Biology of Mind

00:00:00 I'm Ednner Sassin, director of the helix center. Welcome to the program of this afternoon on biology of the mind. Uh just two announcements. Next week the round table is on nationalism, fanaticism and identity. And on April 12th we uh if I can get this up and on April 12th we have a round table on synchronicity. Uh today's round table is biology of the

00:00:32 mind and I will briefly present you the participants. I won't read everything that is on this paper which I think some of you have just the highlights. Uh when I call when I read your name if you raise your hands that would be helpful. So John Krakau is professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University of uh school of medicine. director of the BLAM lab and co-founder of the KTA KATA

00:01:04 project. Um Gary Marcus is director of the NYU Center for Language and Music and professor of psychology at New York University. Uh Ken Miller who has been here before is professor department of neuroscience. uh department of neuroscience, department of physiology and uh director center for theoretical

00:01:35 neurobiology, Columbia University. Uh David Rosenthal is professor of philosophy and coordinator of the interdisciplinary concentration in cognitive science at the graduate center of the university of New York. So Matthew, you want to I'm Matthew Stone. I'm associate professor of computer science and a member of the center for cognitive science at Rutgers uh in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Thank you. Okay. Well, my main work uh used to be

00:02:07 on the mind body problem. Now I mainly work on consciousness. Uh uh when I worked on the mindbody problem, it seemed to me very clear that all mental goings on are simply physical going on. uh in the brain. Uh and maybe I won't say very much more about that right now. Uh waiting to see what other people say about that. Uh that that seems to me unproatic. One of the things that was

00:02:39 listed uh that we might talk about is how far down mental functioning goes in the phoggenetic scale. And I assume it goes pretty far down. Uh I don't know. Uh I don't know very much about fish. Um I'm I'm pretty sure way way lower than that. Uh well, I'm just saying I don't know very much about fish. So you can you um

00:03:10 I'm suspicious. You're suspicious that fish have mental functioning. Would you I don't know very much about fish. Fish may have mental functioning. Fish certainly have complicated biological functioning. Uh, but it seems to me, well, they certainly make choices about what they should do in in a given context. Um, there's there's behavioral evidence. I'm not a fish expert, but they make decisions about mates. They they battle over mates. Um, they decide

00:03:40 about obstacles and whether to follow, you know, whether to go this way or that way. I to me that certainly counts as mental functioning. You you could I suppose have a definition of mental functioning that would have a higher bar and you could say well you only have mental functioning if you can reflect on yourself but I would call that self-awareness not mental functioning. No I don't they they share lots of neurotransmitters and brain organization with us. You can use the same kinds of instruments and even better instruments to look at their neural processes. To me it doesn't seem controversial to say

00:04:12 that a fish has mental functioning. It's just a question of deciding what is the mental function. What are a fly or a spider. I mean, if you're if you're an animal with a nervous system, you have mental functioning at at some level. So, I'd go down to jellyfish and and maybe even take the argument to bacteria. I don't think that you need to set the bar anywhere near consciousness in the sense of self-awareness or self-reflection. It seems to me some plants do various things that are

00:04:43 beneficial to the plants and it doesn't seem to me we want to say that's mental functioning. So if a fish does something that's beneficial to the fish like choose a nice mate or get some food or go away from an environment that isn't conducive. Uh that doesn't seem automatically to be metal functioning. seems to mean there must be some difference between uh biological functioning uh and mental functioning. What's now? Yeah. Now we get to what we

00:05:13 really maybe why don't one of you define what you mean by mental function. Well, it's his term and I wanted him to define it. But but this the last point that he said is even more provocative I suppose which is I take it and I thought you did that all mental functioning is biological functioning. Oh, mental functioning is a subset of biological function. Absolutely. But it's a subset. I have to disagree with that. You want to disagree with that part? Well, certainly could be non-biological mental functioning. That's Oh, I agree with that. But

00:05:44 I I don't Let's hear that argument. Uh in principle if you think that what you're when when you take a functional approach approach to the mind and you want to describe um either making decisions, pursuing goals, acting in ways that um seem intelligent in the context. That functional behavior as best we can tell um is something that we can understand

00:06:16 at the level of what we usually call information processing in the sense that there's represented information about the world in some physical form that's then controlling the behavior of the system. And we know that one way that that can happen is in neurons, but as best we can tell that can happen in silicon or really any other physical system. Okay, that's that's a different kind of distinction. I'm willing to um here I'll give you a revised version if if we're opening the window to silicon which would be that when biological creatures

00:06:47 have mental functions they do it using biology that for them it's a subset of um of biology but you could use silicon and then we don't really apply the word uh biology to silicon. There probably be mergers in the next 20 or 30 years we could talk about where it'll be more complicated to draw those dividing lines. But if if the argument you want to make is it's possible to have mental functioning in some other kind of substrate, say silicon, I think that's a reasonable argument. But I wouldn't want to make the argument that there's any mental functioning that we humans do, for example, that doesn't have a

00:07:18 biological basis that we can't ultimately uh trace down to the things like actions of neurons and so forth. I don't know if anybody wants to challenge that view. So I'm agreed with all of that. Uh I guess I would challenge uh another tiny aspect of what you said. You said and I agree that mental functioning is a subset of biological functioning. What which subset? Uh well I mean I think there are many things that go into that subset. I think we can start exclusionarily maybe and we

00:07:50 can say although it it gets problematic quickly. So we can say we're mostly not talking about things like metabolism, but the truth is that they do matter. So a lot of the machinery that goes into the biology of thought goes into the biology in general. So if you take away the KB cycle that gives us metabolism in individual cells, you take away thought, you take a lot of other things away, too. But the way that evolution works is it builds new things on top of old things. And mental life is built on biological life. So neurons are specialized cells. A lot of the

00:08:21 machinery we expect in a cell in general we find tweaked in some particular way in a neuron. So I understand all of that but uh I would have thought that the distinction between the metal as a smaller subset of the biological was going to be in some way or another functional. That is to say, we we we would say, well, there's all this biological stuff going on and some of it some of the biology subserves

00:08:51 mental functioning. I liver absorbing or or um dealing with toxins, for example. It's probably biological, but it's not mental function. I don't know what we're talking about. So, I have to I have to say the same thing. I I don't quite know. I mean, everyone here must be completely bewildered. I mean, what are we arguing about here? In other words, um, how do you know when you want to describe something? I think it's, you know, it comes from philosophy, and David is our representative philosopher. You want to be able to say what counts as mental, what counts as physical, and

00:09:21 what is the relation between the two. If we don't give the audience an answer to this question that's been bandied about for 2500 years, then they're right to ask for their money back. So, we should we we should try to to answer this question about what what is the relation between them. But there well there's a I mean you're starting with the dualism which you know I think most of us at bottom maybe all of us reject. So but I think we have reject it but the question is what is what is the revised view? How do you articulate the revised view? I think there are no dualists I think in this

00:09:52 cast to finish his thought. Thank you. um the you know what we think of as mental functioning I think is where you sense what's going on in the world and you decide how to behave toward the world uh based on that sensing and um I guess and I would I would talk about I mean so some of that could be metabolic you sense that there's some glucose in the environment or something but uh so okay I'll grant it needs a little bit more distinction but um in essence but

00:10:24 maybe not maybe That's even the beginning of mental functioning. But it's basically what animals have to do that plants don't have to do, which is they've got to get their food by going after it. And they in order to do that and they've got to find their mates by going after them. You don't just disperse your seeds to the wind. and um all the apparatus that lets us do that, that lets us see, you know, sense what's going on out out in the world and then uh develop a behavior uh to deal with the world based on that that that allows

00:10:54 us to reproduce. That's mental functioning as far as I'm concerned. Don't plants up the roots go after water or light or light. It's a I mean honestly I think this is the wrong level. I mean, I think what everyone I mean, my guess is that what people are intrigued by as you go up the phlogenetic scale, if I'm allowed to say that, people in evolutionary biology hate that value judgment about going up or down. Um, is I I'll give an example, maybe this will help. You know, if a lobster is has its claws and it's at the bottom of the ocean and its own tail

00:11:25 gets into its line of sight and it suddenly lunges for its tail, is that because it doesn't realize that that tail belongs to me? And is that because it doesn't have such a conception? I think people who care about consciousness um in some philosophers like Daniel will only speak about humans because of this notion of I. But on the other hand, there are ways that the nervous system can actually give you a sense of self through Ephron's copy and propreception. So the lobster probably won't start feasting on its own tail without actually having to conceive of

00:11:57 the lobster saying, "I'm not going to eat my own tail cuz it's mine." And anyone who has a cat, sometimes a cat starts chasing its own tail. You get the funny sense that it's forgotten, that it's actually something attached to itself. Okay. Now, there's an entire neuro neuroscience of this notion of sense of your own body versus the external world. And some philosophers and neuroscientists have said that consciousness is just some kind of evolutionary adaptation on that system that can distinguish self from non-self. So there's certainly an argument that

00:12:28 can be made using neuroscientific principles for how you might be able to iteratively reach something that phenomenologically is consciousness. And I think what everyone in the room including probably us is it doesn't feel comfortable intuitively that consciousness is just going to be one more phenomenon generated by the nervous system um that has all these as Nicholas Humphrey puts it magical feeling and qualities to them. Therefore, we have to invoke something qualitatively different to explain it that we don't demand of any other manifestation of the nervous

00:13:00 system. Now, I frankly I don't know what the other speakers think that's an illusion. I take the Dennet view that because it feels qualitatively different, therefore the mechanism has to be qualitatively different. And I think that is something that we need to basically get rid of because what it really is, if you say that, is dualism in its modern guise, right? it and and I dismiss that utterly and I think Ken does probably as well. I'm not sure I followed all of that. uh

00:13:31 uh I mean there can be simpler and more complicated neural mechanisms and so there's no reason to suppose immediately that we know uh what mechanisms are going to correspond what what mechanisms are going to subserve more or less advanced psychological or mental functioning. Uh but my thought about this wasn't that there was anything magical. I don't think that there is anything magical. I started out by

00:14:01 saying it's all biological. Uh and I think it's all neural. Uh so far as we know it is, but it does seem to me that it's a subset of the neural. Reflex arcs aren't going to count as something that is psychological or mental. I think uh even though they're neural. And so we have to be able to give a little bit of thought to what it is uh that constitutes the subset. Oh, and there's wonderful work on that.

