Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View Podcast. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Trevor back the second time in podcast Studio Alpha aka
Speaker 1: my wife's office aka a shed I built. I hesitate
Speaker 1: to call it a shed. It's pretty nice. We've got
Speaker 1: French doors, we got a dormer, we've got six windows,
Speaker 1: we got a c it's pretty sweet, pretty sweet, and
Speaker 1: for one thousand dollars, I can give you a backstage two.
Speaker 1: And I'm kidding, but we do need to figure out
Speaker 1: a way to monetize this thing. No, I kid, I kid.
Speaker 1: It really is. As you often remind me listeners and emails,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a form of therapy. It's nice. There's
Speaker 1: something about the rant, there's something about the intellectual rant
Speaker 1: that's helpful. But the problem is, I don't know anyone
Speaker 1: in my day to day life that I can rant
Speaker 1: about this stuff with, because you got to be a
Speaker 1: kind of a specific person to be, you know, not
Speaker 1: like you. You might think even you out there like, oh,
Speaker 1: you'd love to talk about this stuff. But the truth is,
Speaker 1: I think it's fun to listen to. But as far
Speaker 1: as like having this type of conversation in real life,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little overwhelming. It's a little much. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like, can we just talk about the weather?
Speaker 1: You know? And so the one place I might go
Speaker 1: where I could find people who would be interested in
Speaker 1: talking about this stuff, you know, the university, my work colleagues.
Speaker 1: I just get I get so annoyed by that because
Speaker 1: they just disagree with me. You know, I want people
Speaker 1: to disagree with me. I mean, I want people to
Speaker 1: agree with me or at least perspective. But academia is
Speaker 1: so it's a reductionists. Now that that's difficult. So I'm
Speaker 1: excited to report that there are finally in this theory
Speaker 1: has been around for a while, but it's getting a
Speaker 1: lot of traction lately. There are finally some theories of
Speaker 1: consciousness that I think I would hesitate to call them
Speaker 1: purely reductionist or purely materialistic. Now they are physical, but
Speaker 1: there's something about them. They've got a little bit of something.
Speaker 1: I think. They still suffer from some of the same problems,
Speaker 1: but it's new. It's sort of a new dawn in neuroscience.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about that theory tonight. It's
Speaker 1: called integrated information theory. Now, I did a debate once
Speaker 1: and no It's funny because it was agreed that it
Speaker 1: wasn't a debate, but it was. This guy said, hey,
Speaker 1: could you come talk to my buddy. He's an atheist
Speaker 1: and he's like obsessed with AI and let's have a debate.
Speaker 1: And I said, no, I'm not interested in having a debate.
Speaker 1: And he said, okay, well just come have a talk
Speaker 1: the conversation. So I said sure. And so I was
Speaker 1: like kind of looking to have a talk and the
Speaker 1: guy was like, very quickly, like I need to understand
Speaker 1: what you believe so I can argue against it. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, buddy, well, I mean I guess this
Speaker 1: is what I believe. And then he's like hitting me
Speaker 1: with this tough It's like, oh boy, and basically his position,
Speaker 1: you know not. It's funny how often non scientific people
Speaker 1: are like enamored by science. And so his position really
Speaker 1: was that, hey, we figured this out. We figured out
Speaker 1: what consciousness is. It's called it. And he showed me
Speaker 1: a Nature paper and he said boom, I win. And
Speaker 1: you know a couple couple things. I am not really
Speaker 1: approaching this topic as a consciousness researcher. I'm just approaching
Speaker 1: this topic as I would say an educated layman. Yes,
Speaker 1: I do neuroscience research, but I don't study consciousness. You know,
Speaker 1: I study neurodegenerative disease and cerebrovascular disease. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if someone presents me with the Nature paper and says
Speaker 1: it's figured out, you know, I tend to take their
Speaker 1: word for it and just sort of retreat to my
Speaker 1: natural skepticism. You know that often we overinterpret findings. Often
Speaker 1: scientists make category errors. And so what I didn't know
Speaker 1: at the time is that I the theory he was
Speaker 1: espousing as the physical or the the reductionist materialistic answer
Speaker 1: to my fringe and wacky views that consciousness might be
Speaker 1: more than computation actually didn't support his position. You know,
Speaker 1: if I had just known more about it at the time,
Speaker 1: I could say, oh, well, interesting you brought that up,
Speaker 1: because that theory is more in line with my beliefs
Speaker 1: than yours. Anyway, Alas can't win every argument, so it
Speaker 1: might be good here before we play the clip. This
Speaker 1: is one of the best clips I've ever heard on
Speaker 1: I So you're in luck. It might be worth just
Speaker 1: clarifying the position here that we take on this show.
Speaker 1: And you know, if we have a recurring topic. It's
Speaker 1: this topic. And so what is the position? What is
Speaker 1: our you know, assuming you agree, what is our position
Speaker 1: here at the God side View podcast? And I think
Speaker 1: position is that consciousness is not excuse me, consciousness is
Speaker 1: not merely an epiphenomenon. And so to unpack what that means,
Speaker 1: it's not merely an emergent property of complexity. This isn't
Speaker 1: in the public, this is in the like pop science community,
Speaker 1: this is the most popular position in neurosciences, becoming increasingly
Speaker 1: less popular, but it's still preferred to something like the
Speaker 1: spirit or the soul, right, But at his heart, what
Speaker 1: it means is like, hey, you see when I show
Speaker 1: you an apple. If I scan your brain while I
Speaker 1: show you an apple, this part of your brain becomes active. Therefore,
Speaker 1: that part of the brain is what produces the experience
Speaker 1: of appleness, of seeing an apple, of having memories about
Speaker 1: times you've made an apple. It's all wrapped up in
Speaker 1: these neurons. And this is called the neural the neural
Speaker 1: correlates of experience. So when you experience something, what part
Speaker 1: of the brain becomes more active or less active? In harmony,
Speaker 1: whatever that part of the brain is. We can now
Speaker 1: say with certainty that this part of the brain explains
Speaker 1: the conscious experience of that thing you saw or smelled
Speaker 1: or remembered. And you know, certain parts of that circuitry
Speaker 1: are merely pragmatic, right, Like there are parts of your
Speaker 1: brain that merely allow you to interpret color and shape,
Speaker 1: and you know the the boundary, the threshold distinction, like
Speaker 1: where's the edge of the apple compared to the background.
Speaker 1: And we might call that like your primary visual cortex.
Speaker 1: But then there's another much more complex part of your
Speaker 1: brain where you have the conscious experience of that information,
Speaker 1: that visual information, and you might have an association with
Speaker 1: a memory. You might think about what an apple tastes like,
Speaker 1: what it smells like different apples you've seen. This is
Speaker 1: called association. And somewhere in there we think is the
Speaker 1: conscious experience, because in the moment where you report having
Speaker 1: the conscious experience of seeing the apple, this part of
Speaker 1: your brain was active. This is called neural correlates of consciousness,
Speaker 1: and it's for the most part how neuroscientists study consciousness.
Speaker 1: We don't buy it. We acknowledge, of course that you
Speaker 1: cannot have the conscious experience of seeing an apple or
Speaker 1: you know, et cetera without that basic hardware, but that
Speaker 1: the experience itself is fundamentally distinct, because of course you
Speaker 1: can imagine a system that could see an apple and
Speaker 1: respond to an apple and retrieve important information about apples
Speaker 1: without a conscious experience, like chat GBT for example. So
Speaker 1: clearly there is something else, There is more to the story.
Speaker 1: That is I think our basic position we are not
Speaker 1: automatons having an epiphenomenal conscious experience. We are embodied agents,
Speaker 1: and consciousness is some core feature of who or what
Speaker 1: we are, and it's unique, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: room for mystery in that, in that space of trying
Speaker 1: to answer this what is traditionally called the hard problem
Speaker 1: of consciousness, how do you get experience from matter? All right,
Speaker 1: let's jump into the clip. They start the clip off
Speaker 1: talking about the start of this research and Francis Quik
Speaker 1: was a big part of that, and so we're going
Speaker 1: to pick up right there with that conversation.
