They meant information in a technical, formal sense - not the informal sense in which reading a newspaper is informative. The promising bit comes from what Gerald Edelman and Tononi together observed, in the late вЂ™90s, which is that conscious experiences are highly вЂњinformativeвЂќ and always вЂњintegrated.вЂќ Well, I find some bits of IIT promising, but not others. What is integrated information theory, and why do you find it promising? For example, you seem to support the work that Giulio Tononi and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have been doing on вЂњintegrated information theoryвЂќ (IIT). YouвЂ™re clearly more drawn to some of the approaches to consciousness that researchers have put forward than others. It is because we are flesh-and-blood living machines that our experiences of the world and of вЂњselfвЂќ arise. How does consciousness play into that picture? How is consciousness related to our nature as living machines, in a way thatвЂ™s continuous between humans and other animals? In my work - and in the book - I eventually get to the point that consciousness is not there in spite of our nature as flesh-and-blood machines, as Descartes might have said rather, itвЂ™s because of this nature. La Mettrie said, вЂњOK, if animals are flesh-and-blood machines, then humans are animals, too, of a certain sort.вЂќ So just as there is a beast-machine, or a bГЄte machine, you also have lвЂ™homme machine - вЂњ man machine.вЂќ He just extended the same basic idea without this artificial division. Descartes considered nonhuman animals as вЂњbeast-machines.вЂќ (This is a term I re-appropriate and hope to rehabilitate in my book.) The beast-machine for Descartes was the idea that nonhuman animals were machines made of flesh and blood, lacking the rational, conscious minds that bring humans closer to God. Descartes was always trying to finesse his arguments in order to avoid being burned alive, or otherwise being subject to harsh clerical treatment. I think of him as basically taking DescartesвЂ™ ideas and extending them to their natural conclusions, by not being worried about what the Church might say. La Mettrie is a fascinating character, a polymath type of figure. How did his views differ from those of Descartes, and how do they bear on your own work? In your book, you mention the work of a less familiar figure, the 18th-century French scholar Julien Offray de La Mettrie. RenГ© Descartes, for example, famously argued that nonhuman animals were akin to machines, while humans had something extra that made consciousness possible. That leap from the physical to the mental is something that philosophers have grappled with for centuries. ThereвЂ™s a suspicion that scientific explanation - by which I mean broadly materialist, reductive explanations, which have been so successful in other branches of physics and chemistry - just might not be up to the job, because consciousness is intrinsically private. When we think about consciousness or experience, it just doesnвЂ™t seem to us to be the sort of thing that admits an explanation in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. Why has this problem of consciousness been so vexing, over the centuries - harder, it seems, than figuring out whatвЂ™s inside an atom or even how the universe began? The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Quanta recently caught up with Seth at his home in Brighton via videoconference. вЂњI always get a little annoyed when I read people saying things like, вЂChalmers proposed the hard problem 25 years agoвЂ™ вЂ¦ and then saying, 25 years later, that вЂweвЂ™ve learned nothing about this weвЂ™re still completely in the dark, weвЂ™ve made no progress,вЂ™вЂќ said Seth. Yes, itвЂ™s a challenge - but weвЂ™ve been chipping away at it steadily over the years. But the way Seth sees it, Chalmers was overly pessimistic. This puzzle - the mystery of how inanimate matter arranges itself into living beings with self-aware minds and a rich inner life - is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the вЂњhard problemвЂќ of consciousness. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?вЂќ And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do - but he knows that the puzzle of consciousness spills over from neuroscience into other branches of science, and even into philosophy.ДЄs he puts it near the start of his new book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (available October 19): вЂњSomehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work.

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