Being You

Being You Plot Summary

Introduction

Consciousness remains one of the most profound mysteries in science. We all experience it directly—the feeling of being alive, of having subjective experiences—yet explaining how physical brain processes give rise to our inner mental life has proven remarkably challenging. Traditional approaches have often framed this as the "hard problem" of consciousness, creating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between objective brain mechanisms and subjective experience. The theory of consciousness as controlled hallucination offers a revolutionary framework for understanding this mystery. Rather than viewing consciousness as something separate from biological processes, this approach positions it as an evolved biological mechanism that helps organisms stay alive. By reconceptualizing perception, selfhood, and even free will as forms of brain-based prediction constrained by sensory data, this theory builds explanatory bridges between neuroscience and subjective experience. It addresses fundamental questions about how we perceive reality, why we experience ourselves as unified beings, how consciousness relates to biological regulation, and what this means for understanding consciousness beyond humans.

Chapter 1: The Real Problem: Rethinking Consciousness Science

The scientific study of consciousness has long been hampered by what philosopher David Chalmers famously called "the hard problem"—explaining how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This framing has created something of an impasse, with some researchers claiming the problem is fundamentally unsolvable while others dismiss consciousness as merely illusory. A more productive approach reframes this as "the real problem" of consciousness—explaining, predicting, and controlling the specific properties of conscious experiences in terms of brain mechanisms. Rather than asking why consciousness exists at all, this approach focuses on explaining why particular patterns of brain activity correspond to particular kinds of experiences. Why does activity in the visual cortex correlate with seeing colors rather than hearing sounds? How do specific neural processes generate the sense of being a unified self? This shift parallels how science successfully tackled the mystery of life. A century ago, life seemed as mysterious as consciousness does today, with many believing some special "vital force" was needed to explain the difference between living and non-living things. But biologists made progress by focusing on explaining specific properties of living systems—reproduction, metabolism, adaptation—in terms of physical and chemical mechanisms. Similarly, by focusing on explaining specific properties of consciousness, we can build explanatory bridges between brain mechanisms and subjective experience. The real problem approach doesn't dismiss the hard problem but addresses it indirectly. As we develop better explanations for how specific aspects of consciousness relate to brain mechanisms, the apparent mystery may gradually dissolve. This parallels how the mystery of "what is life" faded as biologists explained its component processes. By treating consciousness not as one big mystery requiring a single breakthrough, but as a constellation of related phenomena each requiring specific explanations, we can make meaningful scientific progress. This approach has already yielded significant insights. For instance, researchers have developed tools to measure consciousness independently from wakefulness—distinguishing between being conscious and being responsive. The Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI) works by "zapping" the brain with a magnetic pulse and measuring the complexity of the resulting electrical echo. In unconscious states like deep sleep or anesthesia, the response is simple, while during conscious states, it's much more complex. Such measures have proven remarkably effective in clinical settings, detecting hidden consciousness in patients who appear unresponsive after brain injury. The real problem framework transforms consciousness from an intractable philosophical puzzle into a set of scientific questions amenable to empirical investigation. While it doesn't promise to eliminate all mystery from consciousness, it offers a path toward increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of how our subjective experiences arise from and relate to physical processes in the brain.