Speaker 2: They're sort of approach to it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: Was still a bit sort of materialist in a sound
Speaker 2: sort of old place for from neural Garletts. So okay,
Speaker 2: I nailed d NA. Francis creek. Right, Okay, now we
Speaker 2: can let's nail consciousness just finding the neurons so exactly.
Speaker 3: So now coming coming to the to the question.
Speaker 4: A bit there where we can be very grateful for
Speaker 4: these these pioneers for at least sort of blowing this
Speaker 4: box open that that we can even talk about the topic.
Speaker 4: But of course, what they what they did or I
Speaker 4: can you know, to give Francis quick As as an
Speaker 4: example here he basically imported certain let's say, paradigmatic assumptions
Speaker 4: from biochemistry, which is great. I mean you have to
Speaker 4: start bootstrapping from somewhere, right, So basic assumptions about biochemistry
Speaker 4: and a certain I guess mindset of thinking about emergent
Speaker 4: properties right in a biochemical sense, right, you might, for example,
Speaker 4: in a really simple sense, you might say life is
Speaker 4: an emergent property from certain biochemical processes or something, or
Speaker 4: even before life, you might talk about other you know,
Speaker 4: higher levels of biological organization or biological functions that somehow
Speaker 4: emerge from you know, this this biochemical substrate. And so
Speaker 4: they imported this way of thinking into the first research
Speaker 4: done in consciousness science. And so this was very good
Speaker 4: to get things off the ground, to get the search
Speaker 4: for neural correlates off the ground and so on. But
Speaker 4: you know, to quote Julio Tononian and Christoph Koch who
Speaker 4: often say this, the problem is that if you start
Speaker 4: from the physical world and you try to squeeze out consciousness, right,
Speaker 4: I think that's the way it really often says it.
Speaker 4: You know, it's never going to work. You're always going
Speaker 4: to be left with this this classic thing called the
Speaker 4: hard problem of consciousness. Right, if you're starting from the
Speaker 4: substrate as being what you what you think to be
Speaker 4: the base level of reality, right, you're always going to
Speaker 4: have this hard problem or this explanatory gap between you know,
Speaker 4: what you know about this physical substrate and and and
Speaker 4: the and the fact that consciousness is so qualitatively different
Speaker 4: from that, You're always going to be left with this
Speaker 4: sense that it's not really scratching your itch of explanation, right,
Speaker 4: there must be something else there. So yeah, so this
Speaker 4: absolutely is I would even say it's it's pretty predominant
Speaker 4: in the field still that people approach the question with
Speaker 4: this sort of emergentist thinking, and it's also applicable from
Speaker 4: a computational functionalist perspective. Well, for the most part, the
Speaker 4: notion of emergence might be a bit different if you
Speaker 4: think it emerges from some you know, information theoretic construct
Speaker 4: or some mathematical you know construct or something, or if
Speaker 4: it emerges from some neurofiring pattern or something, you know,
Speaker 4: the core kind.
Speaker 1: Of think about think about the degree of magical thinking
Speaker 1: you have to employ here. You know, we've got to
Speaker 1: be better about not letting the popular science people or
Speaker 1: even many you know, very professional neuroscientists. You need to
Speaker 1: be better about not letting them get away with insisting
Speaker 1: that their position is clearly the most logical, makes the
Speaker 1: least amount of assumptions, and has the most straightforward logic chain, right,
Speaker 1: Because to say that, to sort of wave your hands
Speaker 1: and say like, oh well, just sort of emerges out
Speaker 1: of firing patterns, this is speaking a desire into existence.
Speaker 1: It is not actually explanatory. It's just a statement of belief.
Speaker 1: There is no actual mechanistic explanation being conveyed. And usually,
Speaker 1: as like a layperson, you hear them say that, and
Speaker 1: you just sort of assume that that mechanistic explanation must
Speaker 1: exist somewhere. However, it does not because it can't because
Speaker 1: it's a category area. They're just explaining a correlation. They're
Speaker 1: showing you, Yeah, the brain looks like this when you're
Speaker 1: thinking about this, and it's like, okay, I can accept
Speaker 1: that as fact. Fair enough, Okay, So how does that
Speaker 1: explain consciousness? Oh? They're like, Oh, that's it. That's the end.
Speaker 1: You know, I've heard this good kind of example of
Speaker 1: like it was an interview with Sabine Hasenfelder. Actually I
Speaker 1: think it was Alex O'Connor and Sabine Hasenfelder, but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure where he said. Hey, you know, to me,
Speaker 1: it seems like, excuse me, I've got like a tickle
Speaker 1: in my throat. To me, it seems like like he
Speaker 1: was saying to Sabine, let me present you with the
Speaker 1: scenario over there is a light bulb, and as I'm talking,
Speaker 1: it turns on. Occasionally. Through experimentation, we can sort of
Speaker 1: figure out what you might call a scientific explanation, and
Speaker 1: you might say, you know, I notice that every time
Speaker 1: I hit like a high note, like if I ask
Speaker 1: a question like hey, what do you think about this?
Speaker 1: And I sort of have an upward inflection, it lights up.
Speaker 1: And I could run a series of experiments and I
Speaker 1: could go like, oh and I could say that was embarrassing.
Speaker 1: I could hum different notes and determine predictably that the
Speaker 1: light turns on at this time, and so I could
Speaker 1: write out a predictive model I could show, I could
Speaker 1: run all these empirical experiments in multiple trials and show
Speaker 1: at a frequency between this and this that light bulb illuminates. Right, correct, right,
Speaker 1: he says, just so, being correct, and she goes, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And you know the question then, is is that an
Speaker 1: adequate explanation? And some being said, yes, that's as much
Speaker 1: as you can hope for in science. And I actually
Speaker 1: kind of think that's true, because I think that is
Speaker 1: the domain science should operate in. But clearly, clearly that's
Speaker 1: not what Alex meant, right, Like, clearly that's not a
Speaker 1: satisfying explanation. You know, we want to know why who
Speaker 1: put the light there? You know, why does the system exist?
Speaker 1: Or you could even go deeper into the mechanistic explanation
Speaker 1: of like, you know, how does it work? You know,
Speaker 1: is it that the sound waves are vibrating some membrane
Speaker 1: that's connected, like you could you could even take like
Speaker 1: a detailed mechanistic chain that would be still scientific, but
Speaker 1: a better explanation, but really at the end, at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, we want to know, like why
Speaker 1: is this here? Does somebody put it here? You know,
Speaker 1: what's the point of it to serve some role? Is
Speaker 1: it arbitrary? You know? And scientists kind of like to
Speaker 1: pretend like they explained the latter with the former. You know,
Speaker 1: they like to say, like, well, since we can predict
Speaker 1: when the light will turn on, therefore we know why
Speaker 1: it exists, why it turns on, who put it there,
Speaker 1: how it got here, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 1: they'll often they'll often sort of try to do that
Speaker 1: slight of hand in conversation. And I think if you
Speaker 1: are someone who listens to popular scientific explanations of things,
Speaker 1: you have to be kind of vigilant for that. That
Speaker 1: is a that is something that is sort of slipped in,
Speaker 1: Like if you're listening to Richard Dawkins or Neil de
Speaker 1: grasse Tyson or you know, they're really bad examples. But
Speaker 1: even like much more credentialed and sophisticated scientists will make
Speaker 1: the same mistake.
