Anil Seth
Anil Seth
Neuroscience of Consciousness
We are part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature.
Human consciousness is just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.
We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality".
Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.