

is not a direct picture of what's actually there and that this also applies to the experience of being a self one of the other common experiences under hallucinogens is that as of ego dissolution the experience that the boundaries of the self become unclear or even completely absent

And we no longer experience ourselves as separate from the world, as observing the world from a first-person point of view, but that the self and the world become more continuous.

And I think that's also...

a really important sign a clue that neuroscience is aligned with that that tells us the self is itself a kind of perception it's not just the thing that does the perceiving so there's a lot of ways in which these experiences align as for what's real yeah things exist in the world and but what reality really is that's a question for a physicist not for a neuroscientist

Thank you, Mike.

That was a wonderful conversation.

Just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us does not mean that they go together in general.

The assumption that they do, well, that's a reflection of our own psychology, not an insight into the nature of reality.

We are built to be seduced like narcissists by our own reflections, and so we see ourselves in our algorithms.

The AI we have is already smart, at least in some ways.