Speaker 4: Pattern is more or less the same, and it is
Speaker 4: very different from that. It has a totally different approach
Speaker 4: to the question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm actually again sorry to depose again already, but
Speaker 1: he makes this claim that it is very different. I'm
Speaker 1: not really sure if that's true, but I'll let you
Speaker 1: be the judge. We're gonna listen to twenty minutes of this.
Speaker 1: It's long. We normally don't play that long of a
Speaker 1: clip on the show, so I'll do my best to
Speaker 1: listen in and try not to interrupt. But no promises indeed.
Speaker 1: And I find it funny that wasn't that there? It
Speaker 1: is bat between Dave Chalmers who sort of first phrase.
Speaker 2: The heart problem of consciousness? Right, how do we get
Speaker 2: from sort of the neuronal activity in our brains to
Speaker 2: mind the water of the wine of consciousness?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And then there was this bad I think also between
Speaker 2: Christoph who was still sort of finding those cologies and
Speaker 2: he lost it. Right. So, so where we are right
Speaker 2: now is that the art problem is pretty much established.
Speaker 2: I do think like in society and and and culture
Speaker 2: at large, we find it very hard to do not
Speaker 2: think that complex computational systems systems can give rise to consciousness. Right,
Speaker 2: So why exactly in I t is our touring machines
Speaker 2: that let's stick with computation. We have nowadays. Are our
Speaker 2: big l l ms are in the end all turing
Speaker 2: machines right? And why can't they be conscious?
Speaker 3: According to I T, Well, you have to look under
Speaker 3: the hood. In I T.
Speaker 4: What I mean by that is you have to look
Speaker 4: at how things are built, not just on what they do.
Speaker 4: So so, uh, you know, something that we often say
Speaker 4: in I is that consciousness is a.
Speaker 3: Question of being, not of doing right.
Speaker 4: So it takes a bit to you know that, maybe
Speaker 4: contemplate what that really what that means. But in more
Speaker 4: practical terms, most paradigms are functional as paradigms, meaning it's
Speaker 4: about about doing something right that you think consciousness is
Speaker 4: about somehow performing a certain function or computation something like that.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 4: Llms can indeed do much of what we can do,
Speaker 4: and especially if it's combined with some advanced robotics and
Speaker 4: so on, it'll end up being they'll end up being
Speaker 4: able to imitate our behavior assumably, you know, I would
Speaker 4: assume perfectly eventually. But the problem from it's perspective is
Speaker 4: that they're not built the right way right quite simply,
Speaker 4: where it says consciousness doesn't isn't produced somehow because of
Speaker 4: some sort of a function that you're doing, right, you
Speaker 4: can have you can build a system that is, let's say,
Speaker 4: functionally equivalent to a human but the wiring, to make
Speaker 4: it very simple, the architecture, the neural architecture is going
Speaker 4: to be completely different from from a human brains architecture.
Speaker 4: Then it might end up doing exactly the same thing, right,
Speaker 4: it might be just as intelligent, right in the way
Speaker 4: that we measure intelligence based on behavior and functions and
Speaker 4: so on.
Speaker 3: But because of the way this thing is built, because
Speaker 3: of how.
Speaker 4: It's wired, it it isn't an actual It isn't a
Speaker 4: conscious entity.
Speaker 1: Yeah right.
Speaker 2: I liked and you looked to know his book five
Speaker 2: where he compares it with the brain to sort of
Speaker 2: ads lark camera because we talking about images and is
Speaker 2: seeing stuff. I can our cameras here a I've reraten
Speaker 2: on a app sort of a Seamas sensor that reads
Speaker 2: out the photodiodes and gives the picture in the end. Right,
Speaker 2: So we end up both the picture and actually the
Speaker 2: cameras nowadays might even have a eye a resolution picture
Speaker 2: than I do. But if as you say, we look
Speaker 2: under the hood, I see quite neatly organized photodioids on
Speaker 2: that sensor that correct me if I'm wrong. Aren't truly
Speaker 2: interconnected the one it's next to the other and doesn't
Speaker 2: connect to the other one. It's just in the end
Speaker 2: of the processing it gives us that image. So I
Speaker 2: guess then integrated information as that photo camera is not
Speaker 2: integ integration low, processing power probably high. I can give
Speaker 2: eight K video stream image, so that's good computation output high,
Speaker 2: but integration low exactly so, and then the theory would say, Okay,
Speaker 2: therefore the camera is not conscious because it's integration is.
Speaker 3: Low or even non existent actually in that case.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you can think of the way most computers
Speaker 4: today are built. I mean, by the way, before I
Speaker 4: say too much, I should give credit to especially my
Speaker 4: colleagues Graham Findley and Billy Marshall, who recently came out
Speaker 4: with a great paper that's called Dissociating intelligence from Consciousness.
Speaker 3: I shouldn't have papered by heart, but it's interesting.
Speaker 4: We call it computer consciousness for short in the description.
Speaker 2: Actually, nice to just park that one for a bit,
Speaker 2: just intelligence versus consciousness.
Speaker 3: It's just yeah, well, but it's this question.
Speaker 4: Actually, if you know l l M's basically indeed, you
Speaker 4: know or it's even to some degree that the camera
Speaker 4: related to the camera past. So in a really simple sense,
Speaker 4: you know, computers is how they're they're typically structured.
Speaker 3: People refer to it as feed.
Speaker 4: Forward processing, where there's not a lot of cross talk
Speaker 4: between modules, right, and so information is kind of sent up,
Speaker 4: sent up this hierarchy and different you know, feed forward
Speaker 4: streams in through different modules and it ends up being
Speaker 4: processed at higher levels and then you know, create some
Speaker 4: sort of an output, right, and so a you could
Speaker 4: in theory build a a neuromorphic computer and it would
Speaker 4: say something different about that case. Right, You can just
Speaker 4: table that though, but if you just compare the way
Speaker 4: you know, computers are also your your digital camera there,
Speaker 4: the way it's wired, it's totally different from how the
Speaker 4: brain is wired. Right, and without getting into too many details,
Speaker 4: you know this the LLM or what the computer powering
Speaker 4: the LLM, it's simply as a whole does not have
Speaker 4: a what we would call a maximal of integrated information.
Speaker 3: It simply isn't.
Speaker 4: It doesn't hang together you could say as a single entity. Right,
Speaker 4: it doesn't actually hang together. It hangs together for us
Speaker 4: when we look at it, right, and its functions seem
Speaker 4: to hang together for us as external extrinsic observers of it,
Speaker 4: but in itself, you know, to use an it term,
Speaker 4: it's intrinsic from its intrinsic perspective, if you will. It's
Speaker 4: not really a thing, right, it doesn't hang together as
Speaker 4: a thing.
Speaker 3: But if you look at a human brain, it.
Speaker 4: Indeeds or at least certain parts of the brain. We
Speaker 4: should be very precise the substrate of consciousness, which is
Speaker 4: a sub portion of my brain in I T. It's
Speaker 4: predicted to be a region mostly of posterior cortex. We
Speaker 4: call it the posterior hot zone. And this, this part
Speaker 4: of the brain is wired completely differently right in a
Speaker 4: fully integrated system. And interestingly, to even draw a parallel
Speaker 4: to the brain, there is a certain part of the
Speaker 4: brain that's actually wired more like this computer I.
Speaker 1: We'll pause right there. This is incredibly compelling number one,
Speaker 1: just to let you know. However, I worry we're in
Speaker 1: danger of making the same mistake where we just attribute
Speaker 1: something we see as explanatory. Now it's a little bit
Speaker 1: tougher to make that case with I T I T
Speaker 1: is a much more sophisticated theory than just neural correlates.
