E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination

**Anil Seth** (0:00)
We open our eyes, and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just objectively out there, the colors, the shapes, the people. It's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds, but that's a very misleading view. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world. What we perceive as the brain's best guess.

**André Duqum** (0:20)
A controlled hallucination.

**Anil Seth** (0:21)
Yeah, I mean, none of us see things as they really are. Just as color seems to be revealing the future of the world, the self seems to be revealing some persistent, unchanging essence of me. That's just not the way it is.

**André Duqum** (0:35)
I want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. What is it about AI that's incompatible with having a conscious experience?

**Anil Seth** (0:40)
We're going to talk about that, but firstly, the question I really want to understand, is consciousness really tied to life or not? I spoke to my mother about death. She knew it was coming, but she couldn't imagine not existing.
What dies? The honest answer is, there's wonder in awe in the simplest of experiences of opening your eyes and a world appearing which should celebrate the everyday miracle of being conscious.

**André Duqum** (1:19)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He's one of the world's leading voices and researchers on consciousness. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because of the wide range of topics that we can dive into with nuance from the self to reality and consciousness and perception. Anil Seth, thank you for being here.

**Anil Seth** (1:45)
Thank you, André. It's a great pleasure.

**André Duqum** (1:47)
I'd like to start by what you say is that we don't passively perceive the world. We actively generate it.
For somebody that's just tuning in to this episode, what does the weight of that statement mean?

**Anil Seth** (2:01)
It means a lot to me anyway. I think it's initially very counterintuitive. We open our eyes and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just objectively out there with all its properties, the colors and shapes and objects and people and places. And it's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds through our eyes and our ears and our other senses. And we just see things, perceive things, hear things as they really are. But that's, I think, a very misleading view of actually how perception works, actually how our experiences of the world and the self are constructed.
Closer to the truth, I think, is that our brains are always actively interpreting the signals that come in to our senses, and not just a slightly nuance will change them. But think about it this way. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world, the reds, the greens, the oranges and so on. There is light, there's electromagnetic radiation, but that in itself doesn't have color, just has wavelength. And our eyes, the cells in our eyes, are sensitive to only three of these wavelengths. And they're short, medium and long. We tend to call them red, green and blue, but they're not, they're just short, medium and long. And out of those three wavelengths, our brains somehow construct millions of different colors that we experience that give our lives texture and meaning and beauty.
And so in some sense, when we experience color, we see both less than what's really there, because we only experience or we're only sensitive to three wavelengths of light. But our experience is also more than what's really there, because we can experience millions of different colors, not just three. And what holds for color, I think holds for everything else. The world that we experience comes just as much, if not more, from the inside out than from the outside in.

**André Duqum** (4:10)
So what's the actual mechanism? You know, if I take a glance at this cup right here, it looks like I am perceiving this cup, which is, I mean, is held in my hand, it's out there.
How am I actually generating this? Because we perceive that it's out there, this world appears when we open our eyes. What does it mean that we're actively generating?

**Anil Seth** (4:30)
This is the nuts and bolts that actually, I mean, this idea of perception being an act of construction is very old, you know, it goes back in philosophy, in Western philosophy is at least Emmanuel Kant, he talks about these ideas and they've evolved and developed slowly and these days, it is really about nailing down the mechanisms, what's happening inside our brains. And the idea that me and my colleagues, we work on is to think of the brain as a kind of prediction machine. So there are lots of connections coming from the eyes that go into the brain, but there are also many connections going in the other direction from the brain back out towards the senses, the eyes and the ears.