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Passion Quest

How your brain invents your "self" - Anil Seth

Updated: Jan 23, 2023

In this fascinating talk, Anil Seth shares unexpected ideas about how our brains construct who we are - and it works pretty much the opposite of how most of us think.

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“. . . the self is not the thing that does the perceiving, the self is a perception too, or rather it's the collection of related perceptions.”

 

Transcript


Okay. Who are you? I mean, who am I - or anyone really? When I wake up in the morning and open my eyes, a world appears, and it's a very familiar world. There's the wardrobe beyond the end of the bed, shuttered windows, the shrieking of seagulls, which drives Brighton residents like me absolutely crazy - but even more familiar is the experience of being a self, of being me, that glides into existence at almost the same time.


Now this experience of self - it is so mundane that its appearance usually just happens without us noticing at all. We take ourselves for granted, but we shouldn't. How things seem is not how they are. For most of us, most of the time, it seems as though the self - your self - is an enduring and unified entity - in essence our unique identity. Perhaps it seems as though the self is the recipient of wave upon wave of perceptions - as if the world just pours itself into the mind through the transparent windows of the senses. Perhaps it seems as though the self is the decision maker and chief, deciding what to do next and then doing it, or as the case may be, doing something else. We sense. We think and we act. This is how things seem.


How things are is very different. And the story of how and why this is so is what I want to give you a flavor of today. In this story, the self is not the thing that does the perceiving, the self is a perception too, or rather it's the collection of related perceptions. Experiences of the self and of the world turn out to be kinds of controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses that remain tied to the world and the body in ways determined not by their accuracy but by their utility, by their usefulness for the organism in the business of staying alive.


Now, the basic idea is quite simple and it goes back a very long way in both science and philosophy, all the way back in fact to Plato and to the shadows cast by firelight on the walls of the cave - shadows which the prisoners within took to be the real world. Raw sensory signals, the electromagnetic waves that impinge upon our retinas, the pressure waves that assault our eardrums and so on. Well they're always ambiguous and uncertain, although they reflect really existing things in the world, they do so only indirectly. The eyes are not transparent. windows from a self out onto a world, nor are the ears, nor are any of our senses. The perceptual world that arises for us in each conscious moment - a world full of objects and people with properties like shape and color and position - is always and everywhere created by the brain through a process of what we can call inference. Under the hood, literally, implemented brain-based best guessing.


Now, here's a red coffee cup. When I see this red coffee cup, when I consciously see it, that's because red coffee cup is my brain's best guess of the hidden and ultimately unknowable sensory signals that reach my eyes. And just think about the redness itself for a moment. Does the color red exist in the world? No, It doesn't. and we don't need neuroscience to tell us this. Newton discovered long ago that all the colors we experience - the rainbow, the visible spectrum - are based on just a few wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which itself is, of course, entirely colorless. For us humans, awhole universe of color is generated from just three of these wavelengths corresponding to the three types of cone cells in our retinas. Color-wise, this thin slice of reality, this is where we live. Our experience of color, indeed our experience of anything, is both less than and more than whatever the real world really is.


Now, what's happening when we experience color is that the brain is tracking an invariance irregularity in? How surfaces reflect light, how objects and surfaces reflect light. It's making a best. Guess a top down inside out prediction about the causes of the relevant sensory signals and the content of that prediction. That's what we experience as read.


Does this mean that red is in the brain rather than in the world? Well, no, the experience of redness requires both the world and the Brain unless you're dreaming but let's not worry about that for now. Nothing in the brain is actually read. This is an the great impressionist painter. Once said that color is where the brain and the universe meet. Now the upshot of all this is that perceptual experience is what I've come to call drawing on the words of others. A


Trolls hallucination. Now. This is a tricky turn prone to misunderstanding. So let me be clear. What I mean is that the brain is continuously generating predictions about the causes of sensory signals, whether these come from the world or from the body and the sensory signals themselves, serve as prediction errors reporting the difference between what the brain expects and what it gets, so that the predictions can be continuously updated. Perception isn't a process of reading out, sensory signals in a bottom-up or outside in Direction. It's always an active construction and inside-out top-down neuronal fantasy. That is yoke to reality, in a never-ending, dance of prediction and prediction error.


My coolest process controlled hallucination to emphasize justice points. All of our experiences are active constructions, arising from within and there's a continuity here between normal perception. And what we typically call hallucination, where, for example, people might see things or hear things that others don't. But in normal perception, the control is just as important as the hallucination. Our perceptual experiences are not arbitrary. The Mind doesn't make up reality while experienced colors. Need a mind to exist physical things like The Coffee Cup itself exists in the world, whether we're perceiving them or not. It's the way in which these things appear in our conscious experience, that is always a construction. Always a creative act of brain-based best guessing.


Because we all have different brains. We will each inhabit our own distinctive personalized in a universe. Now I've digress quite far from where we began. So let me end by returning to the South to the experience of being you or being me. The key idea here is that the experience of being a self, being any self is also a controlled hallucination, but of a very special kind. Instead of being about the external World experiences of Salford are fundamentally about regulating and controlling the body. And what's important here.


