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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host,

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Trevor Wow. I have a very very interesting episode in

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store for you. I'm recording this introduction after a conversation

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with Michael C. Weist at Wellesley College. Mike is a

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professor of neuroscience who has done some really just I mean,

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you'll hear me just shower him with flattery the whole episode.

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But he's just done some really interesting experiments, and he

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is a very mainstream neuroscientist, asking sort of paradigm shifting questions,

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and he really had to put up with a lot

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of my armchair philosophizing. You know, I kind of I

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sometimes I kind of felt like a little kid at

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a campfire and the village elder. He's not an elder.

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I just he's my intellectual elder. I felt like I

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was at a campfire asking him questions and he was like, well,

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well son, that's not exactly it. So anyway, and of

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course we didn't. You know, you know, I have sort

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of complex philosophical and theological views and ideas on things,

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and there's certain theories of physics and consciousness that really

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appealed to me. I think this is one of them,

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I think so, and I hoping I'm hoping it will

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appeal to you too, So without further ado, I think

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we'll just get into it and then maybe we can

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sort of think about this and talk about it more

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than a follow up episode. I will if you will

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just allow me to sort of pre apologize. This is

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a disclaimer. This is not false modesty, This is real.

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I had one of the worst nights of sleep of

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my life last night, So I hope that's not too obvious,

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you know. I sometimes I would ask questions I was

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sort of having a hard time cognitively, and Mike very

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kindly would say something like, well, you know, I did

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sort of already answer that, but let me just read

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it anyway. So it was hopefully it's not too bad,

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Hopefully it's not too brutal. Hopefully you'll forgive your favorite

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podcast host me, if I could presume that that's me

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one of your favorite podcast hosts. Anyway, So Mike was

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very generous with this time, very smart, and I kind

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of steered him in a lot of different directions. It

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was sort of stochastic, you know. I think he probably

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would prefer to give like a lecture with the logical

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sequence and flow. Unfortunately I didn't really permit him to

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do that because I was just sort of like like

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that dog and up squirrel. But you know, I hope

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maybe this is a naive hope. I hope that that's

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kind of how most of us feel about this topic.

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It's just it's so abstract and so complex, and there's

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of course a lot of spiritual implications, and there's a

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lot of paradigm shifting implications for science, and so I hope,

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I hope I did that justice. Anyway, email me at

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God's Eye view Book at gmail dot com if you

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have any questions for Mike, and without further ado, Michael Seweist, Well,

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I was kind of hoping I could start with some

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flattery if you'd permit permit that, oh please. So I

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don't have a you know, a professional interest in the

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topics we're going to talk about, but like any human being,

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of course, I'm casually interested in the idea of consciousness.

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And from my perspective as an outsider looking in, it

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kind of seems like you're doing something maybe a little

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unique in a field that's kind of dominated by philosophers

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and theologians, And you know, also maybe neuron obsessed reductionists,

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you know, on the other side of things. So it

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seems to me like you're doing you're asking and answering

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really interesting research questions empirically on a topic that traditionally,

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at least in my experience, that doesn't seem to be

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done a whole lot. Is that is that the case?

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Is that my misconception.

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Speaker 2: Well, we've been making prog progress, good progress for the

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past one hundred, one hundred and fifty years, but in

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the last century this was kind of a taboo topic

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for most neuroscientists before they were even called that, I guess.

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But still we made fundamental discoveries during that era of

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so called behaviorism where scientists didn't even want to say

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the word consciousness, right, But for example, the split the

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discovery of split brain phenomena, where surgical separation of the

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two hemispheres of the brain can lead to apparently two

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different people in there at least you know, sort of

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temporarily or in specific conditions. So we've had, you know,

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steady accumulation of some real progress, real fundamental results about

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how our brain relates to our consciousness. But it wasn't

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until the nineties that the nineteen nineties that it got

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kind of bumped back into an acceptable, somewhat acceptable scientific

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object of study by Francis Crick, the co discoverer of

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the DNA structure. He and Christoph Koch, who's still working

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in the field, wrote a paper that kind of said

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it's time we go back to talking about this fundamental

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question again. And so since then, you know, there is

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still a sort of hangover where there are many conservative

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scientists who still feel it should be outside the realm

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of science to try and address these kinds of questions.

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But at the same time it's become more and more

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acceptable in the side of the community. So there's I

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think you overstated a bit when you said it's all

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philosophers and theologians. There's definitely a whole field now of

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neuroscientists who are using empirical methods to try and address

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this question. On the other hand, you're right they are

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mostly going to be physicalists or materialists, which I take

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to be synonymous. Yeah, and we can talk more about

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what that might mean exactly, because people argue about it,

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but it's not that straightforward to define exactly what you

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mean by it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because I certainly think from what I've read of

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your stuff that is also a you know, a materialistic

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and a physical explanation is just very unique, and it's

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falsifiable and testable in a way that some of the

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other theories don't seem to be, perhaps right.

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Speaker 2: So I think maybe it's worth talking about the word

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a bit because I think in the public at large,

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you know, you just said that my point of view

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seems materialistic, because yes, I think the brain is involved,

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and in some way it's contentious to say the brain

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generates consciousness, but anyway, in some sense that you've got

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to look at the brain to understand consciousness. That is

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my point of view. But on the other hand, I

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am not a physicalist or materialist as the philosophers define it,

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because because in that understanding, what it means is that

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only that you get a complete description of physical and

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mental properties or including consciousness, you can completely account for

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that with only physical properties of physical systems, whereas my

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non physicalist position is that no, we need to add

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fundamental new, a fundamental new mental property to our scientific

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ontology list of what things there are, what kind of

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properties there are, in order to account for consciousness. So

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that is what makes it non materialist in that sort

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of strict sense where a materialist says everything comes from

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matter or from the physical, including the mental, whereas I

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do not think that you can derive mind from only

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physical variables.