Speaker 1: But I almost think you could argue we still just
Speaker 1: start talking about neural correlates. So let's think it through
Speaker 1: a little bit. Well, maybe we'll actually make the pro
Speaker 1: I case. First, there are parts of your brain. You
Speaker 1: notice he's not really defining, like he hasn't really explained
Speaker 1: what this means. Like he's describing a computer as like
Speaker 1: or a picture like a chip, right, and all the
Speaker 1: circuitry in the computer from our perspective, From an extrinsic perspective,
Speaker 1: it looks like one thing. But one thing is a
Speaker 1: pretty vague definition, actually, and I think I argues that
Speaker 1: you can be more sophisticated in the way you describe
Speaker 1: like thingness. And the word they use for this is integration.
Speaker 1: And I don't love that because integration actually means something
Speaker 1: different in neurophysiology. But that's okay. And I've been really
Speaker 1: desperate to try to understand what they mean by integration
Speaker 1: because they say it all the time, and they're talking
Speaker 1: about there's more integration in this part of the brain.
Speaker 1: So that's where consciousness is. And after a bit of searching,
Speaker 1: it's actually much simpler than I expected. So you can
Speaker 1: think of the way a computer works as largely being
Speaker 1: like a serial processor, like an if then type of thing,
Speaker 1: and the actual circuits are in series. That's sort of
Speaker 1: an oversimplification, and it's sort of a feed forward, you know,
Speaker 1: so you start in one spot and end in the
Speaker 1: other spot. But integration would imply almost like some recursiveness
Speaker 1: and some crosstalk, and so there is this like feedback
Speaker 1: loop rather than a feed forward processing. And the more
Speaker 1: of this you have, the sort of the more self
Speaker 1: supporting circuits you have, the more conscious that region of
Speaker 1: the brain would be, or theoretically like an AI could be. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, we've known about this stuff forever,
Speaker 1: and we've known that the brain operates this way as
Speaker 1: divergent circuits and convergent circuits and parallel processing and serial processing.
Speaker 1: And it is true that the more complex parts of
Speaker 1: the brain that we've traditionally always associated with consciousness tend
Speaker 1: to have more of that. So in a sense you
Speaker 1: could argue that this really isn't a new theory, because
Speaker 1: I mean, this has sort of always been my understanding.
Speaker 1: We have these things called multimodal association areas, or these
Speaker 1: big swaths of the brain that have tons of inputs
Speaker 1: from all the other parts of the brain, lots of
Speaker 1: neuron crosstalk, meaning there's a lot of neuron firing going
Speaker 1: on between neurons in the same region. Like it's just
Speaker 1: highly networked. And I don't know, I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is true, but I would assume there's also a
Speaker 1: lot of like feedback loops in this part of the
Speaker 1: brain in terms of the actual neural architecture. And so
Speaker 1: these areas are called association areas or multimodal association areas,
Speaker 1: and they've always been associated with consciousness. So I just
Speaker 1: don't know if this really solves the problem. However, it
Speaker 1: does present a new challenge for people like me who
Speaker 1: try to sort of pump the brakes on this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, like this rush to assume we could invent
Speaker 1: consciousness in machine AI consciousness the new line I think
Speaker 1: is going to become well as soon as we figure
Speaker 1: out how to actually mimic neural architecture in conscious regions
Speaker 1: of the brain, we can produce consciousness. And you know,
Speaker 1: so it really is just the same argument as we've
Speaker 1: always had. You know. The thing is the first wave
Speaker 1: of like AI in the in the seventies, like Frederica Fijien.
Speaker 1: We've talked about him on the show before, Joseph Wisenbaum. Uh,
Speaker 1: but Federico Fagen specifically, he was really into trying to
Speaker 1: do this, like he he. I think he might have
Speaker 1: coined the term neural networks, the idea that you can
Speaker 1: make AI systems that look like the brain in terms
Speaker 1: of their actual you know, circuitry is the wrong word,
Speaker 1: but their actual the actual mathematic they use too to
Speaker 1: produce language. And I think they ended up kind of
Speaker 1: moving in a new direction and now now it sort
Speaker 1: of works quite differently. It's it's just a predictive model,
Speaker 1: but it's very linear rather than recursive or having like
Speaker 1: a feedback loop. So I don't know, I think it's
Speaker 1: a good time to get into this space, Like if
Speaker 1: you're looking for a job for your kids. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm a millennial, so like I feel like the story
Speaker 1: of the millennial generation is like all the device, all
Speaker 1: the advice we received was terrible, you know, like, yes,
Speaker 1: borrow money, go to school, because you get if you
Speaker 1: don't have a degree, you're screwed, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And I generally think that's good advice, but really really,
Speaker 1: all that happened is now like a bachelor's degree became
Speaker 1: like high school to bloma. Everybody's in debt. Everybody got
Speaker 1: in house since they can't afford. There's a financial crisis.
Speaker 1: Right when everyone is telling that people to save, you know, invest,
Speaker 1: save invest, everyone loses everything. It's just been a series
Speaker 1: of catastrophe. And so the advice, my instinct, the advice
Speaker 1: is to say, don't get into academia. That's what everybody's
Speaker 1: saying right now. Everybody's saying, don't get in academia. Don't
Speaker 1: get in academia. But I don't know. I think it
Speaker 1: might be a good time to push kids into the sciences,
Speaker 1: because yes, the reputation of science has never been worse.
Speaker 1: But I do feel like a hunger to do better,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think it is kind of a
Speaker 1: manifestation of that, even though I still disagree. I don't
Speaker 1: think this is it. I don't know, But that could
Speaker 1: just be the religiousness in me talking, you know, because
Speaker 1: there is this I think sphere that if we were
Speaker 1: to actually figure out how consciousness works, that might do
Speaker 1: something to invalidate religion or spiritual spirituality. But actually that
Speaker 1: maybe is silly because you know, we believe we're created.
Speaker 1: You know, this is this is a Christian not just Christians,
Speaker 1: but this is a basic fundamental Christian doctrine. As we
Speaker 1: believe we were created. So why with enough time and
Speaker 1: energy and smarts could we not create something that is conscious?
Speaker 1: How would this invalidate anything? I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: really common argument in origin of life research or you know,
Speaker 1: in uh yeah, because people. This is a huge tangent. Actually,
Speaker 1: I actually have a clip for that, so we'll do
Speaker 1: that maybe next episode. They some scientists recently claimed to
Speaker 1: have produced cells from scratch, and it's a hot topic
Speaker 1: right now and evolution talk and research and religion and
Speaker 1: theology and stuff, so we'll talk about another time. Let's
Speaker 1: just get back to the clip.
Speaker 3: And that's a cerebellum, right, this little mini brain that
Speaker 3: we have.
Speaker 1: I talked for so long, I should remind you. So
Speaker 1: the point he's making is that there are parts of
Speaker 1: your brain that do sort of work like a computer,
Speaker 1: like a traditional linear processor, and the cerebellum is one
Speaker 1: of them. And interestingly enough, the cerebellum is not related
Speaker 1: to consciousness. So it's a good argument underneath.
Speaker 2: Okay, there do neurons have less cross stalk.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, the writing is much more modular, much more feed forward.
Speaker 4: It kind of imitates or the way typical computer architecture
Speaker 4: is sort of imitates a bit the way a cerebellum works.
Speaker 4: And interestingly, one of the very early insights that Julio
Speaker 4: had as a neural.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I have to interrupt, so I'm in the shed.
Speaker 1: My is here with me. He's playing on his iPad.
Speaker 1: He just looked over at me, gave me a thumbs
Speaker 1: up and said, hey, you're doing good on your podcast.
Speaker 1: I love him, man, he is literally the best. Okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: sorry for the interruption.
Speaker 4: Scientist was it seems awfully curious that the cerebellum is
Speaker 4: something like three fourths or four fifths of the neurons
Speaker 4: in the brain, something like sixty billion neurons, I think.
Speaker 4: And apparently you can severely damage it, or people can
Speaker 4: even be born without a cerebellum and it doesn't really
Speaker 4: affect their conscious experience. Of course, it'll affect your ability
Speaker 4: to walk smoothly and to speak and to.
