THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.187 - ANIL SETH

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Adam talks with British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Anil Seth about the difficulty of defining consciousness, the difference between the idea of a self and a soul, what happens when things go wrong with your perception of self and those around you, the way that psychedelics alter consciousness for better or worse, and whether Anil's work has changed the way he thinks about the big D. Not Sunny D. The other one.This conversation was recorded remotely on July 1st, 2021Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Becca Ptaszynski for additional editingPodcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSTAKE PART IN THE PERCEPTION CENSUSBEING YOU - A NEW SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Anil Seth - 2021 (ABE BOOKS)YOUR BRAIN HALLUCINATES YOUR CONSCIOUS REALITY WITH ANIL SETH - 2017 (TED TALK)THE NEUROSCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS WITH ANIL SETH - 2017 ROYAL INSTITUTION LECTURE (YOUTUBE)NICK BOSTROM - THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT - 2013 (YOUTUBE)THE PARADOX OF THE ATHEIST SOUL by John Gray - 2020 (NEW STATESMAN WEBSITE)HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND by Michael Pollan - 2018 (MICHAEL POLLAN WEBSITE)NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF by Julian Barnes- 2008 (ABE BOOKS) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buxton here, and I'm reporting to you from a farm track

in the east of England Norfolk County to be precise and I'm walking along beneath cloudy skies it's not raining just at the moment but it has been and I think it plans to do so more, which is good. We need the rain. We've had a few good downpours over the last couple of days, and already things are beginning to look a little greener. I'm on my own today. Rosie, my dog friend, is perfectly fine. She's very well, in fact.

But she went for a run this morning with her mum, and I think she's knackered now, so she's at home curled up on the sofa also I think she's sad about the queen fair enough we're all sad about the queen she was by a long way my favorite queen and Rosie is concerned about the Christmas podcast and whether it's going to be appropriate for the queen to still be involved somehow. I've yet to receive official word from the palace, but I've assured Rosie that I think it'll be fine. I think it's what the queen would have wanted.

Anyway, on we go. How are you doing, podcats? I hope you're okay and that you had a reasonable summer. I'm doing fine, thanks. Nothing major to report, is there? Don't think so. So let me tell you a little bit about podcast number 187, which features a conversational ramble with British professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience

at the University of Sussex, Anil Seth. Here's some brief Seth facts for you. Anil Kumar Seth, currently aged 50, grew up in Oxfordshire, UK. The hint of a northern accent in his voice comes, perhaps, from his mother, who was from Yorkshire. His father was from India. Anil has a load of degrees. He's got one in Natural Sciences from Cambridge. He's got the Knowledge Based systems degree from Sussex, where he also got the computer science and artificial intelligence degree. He's got other stuff too, but that's

some of the degrees. In the early 2000s, he also spent five years as a postdoctoral and associate fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. Nowadays, at Sussex University, Anil and other scientists and philosophers are investigating the question of how consciousness happens, and what happens when it goes wrong. His book, Being You, A New Science of Consciousness, is about the ongoing process of attempting to understand how the inner universe of subjective experience relates to and can be explained in terms of biological and physical processes unfolding in brains and bodies. Says Anil, the essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul.

It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive, that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed, for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body. That's where Anil is coming from in this book. Jim Al-Khalili, who I trust, calls Anil's book insightful and profound. The nature of consciousness is still one of the hardest problems in science,

but Anil Seth brings us closer than ever before to the answer. This is a hugely important book, says Al-Khalili. My conversation with Anil took place remotely last year in July 2021, with me in my nutty room here in Norfolk and Anil in Sussex. And after I explained that I was going to be approaching the conversation very much from a layman's point of view, and maybe even a lame man's point of view we talked about the difficulty of defining consciousness the difference between the idea of a self and a soul what happens when things go wrong with your perception of self the way that psychedelics

alter consciousness for better or worse whether we are living in a Matrix-style computer simulation, whether artificial intelligence will achieve human-like consciousness, and finally we talk about whether Anil's work has changed the way he thinks about the Big D, the final curtain, the clog pop, the mortal coil shuffle. Anil is a fascinating guy. It was really good to talk to him. And if you enjoy our conversation and you're interested in what we talked about, you can help him with his work.

Oh, it's windy now. And you can help by taking part in an online census, the Perception Census, which Anil is working on. It's a large-scale citizen science survey of perceptual diversity, investigating how we each experience a unique world. Anil says, we're hoping for tens of thousands of people to take part. It's a series of fun, engaging, interactive illusions and such like that put your senses to the test. There is a link to the Perception Census in the description of this podcast,

along with some other bits and pieces which I will tell you about at the end. But right now, with Anil Seth, here we go. Ramble chat, that's a far ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Ramble Chat it feels to me as if people are more and more interested in the subject of consciousness and the way that we perceive the world. It all seems to have kicked off for me and for people of my generation when we saw The Matrix. Before then, I don't remember ever really thinking about things like that. How about you? That's funny.

