Apprehending Consciousness

00:00:00 uh my name is rob penzer i'm the associate director of the helix center i just have a few announcements next saturday march 7th we have curiosity in conjunction with the publication of the eponymous book by alberto mengele with psychiatrist paul browde physicist edgar truari poet marie howe writers siri hustved and of course alberto manguela himself on april 18th we have a john templeton foundation roundtable the mind of a child followed by april 25th another templeton

00:00:32 foundation roundtable the changing nature of free will on may 2nd we'll be discussing trauma and its after effects on may 9th we'll have a program of experimental films and make note that there is a helix center benefit coming up on may 8th at the lotus club and announcements will be forthcoming so watch your emails and please uh check on our website helixcenter.org please like us

00:01:03 on facebook and and like us anyway and uh follow us on twitter and now uh to today's program and please yes thanks ed please make sure that uh if you did receive one of the evaluations for today's program that you uh fill it out and hand it back to uh someone from the helix center we uh we depend

00:01:33 on your feedback greatly uh for the fulfillment of our uh templeton grant so i'm going to introduce today's participants and as i say your name if you can just raise your hands so the audience will identify you david chalmers professor of philosophy and co-director of the center for mind brain and consciousness at new york university is best known for his work on consciousness especially for his formulation of the hard problem of consciousness and his arguments against materialism his 1996 book the conscious mind in

00:02:05 search of a fundamental theory was successful with both popular and academic audiences he's been a leader in the interdisciplinary science of consciousness and also works on issues about language metaphysics and artificial intelligence his most recent book constructing the world was published in 2012 and attempts to build a model of the world from a few primitive concepts carl fristen professor at the institute of neurology university college london is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging the inventor of a major body of statistical techniques for analyzing

00:02:36 functional neuroimaging and other mathematical contributions he currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuron excuse me neuronal interactions with his main contribution to theoretical neurobiology being a free energy principle for action and perception among his awards and honors he has been the recipient of the first young investigators award in human brain mapping election as fellow of the royal society and recipient of the weldon memorial prize and metal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology

00:03:07 pete hutt has been professor of astrophysics at the institute for advanced study since 1985 where he is currently the head of the program for interdisciplinary studies his research and interests encompass computational astrophysics interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive science and philosophy of science the origins of life on earth as well as elsewhere in the universe for which he is a foreign principal investigator at the earth life institute science institute at the tokyo institute of technology the author of more than 200 publications he was honored in 2004

00:03:37 when a main belt asteroid was named 17031 piet by the international astronomical unions committee on small body nomenclature gabriel bennett jackson is assistant professor of philosophy at stony brook university after receiving her phd in philosophy from harvard in 2011 she was the andrew mellon postdoctoral fellow at the university of toronto's jackman humanities institute and a visitor at the institute for advanced study at their school of social sciences she's interested in scientifically informed approaches to the study of the

00:04:08 mind and her recent work includes articles skillful action in perry personal space and neuro philosophy and its discontents ken pallor professor of psychology and director of the training program in the neuroscience of human cognition at northwestern university is cognitive neuroscientist whose recent research includes sleep's role in memory and memory dysfunction sensory processing during sleep and learning the neural substrates of conscious memory experiences and memory and intuition a fellow of both the mind

00:04:38 and life institute and the association for psychological science and journal editor at neuropsychologia he is the recipient of multiple research grants including the nsf and nih and the senator mark hadfield award from the alzheimer's association nicholas schiff is gerald katz professor of neurology and neuroscience as well as director of the laboratory for cognitive neuromodulation at weill cornell medical college his research focuses on recovery of consciousness following brain injuries he and his research group have contributed several landmark advances

00:05:10 including the first demonstrations of brain structural alterations occurring in the setting of very late recovery from severe brain injury he received the 2007 research award for innovation in neuroscience from the society for neuroscience for his research on arousal regulation and deep brain electrical stimulation demonstrating that long lasting severe cognitive disability may be influenced by electrical stimulation of the human central thalamus and now to our round table uh i thought i'd get you started by

00:05:43 saying that two weeks ago we showed the movie particle fever here and the documentary and then we had a round table afterwards and as you know that was about detecting the higgs boson so my question to you is if we can detect higgs boson why are we having so much trouble with consciousness sure um i guess there's a lot of things

00:06:15 that make consciousness distinctive and difficult um science is supposed to be objective but consciousness is this quintessentially subjective phenomenon's defined the subjective experience the subjective experience of the mind and of the world and but we want to explain everything in terms of objective mechanisms that's what we do in science and there seems to be this potential gap in the explanation between

00:06:46 the level of objective mechanisms how one thing causes another thing and this billiard ball causation in the universe and consciousness how is it that this giant network of neurons we have in the head objectively hooked up bring about consciousness now this doesn't mean you can't do science on it one of the wonderful things that's happened in the last you know uh 20 odd years now is there's been an exploding science of consciousness the neuroscientists have been

00:07:17 have been uh studying it making all kinds of progress on finding the you know the bits of the brain that go along with with bits of consciousness but it is for now a science of correlation we know that some bits of the brain go along with some bits of consciousness we're still working on the part which is about explanation and i think you know it's these issues about explanation that really make the study of consciousness difficult i'll take a stab at following that up i think the the evolution and the maturity of theory in physical science is

00:07:47 just so vastly beyond what it is in biological science to give you an idea of what consciousness what the rules of the game might be for causal um creation of consciousness in a in a central nervous system and the measurements that we have that we can link correlationally are few and far between so that we're we're just we're just very far behind the curve of anything like what what got you to a higgs boson a theory predicting a particular phenomena in the physical structure of the brain that's linked to consciousness

00:08:18 i mean it's very hard actually to know if somebody can't show you any response whether they're conscious that's a large operational part of what we do at the interface of clinical medicine and research to try to understand retain consciousness in a structurally injured brain because we don't have rules that say okay you know if you have these parts of the brain in there in these states you definitely have consciousness another problem with trying to explain consciousness is that um

00:08:48 sort of like other phenomenon science uh when you observe them you don't necessarily expect them to change fundamentally upon observation but the nature of consciousness is that the observer in the observed are the same thing what it is to have a conscious mind is to be an observer to have a point of view and so i mean the physicists are familiar with this phenomenon i mean if you're looking at a conscious state or a conscious process in virtue of looking at it have you artificially changed the thing the very thing you're

00:09:19 supposed to be explaining and so how do you get behind being the observer and focus on the on the real phenomenon as it's happening so i'd also agree with these reasons for why this is a difficult problem to try to understand consciousness but i think it's nice that david came up with this catchphrase of the hard problem of consciousness because note that he didn't decide to talk about the impossible problem of consciousness he didn't say it was that difficult as

00:09:51 to be impossible there is a science of consciousness and that's moving forward as you mentioned and will continue to move forward so we we admit to it being a difficult problem but i'm not sure if we think it's impossible that's the spirit yeah i was just going to follow up on the the observer aspect i mean part it may be that that aspect of the problem is the thing that makes it hard i think that's that that's the

00:10:22 interesting question why is it so hard if you follow richard feynman that if i want to understand something i have to be able to model it what you're asking of an understanding of consciousness is the ability to model myself and i think there's something fundamentally impossible about a system that can model itself because it has to represent itself as it does that it has to represent that representation and that infinite so there may be something deeply problematic and deeply hard about the brain modeling itself which is

00:10:53 not an aspect of modeling higgs boson it's very interesting for me to hear your example of the higgs boson since uh about 40 years ago i started my graduate studies studies it's hard to imagine 40 years but and what i did was to compute to make computations of the higgs boson and i i had many different interests it was hard to to choose so i tried to do a double phd

00:11:23 in particle physics and astronomy the very largest and very smallest because they are the simplest this scale is the most difficult to understand and by the time i got my phd i got a feeling that it might take a while for the higgs boson to be discovered so i decided to become an astrophysicist rather than a higgs boson specialist and i'm glad i did because most of my career i would have to twiddle my thumbs but what you said about physics so being so different from

00:11:54 from other from brain studies i think there are three big problems in all of science the three biggest problems where is matter come from there is life come from and where is consciousness come from and the where is really a right question why is there matter why is there a life why is there consciousness if you would have nothing at all you would never expect that to be something forget about who is asking the questions but in general in principle so big surprise there is

00:12:27 something at all and then if you have physics and chemistry who would have guessed a living cell so complicated big surprise and giving simple life who would have cast consciousness so the three questions can also be formulated why is there matter why is there life why is there the ability to ask why is there this matter why is there life and why is that as consciousness and that is that feedback loop

00:12:59 but dave you think there are some hard problems that can't be solved so you think there is an impossible problem of consciousness oh i think we have a i think we have a scientific theory of consciousness and i've been very invested in the uh the movement to work towards such a science i think some theories will be good theories and some theories will be uh will be bad theories so for example some people out there would like to reduce consciousness to a process in the brain and say all there is to consciousness is you know some

00:13:29 neurophysiological process then we can give a complete explanation of consciousness in terms of a bunch of uh neural firings in the brain for various reasons i think that kind of theory although you know it's a great thing to aim for but i think that kind of theory isn't going to work any explanation that's wholly in terms of the neurophysiology of the brain is basically going to explain a bunch of the uh maybe a bunch of the things we do you know our ability to get around in the world and to respond and so on but it's always

00:13:59 going to leave out the subjective experience so i've argued that we need a different kind of theory one that takes consciousness as as uh something fundamental in the world and connects it to all these other things but that's i would still see that as a solution to the hard problem the hard problem is explaining how is it that consciousness arises from the processes in the brain it's just i think you need you know you need to the standard methods we've developed so far in neuroscience only go so far and i think a lot of people agree we need new methods the question is what are

00:14:30 those new methods and new theories what are those new methods why would you need new theories why why not just figure out the way i mean you know what what brings about consciousness don't you you said firing of millions or billions of neurons so you know what brings it about coffee right

00:15:02 yes but how does coffee bring about consciousness that's what we need to know but i don't think that we do know that i think what we have are very good understandings of state correlations in the of of brain state and likelihood of consciousness and that's you know that's better than nothing and it gives us a clue about what aspects of neuronal function are more or less important to wakefield consciousness for example and that's i think probably where our best correlational data are right now but but it's actually

00:15:33 it's not good enough for you to just get the brain data and to make a reasonable or fiducial inference about whether somebody actually is conscious you can make a pretty good risk assessment i think and an increasingly good risk assessment and that's um that's different if you wanted to just partition the problem right if there was a problem of how does consciousness arise from neuronal processes that presumably is easier than the reverse question is how does

