A neurobiological account of consciousness.
“Whether you’re a scientist or not, consciousness is a mystery that matters.” So writes Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex. “For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is.” Some current theories make the mystery all the more mysterious: the notion, for example, that consciousness is a shared hallucination, a thought that would send a Cartesian into fits. What matters, by Seth’s account, is that consciousness arises in the “wetware” of our brains, which “are not computers made of meat” but are instead assemblages of electrical and chemical networks that, crucially, are embodied—i.e., contained within a living being. “In my view,” writes the author, “consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent.” That said, he depicts the brain as a marvelous thing that we only dimly understand but that has provoked tremendous scientific growth in recent years. In one moving episode, Seth scrubs in for an eight-hour neurological operation that, by exposing the brain to surgical intervention, revealed “the mechanics of a human self.” Exploring the nature and content of consciousness, the author finds it intricately linked with self-consciousness. He also emphasizes its biological nature, suggesting that biotechnology, more than the “fleshless calculus” of artificial intelligence, will bring us further advances into what he calls “synthetic consciousness,” teaching machines to think in more human terms. As for human consciousness proper, it works by means of perception. We perceive the passage of time, and it passes; we perceive the world, and it exists. These are testable notions, he asserts, that help place us in the world and in time, allowing us to accept the inevitable, when “the controlled hallucination of being you finally breaks down into nothingness.” It may not be the most comforting thought, but there are worse.
An accessible, unfailingly interesting look inside the workings of the human brain, celebrating its beguiling nature.