For me, I've always thought about it i had the impression that thinking about consciousness and and self and where do we come from and what happens after we die and why are we conscious at all that these were thoughts that everybody had as a kid but i've just been lucky i think in continuing to have the chance to think about consciousness until it became a career and that's what that's what i do now i do think there is something that that for young children there is this fascination with these big questions and so it does feel like a bit of a childlike enterprise to some extent continuing to to think about and work on consciousness. And did you as an adolescent perhaps have

a kind of pivotal experience or revelatory thought that made you think differently about consciousness? I think I'd go back even further and of course I'm not sure how reliable this memory is and this wasn't necessarily the memory that set me on the course to oh I want to become a neuroscientist now but I do remember the first time I realized that I would at some point die and that what it was to be me would at some point come to an end and I'm I remember being in the bathroom of my of my family home in Oxfordshire and just having this recognition and being extremely blown away by it, and knocked sideways. I don't remember it being that distressing or anything, just this sudden recognition that life is circumscribed. And that for me was certainly,

it must have been part of this trajectory of thinking about mind brain and self over those years and then i think later on at school and even at university to begin with i just became more and more interested by this mystery of consciousness as a scientific mystery and as a philosophical mystery because there didn't seem to be any answer to it. And did you have any vague conception of what those answers might look like? Did you think that you were going to find evidence of a soul? Or did you think that you were going to figure out something that correlated consciousness between humans and animals and other organic objects in the world? Or did you have it? What were your ideas? I was always very suspicious and still am

about ideas of soul. It wasn't that I was setting out to find the neural fingerprints of a soul somewhere inside the cerebral cortex or anything like that. I've actually become a little bit more sympathetic to the idea of the soul now, but not as a thing, not as an essence, but more of a basic description of what it feels like to be a conscious being. But that isn't how I started. I think I started like many people at school and early stages of university, especially those interested in science and if anyone, people had an aptitude for science. My first aptitude was maths and physics. It was kind of easy. And I thought, well, also, that's the most fundamental level of description of the universe. It's the queen of all sciences. So my initial suspicion was that that's where

the answer is going to come from it's going to come from some new insight into physics about how the universe works as a whole that's going to be the key to understanding how the brain gives rise to the mind and to consciousness and i'm not sure how coincidental this is but halfway through university i just hit a ceiling with my ability in math and physics. And it went from being easy to being absolutely impossible. And I just couldn't do it at all anymore. And at the same time, psychology was on the menu. I could study psychology as well.

So I started mixing math and physics psychology and suddenly realized that, oh, this is kind of convenient because actually, maybe it's not math and physics that's going to give the answer after all. It's studying the brain and the biology of the brain. So I then switched to studying psychology and neuroscience. I no longer think that the answer to consciousness is going to come from some eureka moment that revolutionizes physics. Now I'm just picturing you the way that I picture all people who are good at maths and physics and things like that, which I am very much not and never have been, as just being able to see the world a little bit like the matrix, just strings of green numbers flowing around everywhere. Anyway, listen, let's start with some basic terms. Your book is all about consciousness. How do you define it? What is consciousness? This is indeed the starting point.

It's easy to get hung up on trying to define it, and people will always disagree, and partly because we're all very possessive of our own consciousness. We have direct experience of it. It is our direct experience. In fact, that is probably the best definition. experience of it. It is our direct experience. In fact, that is probably the best definition. Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. There's a philosopher called Tom Nagel who defined it in a very simple way, which might seem even a bit trivial. He said, for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. There's just something going on for that organism. There's something it's like to be me. There's something it's like to be that organism. There's just something going on for that organism. There's something it's like to be me. There's something it's like to be you. There's something it's like to be a sheep, probably. But, you know, the table is just a table and my iPhone is just

an iPhone. There's nothing it is like for that table to be a table. It's just an object. It's a very, very uninformative definition of consciousness, but I think it's helpful because it focuses on the fact that consciousness is all about experience. It's the redness of red. It's the feeling of an emotion. It's not the words we use to describe it. Consciousness is not intelligence. Consciousness does not require language. Consciousness is not the same thing as thinking either though we are we're conscious when we're thinking but at bottom it's just the raw facts that we are having an experience that an experience of some kind being totally unresponsive. just an emotional feeling like when you have a visual experience it feels like something to have that experience compared to a camera which just takes a picture and the camera doesn't experience

anything when it takes a picture right it's it's us looking at an image that has a visual experience and there's all kinds of experiences that that we have and we often seek which we can think of what are often called flow experiences when you're in the moment playing music or playing sport dancing we're just speaking sometimes where you're not aware you're no longer aware of yourself as separate from the world you are fully immersed in it that the world is just happening for you the world is just happening an experience is just going on and that that's enough another way to think of it very simply is consciousness is what goes away when you go under general anesthesia or when you

fall into a dreamless sleep. Dreams are conscious. You're having experiences there. But in a state of sleep where you just go out, that's what goes away. It's the consciousness that goes away and comes back again when you wake up. Yes. You're with anything i mean you say that what we perceive as humans is the brain's best guess of what's out there in the world and i suppose that makes me think a little bit of consciousness as something inside of us that's controlling things or receiving the information and then making us respond somehow like a little guy in there like the numbskulls in bino yeah that's something to always be wary of when thinking about consciousness which is this very tempting idea that there's a mini me inside me that's receiving all this information from the senses

and it's sort of like watching an inner movie screen that's being directed by some by the brain and there's this mini me inside and i'm watching it and i'm getting the sound of the band playing all the sounds from outside and and i decide what to do and then I pull some strings and make my arms move, make my muscles move. That, I think, it doesn't work because then, well, you've just pushed the problem one stage back. How does the mini-me work? Is there another little mini-mini-me inside that?