00:16:05 consciousness affect or influence or nuance neural processing absolutely so you know i mean your job in terms of detecting conscious level i think is a testament to the fact there's an enormous amount of progress made in mapping from the biophysics to the conscious level and i thought the deeper problem is getting back again but i think you know quite frankly it's a very uh sort of humbling job right because you're you're often left with a very wide variance of uncertainty and

00:16:36 that and um as you say i mean i once you get to the idea that consciousness might have some emergent effects like on top a dynamic element that on top of the brain then has causal effect on the structure well i just we don't have a model that gets us even close to those sorts of questions yet um so i mean from my point of view but that's you know maybe a limited you know understanding but do you do you see that margin of uncertainty decreasing absolutely through the years yeah no i mean i think i think we're making a lot of progress it's just that we're not anywhere near

00:17:08 our standard model which would produce something like a prediction about something from theory that we might then go go measure in the brain and say aha this model is right and that's that's sort of the amazing thing about the higgs boson i think is it but but dave is making the assumption that no physiological theory will ever be sufficient he prefers a theory with consciousness as a primitive which is a fine alternative for theory but your assumption that a neurophysiological theory is going to come up short is really based on our current

00:17:39 understanding of consciousness and you're projecting about future theories of consciousness that haven't been presented yet so how do we well one thing why should the rest of us i don't know if the rest of us are convinced but why should the rest of us be convinced that none of those future theories are gonna provide what you say you don't think is possible um well i think it depends i mean different people are going to get off the bus at different points first of all it's to make a point about current theories i mean

00:18:10 is what current theories gives us basically of a level of correlation i think what we are getting is this connection from this mapping i think is carl was putting it from neural processes to uh to consciousness and it's slow and slow progress two steps forward and one step back but we're making getting somewhere in the mapping but it's still a level of you know mappings or correlations there's nothing analogous to say to what you got um pete mentioned the case of life so let's take one central element to the explanation of life the explanation of the

00:18:41 genetic processes in terms of of dna what uh watson and crick didn't do was ah we discovered that whenever there's life there's there's dna look at this amazing correlation rather they found the uh they found the mechanism potential mechanism at least in the structure of the dna molecule and they told you know the beginnings of a potential story about how this could explain the things that we want the gene to uh to explain like the transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next we just

00:19:12 have nothing like that kind of story right now in the neuroscience of consciousness um even though we've got we're developing some nice correlations and then the question is why is that is it just is it just something about the structure of our current theories or is it something about the character of what you get from these um neurobiological explanations i think the more you look at it the more it starts to look as if it's not just something about the contingent character of the neurobiological theories we've come up with so far it's rather something about

00:19:43 their mechanistic nature it's all about you know you've got a bunch of uh objective mechanisms which are here performing certain functions doing certain things you can always raise the raise the further question why does all that give you subjective experience why should it be why should it feel like something from the inside so either it looks like either what you've got to do is add some ingredient to that explanation to to you know put some extra thing in the base or the alternative and it's a important alternative is to somehow deflate the phenomenon of consciousness

00:20:15 either say neuros neurobiology is something more than we thought it was or consciousness is something less something less than we thought it was some people have tried to take that move somebody like daniel dennett for example has said so much of consciousness is an illusion my view is that if you want to try and explain consciousness wholly in terms of these objective mechanisms in the brain you may have to deflate consciousness to some considerable extent still that the jump you're taking is from our current the current

00:20:45 shortcomings of theories of consciousness to project that then all future theories have that same shortcoming i think certainly and not like there's a million different theories of consciousness and some of them are i'm totally on board with the question is reductionist theories of consciousness in terms of neuroscience the question is what resources does neuroscience give you and the reduction of the explanatory base in neuroscience the stuff we explain everything in terms of is a bunch of mechanisms which come down to certain structures

00:21:16 playing certain dynamical roles which is fantastic for explaining how it is that the brain does certain things produces certain behaviors and certain responses but for any explanation of that kind you can always ask the further question why does all this objective functioning give you consciousness so any theory my view is any theory cast purely in terms of objective structure and function will leave that gap maybe there are other kinds of theories is there a deepest intuition about what would what would resist a deflation from your point of

00:21:48 view is there you know what aspect of subjectivity do you see hardest to fit in principle against the kind of models that exist or could evolve from those that exist i would say you know it's the fact that it feels like something from the inside i mean there's this classic philosophical thought experiment of a mary the scientist in a black and white room who um knows everything about color processes in the brain and about the wavelengths that bring them about and about the uh the retinol and the neurophysiological responses and about

00:22:20 the words uh we associate with these things um but she is herself colorblind or maybe she grew up in a black and white room um so she knows all about the brain processes associated with seeing red which she's never had the experience right of seeing red and it looks like okay she knows all the brain stuff but she doesn't know the central thing about seeing red namely what it's like from the inside that's the subjective experience so so so imagine a fast forward of existing measurements and theories where

00:22:51 you have um take take a fanciful example of an mri that can map the column space of the color area in v4 or something like that and you look and you see that people who can resolve certain collections of perceptions that include one that she doesn't have partition activity into five dimensions or something and she does it in four and then you have some manipulation where she suddenly partitions it into five and tells you aha now i see this so is is an explanation like that what's

00:23:22 an identification of something you might measure with the idea that there's a qualia associated with it not count as a at least a possible explanation not an explanation but um enough of an enough of a model to kind of say well maybe this is enough i agree it's a model and i agree there's a kind of explanation you get from this kind of work of building up it's basically building up systematic correlations between these things you know the brain processes and the experiences such that for example one could make some predictions if somebody has a certain novel kind of

00:23:54 brain process here you know david hume talked about the missing shade of blue the one he had never experienced well maybe we could predict that if you had a certain neurophysiological process they're in between the other shades of blue then you'd get that experience of the missing shade of moon that's that's predictive that is to a certain extent explanatory but what it's not is a full reductive explanation of the experience right well one example that does exist that sort of this reminds me of right away is um the uh the difference between natural naturally um deaf signers and people who

00:24:27 have acquired deafness in signing and the use of physical space and i think it's ursula luji or somebody who's done a lot of work on this and they find that the um auditory cortex takes over visual functions and there's a fluency difference and and so people who are natural signers will know if somebody's truly fluent because of the way they use space in front of them in their hands and place things and you know there's a whole visual motor component to their to their their language effectively that's not you know it's not auditory and there's a neural representation

00:24:57 that's novel so you know i mean that you know not that that's proof that this is all in the brain or that this is an argument against the philosophical standpoint but i just you know there are these kinds of things like this and they give us a sense that they're you know the identifications can get larger this is what we're getting from the science of consciousness over the last 20 years a beautiful set of isomorphisms from processes in consciousness to psychological processes some computational processes and some gradually developing some brain level processes there's nothing here i think that answers the fundamental question

00:25:28 why does all that brain stuff give you consciousness in the first place rather this science takes the existence of consciousness for granted as a kind of datum it's given that we have it what does it correlate with and we're getting it we're getting a very nice science from that but uh and that's why you know people always want to you know put it as if by opposing the reductionist explanation of consciousness you're opposing science completely but no in fact the science has been tremendously productive it's been predictive and some of it's even becoming useful and you know in treating patients in clinical settings where

00:25:59 we've taken stuff we know about the correlates of consciousness and put it to to uh to practical uh purposes but it does does leave the fundamental philosophical question open i should say i mean we are yeah we can focus all day on the things that make consciousness difficult but we've got people who are speaking an optimistic tone of voice about the uh you know the wonderful theories that might be just around the corner so i'm curious to hear what what some people think are there are other places where they where they

00:26:29 see we're actually likely to be making progress say over next over the next 10 20 30 years and what kind of theories might be the ones that will have some promise gabriel for you um i mean i'm still sort of hung up on this sort of question of what the it is when you say we can explain all the we can find out more and more about the brain processes and the complex dynamic systems that are implemented in the brain but we still haven't explained consciousness i'm just sort of interested in what we think

00:27:00 we're trying to explain is it so we're all sitting in this room and there's this background hum of the air coming into the room and there's this kind of disperse consciousness that maybe we're we're aware of that and then there's the sort of focus consciousness that brought your attention to the sound of the air coming into the room so surely we're conscious of that because i've not brought your attention to it but that's tensional consciousness which is different than dispersed consciousness that might be just happening in the background and and i and i'm sort of curious actually

00:27:31 to ask the scientists too so when you're sitting in the lab and you're devising an experiment about memory or what we're experiencing when we're asleep and dreaming states um how do you know that we're studying a conscious state unless there's someone reporting on it saying that i'm conscious of this thing um of course once they've reported on it then you're then you're talking about a particular kind of consciousness the consciousness that requires access attention so what is the the

00:28:01 clever workaround that the scientists here are using to sort of get at that problem yeah well i think we don't have a workaround for understanding awareness during sleep aside from maybe lucid dreaming we know very little about that and i think maybe if we get somewhere it will be with some brain measures that have a tight correlation but we're not there yet um but back to the other idea of memory i think one of the perhaps answers to your your point is in a number of fields in my field in

00:28:31 memory research one of the approaches is to contrast different types of memory and so we have a widely agreed upon contrast between implicit memory and explicit memory and so we understand the brain mechanisms of these types of memory and how they differ from each other and the interesting part of that is that with explicit memory you can do mental time travel and you can relive a past event you can have a conscious experience of something from the past with implicit memory you don't have that now both types of memory very complex so

00:29:02 we can look in the brain and ask well what's happening to allow those memory memory phenomena to go forward and then how do they differ what fundamental differences are there between those two types so that's again not a solution it's not the answer but it's one of the avenues of which there are many to try to pinpoint the essential features that are happening in the brain and and then my thought is as we pursue that we

00:29:32 might have some new ideas about what it is that's special about the aware memories compared to the unaware memories here's one example carl your review on where the uh where the progress is going to come from um i think the progress will come from posing posing the problem i mean you asked a very good question you gave an excellent answer um i wonder whether just looking at the brain as a scientist might hold the clue

00:30:04 to the hardness of it so you've been talking about inferring through correlations through statistical regularities mappings that this is a conscious brain that's making its own inferences about its own sensory input but if it is the case the brain is a scientist in the game of trying to infer the causes of the sensory information then there is we come back this fundamental problem the brain is actually trying to make inferences about itself