00:14:33 I mean, you're totally right. In other words, there's work on, you know, binocular rivalry. There's work on other phenomena where it does seem that it's a subset of regions that seem to be responsible for this. you know if you can extrapolate from perception for example V1 you know primary visual cortex doesn't seem to have this property extra strike cortex may have this property um when it comes to motor cortex it doesn't seem to have this property prefrontal singulate inferior parietal cortex seems to have it so I

00:15:03 absolutely what's the property the property of this extra property of the mental of the kind that I was mentioning I think we should be careful here I don't think it's a property yeah I think we're talking about two different things and we these need to um keep them separate before we make decisions about them. one one is about whether something's mental or not and the other is about whether something is say part of awareness and what I heard in your neuroanatomy there was an inventory of the things that participate in awareness but I would argue that you don't need any of those things to have a

00:15:33 mental property so um reflexes are actually worth arguing about and or grounding our our terms whether a reflex is a mental property so I would say that a rock doesn't have a mental property of being able to make anything like a decision vision and when I bang your knee it's not exactly a decision but it is a to me it seems like a cognitive system there's an input there's an output there's information processing and so for me I would actually count that as mental not awareness I mean almost by definition that particular reflex is not the word mental for you just become

00:16:05 anything that a nervous system does it well I mean sort of what I was saying as well that's just you're basically just making mental synonymous with what a a nervous system can do well no work up to Matthew's point about functionalism and maybe machines could do mental things too. So if if a machine does calculation, you know, it depends on how you want to define the terms. It goes back to um do airplanes fly or not? Well, that depends on how you want to define fly. And this is why I wanted us to ground these definitions early before we get into the stratosphere of like

00:16:36 what do we count as mental or not? I'm perfectly comfortable attributing mental to um a reflex because I think that's what biological creatures do in response to certain kinds of stimuli. What are the grounds for excluding it? But we can we can make a different definition. I just want to be firm about it. So if the stimulus is the sun and the plant goes towards the stimulus, uh that's mental. I'd like to know more about plant biology. There was a pretty interesting article in New Yorker which I did not yet read, I confess. um not too long ago

00:17:09 um there are lots of neurotransmitters Ken might know this literature better than I do um that you find in plants that there's you there's some relation between the neurotransmitters we have and some set of signaling molecules that are in the plant so there's signaling and somebody could say that signaling is is you know at least the first step I mean to towards mentality so so and maybe this is this is partly the divide between the empirical scientist and the philosopher just how we think about things but what we're talking about is not the world and what's out there what we're talking about is our our concepts and where we want to draw the lines on them, you

00:17:40 know, and and we start with I mean our I think our real interest from of about the mind comes from the fact that we have one and we experience one and so a lot of our real interest is in self is in all the stuff we're aware of. But then of course we're aware there's a lot of stuff we're not aware of. Um and so we're interested in that too. And then you start trying to generalize and look at other animals and try to say how much are they like us and how much are they different from us and but it's a concept. mind is a is not a thing that that God created or Plato put out there in the world. It's it's a concept. We're

00:18:11 just you can draw your lines where you like. I wouldn't be uncomfortable with with calling uh you know plants doing active uh things in the world mind and I wouldn't be uncomfortable with not calling it mind. I don't know that it's a really critical thing to work out. I I mean I agree with you and I think it depends on where you want to go from there. If we're going to start it as a ground assumption and ask a question like what is the relation between consciousness and the mental, we need to know what we mean by the mental. Um, but I agree with you that these are things that don't have an absolute truth. We're we make some cut definitionally and then

00:18:43 we can go from there and try to build something based on that initial cut. So suppose we just think about let's forget about plants and we think about what nervous systems do as our as our grounding for mental functioning. And then maybe there's some subset to that that we're particularly interested in. I would I would vote for, you know, let's just start there in order to focus the conversation. Let let me throw out a a concrete example that I think is interesting to think about, which is the um the worm, the sea elegance worm, which is one of these model organisms that we know a lot

00:19:13 about, including the conneto of all of all of its 302 neurons. Um and there are some interesting neurons in there, like I think it's the AIB interneuron. Uh, one thing that it does is it seems to correlate with hunger and with a kind of state where the worm can do one thing or another thing depending on hunger. I got this example from Corey Bergman who's who's on the NIH panel among other things uh for the brain initiative and she's she described having a picnic at her house and she said, you know, there was all this wonderful fresh meat that

00:19:45 all of her graduate students were gravitating to, but she had a Nora virus um at that moment and so she was repulsed by the same smell. The point is that you can be in different states with respect to an external stimulus. Um in the worm I think is in this case. So there there are input uh neurons that respond to particular smells. There are motor neurons that engage particular actions mostly turning around. That's what worms do. And then there are these inter neurons that mediate. So the worm can bas basically be in a hunger state or not. For me and people can argue with it and it is partly definitional, but

00:20:16 for me that seems like a rudimentary example of of a kind of awareness. I'm in this state or I'm in that state. I'm not any longer driven purely by reflex. I'm driven by which state I'm in. For me, that that already puts it over the edge. Then everything else is complexity. Everything else is more complicated states. I don't think you have to accept that view. But that's view that I've been sort of gravitating towards lately. So depending on what state you're in digestively, you've had a big meal, you've had a small meal, you're starving, uh whatever

00:20:46 it is, uh you'll behave differently. It doesn't seem to me that the digestive system is part of what subserves psychology. Yeah. Well, Gary Gary, I'm puzzled by you using the word awareness there. I mean, you can be in different states, but you don't you not necessarily aware of any of them. Well, I mean, I think there's self-awareness. There's a reflective awareness, which I think is a different thing. I would not argue that the worm has any self-awareness, but I would say that it has an awareness of its environment that those states um and it

00:21:18 has it has an awareness of an internal state. Um it may not be able to reflect on it and speak about it, but that internal state mediates its input output relations. That's true. But that's true of we've known about state dependent reflexes for half a century. I didn't say it was new. I just thought it was a nice example. The stretch reflex the stretch reflex is state dependent. uh tell me where you know depending on where you are in the gate cycle for example will completely determine what your 1A afrant neurons and spindles will do. So even I mean the

00:21:50 notion of a reflex itself is problematic because reflexes can be remarkably intelligent. They can have state dependent reversals. They can be context dependent. So I think that I agree with you that you can take something that seems so simple and rudimentary like a reflex and begin to show that they can have intelligence and the view I would take about reflexes that they are simply primitives that we incorporate into more complex behaviors and what you've described you know in C elegance is simply the stretch reflex and another

00:22:22 dies. Well, there's actually a second question in that neighborhood that I've been thinking about lately, which is I I call it the subumption issue. So, it seems like consciousness is unified. You have one conscious state. We could talk about split brains as a possible counter example and so forth, but in general it seems like you're aware of one state and there there's all kinds of details modulating that, but it seems at least logically possible that if you're let's say a low order creature, and I know about the evolutionary biology cautions on that you were already alluding to,

00:22:52 but if you're a low order creature, then maybe your only state is hunger or not. And if you're a higher order creature, there are many things that enter into your awareness, but maybe some of the principles are the same. And just one other point I mean awareness and consciousness in the in cognitive neuroscience are not synonyms. So they can dissociate. So for example Anton syndrome where people have occipital strokes and they're blind um will be unaware that they're blind but they are blind and they're having

00:23:23 the problems of blindness experiencing them but they're not aware of other things. But but so in other words there's they're different. Um so I and also again I I do think for the sake of myself and the audience we have to sort of be clear where we're going. One is what are what are the you know is there a hierarchy of behaviors that only nervous systems are capable of and do they have to be implemented by biological tissue or by silicon and I think we've agreed that you could probably imagine processes being done by

00:23:54 other materials. We can have our clue as to what we're interested in by behaviors and then have a hierarchy. And I think what's being implied here is that at the top of the hierarchy of behaviors that can be implemented by circuits, whether biological or not, is consciousness. Right? That's what we're really talking about here is we start with reflexes. Can we go with the m the the approaches and experiments and concepts that we use to explain reflexes and can we extrapolate to consciousness? That's what we're really talking about here.

00:24:25 And I think again that we probably can, right? that we it may seem counterintuitive and there may be a dualist urge but I think we can go from reflexes which are surprisingly complex which is good because they've already got characteristics that may make them worthy of study and and I'll be very blunt I study the motor system and visual motor transformations which I think lie just in that intermediate space between reflexes and consciousness with the hope that by studying this

00:24:55 intermediate kind of behavior we're going to be able to generalize up and down and actually get to where we're going rather than jumping in and studying consciousness. Now, I don't know what the psychologists say about that, but I do think it's important to realize that we can use the same aramentarium and the same concepts to ultimately, I think, explain something even as seemingly mysterious as consciousness. But I think that's what we're talking about here. Can we get there? Right. So I would uh let me let me throw out my

00:25:28 thought on that which then people can shoot down. Um that um well first of all we've all nobody's debating that it all just is something the mind does the the brain does the nervous system does and there's nothing else magical going on. Um so if we can all grant that. Um but the question is you know what can we say scientifically about consciousness or to what does it mean to explain it? And um my own thoughts are that uh in

00:25:58 principle we can we will be able to say you know with absolute clarity this kind of structure of neural activity enters consciousness and this kind of structure of neural activity does not enter consciousness and these aspects of this piece of mental of neural structure enters consciousness. we'll be able in principle there's no reason why we can't completely correlate every aspect of consciousness to every aspect of neural functioning. Um but to explain why we're not zombies

00:26:29 philosophical question to explain why we actually are aware of anything when all this happens I don't understand how science could possibly approach that. Um the whole nature of science is that we I mean the world as we encounter it has subjectivity and objectivity. The whole nature of science is to extract the objective and the reproducible out of this mess of subjectivity and objectivity. And now we want science to tell us why some set of mental constructions leads to an internal

00:27:00 awareness. I don't even know what why would mean. Um I I I just don't see how you pose that as a scientific question. We could say everything about when it happens, but why are we not zombies? I don't see how I don't know what to do with that question. So by subjectivity, you mean what? Well, uh, everything that, uh, our internal experience, our internal awareness. So, could you derive from first principles, just to make this concrete, what it feels like to be in pain, to experience an orgasm, or what it's like to um, perceive the color red. So,

00:27:32 there's one piece of the problem that seems very straightforward, if not easy, um, which is which which information source are you aware of at any given point? Neuroscience is making a lot of progress on that. So we um John gave us a rundown before these areas seem to be part of that awareness circuitry and these aren't. You can say that this particular thing enters into V1 but doesn't go beyond there and so forth. We we can characterize this. This this is Ned Block's um access consciousness versus phenomenal consciousness. But can

00:28:04 we explain these other things? Could could you explain to an alien what it's like to experience an orgasm given the facts that we know about how the brain works? Or could you only say, for example, it's represented in this way in the prefrontal cortex and there's this other representation in the brain stem and these are the the patterns of activity that we see during the orgasm, but not actually be able to explain. Yeah. I mean, I just think this is the core question. Would we ever be able to explain to an alien what it's like to

00:28:34 see red? And I think this is the most I mean again I take the Dennet and Humphrey view. This is such a pseudo question. I mean there's no denying that there's such a thing as qualia and experience. But I think what the the fallacy of it is to think that the explanation is going to feel like the thing it's explaining. Now why do we think that explanations when it comes to consciousness have to feel like consciousness itself? In other words, it's the same fallacy. I don't think anybody's saying that. Well, that I think that is what's

00:29:05 actually happening is okay, you've explained memory with synaptic changes, but it doesn't have the memoriness of memory when you explain it that way. No, but but John, take the question. Take take the question of why you have an awareness of something and you're not a zombie. That's the thing I think we can't address. Do you think we can address that? When you say why, I want to understand what you mean by why. So, let me just, you know, take the Dennet Humphrey line, right, where they and there are two questions that come to the bottom of consciousness. Well, three, right? One is could you

00:29:35 detect it in another person? It doesn't mean you'd know what it feels like, but could an alien come down as Nicholas Humphre has written about and do enough recordings and observations to say this is a conscious being, not a zombie. A B what are the neural bases for consciousness? We don't know, right? He comes up, you'll be interested, with the idea of you piggyback on Epherence's copy and forward models. You develop a reverberating attractor and that itself leads to a endogenous feeling that's called consciousness.

00:30:05 Well, but but there's the there's all the magic leads to No, no, no, no, but we but I could say that about anything else. When when when I say I want to pick up this cup, the commands that I need to generate to reach for that cup, we don't know what they look like. They certainly don't look like the movement itself. In other words, there's no obvious mapping. If you have a windscreen wiper switch on your car, right, and you see the windscreen wipers going like that, the one thing you don't need to do with the switch on the car is it doesn't have to look anything like it.

