Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 469: A Mystery That Matters | Anil Seth

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

How, on this planet, did we go from molten lava and shifting tectonic plates to sentient beings? How are you awake and aware right now? Who and where and what exactly is the “you” that is experiencing everything?Guest Anil Seth says that exploring these questions can lead to real and radical changes in your life, including reducing your emotional reactivity.Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness. His TED Talk on consciousness has been viewed over 13 million times. Most recently, he is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.In this episode we talk about: How brains give rise to consciousness The bundle theory of selfThe comfort in thinking of the self as impermanentA new way to think about emotional statesHow Seth’s personal experience with long COVID has changed his own sense of selfThe question of whether we have free willWhether machines can be conscious – and whether we should be afraid of artificial intelligenceFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/anil-seth-469See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, we're all familiar with the great mysteries of the universe. Why are we here? Is there a god who let the dogs out? Today, we're talking about a huge unanswered question that doesn't always get that much air time, but that is, per my guess today, a mystery that matters.

Those are his words, and here's the mystery. How on this planet did we go from molten lava and shifting tectonic plates to sentient beings to the universe knowing itself? This has been called the hard problem of consciousness. How are you awake and aware right now? Who and where and what exactly is the you that is experiencing everything? This is not purely academic. Exploring this question can lead to real and radical changes in your life, including

not taking everything that comes up in your mind, so personally and thereby reducing your emotional reactivity. In fact, that is exactly what my guest says has happened for him. A Neil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sackler Center for Consciousness Science, and editor-in-chief of neuroscience of consciousness. His TED talk on consciousness has been viewed over 13 million times, and most recently he's the author of Being You,

a new science of consciousness. In this conversation, we talked about how brains give rise to consciousness, or at least the best theories on that. The bundle theory of self, the comfort that comes with thinking about the self as impermanent, a new way to think about emotional states and how Anil's own experience with long COVID has changed his own sense of self. We also talk about the thorny question of whether we have free will, whether machines can be conscious, and whether we should all be very afraid of artificial intelligence. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% .com all one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family and experts the questions that are in my head like it's only's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace?

Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. And Neil Seth, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. Likewise, let me ask a big broad question here, hopefully not impertinent. What is consciousness and why should we care?

Well, that's two big, broad questions, but both of which are very sensible. What is consciousness is, on the one hand, it's very easy to answer. We're all very familiar with what consciousness is. It's perhaps the most familiar thing for any of us. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go under anesthesia and what comes back when you come round again or wake up again in the morning. It's a property that we have.

I'm conscious you're conscious, but tables and chairs probably don't have this property. It's any kind of subjective experience, the redness of red, the sharpness of pain, the pang of jealousy or envy, all of these are instances of conscious experience. So we all know what it is, but actually to define what it is

in the same way that we can talk about other things in science, or in biology, or in physics, is quite difficult. It doesn't resolve itself into a single phenomenon, quite so easily. And why is it important to understand consciousness? Well, people have been wondering about consciousness, probably since they've been wondering about anything.

It's one of the oldest mysteries that there is. We all wonder, I think, from a very early age, I certainly did. Who am I? Why am I me and not someone else? Why is it like anything to be me at all? What happens when I die? And then these questions, I think just evolve over time into how is it that this mess of wetware inside my skull, which is just stuff. It's just molecules of different kinds.

How can this underlie any kind of conscious experience at all? It seems really, really strange that mere stuff, however complicated and wonderful, could give rise to the feeling that you get looking at a beautiful sunset. There are also some practical reasons we should care about understanding the biology of consciousness. All suffering, all mental health issues manifest themselves in conscious experiences. The condition of depression is primarily about the conscious experience of depression rather than any behavior

that somebody with depression might exhibit. And it's by understanding the mechanisms that shape our conscious experiences that we might get a handle on how better to understand and perhaps even treat mental health disorders and other disorders of the brain, neurological disorders that follow stroke and brain damage and so on. So I think there are really deep personal reasons, but also a wealth of practical reasons for understanding consciousness being an important thing for us in society to do. I love the term wet wear, this large damp globule of whatever in between our ears. And you pose this question, which I think is sometimes referred to as the hard question.

How does this wetwear become this conscious experience? How does it get rise to that? Do we have anything approaching an answer? This is the famous or infamous hard problem of consciousness that is phrased this way by the philosopher David Chalmers, who's been a great influence on me and many others. It is indeed this question of how can any kind of stuff, physical stuff, this globule of wet wear inside our skull, how could it give rise to or be identical with any kind of conscious experience? As the philosopher David Chandler's put it he says, it seems remarkable that it should,

and yet it does. Brains, give rise to or in some way are intimately related to consciousness. This is not a new problem. Deca talked about the same thing with his separation of the mind and the body back in the 17th century. And it's remained a mystery. Do we have an answer to the hard problem, a resolution to the hard problem? The short answer is no. But have we gained a much deeper understanding of how the brain, the body and the conscious mind relate, and

the answer is definitely yes. My suspicion is that directly addressing the hard problem head on and trying to find the magic stuff, the special source, if you like, that magic's experience out of mere mechanism might be the wrong way to go about it. There are other examples in the history of science where something that looked like a single, really difficult problem turned out not to be that way. So, wasn't that long ago that most scientists could not conceive that the property of being alive could be understood in terms of physics and chemistry. This was the pretty dominant perspective called vitalism that there was a spark of life, a special source that was outside the known laws of physics and chemistry that explained the difference between the living and the

non-living. But of course things didn't turn out that way. And as biologists got on with a job of explaining the properties of living systems like metabolism and reproduction and the other things that living systems do, we've lost this idea that there's something deeply mysterious about life that cannot be understood through science and philosophy. It can be. We don't understand everything yet, but the hard problem of life wasn't solved head on. It was dissolved by gradually explaining its properties. My suspicion is the same thing will apply to consciousness. I talk about the real problem of consciousness, rather than the hard problem of consciousness, which is treating it pragmatically like we treated life not as one big scary mystery in search of a Eureka moment of a solution.

You know, that may happen in which case brilliant, but rather as a collection of related mysteries about consciousness, what's free will all about, what's the experience of being a self all about, why are experiences of color different from emotion. And as we make progress in explaining these things individually, maybe the sense of mystery about consciousness being class of the universe will dissolve away. You've called this a mystery that matters. And you've talked a little bit about why it matters. But I just want to utter that phrase and see if it provokes any more musings on your end.

It does matter because everything that happens to us, to anybody else, is only really meaningful in terms of its impact on conscious experience. Now, if we were just automata going about our business without experiencing anything, like biological robots, meat machines with no inner universe, then nothing would really matter at all.

