Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

Anil Seth (2021)

In a paragraph

Our perceptions are controlled hallucinations, a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be. Consciousness, including the experience of being a self, is a control mechanism for a beast machine.   Consciousness science can progress by focusing on the real problem of consciousness – to explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience. 

Key points

• The definition of consciousness as ‘any kind of subjective experience whatsoever’ is admittedly simple, but this is a good thing. Prematurely precise definitions can be constraining, and useful definitions evolve in tandem with scientific understanding.

• A functionally agnostic flavour of physicalism is the most pragmatic and productive mindset to adopt when pursuing a science of consciousness.

• 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.

• The real problem of consciousness. The primary goals of consciousness science are to explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience. It focuses on phenomenology so is distinct from the easy problem(s) and goes after the hard problem, but indirectly. Hopefully, as we build sturdier explanatory bridges from the physical to the phenomenological, the hard-problem intuition that consciousness can never be understood in physical terms will fade away.

• Consider how the scientific understanding of life has matured. The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity.

• Is consciousness more like temperature – reducible to and identifiable with a basic property of the physical (or informational) universe? Or is it more like life, a constellation of many different properties?

• Consciousness level can be measured by the Perturbational complexity index (PCI) from EEG response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

• Conscious experiences are both informative and integrated. Integrated Information Theory (IIT), single measure Φ Phi.

• How things seem is not necessarily how they are. As with the Copernican revolution, this top-down view of perception remains consistent with much of the existing evidence, leaving unchanged many aspects of how things seem, while at the same time changing everything.

• What we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

• The controlled hallucination of our perceptual world has been designed by evolution to enhance our survival prospects, not to be a transparent window onto an external reality, a window that anyway makes no conceptual sense.

• We perceive the world around us in order to act effectively within it, to achieve our goals and – in the long run – to promote our prospects of survival. We don’t perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us.

• The Beholder’s Share. Phenomenology of objecthood and change blindness.

• We can respond more quickly and more effectively to something happening in the world if we perceive that thing as really existing. The out-there-ness inherent in our perceptual experience. Transparency – we consider our models as reality.

• Embodied, perspectival, volitional, narrative and social self. Exteroception and interoception. We live with an exaggerated, extreme form of self-change-blindness.

• Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. Active inference.

• The beast machine’s ‘drive to stay alive’ resurfaces in the Free Energy Principle (FEP) as an even more fundamental imperative to remain in statistically expected states,

• We project causal power into our experiences of volition in just the same way that we project redness into our perceptions of surfaces

• Once we pass a certain threshold of competence to control our degrees of freedom, we can be held responsible for our actions.

• The twin risks of anthropomorphism – the attribution of humanlike qualities to the non-human – and anthropocentrism – the tendency to interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences.

• All mammals are conscious. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, but I am pretty confident. This claim is not based on superficial similarity to humans, but on shared mechanisms. Mammalian brains are strikingly similar.

• If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems – such as other animals – that fail to match up to our questionable human standards of cognitive competence.

• All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. My intuition is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness.

• The Turing test is a test of the human, not of the machine.

• The fuss about machine consciousness is symptomatic of an increasing alienation from our biological nature and from our evolutionary heritage. The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way – the entirety of human experience arises because of our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms.

• Perception is an active, action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality. Our perceived worlds are both less than and more than whatever this objective external reality might be. Our brains create our worlds through processes of Bayesian best guessing in which sensory signals serve primarily to rein in our continually evolving perceptual hypotheses. We live within a controlled hallucination which evolution has designed not for accuracy but for utility.

• Every time science has displaced us from the centre of things it has given back far more in return. The science of consciousness, of which the beast machine theory is just one part, is breaching the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism – the presumed specialness of our conscious minds – and showing this, too, to be deeply inscribed into the wider patterns of nature.

• What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us. Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real – these may be aspects of perception too. The tools of consciousness science are allowing us to get ever closer to Kant’s noumenon, the ultimately unknowable reality of which we, too, are a part.

Comments

A very impressive book, which both provides an attractive general introduction to consciousness science and gives a compelling presentation of Seth’s own views. 

The writing is clear and engaging and everything is arranged and set out with great care.  Warmth is also provided by some more personal anecdotes, particularly in the excellent audiobook read by the author.  