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Speaker 1: Yes, that's fascinating. Well, if you'd permit me just about

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sixty seconds of preamble, I'm hoping I could sort of

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outlay my AIM's my goal, and then we can take

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right into to orco are and your research and all

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of this interesting stuff. So I work in a neurology department,

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you know, not you know, studying clinical stuff at a

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medical school. And if I were to pull a colleague

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aside in the hallway and start talking about, you know,

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quantum resonance in the microtubules and things, I think there

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would be like a sort of a knee jerk visceral

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reaction like what are you talking about?

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Speaker 2: You know?

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Speaker 1: So I'm hoping my goal kind of two aims, and

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one would be you know, they'll never listen to this

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because they don't know about the podcast, and I plan

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to keep it that way. But if they were listening,

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could you help me convince them that the microtubules probably

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are key or fundamental or at least intrinsically related somehow

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to the subjective experience of consciousness beyond synaptic transmission or

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some like more mundane thing that we already know they do.

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And then two this might be harder, like how do

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we why is quantumness important to that? That idea? So

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I watched a video of yours. I thought the overton

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you know, solubility thing was a great kind of segue

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into this topic. Is your research, but I'll just kind

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of step back and let you take it away.

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Speaker 2: Okay, So, yeah, why microtubules and why quantum? From my perspective,

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the why quantum is the more fundamental thing, and the

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microtubules just look like the best light and the most

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likely candidate forgetting the kind of quantum process that I

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think is necessary to account for consciousness, And so maybe

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I should start there. So, you know, there's conceptual considerations

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that convinced me thirty years ago it had to be quantum,

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But nobody believes. I use the word conceptual, but if

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you don't want to engage it, you call it philosophical

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and you dismiss it. Right, So I have conceptual reasons

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that I think it had to be quantum. What I

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would tend to refer to as the substrate of consciousness

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in the brain has to be quantum. And then there

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was the immediate there's the immediate reaction from smart, educated

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people about why that can't be right about the brain.

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And I think those theoretical arguments were never conclusive. But

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now in recent years we've started to get experimental evidence,

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so you don't have to convince people of the theoretical

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arguments or motivation for expecting something like this to turn

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out to be true. But still, if you don't express

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the theoretical motivation, then people have a tendency to go

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back to the old way of making fun of this idea,

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which is you've got consciousness that's missed serious and you've

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got quantum physics that's mysterious. Let's just jam them together

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and declare both mysteries solved. But the point or the

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import of the theoretical arguments is that what quantum physics

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has is exactly what a theory of consciousness needs, namely,

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some way to account for irreducible wholism of our conscious experiences.

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And so to just that's a pretty abstract little phrase,

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but to say what I mean by that, I mean

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every moment of my conscious experience when I'm looking at

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my laptop and looking around my office. Every moment of

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my conscious experience somehow includes multiple elements, multiple features, multiple

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concepts I might have in mind, sounds, smells, tactile, feels,

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my mood. All that is somehow unified into one field

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of experience, including the visual field with lots of things

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in different positions and colors. All of that is somehow

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unified with all the pieces in relation to each other.

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And it's from my singular point of view, and I

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think rigorous reflection reveals that a classical model cannot account

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for something like that, because in classical physics, anything big

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is reducible to just little bits pushing on their neighbors.

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And so when you have a classical model of something big,

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like a wave or a tornado, giving it that name

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for the big thing is just a in principle, is

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a convenience, because the thing is so complicated with all

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the little bits of wind pushing on each other. In principle,

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the classical theory never needs to have a name for

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the tornado because it's completely described by the bits of

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wind pushing on each other. And the relevance of that

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to consciousness is if you say, well, I think or

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my theory of consciousness is that when the brain isn't

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an certain pattern of electrical activity, it feels like this

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or I experienced such and such. In a classical theory,

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you never need to make reference to this holistic experience,

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because the entire dynamics of what that brain does and

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what it makes your body do and what it makes

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me say, is it, in principle, in a classical model,

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entirely determined just by the little neurons pushing on their neighbors,

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so to speak, without any need in principle to ever

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refer to this putative holistic thing that goes along with it.

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And so that means if there is this holistic thing

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that goes along with it, it couldn't be doing anything

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in a classical model.

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Speaker 1: Is is this where the idea of you know, a

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lot of classical theories of consciousness will describe it as

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as like an emergent property or sort of like a

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just almost like an illusory like, uh, you know, unavoidable

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thing that just sort of happens when you have these

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like this complex interaction of all these different things in

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your brain.

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Speaker 2: Okay, is it this idea. I you, you kind of

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mentioned three distinct ideas.

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Speaker 1: That okay, thank you, pleasure, and I would.

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Speaker 2: Love to dispute every one of them. So the first

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one is when people say consciousness is illusory. That's the

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worst one.

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Speaker 1: I kind of think, like an illusion for who, like,

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who's being fooled by this?

