Is Consciousness a Controlled Hallucination?

New research into consciousness is suggesting an incredible new way of perceiving the world, that consciousness itself is a controlled hallucination. In his presentation at TED, neuroscientist Anil Seth, tackled one of the fundamental mysteries of modern science: how does consciousness happen? How do billions of neurons work together to form consciousness and materialize the world and the self?

Seth identifies the primary modalities of understanding the self: the Bodily self; Perspectival self; Volitional self; Narrative self; Social self; AND Interoception, which is the perception and regulation of the internal state of the body and the physiological functions that keep us alive.

Seth argues that the brain is a prediction engine and that a stream of electric signals combines these sensory signals with prior beliefs to predict the nature of external reality. Your brain’s guess as to what should happen changes your conscious perception of reality, and this perceptual prediction flowing in the opposite direction--from the inside out--of external sensory signals is just as important if not more important in establishing reality.

If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception is a kind of controlled hallucination.

Using the rubber hand experiment, and Google’s Deepmind algorithm as examples, Seth quipped that we’re hallucinating all the time--but when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.

This new scientific model for Groupthink also extends to the self. Just as we can misperceive the world, we can misperceive ourselves, and further study into this could help with conditions like depression and schizophrenia.

Seth also makes the controversial argument that advanced conscious artificial intelligence (AI) is unlikely to achieve sentience because consciousness is so intertwined with the experiences of being a living, breathing biological animal. In other words, consciousness cannot be uploaded to a computer because it is shaped at all levels by the biological mechanisms that keep something alive. Intelligence does not equal sentience, he argues.

Check out the presentation below. What do you think? Is consciousness a controlled hallucination specific to biological organisms?