We Are Beast Machines
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Highlights
- Let’s first consider emotions and moods. These forms of conscious content are central to the experience of being an embodied self. Like all perceptual experiences, they can be understood as controlled hallucinations: brain-based best-guesses that remain tied to the world and the body in ways determined not by their accuracy, but by their utility for the organism.
- As with all perception, this best guessing is achieved—I believe—through a neural dance between top-down prediction and bottom-up prediction error. And just as predictions about visual sensory signals underpin visual experiences, interoceptive predictions underpin emotions and moods. Whether it’s fear, anxiety, joy, or regret—every emotional experience is rooted in top-down perceptual best-guessing about the state of the body (and about the causes of this state). These experiences, too, are kinds of controlled hallucination.
- We are not the beast machines of Descartes, for whom life was irrelevant to mind. It is exactly the opposite. All of our perceptions and experiences, whether of the self or of the world, are inside-out controlled and controlling hallucinations that are rooted in the flesh-and-blood predictive machinery that evolved, develops, and operates from moment-to-moment, always in light of a fundamental biological drive to stay alive.