00:30:35 and that's not the same you know as you try to infer when this subject is conscious or not or whether somebody is having some um perceptual adventure in a dream during sleep or trying to impute whether they are conscious when they're not allowed to um verbally report so all of these issues i think do do detract from the fundamental thing it's my influence and how do i infer that i'm making an inference when the machinery i'm using to do it is

00:31:06 the thing that's making the inference it means i have to sit on top of it how about this we make a deal all model you new model means okay then we'd have to merge our ego boundaries and then we'll be happy because in fact our modeling is a group the science endeavor is a group process it's not each of us on our own and i think what you say about changing understanding of existing notions it is very much true in my field as a physicist that

00:31:36 our understanding of matter over the last 200 years has changed enormously so if people tell me i'm a materialist i ask them well do you mean like in 1800 or 1905 or 1925 or maybe you are a string theorist you do you see the world in terms of strings i mean the same word matter has evolved from something inert and something objectively existing to something which you can only probe

00:32:06 by admit taking a chance a stance of how you measure it and something which on a smaller scale can even have completely different properties maybe even live in a different number of dimensions so it may very well be that gradually over time our understanding of the brain mind connection will also move on and what's what you sometimes call pan-psychism that everything has a conscious component the first time we hear that we think about the physics

00:32:37 world and then within the physics world some sort of spooky fluid field or medium whatever which is then consciousness but that would be as strange as learning relativity theory and saying there is matter and there is energy and somehow the two interpenetrate each other it's so mysterious actually there is one thing and sometimes it condenses into matter and sometimes it's it shows itself as energy and it's not two different things which interpenetrate or interact with each other

00:33:10 the way william james said it i really like about meta and mind he said if two lines intersect there is one point where they cross not two different points there is one point lying on two lines so mind and matter i can look at this as a physical object but this is also an experience in my mind but the experienced bottle and physical bottle for me there are not two bottles which somehow have to be pushed together

00:33:42 it's the intersection of both or the coupling i mean i use the word kaplan mindful of that nice example about an understanding of dna and how it causes us to be here as phenotypes and how good phenotypes propagate through their genes in that there's a circular causality which does i think bridge different levels of explanation so the difference between the the physical bottle and your inference that is a bottle

00:34:12 causing the sensations caused by physical bottles that's one example of closing that circular causality that i think does bridget levels so i think the deflationary explanations are unsatisfactory because they deny the challenge of coupling the levels of explanations you talk about experiences and beliefs which basically means that neuroscience has to have a formal machinery to explain quantify and write down beliefs i mean it's as simple as that and once

00:34:43 you've done that you can then work out how neuronal firing causes beliefs and then you can work out how beliefs change neural firing and this gets to your state example which is a very it's not a theoretical example it's it's for me it's an example that kind of enlarges in in many of the cases that we see because almost all of them are like your your neuroscientist in a room when they're hard if there's no output and you and you start to have correlations that get you close to states that look like states when that person doesn't

00:35:14 have a motor problem they can talk to you and do lots of things but then you have this kind of limited set of measurements to try and you might not get a response that's expected in other words they seem to have the right parts of the brain they should be able to if they're just awake and conscious and in the state that you or i were in do a few things that you could measure and reliably get the result and you don't so then is it is it their point of view are they in a lucid dreaming like state are they in some other you know altered consciousness because we don't have a model that says you know you get represented

00:35:46 representational stuff with subjectivity when all this happens in the brain and if you're missing this aspect of it you kind of don't or actually it's as if you know you're there but you're not really aware so you're not taking in the sensory information and processing it the way you would be if you were kind of admitting to the world around you being real i mean there's just an endless number of variations on it that you could sit there and kind of wonder is that what i'm looking at

00:36:17 i am assuming that you can in your lab say this person is conscious this person is comatose and this person is dead well okay let's start with let's start with the last two so okay okay because no because i think you know that's that's meaningful so we know when someone's dead okay and that's actually and that that's the most unambiguous and um not not present with uncertainty

00:36:48 determination that we can make given all of our available tools and so the only time that that becomes an issue of uncertainty is that sometimes we're relying on a subset of those tools because it's not practical to make every possible measurement to determine that every first dead person is dead okay but it is it is possible to unambiguously unequivocally figure out if somebody is dead that we understand coma is also a state that has not too

00:37:18 much ambiguity somebody who's comatose with the right reasons to be comatose in terms of medical problems the correlational data that go goes along with being in a deep coma doesn't have a lot of variation it doesn't have a lot of variance and i would actually say that we shouldn't have a problem identifying when somebody's in a coma but that's the that's that you know this is this is the left hand if we put it on linear scale that's the extreme left and the extreme right would be full consciousness and when you move from coma the next level up would be people

00:37:50 who appear to be comatose in terms of not responding to you in any way but for periods of time their eyes open their eyes closed that's that's sort of definitionally what vegetative state is now vegetative state should be defined or identified by a whole biological context in which the brain is very severely injured and that eye opening and eye closure is just reflecting a remnant of arousal the brain stem and activity above the brainstem not being present but then things get more complicated because that measurement isn't always fall that assessment isn't always followed up with measurements that would

00:38:20 verify that underlying model and you hear stories about people who are diagnosed as vegetative who have high level cognition and that we just had a whole conference on this about six months ago that's just a contradiction and just a mistake i mean those are patients who are misdiagnosed as vegetative and there should be lots of correlational data that tell you that that's probably bad as an assumption and we've been working that out as a field and i think everybody's kind of getting to that point but then the next level up is that you start to show some sign of consciousness you may give a thumbs up you may give some very limited response but you can't

00:38:51 communicate so you can't go and say well what's what's inside of this person's you know subjective response and and you know and actually what's their status of consciousness compared to you and me when we can tell you about it and give you metaphors and speak in senses about it and then it and then the grading as you go up gets you know more complicated in their elements of memory or orientation or self-awareness and things like that that don't come back and then finally you get into a range of normative conscious experience which is really pretty wide because once you get to be near normal then things are highly

00:39:21 multivariate so it's it's actually the answer is no i can't do that you cannot detect what changes in the brain as the person from the vegetative state moves towards the consciousness no that i didn't say no that's that's different we can at a coarse grain fashion do that and increasingly well and that's the engine underneath our science so you can drop a rough line we can draw

00:39:52 a rough line with some coarse graded points on the grid and and that's how this game is getting played and it's and it's increasingly getting more predictive well i think it's a great um it's moving towards a great science of the of the correlations between you know what brain areas what brain criteria there are for being conscious and for not being conscious although even as a science of correlations i think it has to be said it's fairly primitive in some respects at the moment we've got some clear cases cases where we think okay there's very

00:40:23 good reasons for thinking these people are conscious and we we know the uh we need to know something about the brain processes that go along with that as you move away from the clear cases it gets very difficult you know there are cases where people aren't responding i always want to ask the question well how do you know there's not some residual consciousness there that's not showing up in their in their actions and their and if you could responses instruments that detect those differences

00:40:55 then that would be this would all be this would be so much easier if we had the famous consciousness meter you just wave it wave that wave this instrument at niko's head and get a readout of his consciousness up on the up on the screen it doesn't have to be a consciousness meter it could be from uh instruments that detect the activity of the brain that you say is not detectable i can tell you that in practice and this is this can be reduced to an operational set of problems and i can think of really great cases the boundary question that you're posing

00:41:25 is what about minimally conscious versus vegetative where you know if you have somebody who has some level of brain activity or some very low level response you measure when is it conscious versus when is it really like coma and you know what the answer is we don't know how to do that and then there's some very interesting stuff when you start trying to make sense of some of the things you might measure or observe and correlate with neuronal function but we don't have a model that says this kind of brain activity you know creates a representational subjective internal state and you can you know make

00:41:57 a few probes at it and say well you know it at least has this content there's nothing there's nothing like that i have a question uh about about this if if you find somebody who can have a minimal reaction like yes no yes then in principle you would think it can take a very long time but in principle you could kind of sentence out of that person by asking is it a is it b or whatever in the tree you're right and you're right in the game and so we we have we have we have examples on every edge

00:42:28 of that right so i you know we have patients who we first detect that they can follow a command to move their eye and one woman we saw after two years even her family had never seen any response once that was discovered and a huge effort was made to connect with her and she can inconsistently communicate but she doesn't yet have any way with existing technology to turn that into a successful communication system so we believe she's conscious when there are windows of time when

00:42:59 she's aware enough that she can use that eye you know we we know that that state is one in which she has awareness and some of the some of the problems of memory and things like that that she may have because she's intermedial temporal structures can kind of be you know suggested by things she does answer right and things she doesn't answer right we have other examples of patients who you know have these very narrow communication channels where you start to get a flavor for it but then we have patients who have every correlation in fact examples where their brains look better than all these patients but we have

00:43:29 absolutely nothing and now that you know i mean there's like the ultimate urgency to kind of figure this out because some of these people are very young and they're otherwise healthy their problem is just brain injury but yeah so we we see that and then and then we have examples where people transitioned so we had one man who came to us who all but one person who saw them thought they were unconscious but the one person who figured out they were conscious worked out a head movement system so that they could spell very slowly out and it was clear they were conscious and then they were given

00:44:00 various tools and they harnessed them over time now that patient send us emails and came back after five years in with a great email saying i'm looking forward to coming so i can show you what i can do now and you know and and over time had evolved a much more full and complete communication system so that we could see through his writing through the book he was writing is his interests he wanted to go to cooking school you know that that you know the fullness of his consciousness was there and actually his brain was more structurally injured than the other five people like this

00:44:31 that we've been following so you know it's it's true but it's not trivial so is it possible that you got this case of someone who only responds by a head movement or maybe by uh blinking their eyes or or something and that's the only way they can express their consciousness this raises the question well couldn't there be someone who didn't have the ability to make the head movements but nonetheless that we've studied who i worry very much about that and we think the data give us the

00:45:02 probability that that's the way they are but but you know we don't have the tools to say they that is the way they are do you think they're probably conscious i yeah absolutely and the question is what do we do about but now that you can you can measure their brains you can ask them to to use the way of thinking to to use the blood flow in the brain effectively instead of the head movement so this is where this this gets into the heart the absolute core of the issue here measurement isn't that easy it's not it's often those measurements aren't