Speaker 1: This is like a common misconception. People assume that you know,
Speaker 1: the bulk of your brain is dedicated to emotion or
Speaker 1: language processing, or cognition or memory. But no, by a
Speaker 1: huge margin. It's dedicated to being able to move around.
Speaker 1: It's insanely difficult to just move around. And this has
Speaker 1: sort of been a problem, you know, for the complexity
Speaker 1: is the root of consciousness crowd because the parts of
Speaker 1: your brain that are the most complex in one sense,
Speaker 1: in the sense that they have a lot of neurons,
Speaker 1: and neurons are extremely complex, they have complex architecture. So
Speaker 1: you could argue that, hey, if four fifths of all
Speaker 1: the neurons in your brain are for movement, you know,
Speaker 1: then then why why aren't why aren't those super complex
Speaker 1: parts of your brain? Like why why why isn't that
Speaker 1: it that the conscious parts of your brain are complex? Sorry,
Speaker 1: that was a weird way of saying that, And I
Speaker 1: kind of attempts to answer that question because they say,
Speaker 1: you know, those parts of your brain are structured differently.
Speaker 1: They're structured the way a computer is structure, and so
Speaker 1: it makes sense that they're not conscious because computers aren't conscious,
Speaker 1: you know. But the parts of your brain that aren't
Speaker 1: related to consciousness are structured differently. That's the claim, and
Speaker 1: there certainly is some truth to that, But you could
Speaker 1: just as easily argue that they're structured differently because they
Speaker 1: do different things. You know. The reason there's a lot
Speaker 1: of complex circuitry in an association areas because you're tying
Speaker 1: together multiple brain regions. You know, you like for your
Speaker 1: visual association cortex. I mean basically you're you're pulling in
Speaker 1: you know, there's fibers running from the primary visual cortex
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of connections with other brain regions.
Speaker 1: So you can relate visual experiences to memory, sure, but
Speaker 1: also to language. You know, if you see your friend,
Speaker 1: you need to trigger that that pathway right that allows
Speaker 1: you to produce speech. Hey, how's it going? You know, Oh,
Speaker 1: I seen you just reminded me that I forgot to
Speaker 1: get back to you yesterday. I'm sorry, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Like there, it's it's language, its memory, all
Speaker 1: sorts of things. So, so of course those areas are
Speaker 1: going to have more inter connections because that's what that
Speaker 1: part of the brain does, is it connects disparate parts
Speaker 1: of the brain. So anyway, so that that but it's
Speaker 1: a good argument. You know, it is a really good.
Speaker 4: Remotor skills and so on. But your conscious experience apparently
Speaker 4: is is unchanged, and so that should be a very
Speaker 4: interesting insight, right, So there is a bit of a parallel.
Speaker 4: This is one of the original you know, intuition pumps
Speaker 4: that Julio had for thinking about about consciousness.
Speaker 3: And there is a total parallel.
Speaker 4: Between how computers are typically wired and how the cerebellum
Speaker 4: is wired.
Speaker 2: And very rough term that I find interesting because that
Speaker 2: to me, that really helped me to sort of that's
Speaker 2: really in favor i'd say of I t as sort
Speaker 2: of a scientific theory to to sort of measure so
Speaker 2: to speak, consciousness, because up to now we had to
Speaker 2: do with like the reports and then you would end
Speaker 2: up just like maturing test for consciousness. Because yeah, but
Speaker 2: that we are already there, right if if if I
Speaker 2: talk to our lll ms, how do you feel to
Speaker 2: get like a conscious simulation will be a hard so
Speaker 2: that that's already passed. But now we have a way
Speaker 2: to say because in humans you can damage the architecture
Speaker 2: that is the same as the l l M you're saying,
Speaker 2: So the cerebellum, we have a sort of actor if
Speaker 2: we can and and still the person reports consciousness or
Speaker 2: or shows consciousness and where if we damage the cerebrum,
Speaker 2: so in the hot song we damage stuff that then
Speaker 2: we see consciousness.
Speaker 3: Absolutely and certainly being damaged in the right areas. Yeah,
Speaker 3: absolutely so.
Speaker 2: In I T you can measure the amount of integration, right,
Speaker 2: and that's called fire.
Speaker 1: It's maybe good to mention here, Like if you have
Speaker 1: a more confrontational perspective like I do in regards to
Speaker 1: what consciousness is, you need to be careful what you
Speaker 1: allow your actual opinion to be, because if you start
Speaker 1: finding yourself saying things like or thinking things like, the
Speaker 1: brain doesn't produce consciousness. It's kind of a problem because
Speaker 1: like we know, there are these specific areas in your
Speaker 1: brain that if you damage them, you're no longer conscious.
Speaker 1: You know, so clearly, clearly you cannot be conscious without
Speaker 1: a brain. The question is what is it about the brain?
Speaker 1: A mechanical structure, a physical structure that can give rise
Speaker 1: to subjective experience? Is there some other what you know?
Speaker 1: That's why I like the quantum theories, and of course
Speaker 1: it's not lost to me the obvious parallels between sort
Speaker 1: of like the quantum strangeness and spirituality, you know, entanglement,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, so you know, I like that, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: But if you start kind of I don't know if
Speaker 1: I want to go as far as to say you
Speaker 1: can't be conscious with that, No I do. I do.
Speaker 1: And so this is not to say that there's nothing
Speaker 1: that could exist without your body, although, you know, not
Speaker 1: to get theological for a second, but this is I
Speaker 1: think sort of a misconception about what the Christian belief is.
Speaker 1: And my friend actually called me out on this. Who
Speaker 1: I've been arguing with about theology is you know, the
Speaker 1: word soul is an interesting word because if you actually
Speaker 1: go look at how the early Christian use that word,
Speaker 1: how the ancient Hebrews use that word, how the God
Speaker 1: of the Old Testament describes the definition of that word.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean like some force that can exist apart
Speaker 1: from the body. Soul is very specifically a person. The
Speaker 1: word soul is used the way the captain of an
Speaker 1: airplane might use the word soul like you know, Delta
Speaker 1: seven three two, three hundred and forty souls on board.
Speaker 1: You know, it just means person. Now, there is a
Speaker 1: word for what we would traditionally call a soul, but
Speaker 1: it's very specifically from God, and that word is spirit.
Speaker 1: And so the implication and this comes down to like
Speaker 1: how people interpret the state of the dead and stuff.
Speaker 1: This is like theologically complex, but there are many Christian
Speaker 1: denominations that I don't really think of heaven as a
Speaker 1: place you go spiritually, like as a disembodied spirit, but
Speaker 1: rather instead, and I think this is backed up scripturally,
Speaker 1: is that you know, well, this is this part is
Speaker 1: definitely backed up scripturally, is that when you pass, you
Speaker 1: cease to exist until judgment Day, at which point you
Speaker 1: are literally resurrected. You're given a new body, and you know,
Speaker 1: a glorified body when that doesn't age or whatever. And
Speaker 1: so actually it's kind of interesting because the the actual
Speaker 1: like I would say, I don't know if traditional is
Speaker 1: the right word, but certainly a large portion of Christians
Speaker 1: believe this. It's and that is actually very combatible with
Speaker 1: some modern scientific explanations for consciousness. You know that you
Speaker 1: need you need this easing, complex machine called the brain,
Speaker 1: plus something that's sort of difficult to describe from God,
Speaker 1: his breath or spirit. And certainly I think there's all
Speaker 1: sorts of really amazing and complex things that could be
Speaker 1: So so I think I actually am pretty comfortable saying
Speaker 1: that you know that you cannot have conscious subjective experience
Speaker 1: without a physical brain, because what would that even mean,
Speaker 1: What would that even mean? You'd have no sensory input,
Speaker 1: you'd have no ability to form memories. And this is
Speaker 1: something that's really critical about what consciousness is and what
Speaker 1: memory is. You know, consciousness the brain, and the brain
Speaker 1: allows us to experience linear time if you think about it.
