Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

Being You advances a predictive-processing account of consciousness in which the brain is a prediction machine and perception is a "controlled hallucination": the brain's best guess about the causes of its sensory input, constrained by the world. Its central claim extends this to the perceiver, so that the sense of being a unified self is itself a constructed prediction.

The argument grounds selfhood in interoception, the brain's modeling of the body's internal state, driven by the imperative to keep the organism alive. Seth treats consciousness as a biological phenomenon to be explained by neuroscience rather than a window onto a mind-made reality.

The work functions as a deliberate boundary case: it shares the vocabulary of construction with idealist and manifestation writers yet reaches the opposite conclusion, distinguishing how brains model a real external world from any claim that reality is mind-dependent.