00:45:33 super reliable even in normals but once you start introducing issues of brain injury state variations because of brain injury so that you know that they may have the material there to do a mental imagery response but their arousal function or their level of their quality of consciousness over their wakeful periods of time varies dramatically you start getting into complexities about not having a reliable model that says this is what has to happen this is the state it has to be and it has to be held constant in this way and you know and this is how

00:46:03 you're going to get reliable communication so again these are more practical issues but they make it they make it then hard when you don't have the communication to make an assessment of where they are subjectively because again it's it's an assessment of what's their subjective state that needs some kind of readout for from them to you to make an estimate of it and your practical problem is actually twofold because you want to know what their current state of awareness is and you want to know what the future holds well also how to move them so that they can get better

00:46:33 and become part of the world or interactive with the world they're part of the world but to be part of the community that's right and so that's that's exactly and so that's why you know i think we're pretty close to where the predictive models tell us what we can do because we would have a consequence if they were better so to my what you're saying to me now what you're saying now sounds like um that depending on from patient to patient even what could be a marker for activity in the brain is different and this actually reminds

00:47:06 me of another thing that william james says when he talks about consciousness he says some something like i'm going to miss quote um total pluralism absolute insularity and of course he's talking about how consciousness is personal and for every person in the room there's a different consciousness but also it sounds like even scientifically for every brain injured patient that comes in there's a different potentially different measure that you're going to need to figure out whether these patients are aware of modern medicine this is the ultimate in personalized medicine yeah yeah but but that doesn't mean there won't be a general model about how the

00:47:37 brain works but if in all these different cases you know if there's for every different possible case there's a different mechanism that you're looking at than in the normal case well but this is i mean that's a theory with a lot of disjuncts right now but i mean you know at some point there should be some simplicities right right like there's a brain that's got parts and they're in the right state and we could be clever about you know working around brain lesions and the rest of it but you know it is it does come down to the biology a bit so something like coma

00:48:07 things are very uniform in how the brain activity appears everywhere and once you start getting minimal signs of consciousness then things get much more complex they start looking a lot like normal depending on which you know measure you're looking at and then it's the same problem like what what are the correlations that are meaningful unconsciousness seems very like almost like leaky or something like it sort of goes like it can sort of go to like one kind of process and that's going to be the one that's correlated with consciousness or it could leak into some other areas depending on whether or not they have a model that said you know if you have a subjective state that has you know that's a

00:48:39 correlated with this belief or that i'm you know i'm dreaming versus i believe i'm in the world that you know they're both conscious but what's the what's the what's the measure that's associated with it we just don't have that the pluralism here is more about the way that you access or you infer that there is some inference going on right i get the impression that any modality will do whether it's a popular response or wiggling of a thing as long as there's some embodied expression of it which can be very different and very individual but

00:49:10 implicitly that underneath you think that there is something canonical about the conscious brain you need to demonstrate coming back to your question though if you could never demonstrate it would you say that that person was no longer consciousness conscious well okay so i mean let's just let's go canonical right so it's the stuff that the brain is made of is very stereotype right so you know we have certain i mean there's complexity on complexity but we think of consciousness as in the corticothalamic system right and the chlorothalamic system has

00:49:40 conservation of motifs i mean the cells are different they have alternate all sorts of interesting differences but you know if we had a whole hemisphere we have these rules from clinical neurology and it's only an issue when it's only an issue when the motor system is out of the game right because if the motor system's in the game and we have you know that i mean that's and there's some fine print there if i can i can hear that i can hear my colleagues jumping i mean is it inside the motor system in terms of willed action and other things there might be things that that stop you from showing conscious behaviors even though you have a connection to your skeletal

00:50:12 muscle system but let's just say that you know the issue is um you know is is this person in a conscious brain state well there are some correlations we have if you have one hemisphere you can be conscious and if you had enough thalamocortical cells and they were in the right state you know we kind of think that you should be conscious and if you're not then then it's just because there's something we don't understand so you're saying that i mean it doesn't have to be the striatal muscle system it could be your autonomic system sure i could show like cardiac acceleration or a blush you

00:50:43 know so the key thing is acting on the world part of being embodied it's somehow i have to change the world in order to express my consciousness or not and that right to generate a bit that we can detect yeah practically speaking but are you saying i mean i guess it's a little bit like the question can you be a scientist if you can never do an experiment you can certainly have scientific aspirations and you can certainly have glorious ideas about all the data other scientists are generating but are you truly a scientist if for the rest of your life you can

00:51:13 never acquire any more data actually that reminds me of my profession of as a physicist the latest cosmology theories have not one universe but a multiverse multiple universes and the best theories we have predicted but we know that we cannot check it so is that empirical science no is it science well it's a consequence of empirical sciences but it's a similar gray area it sounds like the situation you're in then you know that's right it's actually not that

00:51:44 different right i mean it's because there but we don't even have the theory that predicts these things we just have the observations that you know there are different states that look like they could be supporting consciousness so people are trying to come up with unified models of consciousness one of the one of the interesting things that's happened recently is people trying to develop systematic quantitative theories of consciousness that might have some application to these cases um there's you know this giulio tinnony's integration integrated information theory where he basically says consciousness goes

00:52:16 around goes along with the amount of information that's being integrated uh in the brain or in some other some other process and you know he measures this with a quantity he calls phi so you have a lot of phi you've got you know a lot of consciousness you've got less pi you've got uh you've got less consciousness and actually the conference we had um one of the more interesting presentations was someone trying to apply that to the case of people diagnosed with vegetative state and related conditions i mean this thing phi is actually very hard to measure

00:52:46 in the brain but people find surrogates for it that might at least approximate it perturbational complexity and so one of the things that evolved there was that it's very very good at the dichotomization of not conscious and conscious so it helps you find people who are vegetative the proxies that do the march elements amines work it's very nice to separate people in coma anesthetic coma or vegetative state from wakefulness but once you start getting into these conditions of minimally conscious confusional behavior on your way up to normative conscious fever it's it's it there's no fine line and

00:53:17 there's and there and there's no separation so that you know it doesn't mean there aren't other measures and there isn't a model but it's just that that's where we're lacking we're lacking something that gives us an insight into the dynamics that are really informative about qualitative subjective consciousness even within these models nobody knows we get this you get this number out of it but you know five could be you know one or ten or a hundred or a thousand nobody knows which where on this line corresponds to no consciousness i mean i think tononi's own view is that even though there's a tiny amount of information

00:53:48 integrating there's a tiny amount of consciousness but that's in a way philosophical right it's not a specialistic account of it so presumably if our robots get complex enough we can ask the robots whether they're conscious yeah that would be that that would convince me before you knew that cirrhosis of the liver caused actors and so you saw yellow people and you didn't know why they were yellow but you

00:54:19 knew they were yellow then you discovered that it was because the liver was sick so why is why is the manifestation of the organs so different and so difficult the number of times you said we don't have the tools we don't have the tools is it just the question of tools well the tools and the theory and they go together i think i mean you can invent all sorts of models which i think tonnoni has one of them

00:54:50 but and i'm sure in the old days people invented various theories why someone was yellow so there were many models but eventually you discovered why in fact they were yellow and then you even refined that further and further and further to the chemical level so why is that kind of thinking not applicable to the issue of consciousness well it could be that it is and we're just not clever enough to see how existing tools and models you know could be used to kind of account for it but i think it's

00:55:22 qualitatively distinct so if you had other people turning other diseases turning people other colors and there were different substances which there are and i can't remember the history of where uh ichthyl you know icarus came in with you know all that but the i think the feeling is and i think what you're hearing is that none of the models none of the measurement tools even in principle give a satisfying flavor that they could give you an account of how there's a subjective internally representational state occurring with

00:55:54 neural activity of any pattern one answer though i mean you spoke about that i'm a cortical interaction so my guess is you do actually have an understanding of the functional anatomy of consciousness you're just being a bit modest at the state level of course i i think the difference between jaundice and the liver is that there is um it's an easy problem because the you know you don't have to explain how being yellow causes liver disease i

00:56:25 think there's a much deeper issue when it comes to this levels of description and the circular causality so what the question is for the brain that might be disconnected from the world is there sufficient evidence of self-organization by which there is coupling between different scales if you like the scales of neural firing and the scales of belief that might be reflected in phi or it might not be yeah i think you don't need to apply the notion of self-organization to understand the physiology of jaundice

00:56:57 but you do need to understand it to find out what is quintessential about the conscious brain even if it can't tell you it's conscious and i'm sure that's in the sort of the hierarchy um and in that separation of spatial and temporal scales um that clearly you in your head believe is is crucially tied to thamocortal interactions and possibly bits of the brain which you might say that the prefrontal cortex and i'm sure you'd have something to say about self-organization as something which is

00:57:28 you know to crack that i think getting much closer to cracking the the concept that's totally open there is a lawful set of correlations and they're increasingly available but yeah i agree what you said about feynman and making something only when we knew how to make a pump could we understand the heart and only after making sonar could we understand bets so we are not yet at the point that we can make an artificial brain our

00:57:59 computers are so much worse the hardware and software combined so much worse it's dealing with everyday life than our brains are so by the time we can make an artificially intelligent robot either physically or in a computer program ideally physically moving around if that robot can really behave like a human i think we will be much much closer to answering the question how hard a heart problem is and until we are

00:58:29 close to that these questions of what is consciousness and what is not even on the level of information processing it would be like trying to understand the heart without knowing much about pumps become increasingly uh self-aware oh no i think i don't see any difference in principle between robots and biological brains i think you know it's very difficult to see how all this

00:58:59 silicon inside a robot should give you consciousness but it's equally difficult to see how a bunch of neurons inside a brain should give you consciousness but somehow the neurons in the brain go along with consciousness i don't see why silicon should be any worse in principle i mean i suspect that everything we what we know about the uh the brain and thinking about cognition in general seems to suggest that what matters is the information processing and the and the representation of the world and so on and i think that's got a lot specifically to do with uh with neurons as opposed to uh

00:59:32 to silicon i think for example if you you know if you replace my neurons my neurons start wearing out and you replace them with prosthetic neurons made of silicon you know one at a time and the question is what's going to happen to my consciousness well as long as those prosthetic neurons are doing their job right and connecting up to the other neurons i'm at least gonna keep responding the same way and is there any reason to think my consciousness is gonna fade out or suddenly disappear i don't i don't see why not so i'm i guess i'm inclined to agree with pete that if we had the

