CONCEPT
The Beast Machine
Anil Seth’s reclamation of Descartes’ dismissive term for animals—turned to argue the opposite: that being a living machine, an animal with a body that must keep itself alive, is not an obstacle to consciousness but its very foundation, and that what makes us conscious selves is inseparable from what makes us mortal beasts.
Descartes called animals
bêtes machines—beast machines—to deny them souls and minds: they were, on his account, elaborate automata, their behaviors explicable by mechanical causes with no inner life required.
Anil Seth reclaims the phrase to make the opposite argument. We are beast machines, and we are conscious selves precisely
because we are beast machines. The deepest and most consequential turn in Seth’s thought is this: consciousness is not what rises above the animal body but what grows out of it, and the biological imperative to maintain a living organism against the constant threat of dissolution is not incidental to experience but constitutive of it. The framework extends
predictive processing inward: the brain not only predicts signals from the outside world but predicts the signals arriving from inside the body—the state of the heart, gut, blood, viscera—in the service not of accurate