What makes you… you? (w/ Anil Seth) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, but actually, how do I know that I'm your host, Chris Duffy. How do I know that I am Chris Duffy? Am I sure about that? How do I know that I am me? How do you know that you, are you, are we actually conscious beings? Are we just figments of someone's imagination or just bits in a simulation. Today on the show, our guest is cognitive and computational neuroscientist Anil Seth. Anil is the author of Being You a New Science of Consciousness, and he and I are gonna get into some weird and wild territory, the kind of topics that you might discuss at 3:00 AM in a dorm room, or after having eaten a very powerful edible.

But we're gonna be talking about this using real science and trying to understand genuine advances in technology and research that are happening right now. Here's a clip from Anil's TED Talk.

Anil Seth: So just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist. I was having a small operation. My brain was filling with anesthetic, and I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart and a coldness.

And then I was back drowsy and disoriented, but, but definitely there. Now when you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time or anxious about oversleeping, but there's always a basic sense of time. Having passed of the continuity between then and now and coming round from anesthesia is very different.

I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years, or even 50 years. I simply wasn't there as total oblivion anesthesia. It's a modern kind of magic. It turns. People into objects and then we hope back again into people. And in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy.

How does consciousness happen? Somehow within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one, a tiny biological machine, is generating a conscious experience and not just any conscious experience. Your conscious experience right here and right now, how does this happen?

Well, answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it, there's no world. There's no self. There's nothing at all.

Chris Duffy: Well, we are very lucky today on the show because here to share a bit of his conscious experience with us is Anil Seth.

Anil Seth: Hi, I am Anil Seth. I'm a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and the author of the book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

Chris Duffy: The first question that I have for you is for a regular person. Just going about their day to day. Why is it important to think about consciousness? Why does that matter?

Anil Seth: It's really easy to take it for granted, isn't it? I mean, we, we just are who we are and the world is how it is, and we get on with our daily lives. But I think if you just reflect on it for a little bit.

I actually think children are very good at this 'cause I remember first getting interested in consciousness as a child. I think as many of us are like, why am I me and not somebody else? Questions like that. What happens when I die? But this moment of reflection suggests, I think, makes it clear that everything that matters to us.

Matters through the medium of conscious experience. You know, we feel good, we feel bad, we see something beautiful, we see something ugly. We, without experiencing the world and, and the self, nothing really matters at all. So I think it's, it's a central concept. It's a central aspect of what it means to be.

A living human being. There are plenty of other reasons why it, why it's important. Plenty of other practical applications and you know, it's not just the realm of philosophy. It, it matters in our daily lives, though I think that's fundamentally why we should be interested in it.

Chris Duffy: One of the, the many things that I admire about your work is how you take really big, complex ideas.

You don't oversimplify them, but you do make them accessible. And so as we are gonna have this conversation that I think is going to touch on a lot of, of, of big, complex ideas about consciousness and conscious experience, let's actually get started with what I found in your book and in just thinking about these ideas to be one of the.

Easiest, most concrete, immediate examples, which is to think about color. We have a conscious experience of say the color red or the color green, and we all think that we understand what that is, and yet it's possible. In fact, it's quite likely that other people's perception of those exact same colors is not the exact same as ours, that their experience of the world, their conscious experience is not the same as ours.

Anil Seth: Well, I think it's not only likely, it just is the case with as that example, I think, do you remember it Chris? I dunno if people listening to this will, but about 10 years ago there was this photo of a dress that half the world saw as yellow and white, and the other half saw as blue and black. And that's a very clear example of how you can have exact.

The same exact stimulus. The same image, but we can have a very different subjective experience. I think color's an excellent example that gets us into this whole issue of. Of consciousness and why it's important, because as you said, it's it, we take it for granted now. We are, we walk around the world and things are red or things are green, the sky is blue and it feels to us as if, but it exists that out there in the world independently of us.

But we know that's not true and it, this is even before neuroscience gets going, really from physics. We know that the electromagnetic spectrum. Goes all the way from radio waves, which are very long to x-rays, gamma rays, which are really short, and this so-called visible spectrum is somewhere in the middle.