Things have significance in life because we experience them, we experience their consequences. We imagine their future consequences, we have emotional responses to things. Life in general has meaning because we are conscious creatures. And this is the most general sense in which I think it's a mystery that matters. And that's underlies, I think, these other more specific senses that it matters because we can come up with new approaches to psychiatric conditions, mental health, well-being, and in general. And I also think it matters because it's just part of this

narrative of self-understanding that we as a species have been on. This sounds very grandiation, I apologize for this, but if you think about how we think of our place within the universe, there have been a few major transitions. It used to be considered that we were at the centre of the universe and that there were at the center of the universe and that there were just the spheres of the heavens rotating around us and the earth was definitely at the center. And of course, that's not the case. We become more humble in the knowledge of the vastness of the universe. It's so much larger, more wonderful than we could have thought. And of course, we're not at the center. And then Darwin comes along and shows that we are not so special among other living creatures

either. We're related to all other living creatures with parts of the family of life on Earth. And I think that too is a moment of humility, but also a moment of awe and wonder. And I think the same thing is happening as we try to understand consciousness, this feeling that we have rational minds that are somehow distinctively human and perhaps not explainable in terms of our biology. Now, that's something we can still cling onto that makes us different from the rest of nature apart from nature. And I think understanding consciousness matters because it makes us in all our respects and everything about us, it makes us part of nature

rather than apart from nature. That's really interesting from my perspective. It reminds me of kind of a meditation technique that I've been using for the last couple of years, comes from a Burmese master, and instead of having a sort of a rigid focus on the breath style practice, he has these three phrases that he has students kind of drop into their minds on a regular basis throughout your meditation practice, actually, but also throughout life.

One of the phrases, I won't inflict all three of them upon you, but one of them is, this is nature. Whatever is happening right now in your mind, which we tend to take quite personally, is just nature. Anyway, I could hold forth on that for a long time, but I want to shut my app and let you respond to it. I think that's very interesting, because to what, to me, what that evokes is this idea that this separation that we often feel in our daily lives between us and the rest of nature, like I am looking at nature, I am looking at the world, the world is separate from me as the observer. That is something that in my understanding of Buddhist thinking

is challenged. That separation is, in some extent, illusory and certainly the way we experience things is not a good guide to the way they are. This separation between subjectivity and the rest of the world is one of those ways in which how things seem is not how they are. And I think the whole practice of neuroscience and philosophy in this regard is saying much the same thing that the brain is generating this experience of being a perspective on an external world. But that doesn't mean that we are brains, our bodies, our minds actually separate from it. It is all just nature. And one of the things I don't know if this would count as meditation, but one of the things that I've

found myself doing over the years that I've been trying to understand consciousness from the perspective of neuroscience is just when you walk around, reflecting on the fact that within my skull there are just these roughly 86 billion neurons or connected together and there are light waves impacting certain cells in my eyes and that's everything is joined up and there's this physical thing which is me and my brain and my body moving through a physical world and that's really what's going on and out of that somehow in ways that we don't fully understand yet, this experience is conjured of being a subject within the world rather than a subject being completely

seamlessly part of it. And just I think that maybe a similar kind of meditative refrain just to say, okay, no, I am part of what is going on. I am not apart from what's going on. And there's a, I hate this word because it's just, it just gets thrown around a lot in new age and they often even tech circles, but I'm going to use it anyway. But there is a kind of co-creation, I think, going on in that there's an exchange between self and the world. Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist who writes a lot of books about the overlap between modern

psychology and Buddhism has a little phrase that he's used, which is no self apart from the world. And that just came up in my mind as I was listening to you speak. Does it resonate with you at all? It does, and I think the relationship between what we call the self and the world and our experiences of these things is where some of the richest veins are to mine in this whole neuroscience philosophy adventure. And again, I think there are lots of resonances with meditation, with Buddhist practice. So one of the things that I think is relevant here is this idea that the self is not this essence of me or you that does the perceiving of this external world. The self as a perceiver, the sort of minimi inside my head, looking out through the windows of my eyes and so on.

The self is another kind of perception. There are just experiences. Some of those experiences are to do with the world. Other experiences are to do with the world, other experiences are to do with the self. And in this sense, the self is rightly called illusory. And it's illusory because it seems in most of our normal everyday experiences that my experience of being a self picks out a real thing, which is me, which is somewhere inside my head. Now, that experience is real, but it's illusory that that's not what is being picked out.

And there's something else going on which you're a whole bunch of unfolding ways of perceiving certain things my organism as a whole is doing or has done or may do in the future. And those together constitute this experience of self-hood, but there's no immutable essence of me underlying that. In the same way that when we look at the world and we see a green lawn, it's a beautiful green grass, the green is not actually out there in the world. The green requires both a world and a brain and a

mind to exist. We don't need neuroscience for this. The artist Cisanne said it, colour is where the brain and the universe meet. There's no such thing as colour without a brain to perceive it. And we all see colours in slightly different ways. Certainly other animals will see very different world of colour to you and I. And you and I may well experience colors differently in fact I think this is the other point that it made me think of when we walk around Our experiences of the world are that the things we see or here really are that way

How things seen has the character of being how they are. If I see a red bus across the road, it really seems as though there's a red bus on the other side of the road. Now, of course, there's something there. I don't want to stand in front of it when it's pulling away. It'll hurt. But what is actually there? There's a solid object which reflects light in a particular way. But the red bus that I see might not be the same as the red bus that you see or the cat sees or adogses. And always challenging this idea that how things seem is not necessarily how they are, I think, is another useful lesson that probably transcends all these different disciplines. And that's a sense in which co-creation makes sense. Yes, the brain in the world

different disciplines. And that's a sense in which co-creation makes sense. Yes, the brain in the world are both necessary to generate the experience by one of the other. Something that came up in my mind as you were talking, and it was sort of not the last point you made, but one of the middle points you made about the self-being another perception. I want to mention to you a meditation technique that my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein sometimes teaches people. I have mentioned this on the show before listeners, but it's actually very, very interesting. So I'm going to mention it again and I believe it derives from a Tibetan school of meditation practice called Zogchen, DZ-O-G-C-A-G-N, Zogchen. Practice is quite simple, and you can do this just sort of walking around.

