Does Your Brain Hallucinate Conscious Reality? - Anil Seth - #649

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and an author.

What is the Self? What does it mean that we are the same person we were 10 years ago? Why do we have a subjective experience of reality at all? Is consciousness created or perceived? These are fundamental questions that philosophers and neuroscientists have been trying to answer for centuries. So can a new science of consciousness give us the answers?

Expect to learn why answering the problem of consciousness is such a difficult challenge, why you wake up as the same person everyday, whether we know for a fact that animals are conscious, why perception often is divorced from objective reality, just how reliable our memories are, how to trust your brain even when it's incredibly fallible and much more...

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:28) The Real Problem of Consciousness

(04:39) Why is the Self Rooted in Consciousness?

(13:10) Thought Experiments to Understand Consciousness

(19:39) Are We Experiencing a Controlled Hallucination?

(22:40) Looking at Perception Through an Evolutionary Lens

(32:29) Studying How to Alter the Predictive Brain

(41:17) Where Does Consciousness Arise?

(45:38) Testing the Consciousness of Lower Animals

(49:36) The Most Common Definitions of Consciousness

(59:10) The Challenge of Testing the Internal Processes of Animals

(1:05:32) Anil’s Experience with LSD

(1:11:04) How Anil’s Studies Have Impacted His Outlook

(1:15:58) Where to Find Anil

Extra Stuff:

Check out The Perception Census - https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world/

Read Being You - https://amzn.to/3ppLiIj

Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/

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