Seth’s substantive view is that all perceptions, including the sense of self, are ‘controlled hallucinations,’ top-down creations of the brain as a best-guess model that is continually checked against sense information and updated.  Seth is far from alone in holding a view of this type – for example, Thomas Metzinger’s view of consciousness as models is very similar – but Seth presents his approach particularly clearly and, for me, compellingly.  Such views may have become commonplace in consciousness science but remain a radical departure from common sense.  It involves a kind of Copernican Revolution to see our perceptions not as realty but as models created by the mind.

Seth’s methodological approach is also noteworthy.  He thinks we should focus on the ‘Real Problem of Consciousness’ – to explain, predict and control how conscious experience arises – and, by improving our explanations, dissolve the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Seth has recorded a number of good talks and discussions including a brief introduction for TED and a longer discussion on the Sam Harris podcast. 

Notes From The Book 

Prologue

The story I will tell is a personal view, shaped over many years of research, contemplation, and conversation.

By accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious.

Experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body.

Four parts: conscious ‘level’, conscious ‘content’, selfhood, other animals.

Controlled hallucinations

Freud three ‘strikes’ against the perceived self-importance of the human species:  Copernicus, Darwin, naturalistic explanation of mind and consciousness

I: LEVEL

1. The Real Problem

I’ve always favoured Nagel’s approach because it emphasises phenomenology:

Consciousness is first and foremost about subjective experience – it is about phenomenology.

Some prominent theories in the science of consciousness continue to emphasise function and behaviour over phenomenology.

‘global workspace’ theory,

behavioural flexibility.

metacognition

The definition of consciousness as ‘any kind of subjective experience whatsoever’ is admittedly simple and may even sound trivial, but this is a good thing.

prematurely precise definitions can be constraining

useful definitions evolve in tandem with scientific understanding,

mind stuff, res cogitans, and matter stuff, res extensa.

Take a deep breath, here come the ‘isms’:

Physicalism.

Idealism.

Dualism. The seductive intuition that conscious experiences seem non-physical encourages a ‘naïve dualism.’ The way things seem is often a poor guide to how they actually are.

Functionalism. I’m suspicious of functionalism.

Panpsychism.

Mysterianism.  Mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment.

Functionally agnostic flavour of physicalism. To me, this is the most pragmatic and productive mindset to adopt when pursuing a science of consciousness.

Conceivability arguments are intrinsically weak.

It has a plausibility that is inversely related to the amount of knowledge one has. Can you imagine an A380 flying backwards? Of course, you can. Just imagine a large plane in the air, moving backwards. Is such a scenario really conceivable? Well, the more you know about aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, the less conceivable it becomes.

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.

The real problem of consciousness.

According to the real problem, the primary goals of consciousness science are to explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.

Is also distinct from the easy problem(s), because it focuses on phenomenology rather than on function or behaviour.

The real problem goes after the hard problem indirectly, but it still goes after it.

It still amazes me how disreputable consciousness science was, even just thirty years ago.

Neural correlate of consciousness, or NCC,

‘Binocular rivalry’

neural happenings that are either prerequisites for, or consequences of, an NCC itself.

correlations are not explanations.

The ambition of the real problem approach is that as we build ever sturdier explanatory bridges from the physical to the phenomenological, the hard-problem intuition that consciousness can never be understood in physical terms will fade away, eventually vanishing in a puff of metaphysical smoke.

What justifies this ambition? Consider how the scientific understanding of life has matured

Vitalism. elán vital. The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity. This is the same flaw that lies at the heart of the zombie argument.

Conscious level, conscious content, conscious self

Dividing up the real problem of consciousness in these broad terms has many benefits. By providing distinct targets for explanation, it becomes more feasible to propose possible mechanisms able to do the required jobs of explanation, prediction, and control.

Eventually, the hard problem itself may succumb, so that we will be able to understand consciousness as being continuous with the rest of nature without having to adopt any arbitrary ‘ism’ stating by fiat how phenomenology and physics are related. This is the promise of the real problem.

2: Measuring Consciousness

Scientific progress depends on measurement.

‘Consciousness meter’

‘bispectral index’ monitor.

consciousness (awareness) and wakefulness (arousal) can come apart

The activity patterns that matter seem to be those within the thalamocortical system

Massimini. EEG and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS rig is a precisely controlled electromagnet which allows a researcher to inject a short and sharp pulse of energy directly into the brain through the skull, while EEG in this case is used to record the brain’s response to this zapping.