You can do it in meditation or you can just do it in your daily life Which is to kind of phrase things in your mind in the passive voice. So objects or mental objects are hearing or seeing or whatever is happening right now is being known Just to say you're walking around. Oh seeing is being known hearing is being known the oh, seeing is being known. Hearing is being known. The feeling of movement is being known. Just to touch into the fact that there's this kind of effortless knowing that's happening all the time. And then the key is to say known by what? And that throws you into the space of looking for where's this subject? Where's this nowhere? You can't find it. You might find a sensation of knowing,

I sometimes feel like my sensation of selfness is kind of right around my eyes or my mouth or something like that. There's just feeling of dandness somehow there, but that's just another perception arising in consciousness. I cannot find the homunculus of damn taking delivery of all of these packages. That's absolutely right, isn't it?

Yeah, I think that hits the nail on the head that it's just another perception. It depends what arises in your field of attention at a time. It could be, indeed, this sense of being behind your eyes. It could be the thought that of being behind your eyes, it could be the thought that suddenly pops into your mind. In the limited meditation that I've done, that's always something that I try to cultivate this idea of noticing when a thought appears and just letting it go by and trying to catch it a little bit to say where did that come from?

Where did it go? Rather than just letting it lead on to the next thought and the next thought and the next thought, just seeing it for what it is, this thought, as you said, this is a thought that is known, but known by what? And there isn't a what? Then the attention could move on to this sense of volition or intention. I think for many people, the essence of self is tied very closely to the sense of free will, the sense of being able to do what you want to do, to voluntarily move your arm or make a cup of tea or walk out the door or whatever it is. But where do those intentions come from? Do they not just arise too in the same way

that the thought arises in the same way that any experience arises? And there's a very old idea in philosophy of minds called the bundle theory of self due to David Hume, which basically said the same thing like 300 years ago, 400 years ago, that this is what we think of as the self is just a bundle of different perceptions. But now, of course, the key is to understand, to drill down a little bit more into what that means in practice, what kinds of perceptions, why? What are the different ways in which experiences of being a self could manifest? They come together in a particular way for you and me. They might come together in a different way for for you and me they might come together a different way for somebody else and certainly for for other species. This experience of self-hood might still be there but it might be very very different from how it's manifest for human beings with our particular

biological bodies, particular shapes and particular way of being in the world which is very different from many other creatures. I want to talk about free will, but let me just stay with the bundles for a second, because in Buddhism, we talk about the aggregates. I mean, the several millennia before Hume started drawing breath on the planet. The Buddha was helping people disambiguate the self, get underneath it, and see that it is, it's just an accumulation of body sensations, mental activity, what he would call sort of the feeling tone, like does whatever is arising your mind feel positive or negative or neutral, what's the sort of valence of it from that regard, just a way to, I think it's called seeing through dividing, you know, taking a part

any moment of experience in a way that allows you to kind of see it for what it really is. And I'm just wondering to you when you see how consciousness is both mysterious and impersonal, this, I don't know what to call it, a force or a way that underlies all of our experiences which we compute as hours. When you are able to touch up against this mystery

either through the meditation techniques that we've discussed or through just your sort of work as a neuroscientist and a philosopher, what does that produce for you? Does it produce odds? Does it give you a sense of maybe divinity to use a loaded phrase? Is it healing in that you can see that all of your neurotic compulsions are just arising against the backdrop of this yawning chasm of pure knowing? How does all of this go down for you?

I think it is helpful though. I would say that pursuing the neuroscience of consciousness is probably a very inefficient way to reach an accommodation with my own personality and experiences in life. I think it does get you some of the same way, though, that meditation does and some of these spiritual perspectives do. It certainly does help. When at difficult times, I can use whatever tools I happen to have to hand, whether it's thinking about what I know from neuroscience or what I can do in meditation or whatever other times that I've come up against this personal mystery, that indeed, these are just experiences arising that they shouldn't be

rayified, they shouldn't be taken as objects that have some sort of permanence immutable existence that things will change, things will evolve and that's fine. There's a certain comfort in thinking about the self as in permanence, as always evolving. The person I am now is not the same person I was yesterday, certainly not the person I was six months ago or a year ago or ten years ago. And this of course, Buddha was telling us this long, long ago, but a neuroscientific perspective on it, just I think it converges in a surprising way, it converges so closely with these other ideas of the impermanence of the self that the

combination of the two I think can be particularly powerful, can be particularly helpful. And it does also evoke a sense of all sometimes. There is, I think, in a lot of scientific enterprises, when we are faced with the amazingness to use a strange word, but just the sheer amazingness of what's going on here. I mean, the things we take for granted, it's very easy to take our conscious lives for granted. We wake up in the morning, we open our eyes and boom, there's a world, it's got colors, shapes and so on. But understanding how remarkable it is that this should happen and that it should happen effortlessly

that our brains are capable of conjuring this world of experience from just electrons and atoms interacting in various ways. Now, that is something that if you dwell on it, world of experience from just electrons and atoms interacting in various ways. Now that is something that if you dwell on it does inspire or. But none of this is a permanent state, even though I know that redness doesn't really exist in the world, I don't stop seeing things as being red now. You live your life as normal, but it adds another layer. And I think that that was a surprise to me. I didn't, to be honest, when I got into this area, it was mainly because it was a scientific mystery.

I wanted to understand, and of course, I wanted to understand who I was as well. I thought that would be, and we all have that drive to figure out who we are. But I didn't really expect it to have this immediate impact in managing my own life on a day-to-day basis. And of course, I don't know, if I hadn't done this, maybe it would be just the same. I don't have the alternatives of me that did something else. But it feels like it's made a difference. And that's been a pleasant surprise. Can you say a little bit more about the mechanism by which it's made a difference. And that's been a pleasant surprise. Can you say a little bit more about the mechanism by which it's made a difference

in managing your own life? Well, I think the most obvious example that comes to mind is in dealing with emotional states. I've had my own experiences of depression over the years. And being able to just understand a bit more about what underlies any kind of emotional experience. To think about the emotional experience as, okay, this is my brain perceiving the state of the body in a particular context. That helps deflate some of the more negative emotions of their staying power.

This traditions, practice and meditation that basically train people to do this as well. The body scan, you feel things in your body, and this is what emotions literally are to our best understanding at the moment. They're not sort of just instances of conscious experience that parachute into the brain from somewhere else and are there to stay and guide you. They are the brain's way of perceiving the state of the body in a way that evolution has tuned to be relevant, which may not be relevant in the world in which we live in today. And this means that it becomes easier to manage the flow of emotions because we can just feel them for what they are, feel them

as bodily states rather than projecting them into possible, usually, bad features in the world. And I think it allows us to change our experience of the very same emotions. They seem less distressing when they're understood this way. And of course this again, it doesn't work all the time. It's not that the experience of emotion has changed into something else or diffused, deflated completely, but the power of negative emotions to completely take over, I think is reduced. I certainly not claiming that I've mastered this by any means at all. I'm still very subject to being carried away by negative emotions.

