Many scientists tried to understand what consciousness is and how it interacts with the world, and Anil Seth, in his speech, also talks about his findings on this topic. Seth (2017) says that people hallucinate all the time, and the images that they perceive as reality are formed by the protective functions of the human body that have developed in the process of evolution. However, chapter “A Grand Illusion” by Susan Blackmore is also has similar to Seth’s ideas, since it notes the importance of historical processes and evolution for such concepts of consciousness as intuition or subliminal perception.
Consciousness is an under-explored and complex concept that scientists try to explain by biology, physics, and chemistry. Seth (2017) approaches this issue from a biological point of view and highlights the main features of the human brain and consciousness. First, the scientist claims that a person constantly sees hallucinations; however, what people usually perceive as reality is the controlled manifestation of these hallucinations. This aspect exists because the brain only makes its best guesses by receiving information through electrical impulses caused by touch, taste, and smell, which explains all the visual and audio illusions. However, to the same extent, the brain projects the images based on its previous experience. Consequently, human consciousness constructs the world to the same extent, both from external and internal signals.
The author also explains what causes these processes and how they connect the body and consciousness. Seth (2017) notes that the brain forms how people feel their body, and the body and biological mechanisms form the fundamental concept of a person’s “myself.” As evidence of the first statement, Seth (2017) shows an experiment in which a man has to concentrate on the rubber hand while this fake hand and his real one are being tickled. After a few minutes, this person starts to feel a rubber arm as part of his body. The author explains the second statement by the fact that the signals that are given by the internal organs help the brain predict, control, and manage it to keep it safe. Consequently, people’s perception of the world around them and inside them is the result of a thousand-year evolution of brain functions that try to keep the body alive.
Such a biological explanation of consciousness also correlates with an understanding of intuition, perception of emotions, and subliminal perception of the world. Blackmore (2017) also addresses these issues in her book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. The author claims that a person’s ability to recognize emotions exists due to evolutionary development in which a human had to make a decision, and often this process occurs unconsciously (Blackmore, 2017). The same peculiarity applies to the understanding of intuition since, in the process of evolution, a person was faced with various dangers. Modern people have already ceased to face such risks as predators, the rain, heat, or cold from which there is nowhere to hide, and less encounter with the unknown. However, the instincts that have been kept from past times still live in consciousness, and they turned into an intuition that tells a person what is best to do and who to believe. Consequently, intuition, or the ability to feel the correctness or incorrectness of a situation, is from the projection of consciousness to keep the body alive, as was also mentioned by Seth.
Another common element for the two authors is an explanation of how the brain receives information about the outside world. Often, the data collected from outside arrives unconsciously, since people see, smell, and touch different objects constantly of often without paying attention to them. At the same time, the brain automatically continues to make guesses and send signals back to create controlled hallucinations of reality (Seth, 2017). This feature is an explanation of the subliminal perception that Blackmore (2017) mentions when describing examples with words’ associations or a reaction of a person with copied emotions to the next person or object. Although Seth (2017) does not explain or even mention the subliminal perception, his theories and explanations fit with this concept, which also confirms their validity. Therefore, people not only constantly hallucinate but also receive information that feeds these hallucinations to protect their bodies. However, this combination of the two authors’ ideas also explains why people react to different marketing strategies by consuming information.
In conclusion, Blackmore and Seth’s ideas about consciousness have some common features and are interconnected, since they are built on the ideas of human biological evolution. Seth explains in more detail the processes and features of a person’s perception of the world and gives scientific evidence and practical examples of his statements. Blackmore also describes the features of the brain through examples, but she uses a descriptive approach. Besides, scientists do not talk about the same things directly, but their ideas complement each other. Therefore, although the authors have different methods, ideas about the evolutionary processes that shaped the human mind to protect the body are common to them.
References
- Blackmore, S. (2017). Consciousness: A very short introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
- Seth, A. (2017). Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality [Video]. YouTube.