During conscious states, the response is very different: a typical echo ranges widely over the cortical surface, disappearing and reappearing in complex patterns. ‘zap and zip’:

Algorithmic complexity

‘Lempel-Ziv-Welch complexity’ or ‘LZW complexity’

Perturbational complexity index, or PCI. It uses LZW complexity to provide a measure (index) of the algorithmic complexity of the brain’s response to a perturbation

Complexity of spontaneous cortical activity

‘locked – in syndrome’

Jean-Dominique Bauby: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Multidimensional levels of consciousness

The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, the inventor of lysergic acid diethylamide – LSD

Brain activity in the psychedelic state becomes more random

Complexity is as the middle ground between order and disorder

Tononi

Edelman,

All conscious experiences – are both informative and integrated.

Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience

Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is – mathematically – what is meant by information.

Every conscious experience appears as a unified scene.

One might reasonably expect measures that adhere more closely to theoretical principles to perform better in practice than measures like algorithmic complexity, which are only weakly tied to the underlying theory. But this is not what we see,

Is consciousness more like temperature – reducible to and identifiable with a basic property of the physical (or informational) universe? Or is it more like life, a constellation of many different properties?

3: Phi

Under the analogy between consciousness and temperature, according to IIT consciousness simply is integrated information.

At the core of IIT is a single measure called ‘Φ’ (the Greek letter phi, pronounced fy) .

It measures how much a system is ‘more than the sum’ of its parts, in terms of information.

A system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.

The standard use of information in mathematics, developed by Claude Shannon in the 1950s, is observer-relative.

Information in IIT must therefore be treated as intrinsic to a system,

IIT also implies that information itself exists – that it has some definite ontological status in our universe. The physicist John Wheeler – information is primary.

Treating ‘integration’ and ‘information’ as general properties of conscious experiences to be explained, not as axiomatic claims about what consciousness actually ‘is’. In other words, treating consciousness as being more like life than like temperature.

In information theory, the ‘bit’ is the fundamental unit of information.

 

II: CONTENT

4: Perceiving from the Inside Out

The idea that the brain is some kind of computer perched inside the skull, processing sensory information to build an inner picture of the outside world for the benefit of the self

How things seem is not necessarily how they are.

As with the Copernican revolution, this top-down view of perception remains consistent with much of the existing evidence, leaving unchanged many aspects of how things seem, while at the same time changing everything.

Kant’s term noumenon refers to ‘things in themselves’ – Ding a sich

Hermann von Helmholtz. ‘Unconscious inference’.

Richard Gregory.  neural ‘hypothesis-testing’.

Controlled hallucination

Chris Frith

First, the brain is constantly making predictions about the causes of its sensory signals.

Second, sensory signals – which stream into the brain from the bottom up, or outside in – keep these perceptual predictions tied in useful ways to their causes.

Perception happens through a continual process of prediction error minimisation.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves; we only ever experience interpretations of them.

What we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

Every colour that we perceive, indeed every part of the totality of each of our visual worlds, is based on this thin slice of reality. Just knowing this is enough to tell us that perceptual experience cannot be a comprehensive representation of an external objective world. It is both less than that and more than that.

Your experience of colour picks out an invariant property of the paper: the way in which the paper reflects light. The brain infers this invariant property as its best guess of the causes of its continually changing sensory inputs. Whiteness is the phenomenological aspect of this inference – it is how the brain’s inferences about this invariant property appear in our conscious experience.

Colour is a useful device that evolution has hit upon so that the brain can recognise and keep track of objects in changing lighting conditions.

Daniel Dennett has called the fallacy of ‘double transduction’

The larger claim here is that this applies far beyond the realm of colour experience. It applies to all of perception. The immersive multisensory panorama of your perceptual scene, right here and right now, is a reaching out from the brain to the world, a writing as much as a reading. The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

‘The Dress’.

Adelson’s Checkerboard.

‘two-tone’ or ‘Mooney image’

‘sine wave speech’.

The controlled hallucination of our perceptual world has been designed by evolution to enhance our survival prospects, not to be a transparent window onto an external reality, a window that anyway makes no conceptual sense.

‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities.

‘seeing a gorilla’ is never a completely new perceptual experience.

Money requires social conventions to exist and so is a ‘social kind’. Water does not require social conventions to exist, and so is a ‘natural kind’

5: The Wizard of Odds

Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702 – 1761)

Richard Price,

Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Abductive reasoning. The best explanation.

Priors, likelihoods, and posteriors

the scientific method itself can be understood as a Bayesian process,

The combination of two Gaussian distributions depends on both the means and the precisions.

