In this book, neuroscientist Anil Seth provides his scientific definition of consciousness. There is currently no theory that is able to explain the concept of consciousness, but there are several hypotheses, including the one put forward by Seth. What’s more, they are all quite complex and hard to understand for anyone who is not an expert. According to Anil Seth, consciousness really shouldn’t strike us as any kind of mystery; it is simply linked to the very fact of our being alive and the subjective experience this involves. To use a more complex but inclusive term, consciousness is linked to each organism’s phenomenology.
For a long time, consciousness was confused with intelligence, language, or other human traits, so anything that did not meet these criteria, including animals, was automatically considered to be unconscious. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published an article called ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ in which he argued that, for any conscious organism, being alive means feeling something. The article later became a cornerstone of mind philosophy, and focused on the phenomenology of the conscious experience. It may seem obvious today, but at the time, it was revolutionary. For centuries, science and philosophy had been trying to understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The so-called ‘hard problem’, a term coined by the philosopher David Chalmers in the early 1990s, describes the difficulty in explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and consciousness. The roots of the problem probably date back even further than the ancient Greeks, but they came to a head in the 17th century, when the French philosopher René Descartes divided reality into two distinct parts: res cogitans, meaning thought or consciousness, and res extensa, meaning matter. This distinction gave rise to the philosophy of dualism, and made the debate on what constitutes consciousness even more complex.
There are several different branches of philosophy that aim to understand and consciousness. Like many other neuroscientists, Anil Seth favours physicalism, also known as materialism. This theory is based on the idea that everything that exists is made of physical matter, which gives rise to states of consciousness.