Is Reality Just A Hallucination In The Brain? - Anil Seth
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- čas přidán 8. 07. 2024
- Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and an author.
What is the Self? What does it mean that we are the same person we were 10 years ago? Why do we have a subjective experience of reality at all? Is consciousness created or perceived? These are fundamental questions that philosophers and neuroscientists have been trying to answer for centuries. So can a new science of consciousness give us the answers?
Expect to learn why answering the problem of consciousness is such a difficult challenge, why you wake up as the same person everyday, whether we know for a fact that animals are conscious, why perception often is divorced from objective reality, just how reliable our memories are, how to trust your brain even when it's incredibly fallible and much more...
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#consciousness #self #psychology
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00:00 Intro
00:28 The Real Problem of Consciousness
04:39 Why is the Self Rooted in Consciousness?
13:10 Thought Experiments to Understand Consciousness
19:39 Are We Experiencing a Controlled Hallucination?
22:40 Looking at Perception Through an Evolutionary Lens
32:29 Studying How to Alter the Predictive Brain
41:17 Where Does Consciousness Arise?
45:38 Testing the Consciousness of Lower Animals
49:36 The Most Common Definitions of Consciousness
59:10 The Challenge of Testing the Internal Processes of Animals
1:05:32 Anil’s Experience with LSD
1:11:04 How Anil’s Studies Have Impacted His Outlook
1:15:58 Where to Find Anil
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Hello you beauties. Access all episodes 10 hours earlier than CZcams by Subscribing on Spotify - spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - apple.co/2MNqIgw. Here’s the timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:28 The Real Problem of Consciousness
04:39 Why is the Self Rooted in Consciousness?
13:10 Thought Experiments to Understand Consciousness
19:39 Are We Experiencing a Controlled Hallucination?
22:40 Looking at Perception Through an Evolutionary Lens
32:29 Studying How to Alter the Predictive Brain
41:17 Where Does Consciousness Arise?
45:38 Testing the Consciousness of Lower Animals
49:36 The Most Common Definitions of Consciousness
59:10 The Challenge of Testing the Internal Processes of Animals
1:05:32 Anil’s Experience with LSD
1:11:04 How Anil’s Studies Have Impacted His Outlook
1:15:58 Where to Find Anil
Ex materialist here: i use to say if i ever saw a ghost I would believe i'm going crazy rather than believe the ghost is real.
My friend once said, but what it we both saw the ghost? To which i replied, then i would have to take things more seriously. Fast forward a few years and me and a friend are doing lsd together and experiencing at the very least a convincing illusion of telepathy.
I think Anil Seth needs to continue his psychedelic explorations in group settings and see if he still has the same beliefs
FINALLY someone has brought Trigger’s broom into the philosophical debate on personal identity 😂 I’ve been waiting 15 years for that, so thank you, Chris 🙇🏻♂️
"Brain is the most important organ" says the Brain.
So full of itself, that brain
It's secretly the appendix
A beautiful skeleton is the most valuable attribute you may have
There is no way you could possibly know any different.
That's deep
"Contrary to what everyone knows is so, it may not be the brain that produces consciousness -- but rather, consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain..."
Damnnnnn bruh!!! So everything we know about brain is also just a projection of consciousness. I don't know what to believe anymore lol.😂
Commenting for the algo but also to say this was worth the wait. Very thoughtful and provoking questions.
The fact that I can feel pain and pleasure, along with joy and sadness in my dreams. Basically every emotion in real life has been felt when I dream.
.
We operate in conscious reality, not base reality.
The Ship of Theseus idea, and understanding how our "self" is the pattern we're arranged in, and not the cells themselves, opened me back up to ideas I used to think of as magical, like true resurrection, from dry bones, from dust, from nothing at all. Whatever brought the universe into being, it brought me into being, and it could do again. It would be no greater a miracle to create me again from nothing than it was the first time I came from nothing.
You ARE the universe! A microcosm of the macrocosm.
May I suggest to you Advaita Vedanta and since you are a fan of the ship of Theseus thought experiment I'd recommend searching the clay pot/gold necklace metaphor which is a very common teaching in Advaita
18:00 Mauler did a breakdown of a game called Soma on his channel, much of the game revolved around questions of identity and what the consequences would be it were possible to copy the mind from the brain to something else which would allow that mind to continue to function - "after a fashion" - it is a horror game...
If my life is someone's idea of a game, i'm gonna have a good talk with this fella.
I always wondered since I was a kid if people see the world as I see it. Like how do we know that the colour red looks the same to me as it does to someone else. Fascinating
As a child I had the exact same thought very often!