Speaker 1: And I had this conversation with Mike Weist. Go back
Speaker 1: and listen to that interview. I'm going to keep it,
Speaker 1: and I think it was kind of profound. Actually I
Speaker 1: hate to admit it, but this idea that if you're
Speaker 1: in free fall, if you just jumped out of an
Speaker 1: airplane without a parachute, if you didn't have the ability
Speaker 1: to archive subjective experience like frame by frame, would you
Speaker 1: know you're falling? And your instinct might be well, of
Speaker 1: course the wind is rushing past me, you know. But no, no,
Speaker 1: because that wind rushing past you has a temporal component.
Speaker 1: Time is a part of that. You have to move
Speaker 1: through the air in space, yes, but in time. So
Speaker 1: if you cannot archive that experience, that linear temporal experience,
Speaker 1: then no, you're not falling. So what would what would
Speaker 1: conscious experience even be without that machine brain that allows
Speaker 1: you to archive experience. The question then is just well,
Speaker 1: but it's still you still have the hard problem of consciousness.
Speaker 1: There still is this mystery of like how do you
Speaker 1: actually have subjective experience? And it is interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: what does God say his name is in the Bible?
Speaker 1: It's being itself? And so isn't it just weird that
Speaker 1: the one part of the brain, just the one part
Speaker 1: we can't figure out is this this concept of being?
Speaker 1: So the one part that's elusive, the hard problem of consciousness, right,
Speaker 1: the subjective experience aspect just happens to be the thing
Speaker 1: that was breathed into us at our creation in the
Speaker 1: biblical account. It's interesting. I mean, listen, you can read
Speaker 1: the Everyone reads the Bible. They come up with their
Speaker 1: own ideas. They're trying to project things onto it and
Speaker 1: pull things out of it. I'm just spitballing, but it
Speaker 1: is kind of an interesting coinket in you know, don't
Speaker 1: you think, like, like, man, we've we've we've mapped the brain.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, We've figured all these things out. How this works.
Speaker 1: It's oh, there's a wolf howling. I wish I didn't
Speaker 1: have my background noise suppressor on. You could have heard
Speaker 1: a wolf can't be a wolf, must be a coyote.
Speaker 1: Do you hear that? Is that your iPad? Or is
Speaker 1: that your iPad? Such a nitting I wish I could
Speaker 1: edit that out? Is that really your ipet? It's so funny,
Speaker 1: it sounds so real. Oh my gosh, that was so embarrassing. Well,
Speaker 1: I go on walks around here and there are coyotes
Speaker 1: that how but they don't sound like that? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was dumb. We don't have wolves here. What was
Speaker 1: I talking about? Anyway, That's fine, let's keep listening.
Speaker 2: That the way to put it, ye okay, how to
Speaker 2: measure it?
Speaker 3: To measure okay?
Speaker 4: Well, so this is where we can really distinguish IET
Speaker 4: as a theory, right with a capital T, a theory
Speaker 4: of consciousness, because it of course takes certain insights into
Speaker 4: how the brain is wired, how the brain works, and
Speaker 4: so on. It takes it uses those insights to inform
Speaker 4: the theoretical development. But the actual theory itself is highly
Speaker 4: mathematical and based on working with what we call toy systems, right,
Speaker 4: toy models and the reason So it might mean for example,
Speaker 4: a model of six neurons. We can call them neurons,
Speaker 4: but we tend to use a more generic term like unit,
Speaker 4: because it might also be modeling, you know, entire mini
Speaker 4: columns in the brain, or even whole.
Speaker 3: Cortical areas of the brain.
Speaker 4: Right, So we just say we try to build our
Speaker 4: a model of six or ten or whatever units. Right,
Speaker 4: you can think of them as neurons for now, and
Speaker 4: in order to become a proper theory, at least from
Speaker 4: it's perspective, right, with a capital T, you want to
Speaker 4: be as precise as possible, right with what you're what
Speaker 4: you're really articulating.
Speaker 3: You want to be more than just a good a
Speaker 3: good metaphor or a good.
Speaker 4: Kind of hunch, right, but you really want to be
Speaker 4: as mathematically rigorous as you can.
Speaker 3: So with this aspiration, we.
Speaker 4: Intentionally work with idealized uh you know, toy systems right
Speaker 4: of neurons likeness. So the way that that this calculation
Speaker 4: of five, right, the way this is done is very
Speaker 4: precisely formalized based on these these toy systems.
Speaker 1: I kind of went on a long monologue there. I
Speaker 1: should point out this is a very important section because
Speaker 1: most likely if you're listening to this. No, it's not fair,
Speaker 1: because I I've listened to the forty minutes before this portion.
Speaker 1: This is to me the most the part I'm playing
Speaker 1: is the most interesting part. But you know, when I
Speaker 1: got to this part, I was finally like, okay, finally,
Speaker 1: because the whole time you're like, how is this different
Speaker 1: than anything else? You know, how is this different than
Speaker 1: any existing idea? And what's different about it is they
Speaker 1: can they claim to be able to measure it. They
Speaker 1: claim to be able to measure integration. And that's interesting
Speaker 1: because you can measure integration and someone who's asleep, someone
Speaker 1: who's awake, someone who's dreaming, someone who's under anesthesia, and
Speaker 1: theoretically you should find you should have different levels of
Speaker 1: integration at these different you know states. I'll admit though,
Speaker 1: it's very confusing because before this I was thinking of
Speaker 1: integration as a physical, a structural, architectural feature of parts
Speaker 1: of the brain. However, if you can have different levels
Speaker 1: of integration in different brain states like sleeping awake, then
Speaker 1: clearly it's not you know, it's no longer architectural. So
Speaker 1: now I'm a little bit confused because because now it's
Speaker 1: sort of starting to sound like a neural correlates again,
Speaker 1: because this is what we do in fMRI. We see
Speaker 1: what parts of the brain activate at the same time.
Speaker 1: We call those networks, and we can measure the degree
Speaker 1: of connectivity in a brain region. And so to me,
Speaker 1: this just sounds like basic neuroscience again. So I'll admit
Speaker 1: I am sort of struggling to understand what's unique about this,
Speaker 1: but let's listen.
Speaker 4: The major challenge and as a shout out to any
Speaker 4: possible postdocs out there, but the major challenge is then saying, Okay,
Speaker 4: how do you relate this theoretical model, which is very
Speaker 4: elegant really and very insightful, right, offers a lot of
Speaker 4: insights also into thinking about what to look for in
Speaker 4: the brain and so on when you look for neural correlates, etc.
Speaker 4: But scaling up, if you like, from six neurons to
Speaker 4: eighty billion, it's.
Speaker 3: Not so easy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so just as a simple example, I think
Speaker 4: the software that we use right now, it's called pi fi, right,
Speaker 4: it's a Python software to use to calculate five I
Speaker 4: think it maxes out somewhere around maybe thirty thirty units,
Speaker 4: and then beyond that it's just astronomical the amount of
Speaker 4: compute you need to actually compute five precisely right, somewhere
Speaker 4: between twenty to thirty.
Speaker 3: I think it maxes out.
Speaker 2: But the interesting thing to me is that you can
Speaker 2: have a system that sort of computationally has the same power,
Speaker 2: right like say, is a very simple toy system as
Speaker 2: you color, like like six nodes, and then computationally you
Speaker 2: have one that is only has feed forward like modular
Speaker 2: computation as we know it, and the other one is higher,
Speaker 2: very eighth grade. If it would put a scheme, it
Speaker 2: would be like, yeah, just like lots of cross connections.