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Speaker 2: Right? So you think of an illusion of an oasis

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means you're seeing an oasis, but the oasis is not

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really there. But an illusion of consciousness means you're seeing consciousness,

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but the consciousness is not really there. So it sounds

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like they're saying consciousness doesn't exist without exception. In my experience,

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when you press them on that, they say, oh, that's

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not what I meant. I just mean it doesn't exist

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in the way you thought. And then I don't think

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they have much more to say than that, right, Y're okay,

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So that's illusionism. The older version of that was illimitativism,

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where we should just get rid of the word because again,

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it doesn't really exist if you imagine the brain is

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doing everything, but that's maybe muddling the water. Muddying the

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water's a bit. But so, yeah, I don't think it's

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helpful to say consciousness is an illusion, but a lot

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of neuroscientists will say it's an emergent property. And as

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you just did, relate it to complexity. When things get

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very complicated, the information processing gets very complicated, somehow this

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new feature blossoms into his existence. Now that might be

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okay as a theory if you just admit that that

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is not physicalism. You know, interesting, our physical theory has

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rules for how things push on each other. And if

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you're saying this emergent property then changes how they push

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on each other, that's not in our current physic in

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our current physics theory. You know, from that point of view,

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it's just magical thinking to just think if you've got

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something that's really simple, switches pushing on each other, and

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you just add more of them, suddenly you get a

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new magical property that I don't think is coherent, but

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you could postulate as that as a new law of

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nature in your theory. And then you've got to decide

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is that an emergent property going to violate the laws

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that we already have and you got to see how

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you're going to make it consistent with what we already know,

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or are you're going to bite the bullet and say, Okay,

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it's an emergent property, but it's epi phenomenal. It doesn't

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actually do anything. It just for some reason pops into

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existence when thing gets things get complicated, but doesn't actually

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change how that system behaves physically.

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Speaker 1: I love the idea of calling it magical thinking. That is,

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that is really what it is.

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Speaker 2: The word magic gets thrown around by illusionists, so it's

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it's there's a there's a real rhetorical aspect uh magic

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and related words, they'll say that a non physicalist neuroscientist

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like me is engaging in magical thinking, imagining there's some

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ghost that goes along with the physical properties in a sense,

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I'm saying that, but I'm making it consistent with physics. Yeah,

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I think I've got a way to see it as

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consistent with physics, which a classical model, in my view,

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would just leave you with just kind of arbitrary ad

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hoc rules that these certain weird brains that appear when

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they get complicated enough, you get this mind thing that

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pops into existence, but it can't do anything, and therefore

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we can't understand evolutionarily. You know why fire hurts and

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ripe fruit tastes good. You know, your conscious sensations seem

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to be giving you pretty good advice about what to do,

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like take your hand out of the fire. But if

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your model doesn't give consciousness anyway to participate in taking

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your hand out of the fire, it seems there's no

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way to account for how it could have provided a

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evolutionary benefit so that it could have evolved.

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Speaker 1: This reminds me of something that happened recently that I

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think you might be able to sort of fix this,

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this logical error that a famous evolutionary biologists made recently,

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I think Dawkins. So he recently got in a lot

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of trouble for basically seemingly thinking that he was engaging

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with like a conscious agent talking to his clawed AI

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and so he said that if AI agents weren't conscious

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but yet could demonstrate human level intelligence and emotional nuance,

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this would sort of undermine the idea that consciousness evolved,

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since these AI bots didn't evolve and yet they display consciousness. Therefore,

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in his conclusion was therefore chatbots must be conscious. And

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I think most people hear that and we think, oh,

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that's kind of a reverse, you know, maybe way of

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looking at it. Some people on the other end of

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the spectrum may say, well, maybe it means conscious there

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is no evolutionary pressure for consciousness. I imagine you sort

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of have an answer that's sort of in the middle

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ground with your theory that yes, there is evolutionary pressure

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for consciousness. We know that because we're conscious. However, this

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just proves that we need some new theory. But we

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can't just assume that, you know, AI parameters and complexity

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result in consciousness.

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Speaker 2: Okay, So it's an evolutionary argument that I'm not used

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to coming at it that way about whether the llms

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might be conscious or not, whether it's relevant that they

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evolved or not. In my view, that's not relevant because

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even if we evolved, if we have we I think

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think we evolved to our present form of consciousness. But

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still if we just in principle duplicated this physical system

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by engineering, it should be conscious too. I mean, that's

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a meta form of magical thinking to think what happens

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in the past makes a difference if it didn't actually

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leave in the present, that would be again I think

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magical thinking or new physics where different times talked to

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present times in current physics, but the way. I So

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a lot of people, it seems, are inclined to think, well,

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we don't have a good theory of consciousness, and so

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if you don't have a good theory of consciousness, you

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can't be sure when you think that the LLM or

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a fancier version of the LLM with a world model,

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or whatever is conscious is not conscious. You can't be

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sure because you don't we don't have a final, rigorous

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theory of consciousness. Yet nobody agrees everyone's argument. But I

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think we know enough already to say that a classical computer,

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classical physical system can never be conscious in the way

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we are, which again involves holistic states where you can

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be one thing that nevertheless has multiple properties that are

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irreducibly connected to each other. That only happens in quantum physics.

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In a sense, quantum physics is just the dynamic theory

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that describes how irreducible holes do stuff, apparently in the

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real world, because quantum physics describes the real world really well.

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But again, there are no irreducible holes w H O,

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L e s in classical physics. And that's my main

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argument about why it has to be quantum. That's where

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we started why quantum and why microtubules. We haven't gotten

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to microtubules yet, but this was all fairly theoretical about

350
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why I think it has to be quantum, and in

351
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a word, it's the binding problem, the problem with counting

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for the unity of consciousness.

