Anil Seth

What was going on before I was born?

And there's an intuition.

I think not everybody has this intuition, but it's kind of a common intuition that there's this thing that is you.

There's an essence of self, an essence of Mike or an essence of Anil that is perched inside my head somehow, looking out through the windows of my eyes and gazing out onto this external world that's full of objects with shapes and colors and so on.

And in that view, consciousness is just this reading out of this external world.

And there's this conscious self somewhere inside the head that's doing the reading.

But what's actually happening, at least what I think is happening, building on a rich tradition in neuroscience and philosophy, is not like that at all.

There are just unfolding processes in the brain that are interpreting sensory signals that themselves have no color or shape or sound.

And it builds this picture.

And the self is not something that's looking at this picture.

The self, yourself or myself, is part of the picture.

We're part of our own inner movies.

Well, actually, the red that you see might not be the same red that I see.

It might be a subtly different shade of red.

We might have different experiences.

But the redness that we both... Let's say we both perceive some kind of red.

Does that mean that the leaf is actually red?

Well, no, there's no inherent redness to the leaf.

Redness is something that the brain constructs.

There are leaves.