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+--- Thread: Anil Seth's "Beast Machine Theory" of consciousness (/thread-19226.html)
Anil Seth's "Beast Machine Theory" of consciousness - Magical Realist - Nov 20, 2025
Makes alot of sense. We are not just our brains. We are our whole bodies, actively and cognitively engaged in a world that somehow also mysteriously includes us.
https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1544948550185970
"Consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. Experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of selfhood.
Our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happen with, through, and because of our living bodies. Our animal constitution is not merely compatible with our conscious perceptions of self and world. We cannot understand the nature and origin of these conscious experiences, except in light of our nature as living creatures."---- https://nautil.us/we-are-beast-machines-238325/
RE: Anil Seth's "Beast Machine Theory" of consciousness - C C - Nov 20, 2025
Continuing to base "self" solely on old, immaterial definitions of it just leads to the crazy elimination of it altogether (that's popular today). So, yeah... Shift to a generic or primal version revolving around the body, and the narrower version being particularly dependent upon personal memory.
In contrast to others like Michael Graziano, who dismiss both selfhood and experience as illusions of description (not even controlled hallucinations). The belief that the manifestations of the senses and personal thoughts are nothing more than our pretending that they are the case, radically undermines there being evidence about anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano#Contributions_in_neuroscience
The attention schema theory (AST) seeks to explain how an information-processing machine could act the way people do, insisting it has consciousness, describing consciousness in the ways that we do, and claiming that it has an inner magic that transcends mere information-processing, even though it does not. AST is currently being incorporated into artificial intelligence systems through the work of the international Astound project.
RE: Anil Seth's "Beast Machine Theory" of consciousness - Ostronomos - Nov 21, 2025
I would not be so quick to discount an immaterial soul. As the idea of the immaterial soul is not an illusion. Anil Seth got it wrong when he posited that consciousness is an illusion. There exists a state of mind in which we have access to a metaphysical realm. THAT is fact, nothing less. The processors of the universe allow for the necessary reality of prediction in dreams, which would not be possible without predeterminism.