But I do think it helps. I totally agree. I do think it helps as well. Can you help me understand a little bit more about what you were saying about the current view of emotions that it's not like these adventitious outside forces that are parachuting into the brain? it's more the brain gauging the sense of where the body's at right now, kid. I didn't quite grok that.

That's now pretty much exactly right. So the history of emotion is very long. Of course, people have been interested in emotions forever. In ancient Greece, there was this idea of classical emotions that were the same for everybody and possibly across species as well, that were the same, they just shared. And more recently, about the turn of the 1920th century came this idea that instead of emotion being part of a conscious mind that then controlled the body, like take an example, I see something fearful, potentially scary, like a snake, something like that. So I see a snake, I feel the emotion of fear and that emotion then causes me to react in a particular way,

to run away from the snake or to hit it with a hammer or something. That would be one way of thinking about it, and maybe that's a natural way to think about it. But this other way of thinking came about, G2 William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology and Carlangue in Denmark, that it's the other way around. So I see the snake, and the sight of the snake puts my body into a particular state, like heart rate will go up, adrenaline will start coursing around. And it's the brain's perception of the body being in that state. In the context of a snake being present, that is the emotion of fear. So it's the brain

perceiving the body in a way that makes sense in terms of what the body should then do. That's the experience. And to just whizz up to the present day, this is a line of thinking that I took forward a little bit in my own way by basically finishing the parallel, that the way in which we experience emotion is very, very similar, I think, to the way that we

experience anything. If you open your eyes, it's not just that the world pours itself into the mind. Yeah, the brain doesn't just pour itself into the mind. The way the world is is ambiguous to the brain. It's just there's too much going on. There too many different ways it can be we can any sample little bits of it here and there So perception whether it's vision or whatever it is is An interpretation the brain is making its best guess of what's actually out there It's predicting the way the world is on the basis of its prior Beliefs about what's going on and the sensory data that gets and

Finish the thought the idea is this is exactly what's going on and the sensory data that gets. And to finish the thought, the idea is this is exactly what's going on with the body too. The brain is also trying to perceive the state of the body and it's making a guess about what's going on in the body and it gets sensory information from the body. There are perception isn't just about the world outside. A large part of the brain is geared to perceiving the interior of the body and it's making a best guess about what's going on and that's based

on its prior expectations. So if you change the context, if you change the expectations, you can have a very different experience even for the same state of the body. So there's a parallel here between how we see the world and how emotions arise. Just going back to the view of the snake, to run through the order of operations, the brain perceives the snake, the body then reacts, and then the brain perceives that reaction and computes it as fear. Yes, it's probably spooched together much more in, there's, there doesn't separate into these clean stages, but that, that reversal, that's the interesting part.

And I think that's largely the case. So how then would one change the context or expectation in a way that might change that experience? Well, I think this is where things like meditation can really help because to the extent that you can begin to before changing the context, you just recognize the process. So you recognize, like, if you feel anxiety, for instance. Now often, when I have states of anxiety, I now recognize that these and most apparent in my body, I can feel it, literally, often in my hands and my feet, and I perceive the emotion

as manifest in the body. That in itself is enough to induce a little separation between my experience of anxiety in the moment and what my thinking mind might assume is the object of that anxiety, whatever's going on in my life, that might be the source of that anxiety. So just recognizing the context is important there and I can think, why is this happening? And then changing the context can happen in many different situations. And I think this makes sense in a happen in many different situations. And I think this makes sense in a lot of different therapeutic situations.

So things like exposure therapy, they try to, they change a context in which you experience something that would otherwise be very, very difficult to experience in a bit by a bit. The context means that the emotion that goes along with that stimulus changes. There was an experiment about 50 years ago, and there were two groups of students, and they both walked across bridges across a river, somewhere I think North Vancouver. One bridge was quite low, it wasn't a big drop, it was quite a sturdy bridge, but the other bridge was very high up against this raging

torrent, and it was a very rickety precarious bridge. And so they both walked across this bridge, the rickety bridge group. There a adrenaline got going because it's quite a scary bridge to cross. But the other group, yes fine, I'll just walk across this bridge. And then at the end of the bridge, they were met by an attractive female researcher, all the students were male in this group. So they walked across their met by an attractive female a student who asked them to fill in a couple of questionnaires

and also gave them a phone number in case they had any more questions. And the interesting measure here was how many of the male students phoned up to ask the female researcher for a date or for something? And it turned out many more of them who'd gone across the precarious bridge did so than he'd gone across a sturdy bridge.

And the interpretation of this ethically very, very dubious experiment is that the group who walked across the rickety bridge misinterpreted their physiological arousal caused by the scariness of the bridge as some kind of sexual chemistry with the female researcher. So changing the context, yeah, you can do it in all sorts of ways, ethically, nefarious or otherwise, but it does seem to make a difference to what we experience. Coming up in Neil Seth on what he calls spooky free will, recognizing the precariousness of the self, and how the concept of free will ties into moral responsibility right after this.

Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Let's talk about free will. You mentioned it earlier, but I've never been able to really understand this. Notwithstanding the fact that I have known and been friends with Sam Harris for a long time and he's written a book about the fact that free wills and illusion.

And I've asked him about a million times and I don't get it. So maybe you're the person who can help me understand this. But is the consensus view among the experts that free will truly is an illusion that I cannot choose to, you know, swap that cat away that was on my lap and ruining this interview. I wish there was a consensus view. It's amazing that something that is essential and has been thought about and researched about for as long as free will still fails to gather consensus. My old boss, when I was a postdoc in San Diego, said free will, we're determined to have it, and we really need to have these experiences of free will. So what's going on with free will?

The first thing is, the experiences exist. So there is a class of experiences that we have, which we label as being experiences of free will or volition. There are times where I really have the experience that I'm picking up a glass of pineapple juice, and I can drink it and that feels like something I did of my own volition. And in fact, there's a behavior that goes

along with it. I did indeed pick up the glass of juice. So all these things are real. So what doesn't exist? What's illusory in this sense? What's illusory, I think, is the idea of free will as this extra physical stuff, this essence of me that is independent of my brain and body that parachutes in and makes something happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. Philosophers call this libertarian free will and I rather unkindly call it spooky free will. This idea that free will is this ability to change the course of physical events in the universe to make something happen that otherwise wouldn't happen. So, okay, say that doesn't exist. I don't think that exists.

