Being You Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Being You

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Zusammenfassung von Being You

Name: Being You
Rating: 4.2 (451 reviews)
Author: Anil Seth

Anil Seth

A New Science of Consciousness

4.2 (451 Bewertungen)

25 Min.

Themen

Menschsein Kritisches Denken & Problemlösen Neurowissenschaft Das Gehirn Der Körper

Inhaltsübersicht

Being You
in 8 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 8

What’s in it for me? Unravel the mystery of consciousness.

Imagine you had the opportunity to replace your brain with an identical, but mechanical, one. The replica would work exactly like your brain – you’d still behave, think, and dream the same way you do now. Oh, and you’d also be immortal. Would you take the deal?

Probably not. Each of us has a distinct feeling of what it means to be ourselves: we’re self-aware. Somehow, this feeling of consciousness is connected to our flesh-and-blood bodies. Could you really be sure that the machine brain would feel like “you”?

These blinks delve into neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to explore what it means to be you – and present a new theory of consciousness that will make you question everything you thought you knew.

During this ride, you’ll learn

how scientists measure consciousness;
why all your experiences are hallucinations; and
why pigs ended up in court in the Middle Ages.

We can’t solve the hard problem of consciousness, but we can dissolve it into real problems.

What does it feel like to be a bat?

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a famous essay asking just this question. Nagel wasn’t really interested in bats – his interest was in the nature of consciousness. He argued that for every conscious organism – a bat, for example – being alive feels like something. This may seem obvious now, but it wasn’t back then. Many scientists at the time were still confusing consciousness with intelligence, language, or other human-like characteristics.

Today, most agree with Nagel. Consciousness is its own, unique thing; and all living beings share it to some degree. Even more, it has a certain subjective “flavor” to it. But there’s one big question that remains: Why does it even exist?

This question is known as the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Here’s the gist of this blink: We can’t solve the hard problem of consciousness, but we can dissolve it into real problems.

Many scientists believe that the hard problem of consciousness is virtually impossible to solve. Think about it: Even if they knew all the biological mechanisms that give rise to your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, they still couldn’t explain why they’re accompanied by this strange, ever-present feeling of “being you.”

After all, you could easily imagine a “zombie” version of yourself that walks, talks, and acts exactly like you – but that has no inner life.

Consciousness seems like some kind of secret special sauce the universe added to all living beings.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t find out what the ingredients are. Science already has many tools and theories to explain different conscious experiences – we just need to put it all together.

Sound lofty? Well, science has done it before. Before the twentieth century, the biological property of life was just as mysterious as consciousness. The philosophy of vitalism proposed that there was some special, supernatural energy present in all living beings. But as biology progressed, and scientists began studying extreme cases like single-celled organisms and viruses, they started to understand that “being alive” wasn’t some mysterious all-or-nothing property. It was more like a scalable collection of different biological processes.

So, while we might not be able to solve the hard problem of consciousness outright, we might be able to dissolve it—by studying different aspects of consciousness. The author calls those the “real problems” of consciousness. For example, we could study how activity in the visual cortex gives rise to the experience of seeing something dark red versus seeing something light red.

The more we can explain about how physical patterns in the brain correspond to conscious experiences, the less mysterious consciousness will become.

There are different levels of consciousness, and scientists are close to measuring them accurately.

Consciousness is a complex thing. Like being alive, being conscious is probably not a singular property, but many biological processes taken together. That means that if we really want to understand consciousness, we’ll have to look at it from a lot of different angles.

In these blinks, we’ll start with the different levels of consciousness, then we’ll look at the contents of consciousness, and finally, we’ll investigate our self-consciousness.

IIT makes the compelling case that consciousness is simply integrated information.

We’ve made a pretty good case that there are different levels of consciousness, and that those levels can even be measured. But we still don’t know what consciousness really is.

Modern science offers a few different theories. One of the most compelling ones is called Integrated Information Theory, or IIT. It comes from the scientist duo Tononi and Edelman, who proposed that the fundamental characteristic of conscious experience is that it’s both informative and integrated.

The contents of our consciousness are simply our brains’ controlled hallucinations.

What if we told you that you’re hallucinating all the time?

This theory is actually not as crazy as it sounds. In this blink, we'll turn to a second aspect of consciousness: content. And we’ll discover that what we consciously experience as real is just our brain’s best guess at reality.

Our brains are Bayesian prediction machines, using prior beliefs to make best guesses about the world.

So the world we perceive is just a controlled hallucination of our brain, based on best guesses. But how does our brain make those guesses?

Let's look at a bit of mathematical logic to explain this.

Your sense of self is the product of many controlled hallucinations working together.

Now we turn to the third and final component of consciousness: our self-perception. Just as Thomas Nagel suggested in his essay, being you feels like something. So does that mean that there's an actual self, some immaterial soul, hidden deep inside of you? Well, not really.

Your sense of self is just another controlled hallucination of your brains. And it’s actually not a single sensation – it’s made up of many different aspects.

Consciousness is a natural function of our animal bodies.

In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes argued that all living creatures are “beast-machines.” Humans, however, are the only beast-machines equipped with a divine, immaterial soul.

Descartes was at least partially right: the human body does work a bit like a machine. But we don’t need an immaterial soul to explain why we’re conscious. Our consciousness is an intrinsic part of our living, breathing body-machine. We experience the world with, through, and because of our living bodies – not in spite of them.

All living beings are conscious to some degree, and it’s likely that consciousness depends on biological processes.

A few centuries ago, it wasn’t all that uncommon for unruly animals to end up in court. Pigs were executed for murdering children, eating holy biscuits, or abetting a crime – by grunting in approval.

Today, the idea of dragging a pig to court seems ridiculous. But so does Descartes’ idea that animals are just “beast machines” with no internal world.

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Worum geht es in Being You?

Being You (2021) offers a new theory of consciousness. What does it mean to be you? Why do your experiences of the world, your selfhood, and your body feel the way they do? Combining neuroscience, philosophy, and a pinch of speculation, these blinks argue that consciousness is not as mysterious as it seems – it is deeply entwined with our living, breathing bodies.

Wer Being You lesen sollte

Science enthusiasts interested in the mystery of consciousness
The philosophically inclined
Fans and critics of Artificial Intelligence

Über den Autor

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist and author. He’s a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he also codirects the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.

Kategorien mit Being You

Philosophie Wissenschaft Psychologie

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