00:30:35 I think you're attacking a straw man. Optical illusions are the same thing. I agree. It's never the explanation is just going to be that is the necessary and sufficient conditions in the brain to cause the phenomenological phenomenon. And to say that the explanation has to feel like the phenomenon, it will never happen. Well, no, no, but but this is this is my question. I can say this is this is the you know this is the correlate all I mean we can't say cause we can say correlate. Um and if you legion it and if you had a measure of conscious it go it goes

00:31:07 correlation and cause can be fused if you do necessary and sufficient conditions. So you're you're not telling us what this subjectivity is. You're speaking of it as something other than. You're speaking of it as something that gets caused or gets led to or something of that sort. I think what probably an alien isn't going to find out is uh an alien isn't going to have your

00:31:37 experiences. So if the demand is to have your experiences, then not going to happen. But the alien isn't going to have your stomach or your food or anything else. He isn't going to have your home or your car, right? That's different. Uh so I'm not I'm still puzzled by what this thing is you're calling subjectivity. It does seem to me, it does seem to me that you can give a pretty good explanation,

00:32:07 not in neurological terms, but in psychological terms as to what's going on when you see red. Uh, I won't for today hazard a guess as to how to describe orgasm. Uh, but seeing red is a lot closer, for example, to seeing orange than it is to seeing blue. And you can get a kind of quality space which people have mapped and you can give a description of what it's like to see red in those terms. And you and I

00:32:38 assume that if neither of us is colorblind and color blindness is perfectly testable empirically, we assume that more or less modulo the difference of cone distributions in our eyes. Uh this is going to be the same for you and the same for me, right? But I'm not going to have your experiences and you're not going to have my experiences. So if that's the mystery of subjectivity, it doesn't seem to be a mystery at all. I totally agree. Look, we we can build everybody agrees we can build a robot that has some

00:33:10 interesting behavior. Not nearly as interesting as ours, but has some interesting behavior. I think we would also all agree that the robots we can build right now don't have any self-awareness, don't have any consciousness, don't we know that in advance? Dude, there are there's a guy named Scalleti at Yale who's been building robots that have a form of self-awareness so they can recognize themselves maybe in a mirror and they can plan around their own bodies and so forth. So that's actually not as obvious as as you're presuming it. Do you I think you actually think that they have subjective awareness like you and I do. Well, I mean I go back and forth on

00:33:40 this. There are days in which I think this is a pseudo problem as these gentlemen have been saying and that there's no, you know, way to answer that question. So we don't have a meter that can evaluate this person has a subject subjective awareness or not. And I think that's the reason why I think it's not a pseudo problem is because I can absolutely imagine a world where we do all the things we do for all the reasons that we do them and and we have no subjective experience about it. Well, I don't know what you're imagining when you imagine that. there these

00:34:10 people like David Chowmer's who say that they can imagine this and they can imagine that and I think this is wonderful I can't uh and uh so I would like to know from you what it is you're imagining that is to say what what what I'm imagining the robot that does interesting behavior but I'm quite confident does not have anything like my experience so I'm taking you to be a generous fellow and therefore to accord me

00:34:41 experiences of Brown and so forth and so on. But on what basis? Just just by analogy to my own experience and then the way but what's the analogy? I mean you can't if it's the right I can never say for but I you know I take it for granted but I can't prove it. No no no no no not not I'm not asking for proof. Proof is for mathematicians. Uh that's what he is a little bit. Right. Okay. So, in that field, I defer to you

00:35:12 with proof. But we just want a good reason. We want something to go with here. Uh there are all these people in this room. Why do you think any of them has experiences of anything? Why aren't they all like the robot that you were imagining? What is the reason for this? Is it just an analogy to one person? It's good. When I talk with them, they exchange, you know, when we talk, we exchange things that that that that tell me that that that make me believe that what goes on inside you is pretty much

00:35:43 like what goes on inside me. I I'm sure that they're going to get robots that are really good at that kind of thing. Well, at some point there may be a question about the robots. Right now there isn't. See, what you're asking, I mean, I completely agree with you, is um the second question. I mean, the neural basis of consciousness is very difficult, right? Andural the neural basis of it is very difficult and some people may never agree maybe you won't but are you equal saying mental and conscious I'm I'm talking about consciousness now whatever this awareness self-reflection the non the anti-zombie right that's

00:36:13 what I'm talking about mental and non it's just nervous system stuff okay um but then the second question is why do we have consciousness at all and my problem and I agree with you about this robot world everyone is it wouldn't look like our world I mean consciousness was presumably selected for it was presumably piggybacked on some previous function and it probably has some benefits otherwise we wouldn't have it and what those benefits but but then you're saying there is such an it and there be a possibility of not having it. I'm saying yes.

00:36:43 So that's subjectivity. I mean I thought a minute ago you said that there wasn't really any it there. No no I said that there's no problem with I don't I don't disagree that there's subjectivity in consciousness and I also agree that there's more of it in humans than in other animals. What I was saying is I'm not sure that the nagal the nagal view of what it like to be a bat is not a scientific question in my view. All we need to know I don't think it's a question of any sort. Yes, agreed. But people get hung up on saying what's it like to be me and think that scientists are going to come up with an explanation. That's what I'm

00:37:14 calling a pseudo question. When I'm asking about the ro what I'm saying about the robot point is that consciousness is probably what makes everyone in this room sit and listen to us blather on, right? They they actually come here and go, I want to learn about the mysteries of life. I'm interested. When your dog is panting and can't wait to go for a walk, right, take me for a walk. If it were a robot, it would just, you know, presumably you could talk a robot to do that. No, but then what you're doing is you're mimicking, you're mimicking these funny

00:37:44 features of joy and exuberance and curiosity, and those might be useful actually for evolutionary purposes. And that may be what we're talking about. But hold on. There's evolutionary purpose in having a motivational system, in having a selective attentional system and so forth, and consciousness is a uber version of that. Well, that's the question is so so what is it adding beyond the selectional attention, the motivation and so forth? Why not just have an organism that had those? Is there some extra thing that

00:38:15 we're trying to explain? And what is that extra? Well, I'm going to I'm going to study for the next four years to be a doctor because then I'll be able to make money and help people. Think about that. That's the motivational system. An animal there's no animal that can sing four years ahead. We have different motivational systems than other animals. I don't doubt that. All I'm saying is that perhaps consciousness is the preerequisite for that much more complicated form of motivation. That's what I'm saying. I think that there's reason to think that that's not the case

00:38:47 because look, thinking thinking can occur without being conscious. What does that mean? How how oh easy. Uh so all the stuff that happened before you're aware of what you're thinking. But then it's not think well then thinking just becomes again like mental a synonym for anything your nervous system can process and do. No, it doesn't. It be it it's quite specific. You have a problem. You don't know how to solve it. Uh you say, "Oh, to heck with it. I'm going to bed. And the next morning, you wake up and by gosh, there's the solution. And this is

00:39:18 this is complicated enough that it's going to have mental content. It's going to have what people in philosophy call propositional or intentional content uh expressable by that clauses. Uh I think that such and such, I think so and so. uh and it's going to be describable in the same way that we describe conscious thought except for the bit about you're not aware of it taking place. So it's thinking but it isn't conscious. And the

00:39:50 question is what does the being conscious add to it? Because uh to get an animal to do what's good for the animal, right? It needs to think and it needs to have selective attention. It needs to have all of these things, but none of those processes need to occur consciously. So, I just want to so just to clarify again for the audience, no one's denying that there are quite complex implicit cognitive process. There's a whole wonderful field. You know, Tim Shalas

00:40:20 has written beautifully on this, that you can have processes that look analogous to processes that you're conscious of without consciousness of them. And you want to deny that those are thinking though? No. Well, okay. So if you grant that those are thinking that I don't have to make sense of I'm saying I'm going to say no right because then thinking stops doing useful work as a concept. So let's take the overnight no it doesn't stop doing well useful work it what you can do with thinking is for one thing infer. So you

00:40:51 have this thought and that thought leads to this thought which leads to that thought and you wake up in the morning with the solution. Well okay let me just say talk about that. So we have no evidence right that qualitatively what you just described when awake and conscious is what's going on overnight when you have your aha moment in fact consolidation. So just for those of you who aren't neuroscientists it is true that you can have all sorts of um improvements overnight in many many tasks that you did the day before and come back better

00:41:21 the next day with no additional practice. Right? So the question is something was going on in your brain overnight that continued what you were doing and you wake up and you're better and you could extrapolate to say maybe that's the aha moment because you were doing something overnight. There are people who study hippocample replay for example. But what seems to be happening is you may be tuning neurons better, right? And so that when you now use that same circuit to do the same thing the next day, it's better at it. That tuning

00:41:52 that went on overnight doesn't itself need to be called thinking. It certainly needs to be called learning. But they're not you they're not synonyms, right? I mean, I always think learning to be a subset of thinking, but you've got a different definition. I think we obviously we have another uh definitional issue here. What What is your definition of thinking that it excludes learning? No, I I think thinking is another one of these dangerous vague terms that people have a fuzzy colloquial notion about. You seem confident in the wrong excluding I gave you a pretty tight one. I would say that thinking is another

00:42:23 word we give to conscious neural processing. No more no less. So all of Conoran system one things you would exclude from thought then? I mean all this kind of automatic intuitive stuff that's well I mean that's you know what we're going to call Canaman's cached ideas. I mean for those you know system one system two what system one is and there are many other areas in neuroscience that look like system one where you have a cached repertoire of responses that are triggered right because it would be

00:42:53 incredibly annoying if you had to keep from first principles deriving your responses. So yes the nervous system has cache repertoire of responses and we're going to let's be careful there because there's interpolation there. So you can you can without conscious effort do some kind of um posture for example or adapt to some unusual posture. Let's say you're carrying something. I give you some extra weight. You don't have to think about it but you're changing your motor system. That's because you have a control policy a pre-established cached control policy and and basically system one in the cognitive domain is a control policy.

00:43:26 We we should probably um define these terms. No, I'm just saying I think what's better for the audience is to to realize that once one starts to get systematic and one starts to be thick in one's descriptions of the phenomena one's interested in then you realize that it's not really the terms we're getting hung up on. It's the range of the phenomenology we're trying to talk about. And I'm saying, oh my gosh, like that. We have like a cough switch over here. Yeah. So, um, I think that it's helpful just to talk about the phenomena and how

00:43:56 we're trying to describe them and study them rather than getting pitched up on words. But, but I'm still stuck with your your word thinking because you're using in a very different way than I've heard before. I just want to clarify something. You're saying that anything that's cached is not thinking. I look, I'm not going to be I'm saying that, you know, I'm like the philosophers. I don't believe that interesting discussions require rigid definitions. If you look at modern epistemology and philosophy where you

00:44:26 talk about knowledge, a lot of very interesting work in philosophy has been done on knowledge without a definition that's rigid of what knowledge is. I'm cool with that. I'm not and I'm just saying that I'm trying to make distinctions which have fuzzy boundaries, I admit. But I'm saying that to talk about offline tuning of neurons in the brain during sleep as equivalent to what we do when we're awake and and thinking. I was granting your sleeping case, but I was very interested in the um the conment system one stuff. So it it's a

00:44:56 different way of construing what thought is to say that thought only includes the deliberate um conscious reflective kind of stuff when we sit here and we take a long time. My guess is most people here would probably think that's what it means too. Well, I think some people might include like the intuition you decide when you're trying to pick which apartment. You've looked at a lot of apartments and you might buy them and everybody is fighting over, you know, putting down the down payment first. You're integrating a lot of information about the view and how close it is to the subway, what are the schools like and so forth. You don't necessarily put it all