There are still people who think that it does. There's some space and they usually say, well, look, the universe is random. There's still randomness down in the depths of quantum mechanics or wherever you look. Maybe that's enough elbow room. There's an elbow room there for free will to come in and load the dice one way or the other. But that doesn't work because free will isn't about behaving randomly. Free will is about doing what I want to do when I want to do it. Randomness doesn't help you at all. So this whole debate between is the world deterministic, like does everything unfold like clockwork, or is it essentially random?

To my mind, this debate is entirely irrelevant. It really doesn't matter one way or the other. What matters is we as organisms, some things we do are very reflexive. If I put my hand over a flame on the fire, I'll withdraw that hand. I don't have to think about it. It doesn't feel like a voluntary action. It just happens. And that's fine. That is a very quick.

It is a reflexive action. But there are other things. If I choose to put my hand there in the first place, that feels like a voluntary action. Now, voluntary actions, they feel like specific kinds of actions, they feel like they come from within, they feel like they're aligned with what I want to do. You know, why I want to put my hand in the fire is a very good question, but at the moment I did it, it felt like what I wanted to do, let's say. And it feels like I could have done otherwise. It feels like I could have done something different. I made a cup of tea. I could have made a cup of coffee. But

again, we've got to step back and recognize that how things seen in our conscious experience isn't how they are. So for me, the simplest way to understand what all this means together is to think of free will and experiences of free will like the experience of seeing a color to get back to our example of color. A color, like say the redness of the car on the other side of the road, that redness doesn't exist independently of a mind of my mind at this time. That's the product of my mind to get it with the car out there. It doesn't mean that this experience is useless, it's playing an important role for the body.

The fact that my visual system is able to conjure colours means that I'm able to identify surfaces as lighting conditions change and do all sorts of useful things. This is why we perceive colours. But the colour doesn't exist out there as a real property of the world. Now the same line of thinking to my mind works for free will. So we experience that I am the cause of this action, doesn't actually mean that there's an essence of me that is the cause of this action. But all the ways we experience free will,

as an organism, we make voluntary actions, we experience them as coming from within, We could have done differently and all this. That's useful for us as organisms exactly the same way that seeing things as being colored is useful, but it's not for the reason we think it is. It's not because the experience caused the action. I think it's useful for the future. Like we experienced something that I could have done differently, because next time, I might. You never step into the same river twice. It's not the same river, you're not the same person. So this is a bit of a far out idea, I can see it, but I think, and I'm not the only one, that experiences of free will, a real and voluntary actions are real, but the experience doesn't cause the action, that experiences a free will, a real, and voluntary actions are real,

but the experience doesn't cause the action, the experiences for the future. We experience voluntary actions the way we do so that we might do better the next time. I've probably muddied the horses horribly, but that's what happens with free will. I'm afraid. It mixes together so many different things. It's, you know, world, I'm afraid. It mixes together so many different things. It's a philosophical mystery, there's physics because you have this thing about with the world being deterministic or random, and it's a neuroscientific, psychological mystery too, because it's so central to how we experience being who we are.

But essentially, I don't think it's any more mysterious than how we experience emotions or colors or any other aspects of our mental lives, but it just has this particularly subversive quality that it seems like the experience is having a some sort of extra physical causal impact. But things don't work that way. There's nothing more to us than the combined activity of our brains and bodies over time. And that's not to be reductive about what we are.

We are amazing things, this sort of quintessences of dust. We are amazing things. But there's nothing more that's necessary to produce the wonder of what it is to be each of us than our brains, bodies, minds, and the environments that we're in, which of course includes other brains, bodies and minds too. I'm not sure I have a toe hold here, but let me just kick up step. I mean, this ties back to the discussion of the self.

There is no core of Dan reaching for this can in front of me right now. It's the bundle of the aggregates of Dan doing that and it produces this illusion of me making a decision and carrying out an action. Yeah, basically, I think that's part of what it is to be a self, part of being you, being Dan, being me is the experience of the body that we have, right? I have this object in the world is me and other things are not me. The table is not me, the chair I'm sitting on is not me. Then this body can do things.

This body can make voluntary actions. And when it does, I experience myself as the cause of that action. But what I'm saying, and I think what you said beautifully that is that, no, it's not that yourself is the cause of the action, but the experience of being the cause of that action is part of what it is to be yourself. There are people who have a condition called akinetic mutism, which is a condition in which they don't express any voluntary actions, they don't make voluntary actions, they're conscious, but they don't do anything of their own accord.

And I think this is informative because it tells us that just as with any other aspect of self, whether it's our memories of what's happened to us in the past or our experience of what is our body and what is not, there are conditions in which each of these aspects can go away, but the rest can remain. And the self is in this sense extremely precarious. And I think we're very familiar with people losing memory and Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And when they do that, it's not that they see to be there. You know, there's some essence of them

that still seems to be there. And their emotional responses might be similar. Their ability to make voluntary actions is there. They may like the same foods. They may like the same foods. They may like the same foods. There's just part of what it is to be their self has changed. And I think that applies pretty much to every aspect of self. There are people who don't experience free will,

or people with schizophrenia, might have, again, very unusual experiences of volition. They may make actions that they don't experience as being made voluntarily by them, that they're being controlled by somebody else, this is a relatively common phenomena in schizophrenia. So these things that we take for granted as just being the way they are, they really aren't.

And I think that's illuminating and important for all of us. I believe Sam talks about these neuroscientific experiments that show that the brain registers an action well before the mind does. Whether well before you know you're gonna do a thing, the brain does you're gonna do it. That kind of leads me to think

you use the word deterministic earlier, and I'm not quite sure I know what that means, but it makes me feel like, oh wait wait so if free wills and illusion or we all kind of automotons moving through the world is sub I don't control by what I don't know oh we're controlled by us I mean there's a lot of middle ground here it's not that we've got no control over what we do. We do. We make voluntary actions, but there's nothing outside our brains and bodies that comes in and makes that happen. That's a product of our brains and bodies. There are these experiments, and these have been some of the most controversial experiments in neuroscience, I think, ever. And the basic phenomenon is quite simple. So, the guy Benjamin Libat, who did

these studies in the 1980s in San Francisco. And the setup is quite simple. He asked people, they just sit there and he says, wherever you feel like it, just lift your wrist, make a simple wrist movement. So they do this off their own free will, is the idea. Of course, they've been told to do this

so it's not entirely of any way, but you can set that aside. They, at the time of their choosing, they lift their wrist. So you can measure a number of things. You can measure the time at which their wrist moves. That's very clear. You can measure the time at which they say they felt the urge to move their wrist. This is a bit trickier to measure.