It's a thin slice of reality and what's more within that thin slice of reality, we just have. Cells that are sensitive to more or less, three different wavelengths. We call them red, green, and blue, but they're not actually colored. They're just three wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. And outta those three wavelengths, the brain conjures up millions of different colors.

So it's color just is not. They're out there in the world in the way that it seems, but it's also not made up. You know what, what's happening as far as people who study this stuff in in detail, think is that surfaces reflect light and what we experience as color is a sort of property of how. Different surfaces reflect light in in different ways, and that's why color is useful for us.

'cause it helps us keep track of objects when lighting conditions change and when things change. It's a very useful thing for our visual systems to be able to do, but it's not this direct transduction of something that exists in objective reality. It requires a brain and a world to experience color.

Chris Duffy: One of the other reasons why I think color is such an interesting place to start.

Is because my personal experience here is I am colorblind. Yeah. And so I struggle to differentiate between colors. Certain colors that many other people feel are very clearly different. So to me, my experience of the world does not include this bright line between, say, lavender and light blue. Certain types of green and brown are more on a spectrum to me, rather than, like, there's a, there's a.

A clear difference between them. And one of the things that happens whenever people find out that I'm colorblind is we play this game. It's, it's like unavoidable and it doesn't bother me. I know it bothers some other colorblind people, but we end up playing this game where they point at all the things around us and they say, and what color is that?

And what color is that? And what color is that? And what does this look like? And they're amazed that it's not always the same for me as it is for them.

Anil Seth: The, the most common form of colorblindness, and see if this resonates with you is, is when, what non colorblind people. It would say as red and then say as green?

Mm-hmm. People with, mm-hmm. The most common form of colorblindness would perceive those things as being, you know, roughly the same.

Chris Duffy: Yes. It's a red-green colorblindness. Every once in a while there'll be these photos that kind of go viral, which is like how the world looks to someone with red-green colorblindness, and it'll be two photos.

That I'm told to someone who does not have this look very different. And to me, those photos look exactly the same. I could not tell you which one is the altered one.

Anil Seth: The philosopher Thomas Nagel years ago, 50 years ago, actually wrote this, this wonderful essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Now, I'm not saying being colorblind is like being a bat.

No, but his point was Uhhuh, that for each of us, we have our subjective world and. That is unique to us. You know, everybody's world will be different. The subjective world of a bat is going to be very different 'cause they have echolocation, and you know, all this other stuff. And the subjective world of someone with color blindness is gonna be different with respect to color. It's not a simple subtraction of, of, you know, what my experience would be in,

Chris Duffy: in being you a new science of consciousness. You describe one idea of, of seeing the world as controlled hallucination. So can you define that and talk to us about, about that? 'cause I feel like it really ties in into what we're talking about.

Anil Seth: The idea of controlled hallucination is, is not just a. An account of how we experience color. I mean the power of the idea, at least for me, and as I try to explain in the book, it's a way of understanding everything that we experience, whether it's an emotion or a sense of free will or the sense of being, Chris, or, or being Anil. It's, it's, it's a way of understanding everything that we experience whatsoever. And the idea is, is pretty simple and it's pretty old. I mean, in thinking about color, it's already clear that what we experience isn't this direct readout of what's objectively out there in the world.

'Cause colors aren't objectively out there in the world. But now let's switch perspective a little bit and think about what things are like from the perspective of a brain. So. Imagine being a brain. A brain is locked inside this bony volt of a skull and you know, to a first approximation, what it's trying to do is figure out what the hell is going on out there in the world or in here in the body.

All the brain has to go on are these electrical sensory signals that arrive via the eyes and the ears and so on. And light doesn't just get right into the brain. It's dark in the brain and it's silent. All the brain has are electrical signals that are only. Indirectly related to the things out there in the world.

They don't have labels. Mm. So the brain has to infer has to make a best guess about what is happening in the world based on these ambiguous, unlabeled, uncolored unsound sensory signals. The brain, the. Makes this best guess about what's happening in the world by continually making predictions about the sensory signals that it's getting.

