How We Build Perception from the Inside Out
Anil Seth & Nigel Warburton | 10:32
Transcript
Are we going to be talking about conscious experience? Could you just begin by saying what you understand I conscious, it's quite hard to come up with a definition everybody agrees with scientifically, but we are all familiar with what consciousness is some sense, it's the most familiar thing to any of us. It's what we lose when we fall into a dreamless sleep, or if we have anesthesia in the operating theatre, and then it's what comes back when we regain wakefulness in the morning, or when we come out of anesthesia, consciousness is really any kind of subjective experience.
I don't think it's simply thinking or being aware of beliefs or of particular senses, any kind of experience at all counselors consciousness, I think the best definition from philosophy about this is that for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. Whereas for you, for a table or a chair, there is nothing, it is like to be a table or a chair, let's suppose but for a person, for a monkey, for an octopus, maybe for a honeybee, there is something that is like to be that creature.
And when I have the conscious perception of buildings behind you, I'm assuming they're really there that my perception is vertical. What does the recent neuroscience tell us about that sort of experience, the neuroscience and physics actually, and probably philosophy to will, will tell you that the relationship between what we perceive and what's actually there is often very far from from vertical. And in fact, evolution has done very well by building for us perceptual systems, so that what we perceive really seems to be a property of, of the world.