Being You, by Anil Seth (2021)

An interesting read, particularly as an introduction to the methodologies being used to explore consciousness today.

After some handy definitions and a primer on historical approaches, the author puts forward his own beast-machine theory, which is an amalgam of existing parts with its name inspired by Descartes’ Animal machine. The gist of it is that consciousness is a controlled hallucination which emerges from Bayesian predictions about exteroceptive (outside the body) and interoceptive (inside the body) sensory data in order to keep us alive.

The theory is interesting, but the presentation of it didn’t feel very enlightening or cohesive, which seems to be the nature of the science of consciousness in general.

Some helpful definitions for future reference:

The hard/easy problems of consciousness, defined by David Chalmers: the hard problem is “how does consciousness happen?” and the easy problems are “how can brains give rise to any number of functional and behavioural properties” such as processing sensory signals or performing actions, i.e. non-phenomenological experiences.
The real problem of consciousness is the author’s term for a new approach which aims to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience in terms of physical mechanisms and processes in the body, but not why or how it exists in the first place.
The global workspace theory as a functional theory of consciousness, in which consciousness arises as the result of a “workspace” to facilitate the contemplation of mental content in the frontal and parietal regions of the cortex.
The higher-order thought theory which sees consciousness as the highest level of a hierarchical cognition process, also situated in the frontal brain regions.
Physicalism vs idealism, with the former (also called materialism) assuming that all phenomenological properties are emergent properties of physical matter, and the latter assuming the opposite: that the mind is the source of reality in which matter resides.
Functionalism is the idea that consciousness depends on what a system does rather than what it is made of, and therefore could be instantiated through simulation.
Panpsychism whereby consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.
Mysterianism is the idea that an explanation or solution for understanding consciousness exists, but that we are not, and never will be, equipped to understand it, or even recognise it if presented to us. It is “cognitively closed” to us by our mental limitations.
Vitalism is the now rejected idea that “being alive” requires something extra which is not present physically, something “supernatural” etc.
The philosophical zombie thought experiment in which a zombie which behaves as though conscious and claims to be conscious but is not actually experiencing consciousness. It intends to disprove the physical basis of consciousness by extension of your ability to imagine a world the same as our own but full of people not experiencing consciousness. The book discredits it by comparing it to “imagining an A380 flying backwards”, which you can do just fine providing you know nothing of the laws of physics.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is an approach to understanding consciousness which searches for the minimum neuronal activity in the brain associated with a conscious experience, such as seeing a colour. It uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to map neuronal activity to subjective experiences.
The perturbational complexity index (PCI) which is a new approach to probing consciousness by ‘zapping’ the brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), recording the activity with EEG, then ‘zipping’ the data from the brain’s response to find its algorithmic complexity (Lempel-Ziv-Welch complexity or LZW). This quantifies the complexity of the brain’s response and creates a continuous scale akin to what temperature is for heat.
The integrated information theory (IIT) which says that information is as real as mass or energy, and that consciousness is just integrated information. The theory proposes that consciousness can be quantified by calculating how much a system is “more than the sum of its parts” in terms information, which is labelled Φ. It is impossible in practice because it relies not on observer-dependent extrinsic information of a system, but on intrinsic information belonging to the system independent of an observer, meaning you’d need to know every way a system can theoretically behave (not just be seen to behave) in order to quantify it.
Double transduction, coined by Daniel Dennett, is the fallacious idea that a property of the world such as colour needs to be reinstantiated in the brain in order for us to perceive it. i.e. to see the colour red, sensory signals from the retina would need to reconstructed in the brain to “recreate” the colour red in order for it to be experienced.

And some other small highlights:

The Good Regulator Theorem: ‘every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system’. To accurately regulate a system you must model it, which could explain why the brain would evolve to have a predictive, generative model of the world internally. Not only to control the body but also to perform active inference (moving and doing stuff) as a means of controlling the external world.
Misattribution of arousal being a term for the brain’s ability to misattribute the physical arousal that arises out of fear or anxiety as sexual arousal, mentioned as part of the James-Lange theory into emotions originating in the body and being interpreted by the brain depending on sensory data and context.

I thought I was going mad at one point because of an overlap with Everything is Predictable by Tom Chivers which I read earlier this year. Most notably they both used the same analogies to explain concepts I wasn’t aware of prior to reading. Off the top of my head, they shared the following:

Bayes theorem, the brain doing active inference, etc.
predictive perception explained using a coffee cup on the desk analogy
… and a garden sprinklers vs rain analogy for updating Bayesian priors
… and similar optical illusions including: Adelson’s checkerboard, the blue/black/white/gold dress thing, and Mooney images
Hermann von Helmholtz and the concept of reality as a controlled hallucination
references to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
the method by which we catch a cricket ball in flight, using optical acceleration cancellation
Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle work, down to a mention of the parody twitter account satirising it for its inaccessibility

On reading the last one, I had to dig out the other book to check I wasn’t having a fucking stroke. There was a mention of William James and Carl Lange’s theory of emotion originating in the body too, which I also discovered earlier this year in Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow.

Highlights

001

Under general anaesthesia, things are different. I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years — or even fifty. And 'under' doesn't quite express it. I was simply not there, a premonition of the total oblivion of death, and, in its absence of anything, a strangely comforting one.

012

A creature that comes into being only for a moment will be conscious just as long as there is something it is like to be it, even if all that's happening is a fleeting feeling of pain or pleasure.

022

Whether something is conceivable or not is often a psychological observation about the person doing the conceiving, not an insight into the nature of reality.

025

In 1989, one year before I started my undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, the leading psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote: 'Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon. It is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.'

026

The NCC [neural correlates of consciousness] approach proposes that there is some specific pattern of neural activity that is responsible for any and every experience, such as the experience of 'seeing red'. Whenever this activity is present, an experience of redness will happen, and whenever it isn't, it won't.

029

The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity.

035

The history of thermometry, and its impact on our understanding of heat, offers a vivid example of how the ability to make detailed quantitative measurements on a scale defined by fixed points, has the power to transform something mysterious into something comprehensible.

038

Consciousness instead seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other. And not the brain as a whole: the activity patterns that matter seem to be those within the thalamocortical system — the combination of the cerebral cortex and the thalamus (a set of oval-shaped brain structures — 'nuclei' — sitting just below, and intricately connected with, the cortex).

040

In unconscious states, like dreamless sleep and general anaesthesia, these echoes are very simple. There is a strong initial response in the part of the brain that was zapped, but this dies away quickly, like the ripples caused by throwing a stone into still water. But during conscious states, the response is very different: a typical echo ranges widely over the cortical surface, disappearing and reappearing in complex patterns. The complexity of these patterns, across space and time, implies that different parts of the brain — in particular the thalamocortical system — are communicating with each other in much more sophisticated ways during conscious states than during unconscious states.

052

Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have.

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