M&B 10th Anniversary Event
By personal e-mail invitation only. If you haven't received an invitation, please contact:
mb-manager@hu-berlin.de
Distinguished Tenth Anniversary Lecture
Professor Anil Seth (Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex)
“The new neuroscience of consciousness: solving the real problem”
The biological basis of consciousness stands as one of the great unsolved challenges in science. One approach is to ask how biophysical mechanisms can account for specific phenomenological properties of consciousness, without necessarily explaining the existence of consciousness in the first place. This can be called the 'real problem' of consciousness. I will describe how this approach has illuminated three distinct aspects of the biology of consciousness: level, content, and self. For conscious level, 'how conscious we are' can be tracked by mathematical measures of neuronal complexity that capture the unified yet differentiated nature of conscious phenomenology. For conscious content I will describe how the emerging Bayesian framework of 'predictive processing' helps reveal the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. And by generalizing predictive processing to interoception – the sense of the body from within - I will develop a Bayesian view of the experience of 'embodied selfhood'. Speculatively, this may help us understand the deeply subjective nature of consciousness as emerging from systems that care intrinsically about their own existence. It also suggests powerful new approaches to understanding and treating clinical disorders of selfhood and conscious perception.
