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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
There's.
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.
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 like have no color, well, of course they have color.
I mean, the red tree or the red leaf on the tree is red.
It's red to me.
It's red to you.
It's red today.
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.
Painter Suzanne Longo 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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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 can go away.
It's sort of the natural state of the brain is to generate no experience whatsoever.
And 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.
We go about our lives thinking with this experience that we're in control of our actions, that indeed I could decide to stop talking to you now and go and make a cup of tea instead.
Do something like that.
But I don't do it.
I continue talking to you.
But we do make voluntary decisions.
We do it all the time.
And these decisions, these actions seem to come from within.
So what's all that about?
Well, I think there's a wrong way and a right way to think about free will.
There's a sense of free will which I don't think we have and I actually don't think makes any sense.
And this is the sense in which the self consciousness, the soul, is something that is completely independent of our brains and our bodies and comes in and pulls the strings somehow so that we do the things that free will decides that we should do.
It's a sort of new force in physics.
It swoops in and changes the course of the physical events in our brains and bodies.
That's a kind of spooky free will that I don't think we have, but also I don't think we need.
So we are complex organisms.
Our brains are capable of controlling our bodies in all sorts of ways and making plans and responding to things in very flexibly.
I can see a mug of tea in front of me.
I can pick it up and drink from it.
I can take it to the kitchen.
I can do all sorts of things.
And when the brain is controlling voluntary actions of this sort.
These are actions that are caused by processes in the brain and body that are largely internal, that come from within, that are aligned with the beliefs and desires that me as an organism has.
I'm English.
I like tea.
I make tea rather than coffee.
But I didn't choose to like tea.
I didn't choose to have the beliefs and desires that I in fact have.
And so everything that I do that is voluntary is just a natural consequence of who I am, of the brain and the body that I have.
And I experience actions as being freely willed, when they're not imposed on me by a hypnotist or by somebody moving my arm from the outside or zapping my brain somehow, and that kind of free will is real.
You know, we can make voluntary actions and and we do, and we experience them, And all that is fine.
But it doesn't require any of this spooky stuff that swoops in from another realm and changes the physical flow of events in the universe.
But if you're going to have a discussion about whether or not we have free will, then the discussion at some point turns to well if we don't have free will.
Is there some sort of master plan?
And it's all predetermined.
And if that's the case, whose plan is it?
Who or what is determining our will?
I think a lot.
I think it's actually in many ways simpler to argue about free will in all sorts of directions.
People wonder whether, like if the universe is deterministic right that everything just unfolds according to a predetermined plan, then surely we don't have free will.
None of this really matters, at least in my view.
None of it matters at all.
In general, for a healthy adult human, we are indeed in control of our actions.
And this, in a sense, is pretty obvious, because we are not something that is separate from our brains and bodies.
We are just a collection of experiences that are part of the ongoing flow of conscious experience.
So of course, we can be in control of our actions, because that's part of what it is to be a self in the first place.
So a lot of this goes to begging the question of it.
So if we have this conscious experience, we are who we are and we know we are who we are.
What happens when we die?
Does it just shut down?
It turned off, gone, see you later?
The honest answer to that is that, of course, nobody knows.
And it's a very sensitive question, I think.
We all have personal beliefs about this.
We have religious and cultural backgrounds that lead us to think in different ways.
And I think it'd be wrong to for somebody to parachute in from science and just say this is what will happen or this is what won't happen.
But having said that, this experience or non-experience of anesthesia gives a very strong clue that the kind of consciousness that we have in our daily lives, even though it changes as we age, that does go away when we die.
Everything that we know from neuroscience and from science in general shows that normal conscious experience depends in a very intimate way on a normally functioning brain.
And when the brain stops functioning, then you stop too.
This is probably an unfair question and you can tack this on to a discussion about almost anything, but if we're born and we have our consciousness and it develops and we go through life and our consciousness is our consciousness,
And then we die.
So what was the point of all that?
Then why are we here?
What's the point?
What's the point?
Well, I'd almost throw that back in almost the opposite way.
Imagine that life went on forever.
And that you just no moment of experience had any particular meaning, because the next day there's always another day.
There's always a new experience you could have.
You could have every experience that was available in the universe of experiences over time.
You could say that if life went on forever.
That would be the thing that would drain the meaning and purpose out of our existence.
It's the fact that there is finitude to life that we exist in this world as a conscious creature, a self-aware creature, for an astonishingly brief period of time.
That's what gives our experiences in the moment the value that they have.
One thing I did want to ask you about is that it does seem that for as long as there have been people in their consciousness, there have been attempts to alter that consciousness through drugs and alcohol and things like that.
As if our consciousness isn't good enough or is too painful, or for whatever the reason.
People do that, but it seems like they've always done that.
And why do we do that?
You're right.
I think the history of people and societies using mind-altering substances is about as long as history itself.
And interestingly, it's not only humans.
There's quite good evidence out there of other animals eating mushrooms of various sorts for reasons of their own, which is very hard to understand.
We can't even ask them.
It's hard enough to know why we as humans do it.
I suspect it's not all about just alleviating the pain of the everyday.
I think there can be a grandeur and a wonder in exploring the wider space of conscious experiences that are possible, and there are many ways you can do it.
I mean that the um.
For me, the most interesting history and future of mind alteration are with things like psychedelic substances.
They're not addictive.
They're not toxic.
What they do is they open up dramatically new kinds of experiences.
And in a sense, they show us quite directly that the way we experience the world should not be taken for granted, that there's more going on both in the world and in our minds.
But of course, but of course, we should be very careful too with any of these mind-altering substances.
This is uh, 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.
Well, but that brings up a question of Of what's real, because when you take a mind altering substance like a hallucinogenic or you know LSD or something, where you actually you know where the, where the desk turns into a bowl of soup, or I mean, I've never taken LSD, so I don't know if that happens.
But?
But the desk didn't turn into a bowl of soup by most objective means viewpoints.
So what's real, what's conscious, what's it?
Just because my brain sees that doesn't make it so.
Now 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 are.
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 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.
But what reality really is, that's a question for a physicist, not for a neuroscientist.
Well, I love conversations that make me think, and this has certainly made me think about what it means to be me and what my consciousness is.
Anil Seth has been my guest.
He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.
And the name of his book is Being You, A New Science of Consciousness.
And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.
Thank you, Anil.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you, Mike.
That was a wonderful conversation.
Yes, it was.
I agree.
And that concludes this SYSK Trending episode.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening.