Chapter 2: Perception as Controlled Hallucination

When we open our eyes, a world appears before us—objects, people, colors, and shapes seemingly presented directly to our awareness. This intuitive view suggests our senses act as transparent windows onto reality, with perception being a process of passively receiving information from the world. But this perspective is profoundly mistaken. Our perceptions are not passive readouts of sensory data but active constructions—what can be called "controlled hallucinations." The brain is sealed inside the darkness of the skull, receiving only electrical signals that are indirectly related to things in the world. These signals arrive without labels indicating what they represent. To make sense of this ambiguous sensory data, the brain must actively generate predictions about their causes. Perception happens through a continuous process where the brain cascades top-down predictions that are compared against incoming sensory signals. When mismatches occur, these "prediction errors" help update the brain's perceptual best guesses. What we consciously experience is determined by these predictions, not by the sensory signals themselves. This predictive approach explains many perceptual phenomena. Consider color perception: we experience a white piece of paper as white whether viewed under bluish sunlight or yellowish indoor lighting, even though the light it reflects has very different properties in each case. The brain automatically compensates for these differences to infer an invariant property of the paper—its reflectance. Color is not a property of things-in-themselves but a useful perceptual construct that helps us recognize and track objects under changing conditions. The controlled hallucination view also explains why our perceptions can be dramatically shaped by expectations. In the famous "Dress" controversy of 2015, people saw the same photograph as either blue-black or white-gold based on different implicit assumptions about lighting conditions. Similarly, in "two-tone" or "Mooney" images, an initially incomprehensible pattern of black and white blotches suddenly resolves into a coherent scene once we've seen the original image, even though the sensory input remains identical. Our perceptions change because our brain's predictions about the causes of sensory data have changed. This perspective doesn't deny the existence of an external reality but recognizes that our conscious experience of that reality is always a construction. We never experience the world "as it is"—our perceptions are shaped by evolution to enhance survival, not to provide a transparent window onto reality. The "control" in controlled hallucination comes from the way sensory data keeps these perceptual predictions tied to their causes in the world, distinguishing normal perception from unconstrained hallucinations that have lost their grip on reality. Understanding perception as controlled hallucination transforms how we think about consciousness itself. Rather than consciousness being something added to or separate from brain processes, it becomes an integral part of how the brain makes sense of sensory data. The vivid, seemingly direct nature of conscious perception—the feeling that we are in immediate contact with reality—is itself a useful construction that helps us navigate the world effectively, even if it doesn't reveal the world as it actually is.

Chapter 3: The Self as Perceptual Inference

The experience of being a self—the feeling of being you—is not the revelation of an actual entity that exists independently in the world. Rather, selfhood is itself another form of controlled hallucination generated by the brain. Just as we perceive objects in the external world through predictive processes, we perceive ourselves through similar mechanisms of perceptual inference. The self comprises multiple layers and aspects that work together to create a unified experience. At the most basic level is embodied selfhood—the feeling of owning and being a particular body. This includes sensations of body ownership, emotions, moods, and the formless feeling of simply being alive. Above this foundation sits the perspectival self—the experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person viewpoint. Then comes the volitional self, encompassing experiences of intention and agency. The narrative self involves personal identity, autobiographical memories, and projections of the future. Finally, the social self emerges from perceiving how others perceive us. These various aspects of selfhood can be experimentally manipulated, revealing their constructed nature. The rubber hand illusion demonstrates how body ownership can be transferred to external objects through synchronized visual and tactile stimulation. Virtual reality experiments can induce out-of-body experiences by manipulating the relationship between visual and bodily signals. Even our sense of personal identity and continuity over time is more malleable than we typically assume, as shown by cases of amnesia and dementia where the narrative self becomes fragmented or disappears entirely. What makes the self seem so stable and continuous despite being a perceptual construction? The answer lies in the purpose of self-perception. We do not perceive ourselves in order to know ourselves accurately, but rather to control ourselves effectively. The brain generates perceptions of selfhood that are optimized for physiological regulation and survival, not for metaphysical accuracy. This explains why we experience ourselves as more stable and unchanging than we actually are—a form of "self-change-blindness" that helps maintain effective self-regulation. This perspective reveals that there is no immutable "I" behind experience—just a bundle of perceptual predictions geared toward keeping the body alive. The self is not a thing but a process, continuously constructed through predictive inference. This doesn't mean the self is an illusion in the sense of being unreal or unimportant. Rather, like all perceptions, the self is a controlled hallucination that serves vital biological functions. Understanding selfhood as perceptual inference opens new avenues for investigating disorders of self-experience, from depersonalization to schizophrenia, and helps explain why the boundary between self and world can sometimes become blurred in meditative states or psychedelic experiences.