Is that the experiences of being a self, a composed of many different parts that normally hang together in a unified way but which can come apart in, for instance, psychological or neurological disorders. There are experiences of being a continuous person over time with a name and a set of memories shaped by our social and cultural environments. There are experiences of Free Will of intending to do something or of being the cause of things that happen. Their experiences of perceiving the world, from a particular perspective, a first-person point of view and then there are deeply embodied experiences, for instance, of identifying, with an object in the world. That is my body. These hands are my hands and then of emotion and mood. And at the deepest line, most basal levels experiences of Simply being a living body of being alive.


A my contention is that all these aspects of being a self are all perceptual predictions of various kinds and that the most basic aspects of being any self, is that part of perception, which serves to regulate the interior of the body to keep you alive? And when you put on this thread, many things follow everything that arises in Consciousness is the perceptual prediction and all of our conscious experience. Audiences, whether of the self or of the world, are all deeply rooted in our nature as living machines. We experience the world around us and ourselves within it with through. And because of our living bodies,


So, who are you really? Think of yourself as being like the color red you exist, but you might not be what you think you are. Thank you. All stand in for the audience. David is traffic and makes me feel better. That's good. It was great. Thank you for that. I have to say that the thought of my brain floating around that I'm phony person. Is it disturbing one, but


How do all those kind of billions or trillions of neurons? Kind of give rise to this experience of Consciousness and your view? Well, first, I mean Consciousness is experience. So I use the two terms synonymously that, that's exactly, it's the same thing. And just by the way, I mean the idea of your brain wobbling around in his bony vaulted, the skull is, presumably less disturbing than it doing something else and being outside of the skull, that would be there. Particularly worrying situation, but the question of could, this is a big question that you start off with it with a simple questionnaire. How does it all happen? And this is why this is, there's a there's a long way to go here and there I think two ways to approach this this mystery. So the fundamental question here is What is it about a physical mechanism? In this case a biological neurobiological mechanism 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections that can generate any conscious experience. Put that way. It seems extremely hard because conscious experience is seeking to be the kinds of things. That cannot be explained in terms of mechanisms. However, complicated, those mechanisms might be. This is the intuition that drives work, David Chalmers, famously called the hard problem, but my Approach is hinted.


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What a perceptual experience is like what an experience of self is like what the difference between sleep and wakefulness is like and in each of those cases we can tell the story about how neural mechanisms explain those properties in the part of the story. We've touched on today. It's all about predicted processing. So the idea is the brain really does in code within it sort of predictive generative model of the causes of signals from the world and it's the Intent of those predictions that constitutes our perceptual experience. And as we develop and test explanations like this, the intuition is that this hard problem of how and why neurons or whatever it is in, the brain can generate a conscious experience won't be sold directly. It will be dissolved. It will gradually fade away and eventually vanish in a puff of metaphysical smoke Katarina One Step talk about anesthesia.


That kind of experience of having your Consciousness kind of turned off. What do we know about this ability to switch a person off and kind of a matter of seconds. What is actually happening there. Do you think firstly, I think it's one of the best inventions of humanity ever, right? The ability to turn people into objects and then back again into people is just like, I wouldn't want to live at a time in history without it. Whenever we have this sort of like, wouldn't it be nice to live in? I don't know, Greek Antiquity or something. When people Swan around philosophy. Using drinking wine. Well, yes, but what about anesthesia? That's what is my response to that? So it does work. This is a fantastic thing. How we're here, isn't just an enormous opportunity for Consciousness science because we know what anesthetics do at a very local level. We know how they act on different molecules and receptors in the brain. And of course, we know what ultimately happens, which is that people get knocked out. And by the way, it's not like going to sleep when your


General anesthesia you you're really not that it's an oblivion comparable with the Oblivion before or after before birth or after death. So the real question is, what is happening? How are the anesthetics? The local action, of anaesthetics affecting Global brain Dynamics. So as to explain this disappearance of Consciousness and to cut a long story, very short. What seems to be happening is that the different parts of the brain? Become functionally disconnected from each other. And by that, I mean, they speak to each other less. The brain is still active, but communication between brain areas is becomes disrupted in specific ways, and there's still a lot. We need to learn about the precise ways in which this disconnection happens. What are the signatures at the loss of consciousness?


There are many different kinds of anesthetic, But whichever variety of anesthetic. You take when it works. This is what you see. I think some folks such as Jasmine and more Anonymous folks are troubled by this idea that we, or what, I call Red might be a different color for you. And for everyone else, is there a way of knowing if we're all kind of hallucinating reality in a similar way or or not. This is again, this is a lovely topic.