Same here!!!
I think it does unless you have a color disability, since we have figured out people who are color blind and who are not, etc.
@@scholaroftheworldalternatehistthat doesn’t matter in this argument really as well color blindness is having problems seeing a color seperately
The question here is your separate red my red or some other one
Same, as long as it's seen on some relative scale I would imagine. RGB scaling
I listened for a long time before subscribing to the newsletter, and boy was I missing out. Best email of the whole week, thank you!
16:10 this whole discussion is practically describing the story of the video game SOMA.
The trouble with experts in this area is that they tend to just redescribe the traditional problems of philosophy of mind in scientific jargon, add a lot of descriptive detail of the nature of the problem and then pretend that they’ve solved them, when in fact they’re just conducting an elaborate bait and switch.
This guy sounds kinda like John Vervaeke. I also speculate that experience occurs from the inside out.
Very cool. I am really enjoying this episode.
16:00 That transporter thought experiment has been extensively explored in Star Trek.
Imhotep makes some good points. I hope he can avoid the flesh-eating scarabs this time around
Brilliant as Always Chris, also congrats on 1 mil which you gonna hit anytime!
It is interesting to hear how science defines the self when eastern philosophy has been thinking about it for thousands of years. The sevenfold constitution, for example, has the elements of personality (persona, the mask) which are physical, energetical, emotional and mental and then the higher mind. All of these are interconnected, all must be fed. All change over time, but still remain interconnected. The idea that greatly differs from science is that in ancient Greece, for example, Plato speaks of the concept of emanation which says, in a nutshell, that what's out there (exoteric) is not what's real. What's inside (esoteric) is, according to universal archetypes (beauty, truth, justice, the good) because, among other reasons, we can recognise these in ourselves and in the world without being taught and also because the external world keeps changing, whereas these archetypes do not.
It's a fascinating discussion but, being honest, I do not think the self is something that can be defined scientifically. I also do not think it is localised to the brain. Scientists have found neurons in the digestive system and the heart which "think" just like the brain does. And it's not a coincidence that the heart was seen as the central or thinking organ in many ancient cultures.
Food for thought!
this is very interesting, thankyou Chris
Everyone should read his book on consciousness, it will blow your mind!
Read “critique of pure reasoning” by Immanuel Kant. Will surely blow your mind
What an amazing podcast
there's just so much to learn and analyze and go back over in this interview; it's incredibly deep material!
but here, i've always understood that our perception is not THE reality, as if it was creating the reality that is there, but rather that we perceive and interpret the actual reality that we experience.
for instance, at 25:40, professor talks about color not really existing, but the truth is, color is a function of light absorption and reflection as it passes through another medium; it is a real property of physical objects, not simply an abstract thought our brains produce for the fun of it. i'm not sure if i misunderstand him, or if my level of education isn't sufficient in this case?
I'm so glad you mentioned "triggers broom" I think about that everytime someone mentions the 7 cells or planks of wood on a boat 😂😂
Consciousness is fundamental
Concur - we need to add consciousness to our ontology as an unreduced feature of reality, like gravity, electromagnetism or the photon
Thanks!
Very interesting discussion. If we put in more quarters will we learn more?
Love to see you have Rupert spira back again...speaking from first hand experience...it's a mind shift though
30:00 "Chris Frith has made the case..." that our insight into our own sense of self was dependent on predicting the mental states and actions of others. Seth then thinks that this goes too far, because we have to initially make predictions about our own bodies' states, even without others. I think Helen Fisher is right: there are a range of brain types that range between both more and less "introspective/individualist/referencing objects" vs. "other-inspired/collectivist/referencing minds" in _both_ of the prior directions, and that this (plus idea creation and permutations of novel ideas or "software") creates the different psychologies we see in the world today.
I'm 8 minutes in but this guy is a great guest with 'worthwhile' insight, jaja. No really, it's not what you think it is and all IS illusion. We create the world even as it is given to us. Who are we in the context of infinite time. You can't break it down, and our minds demand that we try.
28:00 minutes in and enjoying it. I'm a big fan of Yoga philosophy and believe that in that tradition most of this stuff was worked out a long time ago, in part that our minds just show us what the mind wants to for it's own purposes. Interesting guest.
31:00 *Really interesting* explanation of this stuff from an evolutionary perspective, our minds aren't about reality, they are about keeping us alive in the way they see fit.
19:42 This fragment is the essence of the idea. Until 22:40
I always liked psychedelics because of 2 specific things.