And so on and so on and so on. And it doesn't really make any sense anyway. I think the key thing here is that the self the experience of what it is to be me or you is another kind of perception it's another kind of experience the brain is generating the experience of self in the same way that it's generating an experience of the world as well they're both different kinds of perception. And this idea of perception being a best guess, that's a claim about how the wiring works. It's a claim about what the brain's doing. It doesn't mean that there's a thing doing the guessing. Now, that's all the stuff that goes on

under the hood. We're not aware, like I'm not aware of what my neurons are doing at all. I don't have any awareness of the electrical signals flowing around the circuits of my brain. The result of that is my awareness of the world and of being myself. But what the circuits are doing is this process of taking in sensory information from the world and the body and trying to figure out what caused it and making a best guess about what caused that sensory data and that is what we end up perceiving i mean that's that's what i think i mean it's i'm not the first person to make that kind of argument and it's still just a hypothesis this is not sort of the book of the book of nature laid laid bare it's still just an idea but i think it's very compelling idea um to explain the relationship between what we perceive and what's out there in the world and what's in here in our

bodies i suppose the reason someone like me thinks of the little mini me guy is that you talk to yourself and you have a dialogue with yourself and it feels as if that person that you're talking to is inside you either in your head or just floating around inside you you know it's it's um it's the real you it's the real you. It's the person you can be honest with. It's the person you're not pretending for anyone with, if that makes sense. Yeah, and it's the person always giving you a hard time as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So often that person is a twat and is telling you very unhelpful stuff. And yeah, you're constantly dealing with that person but it does feel like a person inside you who is processing everything and who does control you and i suppose that's bound up with the idea

of a soul this little version of you the true version of you inside i mean even non-religious people have that idea of of themselves right it. It's very intuitive. That's how things seem. It seems like there's this voice in the head, which is weird anyway, if you think about it, because sometimes we treat this voice in the head as somehow separate from ourselves. It's talking to us. And sometimes it is ourself. Sometimes, well, that is me that's doing the talking. so there's there's some ambiguity there but it's certainly you're right it seems as though there is some essence of me that is stable that floats around somewhere whether it's in my head or a bit more

generally in my body and that is perhaps separable from the materiality of the body that it happens to be in right now. I don't know how culturally dependent these intuitions are. They might be quite dependent on where people have grown up and what surrounding cultural and religious beliefs there are. But in any case, the way things seem to us in our everyday experience is not a very good guide to how they actually are and it's probably useful to experience a sense of self as being stable over time it provides an organizing principle for our behavior but it doesn't mean that that's actually what's going on in fact it isn it isn't what's going on. I see, I find that hard to get my head around. Like,

isn't the fact that most of us can agree on what we are seeing in the world evidence that there's a good chance that's what it looks like or feels like? it's not it's not a total fabrication in the sense that it could be anything so i'm not saying i don't think any body in my area would say that your perception is is just completely unrelated to whatever's out there in the world no there's stuff out there and the stuff is real i think we probably overestimate how similar people's experiences are because we use language as this kind of common currency to describe experiences so you know if i see a bus going down the street my experience of its color and of its size might be slightly different to yours but there's definitely something there

the bus has a particular kind of surface that reflects light in a particular way that human brains will tend to, on encountering, generate an experience of redness. And if our brains are sufficiently similar, they'll generate the same kind of experience. But the bus is what it is. It's not red. It's not blue. It's not any color. Color is not a kind of thing that a bus can be. They look pretty red to me, but this is kind of getting into

philosophy, I suppose. And is that an area that crosses over with what you do a lot? Do you read a lot of philosophy and think about things in those terms? Yes, it's impossible to avoid. And I mean, I wouldn't want to avoid it. Philosophy is just at the heart of all these issues, especially the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception. There's a philosophical tradition which is associated with people like Immanuel Kant. And he would say that out there in the real world, we'll never have direct access to what's out there in the real world whatever it is it's not the kind of thing that you will ever know we we can only infer things about it through our senses and later on through making scientific measurements of one sort or another but what's really out there that that's always hidden behind this sensory veil and will only ever experience kind of interpretations of it.