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Speaker 1: Okay, and so I mean this is because neurons, you know,

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they're these little discrete units. They don't even touch each other.

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You know, our visual stream goes to the back of

356
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our head or auditory stream to the side. We have

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self awareness in the front. How do we tie this

358
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all together into a hole? And quantumness and microtubules might

359
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answer that question? Yes, okay, awesome, Well I'd love to

360
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hear more about that.

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Speaker 2: That's what I'm trying to say. So the first objection though,

362
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is okay, so, as you just outlined, Yeah, the signals

363
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are going to all sorts of places all over the brain,

364
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and so if I'm going to use a quant if

365
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I'm hypothesizing there's a quantum state in the brain that

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could unify those signals, it has to be able to

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cross neurons. It can't just be in a couple of

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microtubules in one neuron, because that neuron may only know

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about the red color of the chair over there and

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everything else that as part of my perception, is in

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other neurons, and in my hypothesis, in the microtubules of

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those other neurons. So if there's going to be a

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quantum state in there, I need it to span multiple neurons,

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many neurons, And so that makes it highly implausible to

375
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most people that know what they're talking about, because usually technologically,

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when we want to make a quantum state to do

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something with, to do experiments with, we so far had

378
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usually needed to cool it down to super cold temperatures.

379
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And the brain is too hot, it seems, and neurons

380
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seem to be too big already, even though they're pretty

381
00:27:08,880 --> 00:27:14,000
small by our standards, they're big compared to molecules and atoms.

382
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Where we tend to think that quantum physics applies. It

383
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does apply there, But in our modern, our contemporary scientific

384
00:27:27,359 --> 00:27:29,960
theory of the world, it applies to the whole everything,

385
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not just small things. And in any case, big things

386
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are made out of small things. In the reductionist point

387
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:39,480
of view, yes, and on that reductionism, you know, so

388
00:27:39,640 --> 00:27:43,200
I think you may have to feel like materialism and

389
00:27:43,240 --> 00:27:48,440
reductionism are closely related. They are closely related, but we

390
00:27:48,519 --> 00:27:54,039
can recognize that even if you're a physicalist, quantum you know,

391
00:27:54,119 --> 00:27:57,920
physics is sort of the reductionist method applied to the world.

392
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The reductionist method discovered its own limits in quantum physics.

393
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The reductionist method went all the way and found out

394
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that reductionism does not apply in terms of spatial reduction

395
00:28:12,519 --> 00:28:15,720
or causal reduction. Does not apply to this world we

396
00:28:15,759 --> 00:28:20,599
live in. We have non local coordination or influences among

397
00:28:20,720 --> 00:28:24,640
things at a distance. The spooky action at a distance

398
00:28:24,720 --> 00:28:29,759
that Einstein, that Einstein really didn't like. It seems to

399
00:28:29,799 --> 00:28:34,880
have been experimentally verified that twenty twenty two Nobel Prizes

400
00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:39,079
were about that, although there are still many smart, educated

401
00:28:39,119 --> 00:28:43,079
people that are trying to find ways to deny the conclusion,

402
00:28:43,279 --> 00:28:48,640
which is that there is non locality wholism objective wholism

403
00:28:48,799 --> 00:28:49,720
in our world.

404
00:28:52,960 --> 00:28:56,240
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're just on the precipice of getting into

405
00:28:56,279 --> 00:28:58,880
the quantum, which is where I stuff really gets over

406
00:28:58,920 --> 00:29:02,319
my head. So I might ask you to I pushed

407
00:29:02,359 --> 00:29:04,440
us into the deep end fast. That's my fault. So

408
00:29:04,440 --> 00:29:06,880
I want to can we take a step back, what

409
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:08,240
what are micro tubules.

410
00:29:09,920 --> 00:29:13,839
Speaker 2: Okay, do you want me to say, give a brief

411
00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:16,039
primer on just quantum itself?

412
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Speaker 1: Uh? Sure, sure, whatever you think is a lot of Okay.

413
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Speaker 2: So yeah, we've been I've been talking about quantum physics,

414
00:29:22,599 --> 00:29:24,839
and now I'm going to say why I think microtubules

415
00:29:24,839 --> 00:29:29,119
are a good candidate for instantiating or implementing this quantum physics.

416
00:29:29,119 --> 00:29:32,720
But what is quantn physics? We think of it as

417
00:29:33,039 --> 00:29:36,720
you look it up, it's the physics of atoms and molecules.

418
00:29:37,799 --> 00:29:41,240
And you hear that it's different than our than our

419
00:29:41,319 --> 00:29:45,240
classical physics. Uh Newtonian physics, where the F equals m a.

420
00:29:45,480 --> 00:29:47,680
You push on stuff and it moves, and that's how

421
00:29:47,680 --> 00:29:54,079
you understand everything. What's the same, or let's see in

422
00:29:54,160 --> 00:30:00,440
classical physics, every classical physics theory is basically just a

423
00:30:00,480 --> 00:30:05,640
differential equation. And I'm not going to assume our audience

424
00:30:06,400 --> 00:30:09,880
knows exactly what that is, except it's an equation that says,

425
00:30:10,119 --> 00:30:12,559
if you're given the state of some system at a

426
00:30:12,599 --> 00:30:17,759
certain time, it tells you how to evolve it forward

427
00:30:17,759 --> 00:30:20,519
in time. It tells you how to say what it's

428
00:30:20,519 --> 00:30:22,240
going to do at the next time step, and then

429
00:30:22,240 --> 00:30:23,759
from that you can figure out what we'll do at

430
00:30:23,799 --> 00:30:26,319
the next time step. And so it's a determinate stick

431
00:30:26,319 --> 00:30:29,599
equation that tells you how to evolve the universe.