And then instead of just reading out the sensory signals to sort of form this inner picture of the world, the brain is continually updating the predictions. So they explain away the sensory signals that are coming in. And the key idea here is that what we experience. In this story is the content of these.

Inside out predictions. We don't read out the world from the outside in. We always actively construct it, actively generate it from the inside out. Now, it turns out, now math, if you do all the maths and all this stuff, that if you have a brain which is continually updating, its top down, inside out predictions to minimize, you know, the, the sensory signals that are coming in to try and, you know, explain them, predict them before they happen.

That mathematically is a very, very good way for the brain to approximate exactly what caused the sensory signals out there in the world. It's a very good way to make a best guess, and that's the claim. That's what we experience and that's why I call it a controlled hallucination, which is a term I, you know, like all good analogies.

Chris Duffy: I like the idea 'cause it emphasizes that our experiences come largely from within. That's the hallucination part. One thing that I think is a, a way for me to understand this inside out and outside in dance is when I think about emotions, so. There's the idea, right? Let's just say with the line between fear and excitement, I see something exciting and my heart starts pounding and my heart is pounding because I am excited.

And then there's also the idea that I see something and my heart starts pounding, and then my brain has to decide. Is your heart pounding because you are terrified or because you are excited and that increasingly the, the science seems to be pointing towards the second rather than the first?

Anil Seth: That's right.

There's a theory of emotion from William James who, who like many theories in psychology, he came up with these ideas back in the 19th century, but. It was. It was James and another guy called Karl Langer who first put things this way, and they gave the example of seeing a bear. So you see a grizzly bear or something, you feel very afraid and adrenaline starts causing through your body.

And so you run away. And in this way of thinking about it, you know, you see the bear that causes an emotion of fear and the emotion of fear sets and train all these bodily responses that allow you to, to run away or fight if you really wanna fight a grizzly bear, which is bad idea. And James kind of flipped that.

What James suggested was going on was that. What we experience is the emotion of fear is mostly the brain's perception of the body's response to the bear. So the chain of causation is now subtly, but importantly different. We see a bear brain registers, there's a bear 'cause that's its best controlled hallucination of what's out there in the world.

I mean, that itself is a, is still an inference. That visual perception of the bear immediately. Sets and train all these physiological changes in the body, cortisol, adrenaline, all of that. And then it's the brain's perception of these changes in the context of a bear being present. That is the emotion of, of fear.

This is, is a useful way to think about it because the interior of the body, you know, the, the state of the body, even on the body on the inside, the brain has to infer that too. One of the aha moments for me was to think of this James theory of emotion as actually basically identical to these ideas about how.

Visual perception works. So just as the brain has to infer the causes of its visual signals, and that's what we see, it's making predictions about what's out there. The exact same mechanism can do what James was suggesting happens. It can make its best guess about what's happening in the inside of the body, and that becomes.

Experiences of emotion. And that's kind of satisfying from a, a sort of, if you're a theory person, it's very satisfying 'cause you've got one simple principle, the brain making and updating predictions that can now bring together what were previously. Two quite different fields of understanding human experience.

You know, visual perception on the one hand and emotion on the other. I find very appealing when you have these unifying principles and you can start to understand, you know, different domains of human experience through the same underlying mechanism.

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And we are back. So, Anil, I think that many people, especially in the western world, have this idea of the brain as a supercomputer, like a very hyper intelligent machine that is processing information.

And that image of the brain is, is often as like it is its own thing, quite separate from the rest of the body. But it seems to me like you are saying that. It is quite a bit more of the full body experience than just the locked away supercomputer in the top type situation.

Anil Seth: I think this idea of the brain as a computer has been an extremely powerful metaphor, but it's reaching its limits.

You know, the brain is, this is pretty implacable in its complexity and, and I think scientists have always struggled to figure out how, how can we conceptualize what's, what's happening in this gray goo inside our heads? And initially it was a system of. Pipes and plumbing, and then a telephone network.

