"Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?" ANIL SETH
Our SDG will take both a scientific and a philosophical approach to this age-old question. The central text is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth (2021), a UK neuroscientist from Cambridge and UCSD, and now Sussex. He will try to convince us that our mind is inseparable from our body, and that consciousness developed from our biological interaction with our surroundings and the need to predict events around us.
You don't need to agree with his thesis to enjoy researching and debating the issues this book raises. En route we will glance back at Plato, Descartes and David Hume, and consider the views of contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. No prior learning is required, just intellectual curiosity about ... ourselves.
1 The Real Problem
2 Measuring Consciousness
3 Phi
(Chapters 1-3 deal with what consciousness is and how to measure it)
4 Perceiving from the Inside Out
5 The Wizard of Odds
6 The Beholder's Share
(Chapters 4-6 deal with what things we are conscious of)
7 Delirium
8 Expect Yourself
9 Being a Beast Machine
10 A Fish in Water
11 Degrees of Freedom
(Chapters 7-11 deal with the self and what it is to be a self-conscious person)
12 Beyond Human
13 Machine Minds
(Chapters 12-13 deal with animal and machine consciousness)
Being You, by Anil Seth (2021)
TED Talk by Anil Seth (https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality)
Short Extracts from Plato, Descartes, David Hume, Daniel Dennett