432
00:30:30,240 --> 00:30:33,240
Speaker 1: Computer scientists might think of it like an if then statement,

433
00:30:33,440 --> 00:30:35,599
just over and over and over and over through time.

434
00:30:35,920 --> 00:30:38,079
Speaker 2: It's more like a fore loop. It has no ifs

435
00:30:38,119 --> 00:30:40,720
in it. Okay, Okay, it's deterministic.

436
00:30:40,960 --> 00:30:41,400
Speaker 1: I like that.

437
00:30:41,440 --> 00:30:44,039
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's a four loop going through time, okay,

438
00:30:44,079 --> 00:30:46,240
and just tells you what to change, what to move

439
00:30:46,279 --> 00:30:50,200
at each moment. And there's no in the pure version

440
00:30:50,279 --> 00:30:53,720
of the theory, there's no randomness or.

441
00:30:53,759 --> 00:30:56,240
Speaker 1: Choices, and that's important, okay, yeah.

442
00:30:56,119 --> 00:31:02,279
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the other well yeah, So every classical theory

443
00:31:02,359 --> 00:31:05,000
is just an equation that tells you how to get

444
00:31:05,039 --> 00:31:09,960
the next timestep from the current timestep. Okay. In quantum

445
00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:12,960
physics we still have an equation like that. The most

446
00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:16,640
basic one is called the Schrodinger equation, and it tells

447
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:18,960
you if you're given the state of a system at

448
00:31:19,279 --> 00:31:21,720
time t zero, tells you how to get it at

449
00:31:21,759 --> 00:31:27,559
later times, with one difference from the classical case. So

450
00:31:27,599 --> 00:31:30,839
in the classical case, that equations the whole theory. In

451
00:31:30,880 --> 00:31:34,440
the quantum case, there's two parts. You've got that deterministic

452
00:31:34,480 --> 00:31:37,079
equation that tells you how to evolve through time, but

453
00:31:37,119 --> 00:31:41,039
it only applies when something called a measurement is not

454
00:31:41,240 --> 00:31:47,559
happening and when a measurement happens. So it turns out

455
00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:53,759
what the Schrodinger equation is describing is so called wave

456
00:31:53,799 --> 00:31:57,640
function that describes the probabilities of different things that could

457
00:31:57,640 --> 00:32:03,279
happen different outcomes of your measurement, your experiments. And then

458
00:32:03,319 --> 00:32:07,759
when you do a measurement, you refer to the wave

459
00:32:07,799 --> 00:32:11,039
function that the Schrodering equation gave you to see what

460
00:32:11,160 --> 00:32:14,559
the probabilities are of the different outcomes. And so that's

461
00:32:14,599 --> 00:32:17,920
the first thing we recognize as a difference from classical

462
00:32:17,960 --> 00:32:22,839
physics is this determinism now has a determinist Quantum physics

463
00:32:22,839 --> 00:32:25,240
has a deterministic part, but when you do a measurement,

464
00:32:25,920 --> 00:32:30,119
there seems to be this randomness that there's no way

465
00:32:30,119 --> 00:32:33,160
to get it out of the theory. It just seems

466
00:32:33,160 --> 00:32:34,519
to be in the universe.

467
00:32:34,759 --> 00:32:37,160
Speaker 1: It sort of feels like a metaphor might be for

468
00:32:37,240 --> 00:32:40,319
the collapse of the wave function, like for any feature

469
00:32:40,400 --> 00:32:44,319
of a quantum system, you know, position, momentum, spin, whatever,

470
00:32:44,359 --> 00:32:47,400
it is. It's when you measure it or observe it

471
00:32:47,519 --> 00:32:49,440
or whatever you want to say. You're you're reaching into

472
00:32:49,519 --> 00:32:54,359
a a a basket of you know, like like at

473
00:32:54,359 --> 00:32:56,279
a fare when they drive your ticket, you know, and

474
00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:00,680
there's more probabilistic outcomes and less probabilistic outcomes, and so

475
00:33:00,720 --> 00:33:02,640
you're just sort of reaching into the scrabbag and pulling

476
00:33:02,680 --> 00:33:04,839
out the answer. It sort of seems like that's what

477
00:33:04,839 --> 00:33:06,880
the collapse of the way function is in a weird way.

478
00:33:08,119 --> 00:33:11,799
Speaker 2: It seems like that, but in fact it's more weird

479
00:33:11,920 --> 00:33:15,000
than that because in the grab bag, say it's white

480
00:33:15,039 --> 00:33:18,680
and black balls, there's a certain number of white balls

481
00:33:18,720 --> 00:33:21,200
and a certain number of black balls. But in the

482
00:33:21,279 --> 00:33:25,880
quantum case, the balls haven't yet decided whether they're going

483
00:33:25,960 --> 00:33:30,000
to be in real life. It's not just we don't know.

484
00:33:30,759 --> 00:33:32,920
So there are different points of view on this. There

485
00:33:32,920 --> 00:33:35,799
are people that are still trying to maintain what the way,

486
00:33:36,599 --> 00:33:38,359
you know, if it was that they are really white

487
00:33:38,359 --> 00:33:42,400
and black balls in the bag, that's and then the

488
00:33:42,440 --> 00:33:45,240
probabilities just come because we don't know what's in the bag.