00:45:27 in a spreadsheet. I mean, if you're neurotic like me, maybe you do, but you don't have to. You can do it off in a way that feels a little bit offline. But is that not thinking? It's like that kind of synthesis. that's thinking. So is localizing a sound in this room thinking. Well, I don't see why that follows. There's actually this guy in uh the Netherlands, Dyster House, who has done the example I was alluding to a second ago. Yeah. Uh who's done experimental work uh with complicated consumer decisions, it

00:45:57 works much better if you don't work it out consciously. with simple consumer decisions it does work out better if you work it out consciously I don't know why that is uh but one would think with the complicated consumer decisions like buying a house and so forth and so on without benefit of a spreadsheet uh then this is thinking and it doesn't seem to me that when you speak of tuning of neurons that's really at all relevant and the reason that I don't think it's

00:46:28 at all relevant is we started out we are all agreed that at least for the non-silicon cases, if you've got psychological goings on, it's going to be brain function. So, you can tune up the brain in one way or another. And maybe it's thinking and maybe it isn't. And you've got to have some other way of deciding whether that particular tuning up of the brain is thinking. When you wake up, you find out. Well, look, uh, I wasn't offering a proof, as I said before. I was offering

00:47:00 a good reason to think that if you're absolutely puzzled when you go to sleep by something and then you're very clear-headed and you see all the connections clearly when you wake up, something in the meantime has happened, right? And I don't see why that isn't thinking. Okay. But I think we're back to debating definition rather than phenomena. And and I I mean we can define thinking one way or another. Exactly. Yeah, but let me come from the from the side that is absolutely not

00:47:32 neuroscience and it's uh psychology or psychoanalysis. Sorry. So you have a situation where somebody whenever they are um regretful or feel bad about something they have done or said that they then respond to that by attacking the next person. It's a common occurrence if you're

00:48:05 looking at people's behavior. Now they have no awareness that the reason why they are attacking this other person has to do with whatever feelings. So how would you in terms of your talking about there's no unconscious thinking? How would you explain this? Right. So first of all this is so far from my purview that I doubt I mean what on earth is regret? Well, it it's no no

00:48:37 look it's it's true that it is it is it is far from your purview and it's not since what we are talking about is the biology of the mind and so what I'm telling you is this is what I see as the mind and I'm asking you you tell me what is the biology of this mind so as I said there's a fascinating and other people here know very interesting literature in cognitive neuroscience showing surprising ingly complex cognitive processing going on in the

00:49:09 absence of conscious awareness. Right? So in other words, if one wants to say that at a certain threshold of complexity of the cognitive process, even if unconscious, we're going to call it thinking, then I have no problem. You can call it leading to behaviors, right? Yes. I mean I I have you know Callaman from the from the behavioral economics side or whether it's all the work being done you know by people like Tim Shalis and Adrien Owen and all these people there's no question that surprisingly comp complex cognitive

00:49:41 operations occur that have impact on behavior when people are processing but when you ask them are they aware that they're doing so to the stimulus they'll say no they won't be above chance. So your example fits beautifully into these vast range of phenomena where complex processing is going on and people don't realize they're doing it. So neuroscience is in complete agreement with the kind of thing that you just described. Yours might be more subtle and more complicated and harder to do in a lab and more difficult to control all

00:50:11 the variables and to show systematic effects across many subjects. So it might be difficult to do classic cognitive science on your phenomenon. So the the real question but it can be done. Yeah. The real question is given how much can be done in that way that I would want to call unconscious why we have a consciousness at all. Exactly. Right. And so that's the we the question that I posed before we got onto this terminological issue is if you had a motivational system and a selective attentional system wouldn't that be enough? Why why do you need

00:50:42 more? Well, as I said, the person who's written a whole book on this topic, Nicholas Humphrey, and it's so it's not my ideas at all, but he's the most interesting so far in trying to answer exactly your excellent question, which is that consciousness really is a souped-up qualitatively better way to do motivation and attention if you want to be an organism in a common. Now, look, you to me that almost seems like a category error. If if you say that what you've got is motivation and attention and then there could be something else we'll call

00:51:13 that consciousness. And it turns out that that consciousness is just better versions of the first things then we don't actually need to invoke consciousness. We just need to talk about how you make a better selective attention system and a better motivation system. We don't need a lot of empirical evidence that you get selective attention that's really very fine grained which in the absence of awareness there's just been a lot of work in the last 5 years. That's another no problem. Let me ask Matthew what you think of all this. Well, so so

00:51:45 I don't actually I'm sort of more uh you know also kind of sympathetic to zombie arguments. I don't actually think that there's anything that I could conscious that I could explicitly choose to program into a system that would make it conscious in the sense of having a kind of first person life. Um, even if we like had a whole brain simulation, understood it's not I'm not I'm not I'm not saying that

00:52:16 I would deny that it would happen. I'm just saying I can't say that I don't think it's a functional thing. So I don't actually think that by programming some capacities rather than others, I'd be able to titrate what was what it was like to be a robot. The awareness that we have of ourselves is things like uh I think I'm sitting I think I'm talking to some people about the biology of mind. I think um there

00:52:46 are various things like that. So if you can figure out uh how to get a gadget, a machine to have thoughts and then you can figure out how to get the gadget to have thoughts with this content and that continent and so forth, then you're home free and you can have a gadget that thinks I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I have the experience of red. again like you have you have a system whose representations have have that content

00:53:17 but that's something else from saying that like it's like anything to be that system right so what I want to know is what the other thing is it's as far as I'm concerned it's just this is the universe that we live in well I didn't get I I I would I'm with shammers it's like no no no but I want you to articulate what being with shammers amounts to okay so so what's the difference So you've got these guys who think that there's this subjectivity and it's mysterious and it defies, you know,

00:53:48 scientific treatment. And Nagel's argument is subjectivity is where we start and objectivity is getting away from subjectivity. So objectivity can't give an account of subjectivity. It seems to me this is all word mongering and uh unless one can say what it is that's missing. Well, so so what's what's the difference between all this nonaware sophisticated cognitive processing and

00:54:20 aware sophisticated cognitive? So I was saying that what the difference was was that when you've got conscious seeing as opposed to subliminal seeing then you have an additional awareness. So if I subliminally see the table then I have an awareness of the table. Let's not worry about what the content is. But I have there's the table. I have an awareness of it. It's subliminal. It's not conscious. If the awareness of the table is conscious, if it's conscious awareness, then I have another awareness

00:54:52 of the first order awareness of the table. So, so, so, so if I build a robot that that can that can enter into its memory banks, you know, the thought there is a table and the thought I just noticed there was a table, then is that robot become? Well, I thought we didn't know whether robots were could be like us. Well, but but suppose I just programmed a robot the way we know robots are now where we know they're not like us. And I programmed it to be able to say, you know, not only there's a table, but I

00:55:22 just said there's a table. I know there's a table. So it's not it's not conscious by just because it has that in its memory, right? That's the soul sort of argument. But I would say you have to just look at the world. I mean, let's take play. I mean, it's amazing how little neuroscience of play there's been. Okay, but playing people are beginning to look at it. Now, not every animal plays. So, these animals that have attention and motivation um like a nute or a locust, no one has seen play behavior, right? Then you get

00:55:54 to crows and mammals and I'm not going to talk exactly where the you start to see this extra behavior, right? And we call it play. Now all I'm saying is that there are these qualitatively e different extra behaviors that nervous system start to manifest that seem extraneous, you know, and whether we want to go to the aesthetic, to the planned, to the playful, what some people are saying is that those are the benefits that

00:56:25 consciousness mechanisms might start to give you. And now again I'm in no position to say whether you can't play if not conscious or whether the beginnings of play suggest a little bit of awareness of self and fun but the I think again quoting from Humphrey and Dennit that the arguments for consciousness independent of the neural bases for it are going to have to take this are we going to have a robot zombie writing a poem is it going to open the window and go what a wonderful world it is today right

00:56:56 now that's what I'm saying consciousness probably you need to have it. Okay. Well, so look I would I would agree with you that there's evolutionary reasons for this system which uh this this part of the neural system that is the thing that enters our awareness. The only I I agree that it was selected for I agree that it has a function. The only thing I don't agree with is why it couldn't do exactly the same things without our having any subjective awareness of it because I'm saying it wouldn't lead to

00:57:27 play forward planning. Well, that's that's the part that's not I mean if all the same neural processing and behaviors happen, why do you know what is the they they wouldn't be they wouldn't be triggered. I mean that that is a good question, but I'm just saying I believe purely intuitively that what that it's going to have to go in the direction that I'm saying. We're going to have to look at the phenomenology of conscious behavior to get clues as to what it does extra rather than constantly falling back on these zombie arguments. And I completely agree with you

00:57:57 they negative pointing that to the limitation. No, in other words, why can a computer a robot do everything except be self-aware? But yet do everything. It could even be self-aware, but it might not be aware that it's self-aware, right? It may not have any subjective experience. So I I don't actually think I mean again I don't I don't think about

00:58:28 consciousness that much because like I said I don't think that there is any difference in from the point of view of the system. You know what's interesting from the point of view of the programming as we're able to um you know succeed in building more knowledge into systems in using learning in new ways and in um like having architectures that exhibit more flexible behavior. is that

00:58:58 we understand more and more of the sophistication that goes into our unconscious processing in ways that help us, I think, to reflect on the kind of engagement that we have with the world. Um, and and sort of why it is that mental explanations are such effective explanations of people. Um so one thing that's different between you know computer systems are very good at

00:59:28 solving classification problems. So they'll um be able to make a really good disc good prediction about whether you're going to pay your credit card on time or whether um you know whether uh you want to buy a particular product based on your web surfing history. Um but what they don't do is that they don't um kind of critique the representations that they have of the world. So that they don't sort of use

00:59:58 their uh what they learn as sort of hypotheses going forward. They don't have um kind of they don't pose questions to the world and they don't sort of have feedback. Um, and that sort of seems to be one of the things that's really important when we attribute to each other beliefs about the world to say like, um, you know, when I think that that's water on the table there, that that's making a complex set of predictions about, well,

01:00:29 I'm going to drink it. If it doesn't taste good, I'm going to try to figure out what it is instead. There's a a kind of systematicity to the way that our representations inform our engagement with the world. And that kind of functional structure allows us to appreciate why it's so much easier to explain what somebody does in terms of what they believe than to explain in terms of what's happening in their cortex or even to draw correlations between what

01:01:00 they've done before and what they're likely to do again. Um, right on. I I totally agree with your take on the difference between AI and human cognition. Um I I might say though that that's really about what intelligence is and we have a different kind of intelligence than machines do. Of course different machines have different intelligence from one another. Um I don't know that that's actually informative about what consciousness is.

01:01:30 So in one theory would be in order to be conscious you have to have a certain kind of intelligence. Another theory would be that our kind of intelligence is just one route to having consciousness and maybe machines could have consciousness by taking a different route. And again, some of it's nes have consciousness without having this. I mean, I'm I'm certainly willing to entertain that. I'm not willing to entertain that nes have self-awareness. I don't see any evidence of that. But some level of awareness that that's

01:02:00 prior to self-awareness, I think nudes probably do have. Yeah, the lobster that knows its where its body ends and where the world begins. So what's troubling for might be troubling for some people is that iPhones have some sense of awareness of where they are, right? Their GPS systems, you know, track where they are that to me those kind of arguments are pseudo cleverness, right? They don't actually get to what we're talking about. I mean, okay, yes, programmers made GPS systems in phones, but if we're

01:02:30 going to be talking about evolution and how we go from certain forms, all I've gotten from you today is that it's a better motivational system and a better I can program an iPhone with a better awareness system and a better motivational system. I'm not sure it's going to get me there. I'm not sure it won't either, but an iPhone having motivation awareness is just absurd. Well, certainly an iPhone has awareness. iPhones have awareness. They have accelerometers. They have GPS systems. They have microphones. They have information about they can sense things about the world.