Prediction error minimisation

Precision weighting in perception. Increasing the estimated precision of sensory signals is nothing other than ‘paying attention’.

How things seem is a poor guide to how they actually are.

Perception and action are so tightly coupled that they determine and define each other.

We perceive the world around us in order to act effectively within it, to achieve our goals and – in the long run – to promote our prospects of survival. We don’t perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us to do so.

Active inference

6: The Beholder’s Share

Virtual and augmented reality (VR / AR)

Phenomenology of objecthood. ‘change blindness’.

We infer time based not on the ticking of an internal clock, but on the rate of change of perceptual contents

It’s not just colours: shapes, smells, chairness , changes , durations , and causality too – all the foreground and the background features of our perceptual worlds – all are Humean projections, aspects of a controlled hallucination .

We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us.

We can respond more quickly and more effectively to something happening in the world if we perceive that thing as really existing. The out-there-ness inherent in our perceptual experience.

We do not experience the models as models. Rather, we perceive with and through our generative models, and in doing so out of mere mechanism a structured world is brought forth.

It is because our perceptions have the phenomenological character of ‘being real’ that it is extraordinarily difficult to appreciate that, in fact, perceptual experiences do not necessarily – or ever – directly correspond to things that have a mind-independent existence. A chair has a mind-independent existence; chairness does not.

Dissolving the hard problem is different from solving it outright, or definitively rebutting it, but it is the best way to make progress, far better than either venerating consciousness as a magical mystery or dismissing it as a metaphysically illusory non-problem.

Philosophers call this ‘transparency’ (Metzinger, 2003b).

III: SELF

8: Expect Yourself

‘teletransportation paradox’,

Thomas Metzinger wrote a very brilliant book called Being No One

embodied selfhood – being a body

perspectival self

volitional self.

narrative self.

social self

An overarching unified experience – the experience of being you.

Experiences of unified selfhood do not signify the existence of an ‘actual self’.

‘rubber hand illusion’,

‘Full body illusions’

out – of – body experiences – OBEs

‘body swap’ illusion,

subjective weakness of body ownership illusions

Clive Wearing

socially nested predictive perceptions

subjective stability of the self.

Though we know we change over time it still seems to us that we don’t change all that much

We live with an exaggerated, extreme form of self-change-blindness,

Chris Frith has taken this view even further, arguing that the primary function of all conscious experience is social

9: Being a Beast Machine

Physiological control and regulation

Great Chain of Being

res cogitans (mind stuff) and res extensa (matter stuff).

La Mettrie, (man machine)

Our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happen with, though, and because of our living bodies.

We cannot understand the nature and origin of these conscious experiences, except in light of our nature as living creatures.

Bedrock layers. They range from emotions and moods – what psychologists call ‘affective’ experiences – to a basal, formless, and ever-present sense of simply ‘ being ’ an embodied, living organism.

Exteroception and interoception

William James. We don’t cry because we are sad, we are sad because we perceive our bodily state in the condition of crying.

Be sceptical about taking how things seem like a guide to how they actually are

‘appraisal theories’ of emotion.

Interoceptive inference is therefore more parsimonious than appraisal theory, because it involves just one process (Bayesian best guessing) rather than two (non-cognitive perception and cognitive evaluation) ,

cybernetics.

‘Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system’

System B is better because it has a model of the house,

active inference,

essential variable.

emotions and moods can now be understood as control-oriented perceptions which regulate the body’s essential variables.

James Gibson argued that we often perceive the world in terms of what he called ‘affordances’ .

opportunity for action

The form and quality of my emotional experiences are the way they are – desolate, hopeful, panicky, calm – because of the conditional predictions my brain is making about how different actions might impact my current and future physiological condition.

At the very deepest layers of the self, beneath even emotions and moods, there lies a cognitively subterranean, inchoate, difficult-to-describe experience of simply being a living organism.

Allostasis means the process of achieving stability through change,

Effective physiological regulation may depend on systematically misperceiving the body’s internal state as being more stable than it really is,

The deep roots of all perception in the physiology of the living.

We are not cognitive computers, we are feeling machines.

10: A Fish in Water

Karl Friston on his ‘free energy principle’

What it means for something to exist is that there must be a difference – a boundary –

When an organism is minimising sensory prediction error, as in schemes like predictive processing and active inference, it is also minimising this theoretically more profound quantity of free energy.