489
00:33:45,799 --> 00:33:51,480
That's an epistemic interpretation as opposed to an on tick interpretation.

490
00:33:51,720 --> 00:33:56,119
That No, those probabilities are really objective tendencies out in

491
00:33:56,200 --> 00:34:01,200
the world, not in your lack of not in your ignorance. Right,

492
00:34:03,559 --> 00:34:07,880
that's thing one. That's an irreducible certainty or indeterminism that

493
00:34:08,039 --> 00:34:11,800
is not just because we don't know what the state

494
00:34:11,840 --> 00:34:12,920
of the system really is.

495
00:34:15,199 --> 00:34:16,079
Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting.

496
00:34:16,679 --> 00:34:22,000
Speaker 2: There is a way of trying to maintain that interpretation.

497
00:34:24,599 --> 00:34:25,280
Speaker 1: Well, we don't need to.

498
00:34:26,199 --> 00:34:28,280
Speaker 2: I think I'll set that aside. I don't think it's viable,

499
00:34:28,599 --> 00:34:32,159
but there are a certain segment of physicists who subscribe

500
00:34:32,159 --> 00:34:34,280
to it that point of view, where you could still

501
00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:37,960
think of it that way and in the sense evade

502
00:34:38,199 --> 00:34:41,679
the indeterminacy. So there might be a way to evade

503
00:34:41,679 --> 00:34:45,000
the indeterminacy in a theoretical way. I think there's no

504
00:34:45,159 --> 00:34:49,599
way to evade the next feature of quantum physics that

505
00:34:49,639 --> 00:34:53,599
I'm going to mention that is fundamentally different from classical physics,

506
00:34:53,760 --> 00:34:57,239
and that's the wholeism that I've already alluded to, the

507
00:34:57,320 --> 00:35:02,719
non locality. It's coordination between things that have no time

508
00:35:02,840 --> 00:35:08,480
to talk to each other. So it's very spooky if

509
00:35:08,480 --> 00:35:13,440
you want, if you will, But that's the more important

510
00:35:13,440 --> 00:35:15,719
thing from my point of view. The more essential difference

511
00:35:15,760 --> 00:35:19,519
between quantum physics and classical physics is that in classical physics,

512
00:35:19,599 --> 00:35:23,519
everything's local little bits pushing on each other. In quantum

513
00:35:23,559 --> 00:35:28,599
physics there are irreducible holes. And why I care about that,

514
00:35:28,719 --> 00:35:30,440
or one of the reasons I care about that, is

515
00:35:31,079 --> 00:35:33,480
it seems to be exactly what we need to account

516
00:35:33,840 --> 00:35:37,880
for the holistic experiences that we have consciousness.

517
00:35:38,320 --> 00:35:39,679
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't want to jump ahead, but I

518
00:35:39,679 --> 00:35:41,559
think for the first time it just sort of clicked

519
00:35:42,239 --> 00:35:45,480
what people mean when they say things like that. It's

520
00:35:46,599 --> 00:35:50,480
these microtubules are still distinct structures in that they also

521
00:35:50,639 --> 00:35:52,800
do not touch one another, you know, they don't leave

522
00:35:52,840 --> 00:35:58,800
them or on. However, if they if they are, I'm

523
00:35:58,800 --> 00:36:01,679
going to have their incorrectvocabulary. But if there are quantum systems,

524
00:36:01,719 --> 00:36:05,360
theoretically there could be some degree of entanglement between these structures.

525
00:36:05,400 --> 00:36:08,920
Is that how we get the wholism? Yes word, Yes,

526
00:36:08,960 --> 00:36:09,840
that's cool.

527
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:17,519
Speaker 2: Entanglement among microtubules in different neurons. Okay, you still need

528
00:36:17,880 --> 00:36:25,519
those things to interact, so it's not okay. So to

529
00:36:25,599 --> 00:36:28,840
approach this, let me say a few words.

530
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:29,320
Speaker 1: Please.

531
00:36:29,639 --> 00:36:32,079
Speaker 2: You've been asking me the whole time about microtubules, and

532
00:36:32,079 --> 00:36:35,559
I I kept putting it off. So let's just get

533
00:36:35,559 --> 00:36:39,679
some basics about microtubules. Sure, you know, they're in all cells,

534
00:36:39,719 --> 00:36:42,360
not only in neurons in our brain, so they're in

535
00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:48,960
plants and single celled organisms as well, and they're in

536
00:36:49,039 --> 00:36:54,119
every cell in our body. And they are literal tubes

537
00:36:54,159 --> 00:36:58,880
made out of protein. And the stereotype of them in

538
00:36:58,920 --> 00:37:01,960
biology is that they are you know, they are considered

539
00:37:01,960 --> 00:37:06,960
part of the so called cytoskeleton, and so the metaphor

540
00:37:07,039 --> 00:37:09,800
is that they're like the bones of single cells that

541
00:37:09,840 --> 00:37:12,320
are giving them their shape shape, or like tent poles

542
00:37:12,679 --> 00:37:15,679
that are keeping them from just collapsing, although the water

543
00:37:15,719 --> 00:37:16,719
inside would do that too.

544
00:37:16,840 --> 00:37:19,960
Speaker 1: I've told many people that exact thing as an undergraduate

545
00:37:19,960 --> 00:37:23,880
anatomy instructor years ago. So I feel guilty, we'll do that.

