Being You, by Anil Seth

How do self-awareness and consciousness arise from the meat computers in our heads? This is the so-called “hard problem”, which has long been considered intractable. Anil Seth argues that empirical methodology is chipping away at the foundations of the hard problem, and that Psychology is beginning to make real progress towards answers.

He starts by by examining how modern magnetoencephalograpy can yield an operationalised and quantifiable metric of brain activity which appears to accompany conscious experience, and continues to argue that perceptual inferences driven by Baysian logic may be identical to, and responsible for, consciousness. If true, this would mean that animals are conscious, and that AIs aren’t.

This book was published in 2021 and created quite an impact. It contains some very advanced thinking about the science of consciousness, and it is the first time anyone has attempted to make these ideas accessible for a popular audience. It is very readable and not too long, but the ideas it articulates are mind-bending, and worth reading slowly and more than once!

The Myth of Freedom, by Yuval Noah Harari.

An article by the author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century on Free Will, in which Harari explores the political consequences of the scientific consensus that free will is illusory. He argues that we would be better thinkers if we came to terms with the fact that we don’t have free will.

Harari holds that if we grip on to our belief in free will, it makes us too selfish. We are constantly focussed on ourselves. If, on the other hand, we accept that we are slaves to the stimuli around us, then we focus on those instead. “It is like when you have a conversation with someone. If you focus on what you want to say, you hardly really listen. You just wait for the opportunity to give the other person a piece of your mind. But when you put your own thoughts aside, you can suddenly hear other people.”

“Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of free will has become dangerous.”

“How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans? What’s left of the beliefs that ‘the voter knows best’ and ‘the customer is always right’? How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself?”

The Myth of Freedom, by Yuval Noah Harari.

The Guardian, Saturday 15th September 2018, Review p. 32-35

Connectome, by Sebastian Seung.

Read. This. Book.
This one is in my top three psychology books for A level students to read this year. It is exciting because it sketches out some future directions that cognitive neuroscience is going to take in the coming years and decades.
When Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, he saw for the first time the machinery of planetary motion. This laid the foundations for our modern understanding of astronomy. The same is happening today in brain science. The ongoing improvement in brain scanning is driving new understanding of how the brain actually works. This book is a guide to the road ahead.
Not only that, but the first few chapters are a brilliant primer on the basics of neuroscience and biopsychology, and will be great revision for this part of the exam.
A really interesting read, and very accessible.
“A connectome is the totality of connections between the neurons in a nervous system.”
“In the nineteenth century, the American psychologist William James wrote eloquently of the stream of consciousness, the continuous flow of thoughts through the mind. But James failed to note that every stream has a bed. Without this groove in the earth, the water would not know in which direction to flow. Since the connectome defines the pathways along which neural activity can flow, we might regard it as the streambed of consciousness.
The metaphor is a powerful one. Over a long period of time, in the same way that the water of the stream slowly shapes the bed, neural activity changes the connectome. The two notions of the self – as both the fast-moving, ever-changing stream and the more stable but slowly transforming streambed –  are thus inextricably linked. This book is about the self as the streambed, the self in the connectome – the self that has been neglected for too long.”