Emmanuel Kant believed in God, right? I think he did, yes. I know sadly little about these people's personal histories. You probably know more than I do, mate. But I think he did. personal histories probably know more than i do mate but i think he did and then i think because he believed in god he probably believed in a soul don't you reckon and i'm sorry to keep banging on about soul but i do think about it because i guess i'm interested in that sense that there is an essential version of yourself inside of you and i'm interested in

to what extent that's true or not and i was reading recently about the idea of a kind of episodic self in other words the idea that there's no one fixed version of you inside even though most of us think of ourselves as one essential being with us, you know, that's that guy. It's Adam Buxton. He's got a set of beliefs, sort of. He says things like this. He responds to the world this way. And despite variations over time, not as funny as he used to be, got a bit crankier as he's got older. That's basically who you are throughout your life. But the more episodic view of existing is that you're actually just a ragbag of qualities that shift over time and kind of come in and out of focus. You're not fixed.

I'm probably mangling that a bit, but does that kind of make any sense? Oh, it makes perfect. It makes perfect sense. That's exactly how I've come to think of the self. And I would associate that with a lot of the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and so on. Right. That talk about the impermanence of self and that there isn't an essence that persists from birth to death and that you hang on to that the self is continually changing. And there's again, there's a lovely analogy from how we see. If I show you an image and if it's got a background and like maybe it's a wall in the background and the wall slowly changes color very slowly over a minute or something like

that and you're you're not focusing on the wall i've asked you to i don't know count the number of toasters on a table or something something silly like that you won't notice the color changing at all because it's changing slowly this is called change blindness your perception is changing but you're not perceiving the change. Other great inspirations for me, thinking again about when I was young, getting interested in all this stuff, was reading Oliver Sacks' great book about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Right. of his books he describes all these neurological case studies where people's experiences of the world and the self just fracture in ways which seem totally bizarre uh to us it really reveals that what seems to be intrinsically unified how could it be otherwise i'm me you know and all of

me as part of me my memories my experience of my body my experience of free will all of me is part of me, my memories, my experience of my body, my experience of free will. All of these things are just, they have to be bound together. They have to be, but they don't. And we see this in neurology all the time now that people can lose part of themselves, but not all of themselves. So there's an observable truth to this idea that being a self is a bundle of perceptions a bundle of experiences and not a permanent essence yeah was there a particular case study in the oliver sacks book in the man who mistook his wife for a hat that made a big impression on you when you read it i sort of think of them all as a bundle now all as a kind of collective but but the the the condition that i think made me think the most about this stuff,

and I know Oliver Sacks has written about it, I can't remember which book it was in, is this condition called Capgras syndrome. Capgras. Capgras. And this is a syndrome where people suddenly come to believe that people very close to them, like family members and so on are in fact imposters so they might think their wife or husband or sister they come into the they come into the

room and there's a lot of distress because the person suffering says no you're not really my but you're not you know you're you're an imposter and they aren't you know they are the person they they say they are but whoever's suffering cannot shake this conviction that something devious is happening. And this seems really, really hard to get your head around, right? How could this person come to this very, very strange belief that they hold with such conviction? And there's a story about this, and I don't know how accurate this is. I think it's pretty accurate, but I don't know 100% sure, that there are two ways to explain a condition like that. There's a sort of Freudian psychoanalytic way that suddenly some repressed memory of some

early episode has come bubbling to the surface, and that's causing the person to react in this very aversive way to the presence of their close family member. The other explanation, which is more grounded in the materiality of the brain, is that there's been, for maybe some brain damage or some psychiatric condition, a disconnection between the parts of the brain that deal with an emotional response and the parts of the brain that deal with a visual response. So if you see someone who you're really close to normally these two things happen in harmony i see somebody i love and i feel that

immediate emotion and everything is hunky-dory but if i saw let's say i see my mother or something like that and there's no emotional connection there's no emotional response because that's gone wrong then my brain might reach the weird conclusion that that's not my mom that's an imposter and that's what i feel and then i develop this belief to explain that feeling of a weird emotional dissonance and disconnect yes and the way this was tested was beautiful so well if that's the case then if you ask this person to go out of the room and just, I don't know, make a phone call, then it should all be fine

because now it's auditory information coming in about the person, not visual information. So it should be okay. Whereas the psychoanalytic Freudian view would say, well, no, it's still going to be really difficult. There's no reason why this repressed memory should only affect a visual encounter. and so this is what they tried and it turned out that Freud was wrong that you go out the room and it's all fine and I love that simple intervention

that basically totally changes the story you might tell about how the brain is is generating that weird kind of experience yes Yes, nice and methodical. That reminds me, that case study though, of dissociation, which I think I experienced when I was at university, having taken magic mushrooms for the first time. And I wrote about this in my book, Ramble book. And I think I even talked about it on Nevermind the Buzzcocks back in the day. Simon Amstel goaded me and I supplied him with a drug story.

Anyway, I was at college and me and some of the guys decided that it was magic mushroom time. It was my first time. I didn't really know how many to take. And I think I took too many. I think it might have been a bit too heroic a dose. Anyway, it all seemed to go fine. And then when I thought it was over, I went back up to my room and I looked in the mirror and the person that I saw in the mirror did not feel connected to me.

