Luzie's Reviews > Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

You can tell that Anil Seth is a scientist and not a philosopher. He does a good job at describing the state of consciousness research, the experiments, the data and the models. But as soon as he turns to the more philosophical questions, his reasoning is lacking.
The data does not show what consciousness is. The models do not explain how it arises or how it works. He tries to argue that consciousness is made up of a few simple ingredients, but in the end it does not become clear, how they connect and why this is all there is (apart from that the author feels like that’s all).

And after he fails at explaining human consciousness, he moves on to try and solve the question of animal consciousness - where his arguments can be reduced to ‘I feel like this is how it should be’. And even though he keeps saying you have to be careful of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism when talking about other animals, he keeps falling back on arguments based in both of these.
But by far the best part was the end, where he turns on to non-organic consciousness and cites fiction as his major evidence.

Combine all this with a very clunky execution of ‘I should add personal anecdotes to motivate my ideas and set this book apart from a textbook’ and you get a dissatisfying book about the history of consciousness research trying to mask as the big explanation of everything.