Summary of Anil Seth’s talk on consciousness

In the Ted Talk “How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”, neuroscientist Anil Seth, speaks on one of the biggest mysteries in science which happens to be consciousness. He says that as we continue to expand our knowledge about consciousness through the many disciplines of science, we no longer believe it cannot be explained as just a “force of life” but in terms of a controlled mechanism or hallucination based on prediction.

He starts talking about how technology keeps becoming more intelligent and doesn’t believe there will be a time where technology can both be smart and conscious at once because intelligence has nothing to do with consciousness. He says in his research findings, they suggest that consciousness has less to do with how smart we are and more to do with how we live and survive. So it seems the purpose and the intelligence of AI, is to help humanity live better. So Anil proceeds to explain more about the properties of consciousness. He says there we can look at consciousness in two ways, the outer world and the inner world and a lot of the times the inner world is different from the outer world. So using two different sensory illusions, he showed his audience that the way we perceive things in the outside world is not always accurate. First he put up a visual on a screen. The visual tricks our mind into thinking one square is darker than the other when they are the exact same color! Next he shares a distorted sound and then plays a recording of a voice afterwards. Then he played the distorted sound again and…