546
00:37:24,280 --> 00:37:27,920
Speaker 2: They certainly do that, but you know, like our bones,

547
00:37:27,960 --> 00:37:31,039
they also do other things. But I think they do

548
00:37:31,119 --> 00:37:33,639
even more other things than our bones. But I'm probably

549
00:37:34,239 --> 00:37:38,039
ignorant about real bones. I know they have some stuff

550
00:37:38,079 --> 00:37:41,800
in the middle that's important for your blood or something. Anyway,

551
00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:47,440
that may be your field day you're a cardiac looking

552
00:37:47,440 --> 00:37:50,599
at cardiac interactions.

553
00:37:49,800 --> 00:37:52,519
Speaker 1: With the brain, yes, yes, yeah, well I wouldn't I

554
00:37:52,519 --> 00:37:54,679
wouldn't pretend to know a whole lot about the bones.

555
00:37:54,679 --> 00:37:57,679
But yes, comatopoetic stem cells that's where all are wide

556
00:37:57,679 --> 00:38:00,519
and red blood cells can for yess absolutely, yeah.

557
00:38:00,280 --> 00:38:06,280
Speaker 2: Okay, But so in single cells you got microtubules helping

558
00:38:06,480 --> 00:38:10,239
form the shape of the cell. But what I want

559
00:38:10,280 --> 00:38:13,840
to emphasize is that already in single cells, microtubules are

560
00:38:13,840 --> 00:38:21,639
performing multitudinous functions that we can summarize as integrating sensory

561
00:38:22,239 --> 00:38:26,199
information and coordinating movement, and.

562
00:38:26,119 --> 00:38:29,800
Speaker 1: So fascinating, which is this is the basis of conscious

563
00:38:29,880 --> 00:38:31,760
This is what it means to be conscious to well.

564
00:38:31,679 --> 00:38:34,199
Speaker 2: It's what we would do. So is what our brain

565
00:38:34,360 --> 00:38:38,239
seems to be for integraating sensory signals and coordinating movement.

566
00:38:39,079 --> 00:38:42,360
And so yeah, I'm saying, so you don't in principle

567
00:38:42,400 --> 00:38:47,760
need microtubules or even consciousness to integrate central sensory signals

568
00:38:47,760 --> 00:38:50,320
and coordinate movement. We can make a robot that does that.

569
00:38:52,119 --> 00:38:57,480
But in terms of relating our fancy consciousness to biological

570
00:38:57,519 --> 00:39:02,039
processes that were already happening in biology, this is a

571
00:39:02,079 --> 00:39:05,280
way to see I'm also going to refer to the

572
00:39:05,280 --> 00:39:08,280
physical properties of microtools that seem to make them appropriate

573
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:11,320
for the kind of quantum process I think we need.

574
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:15,199
But just in terms of biology, they seem to already

575
00:39:15,199 --> 00:39:19,400
be carrying out functions that I would be asking them

576
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:22,239
to do for my theory of consciousness. They're already doing

577
00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:26,199
that in single cells. And so it's it's sort of

578
00:39:26,320 --> 00:39:31,400
in that sense evolutionarily plausible that they are repurposed or

579
00:39:32,239 --> 00:39:36,199
you know, elaborated in order to get a fancier kind

580
00:39:36,239 --> 00:39:42,320
of sensory integration and motor coordination. Wow.

581
00:39:44,119 --> 00:39:48,119
Speaker 1: Yeah, because they sort of form the very first on

582
00:39:48,159 --> 00:39:53,679
the maybe the evolutionary timeline, the very first mechanisms for movement,

583
00:39:54,000 --> 00:39:57,239
you know, acilia and flip flagella, and in their highly

584
00:39:57,239 --> 00:40:00,280
evolutionary conserved I mean, they're in every cell right essentially.

585
00:40:00,239 --> 00:40:02,960
Speaker 2: I think just about everything you might. Yeah, so when

586
00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:06,320
you get to viruses, then they don't have microtubules, but

587
00:40:06,360 --> 00:40:08,039
they might I think they might stell some kind of

588
00:40:08,039 --> 00:40:12,719
tubular protein. Now, they can't do it alone. They do

589
00:40:12,840 --> 00:40:16,400
need a bunch of other machinery to do their stuff,

590
00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:21,960
but it but they're always there at the center of

591
00:40:22,599 --> 00:40:28,559
amazing things like the mitosis that I guess you taught

592
00:40:28,559 --> 00:40:30,559
and your well, I don't know if that was a

593
00:40:30,599 --> 00:40:33,800
neuroscience course or a biology course, but you know, the

594
00:40:33,920 --> 00:40:38,360
microtubules are core choreographing that amazing dance they're doing it.

595
00:40:38,880 --> 00:40:43,360
And also the microtubule organizing centers are the actual or

596
00:40:43,840 --> 00:40:47,280
along with other proteins, but they are appear to be

597
00:40:47,320 --> 00:40:48,440
the conductors, you know.

598
00:40:48,639 --> 00:40:53,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I never I always dreaded a student asking

599
00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:56,440
a question like what is the center zone? You know,

600
00:40:56,559 --> 00:40:58,840
like I just never wanted to answer that question because

601
00:40:58,880 --> 00:41:01,199
it's like, well, you know, it's there's all this tubula

602
00:41:01,199 --> 00:41:05,000
in and all these mitotic spindle and kineticore tubules grow

603
00:41:05,039 --> 00:41:07,880
out of it. But what's orchestrating that?