And since the 1950s, this metaphor of a computer has been very powerful. So powerful that, that we just sort of take it for granted that the brain computes and processes information and you know, if you. Programmed a real, you know, silicon computer in the right way. You'd get everything that you get from real brains, including, and we'll come back to this consciousness, and this is where I start to get really uncomfortable about this metaphor.

But the computer, it relies on something to implement the computations, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's not nearly as intimately related to the body. As you know, our brains are related to our physical bodies, and I think that's. Super important if we're ever to really understand how brains work and, and what they're for.

You know, the body isn't just this kind of meat-based robot that can take our brain computer from one meeting to the next. If you, you know, zoom backwards in evolutionary time, every brain that ever existed. Evolved to control and regulate and guide a body. That's what brains are, are fundamentally for.

I'm inclined to think that we've reached the limits of the brain as computer metaphor, and now the brain is actually much richer, much more complex than computers. There's one key difference that I, that I'll just mention and then I, I would love to see what you think of it, which is a key principle of all the computers we have.

Is that we have the sharp separation between software and hardware. I can run the same version of, of whatever it is, word on my computer. It'll do the same thing on on yours and on my computer. I can run many different programs and it'll do the same thing EV every time, right? If it's working properly.

Even a single neuron is a very complicated biological machine that is trying to keep itself going, you know, right down into the furnaces of, of metabolism. And when you see brains like that and understand their, their richness and see how different they are from from computers, then. It really undermines the, the idea that what they're doing is computation, because computation makes sense when you've got this sharp separation and to the extent you don't have that, and it makes much less sense to think of the brain as a computer.

Chris Duffy: Yeah. I think that the connection between our, our body and our brain in the sense of like. You know, if you exercise, if you lift heavy weights or go for a run, it changes how you feel in your brain. It doesn't just change your body in a way that I think if I get a new mouse. I don't perceive that as changing how my computer feels.

Anil Seth: You are right that know there is this tight interaction between our bodies, our brains and our minds. I mean, our brains are part of our bodies. I think this is also something we, we often neglect. But, but you know, the brain is, is an organ just as much as our heart, our liver, our kidneys are organs. But it's a, you know, it's a distinctive one.

It's probably, if you were going to have a, an organ transplant, the brain is. The one operation for which you'd want to be the donor and not the recipient. So

Chris Duffy: You ask a question in your book on on page 209, towards the end that I wanna ask you, and I think is a really important question for everyone who is listening to this or watching this to ask themselves as well.

What is the aspect of being you that you clinging to most tightly? So it's your question, but I would like to put it to you first. What is the aspect of being you that you clinging to most tightly?

Anil Seth: Well, now, course, I clearly remember what I wrote on page 209, but I think the aspect of self that, that I cling to you most tightly is this sense of free will.

I mean, one of the other, I think, ways in which our intuition could mislead us. When we think about consciousness is the idea that the self is just one thing. That there is a single essence of Christopher. There isn't a single essence of of Anil self, but that's not the case. And there are many ways in neurology, psychiatry, but also in the lab where we can show that the experience of being a self has all these different aspects, which are all present.

Chris Duffy: In a kind of unified way for most of us, most of the time, but which can come apart. So for instance, emotion we already talked about is one part of the experience of self. It feels like those are on the verge of crossing from the interesting academic questions into a really practical. Applicable question in a way that is quite frankly to me scary.

So I'll give you just my example that, that I'm curious what you think about is, for me, the aspect of being me that I clinging to most tightly is I think some version of uniqueness that like I am me and there isn't another me out there. And yet. If it was possible to upload my consciousness or to have an artificial intelligence that was trained on my voice and my writing and my thinking, so much so that it was the same as me, but not me, that feels quite disturbing to me, and yet it, it doesn't feel.

Impossible to imagine a world where we get to that place. So, so I'm curious to, to hear your take on that.

Anil Seth: I think you, you're absolutely right that this is, these are the times we live in and that's both scary but also quite exciting and certainly very interesting place to be as, as someone who's followed these things, of course, both in popular cultures as we all do, but just watching what's happening in the underlying.

