Anil Seth: How your brain invents your "self" | TED

Who am I? Who is anyone, really?

In this section, the speaker explores the concept of selfhood and how our perception of ourselves and the world may differ from reality.

The Mundane Experience of Selfhood

• Our experience of selfhood often goes unnoticed as it seems like an enduring and unified entity.

• We perceive ourselves as the recipients of perceptions and decision-makers in our actions.

• However, this experience of selfhood is mundane and happens without us noticing.

The Illusion of Self

• The self is not a separate entity that perceives but rather a collection of related perceptions.

• Our experiences of self and the world are controlled hallucinations created by the brain.

• These hallucinations are brain-based best guesses tied to survival rather than accuracy.

Perception and Reality

• Sensory signals are ambiguous and uncertain reflections of the real world.

• Our perceptual world is created by the brain through inference and best guessing processes.

• Colors, like red, do not exist in the external world but are interpretations made by our brains based on sensory signals.

Perceptual Experience as Controlled Hallucination

• Perceptual experience can be seen as a controlled hallucination where the brain continuously generates predictions about sensory signals.

• Sensory signals serve as prediction errors that report differences between predictions and actual sensory input.

• Perceptual experience requires both the external world and a functioning brain.

The Brain's Best Guess

This section delves deeper into how our brains make predictions about sensory input to create our perceptual experiences.

Predictive Processing

• The brain engages in predictive processing to generate expectations about sensory input based on past experiences.

• These predictions help interpret sensory signals and create our perceptual experiences.

Color Perception

• Colors are generated by tracking regularities in how objects and surfaces reflect light.

• The brain makes top-down predictions about the causes of sensory signals, resulting in our experience of color.

Red as a Brain-Generated Experience

• The experience of redness requires both the external world and a functioning brain.

• Nothing in the brain is actually red; it is the brain's interpretation of sensory signals that gives rise to the experience of red.

Perceptual Experience as a Meeting Point

• Color perception, like other perceptual experiences, can be seen as the meeting point between the brain and the external world.

• Our perceptual experiences are controlled hallucinations based on predictions made by our brains.

Conclusion

In this section, the speaker concludes by summarizing how our perceptual experiences are constructed by our brains through predictive processing.

Controlled Hallucination

• Perceptual experience is a controlled hallucination created by our brains.

• Our brains continuously generate predictions about sensory input to create our perceptual reality.

Perception vs. Reality

• Our perception of ourselves and the world may differ from objective reality.

• Understanding how our brains construct perceptual experiences helps us appreciate their complexity and fallibility.

Perception and the Experience of Self

In this section, Anil Seth discusses perception as an active construction process and emphasizes the role of controlled hallucination. He explains that our experiences are not arbitrary and that our perceptual predictions shape our conscious experience. He also explores the concept of selfhood and how it is a controlled hallucination related to regulating and controlling the body.

Perception as Active Construction

• Perception is not a passive process but an active construction.

• It is an inside-out, top-down neuronal fantasy yoked to reality through prediction and prediction error.

• Controlled hallucination is used to describe this process.

Continuity between Normal Perception and Hallucination

• All experiences are active constructions arising from within.

• There is continuity between normal perception and what we typically call hallucination.

• Control is just as important as hallucination in normal perception.

Perceptual Experiences Are Not Arbitrary

• Our perceptual experiences are not arbitrary; the mind doesn't make up reality.

• Physical things exist in the world whether we perceive them or not, but their appearance in conscious experience is a construction by the brain.

Personalized Inner Universe

• Each individual inhabits their own distinctive, personalized inner universe due to differences in brains.

The Experience of Being a Self

• The experience of being a self is also a controlled hallucination focused on regulating and controlling the body.

Different Aspects of Selfhood

• Experiences of being a continuous person over time with memories shaped by social and cultural environments.

• Experiences of free will, perceiving from a first-person perspective, identifying with one's body, emotions, mood, and simply being alive.

Perceptual Predictions of Selfhood

• All aspects of being a self are perceptual predictions.

• The most basic aspect is the part of perception that regulates the interior of the body to keep us alive.