1) Your perception of reality is very noticeably different.
2) The sense of connection. Less selfishness, but more feeling like we are all connected.
That second thing was always of interest to me.
It implies something unifies us all.
And that unity feels good.
It is a strange thing. Is it the Earth's way of letting us know we are loved?
Is it God?
I don't know for sure, but I know I experience that sensation and it is as real to me as pain.
That was always a mystery to me.
Always trying to find way for instant gratification ! The west will never get over it. Meditation is the only way - ask the yogis, rishis who has been doing this for ages even before the word "psychedelics" was even born.
@@arya7592our dogmatic position clouds your ability to see clearly.
Do you mean the yogis that smoke chillum to alter their consciousness?
What about the “soma” mentioned in the Rig Veda? Go ahead and read the hymns of chapter 9. Those are written explicitly to a consciousness-altering substance. Sound familiar?
“We have drunk Soma and become immortal;
We have attained the light, the Gods discovered.
Now what harm may foeman’s malice do to harm us?
What, O immortal, mortal man’s deception?” - The Rig Veda 8.48.3
Altering consciousness is at the foundation of all mystical traditions, regardless of the “how.” Of course, psychedelics offer a glimpse of a consistent state of consciousness that the yogis and mystics are surrendering in to. Let’s not create arbitrary rules about what’s allowed and what’s not. Many people set out on their meditative journey because of a psychedelic experience. ❤✌️
Get you a few tabs of LSD and paired with Pink Floyd and you'll get a fast track of an out body /mind experience 🔥
Where can I get
When I took LSD, I hallucinated that I was Homer in the episode in which he got high off Weed 🤣
A very interesting discussion! I think people today have become more machine like than ever before, mostly as a consequence of modern technology. I really hope psychedelics are re-introduced into society soon as I believe they are a conduit back to truth (among many other human experiences that we can have).
Another masterpiece from Chris!
13:06 - Okay, earned my like.
The Perception Census is pretty cool.
Regarding the 36m mark on split-brain experiments, Ian McGilchrist ("Divided Brain") and VS Ramachandran ("Secrets of the Mind") suggest that the age-old idea that left is the analytical side, and the right is the creative.. is somewhat of a myth. Would love to hear Anil's take on it!
I had a dream last night that terrified me so much that I think I woke up screaming. I was so disturbed that i couldn't sleep the rest of the night. I got goosebumps at the thought of what happened for at least an hour after. I don't even remember for sure that I woke up screaming - all I have left is a strange blur of memory but my sore vocal cords tells me that it probably happened. I have never sleep walked and i don't talk in my sleep. My dreams have almost always been light hearted and happy. But nothing has ever terrified me so much in my life as whatever I woke up from last night. All I remember is some large beast grabbed me and I was powerless to fight back. I was completely convinced I was about to die. I never thought such terror would be my reaction to the likelihood of death but now I guess I know. It really makes me wonder what all of our reality really is.
Last night I had a series of dreams. The last to second one was a demon choking me out. On top of my bed yelling to me not to move and let them take me to hell in like the most vile voice ever. I simply said no, it’s just sleep paralysis no demon here. Well they got angrier and angrier putting a fuck ton of pressure. until I managed to escape cuz I’m built different. I went straight back to sleep to have one of those dreams that make no sense.
.
I do believe learning to not let dreams shake your confidence is as equally important to not let bad life events shake your confidence either. We must obey reality, but we have full control over the perception of it.
Re the scanning people and recreating on mars thought experiment, I find it fascinating that even smart people do not seem to understand the difference between copying and moving things.
The original warning was that correlation is very often causality, but be aware that variables can correlate randomly.
"Fuck yeah!" You make me smile, Chris.
Interesting, at the age of 10 I asked my teacher are we real or is this a dream. Being 40 years on now and watching this; real is subjective not scientific and we are living our own dream. Funny also that the saying “living the dream” is so accurate. I also think all the old sayings “in two minds” “between minds” “my mind is spinning” accurately describe our consciousness/minds state. So glad this clip has come out
The sense of self question is something ive asked myself for a while
But a game that does this very well is a game called SOMA
(BEWARE OF SPOILERS)
to say it quickly
Your character finds out hes the only human left and other people have been put into robots but still think they are human
Later in the game you become cloned
You think you have been cloned seems better to say though
You find out it copys you and what your thinking
Your ... copyed self realises this and starts freaking out realising whats happend
And the new self is told its a thing that happens and hes going crazy ... trying to keep in your mind that your conscienceness went with you and you are the true you
..... its a pretty crazy game and horror based
But the questions it posed to me will stick with me for life
The problem with the hallucination theory is that you actually require a reality to compare the hallucination to, otherwise you can’t hallucinate. So there must exist a reality for a hallucination to exist within. If that is true then and we can’t have access to the reality because we live in our hallucination…then we might as well treat our hallucination as reality.
