Neuroscientist Anil Seth is the Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. In Being You, he distinguishes between three aspects of consciousness:

Conscious Level: how conscious we are, the difference between being conscious or not
Conscious Content: what we are conscious of, what our perceptions are about
Conscious Self: what it means to be you

Let’s explore Conscious Content.

Our intuition is that the world is revealed passively to our brains through our senses

It seems that our experience of the world enters through our sense organs- whether exteroceptive (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) or proprioceptive (body position, posture and movement)- then progresses deeper into our brains, and at each stage more abstract processing is carried out in hierarchically organised ways. For example, neurons at earlier/lower stages of visual processing seem to respond to simple features, such as edges, and later/higher stages seem to respond to more complicated features, such as faces.

Our brains actively predict our experience corrected by sense data

A Copernican revolution in neuroscience is underway that is challenging this intuition. Sensory data do not arrive in the brain with intrinsic labels, such as ‘visual data from a cup’ or ‘audio data from a bell’. Instead, our brains make best guess predictions to infer the causes of these data based on the background context of our prior (perceptual, affective, cognitive and sociocultural) beliefs, knowledge and expectations.

Likewise, for our internal perceptions. Whereas exteroception and proprioception represent the external world, interoception represents our internal worlds and how well our bodies’ physiological regulation is keeping us alive. Just like exteroception and proprioception, the causes of interoceptive sense data remain hidden so they, too, are inferred via the same predictive process.

Predictions flow from deep inside the brain towards our sensory organs while ‘prediction errors’ flow in the other direction, conveying the differences between what the brain expects and the sense data it receives. Each level of the hierarchy makes predictions about the activity of the level below; and that level below conveys a prediction error upwards based on the sense data it actually received. These prediction errors are minimised by continuously updating the brain’s predictions. Neural rewards arise from the predictability of our experiences and may lead to pleasurable satisfaction when actual experience matches our expectations.

Conscious contents are not merely shaped by perceptual predictions- they are these predictions

For example, when we perceive a red object, redness is the subjective experience of our brain's best guess predictions about how a surface reflects a certain pattern of light.

Emotions and moods are the subjective experiences of our brain’s best guess predictions about how well our bodies are being regulated. Emotions and moods are not merely shaped by interoceptive predictions- they are them.

Predictions and the truth of our experiences

If our experience of the world is based on our predictions and the background context of prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations, then can we experience the world in some kind of raw way ‘as it really is’? But it’s not clear what this means because experience is contextualised; what could the alternative- a experience from nowhere involve? Does a newborn experience the world ‘as it really is’ because it has no prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations?

There is still a mind independent world. Whatever our predictions and expectations, square pegs still do not fit into round holes. Moreover, our common human biology means we generate a shared human reality, and human language allows us to align our individual models and expectations with each other.

Perception is generative

Measuring How Conscious We Are

Consciousness is embodied