Dissolving the Central Mystery of Life with Anil Seth

The Evolving Leader

For years explaining exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience has been described by cognitive scientists as ‘the hard problem’. In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Professor Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex whose book (Being You, Faber 2021) continues this exploration, proposing an idea of the human mind as a “highly evolved prediction machine”, rooted in the functions of the body and “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.

0.00 Introduction

2.11 Let’s start with what consciousness is, and how your approach is about getting to the subjective experience

3.49 Until recently consciousness studies were held outside of science and more in the realms of philosophy. What’s changed to allow you to break down the unfathomable nature of the topic.

7.00 What drew you into this as a field of study?

8.30 Having read ‘Being You’, it’s clear that you take a multi-disciplinary approach to your studies. As a team, how are you successfully approaching this in terms of moving outside of the individual silos of thought.

10.15 You provide a really helpful picture of neuroscience and how it’s shifted as the metaphor of the brain as a computer to a prediction machine. Can you give our listeners a sense of how this helps to construct our sense of reality.

13.57 In ‘Being You’, you also provide an introduction to Bayesian inference and how our brain is performing this form of abductive reasoning unconsciously. Can we start with some basic definitions of the different types of reasoning and why Bayes has been such an influence in your work.

22.33 Can you tell us about your experience of LSD micro dosing, what was it like and why were you doing it?

25.36 What were you trying to discover with your hallucination machine?

28.26 You talk about consciousness as a construct, and that psychedelic experience gives evidence to that. Could it be argued that the psychedelic experience is actually a disruption to what’s going on?

30.58 Could you help me understand the free energy principle.

36.26 How are you seeing your work influencing our thinking on the development of AI?

45.04 Given everything that you have discovered and that you are continuing to work on, what does all of this tell us about being human that the people taking leadership roles in the world need to know about themselves?

48.51 What are the next frontiers for your research?

53.22 As exponential computing power and imaging continues to evolve over the next decade, what do you think you might be able to do then that you can’t now?

57.55 Do you think we need more multi-disciplinary approaches to exploring consciousness, or is that happening?

60.25 Who is most inspiring you as a thinker?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.