01:03:01 They can sense a lot of things about and and they can selectively filter it. So they can focus right now on part of the image rather than the whole image. They can turn on one sensor rather than aware. But you said a new wasn't and a reflex wasn't. Why? You said an iPhone you you're giving iPhone awareness, but you denied that reflex. I'm trying I'm trying to establish the boundaries. You denied that reflexes had it. deny that reflexes have awareness. You said that at the very beginning. I'm I'm willing to exclude reflexes in my but

01:03:33 awareness. iPhones I have I have not adjudicated one way or another. I'm simply trying to pinpoint the distinction. You're s sort of rudely shaking your head, but we're we're trying to figure out where the distinction might go. Right. So it doesn't seem to be at the level of sensation. It doesn't seem to be at the level of selective awareness unless I mean we really have two logical choices. We we're making some definitions here. And one of our logical choices is to say

01:04:04 we're just going to attribute consciousness to iPhones. Most people in the room aren't comfortable with that, but some might. We haven't really given a principled argument. If we're going to go down the line that says we're not going to attribute consciousness to iPhones, then we can't do it because iPhones lack sensation because they have them. we can't do it because they lack selective sensory apparatus because they have them and even motivational system we could at least have an argument. So where if if we want to say the iPhone doesn't have consciousness which I think is a respectable position then we want to say why we are holding that position.

01:04:36 I have not heard a good answer to it yet today. Well I mean we're going back to the idea that I I agree with you that reflexes are based on simple affirant input output. Okay. And that the arguments from evolutionary standpoint are you start with sensation then you move to epherence copy and forward models. What does this mean by the way? It's sort of internal um representations of the external world that simulate sensations. And there's a lot and there's a lot of evidence for that that you can begin to predict the

01:05:06 sensory consequences of what you're going to do based on internal simulations without actually having the sensations. And so the argument might be that you go from sensations to these internal simulations of sensations and then maybe that was piggybacked upon for consciousness being some extra feeling to this internal simulation of sensation and that one could construct that kind of argument. Now, that use of circuitry to go along that spectrum is a completely different universe to talking

01:05:36 about the fact that an iPhone could be programmed to have a GPS or an accelerometer, which you know, of course, but there's no way that the iPhone is now going to say, "Thank you for giving me a sensory system. I'm now going to evolve to have internal copies and then I'm going to invol evolve to being conscious." If it's true that an iPhone can evolve right in front of us in its little lifetime, then that's news to me. It seems to me that everything rests on the part that you called the extra. So in terms of having internal models, again, computers have lots of internal models. They're stock noting

01:06:09 that most voice interfaces only work because the system is able to subtract its own expected sound from its input to detect what you're saying. Right? So all so I'm saying that we understand from engineering and computing the benefit of ford models and we've made them in nervous system and it's an interesting phenomenon and could one go with that if we believe in evolution all I'm saying now a computer you give it an internal model it's not

01:06:40 going to evolve right well that's not true either I mean you can you can make computers that have evolved evolution systems there's some very nice work for example by Kenneth Stanley where there there's evolution over time. The internal models of those computer systems evolve over time. They get better at learning all kinds of things. I mean, they're limited still in in the ways um you pointed out, but but they are I mean, I there it seems to me like just a technological question. So, there's there's a whole field of genetic programming of evolutionary programming

01:07:11 and it's made some progress. It hasn't made as much progress as I would like. Um I mean I don't think that the systems are that sophisticated but they're capable of learning some kind of new representation of building some kind of new model and it seems like you know 25 years or 50 years that that field will be further along like most fields. My intuition is that still won't give us that something extra if there is something extra but part of my intuition is maybe we are it's a it's a red herring looking for this something extra. Well that I I think I think we're not talking about the phenomenon is real.

01:07:41 The question is whether the the explanation for the phenomenon has to be qualitatively different. I think I think we all agree that qualia are real. The first person perspective is real. That label is right. If they are then I would say we haven't today certainly offered any understanding of even how you would figure out what they are. I I that I think is a pseudo question. Okay. Question from the audience. Stand up and microphone please. It seems to me that one really simple epistemic

01:08:11 Can you go slightly closer to the mic or one very simple delineation that can be made perhaps is that uh consciousness can't be a discrete unit. Um it seems to me that consciousness how I want to phrase this consciousness is something that that is shared among us. We all laugh at the same time. Um I sort of share a consciousness with my pets. they share some of mine. I know this is a little silly to to phrase it so simplistically, but um

01:08:43 a phenomenon like quorum sensing or the to describe an organization like the United States of America, we could ascribe the we could use the same descriptions of consciousness to describe groups. It seems to me that the descriptions break down when you try to identify one discrete unit of consciousness. I think the one place where neuroscience has actually made some progress is on replacing this idea of pure localization, one spot in the

01:09:14 brain that does this with the notion that there are networks and circuits. And I think once you have that realization that there are networks and circuits, then at least a little bit of what you're asking about gets gets a little bit easier. So if you understand that what any computation whether we're talking about language or walking or whether we're talking about consciousness is a network and that these different networks overlap with one another then you're not quite stuck I think in in the puzzle of saying well it's it's not a discrete thing. Well most most cognitive capacities aren't really discreet things. There there are

01:09:45 constellations of neural processes that are in flux. They may vary from one moment to the next even in one particular individual and certainly across individuals. I think we're starting to have some understanding of of the network dynamics of the brain. We certainly haven't figured it all out, but I think that's a place to make progress on that question. Hi, I'm Fritz Kendzel. I'm a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and I like to offer a new paradigm. It'll just take me a minute. Uh 10 years I'm sitting behind the couch with patients.

01:10:17 uh over over those over that time I have the distinct impression that the mind is consciousness and unconsciousness. Don't ask me all the details of how I got there but that in fact is what the mind is. So what's the So uh the next question is well what is it? It's it had has to be a form of matter

01:10:47 but it does it's not like any other form of matter you can't see it you can't measure it can't weigh it you can't what is it is it is it an abstraction then of matter is it a special form of matter so if I can so I came across in scientific American the notion that all matter is waves I began to think well maybe consciousness and unconsciousness are

01:11:17 indeed matter waves themselves that is maybe the reason we can't break them down or get their components and so on is because they're primary fundamental matter waves just like energy and time and substance so on these that they're fundamental matter waves I don't if I the The the theory the hypothesis is that at a certain point in the evolution of

01:11:48 the universe that consciousness and unconsciousness matter waves emerged that they then made life. Think about the cell without a surv survival drive and without a survival implementation implementation. How could a cell possibly survive without drive and without a means to do it, a procedure? So unconsciousness became the drive, the survival drive. Consciousness became the

01:12:19 procedure. You have survival drive, survival procedure. You have adaptive drive in animals, adaptive procedure. And you have whole person evolution uh thing in human in human beings. So, so there's two two parts in what you're saying. Um, one is is that drives are really important and I think there's room to argue about what counts as a drive, whether whether you find a drive in a single cell and that's a definitional thing and we could talk about that. On

01:12:49 the other part of what you're saying, I would say um that the waves aren't going to help us here, but what we're looking for is an organization of matter. That's what's proven to be helpful in understanding life itself. So people were looking for this vitalist force which they never really found. What we found instead was that the right way to understand life is in terms of particular arrangements of matter that have particular properties such that they reproduce such that they have metabolism and so forth. Um and that's

01:13:20 how we understand life now is if you have the right arrangement of matter that gives you those properties. What I would say in consciousness is whatever the answer is, it's going to start with information processing. That you're going to have arrangements of matter that allow you to do information processing. There may be some other requirement, but I would say that's a beginning necessary requirement that probably nobody here would disagree with. Ken, you were going to say something. Yeah, I mean I agree with that. I just the a couple of things. One is that the um the connection between you know the

01:13:52 fact that matter is waves which is basically quantum mechanics and and the mind or consciousness is that they're both not they're both uh mysterious uh and and therefore there's a tendency to say this this is mysterious and that is mysterious so this must explain that. Exactly. Um and they have nothing to do with each other. Exactly. And totally agree. Yeah. and and the we know quantum mechanics is mysterious in certain special ways which typically go under the name of entanglement. When these special things happen, it's very foreign

01:14:23 to our experience and it makes it mysterious. It's it's very clear that there's entanglement is not playing a role in the brain. The brain is operating at a temperature under conditions where this is just not playing any role. Um so it's just it they're just divorced. What what is the other thing that I want to say is just I mean we we we all agreed on this issue and so therefore we didn't discuss it which is that you know consciousness is and mind are just are just manifestations of the brain but just to give an experience just to make I mean

01:14:56 we we live with this weird internal awareness which is our mind and it seems so mysterious like it must you know be connected to the cosmos or the universe or something But when you start doing when you do surgery on on animals or on people, you know, everyone has got a piece of meat called the heart and that pumps their blood. And everyone has got a piece of meat called, you know, a kidney and that filters their blood. And everyone inside their skull has got this

01:15:29 brain thing. And it's it's more fat. Excuse me. More fat than meat. Yeah, but it's meat. It's a piece of meat that evolved biologically to do a function and it's no more mysterious or dependent on quantum mechanics than the kidney or the heart. Agreed. I agree. Okay. Next question, please. Uh, first I want to say there are a few iPhones in here that don't seem to have intelligence.

01:15:59 They just want attention. Second, I have two I have two short questions that are sort of contradictory. One is we don't know what strength is in particular. We know that it's an emergent quality of certain objects. So why can't consciousness be considered an emergent quality of the brain? And then the second question maybe I'll just let it go with that actually. I'll start on that one and other people

01:16:29 can disagree. Um if if the analogy I was just making with life is right. Well, life is an emerging property, but there are different kinds of emerging properties. So, life is a kind of emerging property that we can well understand why the functions of particular molecules lead to the configurations that give you the reproduction, the metabolism and so forth. So, um life is different from the constituent molecules, but it emerges in a lawful and predictable kind of way. So, that's one kind of emergence. it's conceivable that there's another kind of emergence that is not sort of uh doesn't

01:17:02 follow in the same reductionist or inverse reductionist fashion. So I would argue that if you understand the right information processing properties that that then consciousness emerges. I mean we I don't think we have a proof of that but at least with the rest of of um mental function that seems to me to be the right way to go is we say these mental functions emerge if you have the right configurations of matter. And I would just say I mean yes it is an emerging property of the brain but it's not as sort of non-specific as that. I

01:17:33 mean the brain has a lot of detailed structure and different pieces of that structure are involved in different kinds of cognitive processes and there is some detailed set of structures that we don't understand that you know and or some some con or some constellations of activity in all these detailed structures that emerge as consciousness. But it's not this kind of you know a soup out of which continence emerges. It's a very specific thing that has evolved. It's not magic. It's emergence from high degree of structure. Yeah. Very briefly at what point would you all be willing to seed to an either an alien

01:18:07 or a robot the property of consciousness? It's a very good question. I have a hard enough time with other human beings. I don't think there's an easy answer to that because there are different ways that we try to answer that question. One is the thing that Ken said earlier. There's a kind of an analogy, right? We all look roughly alike and we seem to function in similar ways and so forth and so on. Uh we can

01:18:40 exchange things by way of language and non-linguistic ways. So, I assume that you're kind of like me and you assume I'm kind of like you. Uh, that's one thing. Uh, but we know, well, we think we know. Uh, I guess the first point of contention was I said fish and all I said was I didn't know much about fish and everybody jumped on. You said they weren't mental. They didn't have I said I didn't know. Fair enough. Fair

