Check Out Being You: A New Science Of Consciousness Assembled By Anil Seth Compiled As Hardbound

You is a fascinating, accessible and highly readable exploration of consciousness, and Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twentyfirstcentury science I feel I have encountered.
Consciousness is the great unsolved mystery in our scientific understanding of the brain, Somewhere, somehow, inscribed in the brain is everything that makes you you, But how do we grasp what happens in the brain to turn mere electrical impulses into the vast range of perceptions, thoughts and emotions we feel from moment to moment Anil Seth, one of Britain's leading neuroscientists, charts the developments in our understanding of consciousness, revealing radical interdisciplinary breakthroughs that must transform the way we think about the self.
Drawing on his original research and collaborations with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards, mathematicians and philosophers, he puts forward an exhilarating new theory about how we experience the world that should encourage us to view ourselves as less apart from and more a part of the rest of nature.


Seth's revolutionary framework for consciousness will turn what you thought you knew about yourself on its head, An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab, His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.
Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease, Being You sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cuttingedge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness.
This book is a lifechanging existential insight into being you, Rich in anecdotal evidence and full of intriguing information from cover to cover, Seth has written a riveting book on an invariably intriguing philosophical subtopic and brings it bang up to date.
Highly recommended. I'm usually leery of reading articles or books on consciousness, because the science is so poorly developed, But this book had amassed such positive reviews 

Unfortunately, Seth does not spend much time describing his own experiments testing aspects of consciousness, There is much more philosophizing, much of it unsupported and going nowhere,

gt Can you imagine an Aflying 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, In this case, even a minimal knowledge of these topics makes it clear that planes cannot fly backwards, It just cannot be done, Its the same with zombies, In one sense its trivial to imagine a philosophical zombie, I just picture a version of myself wandering around without having any conscious experiences, But can I really conceive this

gt Not so long ago, life seemed as mysterious as consciousness does today, Scientists and philosophers of the day doubted that physical or chemical mechanisms could ever explain the property of being alive, The difference between the living and the nonliving, between the animate and the inanimate, appeared so fundamental that it was considered implausible that it could ever be bridged by mechanistic explanations of any sort.
This philosophy of vitalism reached a peak in the nineteenth century, It was supported by leading biologists like Johannes Müller and Louis Pasteur

gt the rubber hand illusion might be largely or entirely driven by suggestion effects.
Unless studies of embodiment illusions take individual differences in suggestibility into account, which by and large they havent, it is difficult for them to say anything specific about the mechanisms involved.
This holds whether were talking about rubber hands, outofbodylike experiences, body swap illusions, or any other situation in which people are led implicitly or explicitly to expect a particular bodyrelated experience.


gt Imagine a system subject to an entirely new form of suffering, for which we humans have no equivalent or conception, nor any instincts by which to recognize it.
Imagine a system for which the distinction between positive and negative feelings does not even apply, for which there is no corresponding phenomenological dimension, The ethical challenge here is that we would not even know what the relevant ethical issues were Being You is not as simple as it sounds.
Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience, How does this happen Why do we experience life in the first person After over twenty years researching the brain, worldrenowned neuroscientist Anil Seth puts forward a radical new theory of consciousness and self.
His unique theory of what it means to 'be you' challenges our understanding of perception and reality and it turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head.
Im typically not a major fan of books on consciousness, but I heard a ton of people talking about this book, so I decided to give it a try, and Im really glad I did.
Seth could have easily written this book in a way that went way over the average readers head, but he made it extremely accessible for a broad audience.
The reason I typically dont like these types of books is because they get way too philosophical or abstract, and sometimes they dive into science thats hard to comprehend.
Anil Seth perfectly organized this book in a way where each section and chapter builds off of previous chapters, The book covers the science and research around consciousness throughout, and it also dives into our idea of self, machine minds, free will, how we perceive reality, and much more.
So, if youre curious about the topic, I definitely recommend it, Твърде много увъртане около мъгляв, все още не добре проучен и трудно поддаващ се на стандартно проучване обект като съзнанието. Все още липсва единна дефиниция що е съзнание, експериментите с психеделици и други методи върху мозъка дават някоя и друга насока, но и тя е само неизяснена линия.

А текстови похвати от сорта на “Представете си, че сте мозък” не са улеснение, а само раздразнение. Става ясно, че почти нищо не е ясно. “The way I see it, consciousness wont be solved in the same way that the human genome was decoded, or the reality of climate change established, Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single eurekalike insight a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about how scientific understanding progresses, For me, a science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads.
The goal of consciousness science should not be at least not primarily to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place.
Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet, What I hope to show you is that 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”