It felt as if I was looking at a clone and it really, really freaked me out. I just thought I'm not up for this at all this is really bad you know I was looking at photographs of family members and it was weird because it was like I could process it rationally I knew who all the people were I knew their names I sort of knew empirically what they meant to me emotionally but I didn't feel connected to them in the way that I had before anyway the feeling subsided the next day I was very happy to discover but then years later when my dad was ill and we were caring for him here he had cancer and he was taking a lot of pain medication that included morphine and he just started chugging the morphine at a certain point and then he phones me up on my

mobile and says come over here adam the strangest thing has just happened i was like what's up he said i don't know who i am and so i was like okay here we go and i went over and talked to him and i did the same sort of thing with him and i showed him family albums and stuff and he was able to identify everyone and it just sounded so exactly like what had happened to me that i thought this is a drug thing this is the cables have been knocked loose by the morphine and then later on i read about people describing uh similar things and referring to them as dissociation drugs definitely can do that to you whether they're psychedelic drugs or morphine as well they can be very very dissociative ketamine in particular is yeah extremely powerful so what's happening there

though well that's a really good question what's happening um i wish we knew i wish i could tell you i think it's really hard to know partly because it's it's quite an amorphous thing it's much harder to pin down the absence of something in the presence of something uh weird but it might well come down to something like an emotional disconnect with your surroundings whether that's because it's been overloaded in some way or whether it's just absent because of some other issue happening but it could be and this is speculation really it could be that dissociative experiences happen when our perceptions lose their emotional tone to some degree. Okay. And have you done

experiments on people who are under the influence of psychoactive chemicals so you can see what's happening in the brain? Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. I mean, there's been this kind of renaissance of psychedelics in neuroscience over the last few years. I mean, it's got this very weird history, and I think in some ways quite tragic history, that back in the 1940s and 50s, there were quite a lot of groups in the US and elsewhere who were already investigating psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocybin, which is the magic mushroom active ingredient, for their possible benefits in medicine. And the main treatments there were for things like addiction. These studies were conducted a very long time ago, so they weren't necessarily the most rigorous,

but there was certainly suggestive evidence that psychedelics could quite quickly break the hold of addiction on people to smoking, to alcohol, to gambling, and so on. And from my perspective, psychedelics are interesting not only for their potential clinical benefit, which I think is hugely important, still to be demonstrated. It's still a lot of unknown. It's not a panacea. It's not a magic bullet by any means. But I think there's a lot of promise and potential there. But also from this very basic science approach of you take this drug, this simple compound, we know at a very low level what happens in the brain. We know where it ends up in the brain and so on and it changes your consciousness i mean you have a completely different conscious experience on psychedelics than you were doing beforehand it's therefore a fantastically powerful tool to to study the brain basis of consciousness and the main thing we found in a few studies is that the brain becomes just much more disorganized, which may not be very surprising. I mean, psychedelic experiences are often described as rather freewheeling and

disorganized and a bit random, and that's part of their interest, right? But that seems to be reflected in some vague way. And I think there is a spiritual dimension to it. And people often describe these experiences as among the most meaningful of their lives. There's a beautiful book by Michael Pollan called How to Change Your Mind, which I think really describes this beautifully. It's incredibly hard, I think, to write about psychedelic experiences without sounding completely naff. But Michael Pollan does it brilliantly in his book. And there is a spiritual dimension to it, but it's interesting how differently that dimension is interpreted. So for me, the experience just amplified my conviction that consciousness comes from the brain because I thought, oh, well, you can just change the brain in this very specific way by changing the levels of serotonin and the washing

around the brain and consciousness changes. this is confirming this materialist idea that i come from that you change your brain and your experience changes too but for other people they'll take a very different message from the experience right that the drugs have sort of freed them from the more robotic processes of consciousness and they've transcended it somehow. That's right. I think I'm with you though, but it scares me that we're so fragile and so vulnerable. So taking psychedelics and going on drug trips always alarmed me because I did feel that consciousness was fragile and it was possible to short circuit it. And the idea that you might never have those cables

repatched was terrifying for me and i guess stories that my mum used to tell me to try and put me off experimenting with drugs about people who had taken acid and never come back and had a you know emotional break or a psychotic break that was at the very least catalyzed or precipitated if not totally caused by the drugs yeah i mean that's that's it's right to to have these concerns i think i mean i certainly wouldn't advocate widespread rampant use of the of these things i think you know they are they're extremely powerful but they are also potentially extremely interesting scientifically and there's all the difference in the world I think, you know, they are, they're extremely powerful, but they are also potentially extremely interesting scientifically. And there's all the difference in the world, I think, between, you know, when you can have the opportunity to study the effects of psychedelics in, you know, well-controlled, very safe and comforting situation compared to other random

occasions in your life where you might, might these things it's very different yeah sure now let's get back to the matrix which i mentioned earlier on and as i was saying a lot of people seem fascinated by this idea that we are living in a simulation of some kind and that our perception of the world is a kind of managed hallucination. Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher, talked about the simulation argument back in 2013. He was saying, what makes something conscious is not that it is built out of carbon atoms, like we are inside the brain, but that it implements a certain kind of computation. I mean, he reckons that the chances of us living in a simulation are low. And his logic is that if there was an intelligence that was sufficiently advanced

