![]() “I always get a little annoyed when I read people saying things like, ‘Chalmers proposed the hard problem 25 years ago’ … and then saying, 25 years later, that ‘we’ve learned nothing about this we’re still completely in the dark, we’ve made no progress,’” said Seth. Yes, it’s a challenge - but we’ve been chipping away at it steadily over the years. But the way Seth sees it, Chalmers was overly pessimistic. This puzzle - the mystery of how inanimate matter arranges itself into living beings with self-aware minds and a rich inner life - is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?” And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do - but he knows that the puzzle of consciousness spills over from neuroscience into other branches of science, and even into philosophy.Īs he puts it near the start of his new book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (available October 19): “Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work. ![]()
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