The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth

Thanks to a very kind Spanish speaker, we now have Spanish language subtitles for this incredible video. Thank you so much. Gracias!

It is good to be alive these days .Such a bounty of information.

The fact that i can watch and learn this for free is truly a gift!!

The more I learn about consciousness the more capable I feel of influencing it for the betterment of my life. Thank you for the talk.

An excellent talk; clear and orderly presentation, tempered claims with basic evidences provided. Thank you Professor Anil Seth, and thank you to The Royal Institution for making these talks public!

I always love listening to talks about consciousness.

Fascinating talk. "You can think of perception as controlled hallucination" "Normal perception is a fantasy that is constrained by reality"

"I predict myself, therefore I am". I am a strange loop.

Psychedelics featured positively on a respected platform ♥️♥️♥️ you all should know what it is to be hyper-conscious

I was comatose after a car accident in 2005. During this time I was more conscious than when I was awake. I cannot explain this nor have I met a doctor who could. Consciousness is forever.

"hallucinations mimic perception" as Oliver Sacks said in a Ted talk .. in my view Anil Seth sets off in a sincere manner but is caught up in a scientific paradigm that is de-humanizing, Making something full of wonder like our existence into measureable stuff, instead of having the courage to stand baffled and admitting that he do not know (I am not blaming him and he does well under the circumstances .. in fact very well ) . We need to link concepts such as biomimicry, mirror-neurons , hallucinations vs perception, psychedelic trips vs "true reality" , We are getting there! Truly exciting times

What brilliant talk! Thanks for sharing this for everybody and thanks to Anil Seth for his contribution.

This has been the best talk on consciousness I have ever seen. It really shows the progress that is being made.

I used to think that consciousness was merely an evolutionary „side effect“. A necessary evil for information (DNA) to survive and reproduce. I read a few books on the darwinian evolution of consciousness and some of their authors were smoothly able to make a sensible case for the gradual evolution of the conscious agent or it’s capabilities. For example the evolution of vision is very comprehensible and well explained, how you can get from a fuzzy shadow to more distinct shadow and light impressions to very delicate forms and a broad spectrum of shades and colors. It’s essentially the same for all the „skills“ of a conscious agent. Their gradual evolution and the conscious judgments that accompany them are very much understandable. The big question to me is: *when did the first conscious being become conscious*, when and how did the first „I“ appear and how was it for this I to have come into existence. How was the transition from „not self“ to „self“ for the agent. Ultimately it comes down to only two possibilities if we say that consciousness gradually evolves over time. One option is that nothing is really conscious and consciousness is actually just „less dead“, „less unconscious“ than completely dead matter or dead with some extra*. This means that hypothetically „zombies“ could be real somewhere in the cosmos if the conscious agent is not a necessity for information to be processed and an agent to survive. The second possibility is that everything is at its core conscious just varying in degree of consciousness, from almost no consciousness to almost full blown consciousness. I don’t think that humans are „fully“ conscious and a bacterium *might be even less conscious and an alien type 3 civilization might be even more conscious than we are. Or they might ALL be equally conscious or unconscious just with different tools of measuring the world. Our concept of consciousness is as good as our concept of life and I think both face the same problem ultimately. Either everything is alive or nothing is and what we experience is just a gradual evolution of what makes a thing alive, what makes it conscious. I tried a psychedelic drug for the first time just pretty recently and even with a very rational and totally materialistic view on the universe, some things dawned on me under the influence of this psychedelic drug. Under its influence evolutionary necessities like distribution of meaning, a sense of self, a sense of reality completely fell apart and what was left was a consciousness that made experiences through the lense of the brain, through the lense and the sensory nervous system of the body. However the conscious experience itself appeared to be more fundamental than even matter itself. Until this day I don’t know if it was just an illusion of the brain but under the drug‘s influence it appeared to me that „the self is an reflection of everything just as everything is a reflection of the self“, It appeared that there was only one fundamental self, and that ALL things, even the things that we don’t attribute consciousness to are „the self“, the basic „consciousness“ that makes all things conscious and looks through different lenses on itself. I get this sounds like esoteric woo-hoo or religion and I’m not entirely sure if it’s really a meaningful or more importantly an accurate description of what‘s really going on but in this state of consciousness that I a normally very materialistic, scientific thinker was, this felt as obvious to me as it is obvious that liquid water is wet. During the entire experience I was aware of this being irrational and I was even trying to convince myself that it is non-sensical but at the same time it seemed clear to me that „all is consciousness“, that consciousness is deeper than the self, that your consciousness is deeper than what’s going on in the body and brain, which does not make sense considering that the drug I took influenced my brain to give the self, the „I“ those kinds of experiences. The experience of taking the drug completely fucked my concept of reality and consciousness and although I still try to view everything as rational and materialistic, the experience of these things was so strong and pregnant that I wouldn’t be as militant in my stance that there is a completely materialistic explanation to consciousness anymore. Interestingly enough it also seemed to me in this state that with our scientific method will never be able to explore or comprehend the depths of consciousness. I can’t say if this is really true. And also curiously enough everyone who tried this drug and reported their experience to me (and all of this was after I had my experience) had very similar or even completely identical „realizations“. Big, big mindfuck that made me realize that consciousness is much more mysterious than it already seems to a sober mind.

I will not agree that nothing interesting has been written about consciousness until 1999 but I deeply admire the intensity of the will, to find what it is and what it is not, shown in this masterful presentation.

It is truly amazing that so little is known about what is arguably the closest thing to us.

I am so grateful and I want to thank you for the lectures that I heard from you. You belong to a growing group in the world that teaches and illuminates and heals many dark and wounded souls. I don't know Neuroscience of Consciousness but in my opinion an excellent and amazing lecture. You have personally enlightened me important points in the physics and medical sciences. So I would like to wish you Good luck to you Anil Seth For any way you choose to go Always that the cosmos will illuminates to you the way even in the darkest places. Love you.❤️

Thank you Anil Seth and The Royal Institution. I find you very effective "Information Sharers". AND, because of your Brilliance and Generosity, I have become more "informed" about this fascinating and seldom discussed/understood subject. I prefer to "learn better" than to "know better". Thank You for Advancing My Learning!, Ted Furlo

This lecture speaks volumes about the progress we are making towards understanding ourselves and the nature/notion of consciousness. I believe it's impossible to truly understand the essence of what we are, which is pure consciousness, in its entirety with the limits of the human brain, but by acknowledging it in science and continuously questioning ourselves, our world, and how we perceive it all, we are stepping closer to the truth, which in turn can/will help in aiding the enlightenment of ourselves and others. It was very interesting hearing him talk, and I admire the amount of work, studies, and experimentation he's conducted surrounding a subject that seems (at least to me) so difficult to obtain real evidence and progression. Thank you for this. "With so often in science, with greater understanding comes a larger sense of wonder and a greater realization that we are part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature"

Absolutely the clearest explanation for a very complex phenomenon I know of .