01:19:11 enough. And everybody jumped on me. But you know one thing about fish is uh I don't feel like a fish is very much like me uh just looking at it off hand. So some but when you look at its genome and its brain organization that that's very different. So the question is how do you do it right and what I'm saying is we have different ways of doing it and one answer isn't going to fit all cases. I I would say that um you know I don't work in consciousness you know but people who do

01:19:44 in uh neuroscience and people who do in philosophy do come up with criteria behavioral criteria uh and we ultimately if we believe what we all do which is it has a physical basis there will be neural criteria which an alien would potentially then be able to say these conditions are necessary and sufficient to produce the behavioral phenomenon of consciousness. So even though I'm not somebody who's writing down the behavioral and neural requirements, um people have it's not totally impossible

01:20:17 to do. So I think we could do it. But if you took Matthew's point from the very beginning seriously, um and at least allowed the imprinciple possibility that machines could have consciousness, then you won't come up with necessary and sufficient neural conditions. You might come up with necessary sufficient computational neural I mean processes. I mean component processes components and processes I'm a functionalist not an internal and here I think David Mars levels in terms of describing things in terms of algorithms and implementation we might

01:20:48 be looking for something that's algorithmic I'm not sure we can find it at all but if we can I would think it would be I'm just saying you got to figure out what the machinery is doing not what the machinery is Farzad Mahutian New York University liberal liberal studies um philosophy background. So this is going to be a little bit philosophy going on. Uh really enjoyed everything. Uh the contention was great. Kind of heated up the room. Um so visa v that uh first comment uh that might be helpful is uh

01:21:19 Emanuel Kant made a distinction regarding what science is because part of the discussion was what science was that was maybe implied uh constitutive versus regulative principles. Regulative principles help sort of guide where science is going, what's worth doing etc. constitutive principles are which atom which molecule under what conditions will do what for you and uh it seemed like the something extra the the magic that was banished immediately from the room which is still here uh I think has to do with regulative princ

01:21:49 principles because the regulative principles for Kant you can never get these you can't find them under a microscope and yet you should try to find them anyway for instance the beginning of time that kind of thing is the example he uses so I think part of the discuss discussion goes to that uh consciousness as a regulative principle helps to guide the research uh whether it's functional research or other kinds of research about neurons and connetos and so forth uh because it's kind of why we're doing this on the other hand

01:22:21 another question um that I had uh I guess first a comment on the emergence thing if you do have all the conditions I don't think it's predictable as uh as professor Marcus said you have the conditions that would give rise to life but you can't predict what kind of life it's going to be otherwise we could predict evolution which we can't I think no one's going to say that the entire scenario was predictable given the right uh no one would say that so uh with that I will then ask you a real question

01:22:52 and the question is basically uh we had the motivational thing uh the the kind of constituency were saying if we had these in the iPhone would be conscious perhaps Perhaps um there's one thing missing that would be helpful. I get this from Whitehead. Uh it's uh the self-intensification of experience. Something that has experience will try to intensify its experience. And it's that in that that Whitehead finds consciousness and life and it finds it in the respect that it diverts from or diverges from uh

01:23:26 routine. It diverges from reflex. Every time it does that things get intense. If experience craves intensity, then experience would logically do that at some point and improve itself thereby. So, it kind of fits part of what you're saying, but uh I was wondering if there's any coralate to the effort to intensify one's experience at whether one is a fish or a sea elegance or a human. I could take the first part of that. Um

01:23:57 there's something that didn't come up today but always comes up and it it should come up which is there are kind of a few logical possibilities here. One is that consciousness is like life that it's an emerging property. If we have the right definitions we understand the right molecular processes we can understand it. Another possibility is that we can never understand it that we're not smart enough and that that the tools that we have won't get us there. Colin McInn has made this argument. I've never been impressed by it but it's it's out there. It's a logical possibility. And the third possibility is that we're

01:24:27 trying to find the answer to a question that is a non- problem that that doesn't really have an answer. So sometimes historically scientists have looked for things that don't exist and they were just asking the wrong question. I would say that today we've made no progress towards giving an answer to what consciousness is because what I would count as an answer would be if we say what that something extra is so that I can then go out and figure out whether I can program it into my phone or not. And until I have an answer about what it is such that I can decide whether it's programmable or not, we haven't made progress. So that just leaves those other two. Either we're too stupid or

01:24:58 it's not a good question. Um, in terms of the intensification, I I can only tell you my reaction to it is is that it it we're taking ourselves as humans and our experience a little bit too seriously as the explanation of of all of you know mental functioning or consciousness or awareness that you know that that I don't know does that imply? In the end, it's an empirical question. you know, we're going to have to look.

01:25:30 The only creatures that we can be sure, you know, are fairly sure are conscious are creatures that can report it to us, which right now is just humans. And, you know, eventually maybe we'll be able to say in humans what neural processes lead to consciousness. And then maybe we'll be able to look for analoges of that in animals and try to draw some conclusions. It's going to be empirical. We don't know what it is. And and I I guess the point is we're not going to get there any more than we could understand quantum mechanics just by thinking about experience. We're not going to understand how the brain works just by thinking about experience. Um it's it's

01:26:02 going to be a deeply empirical question and the answers are going to be, you know, completely surprising and not at all what we imagined. Well, that's something else we didn't really talk about today much is what kinds of neural tools, for example, might help us. So there's a lot of things on the table with the brain initiative. People are trying to figure out better ways of imaging circuits of neurons rather than just individual neurons or large clusters of neurons. I don't personally see how that's going to lead us to an answer to consciousness, but it's a it's a very interesting question. Is there some circuit level

01:26:32 property that if we understood that we would be in a better position to understand consciousness or can we even be more articulate than that and say this is the kind of circuit level property. So there's been some efforts to look at the circuits that control the flow of information um on the notion that part of what consciousness is about is what I was calling selective attention. There are many things you could attend to at any moment, but you select from those possibilities. And I think we're on a good track to understand that at the neural level. But if consciousness is this extra thing that goes beyond selective attention,

01:27:04 then it's not it's not so clear that getting more information about how the circuitry works is really going to answer the question. Well, I I would I would say we're five or 10 levels away of understanding away from being able to maybe 50 or 100 from being able to talk about that. I mean right now we just we need to understand that how the pieces of the brain work to do small bits of computation which is what we're going to understand from these studies looking at many more neurons at once. Mhm. And then and we're going to have to build up multiple levels of understanding of the brain before we can

01:27:34 ever really get to this place we all want to get to now because it's what interests us so much which is to say uh you know well what is it about neural processing that is or isn't conscious. That's that's it isn't to say that by adding lots of neurons now we're going to solve that by adding lots of neurons now we're going to help build the next level to the next level to the next level and I don't know how many levels before we finally get to asking those questions I think we we need to go to the next question otherwise people there's quite a few people waiting so let's

01:28:08 we we've reached 2 hours so we're out of time technically no we started at 2:30 it's Not 4:00 yet. So, go ahead. Oh, hi there. My name is Joe Russo. I'm a web developer and just generous person. What's that? We're at the 90-minute mark. We were just given incorrect information. Very good. Very good. Um, I was wondering your uh thoughts on uh when there are people having near-death experiences and they're basically a lot of things shut down in

01:28:39 their body and then they they come and they're brought back. some some who happen to be brought back claim to have experiences of of certain kinds of things. And it makes me wonder if perhaps the uh the biological um armor that we're sort of equipped with now is just simply one potential place where uh the experience of consciousness and interaction and all that other you know individuality and all that stuff occurs but it isn't

01:29:09 necessarily required. What are your thoughts on that? Uh, the movie Flatliners talks about that a little bit too. It's a great Wait, so I I I didn't understand the question. The question is that that we don't Just say it again. I sure I was wondering your thoughts on the idea that maybe consciousness doesn't even require a body per se. It may be something that actually can uh can um have a persistence without having um biological uh home to live in. Um,

01:29:40 one thing that comes to mind is like, you know, ducks flying and they're kind of communicating and they have this real this really elegant, harmonious kind of interaction that goes on. And granted, yes, they have little duck brains that hold their little thoughts and everything, but there is also this interaction that seems to happen between them in the air. And it makes me think that this idea of consciousness, of thinking, of self-awareness, of all these things that many of the things that we've been talking about, you've been talking about today may be piggybacking as it were off of

01:30:10 biology, but not even necessarily be necessary. So there is hope for the iPhone still. Well, I think all of us would categorically reject that, but we could we could talk about why, I suppose. I mean, there there is um some interesting work um about modules in the brain. You know Stannis love to Hane for example has this blackboard view that it's sort of like a working memory buffer analog and that sort of like your ducks that certain basic modules like S1 M1 V1 aren't conscious but there's a place

01:30:42 where you can put their information into a buffer and this buffer has the property of consciousness. So we wouldn't be totally rejecting if we were to say that maybe these network models that suggest that there's a way of bringing modules online um and this is the one theoretical model this blackboard model that's quite interesting with some empirical data with it um but not embodiment which is I think what you were getting at I don't think we we yeah I mean the idea that you that you can just leave the brain and the body

01:31:13 behind I mean it's it that's about it's about what it feels like to us it feels like our our mind is disembodied. It feels like our mind floats free of any material substrate. But we would all agree that's an illusion. But but yeah, I mean the fact is, you know, any any piece of your mind can be destroyed by destroying some appropriate piece of your brain. Your your mind can be split up in so many completely non-intuitive surprising ways by losing bits and pieces of your brain, you know.

01:31:44 And don't don't depress us. really don't depress us. And all of us up here are physicalists. So we're we're arguing a little bit about whether iPhones might possibly be conscious. We don't really have the definitions and so forth, but all of us think that whatever consciousness is has a physical basis. So we all agree that has a biological basis in us, a physical biological basis in us. And we hold open the question depending on how you define things for whether it might have a different kind of physical basis in some other kind of creature as Matthew

01:32:15 pointed out in the beginning. But we all think it has a physical basis. I'll say one sentence about near-death experiences. The only sentence I'm going to say, which is there's some very interesting work by Philip Lieberman, who's a linguist and a mountain climber about what happens when you lack oxygen and your your um brain gets distorted. Not surprisingly, near-death experiences fall from my mind in the same category. What happens when you don't have enough oxygen? Doesn't tell us anything about consciousness. And I can I just say that that the the brain look everything you're seeing and experiencing now it's not like a camera opening its lens. It's

01:32:47 a computation. Your brain is computing this whole scene from the sensory information it's receiving. Brains sometimes compute hallucinations sometime sometimes compute distortion. They compute you can experience all kinds of things. It doesn't mean they're out there. It means that's what your brain is doing right now. Okay. There's an additional thing that should be thrown in. I think all of us are physicalists not only with respect to mind and consciousness but with respect to everything that is everything has a physical basis. Yeah, I wanted to say I found this

01:33:19 interesting and uh make one comment and then quick comment and then ask a question. The quick comment is just my opinion. the early on uh the issue of definitions came up and I for one think that it is not just important to define things clearly that it's essential to define them precisely and uh uh because if you don't as many scientists agree and it seems would seem to be logically obvious if you don't define your terms you do not know what you are talking about so

01:33:51 that's the point I wanted to make um then the question I have has to do with all the talk about derives from let's say I have a million questions on the subject but um derives from the issue of motivation there are certain presumptions and assumptions that underly that um if you're talking about motivation as how it affects the brain and its development of consciousness well let me just step back one second I won't take uh on the issue of definitions I think the example