The theory that we experience the world, and the self, through mechanisms of predictive perception that are rooted in a ‘drive to stay alive’

The beast machine’s ‘drive to stay alive’ resurfaces in the FEP as an even more fundamental imperative to remain in statistically expected states,

The FEP and IIT are both grand theories, but they are grand in different ways.

11: Degrees of Freedom

Spooky free will

From the perspective of free will as a perceptual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events.

Through the lens of Schurger’s experiment, readiness potentials look a lot like the activity associated with the brain accumulating sensory data in order to make a Bayesian best guess. In other words, they are the neural fingerprints of a special kind of controlled hallucination.

‘degrees of freedom’

Competence to control is implemented by the brain not by any single region where ‘volition’ resides, but by a network of processes distributed over many regions in the brain.

It is the perception of the operation of this network, its looping through the body, out into the world, and back again, that underpins subjective experiences of volition .

The perceptual experience of volition is a self-fulfilling perceptual prediction, another distinctive kind of controlled – again perhaps a controlling – hallucination.

Volition as perceptual inference

Daniel Wegner

The Illusion of Conscious Will,

When it comes to free will it’s not only that how things seem is not how they are. How things seem deserves closer examination too.

It is also a mistake to call the experience of volition an illusion. These experiences are perceptual best guesses, as real as any other kind of conscious perception, whether of the world or of the self.

We project causal power into our experiences of volition in just the same way that we project redness into our perceptions of surfaces. Knowing that this projection is going on – to channel Wittgenstein one more time – both changes everything and leaves everything just the same.

once we pass a certain threshold of competence to control our degrees of freedom, we can be held responsible for our actions.

IV: OTHER

12: Beyond Human

The twin risks of anthropomorphism – the attribution of humanlike qualities to the non-human – and anthropocentrism – the tendency to interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences.

Intelligence opens up new possibilities for conscious experience.

To feel regret – or anticipatory regret – requires enough mental capability to consider alternative outcomes and courses of action.

We have little option but to use humans as a known quantity; a firm foundation from which to reach outwards.

All mammals are conscious. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, but I am pretty confident. This claim is not based on superficial similarity to humans, but on shared mechanisms.

Mammalian brains are strikingly similar

A list of the properties of human consciousness which we thought could be readily tested for in other mammals. We came up with seventeen distinct properties. Anatomical features. Brain activity

Differences in perceptual dominance will mean that each animal will inhabit a distinctive inner universe

In humans, this ‘mirror self-recognition’ ability tends to develop sometime between eighteen and twenty-four months of age.

Who passes the mirror test? Among mammals, some great apes, a few dolphins and killer whales, and a single Eurasian elephant.

dog self-recognition can now be tested with ‘olfactory mirrors’ – though they still don’t do very well

Suggests the likelihood of dramatic differences in how mammals experience ‘being themselves’

Common octopus.  Octopus consciousness – assuming there is such a thing – may therefore also be more distributed and less integrated

There is widespread evidence for adaptive responses to painful events among animal species

Anaesthetic drugs seem to be effective across all animals, from single-celled critters all the way to advanced primates.

At some point, it becomes difficult to say anything substantive.

No more than an intuition – is that there will be some animals which do not participate in the circle of consciousness at all.

Unconsciousness remains rather easy to achieve.

Setting aside its inevitable uncertainties, the study of animal consciousness delivers two profound benefits. The first is a recognition that the way we humans experience the world and self is not the only way.  We inhabit a tiny region in a vast space of possible conscious minds, and the scientific investigation of this space so far amounts to little more than casting a few flares out into the darkness.

The second is a newfound humility. Looking out across the wild diversity of life on Earth, we may value more – and take for granted less – the richness of subjective experience in all its variety and distinctiveness, in ourselves and in other animals too. And we may also find renewed motivation to minimise suffering wherever, and however, it might appear.

Not only can consciousness exist without all that much intelligence – you don’t have to be smart to suffer – but intelligence can exist without consciousness too.

encephalisation quotient,

‘precautionary principle’

The world as experienced by an animal is often called the Umwelt

13: Machine Minds

The first assumption – the necessary condition – is functionalism.

Functionalism says that what matters for consciousness is what a system does.

There are two separate claims here. The first is about independence from any particular substrate or material, while the second is about the sufficiency of input–output relations.

My attitude towards functionalism is one of suspicious agnosticism.

The second assumption is that the kind of information processing that is sufficient for consciousness is also that which underpins intelligence.

If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems – such as other animals – that fail to match up to our questionable human standards of cognitive competence.