Speaker 2: And then it predicts that even if that system which
Speaker 2: has a high, perhaps even as less computational output, it
Speaker 2: still is more conscious than that system that is not integrated.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That's sort of an implication of the theory.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you're yeah, yeah, so any I mean, and
Speaker 4: I'd be curious.
Speaker 2: Sorry, but I asked it's to distinguish between intelligence and
Speaker 2: consciousness because it points to the fact that sort of
Speaker 2: our l ms can because we are so wired to
Speaker 2: associate those two together complete. We always see That's what
Speaker 2: Christoff solved me. Also in nature, we just see this
Speaker 2: line if consciousness. If intelligence goes goes goes up, consciousness
Speaker 2: goes up. And that's we're used to this curve, and
Speaker 2: and and and and that's what's so weird the times
Speaker 2: we're living in that maybe we now systems that are
Speaker 2: super intelligent but not conscious.
Speaker 4: So they can be completely dissociated within it's framework, right intelligence,
Speaker 4: you might have something that's hyper intelligent, even way better
Speaker 4: than you and I are with any you know, human
Speaker 4: or quasi human function, but completely no no consciousness, and
Speaker 4: vice versa. You might have a system that's highly conscious
Speaker 4: but not intelligent, right believing, So this is what I
Speaker 4: would predict, right, they're totally dissociable. But it is also
Speaker 4: useful to point out that in nature what we probably
Speaker 4: see and this is let's say, part of the implications
Speaker 4: of it more than the actual formalism of the theory itself,
Speaker 4: but in nature because of pressure of evolution. Actually, our
Speaker 4: colleague Lariss album Taki has done some work on this
Speaker 4: to show that there is arguably evolutionary pressure, which is
Speaker 4: of course functional pressure right to survive, there is evolutionary
Speaker 4: pressure that ends up favoring integrated systems rather than you know,
Speaker 4: frag or modular systems, right, So there is you know.
Speaker 4: So I'm trying to say, even though these these intelligence
Speaker 4: and consciousness can be dissociated in theory, and they should be,
Speaker 4: right according to I, in evolutionary terms, probably they usually
Speaker 4: go together, right pretty tightly.
Speaker 2: That's interesting because points to me, it points to that
Speaker 2: that consciousness has a function in an evolution. Well, I
Speaker 2: believe why else would sort of evolution favor for systems
Speaker 2: that at that integration, that that that evolution favors for
Speaker 2: what it is like to be something?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think I'll be I think it'll be a slippery slope.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: The reason I kind of, you know, shake my head
Speaker 4: a bit is to say, this sort of framing of
Speaker 4: the problem. Yeah, it's very very commonly adopted by let's say,
Speaker 4: functionalist frameworks to somehow justify why consciousness is sort of
Speaker 4: along for the ride, right. Yeah, But it's a little
Speaker 4: it's a slippery slope because usually the way the paradigms
Speaker 4: that that these the paradigms of these theories are treating
Speaker 4: consciousness as just another function, right yeah, And and I
Speaker 4: guess from it's perspective it isn't.
Speaker 3: Just another function.
Speaker 4: I mean from from yours and my intrinsic perspective, it's
Speaker 4: literally all there is to existence, I mean our consciousness.
Speaker 4: I mean without consciousness, what are we even? What are
Speaker 4: we even talking about when we talk about existence?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: I mean this is the this is the approach that
Speaker 4: I would take there. So, yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 4: think in it's terms, we probably wouldn't think about the
Speaker 4: utility of consciousness for survival and so on.
Speaker 3: Or I think I'll get into you know.
Speaker 4: Hot waters if I If I try to get too
Speaker 4: far in that direction, because people immediately.
Speaker 3: Think of it from a functionalist view.
Speaker 2: That's tackles sort of another another interesting thing about it,
Speaker 2: and that to me is sort of it's sort of substraight.
Speaker 2: And one one is it's highly focused on the substrate.
Speaker 2: That was when I first encountered it. That was sort
Speaker 2: of what put me off. But that was I was
Speaker 2: new into consciousness and I said, ah, this is again
Speaker 2: a very brain based theory. No brain never mind, so
Speaker 2: and I was didn't, only to discover later that the
Speaker 2: theory is is actually quite substraight independent sort of. It
Speaker 2: says it needs this integration, but it could be you
Speaker 2: already said it could be neuromorphic chips for answers. So
Speaker 2: could you sort of talk a bit about that. So
Speaker 2: to what degree is it can of anything that is
Speaker 2: just integrated be conscious?
Speaker 4: Okay, So I think you know, our lead up until now,
Speaker 4: we've been touching on many different little bits here and
Speaker 4: there about the theory. But maybe it's useful to offer
Speaker 4: a kind of you know, I T in a nutshell,
Speaker 4: to formalize it a little bit.
Speaker 3: I think it would be useful at this.
Speaker 4: Point where you know, it takes a very different approach
Speaker 4: from yeah, standard approaches to the question of consciousness, And
Speaker 4: before we even get into the approach of I T
Speaker 4: it's worth it to even articulate what are the key
Speaker 4: questions that it's trying to ask, because I think when
Speaker 4: we have the questions clear, you also see these, let's say,
Speaker 4: differences of the theory.
Speaker 1: I'm going to jump ahead to the most replayed part
Speaker 1: of the video and then we'll wrap up.
Speaker 4: And that is different from the feeling of you know,
Speaker 4: of what it is like to smell lavender or whatever else, right,
Speaker 4: And there must be some systematic reason why this feels
Speaker 4: like that, and lavender, the smell of lavender feels the
Speaker 4: way it does, and you know, a countless number of
Speaker 4: other experiences feel the way they do. Right, So this
Speaker 4: second question is I mean, the first question is already
Speaker 4: tough enough, right, the second question is really tricky, right,
Speaker 4: And so you can think.
Speaker 3: Of this is what I would call a proper theory.
Speaker 4: Of consciousness has to actually answer both of these questions,
Speaker 4: or at least provide a plausible path to answering both
Speaker 4: of these questions in a fair way.
Speaker 2: Jeremiah, I know that this is a bit of a
Speaker 2: sort of I'm just saying. I'm just saying what a
Speaker 2: lot of people think, namely that under fMRI or EG scanners,
Speaker 2: we can already sort of see think about an apple,
Speaker 2: we can see something.
Speaker 1: Light app Oh oh boy, this sounds like me that's.
Speaker 2: The apple neuralin can read it. So aren't we there already?
Speaker 4: So you're you're you're sort of depends on what one
Speaker 4: means by answering a why question, right, So there are
Speaker 4: certainly some people if you say, okay, why does the
Speaker 4: apple feel the way it does, and then someone says, oh,
Speaker 4: it's because these neurons are firing in you know, visual
Speaker 4: cortex or something or whatever. Right, Okay, Well does that
Speaker 4: scratch your itch of explanation or not. For some people
Speaker 4: they might say it does. Other people might say, no,
Speaker 4: this feels there's some correlation between these things, but they're
Speaker 4: apples and oranges. When you try to, you know, draw
Speaker 4: some meaningful you know, relate these in some way, right,
Speaker 4: you're still.
Speaker 3: Left with either the hard problem.
Speaker 4: Or the explanatory gap, or whatever whatever framing you like.
Speaker 2: Right, it's not causation. So it's this correlation.
Speaker 3: By not causation, I mean it's even beyond that.