Science too. And it's happening in many ways. So there's the example about these, these avatars is really, is really fascinating. And I've had a couple of opportunities to have a digital avatar. I haven't yet taken them up 'cause I'm slightly worried about, you know, they're very ethical things about that, that I'm, I'm, I'm concerned about.

But the fact is, it's, it's now possible. I think it would be still distinguishable from me, but it's, things will just get better and, and, and better for sure. The. Other example where I think we're on the cusp of something that's gonna be ethically and morally very challenging is with brain computer interfaces.

Chris Duffy: And when you say brain computer interface, you mean something that literally is going directly between a brain and a computer? Like signals from the brain are directly controlling a robotic limb or they're going straight into a computer, or vice versa. A signal from a computer is going straight into a brain .

Anil Seth: Here's a situation where, on the one hand, you've got all these amazing clinical benefits that you just can't argue against, and you really shouldn't argue against. 'cause they're, they're brilliant. You can help people with Parkinson's disease, you can restore paralysis to people. You can restore sight to blind people potentially.

I mean, that, that's coming. All these, these amazing interventions that are on the horizon or even here now in some cases. But then you get to this. Other terrain of cognitive enhancements. Can someone who's not got paralysis or blindness or Parkinson's disease, should we all have brain computer interfaces just as we all have cell phones these days?

Well, that's a very, very different world. And it's a world where, you know, if you take it to the, to an extreme, something like free will. Which is at least for me, pretty central. And part of uniqueness too. You know, I feel that the thoughts are my thoughts. I feel that, that my actions are my actions, but if now there's a, a, a brain computer interface that is not merely reading out my intentions to get something done, but actually causing me to have intentions.

Thoughts that I feel are my own, but I would not have otherwise thought. That's pretty scary to me because once you've got into the brain, there's nowhere else to go.

Chris Duffy: What should we be doing as regular people to protect our consciousness or to think about it in a way where we won't just wake up in a world that's not the world we wanna live in?

What, what can we do or how can we understand this in a different level?

Anil Seth: Yeah, I, it's, it's a very difficult question to, to answer. I think the good side of the optimistic view is that there's still time to shape the future in these things, and we, we are not already at the stage of fixing a. Problems that have already come to exist as we are, for instance, and how, how do we reign in the societally problematic consequences of, of social media?

We can still decide what kinds of technologies we want and what kinds of technology we don't want and, and how they should be regulated and, and or made available. But you know, I think there are things. That, you know, regular folk can do. You know, we, we can all do, and it, it sort of, it may sound slightly cliched or try to say it, but the most important thing is to just not be scared of, of trying to understand what's going on, right?

We have to be informed. If we're not informed about what these technologies do. Also how our own brains work too. Now we don't have to understand every detail. I'm not asking people to go and do whole neuroscience degrees and so on, but the more we understand how our own minds work, I think the better we'll be able to make informed decisions about the kinds of technologies that we want.

Chris Duffy: We are gonna take another quick break and then we will be right back.

And we are back with the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. In the book, you talk about your experience of caring for your mother and how she had a medical issue that caused her to have a, a brief period of. Amnesia or not necessarily understanding who you were and what your relationship was.

I'd love for you to talk to about that personal experience, but also to people who are caring for family members and loved ones who have cognitive decline and dementia. Where this question of, is this my mother? Is this my father? Is this, the person that I've known is not a hypothetical question and it's not a.

Far off technological question, but it's kind of a practical day-to-day question of like, who is this person that I love and that I care for? And are they the same person they have been because you've been in that situation.

Anil Seth: So the, the episode I described in, in the book, my mother was in a hospital for, an operation. She was just shy of 80 years old, but there were problems in the hospital and she had, what I later learned was what the doctors call hospital induced delirium, which I'd never heard of before. And it's apparently very common, especially in older people, and the name is immediately. Suggestive of people actually don't know what, what's going on at all.