to create such a detailed simulation, then there's not going to be the glitches that certain people report as evidence of the simulation. It's such a weird argument that's built on so many kind of unknowable hypotheticals so i think the argument as i remember it runs something like um if we don't extinguish ourselves as a civilization through some virus or some nuclear catastrophe or something like that then our descendants would have generated massive computers and some of those descendants would have decided to use some of this massive computational power to build simulations of all their ancestors and so we might be living in one of those simulations and because there's going to be many more simulations than the one base reality then the chances are that if we're having

experiences at all um we're having experiences within one of these simulations it's a really fun thought experiment to go through because it does relate to the matrix and to what we were talking about about the nature the relationship between what we perceive and what's really there but the idea that we're living in a computer simulation i don't know i mean it's hard to put any kinds of probabilities on these things about whether our super intelligent descendants will really be interested in developing computer simulations of of us now. Maybe they will. Maybe only a tiny fraction of the potential civilizations need to do that. I don't know.

It just seems impossible to put any reasonable number to. But the main reason I'm suspicious of it is that, as you said a minute ago, it assumes that consciousness is something that can be simulated. I mean, the brain is just such a ridiculously complex object. You need some kind of metaphor to grasp you, to make any kind of sense. But these metaphors, as useful as they are, can also be misleading. And the metaphor of the brain as a computer is very, very useful because it allows us to think of all kinds of complicated internal processes

happening, mediating between light hitting the eye and what we end up doing. Lots of complicated things that can happen, but it's also misleading if taken too literally. Memory is not like storing a file on a computer. And much more fundamentally, computers, at least the sorts that we have at the moment really do separate the hardware from the software i mean that's the point right you can have a computer and you can run a different program on it you can run many programs on it you can build a computer in principle out of anything you want let me give you an example like we simulate weather systems all the time like i actually trust weather forecasts now they actually seem to work yeah and this is because there are these massive simulations of the atmosphere running in supercomputers in

various places in the world really detailed simulations but it never gets wet or windy inside a simulation of the weather system we know that like rain is not substrate independent rain requires water it's not something you can simulate a simulation of rain is a simulation of rain but you can get computers to play go and chess and they are actually playing go and chess that is something that can be simulated it's the same thing so what which is consciousness is it more like go or is it more like the weather and there is this assumption which is at the heart of the simulation argument that it's more like go that a simulation of consciousness is equivalent to the real thing and that might be true i'm not saying that i know that's wrong i'm just saying that i'm not comfortable with making that

assumption i just i don't see any good reason to believe that as far as we know the only things that are conscious in the universe are biological systems yeah logically it doesn't work for me and at a personal level i just don't feel compelled by it either i'm gonna call it it's bullshit come on deal with the real world there's enough to be dealing with out there without worrying about the fucking matrix so i think i can assume that you aren't too worried about the chances of robots becoming conscious anytime soon i'm a bit worried but only a bit you know it's not the kind of artificial intelligence of 2001 it's it's basically just really smart pattern recognition but certainly computers are getting more powerful and doing more impressive things and there's this idea that

there will be some threshold at which the lights come on for these ai systems and they're not only intelligent but they're also aware and for some reason this seems to often get bound up in the idea that firstly this threshold will also be the threshold at which these ai systems reach a kind of human level intelligence which just seems a bit weird it's another example of us humans putting ourselves at the center of the universe and thinking we're super fantastic and you know judging everything by our own benchmark and that after these ai systems have gained superhuman intelligence and become conscious that they will become uh you know threatening to us and and do us all in in some way or another yeah

because that's what we're like so when they become like us they'll want to get rid of everything as well yeah but the first thing about this that comes to my mind is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness will just come along for the ride as artificial systems get more and more intelligent and consciousness is not the same thing as intelligence certainly i think that many other animals that are not humans not even primates have conscious experiences they have different ones and in some sense they might have simpler conscious experiences. They don't think about what they're going to do next month in the way that we do.

They're very seldom doing the kinds of things that make us distinctively human. They're very seldom on TikTok. But it's still possible to be conscious without being all that smart. And consciousness and intelligence certainly don't tightly correlate. Once you get intelligence, you're bound to have consciousness.

So that doesn't work for me either. And then there's this whole idea, as we were just discussing, that it's really not clear to me that consciousness is something that could ever be generated by a non-biological system and there my answer is it's not that it can't it's just that i don't know and i don't think it's safe to assume that it can the real things to worry about for me are kind of twofold the first one is that there's just a lot of unknowns here there's a lot of i don't know maybe a computer of the kind we currently have is enough.