Speaker 4: I mean, I honestly think of it in very simple
Speaker 4: terms of it. It doesn't scratch your itch of explanation. Right,
Speaker 4: there's this gap between you know, why should it be
Speaker 4: that these neurons firing there in the brain somehow correlate
Speaker 4: with apple, and those neurons firing there correlate with banana
Speaker 4: or whatever else? Yeah, I mean that doesn't you know it? Okay,
Speaker 4: you can try to force it. It's been some you know,
Speaker 4: the old theorists that are that are called let's say,
Speaker 4: classical identity theorists, and they would would say, well, there
Speaker 4: simply is an identity between this mental state. They would
Speaker 4: refer to it like that, in this brain state or
Speaker 4: brain process, and they say that's that's it. There is
Speaker 4: this identity, and the other people came in and said, okay,
Speaker 4: that's just a brute identity. You're just sort of mashing
Speaker 4: these things together saying that they're the same thing from
Speaker 4: different views.
Speaker 3: But they're clearly not. I mean, they don't feel they
Speaker 3: don't somehow, you know.
Speaker 4: There's no explanatory power in that, right, And so to
Speaker 4: answer your question, some people will say that's the answer
Speaker 4: why red feels red or the apple feels like the apple,
Speaker 4: But many others would say, Okay, it's just not satisfactory
Speaker 4: as a proper explanation, right, It's simply a correlation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, Well, I'm certainly in that camp. I just
Speaker 1: I don't I don't see why how I t is different.
Speaker 1: Maybe he'll say, right now, so let's listen to another minute.
Speaker 4: And it's not that the it's not that you have
Speaker 4: to figure out the causation of those neurons producing the
Speaker 4: red necessarily, right. Most people think that's the next step,
Speaker 4: but there are other ways of also approaching this to
Speaker 4: make it more explanatory.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that I believe in that, because what
Speaker 2: fascinates me already sort of the anomalies. If you say
Speaker 2: it's all just neuronal activity and it is explaining I'm
Speaker 2: not saying I believe, but if you say it does
Speaker 2: explain it. Because every time someone reports seeing an apple
Speaker 2: and it even smells like this, or that I can
Speaker 2: see exactly this light up. Okay, that explains it. Okay,
Speaker 2: even if you do believe that, you still have anomalies, right,
Speaker 2: But because there are cases where we see neural activity
Speaker 2: going down but repoorts of consciousness going up, right, that
Speaker 2: that at least in psychedelic research, and that's what fascinates me.
Speaker 2: And that's that's what I hope. But what can I
Speaker 2: dc there brain activity?
Speaker 1: Like? Okay, I think we'll wrap up because I know
Speaker 1: what he'll say. I mean, the the theory as we've
Speaker 1: just interpreted, doesn't have anything to do with activity. It
Speaker 1: has to do with integration, and so you could imagine
Speaker 1: a relatively inactive network that's highly integrated. Again, I just
Speaker 1: still don't know what integrated means. So this is a problem,
Speaker 1: you know. So I'm trying, buddy, I don't know the
Speaker 1: code on the on your iPad. Oh there we go. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, So we'll wrap up. I hope you thought
Speaker 1: that was interesting. I'm fascinated by this, Like I like
Speaker 1: this guy. You know, I'm being critical and stuff, of course,
Speaker 1: which is my style, but I I think it's good,
Speaker 1: you know. He he's clearly motivated by that same thing
Speaker 1: that all of us truth seekers are motivated by, like
Speaker 1: just a dissatisfaction with just the field just stating that
Speaker 1: it's figured out all the answers, not actually doing it,
Speaker 1: not actually finding theories with explanatory powers, he says, but uh,
Speaker 1: but just saying it's been found, saying just and kind
Speaker 1: of like bashing you, the questioner, over the head, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you just don't get it. You know, there is this
Speaker 1: thing that happens when you get into really complex topics
Speaker 1: from professors and scientists where you know they don't know either,
Speaker 1: but they can't say that because it's their job to know,
Speaker 1: and so they have to just sort of somehow put
Speaker 1: it back on you. And I think this is really unfortunate,
Speaker 1: but it's effective. I mean, you know, the people who
Speaker 1: just speak with authority, they tend to get promoted, they
Speaker 1: tend to get the funding, you know, so there's something
Speaker 1: to it. I just think it's not intellectually honest, you know.
Speaker 1: So I like this guy. It's kind of been the
Speaker 1: theme of the show lately, is trying to acknowledge some
Speaker 1: of these slightly more rebellious folks. I mean, he's still
Speaker 1: very much in the mainstream framework. But that's probably the
Speaker 1: only way you can do it. I mean, you can't
Speaker 1: go in there and be like, I'm you know, this
Speaker 1: is my theological worldview, and I'm here to prove it correct.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't do that. That's not intellectually honest either.
Speaker 1: You know. That's the whole point, as everyone is bringing
Speaker 1: all this dogma to this idea. Now that's said, I
Speaker 1: can't help but see the overlap. I can't help but
Speaker 1: see the theological overlap with consciousness. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: were going to look at the two worldviews, I think
Speaker 1: you could argue that physics and some aspects of neuroscience
Speaker 1: are moving a lot more closely. They're moving in the
Speaker 1: direction of some theological explanations. Now, of course, different vocabulary,
Speaker 1: different you know, way of viewing things. But I think
Speaker 1: that's much, you know, I think that is more true
Speaker 1: than the reverse, although I don't know, because a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of religious people have accepted a lot
Speaker 1: of scientific explanations for things like evolution. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting time, it's interesting, interesting world. I'm just
Speaker 1: so relieved to see, though, that this frustration that I've
Speaker 1: always had, or at least for the last you know,
Speaker 1: ten years, with the certainty that's portrayed by scientific communicators.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't like that. I didn't trust it.
Speaker 1: I didn't believe in it. And it sounds like for
Speaker 1: good reason, you know, because we're constantly just even even,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, if you're trying to be
Speaker 1: an advocate for science, you would say that that's supposed
Speaker 1: to be how science works. And that's the good thing
Speaker 1: about it. It's not supposed to be dogmatic, but alas
Speaker 1: it is anyway. So we have a couple of exciting
Speaker 1: episodes coming up. I think tomorrow maybe we'll talk about
Speaker 1: spud cells. It's a pretty cool idea we might also.
Speaker 1: I found this interesting. I was getting into some Carl
Speaker 1: Jung stuff. That's such a can of worm. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if I could really like it's there's just
Speaker 1: so much. There's so much on him and his weird
Speaker 1: you know, spiritual and religious entanglements and psychological perspectives, and
Speaker 1: I just don't know that much about the topic. So
Speaker 1: but I did. I did find an interesting article, so
Speaker 1: maybe we'll go through that. And then on Thursday we're
Speaker 1: talking to uh I don't know to look up his name,
Speaker 1: but he's he's very interest. He's got a big show,
Speaker 1: big podcast, so I'm really grateful he's coming on. Robert Frederick.
Speaker 1: I want to maybe to talk about Francis Bacon Shakespeare's
Speaker 1: If you're not into that whole conspiratorial rabbit hole, you
Speaker 1: should check it out. It's pretty cool. So anyway, stay
Speaker 1: tuned for that on Thursday. All right, everybody, I hope
Speaker 1: you're doing good. This was an intense episode, so you know,
Speaker 1: I do say in the show description that this is
Speaker 1: a sleepy time podcast, meant to listen to in bed
Speaker 1: because most likely it will cure your insomnia. You know,
Speaker 1: nothing like talking about neural correlates of consciousness to go. Eh.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll turn this consciousness off for a little bit. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So it was heavy. It was heavy, but thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: and as always, please email me at God's I view
Speaker 1: Book at gmail dot com. I appreciate your feedback. Your requests.
Speaker 1: Just say hey, if you do, let me know what
Speaker 1: part of the world you're from. That's cool. Let me
Speaker 1: know what you do if you want or not. Also
Speaker 1: buy the book why not? It is twenty bucks. It's expensive.
Speaker 1: It's expensive for a paperback, but Amazon takes so much
Speaker 1: of the money, so that's a problem. There's also an audiobook,
Speaker 1: so check that out. God's IV. All right, everybody, stay
Speaker 1: safe out there and God bless