Consciousness and Mechanisms

• The question of how billions of neurons give rise to consciousness is a complex mystery.

• Consciousness is synonymous with experience.

• Explaining conscious experiences in terms of mechanisms seems challenging, but there is still much to learn.

Understanding Consciousness

• Different properties of consciousness can be characterized, such as perceptual experiences and experiences of self.

• Conscious experiences are deeply rooted in our nature as living beings.

Who Are You?

• Our experiences of the world and ourselves are shaped by our living bodies.

The Mystery of Consciousness

In this section, Anil Seth explores the challenge of understanding how physical mechanisms generate conscious experience. He discusses the "hard problem" and presents two approaches to approaching this mystery.

The Hard Problem

• Conscious experiences seem difficult to explain solely based on physical mechanisms.

• This intuition is known as "the hard problem."

Approaching the Mystery

• There are two ways to approach the mystery:

• Understanding what it is about a physical mechanism that can generate any conscious experience.

• Characterizing different properties of consciousness, such as perceptual experiences and experiences of self.

Predictive Processing and Anesthesia

In this section, the speaker discusses the concept of predictive processing and its role in our perceptual experience. They also explore the phenomenon of anesthesia and how it affects consciousness.

Predictive Processing

• The brain encodes a predictive generative model of the causes of signals from the world, which shapes our perceptual experience.

• The hard problem of how neurons generate conscious experience may be dissolved rather than directly solved through explanations like predictive processing.

• Predictive processing suggests that consciousness is not a separate entity but emerges from the brain's predictions about the world.

Anesthesia and Consciousness

• Anesthesia is considered one of humanity's greatest inventions as it can switch off consciousness within seconds.

• Anesthetics act on different molecules and receptors in the brain, leading to functional disconnection between brain areas and a loss of consciousness.

• Under general anesthesia, individuals are not simply asleep but experience an oblivion comparable to before birth or after death.

• The precise mechanisms by which anesthetics cause functional disconnection and loss of consciousness are still being studied.

Perception and Individual Experience

This section explores perception and individual experiences, including whether we all perceive reality in similar ways.

Perception as Mind-dependent

• Certain aspects of perception, such as solidity, are mind-independent, while others, like color perception, depend on individual minds.

• There is debate about whether individuals perceive colors exactly the same way or if there are differences due to subjective experiences.

• Language plays a role in shaping our perceptions by filtering them through linguistic categories and concepts.

Individual Differences in Perception

• Our perceptual worlds may not be as similar as we assume, with variations in how we perceive colors and other sensory experiences.

• The famous dress illusion highlighted the differences in perception, with some perceiving it as blue and black while others saw it as white and gold.

• Our perceptual universes may diverge more than we realize, but language can also influence our perceptions by providing labels and categories for our experiences.

New Section

In this section, the speaker discusses the concept of individual diversity in perception and introduces the topic of memory's involvement in self-perception.

How Memory is Involved in Perception of Self

• The speaker explains that there are different aspects of selfhood and various types of memory.

• Autobiographical or episodic memory, which includes memories related to personal experiences over time, plays a role in self-perception.

• The loss of autobiographical memory does not necessarily erase one's sense of self. An example is given of Clive Wearing, who lost his ability to form new autobiographical memories but still retained other aspects of his self.

• Semantic memory (knowledge about facts) and perceptual memory (how experiences shape future perceptions) also contribute to our sense of self.

• The process by which memories are chunked into meaningful episodes is an important question for understanding how the brain constructs our recollection of events.

New Section

In this section, the speaker emphasizes that humans are feeling machines rather than cognitive computers. They discuss the role of consciousness and perception in relation to survival and bodily regulation.

Humans as Feeling Machines

• The speaker argues that humans are feeling machines rather than cognitive computers.

• Vision has often been considered crucial for understanding consciousness, but the fundamental purpose of brains is to regulate and predict outcomes for survival.

• Brains evolved to keep organisms alive by constantly adapting to physiological needs.

• Perception, including self-perception, arises from the brain's prediction and error correction processes linked to bodily physiology.

Please note that these summaries are based on limited portions of the transcript provided.