23 October 2021

Quanta Magazine: “Anil Seth finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy”

The free-energy principle is not itself a theory about consciousness, but I think it’s very relevant because it provides a way of understanding how and why brains work the way they do, and it links back to the idea that consciousness and life are very tightly related. Very briefly, the idea is that to regulate things like body temperature — and, more generally, to keep the body alive — the brain uses predictive models, because to control something it’s very useful to be able to predict how it will behave. The argument I develop in my book is that all our conscious experiences arise from these predictive models which have their origin in this fundamental biological imperative to keep living.


This imperative for self-organization and self-preservation in living systems goes all the way down: Every cell within a body maintains its own existence just as the body as a whole does. What’s more, unlike in a computer where you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software — between substrate and what “runs on” that substrate — in life, there isn’t such a sharp divide. Where does the mind-ware stop and the wetware start? There isn’t a clear answer. These, for me, are positive reasons to think that the substrate matters; a system that instantiates conscious experiences might have to be a system that cares about its persistence all the way down into its mechanisms, without some arbitrary cutoff. No, I can’t demonstrate that for certain. But it’s one interesting way in which living systems are different from computers, and it’s a way which helps me understand consciousness as it’s expressed in living systems.

Dan Falk

Interesting concepts in this article about consciousness, especially this portion about it depending on a drive for self-preservation, which is absent in (current) software-based AI. I tend to agree with the view that consciousness is inextricably linked to its substrate – meaning that replicating consciousness with cleverly designed algorithms on a hardware substrate would either be impossible (or undesirable for practical purposes), or lead to a completely different form of consciousness that we may not even be able to recognize as such.

Seth touches a mannequin and a volunteer wearing a virtual reality headset
In this study of “displaced perception” in Seth’s lab, a volunteer wears a virtual reality headset that provides a view of a mannequin’s chest. This setup can trick the brain into “feeling” touches that aren’t on the body. Tom Medwell for Quanta Magazine

A definitive answer may elude us for quite some time, but that has not stopped science-fiction authors from writing wonderful explorations of the subject, from Peter Watts’ Blindsight to Greg Egan’s Diaspora and Schild’s Ladder.

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