Anil Seth

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
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our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body.

When the end of consciousness comes there is nothing – really nothing – to be frightened of.

Freud was absolutely right to point out that a naturalistic explanation of mind and consciousness would be a further, and perhaps final, dethronement of humankind.

physicalism. This is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff, and that conscious states are either identical to, or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff.

dualism remains beguiling

The sense of personal identity, built on the narrative self, can erode or disappear entirely in dementia and in severe cases of amnesia, and it can be warped and distorted in cases of delirium, whether hospital-induced or not.

The self is not an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body as a pilot controls a plane.

The experience of being me, or of being you, is a perception itself – or better, a collection of perceptions – a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared towards keeping your body alive. And this, I believe, is all we need to be, to be who we are.

the brain is a ‘prediction machine’, and that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of its sensory inputs.

In physics and in philosophy, determinism is the proposal that all events in the universe are completely determined by previously existing physical causes.