Anil Seth Quotes
Best 20 Other Quotes by Anil Seth
“A good way to study a phenomenon is to see what happens when it disappears.”
“Anesthesia is a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects and back again into people.”
“Consciousness is any kind of experience at all, whether it's a visual experience of the world around us, whether it's an emotional experience of feeling sad or jealousy or happy or excited. From experiences of intending to do something or being the cause of something that happens, consciousness is the word that we use to circumscribe all the different kinds of experiences that we can have.”
“Everything that we perceive - consciously or unconsciously - is a construction of the brain.”
“Human consciousness is just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.”
“I do see this close alignment between the insights we’re getting from cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism to the extent that things are not necessarily the way they seem. Things can change. There is an impermanence to our experience, to the world, there is an impermanence to the self, and recognizing that impermanence... does open the space for change.”
“If you think of perception as prediction then it becomes natural to think that the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. The self is a perception.”
“Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.”
“In our daily life we are constantly filling in the blanks to try and make sense of things.”
“It's because we naturally experience the contents of our perception as being real that it becomes harder to appreciate that somebody else might not experience things exactly the same way.”
“The shape of our minds or the minds of any living creature can only be understood in light of their being alive.”
“The truth is that all perceptions are acts of interpretation. They're acts of informed guesswork that the brain applies when it encounters sensory data.”
“There's this cultural trope that intelligence and consciousness go together and that AI will develop awareness at some point.”
“Upset and resentment are a reflection of our own thoughts and can, therefore, never be caused by anyone or anything outside of ourselves. ”
“We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature.”
“We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.”
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“Never think twice about investments in yourself. They pay dividends for a long time.”
“We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in, in a process hardly different from that which we casually call hallucination. Indeed, in a way, we're always hallucinating. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.”
“We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.”
“When the end of consciousness comes, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.”
“When we suffer, we suffer consciously, whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? Might they be conscious, too? Do they also have a sense of self? And as computers get faster and smarter, maybe there will come a point, maybe not too far away, when my iPhone develops a sense of its own existence. Now I actually think the prospects for a conscious AI are pretty remote.”