Being You

A New Science of Consciousness

By: Anil Seth

Narrated by: Anil Seth

Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

International Best Seller

"Being You is an exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text." (The Guardian)

Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to 21st-century science.

What does it mean to “be you” - that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood.

Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.

Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.

This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF of charts and illustrations from the book.

Cover photograph of iris courtesy of Eyemazy.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Anil Seth (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Seth makes a convincing case that perception masquerades as conscious reality.... Fluent and accessible.” (Financial Times)

“Drawing on philosophy, biology, cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, he argues that our brains are prediction machines that constantly invent our world and then correct our mistakes, so that our sense of self derives from our body.” (Nature)

“Imaginative and compelling....” (Scientific American)

Excellent Book on Consciousness

Seth is as wonderful a narrator as he is a scientist. I love reading about the subject of consciousness, and I especially love, as a layperson, an author writing about complicated topic who can lay things out in ways I understand.

Really good read - and listen!

A Fresh Outlook on the Science of Consciousness

Great book except some anti-transhumanism parts! For a sequel or prequel, but definitely a must, read/listen to The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution by futurist and evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov where you'll find many confirmations as well as additional insights and somewhat complimentary or even opposing perspectives.

Deep But Important

This intricate subject is important for anyone working with clients to assist with understanding themselves and their potential.

Wonderful summary

This book provides a wonderful summary of consciousness research. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

Our Best Guess Self

Seth begins our voyage by focusing our understanding of consciousness theory evolution. So what is conscious experience? What is it to be conscious? This leads to a fascinating journey into perception and how we distinguish and act upon our senses and make a best-guess simulation of what we think is reality.

The world is an internal construction of the brain for each of us. More than this, it is vastly different from species to species. So it is not about what's out there but how it is functionally recreated inside each entity. This is very different from our conventional interpretation of what reality is. That would be something like each of us functioning as some super-perceiving camera. The truth is we are constantly building our own reality(s); our consciousness is an internal construct.

Seth tells us what we make inside us is very different from the world we interpret. For instance, we may love the green of trees or a golden sunset. But there is no colour out there. Trees do not possess the colour green. We see green, and dogs don't. But we believe it is green and are perhaps sorry for the dog's loss. We are wired to see green and have evolved to see a green that does not exist in physics. Green is actually a self-made hallucination (here, meaning not real) but nevertheless a pleasant one.

We experience being a living creature through our bodies. Our self is unified through our experience and our memory, but mostly through us being organisms. Our brain's primary function is not to be intelligent or see a beautiful sunset. Its primary function is to keep us alive. It does that very well and, for a lifetime, resists failure until it cannot.

He says our constructed self, or personal identity, mostly ignores this essential work until something goes wrong. Then we become conscious of a problem. So we, as beings, are conscious not because we are intelligent but because we are each unified organisms whose primary force is to stay alive. Being conscious does not mean being intelligent; it is more about being self-aware or perhaps being-aware.

So when we think about AI, a structure we created, we respond to its opportunities, challenges and threats through our own feeling that it tests us as human beings. He does not believe AI will become a conscious or an interacting series of deliberate, purposeful interactions – a conscious thing. At least not now.

AI appears smart and intelligent. In its evolution, it can computationally do remarkable things. Its algorithms can even mirror or create the illusion of personality. So far, all this is at the bidding of us. We have used this tool negatively in many ways. But we have used it to better predict the weather, climate change, and even our self-created looming extinction.

These synthetic systems are neither sentient nor conscious but are certainly growing in increased ability. They are not self-aware. And Seth believes that AI and machine-learning researchers should not be focusing research on artificial consciousness but on doing needed things – like creating cures, understanding our universe, and staying alive as a species and a planet.

One of the only useful writings on consciousness

this is easily one of the most interesting, useful, and thoughtful books on the topic of consciousness. I highly recommend it.

1 Giant leap for Lifes difficult/wonderful mystery

Consciousness.
Beautifully read by the Author..clear explanations & research that allow a shift from the Hard Problem of how..to the mystery of why...Which we may never know. Consciousness is all we have... when death comes "there is -truly - nothing to fear..".

social cognition forgets the autistic experience

The author makes erroneous claims about a universal individual's 'theory of mind' as a form of social cognition and forgets that the autistic community either struggles with or completely lacks such cognitive ability.

This oversight speaks to a need to understand differences in consciousness not just in clinical cases of brain damage or severe abnormality from a clinical perspective - but also from the loved experiences of the entire neurodivergent community. Neurodivergent people represent a trove of valuable data on cognition and experiences of the self that is not well explored in this book and in fact, the author's seeming ignorance of the non university of theory of mind indicates the author is not aware of this community and has not meaningfully integrated it's existence into his theories of the mind.

Thoughtful and thought provoking.

Well read by the author himself. Complicated subjects explained nicely. No discernible hidden agendas. Refreshing!

BEST BOOK of 2021

Fascinating, eye-opening, remarkable, captivating, outstanding! Anil delivered and went way beyond any expectation. I already know that I will be talking about this book to everybody as I always do when I come across a great, wondrous read. I also know that I will be re-reading this many times in the future. Required reading for all. Topshelf.