He skips the 'hard problem how physical stuff creates a conscious experience and instead focuses on describing the properties of consciousness.
On the self, like many others in the field and the original consciousness scientists: the Buddhists, he describes it as a transitory illusory object for the purpose of selfregulation of the body by the brain i.
e. when under anaesthesia you may cease to exist if the brains electrical activity is quietened which never happens in normal life when were awake or asleep, The self is generated by the brain which he describes as a prediction machine based on all the input its receiving mixed with existing information which results in a controlled hallucination that we experience otherwise known as reality.
Its tricky language but what he is saying here is that human experience may not be exactly what it seems like, Now, everything thats meaningful about selfhood in our lives persists and matters, but the notion of a fixed unchanging conscious self at the centre of our experience, free will, or the

colour redmay not be objective reality and actually exist, but rather they are illusory perceptions that the human brain creates.
The essence of selfhood being a biological process instead of that of a 'soul', Its interesting stuff with language that will give you vertigo at times, but ultimately it makes a lot of sense if you really observe your experience mindfullyhowever, theres still much to be understood and some of this may very well be wrong as physicalism is not universally accepted by consciousness researchers.
All in all, this is a decent book particularly for philosophy lovers, There is a lot of recycled research so don't expect anything new, despite the title, if you're familiar with consciousness studies,

Lastly, the notion to dissolve the 'unsolvable' hard problem by understanding these properties of consciousness that can be observed and studiedto frame things as phenomenology should be primary and emphasized is essentially a form of quitting to me because you're stumped, which isn't the right spirit for a scientist.
He describes to explain, predict, and control the properties of consciousness as the 'real problem', but that sounds like the 'easy problem' to me, . .

/I doubt if there is a greater intellectual challenge facing humankind than the problem of understanding our own minds, Some philosophers even believe this is a problem that cannot ever be solved because how can a system of a given complexity figure out the complexity of itself.
This problem can be broken down into two, potentially interrelated, problems that of understanding human general intelligence and understanding consciousness, Of these two, the first one is significantly easier because there are functional descriptions of what intelligence does, However, when it comes to consciousness, we don't even have a way to describe it precisely, I cannot prove to anyone that I am conscious, as the experience is purely subjective, Yet, none of us have any doubt that there is a conscious world within us, and we feel it most when we temporarily lose it, as in during anesthesia.
 

In theth century, a new branch of philosophy evolved out of the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl that dealt with the conscious experience of phenomenon, and Phenomenology was born.
However, at the other end of the spectrum, neuroscientists and cognitive researchers were also trying to understand consciousness, and they were trying to find neural correlates of consciousness.
During the last couple of decades, a number of candidate theories of consciousness have been proposed, At one end are ideas that completely disregard phenomenology and try to view consciousness as essentially an illusion that the mind creates, There are other theories that want to view consciousness as a natural outcome of a very complex system that develops some selfreflexive properties,  

In this book researcher, Anil Seth is proposing a very different approach, In fact, this is the first idea I have come across where consciousness is not minimized by calling it an illusion or treated as a necessary outcome of a very complex system, but rather accept the basic precepts of phenomenology and explain how a living system can develop such a quality.
To do this he is bringing together a number of powerful ideas that have rarely been applied together Cybernetics, Free Energy Principle FEP, and Integrated Information Theory IIT.
 

Cybernetics was popular during the midth century as the science of control but lost its glamor as traditional computer science and information theory grabbed center stage.
On a personal note, I got interested in AI only after reading a brilliant book by W, Ross Ashby called "A Design for a Brain", and later did my Ph, D. under a direct student of Ashby, Cybernetics shows how a complex system, like any living being, can maintain certain essential variables, like body temperature, heart rate, etc, within a tight boundary.

Free Energy Principle applies basic ideas of thermodynamics and entropy to explain how a living system can take action to maintain itself in a low entropy state they expect to be in.
The author uses this mathematically rich theory to connect to his idea of what he calls controlled hallucinations, Here he claims that all living systems encounter a wide array of possible scenarios through their sensory mechanisms, and then apply Bayesian techniques to actually perceive the most likely version of these hallucinations.
Incidentally, I remember reading a book by Terence Deacon called Incomplete Nature where he was also bringing in the notion of entropy and thermodynamics to understand the emergence of Consciousness.


Integrated Information Theory is also mathematically rich and defines a measure of consciousness based on how such a system is more than the sum of its parts.
To have a high value of this quantity, the system as a whole must have high information that is rule out a large number of possible goal states, but it must also have the property that the sum of information of its constituent parts must be less than the information as a whole.


The author has been able to integrate these three areas of research to come up with a plausible theory of Consciousness, If he is correct then only living things that try to control a huge set of parameters to keep them in a narrow band, and do it at every level of its structure including at the cellular level can experience what we call consciousness.
That does not preclude machines to have intelligence, as he is separating the two, In this approach, something can be intelligent without having subjective consciousness, It also does not rule out the possibility of a machine that is designed like a living entity, that tries to control a large number of internal essential variables, may develop intelligence.
It just says that a very complex intelligent machine will not automatically develop consciousness, even though it may fake it perfectly well,

I think it is a mustread for anyone interested in Consciousness, One may or may not agree with what he is saying, but there is no doubt it is a significant milestone in this field of research, However, one word of caution even though it is written for layperson readership, it may be a little difficult to follow unless the reader is somewhat familiar with this area of research.


I revisited this review after reading David Chalmers book on Consciousness, Wonder what was his reaction to this book, Will he continue to say that anyone who do not completely agree with his duality view is not taking consciousness “seriously”,