01:34:21 of it is how we in the discussion today there was a great deal of confusion and imprecision in the terms consciousness, awareness, thinking and so on. Uh there was talk about senses. I didn't hear anyone say anything about conceptual consciousness which I think is specifically what was referred to by consciousness sometimes otherwise other times it was used in a general way. Then it went this is where like all kinds of confusions you know there's perceptual consciousness sensual consciousness there's all kind there's all essential

01:34:51 awareness let's say and and thinking and and the difference between that and thinking what is thinking I didn't hear a definition of thinking so and it's a simple thing to do I would say but let's not get into that now because it'll become a long story my question is this on the motivation if you're going to get into motivation you have to get into free will because something has to cause it and what I'm thinking of I know that logically or philosophically to take the position of determinism is self-contradiction but when you think

01:35:22 about what happens when you make a choice when a consciousness makes a choice that requires action and sends a message to pick up the glass of water or whatever it was then there's a change of state somewhere in the brain and you get an infinite regress if you try to explain it because according to the laws of physics physical you're all physical guides here the laws governing motion are pretty well determined for everything. You have electrons, you have molecules and so on. And then you make

01:35:52 the decision to do something the instant before that in order to send that message down a neuron something physical has to initiate it. And I think that's where the real real serious mystery lies because what is what is the cause of that change when you make a decision? How can you translate your decision into motion? If you say well because this atom moved over this electron moved over there well

01:36:22 how did it move? What's physically what moved it? And then you give that answer. You say well oh okay because the electric potential change. Well then what changed it? Well because this then what changed it? and you get into an infinite regress and it seems incapable of solution. That's the mystery to me and that's what I want to ask you if you have uh any any uh comments on. Thank you. So I I don't um accept the infinite regress argument. I think people are actually making progress on cases like that. So first of all I do accept your criticism

01:36:54 that our definitions are really shoddy. Um and I think our definitions are really shoddy because for the most part the things we're talking about don't have facts of the matter in the world. So my example on this point was about whether airplanes fly. There is no fact in the matter in the world about whether airplanes fly. It's definitional. You can choose to make that definition with respect to some other problem. Um but there is no fact in the matter in the world and so it's hard to make those definitions. I'm not going to let you take another question because there are other people waiting. Um on the infinite regress part however what I will say is

01:37:25 that people like Ken people who do molecular computational neuroscience um so people working in those two domains have made some real progress at looking at things like signal transduction where they look at the individual molecules that are just involved in very very low deci low low-level decision making where we have a little bit of a cognition on one side and we have molecular events that we can actually identify and manipulate and so forth. So I think there's real progress there. I don't know that we've made any progress at all in understanding consciousness, but in

01:37:56 decision-m we really have. I I really can't really question just real quick. You let me answer my question because my question is where does the free will or the conscious the consciousness where is the point at which it enters that first pause that makes the physical thing process? I think it's a mistake. Keep it a finite physical process. Where is the entry point of your free will? Okay, Matt, you so um so I tend to think of um identity as a content. So to say to say that I

01:38:29 did something is to say that that action is responsible to my values and my beliefs at a point in time. That is to say that I can take ownership of the action is expressing who I am. Well, but what I think is that who I am, the values and beliefs are represented their physical patterns of activation. And so to say at what point does the physical patterns of activation well actually there we know how to implement inferences and and and to like translate

01:38:59 from you know statements of values and statements of beliefs to inferences that say certain actions are the best actions that respond to those things and it's it's completely mechanical. The mistake is to think that that your identity the meaningful what's meaningful about who you are is separate from the physical instantiation that's making it all possible. It's a way of looking at the inst the physical instantiation that's making it all possible. And so

01:39:31 that's why you can make decisions because your brain makes you and it makes the decisions and it makes them match. Two two two answers your point about definitions. I mean I absolutely agree in the kind of science that I do and the kind of operational definitions are essential. Okay. On the other hand when we have quite nebulous things like thinking and consciousness um operational definitions are possible and I agree with you but they're going to be fuzzy. Just like there's going to be a discussion potentially about art here

01:40:02 one day. No one's going to come up with the fundamental definition of art. It doesn't mean you can't have interesting conversations about it. Beauty is another term. So I would say that we are at the intersection between philosophy and science where strict operational definitions are not available yet. But I agree with you. And the second point about the the start point I think you're right that to talk about where did it start in infinite regress is to say that we have a t0 but we don't really have a t0 right in other words I'm in this room right now.

01:40:34 I'm biased towards being in this room. There's a cup in front of me. So, there's a little bit of a biasing towards my wanting to reach for that cup. I'm in a context where I may at some point reach for it, although now it's empty. But, um, do I know exactly why I chose at this time point to go for it versus plus or minus 5 seconds on either side? No. Okay. But I definitely know that I'm in the context biasing me towards certain behaviors. So, there's no real t0. You see, that's the mistake,

01:41:07 I think, is that we're in this ever lengthening context with many different shells of time to it, which all bias you towards certain behaviors because you're in it specific. So, no, I know and and and that that might be a little bit indeterminate, but being in a room in front of a cup was something that I decided to do. So, in other words, I think the by t0ing it the way you are, it causes a slightly false infinite regress. Thank you. Okay. Next,

01:41:37 you can always approach the participants later. Uh so just a couple of quick observations leading to the question about the uh the role that hasn't really been addressed of uh uh the ecological context in which brains operate number one and the role of in computational neurobiology of local minimum and maximum. So uh in terms of ducks for example and fish birds flocking behavior um we actually do know it's not ephemeral that it is the relationship of

01:42:08 keeping the uh fish or bird next to you and in front of you at a certain average distance at all times. So it's simple but it is a social ecological context in which neural processing is occurring. So that's my entry point to this and I wanted to follow up on the first question about quorum sensing because I think the response took it wrongly. I think it was more about again the social context not about one portion of a brain but one brain in an ecological context of other brains quum sensing is ubiquitous it occurs in bacteria it we

01:42:40 can simulate it very nicely um so I'm asking the question if consciousness is an emergent phenomena that is somewhat proportional to the degree of neural complexity in a social species have a neoortex but it's smooth uh But the neoortices of more uh highly encphilized complex encphilization in social mammals they tend to we tend to look at them and see more of our behavior and

01:43:12 sensitivity. Elephants are looked at as quite emotionally sensitive. For example, um we are very similar. The question is not whether we are similar to champ chimpanzees for example. a lot of behaviors uh they do everything from deception to uh certain social aggressions and the rest of it. So my question is how would you address the again the ecological context of neurobiology and how that interaction might affect the local minima maxima

01:43:42 that can lead to a decision point. That's it. I mean I don't think any of us would challenge the notion that the social component is important. There's a interesting new book which I have not finished yet by Michael Gratziano that tries to give an account of consciousness evolutionarily in terms of social function. Um you know whether you buy that argument partly depends on how you ground the definitions of consciousness in the first place. So if you accepted my example of the worm,

01:44:13 you'd say, "Well, the worm's got some modeicum of awareness, but it's not social." Or maybe it is social. You could probably argue that part, too. So again, there's a there's a a grounding issue, but I think Gratiano has has some interesting arguments there. And I don't think any one of us would want to deny that the social component is really important certainly to our subjective experience of the world. I think we might make the argument that in order to understand that ultimately we need to cash that out in terms of my brain internal experiences how they cope with the information that comes uh from the

01:44:44 outside world. We don't want to say that you know information from the ecological environment or the social environment isn't really crucial to the kind of experience that we have. Some of what we're trying to grapple with here is why does the experience have that we have have the flavor that it does? So why does pain feel the way that it does? And presumably social things should enter into an answer for that. We just haven't figured out what would count as an answer. But when we get there, that should be part of I just want to say that I'm saying that's the inverse, but I want to make sure the question is taken properly. In my view, it's not

01:45:15 that we're coping with the social ecological context of others in our species. It's that we need that. My my my small hypothesis is that consciousness emerges in our species because we even have the facial fencing of gyrus which has evolved to focus precisely on details in the facial facial musculature and motion uh of others in our species. So that's my question. I the only look I I can't say much about

01:45:46 the social except obviously we're very social creatures and that was involved in our our brains evolving but I just want to caution against um taking familiar familiarity as humans with something essential about consciousness or about minds or about intelligence. I mean, the creatures whose behavior seems most familiar to us by and large are the creatures that we're more closely re related to and and so, you know, we have more mental structures in common with them. But it doesn't mean that, you know, some very distant creatures. I mean, certainly crows and parrots and

01:46:17 ravens are pretty distant, but they're they've independently evolved, you know, quite a quite a high intelligence. And but they don't write symposia. Well, neither do dogs or cats or or I have I I just have one point tangential point that about your question about the um flocks of birds with these complex structures. Um that's a great analogy and then you said correctly that the rule that leads to this so-called complex structure is actually quite simple. by keeping an average. So in other words, there are many there are many examples of this

01:46:48 where the phenomenon looks incredibly complex, but the rule that leads to this so-called complexity from our viewpoint is unbelievably simple. I'll give you another example. A colleague of mine in California um modeled little mice pups that you could film from above. And these little mice pups when they're put in a box make quite complex pinwheel shapes. Okay? And it looks quite complex. And so he said he was going to make some robotic rat pups and he was going to then do you have to do a sort of like rapturing test. You'd watch the

01:47:20 film of the digitized real rat pups and the robot wrap pups. And he got the rap pups to do the same kind of thing. What do you think the rule was? Anyone? Something. [Laughter] It was entirely random. It was just that the shape to get to your point of the rat pups plus random behavior led to so-called complexity. So I would say that's the same as consciousness. It seems so mysterious and complex to us that we think the rules that lead to it

01:47:51 in the nervous system have to also be very complex to us. And what I'm saying is just like the flock of birds, just like the wrap pups, the rules will turn out to be surprisingly simple and surprise us and and we're going to be entirely wrong. And it's our in a sense hubris that because we think it's so mysterious, the explanation has going to have to live up to our sense of its mysteriousness. It it does and so I should be happy and keep my mouth shut. But okay. No, no, wait. We have to have we

01:48:22 have only 10 minutes left and we have still Hi. Uh thematically that's exactly what I want to ask about. It's not I don't really have a question. I just wanted you guys to talk a little bit more about that inflection point and if it's the biology of the mind which inflection point towards having consciousness yeah the worm sorry I looked at you and assumed we knew we were talking about the worm uh that that how biology evolved past that point and if we step forward in time maybe that's the best foil to look at where something more

01:48:53 complex emerged. Well, you know, the it I think it's sobering to realize that, you know, life was kicking around on this particular planet for, you know, three and a half billion years before primates emerged. And primates were kicking around for what, 20 million years before 50 million uh human, you know, 15 50 million years before hominids emerged. And hominids were kicking around for four or five million years before humans emerged. And you know it it there's a whole lot of life and a whole lot of intelligence, a whole lot of brains, a whole lot of

01:49:24 minds that were happening before human beings happen to pop into the world and and and speak. Um so uh I I I'm worried about the idea that there's some magic, you know, there's some inflection point where we where life crosses it and then we're there. You know, life has gone in lots of ways and places and intelligence has evolved all over the place. I mean, octopus octtopi are extremely intelligent by many measures. I don't know if they have consciousness, but they're they're smart. Just that it simplifies the problem a

01:49:54 little bit more. And I I honestly just want to hear knowledgeable people talk about why they think what were the the evolutionary conditions and the selection. Why did that the brain take that path? The reaction I I The reaction I had to your question was to think about so there has been an inflection point clearly in uh human evolution. So we're very different than our ancestors were 200,000 years ago. People kind of slice at 50,000 or 200. They argue about that but certainly

01:50:24 we're pretty different from 200,000 years ago. A lot of things have changed since. Here's a question that's very appropo to what we're talking about is was the evolution of some change in the system of consciousness really important to that. So it could be that what really made all that change was language let's say and maybe that affected consciousness and maybe it didn't. And of course again we don't have a machine. We could go around and say well our dogs conscious are bonobos conscious. And then we could you know we could look at

01:50:54 our ancestors if we had a time machine too. Right? If we had a time machine and a consciousness meter, we would, you know, be in much better position um to resolve these arguments. But since we don't have either, all we can do is these kind of thought experiments. Um it seems to me like just having language and maybe the ability to represent hierarchical structures and to care about the intuitive theories or beliefs of of others might be enough and maybe you wouldn't need consciousness, but we don't really know. So I thought it was actually a provocative question that was very difficult to answer. But I think your point is well taken that we have to

01:51:27 that but you know I I'll give you an example of dexterity right some monkeys cannot individuate their digits and we can right it's a remarkable change in dexterity and then you ask well is it a biomechanical or is it neural and we think it's neural and then you start looking for what is the neural basis for this quite phenomenal leap from being able to really just do this to being able to do that and you know it's it's a few connections to the vententral horn a change but it's not a giant change in the neural mechanisms and yet you get behaviorally a very big change. Right?

