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Chapter 1: Why do people perceive reality differently?
Have you ever wondered why people often don't see things the way you do? Well, there's a reason for that. It has to do with what makes you, you. It might seem obvious that you are your memories, your personality, your experiences. But what if your consciousness, the very way you experience reality, is completely unique?
And that's why today's SYSK trending topic is why your consciousness is unique. In my conversation with neuroscientist Anil Seth, who has spent years studying how the brain constructs our sense of self and reality, he explains why your perception of the world is more like a controlled hallucination than a direct recording.
If you've ever wondered why no one else sees the world quite the way you do, this episode will change how you think about being alive. And we'll get to that right after this. So here's a big question.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to be you in terms of consciousness?
What does it mean to be you? As you sit there or stand there, you are aware of who you are and you're aware of your surroundings. You are you. You're a conscious being. And you're different from every other conscious being. You have a sense, a consciousness, as to who you are. Yet when you're asleep or, say, when you're under anesthesia... You are not you. You're not aware during that time.
So where did you go? I know all this sounds a little woo-woo and philosophical, but it isn't when you hear it discussed by my guest, Anil Seth. He is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and he is author of a book called Being You, A New Science of Consciousness. Hi, Anil. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me, Mike.
It's a pleasure. So define consciousness for me. What is it? I mean, I know what it is because I have it, but how do you define it?
That's probably one of the best definitions, actually.
Chapter 3: How does our brain construct our sense of self?
It's really hard to formally define it in a way that everybody agrees. But for me, consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever. It's what you lose when you go under general anesthesia or fall into a dreamless sleep. And it's what returns when you come around or wake up in the morning. For a conscious organism, there's something it is like to be that organism.
That's all consciousness is, any kind of experience whatsoever.
And you're aware that you're aware of it.
That's where it gets interesting and difficult and people start disagreeing. I don't think so. I think that's something quite specific and it's certainly something that us adult humans do. We have an experience and we know that we're having it. I'm aware of the experience of talking to you now, which means I'll be able to talk about it later too. But that may not be true in general.
Young infants or other animals may have conscious experiences without being aware of the fact that they are conscious. One of the mistakes we can make, and it's really difficult to think our way out of this mistake, is to assume the conscious experiences of other animals or even other humans and maybe infant humans, young children, as some version of our own adult human consciousness.
And I think this is often very misleading. we have a very distinctive way of experiencing the world. And there's a vast space of possible minds, of possible other ways of experiencing things. The inner universe of an octopus is going to be very, very different from the inner universe of you and me.
And as you said, one of the very distinctive things about us humans is what we might call extensive mental time travel.
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Chapter 4: What happens to consciousness during sleep and anesthesia?
We can remember things from long ago and we can project out into the distant future things that haven't even happened yet. And in our rolling mental lives, these past events and possible futures, they play a quite dominant role in a way that probably isn't the case for most other animals.
But even if you and I are in the same room experiencing the same thing, we're not really experiencing the same thing, are we? We have two very different experiences.
And it's a super interesting question. How different our experiences would be were we in the same room? I don't know if you remember or your listeners may well remember a few years ago, there was this internet phenomenon called the dress. This was a badly exposed photograph of the dress. And for half the people in the world, more or less, this dress seemed to be blue and black.
But for the other half of the people in the world, it seemed to be white and gold. And this was so compelling that the blue and black people just could not believe that it was possible for somebody else to see it as white and gold. I remember myself being mystified that this was happening, but it really happens.
And that opened up a little fracture, just a suggestion that, okay, if we can be in that much disagreement about something so simple, what are the most subtle ways in which our inner worlds differ all the time? I think there's a vast... unexplored territory of the diversity of how different people experience the same thing that we know surprisingly little about.
So what you're calling consciousness isn't really a thing so much as it's the result of processes that we experience.
That's right. That's right. I mean, people have been interested in consciousness, I think, since they've been interested in pretty much anything. It's one of the questions I think we all have as a kid.
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Chapter 5: Why is it important to understand our perceptions?
Like, who am I? Why is it like anything to be me? And what happens after I die? 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.
When you say these things have no color, well, of course they have color. I mean, the red leaf on the tree is red. It's red to me. It's red to you. It's red today.
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Chapter 6: How do different experiences shape our understanding of reality?
