Review of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

Excerpt

How can psychological science define and explain consciousness? A few decades ago, this very question could hardly be raised. During the twentieth century, consciousness was dismissively relegated to the role of “the tip of the iceberg” by the psychoanalysts and their major focus on the unconscious, or, it was considered incompatible with scientific inquiry by the behaviorists and their major focus on overt behavior. Later, a new leading group—the cognitivists—found almost no reason to investigate consciousness as a scientific matter. Indeed, in the 1989 International Dictionary of Psychology, Stuart Sutherland wrote “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it” (Sutherland, 1989). As a reflection of this, for a scientist studying consciousness, it was often seen as career suicide. Toward the end of the century, things began to change. Science began to provide evidence of the concrete benefits of mindfulness, and in parallel, some prominent scientists (e.g., Francis Crick, just to mention a Nobel Prize winner) began to direct their efforts to investigate consciousness. In “Being You – A New Science of Consciousness”, Anil Seth offers us an overview of this field, and some of his unusual ideas about it (Seth, 2021). …