Maybe consciousness is something you can simulate and maybe indeed in the next 20 years or so on, it will happen. It can't be ruled out. I think it's very unlikely, but it can't be ruled out. And if it did happen, it would be ethically absolutely catastrophic. Other worry, and I think this is a much more realistic situation, in fact, I think it's an inevitable situation that has already been explored in great films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina, is that we will have systems that give us the strong appearance that they're conscious. That is so convincing that it will be very hard for us to interpret them, perceive them in any other way. And we're almost there already. We have these deep fakes, you know, these machine learning programs that can animate a photo and make it say anything in a realistic way.

Yeah, I saw my first deep fake ad on YouTube the other day. There's some... Yeah, I mean, it was crap. I definitely knew that it was fake. There's some scary. Yeah. I mean, it was crap. I definitely knew that it was fake, but still I could see that. Okay.

If they can do this now, it'll probably get really, really good in 10 years. Exactly. I mean, that's the thing. Something that's done quite badly now in this area. These are the things that are getting better exponentially. Yeah. Finally, Anil, I want to ask you about the end of consciousness about death has your work over the years made you more or less frightened of the end the honest answer is i don't

know i don't have a different version of myself that hasn't done what I've done to compare with. So I only have how I feel about it now and some guesses about how that's been influenced. And I think I've certainly thought about death a lot and probably more than I would have done otherwise. If you think about consciousness a lot, you can't avoid thinking about the absence of consciousness too, just in general, but also when dealing with some of the cases that we've been talking about, people with severe brain damage and so on. I do think about it from my position now in middle age and hopefully still some distance from death. I feel that I'm not

massively afraid of it. I might still be laboring a little bit under the illusion that, yeah, I know it's going to happen. I know I'm going to stop existing, but not really, you know, not me. That's not really going to happen. So I'm not entirely sure that I've assimilated the prospect of mortality. I think it's a really challenging thing to do. But I do think that studying consciousness and thinking about the self and thinking about the impermanence of the self makes the prospect easier to contemplate from the distance that I have to it at the moment. If there's no essence of me, then there's a title of a julian barnes novel which which i always come back to it's called nothing to be frightened of and of course you

can use that in two ways there's nothing to be frightened of but there's nothing and that's really something yeah very very afraid of and i try to put myself in the former category, and one of the events I talk about in the book, in fact, I open with it in the book, is about general anesthesia. General anesthesia is the closest any of us will come to death. We all say, oh, I was in a car accident, I came very close to death, or I was surfing and a shark swam nearby.

No, you're not close to death at all. You might have died, but you weren't actually close to death. In general anesthesia, your consciousness has gone away completely, much more so than in the deepest of sleeps. You're just not there. And the thing I remember about general anesthesia is that the sense of time passing was also gone. If you go to sleep, and even if it's a really deep sleep and you don't remember having any dreams, when you wake up, you're aware that some time has passed. You don't know how long, might be confusing, but there's a sense of time having passed.

In general anesthesia, it isn't like that, right? I don't know if you've had general anesthesia, yeah i have wisdom teeth out right you're gone right and then you're back no time passes at all yeah it was cool it's really cool i mean the third time i had it i was really trying to pay attention to what was going on and of course you can't because what's going on is that your ability to pay attention is abolished yes exactly the crazy thing of counting from 10 down to one and just feeling yourself evaporate as you count when you're on 10 and 9 you're sort of thinking oh it's fine i'll hang on and then just suddenly off you go yeah and if you see it from a third person so i've seen a few people go under anesthesia while i've been observing and it's it's amazing they they're people and then

they are objects and then they're people again and you just transform somebody into an object and they're not there and from the first person it's that complete absence of anything and it's the absence of time having passed and so that i think is really the closest we will get to a premonition of death it's not not just the big sleep. You were just not there. It's like being not there in all the time that you weren't there before you were born. And we don't tend to worry so much about that. We have this very asymmetric concern about mortality that, you know, we can joke and say, I would love to have been around in Paris in the Enlightenment or something like that, or wherever, I would love to have been around in Paris in the Enlightenment

or something like that, or wherever your favorite historical period might have been. But we don't feel that kind of visceral sense of missing out that we feel about the future when we're not there either. And there's some rationality to that. We can change what happens in the future. What happened in the past, we didn't have any effect on but the the oblivion is still the same in both cases and it's the same oblivion as general anesthesia and so just not existing for a while and then looking back at that episode of not existing well you think well okay actually that's okay in fact how could it be otherwise the prospect of living forever is also quite aversive i mean if you really unpack what that would entail there's very few sorts of situations where that would suddenly seem to

be a really really unambiguously good idea it's only appealing in contrast to our fear of death yeah that i think we think that it's a good thing no i i think i think i'm much more worried as as many people actually are about about the process yes the build how that might the build up how that might feel how that might affect others um and that sense of the gradual loss of of who you are but it can be a really profound thing my father died eight years ago on on Midsummer's Day on June the 21st, then he died at home. I was there and my mother was there. He hadn't been ill very long. And of course, it was extremely sad. He was in his 80s. It was extremely, extremely sad. But he did not

