This Wednesday we will be meeting in Offshore Cafe from 6pm before heading at 7.15pm to an unticketed public lecture by Anil Seth at 7.30pm in the Sir Charles Wilson Building that is hosted by the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. The lecture is on the nature of consciousness and should hopefully expand our understanding of human perception.
Both venues are accessible, but the nearest public transport (Kelvinbridge Subway) isn’t. Email us at neil@uxglasgow.co.uk if you have any questions!
More about the talk:
From beast machines to dreamachines
Consciousness remains one of the central mysteries in science and philosophy. In this talk, I will explore how viewing the brain as a ‘prediction machine’ can help build bridges from neural mechanisms to properties of conscious experience – dissolving, not solving, the so-called hard problem of consciousness. I will first show how conscious experiences of the world around us can be understood in terms of perceptual predictions, before exploring how the experience of being an embodied self can be understood in terms of predictive regulation of the body. In this view, and contrary to the old doctrine of Descartes, we are conscious because we are ‘beast machines’. I’ll finish by describing a recent art-science collaboration – the dreamachine – which involves mass stroboscopically-induced visual hallucinations and a large-scale online survey of ‘perceptual diversity’ – The Perception Census.
If that doesn’t make sense, here is a plain English version of the above generated by ChatGPT:
The topic of consciousness is a big mystery in both science and philosophy. In this presentation, I will discuss how looking at the brain as a "prediction machine" can help connect how the brain works to our experiences of consciousness. This doesn't necessarily solve the mystery of consciousness, but it can help us better understand it. I will explain how our experiences of the world around us can be explained by our predictions about what we are seeing. Additionally, I will explore how our sense of being a physical body can also be explained by our brain's predictions about our body's movements. This means that we are conscious because we are like machines that predict and regulate our own physical experiences. Lastly, I will talk about an art-science project called the "dreamachine" that creates visual hallucinations, and how it is being used to study people's different perceptions of the world.