‘Singularity’ hypothesis,

our Promethean fears that our creations will turn on us in some way or another

Just making computers smarter is not going to make them sentient. But this does not mean that machine consciousness is impossible. What if we were to try to design in consciousness from the outset? A silicon beast machine.

The unsatisfying but honest answer is that I don’t know for sure, but probably not.

All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. My intuition – and again it’s only an intuition – is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness.

Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down, even down to the level of individual cells.

It is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations.

The Turing test is a test of the human, not of the machine.

GPT – 3 can still be caught out by any reasonably sophisticated human interlocutor. This may not be true for GPT – 4, or GPT – 10.

But even if a future GPT – like system repeatedly aces the Turing test, it would be exhibiting only a very narrow form of (simulated) intelligence – disembodied linguistic exchange – rather than the fully embodied ‘ doing the right thing at the right time ’ natural intelligence that we see in humans and in many other animals – as well as in my hypothetical silicon beast machine .

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Geminoids are undeniably creepy.

where it appears strikingly human in some ways but falls short in others, these reactions will turn rapidly to revulsion and fear – the uncanny valley

One possibility is that we will learn to distinguish how we feel from how we should act, so that it will seem natural to care for a human but not for a robot

Were we to wittingly or unwittingly introduce new forms of subjective experience into the world we would face an ethical and moral crisis on an unprecedented scale

We might have no idea what kinds of consciousness they might be experiencing.

Thomas Metzinger called for an immediate thirty-year moratorium on all research aimed at generating what he called ‘synthetic phenomenology’ The possibility of organoid consciousness has ethical urgency.

The possibility of rehousing our wetware-based conscious minds within the pristine circuitry of a future supercomputer that does not age and never dies.

mind uploading,

In a post-Singularity world, conscious machines and ancestor simulations abound.

It doesn’t take much sociological insight to see the appeal of this heady brew to our technological elite who, by these lights, can see themselves as pivotal in this unprecedented transition in human history, with immortality the prize. This is what happens when human exceptionalism goes properly off the rails. Seen this way, the fuss about machine consciousness is symptomatic of an increasing alienation from our biological nature and from our evolutionary heritage.

The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way. On my theory, as we’ve seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms that care about their own persistence .

From the beast machine perspective, the quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from it.

Epilogue

Came face to face with a living human brain for the first time.

David Chalmers’ description of the hard problem of consciousness: ‘It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to such a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.’

The real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains,

build increasingly sturdy explanatory bridges between mechanism and phenomenology,

explain, predict, and control.

This strategy echoes how our scientific understanding of life transcended the magical thinking of vitalism

The real problem approach offers genuine hope of reconciling the physical with the phenomenal – dissolving, not solving the hard problem.

We began with conscious level measurement.

Every conscious experience is simultaneously unified and distinct

Conscious content.

Conscious self.

Post – Copernican perspectives

Understand perception as an active, action-oriented construction, rather than as a passive registration of an objective external reality. Our perceived worlds are both less than and more than whatever this objective external reality might be. Our brains create our worlds through processes of Bayesian best guessing in which sensory signals serve primarily to rein in our continually evolving perceptual hypotheses. We live within a controlled hallucination which evolution has designed not for accuracy but for utility.

The self is itself a perception, another variety of controlled hallucination.

The predictive machinery of conscious perception has its origin and primary function not in representing the world or the body, but in the control and regulation of our physiological condition.

We perceive the world around us, and ourselves within it, with, though, and because of our living bodies.

My theory of the beast machine,

Some perceptual inferences are geared towards finding out about objects in the world, while others are all about controlling the interior of the body.

See ourselves in closer relation to other animals and to the rest of nature, and correspondingly distant from the fleshless calculus of AI. As consciousness and life come together, consciousness and intelligence are teased apart.

Every time science has displaced us from the centre of things it has given back far more in return.

The science of consciousness, of which the beast machine theory is just one part, is breaching the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism – the presumed specialness of our conscious minds – and showing this, too, to be deeply inscribed into the wider patterns of nature.

Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled – or controlling – hallucination.

What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us. Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real – these may be aspects of perception too. The tools of consciousness science are allowing us to get ever closer to Kant’s noumenon, the ultimately unknowable reality of which we, too, are a part.

The beguiling but unhelpful intuition that consciousness is one thing – one big scary mystery in search of one big scary solution.

At the end of this story, when life in the first person reaches its conclusion, perhaps it’s not so bad if a little mystery remains.