The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth
The Royal Institution4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2018
lecture · general · evergreen · 2017–2018 on HN
Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.
HN commenters recommend it as a clear, in-depth lecture on consciousness as a process of prediction.
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6 comments from Hacker News
World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube: link And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great: ▶ this video Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: link
If you are interested in the brain, there are good royal institute lectures on youtube. The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth ▶ this video The Neuroscience of Memory - Eleanor Maguire link Also, any book by oliver sacks is great if you'd rather read books rather than watch lectures.
I remember seeing this on hn before. The current thesis is that the brain ( consciousness ) is a predicting machine. A very interesting lecture by a neuroscientist. ▶ this video
His lecture at the Royal Institution is better and more in depth. ▶ this video Worth a watch if you have an hour to spare.
If you find the topic of consciousness interesting, here is an interesting neuroscientist's talk on consciousness. The idea that we can measure levels of consciousness as brain scanning tools become available and how consciousness may just be a "prediction process/function/tool". It's not "I think therefore I am", but "I predict, therefore I am". ▶ this video
The author's talk at the Royal Institute is here ▶ this video Overall, I'd say we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were 30 years ago. As a science, we are still poking at the brain to gather data and proposing hand-wavy models of low level behavior. As philosophy, we still don't agree on what the phenomenon we need to study is. My gut feeling is that consciousness/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain (a very high-dimensional non-linear system not amenable to reductionism) and that the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand.