Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Seth Explains Consciousness, published by Jacob Falkovich on August 24, 2023 on LessWrong.

The Real Problem

For as long as there have been philosophers, they loved philosophizing about what life really is. Plato focused on nutrition and reproduction as the core features of living organisms. Aristotle claimed that it was ultimately about resisting perturbations. In the East the focus was less on function and more on essence: the Chinese posited ethereal fractions of qi as the animating force, similar to the Sanskrit prana or the Hebrew neshama. This lively debate kept rolling for 2,500 years - élan vital is a 20th century coinage - accompanied by the sense of an enduring mystery, a fundamental inscrutability about life that will not yield.

And then, suddenly, this debate dissipated. This wasn't caused by a philosophical breakthrough, by some clever argument or incisive definition that satisfied all sides and deflected all counters. It was the slow accumulation of biological science that broke "Life" down into digestible components, from the biochemistry of living bodies to the thermodynamics of metabolism to genetics. People may still quibble about how to classify a virus that possesses some but not all of life's properties, but these semantic arguments aren't the main concern of biologists. Even among the general public who can't tell a phospholipid from a possum there's no longer a sense that there's some impenetrable mystery regarding how life can arise from mere matter.

In Being You, Anil Seth is doing the same to the mystery of consciousness. Philosophers of consciousness have committed the same sins as "philosophers of life" before them: they have mistaken their own confusion for a fundamental mystery, and, as with élan vital, they smuggled in foreign substances to cover the gaps. This is René Descartes' res cogitans, a mental substance that is separate from the material.

This Cartesian dualism in various disguises is at the heart of most "paradoxes" of consciousness. P-zombies are beings materially identical to humans but lacking this special res cogitans sauce, and their conceivability requires accepting substance dualism. The famous "hard problem of consciousness" asks how a "rich inner life" (i.e., res cogitans) can arise from mere "physical processing" and claims that no study of the physical could ever give a satisfying answer.

Being You by Anil Seth answers these philosophical paradoxes by refusing to engage in all but the minimum required philosophizing. Seth's approach is to study this "rich inner life" directly, as an object of science, instead of musing about its impossibility. After all, phenomenological experience is what's directly available to any of us to observe.

As with life, consciousness can be broken into multiple components and aspects that can be explained, predicted, and controlled. If we can do all three we can claim a true understanding of each. And after we've achieved it, this understanding of what Seth calls "the real problem of consciousness" directly answers or simply dissolves enduring philosophical conundrums such as:

What is it like to be a bat?

How can I have free will in a deterministic universe?

Why am I me and not Britney Spears?

Is "the dress" white and gold or blue and black?

Or at least, these conundrums feel resolved to me. Your experience may vary, which is also one of the key insights about experience that Being You imparts.

The original photograph of "the dress"

Seeing a Strawberry

On a plate in front of you is a strawberry. Inside your skull is a brain, a collection of neurons that have direct access only to the electrochemical state of other neurons, not to strawberries. How does the strawberry out there create the perception of redness in the brain?

In the common view of perception, red light from the strawberry hi...