By Anil Seth
An imprint of Penguin
Random House LLC
(Fragments of the Prologue)
In the end, I want to leave you with a new conception of the
self- that aspect of consciousness wich for each of us is probably the most
meaningful. An influential tradition, dating back at least as far as Descartes
in the seventeenth century, held that nonhuman animals lacked conscious selfhood
because they did not have rational minds to guide their behavior. They were “beast
machines”: flesh automatons without the ability
to reflect on their own existence.
I don´t agree. In my view, conciousness has more to do with
being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely
because we are beast machines. I will make the case that the experience of being
you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and
controls the internal state of the body. The escense of selfhood is neither a
rational mind nor an inmaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process,
a proces that underpines the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis
for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being
you is literally about your body.
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Our conscious experiences are part of nature just as your
bodies are, just as our world is. And when life ends, consciousness will end
too. When I think about this, I am transported back to mi experience -my
non-experience- of anesthesia. To its oblivion, perhaps comforting, but
oblivion nonetheless. The novelist Julian Barnes, in his meditation on
mortality, puts it perfectly. When the end of consciousnes comes, there is
nothing – really nothing- to be frightened of.
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