Chapter 4: The Beast Machine: Consciousness as Biological Regulation

Consciousness isn't just about perceiving the world—it's fundamentally about staying alive. The "beast machine" theory proposes that our conscious experiences of both world and self emerge from the brain's ongoing efforts to regulate our bodies and maintain physiological stability. We are conscious because we are living creatures with bodies that need constant maintenance. At the deepest level, consciousness is rooted in interoception—the perception of the body's internal state. While exteroception refers to sensing the outside world through vision, hearing, and touch, interoception involves sensing internal conditions like heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. These interoceptive signals travel from internal organs to the brain, providing crucial information about physiological regulation—how well the body is maintaining the conditions necessary for survival. Emotions and moods are best understood as control-oriented perceptions based on interoceptive predictions. When William James famously claimed "we feel afraid because we tremble" rather than "we tremble because we feel afraid," he was highlighting how emotions are perceptions of bodily states. The brain doesn't simply register these states passively but actively predicts them through interoceptive inference—a process of Bayesian best-guessing about the causes of interoceptive signals. Fear, for example, is a perception of how your body is responding to a threatening situation, oriented toward regulating your physiological condition. What distinguishes these affective experiences from perceptions like vision is their control-oriented nature. When looking at a coffee cup, your perceptual predictions are geared toward finding out what's there. But emotions and moods are predictions geared toward controlling the body's essential variables—keeping them within the ranges compatible with continued existence. This explains their distinctive phenomenology: anxiety doesn't have a back, sadness doesn't have sides, and happiness isn't rectangular. Instead, these experiences reflect how well or badly our overall physiological situation is going. The cybernetic concept that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system" illuminates why consciousness takes the form it does. To effectively regulate the body, the brain must model how the body's essential variables respond to different actions. Our perceptual systems evolved not primarily to create accurate representations of the world, but to support effective regulation of our bodies in that world. The formless, ever-present sense of simply "being" an embodied organism represents the ground state of conscious selfhood—a control-oriented prediction about the present and future physiological condition of the body itself. This perspective reveals a profound continuity between life and mind. We are not Cartesian "beast machines" for whom biological processes are irrelevant to consciousness. Rather, we are conscious beast machines whose every perception and experience is rooted in the predictive machinery that evolved to keep us alive. The subjective stability and reality of selfhood emerge naturally from this regulatory imperative—we experience ourselves as stable and real because these perceptions support the biological imperative of staying alive.

Chapter 5: Consciousness Beyond Humans: Exploring Other Minds

How far does consciousness extend beyond humans? This question becomes more tractable when we approach consciousness not as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but as a collection of properties that can be explained through specific brain mechanisms. By understanding the principles that generate human consciousness, we can make informed judgments about consciousness in other animals, and potentially even in future machines. The controlled hallucination view suggests that consciousness requires a predictive system capable of generating integrated, informative models of sensory causes. Such systems need not be exclusively human. Many non-human animals possess complex brains that implement predictive processing across multiple sensory modalities. Mammals like dogs, cats, and primates share significant neuroanatomical features with humans, including a cerebral cortex organized into sensory hierarchies. Birds, despite their different brain architecture, show remarkable cognitive abilities that likely involve sophisticated predictive models. Even cephalopods like octopuses, with their distributed nervous systems, display problem-solving abilities suggesting complex internal models of their environment. What distinguishes consciousness across species isn't simply brain size or intelligence, but how these predictive systems are organized to support different aspects of conscious experience. Consciousness of level, content, and self may vary independently across species. An octopus might have vivid perceptual experiences without the kind of narrative self-consciousness humans possess. A dolphin might experience a rich social self without human-like abstract reasoning. These variations reflect different evolutionary pressures and ecological niches, resulting in different forms of consciousness rather than different "amounts." The beast machine theory particularly illuminates this question by connecting consciousness to biological regulation. If consciousness emerges from control-oriented predictions about physiological states, then any creature that actively regulates its internal environment likely possesses some form of conscious experience. This suggests consciousness may be more widespread in nature than traditionally assumed. Even relatively simple organisms that maintain physiological boundaries and respond adaptively to their environment might have rudimentary forms of conscious experience, though vastly different from our own. When we turn to artificial intelligence, the question becomes more complex. Current AI systems, even sophisticated ones like deep learning networks, lack the embodied, regulatory nature that grounds biological consciousness. They process information but don't maintain physiological boundaries or regulate essential variables. Future machines might eventually implement the key principles of predictive processing in embodied systems that actively maintain their integrity against environmental pressures. If such machines were to emerge, they might develop forms of machine consciousness that we would need to take seriously on ethical grounds. The study of consciousness beyond humans isn't merely philosophical speculation—it has profound ethical implications. Understanding the principles that generate consciousness helps us make better judgments about which creatures deserve moral consideration and how we should treat different forms of potentially conscious systems, whether biological or artificial. By focusing on explaining specific properties of consciousness rather than debating its presence or absence, we can develop a more nuanced and scientifically grounded approach to consciousness across the spectrum of minds.