01:00:04 the robot that was functioning as if it was conscious it would probably be conscious but that alone doesn't tell us doesn't solve the hard problem you know i could have a complete blueprint of pete's brain right now i mean that wouldn't necessarily solve the hard problem i would say the heart problem will remain equally hard but our chances to deal with it will will become better we have not only one example of biological consciousness but if you get more than one example then we can approach the heart pronoun from different angles and

01:00:34 maybe deal with it better but i suppose david's point about that is if we have a conscious robot david would say perhaps we can't understand how it's conscious just by understanding how the silicon works we'd have to invoke a primitive of consciousness to understand it so you're speculating about our theory about any kind of consciousness that it's silicon even though you built it i guess you would say even though we built this conscious robot we don't know how it works just by thinking about silicon

01:01:05 we have to invoke something else and that's what i'm i'm not i'm not willing to take that point i don't know i don't know how we're going to have to explain that theory later and maybe we will be able to explain it by thinking about how the silicon works but david david already knows that that's not going to be sufficient one thing it is one thing that is likely true once we can produce these computational bases for consciousness in robots we'll have the room to do a whole bunch of you know experiments like come up with variations on on the computational system and take this part away and take this part away

01:01:36 and see what matters in producing the consciousness associated responses that might actually give us a whole bunch of relevant data i mean i don't know about the ethics of this producing you know new conscious robots with you know impaired improved consciousness but yeah it reminds me what you said earlier about the matter state right because maybe you know at some point there are aspects of the matter state that once you get to the descriptors that are important in the brain

01:02:06 you know are material to what we associate with consciousness and then and then it becomes you know a problem that makes contact with things like string theory or whatever that you know become important to the work you do and i guess do you have any intuitions about that absolutely the history of physics when we when maxwell discovered the right equations he posited an ether in which the equations were vibrations and it was just a two-bit leap to imagine that there are

01:02:37 vibrations without a carrier but now we have accepted and the children learn it in school or as undergraduates and we sort of felt that's how it is and nobody talks about an ether anymore so i think the notion of ponzichism or any of that i think that it's an intermediate guidance towards a direction of where to go and what's an ether less or sarcasm-less theory will be nobody can know we have we have to get more data

01:03:07 and the beauty of of natural science is that if you get more data you can sharpen your theory which tells you how to look for better data and that sharpens your theory it really it's never that that the one gives the other it is an interplay i mean that's my guess too the measurements are going to drive this and we just don't have a lot of them right now but i think what is important to realize here is that until we study consciousness whether it's origin of matter or of life

01:03:39 anything in biology or physics you all can start with space and time and the distribution of matter even the origin of life it's a rearrangement of molecules in space and time but once you start about consciousness then our understanding of space in time and molecules is generated in our consciousness so certainly we have to really question can we do the type of reductionism in which we start with a stage of space

01:04:09 and time and then in that stage we find the rules of the game but for the first time the stage is produced in the phenomena we want to study so it's a little bit again sorry to go back to physics but i know that many physicists are arrogant and they want to explain everything as physics i try not to be that way but i use the metaphors of my trait like everybody tends to do within physics special relativity tells you what happens if you go at fast at very high speed

01:04:39 and how time and space change but it's different from general relativity general relativity tells you how matter warps and curves space and the curved space influences matter that is a circle so general relativity is much more difficult on a technical level than special relativity and also much more interesting it can generate black holes it can can explain the big bang because you have the gravity influence influencing space and time and space and time influencing gravity

01:05:11 and i think that is a reasonable metaphor only as a metaphor i'm not trying to explain anything metaphor for the mind world problem use your mind to understand the world and in the world you have brains which somehow are connected with the mind that's very interesting are you ready to take questions from the audience sure okay please you have to go to the uh

01:06:03 a while ago a young guy who was minimally conscious was given something like ambien by his mother and he was suddenly alert after a long time and then it's been duplicated with a few others what's going on so um actually if you're interested you can read up you can type in zolpidem which is the uh trade name for ambien and e-life one word e-l-i-f-e and the first google hit will be a paper that we published on three patients like this and um yeah we we have an idea about

01:06:35 what we think is going on but in in you know very short you know description what's going on is that in the patients who respond that drug is creating an activation in an interesting way like other drugs that are sedating like anesthetic drugs there's an early phase where the brain has an excitation before it goes down and it in the drug when when you give ambien or other medications like it to produce these effects it's in a low dose

01:07:06 it's what they call a subseditive dose and it sort of creates this wave of excitation what we think is happening is these patients are living on the edge of being able to catch a weight catch a ride on that wave and become active and the measurements in the paper and the theory and it's elaborate um it says why we think the cells in the thalamocortical system are poised on the edge of being able to catch that wave and then ride with it for a few hours and and and then over time this this allows the brain to be much more active and express behavior and it can be very

01:07:37 dramatic and this is all free on the web you can see the videos of one of the patients where the effect is very clear so this defense that you're saying well so it's it's it's an effect across the whole system of the the brain but we think that the primary effect is in the central thalamus and the frontal cortex and that the rest of the system follows the changes there but that's the theoretical part the measurements are the measurements and they're very uh lawful you can see in the paper so this is the fancy version of coffee

01:08:08 it's the fancy version of coffee with a lot more bells and whistles and much more effective at least in these contexts most of the time if we took it we would go to sleep within the limits of what's ethical to test are any of you taking an evolutionary view and looking at consciousness in other animals or are you starting from the assumption that we're the only conscious animal i don't think any of us make that assumption however it is true the primary data

01:08:39 that each of us has about consciousness comes from the first person case it's because of my own consciousness that i believe there's consciousness at all so the only thing i'm certain of with respect to consciousness is that i have it maybe that humans have it beyond that it's it's got to be an extension and the speculation that said i think a lot of people are making interesting models of consciousness and in non-human animals i don't know if that applies to anybody here i would agree with you what you said i mean ultimately the problem we have is that

01:09:11 if we want to know somebody's conscious we need some way for them to let us report it and so i mean i i agree with david i mean a lot of animals are conscious but i can't communicate with them and and so the the the human communication problem sets the you know kind of the operational criteria for us right now great question yeah same issue arises right same recipe i think you know you have you have an inference of continuity

01:09:45 i'm trying to puzzle things out you know in my mind a kind of a continuum um if if if we interject mind so brain mind and consciousness in an attempt to distill this i'm thinking there are these experiments in which um a problem is presented to the subject and in one of them somebody just makes this there's a window shade with a thing

01:10:16 hanging down and they take their finger and make it swing and in trying to solve it has no relationship to the problem which is to bring two uh to tie something together and they solve they come up with a solution um however when asked about the solution they never mentioned that they saw uh what would you call you know hanging from the shade this this thing coming down they never mentioned that they observed this thing swinging and made an association

01:10:47 uh that brought about the solution to the problem in my mind that's a narrative so theoretically it might be possible to if you have the brain hooked up to find out what parts of the brain are involved in this process so we might be able to distill mind to some extent in relationship to brain through through the measure as neuroscientists are doing on the other hand

01:11:18 to the extent that anybody believes in psychic research there seems to be some evidence of psychic phenomenon if you accept that this is a science at all the statistics that show more than a random or an accidental you know number of times that somebody comes up with something uh that strikes me like the multi-universe that you have a string theory uh and you can't test for it um

01:11:50 at the other end of the extreme so what i'm asking is is this is somewhere in that an approach where you might distill consciousness separate from mind in relationship to brain in an attempt to to apprehend the name of this discussion apprehending consciousness in an attempt to apprehend consciousness as distinct from brain or distinct from mind's relationship to brain does that make any sense

01:12:22 i would say it's the difference between string theory and multiverse is that string theory is probably testable but we don't have the tools yet so either in in the future it could be 10 20 years it could be a thousand years we were likely to find to develop some sort of tool to test string theory and if somebody is very clever they may certainly realize that among the astrophysical

01:12:54 observations cosmic rays neutrinos whatever there is already a test of string theory in some ways we are close so it may happen multiverse in the other hand if you have other universes which are causally disconnected then in principle you cannot make connection with them so that's a very different type of ignorance there are levels of ignorance which are which are different so if somebody would say uh there may be consciousness not connected with matter and if the theory would postulate that

01:13:25 there is no interaction between them then as an empirical scientist it doesn't make a difference it's like saying that our elementary particles uh be more weakly interacting than neutrinos so weakly that there is no interaction at all well yeah there may be those particles but they don't they are not part of physics because they don't make make a difference but i'm saying can you ex if with the experiments between brain and mind in neuroscience

01:13:56 can can one get to a point maybe similar to that we where we can see in some way that there's something like consciousness but we can't identify it the situation that you're saying with string theory in relationship to multiverse we're not in a place yet to identify consciousness where we're at but we can see that it's separate from the reductionist mind brain business you know in other words

01:14:26 experiment with minor brain and neuroscience will bring us closer to that correlation but we're still left with some some x i think what you're saying some x possibly being there that we're not yet close enough to have a system for but we can be more certain that there's a distinction now between brain and mind and we have an alternative to a reductionist uh

01:14:56 being left simply with that i mean my view is there's something missing in uh in our theories that need to be added for example to the ontology of physics to give you an explanation of of consciousness the question is whether that's just adding you said x so the question is whether x just equals consciousness but if that's the extra thing you need to add a pete in a paper 20 years ago said well maybe it could be something else it needed to be consciousness for example i think his analogy was explaining motion in terms of space well you can't quite do it you got to add something but

01:15:28 do you add motion or do you add time well you add time to space and you get motion maybe there's something else x we add that to physics we get consciousness who's to say that's an open possibility too well i could also add to the the beginning part of your question another neuroscience approach to think of when we're dealing with intuitive problem solving is in your example is that we can we can make intuitive decisions this is something we study in neuroscience and the intuitive decisions we think about as being driven by implicit learning so in other words

01:15:58 they're decisions made with information we don't know we have and so there's nothing we don't need to postulate some extra process there we understand that sometimes we make strategic decisions and sometimes we come up with an answer some insight that's coming out of our implicit knowledge information we've acquired and so we can understand how those two types of memory interact and this so this is another approach that is is not not open to saying there's something

01:16:29 missing we're sort of we think we have a story there about how these decisions are being made yeah i'm not jumping into a metaphysics but i'm asking what's the other example of the intuitive can you find it yes we can find implicit learning in the brain yes couple of things you mentioned and also to the previous question about sort of um how far up the evolutionary scale would you go before you you thought consciousness of the sort