That’s a tongue twister 🤔
I don’t think Seth would disagree with you for practical purposes. But we can understand that fundamentally it’s not perfectly aligned.
I find this outlook to actually be quite hopeful. I always used to be very upset that I will never be able to understand base reality. But these days I'm just like, whatever man base reality has no sound, colour, feeling, emotion. Base reality sucks. The hallucination is where it's at. The hallucination is what I care about. It might not be real but it is the only thing that matters to me. That I care about. And I'd rather understand something that matters than something that's real and doesn't matter to me.
😂
Identical twin here, experience makes you very different although some physical inconsistencies must exist in the genetics as well
Ref: The Firesign Theatre - "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?"(1969 - Columbia Records))
It's a hallucination outside the brain. The brain is also being hallucinated by consciousness
I also think this is true but I also don't really know what it means lol. You have some overarching theory you subscribe to?
Trigger's broom was taken from Steptoe and Son who did the same joke decades before. Still British humour though.
Awareness is known by awareness alone.
Mind and matter can't be too fundamentally different if mind arises from matter. The trick is understanding the limits of mind and learning to expand those limits.
Maybe the mind IS the brain, no causality at all, neurology is just another way of observing the brain/mind. Psychology is another way of observing it.
@@bradmodd7856 again if mind is the brain and we all have the same 100 billion neurons, and the same 10,000 taste buds, why is it that I love anchovies why most people don’t? Why do I have a completely different subjective experience with anchovies? If your experience the same chemical and neural processes ?
@@Allenryan819 The difference in your example lies with the synapses. Those would connect your neurons in a way that is uniquely individual to you. Everyone takes in data and connects the dots (potentially) differently based on their experiences.
A lot can be explained by Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis. You should have Rupert Sheldrake on!
If you use Luke brown’s art. GIVE HIM CREDIT for it. Could also be Alex greys work
It’s Alex Grey.
Trekkies everywhere going berserk during the teleportation discussion, as this has been debated among their circles for decades..... teleporters technically kill the original and recreate an unknowing, brand new version at the destination....
The British Ship of Theseus is Terry Pratchett’s King of the Dwarves (Rhys Rhysson)’s Axe of my Grandfather
The more you learn about how shoddy our senses were created 😉the weirder your sense of reality gets, it's not quite a hallucination but to be honest it's not far from that either.
Who's movie is this? The perfect question
Why on Earth is consciousness a problem to begin with?
💜
Self is another conceptualization.
The paradox in saying:
Your brain hallucinates reality
Implies you have full knowledge of the reality of the brain. Thereby destroying the very argument that your brain hallucinates reality.
For your have to have full knowledge of the reality of your brain, to say it hallucinates
Thank you. I was wondering if anyone in this comments section knew what they were talking about.
What you say right there leads to many more interesting philosophical truths such as the idea of rebirth and, I believe, enlightenment when taken all the way to its logical conclusion
I hope Chris got permission from Alex Grey to use his artwork.
47:11 there's a 88.999% chance that vegans will take this portion and use it as their argument to not eat meat
ever heard of the game Soma? the game is exactly the concept that he describes. freaky as hell
If it's simply an illusion in the brain generated from the known senses how do the separate brains remained synchronized enough to agree sufficiently on reality for a coherent mutual world to emerge. That is simply not possible.
Brain is my second favourite organ.!
How do you differentiate between something recognizing itself in a mirror and it just not giving a shit?
I feel like that test is flawed in some fundamental way
Folks that like to link the self to “process”, by definition yoke the self to the temporal. Being requires self. Being is beyond the temporal, just ask a photon.
Then that makes the brain a product of hallucination too.
donated (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ)
🤯
Just think the way we describe the world around us determines our understanding of what we are. Weird
Stub your toe on the coffee table and reality quickly reveals itself.
I strangely thought something very similar about stubbing my shin on my coffee table.. then your comment flashed up on the comments section - synchronicity
😂
Did anyone get The Prestige movie vibes at any point while listening to this?
now that you said it I absolutely am. What a great movie
If the body is an antennae for consciousness, then if we understood how a specific consciousness is tuned to a given body, in theory ones consciousness could be transported to another body on Mars. And since a 25 year experiment has now shown that consciousness does not exist in any one, two, or twenty places in the brain, then how can one not consider that the body is merely an antennae and machine that houses a specific consciousness? The better and healthier the body, the better the consciousness can interface with the body, the better the consciousness can operate. This would be a completely reasonable posit in an Electric Universe Model.