seem to suffer that much. And the process handled well well we had these amazing Marie Curie nurses to sort of make sure that the material needs were taken care of and that allowed us to sort of pay attention to the to the process and him to to be very present it was. And now I look back and I think he was lucky to avoid a lot of suffering, but I think me and my mother, we were also lucky because we can look back at that now and it's sad, but it doesn't feel like a traumatic memory. It feels like the circle of life coming to a close. I think there are ways to end life well i i'm certainly not keen to get there particularly quickly but um i do think that thinking about self and consciousness can reduce the the fear of it because ultimately we're just we're just a bundle of perceptions and that will

dissolve into the air and that's fine hmm well i'm glad that you had that experience i'm obviously i'm sorry that your pa passed away but i'm glad that you felt that way about it that it wasn't as bad as it could have been yeah i think it's really important i think that it's important to think about as well yeah i think it does help to think about it and i think society has done you know western society has done a terrible job pushing death into the background. We don't want to look at it. It's not really there. Or if it's there, it's kind of there in a service of something else. And I really don't think that helps because we all do think about it anyway. it anyway and you know as the world is becoming more secular you know we don't have the kind of religious cruxes to just reassure us that everything is going to be all right and when we die don't worry you know you'll go somewhere nice or but only if you've been good you might go somewhere not so nice otherwise but there's there's not a narrative there's no cultural

narrative for it anymore and that is a problem how do you replace that and i don't think here science is a threat i don't think it's a replacement either but i do think it's a different perspective and i think taking some of the insights that we gain from a scientific understanding of consciousness can help guide us culturally to come to to a new story about i don't know what that will be whether it would adopt some elements of Eastern traditions and impermanence and so on. But I do think there's a glaring need for that

in the society in which we live these days. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop.

These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code Buxton to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. What is real? Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Anil Seth, and I am extremely grateful to him for making the time to chat to me.

His book, Being You, A New Science of Consciousness, is now available in paperback. There's a link in the description. I really recommend it. Lots of fascinating stuff. If you've read Oliver Sacks' book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which Anil mentioned there in our conversation and enjoyed that, then I think you'll definitely enjoy Anil's book. What else do we have, links-wise? Checking notes. Well, there's a link to Anil's TED Talk, How Your Brain Hallucinates Conscious Reality, which has now been viewed nearly 14 million times.

This is very interesting. There is a link to the article that I read about the episodic view of human existence. I didn't mention where I'd read it, but it was in the, what's it called, New Statesman, that's the one. It was an article called The Paradox of the Atheist's Soul, written by John Gray, that was actually a review, really, of a book called In Search of the Soul, a philosophical essay by John Cottingham, which I have not read, but looks interesting. There's also a link to an interview on YouTube with Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher I mentioned in the context of whether we are living in a matrix style simulation or not he

talks about that on this youtube interview that I have linked to there's also a link to another book that Anil mentioned when we were talking about psychedelics how to change your mind by Michael Pollan and there is a link to Julian Barnes's book that Anil also mentioned, Nothing to be Frightened of. on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and an homage to the French writer Jules Renard. I started reading that, and it is good, especially if you're worried about death, like many of us are, or even perhaps if you've lost someone recently and you're grieving,

I would recommend it. Well, there's also a link, of course, to the perception census at the top of the links there in the description. And if you have the time, take part in that and help Anil and his colleagues with their work. part in that and help Anil and his colleagues with their work. Over in the distance, I don't know if you can hear the bells tolling for the Queen out here. I think the funeral is going to be in about 10 days. And then on we go. This podcast will be returning towards the end of September when I'll start uploading new episodes a bit more regularly up until Christmas. And don't forget as well that another way of consuming the podcast

in bite-sized chunks, if you wish to, as well as in full episode chunks, is by going to my YouTube channel. Maybe what I will do, actually, is upload a video of Rosie being sad on the sofa. She doesn't look sad. She's just tired and she's dozing on the sofa. And I, I filmed her because it was very relaxing. I was just sat there with Rosie watching her doze for 10 minutes or so. And it was very peaceful. So I thought, well, maybe I'll share that with the podcast. I mean, it's not going to set YouTube on fire. You know, it's not Joe Rogan. It's a sleeping doggy, or at least a dozing dog but uh you never know might be good for the old mental health and i'm i filmed it in very high resolution so i'm gonna it'll be my highest resolution upload ever so we'll see how that goes i'll try and do that sometime in the next week

anyway i think that's it for for today though and um i should say thank you to seamus murphy mitchell as ever for his invaluable production support thank you seamus thank you to becca tashinsky for her additional editing on this episode thank you so much becca thanks to helen green for her beautiful artwork. Check out her website. There's a link to that in the description of the podcast as well. See all the amazing illustrations she's done over the years and continues to do. Bong! And most of all, thank you for downloading this episode

and for continuing to return to the podcast. I really appreciate it. The sun's come out now and it's nice and warm for a little bit. I'm going to get back before the heavens open and I'll be back with you

in a few weeks. Until then, watch out, take care, keep it nice, and remember, for what it's worth, I love you. Bye! Thank you. Bye. Thank you.