01:17:00 we're talking about emerges in my little world the x is inference so in my simple world consciousness means inference and talking about narratives talking about strategy immediately tells you that you have the equipment to make inferences about counterfactuals about things that not have not yet occurred the discussion we're having about hierarchies immediately tells me that the model i have of the world is a hierarchical model and that immediately puts certain formal

01:17:32 constraints on or differences distinctions between animates or organisms that have deep hierarchical models and shallow hierarchical models so a virus from my point of view does do inference and has a very primitive form of consciousness but by virtue of the fact it doesn't have a deep hierarchical model it doesn't have the depth it doesn't have the self-reflection it is it can never represent its representations i think what you're talking about about narratives and strategy again coming back to the brain as a scientist the ability to plan an experiment and

01:18:04 choose amongst different experiments or different ways of sampling the world is somewhat unique to higher organisms and i think that that in terms of building self-organized robots that show conscious like behavior it is that um prospective both a deep hierarchal model with the ability to free oneself from time so you now have a representation of the world not just now but in the future and i think those that's a so is that almost like a an add-on

01:18:36 in your mind like a world-free object as popper and echols would have put it you know the inference and our d hierarchical model in addition to the basic laws of physics or is it i would actually the basic laws of physics are actually a reflection of that deep inference you've mentioned implicit memories and tacit problem solving um do you think that there's something

01:19:08 it's like to be an organism that can only perform implicit problem-solving and have implicit memories so you're you're asking me the zombie question then are you i mean sort of although i mean i'm i'm just curious what your answer is so are these are these is this like a different kind of consciousness you're talking about or or is there are the lights i mean yeah this is the same question but yeah are the lights on or off when someone is yeah well i think we have to be a little tentative the same way we are with the coma patients so

01:19:39 when someone demonstrates some knowledge they're not aware of you're asking well are they a little bit aware of it or is there nothing and so is that so it seems that there's nothing that it's like to actually you can ask the same question of perception right so if i show you something subliminally and your behavior betrays that that information was processed do you have some awareness of that and i would say well no

01:20:10 that's how we're defining it that's how we're understanding it that you you were you were influenced by the subliminal information but not aware of it so is that is that your question i mean i think most of our i think i my maybe it's just me but i think most of my life goes on sort of in that sort of implicit tacit way of mode of being and so the question of consciousness for me becomes the question of

01:20:41 when the system is trying to access itself that's right so we would i think most neuroscientists would say that most of what the brain is doing we're not aware of right but even if i speak one sentence when i begin to leave the sentence i don't know yet how it ends so each sentence is a mystery and an adventure he enforced this translational stuff it sounds like you know people are talking in different languages and i'm not sure that i'm

01:21:13 i'm getting what everybody is saying and maybe i'm just being redundant with my question but uh i i i've been trying to think of this uh you know consciousness seems to be graded you know and so that when we have the you know most of the time we're running on a a habitual mode and then if we're doing some kind of pattern matching and that pattern uh that we're being exposed to doesn't fit what were our expectations and you know in order to make safe predictions about the future then

01:21:45 suddenly we up the of the the ante in terms of the uh amount of brain that we are synchronizing it seems like uh that reward system stuff like that is actually part of some kind of switch that actually uh enhances the access or the uh of the prefrontal cortex to to amplify uh a more granular approach to paradigm matching that allows for more elementary particles

01:22:16 to start to be recomposed into a pattern that may be more fresh than uvo and it is that in that uh and this this discussion of consciousness uh you know is is about this synchronization process and accessing uh a broader uh network that includes uh more self-awareness so that we can get some sense of who we are in relationship to this

01:22:49 this thing that we're you know which doesn't fit our expectations and so we're doing that pattern optimization thing and then that leads to utilizing a a different pattern to to drive our behavior does that make sense i mean i think it does um it strikes me again the notion of hierarchy quite gracefully accommodates all these issues so helmholtz's unconscious influence was right at the level of the visual cortex

01:23:20 and you're not aware of that and yet as you say we go around using our vision all the time you talk about patterns um patterns by definition are relationships amongst elements therefore you're a naturally invoking hierarchy you're talking about speech that has a a temporal extent that an instant doesn't have again you're invoking a temporal hierarchy of separation temporal scales i think nearly everything that everybody has said in some ways speaks to the notion of modeling upon modelling

01:23:51 upon modeling in a hierarchical sense to give you a deep hierarchy and for free well not for free but almost inevitably again this comes back to what we understand by the physics of self-organization the deeper the more global the more fi esque you get in the hierarchy the greater the temporal extent of your of the things that are brought together are subsumed under the patterns so a centers or a narrative by definition is deep deep deep in the hierarchy that

01:24:24 sees all the stuff on the surface and in the deep past and possibly in the deep future so i think that you can relax a lot of the um the distinction between where i'm unaware or aware of being aware or aware of being aware of being aware and so on uh within a hierarchical within the hierarchical very expensive so i think that we try to conserve our energies and we continually use this habitual system and then only when uh our predictions are not going to be met by because there's

01:24:55 not a good fit with the the current expectation the current pattern that's been being used that's when we access this in the prefrontal cortex and then do this more granular thing and may may even make a new assignment in terms of a new attractor net you know with a higher node that stan instantiates uh a novel pattern that responds to this this current uh situation that we're in that didn't meet you know with previous patterns

01:25:34 i am new into philosophy so right now i'm very confused individual and i have a question but it's more related to pansexism i was reading that is the view that is consciousness that everything has consciousness so a person can show you that is conscious blinking their eyes a dog can show you consciousness drawing around but how a chair can show me consciousness i

01:26:05 i don't understand that well one of the issues with consciousness is it's very hard to know decisively whether any other system is conscious the flip side of that is very hard to know decisively that any other system is unconscious the one really good case as nico mentioned is with people because you know they can at least tell us what they're uh what they're conscious of and you can even raise questions about that um but most of us are happy to go along with that uh verbal report when it's present but when it's not

01:26:36 present then we no longer have that materials for those materials for inference so monkeys and uh dogs and mice well some people are prepared to say there's enough analogs of what's present in uh in humans to ascribe consciousness but as that disappears then we're left in we're left more in the dark but that doesn't mean that so you might say oh well in those cases we should say it's not conscious once you get down to a bacteria or a virus or a quark but i think you know that would be you

01:27:06 might say that's an overreaction um we don't there's an absence of evidence for consciousness but there's not there's not evidence of the absence of consciousness we've got to separate those two things you might say well going in we should just say we're agnostic so what's the question there's two possibilities you know the quack is conscious or it's not now you might say on anti seed and ground it's awfully unlikely that a quark should be conscious and fair enough that's an intuition but you know there are also philosophical

01:27:37 systems that want to say that some at least some precursor of consciousness is present at this bottom level of of reality and there are even scientific theories like chenonis that tend to at least give some motivation for ascribing consciousness to simple systems i think the basic answer is there's no there's no direct evidence of consciousness in systems that are a long way from the paradigmatic human cases at best we've got to work with um but there's likewise no direct evidence of unconsciousness so we're left in this difficult philosophical

01:28:08 situations of having to make indirect inferences which may always remain somewhat speculative okay so i might just be like a presumptuous undergrad student right here but so i have like uh i'm affected all the time by people's consciousnesses all around the world um in this social consciousness

01:28:39 um because i have this social media and kind of connection to people past in this room or past in my direct world and so i'm kind of wondering is there that social consciousness is that different than what we've ever seen before because we have so much more connection than any time before um and then kind of past that we've talked a lot about consciousness in time and space um and if we do have that social consciousness is it outside of any sort of time and

01:29:11 space than we've ever worked in before especially because we can travel across time zones so easily um and then past that with our mental time travel we can go into predicted future and then also absolute archived past and so we know through that um and so i'm kind of wondering how is that affecting like the immediate research and what we're thinking about versus our social consciousness tonight we're all good to time travel one hour into the future exactly so but does that mean that like we don't we

01:29:43 don't uh kind of think about our new social consciousness that i've kind of termed all of a sudden um in a system of time and space that we've ever thought about it before is that true or am i just kind of going too far out there it's funny because being a physicist i claim i own space and time and you are all visiting me in space

01:30:14 but seriously it's an extremely interesting question i mean i'm a multicellular organism as you are and none of your cells as far as we know uh conscious but you have this different consciousness so now we have this internet with billions of people being connected is there a kind of consciousness which we are not aware of it's an extremely interesting question and i don't have any answer does anybody it's a good question thank you yeah

01:30:50 so um i noticed that there aren't any historians on this panel um yes it used to be and um and so i won't infer any insult to my field um i wonder if you think there's anything that the history of the neurosciences or maybe the history of ideas can offer to this conversation at all yeah i'll take that i used to be i did a history and philosophy

01:31:20 of science degree a long time ago and so i think i think it does i think this there's a lot of very interesting uh rich information and in my field in the subfield of thinking about thelma cortical mechanisms underlying consciousness you know there's a lot that i learned from going back to work that was done in the 40s 50s and 60s and then into the 70s and there's some some of the work that was done there is very contemporary and has sort of been lost because of interesting historical shifts and how

01:31:50 things were funded through study sections and through grant applications and um you know there's there's quite a lot and whenever you get you get into it feels like physiology where the experiments are hard and there's a lot of detail in them uh there's always something to learn if you go back and and read good experimental work where all the details were taken down so i mean i could fill that in with lots of examples but i think the answer is yes there are points in history where people are actually much more sophisticated

01:32:21 about consciousness in some respects than than we are i mean even the history of uh the history of psychophysics um history of psychology in the mid-19th century was really conceived of as the study of right of consciousness and that was their primary data in many respects it was uh there were certain kinds of sophistication that have since been been lost in philosophy well there's the phenomenological tradition say from the early 20th century i've been recently trying to you know talking a lot to people who do who study buddhist philosophy where there's a tradition of you know really meditating on

01:32:51 consciousness from the inside i think even if you don't take on board all the metaphysical or theoretical uh conclusions that went along with these world views we have a lot to learn by studying their their methods for for you know gathering the data of consciousness from a subjective perspective and i think there is a parallel in both physics and chemistry physics started with the observation of the motion of the planets and the data from the motion of the planets came from the babylonians and the babylonians saw the planets as

01:33:22 gods moving around and having a good time or a bad time fighting each other but then the greeks took the data from the babylonians and stripped off the the mythological they had their own mythology with the babylonian mythology and they made a mathematical framework and that's ultimately helped us to get science of the ground that is in physics and in chemistry the alchemy most of the alchemy books were absolutely full of allegorical connections with this and