It’s concerning that the consciousness needs an “antenna” to begin with though.
It implies without an antenna. It’s useless.
@@Xarkom89 That's not my interpretation. There are many reasons to believe everything we observe, all matter, is also made of consciousness. I would argue that everything is an antennae for consciousness. However, sentient biological beings may be the "lottery winners" in that they have the ability to use consciousness in ways that a rock cannot.
Focus on feeling pain is such a Buddhist thing to do. All creatures even single cell animals react to unwanted harmful stimulus. It doesn't prove they are conscious.
Intro changed!
Great mustache
Pretty sure I just listened to what my brain perceived as over an hour of gibberish
😂
@@user-ym1kp5np8k 😂
Octopus comes from Greek, Chris, not Latin. Plural would be Octopodes.
I've never been but I believe the wait-staff at these pitch black restaurants wear nightvision goggles.
GIANT MICROPHONE MOUNT
The copy on Mars is not you, the original has experienced a death event so no longer exists, the space-continum of the identity has been terminated
Oxygen: the most powerful hallucinogen in the universe. 🙃 Carbon and its 6 protons, 6 electrons & 6 neutrons: where did you think we were??
I believe that reality does exist, but we only know about it by taking in data from our senses and then, by mixing that with context, hallucinate a narrative to explain it. So the answer is technically yes, but don't go slipping into solipsism and jump into a volcano.
I JUST learned last night from a friend's social media post that there are people (more than a few, from the responses to her post) who FEEL their brain working when they think.
She can apparently feel blood flow things happening when she focuses her thoughts or engages in certain kinds of thinking. And can also feel those movements inside her skull to predict the onset of migraine headaches.
It sounded unreal to me except a bunch of her other friends confirmed this is NOT unique to her.
I'm blown away.
I've never felt my hardware grinding while my brain is processing reality.
We are created in the image of God. Male and female He created them
❤
Life is not a dream.
Water is consciousness. All life processes/metabolism/perception of anything is happening in water. It’s fairly obvious. That’s what my channel is about.
Water appears in consciousness, therefore this makes no sense.
@@brandonross9345 all your perceptions, the stuff related to the nerve impulses and metabolism, are in water. Literally inside the body water. So you know everything you are perceiving right now is a pattern you are seeing and that pattern is located in water. You see water in your perceptions, but the activity leading to the perception of water is in water. We know this from dissecting and testing the body.
@@Aquaticphilosophia let’s grant you that premise, then it’s still IN water and not water itself 🤷♂️
@@brandonross9345 the water is actually awareness. The water is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Awareness is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Water is awareness. Water is surrounding all of your perceptions right now. That is what they call the firmament. That is the water which is containing the perception you have of the sky, earth, body, etc. your body water surrounds and contains all of your perceptions. It is possible to notice this directly, but it is not itself a perception, so you experience it in a weird ‘location’ if you can notice it. An obsession with the utility of perception often makes it seem worthless.
“Is reality just a hallucination?” No. This title is clickbait.
You either didn’t watch the video or don’t understand what is being said
read kant bro
Couldn't we just have two of us, one on mars and one here?
Would be funny if Alex Grey sued Chris 😂
Why would that be funny 🤔
15:30
Is THIS what GOD is?
There's no way the primary concern of consciousness is survival. I just don't buy that. Survival seems like the means to an end, not the end itself.
There is a difference between the brain that is matter and the mind that is spirit therefore GOD created the body out of dust/ matter than put our spirit into them which resulted in consciousness/ mind so now you know
This makes no sense how can you compare what is a hallucination to reality? When supposedly all our perceptions, is a hallucination, where is the contrast to make such a distinction for such a claim ? We would need to know what reality is to make such a Distinction and comparison ? sorry I don’t agree with this, but hey if you are a hard core materialist, you do you, and believe that if that is the case.
Anil seems to want to reach a certain demographic I'm not aware of.
So much time and money, so little result. not a single mention of Internal Family Systems Therapy
What do you mean? I think IFS is a means by which events from one’s past are conceptualized in an attempt to give meaning to experiences of current complexity. What is generated in therapy may be useful or not useful and is mostly constructed. Somewhat like arranging colors on a canvas - it’s one of merely hundreds of possible representations. Whether that’s therapeutic is debatable.
is that tool guy?