They're about did it by having people look at a dot rotating on an oscilloscope screen and basically saying where was the dot as it goes around. At the moment you felt the conscious urge, the moment of free will, to move your wrist. So you have two points. And then of course you can record what's going on in the brain this whole time. you can record what's going on in the brain this whole time. And when he did this, he found that activity in certain parts of the brain started to ramp up not only before the movement, which of course you would expect, brain prepares the muscle soraction and so on, but actually before the person said they felt the urge to make the movement. So he thought, hold on a minute,

this is really weird because it looks as though the brain knows that you're going to move your wrist before you do. So therefore free will is an illusion. That was the first interpretation of these experiments. If the brain already knows, then like, what have I got to do with it? already knows, then what have I got to do with it? What's my experience of free will got to do with it? But unfortunately, it got a lot more complicated than this.

It turns out that that basic result, although it's been widely replicated, is problematic in a number of ways. It's mainly problematic because he only looked at the times where people actually lifted their wrist. There he only looked at the times where people actually lifted their wrist. There's a whole bunch of times where they didn't lift their wrist. And if you look at those times too, the picture gets a lot more complicated indeed. And then it turns out that actually the moment at which brain signals become more separable

is actually much closer to where the person feels the congesurge to move their wrist. But in any case, the whole thing is a little bit weird because what else would you expect? There's always going to be stuff happening in the brain before you do anything and before you have an experience related to that. It's just that's the way it is, that's the way it's going to be. So the results that Libet gets are exactly the results that you would expect to get.

I'm not sure if I understand this any better, but let me ask this, it has a heart and respect to the first question I asked. Why does this matter? Like is this a mystery that matters? Why should we care? So the free will mystery, again, I do think it matters for a variety of reasons. It does matter because it's so central to our conception of human what we are.

It is this aspect of our experience of selfhood that I think for many of us, we're most reluctant to give up on or to naturalize, to say, no, this is explainable by processes in our brains and bodies. But it matters in all sorts of other contexts as well. I mean, one area in which this understanding and the neuroscience at free will is having a direct impact is in the law. In the law, when people are being judged on some crime, typically talk about two things. You need evidence of the act and you need evidence of their intention to do that act. Actous, reiss and mens reyere, I think it is in most western law.

But what if their ability to exercise their free will was damaged? And there have been defenses arranged on this basis for many, many years, a defense of insanity. You weren't responsible because you'd lost your mind. You weren't of your own right mind. It was a crime of passion, maybe. And that's a pretty hard and fast boundary. There have certainly been cases in the past where people have committed some crime. And then later it's been discovered that they had a large brain tumor. And that brain tumor created in them a change of behavior that led to them committing this crime. Now your reaction to a situation like that might be, well, it's not their fault. They wouldn't have done this, were it not for the brain tumor, the brain tumor is the reason, the brain tumor is the problem, it seems wrong to hold the

whole person responsible. But of course, as we understand more and more and more about the basis of voluntary actions, why we do the actions that we do, then it's almost the case of brain team is all the way down for all of us. Now we don't choose our parents, we don't choose the brains we're born with. Yet, some of us do things that others don't, should we be held responsible? There's a, I think a provocative line of argument that says, actually moral responsibility in this sense is just an incoherent concept. Yes, society needs the whole people responsible, but it should be for the purposes of protection of others and rehabilitation, not for retribution. And this goes the other way, not for retribution. And this goes the other way too. Einstein once said that he couldn't take credit for anything because he didn't choose his own brain. Now I don't myself necessarily go

to hell away on this, but I do think it's provocative and it's one of these cases where a greater understanding of the biology just makes the decisions we make a society more complicated. Because this basic decision of are you in the right mind or not was predicated on a very clean separation that there are rational minds and then there's the rest. But now we know that picture is a great deal more complicated. So the question of when do we hold people responsible? You know, think of a person who maybe had stunted neural development because they grew up in a highly malnutrition environment, something like that. There's some case where clearly for no fault of their

own, developed a brain which is suboptimal about inhibiting actions. Do you hold them responsible? That's tricky. It's very tricky. So it matters. Coming up, Aneel talks about machine minds and why he is ultimately not so worried about the so-called Terminator scenario that people often talk about when it comes to fears of artificial intelligence. He's also going to talk about how his own experience with long COVID has personally changed his sense of self after this.

Another societal issue that you talk about in your book that doesn't have to do with humans, but it will on some level, but it's going to impact us. And we're also the creators of this is machine minds or artificial intelligence? How worried are you about machine minds? I'm worried in one way, much more than another way. So there's a sort of science fiction type worry, which is the worry that machines will develop some superhuman level of intelligence, and roughly at the same time, they'll become conscious.

They won't just be smart machines, but they'll be sentient machines that have experiences, and that this somehow will spell the end of human civilization, and it sort of terminates a scenario. I'm not massively worried about this scenario, because I think it's predicated. It's based on a number of assumptions. And I think the two assumptions that I think are most open to scrutiny are the assumption that consciousness is something that a robot or computer could have. We just don't know is that, for me, the correct response to that. We are living creatures and consciousness is very intimately related to our brains, to

our biological bodies. It might not be the kind of thing that you can just program into a computer. Certain things you can. You can program a computer to play chess, but you cannot. Well, when you program a computer to simulate whether it doesn't become wet and windy inside the computer, rain is not something you can bring into existence through programming it. You can simulate it, but you can't make it happen. So is consciousness more like playing chess or isn't more like rain? I think

it's probably more like rain, but the truth is we don't know. So that's one assumption. These computers may look as if they're conscious, but there might not be anything actually going on for them. And the second assumption is that consciousness is inextricably linked to intelligence. And this is another residue of this patina of human exceptionism that we have. We think we're at the center of the universe, we think that we're super smart, so on. And we associate consciousness with what we, I think with some hubris think of as our extraordinary human intelligence. But consciousness is not the same thing as intelligence.

Across the animal kingdom, there are creatures who are pretty smart in their own way, but they don't have to be in order to have conscious experiences. Some of the most basic conscious experiences we have are emotions like pain, fear, joy, surprise. They don't have to be very smart. You just, but they're very relevant. So I think the prospects of actually having conscious machines is pretty remote. But what I worry about are machine minds that look as if they're conscious.

Because we have a natural tendency to judge the ethical importance of things in terms of how similar they seem to us. And I think if we start building machines that give the strong appearance of being aware, that's going to derange our moral sensibilities in ways that are very, very difficult to predict. Now, we might start caring more about our unconscious machine companions than about other people or certainly about other creatures. That is definitely for me, O'Wary. Interesting. I mean, I can totally see that. We could have humanoid assistance that we start caring about more than actual humans who are suffering. So I can see that concern.