01:33:54 that any other thing and then chemistry came from the distillation of the the factual knowledge inside of all of that so it would have been very difficult to start physics without the babylonians it would have been very difficult to start chemistry without using the alchemic database and similarly i think if you don't use the buddhist database at the very least and i don't say that with in this respect i say that in complete respect for all the all the observations that have been made and all the inferences it would be a

01:34:24 shame if you we wouldn't use that and it would be very different from the physics and chemistry history that makes a lot of sense hi hello hi uh firstly thank you so much for your contributions today today was excellent um my question is about beliefs so i was wondering if there are any new findings or exciting research on how our beliefs when reinforced helped firmer versus held more loosely

01:34:57 how you know what the relationship that with that is with uh the flow the speed the very nature of consciousness perhaps i i can address that from the point of view of bayesian beliefs so there's um in the past decades only two decades there's there's a a theme in neuroscience loosely summarized as the bayesian brain comes along in different guises like predictive processing or predictive

01:35:27 coding so the idea is that the brain is a a statistical organ that's generating explanations for its sensory inputs according to bayesian principles and in that sense that that bayesian framework does actually give you a formalism in which you can write down and quantify beliefs bayesian beliefs that are probability distributions um and those ideas can be traced back to helmholtz and unconscious inference and

01:35:57 right back to the students of plato just getting a historical twist into into the answer so much of what i was saying in terms of inference and consciousness presupposes that the understanding of the brain's function can be described at the level of beliefs and what i meant by beliefs was simply probability distributions over fictive constructs that explain the data that i am sampling from the world but there might be beliefs that are not

01:36:28 as well formed so we say the word belief and we have the belief that it's saturday and that we're sitting in this room but presumably there's lots of other kinds of beliefs that would fit this model that don't have that strict kind of formal articulate transferable structure just thinking about the beliefs the proto-beliefs that an infant might have or an animal tacit beliefs that sort of work to sort of form and structure our behavior but that we never entertain consciously but they still have some they might

01:36:58 still have share this kind of bayesian structure um so there's there's also the question that the philosopher always asks is like what do you mean by belief and then there's these different kinds and they might all fit into into the sort of topic of consciousness but they all might also play different roles thank you i wanted to contribute something to the

01:37:29 different states of consciousness um as a self-report and have you respond to it at 14 i had a concussion playing football i was aware of events immediately after the concussion and then out of awareness for an extended period of time then back in awareness about eight years ago

01:38:02 i had an experience of transient amnesia which is fairly common to football players as they age during the period of transient amnesia i talked the ems squad out of taking me to the hospital i have no memory of it i was driven to long island jewish hospital i recognized the road

01:38:33 to the hospital i was then out of awareness for about 18 hours i came to arguing with a psychiatrist that they weren't doing anything for me at which point i was fully aware and quite angry at the hospital that nobody was paying attention to me which apparently i was aware of though i

01:39:04 wasn't aware of yes so during this period i experienced and i'd like to have you react to it different states of awareness that were both physical and implied a great deal about memory because when i came back to myself as i say it i was aware of who i was in the other states though i was

01:39:34 reactive to the environment and reactive to other people i wasn't aware of who i am which implies a different state of consciousness involving some self-awareness and memory or identity which i didn't hear expressed here at all that we have in consciousness a sense of identity right well this is you know i'm sure we both have comments on this because

01:40:05 you know and i've been i've been on the other side of your experience interacting with people having transient global amnesia i took it one more step which i'd like to give you i've had a brain scan i've had an eeg scan i had a brain scan for medical reasons not associated with the original concussion i followed the stuff on the nfl and high school football injuries very closely

01:40:35 when i had the amnesia i contacted the people doing the nfl studies when i found out that all players after 65 have these transient amnesia states but i also had an eeg recently which in fact might have showed me the area that was originally damaged in the concussion and the compensations if it is to be believed but the question i have is about

01:41:07 identity being part of consciousness i'll start because i think you'll have more to say about this maybe the um i've been on the other side of this talking to people you know so you know i obviously wasn't there talking to you but with a global amnesia you it's if you you may not know a lot of things and there may be aspects of your autobiographical memory certainly where you are and why you are there goes away but you can be very conscious so it is a question of what you can

01:41:38 access in memory and what you remember about what happened and i think that you know there are all these different memory systems and perhaps a more elaborate answer will follow but i i suspect that it's just another example of how you can take components out of the integrated experience of normative consciousness and remove them but still have very much a conscious mental state and that's why it's highly multivariate when you start looking at just what normal consciousness

01:42:08 provides you with in terms of awareness because if you're trained to observe certain things you're aware of some things that other people aren't trained to listen to music or look at a picture or just kind of pick up on nuances of facial expressions aren't aware of so you know that's a that's a sort of a small small small version of the larger theme that if you start losing parts of your memory or types of your memory things are very weird and if you you know if you go under anesthesia and you're given an amnestic you'll talk to the surgeons and you'll be fine you won't remember

01:42:39 any of that you know discourse or any of that period but you know it's not you haven't actually lost a component of your memory you just had something that sets you up to wipe out the memory trace for later so there are a lot of games you can play you know yeah so you're right the so the fact that you remember nothing after that anesthesia doesn't mean you weren't fully aware at that moment and so i think it's it's interesting the other point you made about these separate components so of course our own awareness a really important part is our self-consciousness and our

01:43:10 complex concepts that that brings in but you could put that aside and we could take language and put that aside and still have a quite rich subjective experience to try to understand and so these are these are in a sense optional parts there may be very interesting parts to examine and important parts but we can also study consciousness with those aside and try to understand them so there are many studies of amnesia some with chronic amnesia where you can you can see that people can't lay down memories

01:43:41 of their experiences but they seem to be quite with it in the moment so it's possible to be fully conscious and not lay down memories so that that doesn't mean your consciousness was was completely distorted but different in some very interesting ways your observation i think is extremely interesting i was listening very carefully to kind of what yeah you you experience the continuity of your assessment of the um the the neglect and the er which is you know a very common theme

01:44:12 i'm sure everybody's experienced that in the modern day and then you know so that's that's the um that's the clue that you there was something that you know was kind of gradually making its way back and had continuity between the two states for you and that's that's also interesting and maybe it's because it has a limbic balance who knows and this is that i heard the discussion of consciousness out without the concept of identity uh that there is is there is there a sense

01:44:43 of oneself and consciousness or is it there were periods of time in which i was reactive to the environment i argued to not be taken to the hospital though i should have been taken to the hospital but i have no awareness of it when would the concept of self or identity be implicit in this somewhere as in the idea of consciousness people often distinguish consciousness

01:45:13 this primary consciousness consciousness of the world from self-consciousness i would think of self-consciousness as one variety of consciousness and especially important variety but certainly not as exhausting all of consciousness and it might even be on this view that for example a dog or a mouse might have primary consciousness without consciousness of its uh of itself and one take on

01:45:44 what was happening in your situation is that there was consciousness of the world without a whole lot of of self-consciousness of consciousness of your identity i'm not sure that's the right diagnosis it could be you had some consciousness of yourself and you weren't laying down memories but there are good examples of this so there are developmental stages where self-consciousness becomes more you know evident and easy to measure and then in in other types of brain injury there are slower more slowly evolving recoveries of self-awareness as a stage

01:46:16 of recovery so that you know you can dissociate these things and and there are people who study this very precisely to talk about too there's the sort of self that seems connected to experience even if it's a very kind of loose sense of identity just in an instant or a kind of self-identity that persists over time for which you know we experience it as relatively continuous but when you have an injury or you black out then you sort of there's a discontinuous personal identity over time so then

01:46:48 there are philosophers who do think that that any experience of consciousness sort of has to have at its center of gravity a self and then there are others who don't i wanted to bring up an aspect of consciousness that seems pretty important to me but i don't think anyone's really raised this but the the moral implications of consciousness um i mean i think all of us think that it's probably wrong to hurt other human beings but

01:47:20 it's probably not wrong maybe to pull the plug on someone who's already like in a maybe coma comatose state or something but then and then many people believe because animals have some level of consciousness it's it's strong to torture them or harm them but then if if we think like that maybe consciousness has something to do with the integration of information then uh should we worry about things like unplugging the internet or if somebody develops an artificial intelligence if if we're not sure if

01:47:50 it's conscious should we you know give give things the benefit of the doubt or what what's your attitude about that that's a good question if you start becoming sympathetic to pan psychism there's some consciousness everywhere then you really have to worry you know i mean some people think they shouldn't eat anything which is conscious but uh well maybe we're gonna have to draw the line somewhere else if uh if consciousness is very extensive i mean that kind of no there is this intuition that consciousness is what matters morally but as you start thinking about

01:48:23 degrees of consciousness getting lower and uh and lower um in simpler and simpler systems you also start to think that what matters might be the kind of of consciousness maybe there are kinds of consciousness that matter more than others you know suffering for example might carry a special moral weight or maybe beings with the capacity for a conscious thought and reflection that carries a lot more weight than being simply the capacity to sense hot and cold i do agree with you that consciousness is the ultimate ground i

01:48:53 think of our moral concern for for other beings so that's got to be somehow where it starts but you know exactly what kinds of consciousness matter and with respect to human consciousness that's that's how most most of the law and most of the moral intuitions have evolved around whether so the you know the in on on the medical ethics side the negative right to withhold medical treatment or have medical with treatment withheld was founded on the lack of a potential

01:49:25 for recovery of cognition and consciousness and i think you know what's what's evolving now is of course as we understand the recovery of consciousness and the variations in potential then there's a lot of questions how we how we start to look at the opportunities there are for people to become more conscious and the moral obligations to them to become more conscious my colleague joseph finns has a book coming out in july called rights come to mind which is a full exploration of these issues

01:49:56 live through the experience of people taking care of patients with disorders of consciousness and and and you know most of these issues are are unsolved in our system from a legal and a medical point of view so it's it's you know i think you're right to pinpoint consciousness as the as david said just the the core you know issue around moral warrants and you know getting getting into this space

01:50:27 thank you great conversation this afternoon um wondering um if whether you think it's accurate to grade consciousness from an external perspective when consciousness is such an internal experience i.e the quality of experience this whether you're a human animal non-human animal or an individual who experiences a cognitive disability question has research been able to determine a consistent experience experience of consciousness between those with and without cognitive dysfunction and if