It's sort of a name straight outta the 18th century, it sounded like to me. Mm. But it's a severe disorientation, but also a, a change of personality. She didn't recognize me. She thought I was somebody else and appeared to be a very different person that resolved. But, but yes, in the, in the years since then, it's, it's been a continual process in which, you know, she and I have had to adapt to very different circumstances.

So there are many ways in which a person can continue to be the same person, even if they no longer know much about who they are or, or where they are, who other people are. And for me, that's been, you know, I think that's been a useful strategy. It, it, it helps me recognize that there's a, there's a deep continuity you underlying.

These, these fairly dramatic changes, but there's, there's nonetheless a continuity. And of course the same is true for us. You know, we are, we are changing too, but we just don't experience the change in ourselves because we, you know, to cut the long story there very short. When things change very slowly, we tend not to perceive them as changing.

Chris Duffy: I find that to be so profound and so comforting. It's impossible to lose it because it is a continuous transformation through the years. That's right. It

Anil Seth: was never there in the first place to, to be lost. Right. It's always been this, this process, and I think. It's important just talking about these things to, just to point out that these ideas have of course been central to many spiritual traditions, you know, in, in Buddhism, in a lot of meditative practice and Hinduism as well, to some extent.

The idea of the self as process, as identity, as sort of multifaceted, as constructed. I mean, this is not news to many people from different cultures and. What I find quite fascinating is, is the, the confluence, the convergence between these different ways of thinking. And it's not that, it's not that just science is.

Basically telling the same story, but 2000 years later, it's telling a different story. It's a story in which what we are learning from the neuroscience and the philosophy, modern philosophy about the self, I think enriches the stories that we're already there, but also vice versa, understanding consciousness.

That's part of the battle. We come with all these preconceptions about what it is that we're trying to understand, but actually the experience of being a self is not simple. And when we widen the lens to other cultures and other traditions, I think we get a, a richer view of what consciousness research should be about.

Chris Duffy: I feel like it would be professional malpractice to have had a conversation about consciousness in the self and to not ask you. About drugs, hallucinogenic drugs, and also legal anesthetic drugs. Right? Like how does the fact that I can be put under to undergo an operation and wake up and have no memory or any possible way of accessing that time, how does that affect your ideas about consciousness?

And then relatedly, if I can take LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms or any of these other. Types of substances and change my experience of the world. How does that affect consciousness?

Anil Seth: The more hallucinogenic drugs, in particular psychedelic drugs emphasizes the internet connection between consciousness in the brain.

You take a different chemical now interfere in the brain's business with a different kind of electrochemical manipulation, pharmacological manipulation, and now instead of losing consciousness, it changes and it changes extremely dramatically. So I, you know, I find this very, very. Good evidence. It's highly compatible with a sort of view that consciousness is something the brain does.

You know, you intervene in the brain and consciousness changes. Interestingly, you know, you can take it in a very different way. You could take the experiences that you have on psychedelics as some sort of insight into the nature of reality and come to a very different conclusion that, oh look, you know, I've experienced consciousness as in fact, a fundamental property of the universe and.

So it doesn't depend on the brain at all. It all depends on your priors, what you come into it with. For me, it sort of reinforces the dependence of consciousness, uh, on the brain. But I think in each case, psychedelics can show well from, well, maybe not in each case, but certainly from the perspective that psychedelics change the brain and.

That changes consciousness. It really underlines that. What we experience is, is a construction because you change aspects of the brain function, aspects of our conscious experience that we might otherwise take for granted. You know, we, we can realize are things that the brain is doing because they're changed or, or they go away.

So for me it's a very, in, provides a lot of insight into those aspects of, of consciousness, which need. Explaining, and that's entirely separate from all the, the potential therapeutic benefits, which I, which I think are also very exciting, very interesting. I think the juries is gonna be out for a little while on their, on their overall efficacy, but there's a, certainly a lot of rich potential there.

Chris Duffy: Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for your work and, and thank you for taking the time to explain it to us.

Anil Seth: Oh, thanks Chris. It's, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me on the show.

Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Anil Seth. His book is called Being You: a New Science of Consciousness. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is consciously created by a team of fully aware beings.

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