It's red tomorrow. So how can you say it doesn't have color?
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.
There are real things in the world. But color is something that it takes a brain for color to exist. Surfaces reflect light in various ways, and the brain keeps track of how surfaces reflect light. And it creates color as a sort of way for the brain to keep track of these things.
But they don't objectively exist out there in the world in the same way that some things exist, whether there's a mind involved or not. But other things like colors require a mind. And this isn't just neuroscience that says this. The painter Cezanne long ago said that color is the place where the brain and the universe meet.
You're saying that what I perceive as the world and my consciousness and all of this is probably not what's really going on, but so what? It's my perception. It works for me. It's a good working definition, and it gets me through the day. So why is it so important to look at what's really going on?
There are a number of reasons why I think this is important. The first is just plain curiosity. I want to understand, and I think a number of people, many people want to understand, what is the relationship between what we experience, what we see, and what's actually going on? How accurate are our perceptions? How closely do they track the real world?
And so we need to look under the hood and figure out how perception actually works. But there are also some more practical reasons why all this is important.
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Chapter 7: What role do mind-altering substances play in consciousness?
One of them is we can begin to understand, as we were discussing earlier, that different people can have different experiences. I think this is important. Even just at a high level to recognize this helps us build empathy, helps us recognize that other people, just as other people can believe different things if they listen to different news channels,
We can't always assume that people see things the same way that we do. And this goes down very, very deeply, right down to the way we see colors. And then finally, and a little bit more at the extreme end of all this,
Understanding perception as this act of construction, this top-down reaching out from the brain to the world, gives us a new way to think about a variety of mental illnesses and psychiatric disorders that are usually expressed by people having unusual experiences of the world or of the self.
And the more we can understand the mechanisms by which this is happening, the more promise there is to develop new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.
So my consciousness, my sense of who I am, that I'm here, that I'm experiencing this, when I go to sleep or when I'm under anesthesia, where did it go?
Well, it's just gone, isn't it? This is, for me, a remarkable thing. And actually, sleep is very different from anesthesia. This is something that's always struck me, that when you fall asleep, you might lose consciousness completely and then start dreaming or something. But when you wake up, you know that some amount of time has gone by.
I mean, you might be a bit confused about exactly how much time, whether it's five or six hours, but you roughly know that some amount of time has gone by. But under general anesthesia, if it's general anesthesia that completely knocks you out, You are gone and then you are back. And it seems like no time has passed at all.
And there's no indication of whether it was five minutes or five hours or 50 years that you were gone from.
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Chapter 8: What happens to consciousness when we die?
You were simply not there in the same way that you weren't there before you were born and that you won't be there after you die. And for me, this is a really deeply personal lesson that consciousness is can go away. The natural state of the brain is to generate no experience whatsoever.
The amazing thing, of course, about anesthesia is that you turn a person into an object, but then the object gets returned back into a person afterwards.
We're talking about what it means to be you. My guest is Anil Seth. He is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and his book is called Being You, A New Science of Consciousness. So, Anil, I assume that this is part of this conversation of consciousness, is that my perception of my reality, my consciousness, is that as I get older,
time seems to go by faster, even though objectively, I know that time moves at the speed that it always has, but my perception is that it's going faster.
Yeah, this is a very common thing that people will say, and I think there is some truth to it, but it depends on the timescale, right? It may seem that the years go by quickly, but do the minutes go by more quickly? Do the seconds go by more quickly? Probably not.
And in fact, the experimental evidence that we have in psychology, it doesn't reveal any differences in how people experience time at the level of seconds or minutes. But at the level of years, that may be true. And one possible reason why that might be true is that the older we get, the less new stuff happens, broadly speaking. We get set into routines. We've already experienced a lot.
And so the experience of how long a year takes, let's say, that might be partly constituted by how many different new things have happened in that period of time. And that's going to be just less the older we get.
Is my consciousness, my... experience of my life my own creation in other words i could get up and go outside and then my experience would be very different than sitting here talking to you and i have seemingly have the free will to go out there but i'm not going out there i'm staying here so what
So what indeed you've hit on probably one of the thorniest issues in all thinking, researching about consciousness, this issue of free will. Do we have it? What is it? Why is it important? Certainly seems to be.
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