01:50:58 so what does this imply in terms of the ability to provide a universally accepted definition of consciousness except in the most general sense of course we could use neurons for example to explain consciousness but only in the most rudimentary sense of what consciousness is i i would say research has not provided a clear and distinct set of measurements to categorize things that way from my point of view

01:51:30 well so we do our best if it's if you're asking a person to make a decision we understand that someone with dementia may not be capable of making a good decision and so they're they're legal precedence for how to deal with those situations and informed consent and so forth right so we we we have some operational ways to proceed that sort of behavior and and you know sort of uh speech acts i i was thinking in terms of measurement right that's i thought you were saying i'm thinking in terms of measurement two or an outside evaluation of what

01:52:02 it has to do i think a lot of questions circulate around the issues of experiencing a disability and how we rate an individual and who does not experience this life in the same way we think they should experience that life and from our own perspective and even the idea of of dogs and babies and you know this kind of hierarchy that we are kind of creating a definition of consciousness and what's of great value and

01:52:32 and perhaps what is a lesser human experience if we put in the in the in the um in the realm of just the human experience there are some really interesting studies of consciousness in schizophrenic patients compared to in normal patients using a beeper methodology they get people to carry around carrying around betas that go off at a certain point during the day and then at that point patients are asked to write down in their logbook what were you conscious of at that

01:53:03 moment when the beeper went off and it's extremely interesting even for uh even for normal patients but russ holbert who's pioneered this method has done it with schizophrenic patients as well and has found you know certain really clear systematic differences between the consciousness in the in these patients and in um ordinary unimpaired subjects this is in a way it's a it's a methodology to take something external you know the beeper and the records in a logbook nonetheless use it as a guide

01:53:35 to what's going on internally thank you um my understanding is um we have sensory perceptions all right we have eyes we can see things two varying degrees and we have hearing which we use to communicate and and that i think does affect our consciousness so the question is then is what about

01:54:05 someone like say helen keller who was born both blood deaf and blind okay so what you know what could we say about her awareness or her experience her consciousness of the world since she has lacked these two different perceptions or these two sensory perceptions that's a great example and actually it's one that got my interest a long time ago the best way to

01:54:36 find out is to read her perceptions of it and so there's a fabulous account of her early years before uh anime macy sullivan was her teacher came to work with her and to establish her ability to communicate and to start to learn and she describes herself she actually doesn't it's very interesting she doesn't even describe herself with her own name she calls herself phantom and her memories of being pre-cognitive are she describes them as being

01:55:09 being reactive to an external world that just just she had experiences with and most of them were limbic and she just threat she just her memory is thrashing out at things coming into her very personal space effectively and um there's a small section in the book teacher that she wrote where she talks about this but you know there's you get the sense there's something primitive you know awareness but it was very unstructured it wasn't it wasn't structured by language wasn't structured by concept and it was

01:55:40 uh and it wasn't very much fun for sure um but then you get the sense that by the time that she's an adult and you know she's giving lectures at harvard and she's a you know fully educated woman you know she has a you know she has a very full normal human consciousness with a very unique perspective you know everybody has an identity but it's it's not as alien as a as a conscious state as what she describes herself as before she had some way of connecting with the human community it's very

01:56:11 interesting but i think that's the place to go look is what she had to say about herself thank you for this discussion uh one sees how many complex aspects they are to consciousness and i'm going to speak now as an artist uh where the um idea of consciousness is since at least the middle of the 20th century very complicated because a whole series

01:56:42 of determinology came about automatic writing you ask an artist what did you mean when you did this and they said i don't know i was unconscious and one realizes now that that word no longer is valid even for an artist to say they were unconscious because there are so many layers as we can see as we're speaking about what consciousness is so if an artist says i don't know what i was doing we know that they were very conscious on many different planes and levels

01:57:12 and so i'm sort of interested in the idea of people speaking about conscious and unconscious and automatic writing or things that are how do you see the connective points that way do you see it now as one one uniform level of consciousness with many many facets and planes well so my brother is an artist and he considers his painting to be

01:57:42 very intuitive style so he has a lot of expertise in the media he uses but he goes after a process that happens on the canvas and it's he considers it very intuitive so i consider that part of you know part of implicit memory and part of his his part of his mental capacity is to do that without designing it as as an explicit painting that he is conceiving it it's a process that unfolds so does that connect with what you're saying well there's another word

01:58:13 intuitive uh do we have to redefine intuitive i mean in other words i think the redefinitions that become necessary because they once were put into categories and i see it as a more fluid aspect you know without without all these divisions uh that characterize what's rational what's irrational uh what's a spontaneous that's that's well you know we we have all these divisions because that's how we try to understand things in science and we divide them up and then we try to understand how they fit together and how they interact so

01:58:44 yes they're it's very fluid but we we take some steps to divide them up because that's how we're going to understand the parts and then put them back together so a very selfish question um what are the easy problems of consciousness or to be more concrete i guess what are you telling your graduate students to do

01:59:17 well back in the back in the original uh article i wrote on the heart and the easy problems of consciousness 20 odd years ago the easy problems of consciousness were basically ones about behavior and functioning so how uh does the brain perceptually respond to certain stimuli um how for example can we be made to control our behavior in a way that depends on what's out there how does the brain monitor its own processes and issue verbal reports basically the easy

01:59:48 problems on this definition the ones all about objective functioning the kind that can easily be measured from the outside whereas the hard problem is about how does all that stuff give you subjective experience and for the most part i take it when the neuroscientists are giving their graduate student problems they're very often at least about those uh those easy problems explaining the responses and behaviors and so on another class of easy problems though is finding quote easy problems because none of these are really easy is the correlation issue

02:00:18 finding the brain finding the brain process that goes along with certain kinds of subjective experience and that's something which is also being proven to be a subject where you can make tractable incremental progress in the lab year over year um you know but then there's a whole hierarchy of tractable more and less tractable problems so maybe other people can throw in there you never give any heart problem to a student in philosophy all the time it's only hard problems in philosophy that's the way to go out so philosophers

02:00:48 can do the hard problem and the scientists will chip away at it by working on the easy problems i mean a lot of you have been talking about the fact that when we are conscious we have feeling inside that we have an experience inside and then we use other metaphor to be a consciousness like to be in an inner world or to be intrinsic or whatever so my question is inside what because if we say that conscious experience is inside the mind

02:01:19 it's kind of circular definition because just the thing so it cannot be literally inside the head we do not expect to find consciousness like we find sugar in the blood so i i just wanted to to ask inside what something we haven't really talked at all about which i guess we'll wait till the last minute throw it out there is that consciousness is as far as we know embodied um when i stub my toe i feel pain in my toe

02:01:50 not in my brain and i don't feel it in the rock that i stubbed my toe against there seems to be this deep interface of consciousness that blends into the body um even though we've been talking about it being situated in the brain and so when you ask the question we've been talking about consciousness being inside what the first thing i think of is it's inside the body um and that gets us out of that immediate circularity and then you can say well what is the consciousness the embodied consciousness inside of and then that's a different question yeah just a follow-up when i feel that pain

02:02:20 in my in my in my toe it's in my body but when i see the sun is consciousness embodied in the sun too for the same reason when i'm driving my car on the road i don't think i'm feeling that consciousness in the in the car and feeling the wheels directly like the person with the cane so the body doesn't the body is at least something which is very flexible here the boundary is very flexible if you have the right relation to the tool then you feel the person with the cane feels the the strike of the ground not in their hand

02:02:51 but in the in the tip of the tool i totally feel a lot of my consciousness in the cell phone your tacit memory we briefly had a conversation about the morality of consciousness um and i'm uh i'm a moral i'm a moral nihilist and um i was wondering

02:03:25 well so and that is that um uh you don't inherently uh um believe that there are any there are any reasons to make moral judgments on anything um and so i was wondering um if we're trying to make or if we're trying to contrive these moral judgments about consciousness um are we just choosing to ignore um that it's a very real possibility that we live in a moral reality

02:03:55 well that sounds like a philosophy question who's to know where morality comes from maybe there's no absolute fundamental morality in the universe if you go that way then you can say at the very least what we have is something like moral preferences there are some outcomes that we prefer to other ones on reflection and moral respects maybe there's no deep absolute grounding for that as if it came from a god maybe all there is is what we've been evolutionarily programmed with but we can still make

02:04:25 that make the distinction between uh between the outcomes that we want that we think are better morally for society and for other people on reflection and the one i mean it's going to turn into a question about our fundamental values which may be contingent and and biological but we can still make these uh distinctions and it could well be that well here's the thing which is what we contingently value consciousness that's the thing which you know makes our lives worth living and you know we have a

02:04:56 great preference for being conscious and that you know we care about the consciousness of other people around us so i'd like to think that even a moral nihilist in some ways could recast some of these questions in terms of you know what we value and what we prefer i'm a clinical neurologist one time i was interested in brain evolution uh and i learned that there were four basic stages of vertebrate uh brain

02:05:27 evolution uh the most primitive is the fish brain then the reptile brain and that paleo and neo-mammalian brains and in my clinical neurology experience i also have had the experience of patients presenting with acute stroke syndromes which are rare but that affect the midbrain reticular formation which is part of the fish brain and if a part of the brain that controls a certain function in

02:05:58 humans exists in other animals and causes alterations of consciousness would it be reasonable to assume that a fish is conscious if it shares that that structure yes i think it turns out there are some structure some structures that fish share with us and some that they don't actually read a debate in the journal fish and fisheries about where the fish feel pain and when people's one person

02:06:29 one was saying yes fish feel pain because they have this element of pain processing and the other one was saying no they don't because they don't have this element of pain processing so it just pushes the question back which is the thing in the brain that matters yeah uh well another point you know about uh a meditation uh experience of people who have mastered meditation um uh you know teach methods of really turning off the more recent brain structures and getting into a state which is really

02:07:01 uh like focusing on breathing and getting into your your brain stem i guess it's not so clear though if you look at if you look at the data it's actually very interesting the states that experienced meditators get into are high energy states the dynamics are different but you know they you know they they resemble more weightful uh brain activity than they resemble comatose brain activity i mean you know it's it's so you know i i don't

02:07:32 think we again it's another one of these examples where we don't have a great idea about how to go from what is a conscious brain state that's a little different than your weightful state and its dynamics to where where consciousness is and that and what the what the changes in the representational aspects of it are because we never model of it thank you