But it's interesting that you didn't go to the... Because I think there are a lot of serious people who have the fear that the machines will turn against us conscious or otherwise. There are people that make that case, but I think there's lots of issues with artificial intelligence in general. So these are very, very powerful technologies, and they shouldn't just be developed and deployed without careful thought and without back stops and off switches and all sorts of things like that. I think that's true, but I don't really see the prospects of machines suddenly developing

conscious goals that cause them to disrupt human society. I think that's a narrative that's appealing because of its sort of science, fiction overtones, but I just don't see it as that irrelevant. I think it distracts from the more immediate problems that we do have. I mean, artificial intelligence is already becoming a major problem in society. As with any powerful technology, it has its dark sides and its light sides. And AI, even these days, is introducing so much bias in how we experience the world. We don't know.

If you do a Google search, the answers you get fed are driven largely by predictions about what you might want to see. And of course, that's being manipulated by all sorts of behind-the-scenes algorithms and your Twitter feed and so on. We experience different worlds already online. And AI is responsible for a lot of that.

The more we devolve decisions to artificial devices, to computers, we'll face all sorts of problems about where responsibility lies and what biases might be built in to these systems. There was a famous example of face recognition technology that seemed to work very well, although it turned out it didn't work at all well, in recognizing people with dark colored skin because it had just been trained

on data sets of white people. And this was a bias that hadn't been consciously put into the system by its designers, but it slipped in there anyway. And as AI systems get more and more sophisticated, they may amplify biases that we don't even know we're putting into them. I think there's a lot to worry about there and a great need for regulation of AI. And focusing on the terminated scenario tends to distract from these more mundane but I think more real problems that we face.

In our remaining time, if you'll allow it, I'd like to ask just a few questions about you, sad to report that you've got long COVID, which sucks. And I'm just curious what impact this condition has had on your thinking about consciousness. I'm very glad you asked that. It has been a rough ride. Today, actually, the day was speaking, marks six months since I was infected by the last gasp of the Delta wave here in the UK. And I have better days, and today is a better day. We've had to delay recording this podcast a couple of times because I haven't felt well enough. So there's been a very immediate practical impact. I've never felt this ill for such a long time and with this degree of uncertainty about the prospects for eventual recovery. So I've had to draw on without complete success some of the things we were talking about earlier, trying to

manage some of the states of anxiety that come along with a new disease, the outcome of which is still not certain. And I said earlier in our conversation, without mentioning the reason that I don't experience myself for the same person that I did six months ago, and that's really true over this past six months. And it feels true in a way that I hadn't desired or expected. The experience of being me from day to day is literally very different. And that's partly because of my body feels different. The things I do are different. You know, I can't do many of the things that were very important to me, like physical

exercise. I cannot do that now. And even the way I think and read and speak changes, it's not so bad today, which is why we're able to have this conversation. But for a good part of the last six months, it's just not been possible. And so there's a withdrawal from the sense of who I am. And I think before I had this experience of long COVID, I'd been recognizing at some level that my experience of self is illusory and that there's an impermanence and there's everything is continuously changing. But actually during that time, the circumstances

of my life were not changing that much in terms of my body and my immediate environment and what I could do. And so when those things do change, it poses quite a challenge for that way of thinking. Does it accommodate? Can it accommodate? And I don't know the answer to that yet, but I've certainly needed to as much as possible bring to front of mind this recognition that the way I experience being me is changing. This change is expected. this change is natural. But more importantly, this change does not mean this is how things always will be, because that's how it seems in the moment. But it's still something I wrestle with on a daily basis, and there's a tendency, I think, in a condition like this,

which has a waxing and waning property to it, that on a good day, it's very, very hard to remember what it was like to have a bad day. You're in the same way that you, if it's really cold outside and you're freezing, then you come in and it's warm and you, you know you were cold half an hour ago. You know you were freezing, but somehow you can't really imagine what it was like to have been that cold. That's how it feels. And so there's this tendency to try to, I try to smooth out the ups and downs on a good day. You think, oh, yeah, I'm feeling better now, even though I know it's not going to last, it feels like it will and try to recognize that feeling as part of the whole process. So it's still this process of trying to introduce a little gap between how things seem and how they are.

And it's a work, it's hard work. First of all, the situation sounds like it sucks, so I'm sorry. And I know you said it's waxing and waning, but is the overall trajectory toward your prior baseline or, I mean, is it getting better over these six months? I think it is. It is quite difficult to judge because the variance on a day to day, or like week to week, is quite large.

So what I've been doing for the last, I think I started after about two months in, because of course one of the things with long COVID is, you don't really know, you've got it until you're quite away into it. When I first went to see my doctor, who by the way, they've been very good and very supportive. But many people have lingering symptoms, and so for most people, these clear up over a few weeks.

So for the first few weeks, I'm just thinking and hoping and praying that this is just going to clear up of its own accord. And by the time it hasn't, you've already been in it for a couple of months, three months. And at some point over that time, I started to do a very simple thing, which was just to track things, write things down day to day, and even reduce it as part of it to a single number on a scale of one to ten. How was the day? And of course, I can't be sure that I'm keeping the same criteria across this time. But if I look at the number of really bad days, they've gotten less. And that's something that I will, on a bad day, I'm going to look at the diary and say, okay, things are getting better over time. There's a long way to go. And there's so many people with long COVID now,

I think at the estimates are really pretty terrifying as a number of people have selected 10 to 30% of people who contract COVID and being previously fit active health years, no defense being vaccinated only reduces your risk by about 15%. This is going to be a health problem for many people for a long time. But people do improve. And there's a lot of fascinating research going on. And of course, for somebody of my personality, this is where I tend to get some hope for too, is by just digging into the research and becoming like an armchair expert on the physiology of long COVID. But there are a number of interesting hypotheses about what's going on that some of which have relatively accessible treatments. So I do think there is hope. And that's another thing that remind myself when it feels like there isn't.

I've recently sort of walking up to this a little bit because I heard the New York Times report of Pam Bellock, given interview on this subject on the New York Times podcast, the daily, and she and her colleagues were describing this as a kind of pandemic within a pandemic. And one that we're increasingly as a society gonna have to wrestle with. So again, I'm sorry that you're dealing with it. No, thank you.