01:51:58 So in other words, I think what's going to turn out is that there's going to there is an inflection point. We're all talking about something that humans have in abundance. We haven't defined it, but consciousness and self-awareness, we have it. Nevertheless, we have to agree with Ken that it had to be piggybacking in some incremental way on a nervous system that's been around a very long time. So we have this mismatch between an incremental work on the substrate and what seems to be a very nonlinear change in behavior on the outside. Um but that happens with nonlinear systems. Right? So we evolution is the way to get at

01:52:29 this and we will answer this. How do we get this apparent behavioral leap with a fairly nondescript change relatively speaking in the brain? It wasn't like a whole new lobe suddenly occurred. Right? So that's the way we're going to have to go. question is the right one and the inflection point is something we're going to have to look for and I think we will reverse engineer it frankly eventually. Thank you. Thanks. Hi. Um my question is like we we say that the mind gets distracted. It runs.

01:52:59 It it wonders and and like how how is it related to the underlying conscience like this the the mind being wandering or distracting or running? How how how does it relate to the underlying consciousness or subconsciousness and then how does that relate to the firing of the neurons and and like how does this kind of like interlink and which way does it go meaning like does it go from the mind to the neurons or does it go from the neurons to the mind or like well the the second part is the easier

01:53:30 part to answer which is the mind is what the brain does I think Marvin Minsky said that originally um so it's birectional they they are they're just description at a different level of the same thing. The way that you can have physics and chemistry, they're both true. It's not that one is true and then makes the other one happen. They're both simultaneously true. And so we're really talking about different languages to describe the same phenomenon. We're talking about using psychological terms versus using neural terms in terms of the mind wandering stuff that you started with. Well, that's about how the brain decides which information to

01:54:01 follow at a given moment. So, for example, we are distractable. Um, if there was suddenly a loud noise, you'd stop paying attention to what I'm doing. And if you stop paying attention to what I was talking about, you might at that point start thinking about your laundry. And this is a risky avenue for me to talk about because you might start thinking about your laundry. Don't think about pink elephants, anyone, please. Um, but so we have some machinery that govern basically our train of thought. I think that that Freud and James and so forth thinking about stream of consciousness had something to it. there

01:54:32 there's filtering that we use to decide which stimulus should I pay attention to at a particular moment and it counts it was mind wandering if your brain says I should pay attention to this thing that say of immediate importance even though I had decided I should be paying attention to my class kind of very there there's a I mean there are different neural structures responsible for different parts of attention but there's a there's an area which in monkeys is called lip lateral entropal um which is involved in in aspects of of monitoring visual salience as to where

01:55:05 what should get the attention. And there there's an experiment that was done by Mickey Goldberg and James Beasley at Columbia where they record from LIP and a monkey is fixating and then it um it gets shown a target that says when the fixation light goes off move your eyes over there and you'll get a reward and then while it's still fixes so then during that time LIP is really representing that area quite a lot. It's saying, "Oh, that's very important. I'm going to tend to that." And then something completely irrelevant flashes over here. Well, LIP represents that briefly,

01:55:36 uh, but it goes away again because it's irrelevant. And it turns out the attention, you can also measure where the animal's attention is by various tricks. And the animal's attention goes to the distractor precisely when the LIP activity for the distractor is higher than the LIP activity for the target. And when it comes down again, when the when the hill crosses, that's when the attention switches back. So that's a neural coralate of there's something there that we're, you know, you there's something there that you're not attending to, but it's still represented and then you come back to it when it

01:56:06 gets to be the the the the biggest hill. That's that's one example of some coralate between neurons of what you're asking about. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Um my question is one of the problems that you have in discussing consciousness is that we talk about it as a unitary phenomenon but it's really there are levels of consciousness even within the same individual. So you can go from coma to um acute awareness to meditation and then all the levels in between. So um Greenfield who's like a

01:56:37 neurobiologist has studied different neural populations and she found that very small groups she calls them neural assemblies very small units are very briefly um activated and then disappear and she would link that more with a transient awareness maybe something like children have maybe animals other species but as consciousness as we call it like really attending builds up you find uh connections between the different neural assemblies and they're

01:57:08 more longlasting and then out of that even a experience of self emerges from you know but it what it's really dealing with is going from let's say a coma state where almost nothing is happening where maybe um you can activate someone who's deeply unaware by saying imagine yourself playing tennis you know they've done that experiment and they see on an fMRI that area of the brain lights up so that brain bra of a deeply comeos person is indistinguishable from an aware person but obviously that person is not

01:57:41 conscious. Um but in a conscious person you see many more um areas activate. So what we would call consciousness is more like a global longlasting level of activity and the experience of the individual as to whether or not they're really present in the moment or they're just um you know being activated bombarded with stimuli has to do with how much of the brain is functioning at the same time. Then the other um caveat is that the right and left sides of the

01:58:12 brain have different styles of functioning and the right hemisphere processes in a more global very quick way and we call that unconscious. It doesn't have language and um when it gives some kind of message what you sleep on what you get when you wake up in the morning um it then transfers to a more conscious a verbal which it pay we pay a price for the consciousness because it takes time you have to think about each detail and then come up with a decision but you're fed that

01:58:43 information from your global intuitive side. Thank you. Just I wanted just to clarify the Adrien Owen experiment. Yeah, the Adrien Owen experiment. I mean, I think for the audience, it's very important to distinguish what neurologists mean by the word unconscious and conscious when it comes to coma versus what we mean by consciousness. They're totally different things. And two, Adrien Owen when they did that experiment on the tennis, those patients were not in coma. In fact, the whole argument was these were the people who were being deemed to be in coma at the bedside by neurologists, but are in

01:59:14 fact what was called minimally conscious state. So in fact, it it's they're not in coma with a fragment of consciousness. They're not in coma. Okay. Next, brief, please. Yes, we'll be brief. Brief. I'm going to toss this at uh Professor Marcus first, but I want the comments of the other members of the panel. There's been a lot of discussion about definition and I'd like to ask you to comment on a rather solid definition that Gerald Edelman offers for

01:59:44 consciousness for self-awareness the ability to project into the future reflect on the past language use uh whether you might comment on his very concrete definition of consciousness which arises out of biological evolution. Thank you. What what I would say is that all of those things are well two points. All of those things are not a few points. You have two other people waiting. iPhones can do all of those, but it doesn't get at whether there's something

02:00:15 extra. Thanks. First is the female presence on the panel. I think that would have added something. Secondly, um I'm missing not always to easy to get females. Um secondly, that is an old problem. That is the ambiguous sentence of the day. Secondly, I uh you're speaking a language that's very different from my language. I come back from a psychoanalytic uh background and the

02:00:48 unconscious is so important to this institution and I feel like I'm missing something today. I feel like I'm missing you using the word unconscious. I haven't heard it much and I uh um to be brief I would be interested in who given your expertise in the research lab who who is uh approaching uh your terminology from a psychoanalytic

02:01:18 perspective who's doing critical research today on brain functioning and the unconscious as it's used in the psychoanalytic community and as most people are aware of uh psychoanalysis was more or less uh left out of the academic community as our civilization has evolved because of its lack of research and ability to have control groups. So my last question is what is

02:01:49 the hope for psychoanalysis to be included in academia again in this world of research? Well, there's a lot of work being done, okay? Implicit bias, a lot of work being done in that which you could argue the psychoanalysts knew about before. Um, all the unconscious processing work that I discussed that people like Tim Shalas are doing huge amount of fascinating neurosis for example has written very well about this. So there's a lot of work on cognitive processes that are below the level of awareness. So implicit bias

02:02:22 that kind of work priming, right? I mean, you could argue that what goes on psychoanalytically is just a higher level version of of being primed in some way by your experiences. So it may not look to you like it's in the domain of the phenomenology you like, but at the level of processes beneath the level of awareness, huge amount of neuroscience. The the problem is that most of the research done in neuroscience does not have to do with what you are saying. What he said

02:02:53 is not really the same unconscious you are talking about. You are talking about what Freud called the dynamic unconscious. And uh to my knowledge there is very little work on the dynamic unconscious and in my own personal view is that psychoanalysts first need to define that better than they have uh starting with Freud's original work. I I'd also just say that mo most neuroscience is not at the high cognitive level at all. It's it's it's at levels of just understanding how

02:03:23 basic little pieces of neural circuits work and do very small things that are very far from cognitive processing, let alone consciousness. Um, so you know, we're we're just a long way from that level of understanding the brain. Okay. Thank you. I have one more question. No, I have two very different questions. The first one is assuming based on very poor science, I know that it was true. How do you integrate healing at a distance and sending messages at a distance into the

02:03:54 biology of mind? That's my first question. My second question is related to basically what was stimulated by our uh Cambridge speaker. uh when we have a slalom at the uh Olympics and they're going down and we know that they're using a long-term I'm using his words long-term motor skill learning and its relationship to higher cognitive processes such as decisionm how much is body language that is learned does that

02:04:26 put you at a lower or a higher level of mind and uh consciousness in terms of the This is the last, this was the last question. So, okay, in terms of the first one, the the minds talking to each other at a distance or healing at a distance, I think I, you know, at least for myself, I would say I don't believe in it. And um until somebody can scientifically demonstrate that it happens, I'm not going to try to explain it because I don't think it happens. Yeah. So, um just one general point. I

02:04:58 think I I I think what Ken said is something that for us who do psychology and neuroscience is very important. We talked about consciousness today, but we're far from being in a position scientifically. I mean, understanding and explanation. In other words, even now when it says looking at little circuits and they explain behavior, we do a very poor job of even that, right? In other words, it's the unspoken elephant in the room that we're not really that good at extrapolating from the behavior of neurons to behaviors. We can correlate but the understanding is

02:05:30 very poor. So we have to be super super modest. We do a really bad job at even the low-level stuff and here we are talking about consciousness. That's why philosophers are very important and psychologists before we get to the neurons. Okay. To the skill thing. Um I don't quite get your question. In other words, what are you saying being good at something physical makes you less cognitive? Is that what you're saying? Well, I'm saying that they spend a long time a long time learning uh how to move their bodies, but they make decisions at

02:06:02 the same time that they're going down that slalom. There is conscious thinking too. So, I'm just asking where do you put the learn body language? Is this now back to more a reflex response or are you dealing with a very advanced response about the role of the motor the role of the motor system and its connection to consciousness? Yeah. Well, I could talk for hours about that. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. [Music] [Applause]

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