It really gets to the heart of how I've been thinking about perception, because one of the aspects of perception that I think is easy to overlook. Is that? It seems the contents of perception seeing real, right? The redness of this coffee cup. It seems to be a mind-independent really existing property of the external world. Now, certain aspects of this coffee cup. Our mind independent. Its solidity is mind-independent if I throw it at you, David across the Atlantic and you do, don't see it coming. It will hurt will hit you in the head. It will her. That doesn't depend on. You seeing it, but the redness does depend on a mind and to the extent that things depend on a mind, they're going to be different for each of us. Now. They may not be that different. So the there's this in philosophy. There's this argument of the inverted Spectra. So, you know, if I see red, is that the same as you seeing green or blue, let's say and we might never know. I don't have


Much truck with that particular thought experiment, like many thought experiments. It's a bit, you know, pushes things a little bit too far. I think the reality is that we see things like colors. Maybe we see them similar, but not exactly the same. And we probably overestimate the degree of similarity between our perceptual world because they're all filtered through language. And I just used the word read, the no many shades of red painted will stay with you. What red and When I was decorating my house, it's like I want to paint the walls, white like hot. Many shades of white are there. This is too many and they have weird names which doesn't help. So, we will overestimate the similarity of our universe and I think it's really interesting question. How much they do indeed, diverged. You will probably remember this famous dress, this photo the dress that half the world saw as blue and black and the other half saw as white and gold. And what made that particularly, you're a white and gold person. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. A blue and black person. I was right. The real dress is actually blue and black never mind. That's, that's the about that we couldn't. It really is blue and black eye, you know, that I talked to the dress designer. The actual one is blue and black bears, no argument there. But the thing that made that so weird is that it's not just that we sort of vaguely see it as 1/4 of a do. We really see it as that Lunas and Blackness or whiteness and Goldust as really existing in the world, and that was it.


Just thinking lever into a recognition of how different our perceptual universes might be an in fact as study. We're doing at Sussex over the next year or two, which trying to characterize the amount of perceptual diversity, that that is just there to be discovered. We usually only aware of it at the extremes people, call things like neurodiversity, where people have experience of this so different then manifest in different behaviors. But I think there's this sort of big dark matter of individual diversity and perception that we know very little about, but it's there. I'm glad we could put to rest major, internet debate and and come down firmly on the blue and blacks side of things. I guess. Daniela wants to know. Could you explain how kind of memory is involved in this perception of a self?


Well, just as there are many different aspects of self. It, there are many different kinds of memory to I think colloquially, in everyday language. When we talk about memory. We often talk about autobiographical memory episodic memory. Like what did I have for breakfast? When did I last go for a walk? These kinds of things? When did I last have the pleasure of talking to David? These are these are the memories of things that that pertain to me has a continuous individual.


Overtime. That's one way in which memory plays into self and that part of memory can go away and self remain back to the earlier point there. There's a famous case. I talked about it in the book of a guy called Clive wearing who had a brain disease and then cap allopathy which basically obliterated his ability to lay down new autobiographical memories. He lost his hippocampus, which is a brain region. Very,


For this function. And so his wife described it as him living in the in a permanent present tense of between 7 to 30 seconds. And then everything was new is very, very difficult to put yourself in the shoes of somebody like that but other aspects of his self remains, but then there are, you know, there are all sorts of other aspects of memory, that probably also play into what it is to be you or to be mean. And we have, we have semantics Memory, we just know things. Like we know what the capital of Francis we know who the president is, and I hope so, you know, sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes that's not a good thing. And all of these, these things that the get encoded in memory shape, our self to and then finally, there's there's perceptual memory. Every it's not that experience is like a video recording that we can replay, but everything we experience changes the way we perceive things in the future.


And the way we perceive things is also, in my view, part of what it is to be a self. Actually just want to say one of the really interesting questions here. And one of the things we're working on is given that. We basically go to imagine a typical day you go through your typical day your experience. A good tenuous stream of inputs. Now, you blink of course and so on, but, but more or less, there's this continuous stream of inputs, yet when we remember a day, it's usually in chunks. These autobiographical chunks. I did this, I did that. I did the other, this happened. So the really important question is, how does this chunking process happen? How does the brain extract meaningful episodes from a relatively continuous flow of data. And it's kind of disturbing how little of any given day. We remember, so, it's very selective process. And that's something that I think is going to be useful, not only for basic Neuroscience, but for instance, in


Helping people with memory loss and impairments because you could, for instance, have a camera. And then you could predict. Aspects of their day would constitute a memory and that can be very, very useful for them. And for their carers. Yeah, the brand clearly has a good editor, you call us people feeling machines in your, in your book here to here, to expand on that. Yeah. That's right. We're not. Yeah, I think the let. Yeah, we're not cognitive computers. We are feeling machines. And I think this is, this is true of the level of making decisions, but for me, it's really at the heart of Of how to understand, life minds and Consciousness. And this really is the idea that in Consciousness science. We tended to think, look at things like Vision to start with this being the Royal Road to understanding Consciousness. Vision is easy to study, and we're very visual creatures, the fundamentally brains evolved and develop, and operate from moment to moment to keep the body alive, always in light of this deep physiological imperative to


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In an organism and in remaining alive and that fundamental role of brains that that's what in my view, gave rise to any kind of perception in order to regulate something, you need to be able to predict what happens to it. This whole apparatus of prediction and prediction error that undergirds, all of our perceptual experiences. Including self has its origin. In this, this role that's tightly coupled to the physiology of the body. D. And that's why I think we're feeling machines. We're not just computers that happen to be implemented on meet machines. Thank you, Anil for chatting with us today. We enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. David. Thank you.


Your vehicle?


So bad.



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