Your Brain Lies to You (And That's a Good Thing): Anil Seth on Consciousness

What if everything you see, hear, and feel isn't real? What if it's just your brain's best prediction of what's real? Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch sat down with neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Anil Seth to explore the profound question of: What is consciousness? Seth's answer might surprise (and even unsettle) you. Consciousness isn't a window onto reality. It's a controlled hallucination constructed by your brain to make sense of a world it can never directly access. These questions of consciousness illuminate central ideas of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness and more than 200 scientific papers. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend! Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Chapters:  00:00 Escaping the echo chamber 01:43 Defining consciousness  09:05 Perception as "controlled hallucination" 11:26 Why perception feels like reality (an adaptive illusion) 17:06 When perception shapes social and historical "truth" 19:03 Hallucination as uncontrolled perception 21:57 What is the self? 33:38 Intelligence vs. consciousness 35:42 Anthropomorphizing AI and "bio-chauvinism" 36:10 Biological naturalism: can AI be conscious? 39:44 Should AI be designed to seem conscious? 40:52 Perception Box question