Being You
by Anil Seth · first published 2021
89% recommend11% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Accessible overview of current consciousness science, including predictive processing and the controlled hallucination idea; a clear primer for readers with little neuroscience background who want the main theories.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Being You by Anil Seth explores his theory of consciousness and the self. Seth proposes that perception does not happen outside-in, with external physical signals being detected and processed to constitute our view of the world, but rather inside-out, with the brain constantly generating predictions of sensory inputs and only registering surprises. According to Seth, consciousness arises from the brain's "predictive processing" of the world, whereby it constantly generates hypotheses about the causes of its own sensory inputs. Our sense of self and subjective experience emerge from the brai
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…near-identical subsystems called "cortical columns." It's geared toward people who have little background in neuroscience. You might also follow up with Anil Seth's "controlled hallucination" theory in Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. If you prefer to pay for this knowledge with just time rather than also money, on YouTube there are three videos from Numenta that cover Jeff's book, and then there's…
on “Myths about the brain” ↗The Enlightenment - The Pursuit of Happiness by Ritchie Robertson (2020). Long but worth indulging in if you enjoy intellectual history. Being You - A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth (2021). A clear and readable account of approaches to dissolving the hard problem of consciousness. Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper (1945). Plato,…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...)…
on “What Is a Mathematical Structure of Conscious Experience?” ↗…from' or 'arises'. This article did play fast and loose with terminology. I'd suggest reading up on Schopenhauer and Phenomenology, for historical background, and then for modern neuroscience, "Being You" by Anil Seth. They try to get at same thing, our 'subjective' experience is just how our brain interpret inputs, and with meditation you can grow the ability to observer how the brain reacts. But…
on “Head-Trapped – Descartes, Dawkins, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, Darwin” ↗Just finished Being You by Anil Seth and The experience machine by Andy Clark. Both great popular science book on current neuroscience and consciousness research.
on “Ask HN: What are you reading these days?” ↗…from events they won't report having been aware of. We don't have a solid or consensus theory about consciousness, but the idea that we've just made no progress is untrue. Some books I recommend are Being You by Anil Seth from 2021 or Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene from 2014z
on “Consciousness and being: How humans and AI influence each other” ↗I'll also recommend Being You by Seth Anil. It makes a lot of sense of consciousness to me. It certainly doesn't answer the question but it's not just throw your hands up and "we have no idea why qualia", and it's also not just "here's…
on “Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds” ↗I would highly recommend listening to Anil Seth or reading his book "Being You". He is also highly critical of dualism and panpsychism, and justifiably so. As one of the leading researchers on consciousness, I'm surprised he's not mentioned at all in this. He is extremely fascinated…
on “Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?” ↗"Being You" by Anil Seth, released last month, is a great primer on predictive processing and its relationship to the science of consciousness. Its a great complement to Hawkins' latest. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2J9WWD
on “To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions” ↗In the book "Being You" Anil Seth. It does postulate that we make up consciousness. The brain is trying to 'predict' the next sensory input, and that prediction is our awareness. What we would call our 'conscious self'.…
on “Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind” ↗…processing of the sensory inputs and the internal model. So the 'phenomena' is really the processing of the inputs, no substance at all because it is the processing itself. Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth. Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I don't like the terminology because it is to easily misunderstood. But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how Phenomena…
on “Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it” ↗Anil Seth recently wrote a book "Being You", which very much states that we can only know what it is like to be ourselves. Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat. His theory that our perception is a…
on “What is it like to be a bat?” ↗…neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.…
on “Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels” ↗