Let me just ask one last question here, but that relates to your personal experience. And this is maybe a little bit, we'll end this up in a more hopeful place, although it's still gritty. But you write about an experience with anesthesia and how that had an impact on your fear of death. So if maybe you could take us home by talking about that.

Yeah, I mean, that's uplifting, but I just end up of fear of death. But I think it is. It's idea that we have certain in Western societies, that the end of our personal lives is something so difficult to contemplate, like looking straight at the sun. It's so hard to do to bring into focus

that we just don't. We avoid it. We don't think about it. And again, I'm by no means claiming to have made peace with my eventual demise or to have reached some level of personal enlightenment, not at all. But the experience of anesthesia in particular, I think, did make a difference to my relationship with not existing. Now, we all know that there's this weird asymmetry to how we think about not existing. Firstly, it's the one state of mind that we cannot by definition even approximate.

We cannot put ourselves in, right? I can try and imagine any other state of being apart from the state of non-being, self-defeating to imagine that. But there's a fundamental asymmetry. We're not really concerned, most of us, about all the time in history before we were born. We may have like, oh, I wish I'd been alive during the Renaissance or something like that, but it's not something that really gets us down at much. It's like, well, it wasn't there. But we are worried about all the time that we won't exist after we die. There's that, that I said, I'm missing out, I want to be there, I want to see what my kids do, I want to see how the world turns out. That's fair enough,

but if we weren't worried about the time before, why should we be so worried about the time after? It's just not, we're just not going to be around. That's fine. That's how it is for most of the time. we're just not going to be around. That's fine. That's how it is for most of the time. That's one thing, but then this idea of what happens, and what is it like to not exist? As we just said, we cannot approximate that state of mind as an experience because it's defined

by the complete absence of that experience. And the closest we get to it in modern society is general anesthesia. And general anesthesia is very different from sleep. I've had a general anesthesia three or four times now, and the last time I had it was for a very minor thing. So I wasn't particularly worried about the clinical circumstances, and I was paying attention to the experience of losing consciousness and then regaining it. And for your listeners who have had general anesthesia, the anesthesiologist will count down and you just go, you'll say, count down from 10 and by 8 you're gone. And then you're back and there's no time in between. It could have been five minutes or it could have

been five hours or it could have been five months. Now you just weren't there, you were there, you fade and then you're back. Now it's a bit of a woozy coming back, but the point is there was a period of time where you did not exist in a way that doesn't even happen in sleep. If you go to sleep, you know, you dream and even when you're not dreaming, actually if you wake people up in states where they're not having full-on dreams, they still often report things going on in their minds. And you know that you've been unconscious for a certain amount of time. You might have overslept, you might be confused if you've got jet lag, but you know it was five hours rather than five minutes and you certainly know it wasn't

five months. But with Anastasia, you have no idea the parts of your subjective life on either side are just knit together. That recognition of that profound non-existence. There's a profound way to not exist and it really doesn't matter because nothing matters during that period of non-existence. That was comforting to me and it sounds strange to say that it's comforting but it really was comforting and it's comforting for the very simple reason that many traditions have taught us for a long time. simple reason that many traditions have taught us for a long time, that when there's a blivian, there is no suffering. There is literally nothing at all. And I remember thinking about the title of a novel by Julian Barnes that I'd recently read called Nothing to

Be frightened of. And there's a double meaning in that title, which I think is exactly what I experienced or didn't experience during general anesthesia. I think it's pretty hopeful. I'm glad you think so. And yet, gritty. Just final question here. It's not really much of a question, but kind of a gentle nudge to be a little self-promotional if you don't mind.

Would you remind us of the name of your book or any other books that you'd like us to know about as well as any other resources you're putting out into the world that might be of interest to this audience. Oh, thank you for the opportunity. Yes, of course. The book, which shares my first general public book on consciousness and the self is called Being You, a new science of consciousness, and that would be the thing I'd certainly recommend people to read if they're interested. I'm not planning on writing anything else quite yet, but there are a couple of things that I think would be worth mentioning very briefly, a project that I'm very excited about that I've been working on with a team of architects and musicians and designers and engineers for a couple

of years is called Dream Machine and it's based on a phenomenon by which fast flickering light, stroboscopic light on closed eyes, gives rise to very vivid visual experiences. So this has been known about a neuroscience for a long time. The neuroscientist William Gray Walter studied this in the 1950s, but at history goes even further back. And in art, the artist Brian Geisen, who used to hang around with William Burrows and so on, he was intrigued by this experience and developed an early, early prototype of a bright light in a spinning cardboard tube that generated flickering light.

And he thought this was the first piece of art to be experienced with your eyes closed. And anyway, we've developed a 21st century version of this that's happening in London, in Belfast, in Cardiff, in Edinburgh, until September, where groups of 30 people at a time can have a dream machine experience and then reflect on it. And for many people, it's incredibly profound. They don't realize that their brains are capable of doing this stuff. To generate colors that they never see in normal life, and vision that sometimes seems to go right around the back of their heads. So this is sparking a lot of conversations, a lot of discussion about the nature of consciousness, the nature of mind about the nature of consciousness, the nature

of mind, the nature of perception, and it's a beautiful experience. And as part of that, we're launching something called the perception census. Now, something we touched on in our conversation is this idea that we all see the world differently, that you may not see the same blue sky that I see when we both look at upwards. But we know very little actually about this inner diversity. We know a lot more these days about external diversity, we're all different shape sizes and skin colors and so on and we recognize the richness and value of that. But inner diversity, because you can't really put it on a table and look at it in the same way as remained relatively hidden. So we're trying for the first time really to systematically study and

get an understanding of how different are inner worlds are. And I think this is also quite potentially important for society because the more we can recognize that we each see things slightly differently, I think that can be a catalyst to better understand each other and better communication and to bring people together. You first got to recognize how we're all unique and how we're all different. So this perception census, it's a series of very short, hopefully fun online questionnaires and experiments that will be rolled out later this summer. So if people want to take part in that, anywhere in the world, we'd be delighted.

And how do we do it if we want to take part? So if you want to take part, two websites to look at one is my own website, which is www.anilsseth.com. And the other websites would be for anything to do with a dream machine is just dreammachine.world. And Neil Seth, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you. I'm very grateful. Likewise. Likewise. Thanks again to a Neil Seth. Thanks as well to everybody who works so incredibly hard on this show. They include Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Lauren Smith,

Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Plant. And we get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you right back here on Wednesday for a brand new episode. My guest is Jacoby Ballard and we're talking a lot about something that hits home for me. Anger. is Jacobi Ballard and we're talking a lot about something that hits home for me, anger. Hey, hey, Prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-replus in Apple Podcasts.

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