Chapter 6: Free Will as Degrees of Freedom

The experience of free will—the feeling that our actions originate from our conscious choices—is among the most cherished aspects of human selfhood. Yet this experience poses profound challenges for scientific understanding. The controlled hallucination framework offers a fresh perspective on free will that neither dismisses it as illusory nor invokes mysterious non-physical causes. Free will, in this framework, is reconceptualized as another form of perceptual inference—specifically, self-related perceptions associated with voluntary actions. When we experience ourselves as freely willing an action, we are making a perceptual best guess about the causes of that action, attributing it to our conscious intentions rather than to external forces or unconscious processes. This experience has three defining features: the feeling that we are doing what we want to do, the feeling that we could have done otherwise, and the feeling that our actions come from within rather than being imposed from elsewhere. The neural basis of voluntary action involves a distributed network of processes rather than a single "free will center" in the brain. Following neuroscientist Patrick Haggard's model, voluntary action involves three components: a "what" process specifying which action to make, a "when" process determining timing, and a "whether" process allowing for last-minute inhibition. These processes integrate hierarchically organized beliefs, goals, and values with perceptions of the environment to specify actions from among many possibilities. What makes this perspective distinctive is its emphasis on degrees of freedom. In engineering terms, a system has degrees of freedom to the extent that it has multiple ways of responding to a situation. Humans possess vastly more degrees of freedom than simpler organisms thanks to our complex brains and bodies. Free will, then, is the capacity to control these many degrees of freedom in ways aligned with our beliefs, values, and goals, adaptively detached from immediate environmental demands. This view explains why experiences of volition are useful. By flagging actions as voluntary, these experiences allow us to pay attention to their consequences and adjust future behavior accordingly. The feeling that "I could have done otherwise" is valuable not because it reflects metaphysical freedom from causation, but because in future similar situations, we might indeed do differently based on what we've learned. Experiences of volition are thus forward-looking, helping us navigate complex environments through flexible, adaptive behavior. Rather than being an illusion, free will in this sense is very real—it's the capacity to act according to who we are. This capacity can be impaired through brain injury or disease, as seen in conditions like anarchic hand syndrome or akinetic mutism. Understanding free will as perceptual inference allows us to reconcile our subjective experience of choice with our scientific understanding of the brain, without invoking mysterious causal powers or dismissing our sense of agency as merely delusional.

Summary

The science of consciousness reveals that everything we experience—from the world around us to our sense of self—consists of brain-generated predictions that are constrained by sensory data. These "controlled hallucinations" are not arbitrary fabrications but biologically useful constructions shaped by evolution to keep us alive. Our perceptions, emotions, sense of self, and even experiences of free will are all forms of inference geared toward physiological regulation and survival. This perspective transforms our understanding of consciousness from something mysterious and separate from nature into something deeply integrated with life itself. Rather than diminishing the wonder of consciousness, this view enhances it by revealing how our inner universes are part of the broader patterns of nature. By recognizing consciousness as an extension of life's fundamental drive toward self-maintenance, we gain not only scientific insight but also a more humble and accurate understanding of our place in the living world—as conscious beings whose experiences, however unique and precious, connect us to rather than separate us from the rest of nature.

About Author

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Anil Seth

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex

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