604
00:41:07,960 --> 00:41:11,960
Speaker 2: Who does that? Yeah? Yeah, it looks like more than

605
00:41:12,079 --> 00:41:17,800
just things diffusing around. Yes, there's I'll mention briefly, there's

606
00:41:17,960 --> 00:41:21,440
some amazing work by a guy named Gunter Albrecht Buehler

607
00:41:22,079 --> 00:41:24,599
who's got a series of papers that appear to show

608
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:34,119
single cells a rudimentary form of cellular vision that is

609
00:41:34,159 --> 00:41:39,679
detecting electromagnetic light signals and not just like so, one

610
00:41:39,719 --> 00:41:42,599
thing they do is reach out or move towards an

611
00:41:42,599 --> 00:41:45,280
infrared light source, which is sort of trivial. Maybe it's

612
00:41:45,400 --> 00:41:48,280
just going towards the heat or something. But there's this

613
00:41:48,360 --> 00:41:52,840
amazing phenomenon where they appear to orient. There's these elongated

614
00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:56,920
I think they're called T cells anyway, some elongated type

615
00:41:56,920 --> 00:41:59,519
of cells. He puts them on two sides of a

616
00:41:59,559 --> 00:42:05,960
glass barrier and they orient perpendicular to each other across

617
00:42:06,000 --> 00:42:08,519
the barrier. And he did a bunch of controls to

618
00:42:08,559 --> 00:42:10,880
try and rule out other signals they might have been using,

619
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:16,000
and concluded it was electromagnet an electromagnetic signal, and he

620
00:42:16,039 --> 00:42:20,800
has arguments to support that. The I might get the

621
00:42:20,920 --> 00:42:23,400
term wrong here, but I think it's the centurial that

622
00:42:23,480 --> 00:42:28,320
has the T shaped arrangement. Okay, microtubules, he argues, that's

623
00:42:28,719 --> 00:42:31,840
exactly how you would want to arrange your antennas to

624
00:42:31,880 --> 00:42:35,039
be able to tell what directions a light signal are

625
00:42:35,079 --> 00:42:38,119
coming from. Oh that's fast, so it could be the eye.

626
00:42:38,440 --> 00:42:40,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're always they're always drawn at a right angle

627
00:42:40,920 --> 00:42:44,840
to one another. The two show up. Yeah, and I've

628
00:42:44,840 --> 00:42:48,199
always wondered about that. I'm like, what what's the They're

629
00:42:48,199 --> 00:42:50,840
not connected, they're just sort of floating at a right angle.

630
00:42:50,840 --> 00:42:53,400
What is the mechanism? Wow? That is fascinating.

631
00:42:53,480 --> 00:42:57,440
Speaker 2: So that might have a use. Yeah, So all that

632
00:42:57,599 --> 00:43:00,000
is to say, microtubules seem to be in the right

633
00:43:01,360 --> 00:43:03,840
place and do the right kind of thing that I'm

634
00:43:03,880 --> 00:43:09,280
asked that I would want for my hypothot hypothetical quantum

635
00:43:09,360 --> 00:43:16,000
process in the brain to underline underlay consciousness. And now

636
00:43:16,159 --> 00:43:22,159
in neurons, they you know, they have specialized proteins that

637
00:43:22,199 --> 00:43:24,199
go with them that aren't in other cells. They show

638
00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:30,679
up in different arrangements than in other cells. They tend

639
00:43:30,679 --> 00:43:34,159
to be associated with synapses where the different neurons talk

640
00:43:34,199 --> 00:43:36,559
to each other, communicate with each other. But as you said,

641
00:43:36,599 --> 00:43:40,000
there's a space there and the actual signals are the

642
00:43:40,079 --> 00:43:45,760
release of chemicals that diffuse across and trigger an electrical

643
00:43:45,840 --> 00:43:51,840
response from the target neuron. Now another requirement, I said,

644
00:43:51,880 --> 00:43:55,599
if we're I'm developing this, I made a theoretical argument

645
00:43:55,599 --> 00:43:57,800
why I think there has to be something quantum in

646
00:43:57,800 --> 00:44:02,320
my head to account for my holistic experiences. And I'm

647
00:44:02,519 --> 00:44:08,480
focusing on the microtubules. There's a bunch of other reasons

648
00:44:08,519 --> 00:44:13,000
they are prime suspects. Maybe I can get to those

649
00:44:13,039 --> 00:44:16,639
as we go, But if that's going to be true,

650
00:44:18,239 --> 00:44:21,559
those microtubules need a way to talk to the electrical

651
00:44:21,639 --> 00:44:26,239
signals on the neural membranes. We can't just say, oh,

652
00:44:27,320 --> 00:44:30,239
the neuroscientists have been completely off track the whole time,

653
00:44:31,039 --> 00:44:34,119
and our mind has nothing to do with those neurons.

654
00:44:34,119 --> 00:44:37,559
It's the microtubules inside. Can't say that because the way

655
00:44:37,599 --> 00:44:40,360
I know what's going on outside my head is through

656
00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:44,920
the electrical signals on the membranes of neurons, and the

657
00:44:44,960 --> 00:44:48,039
way I move my hands and my mouth and make

658
00:44:48,119 --> 00:44:53,320
words is through action potentials sent to my muscles. So

659
00:44:53,800 --> 00:44:56,760
the action potentials being the electrical signals on the membranes

660
00:44:56,840 --> 00:45:01,559
of the neurons. So if this microtubule hypothesis is going

661
00:45:01,599 --> 00:45:05,039
to be viable, those microtubules need a way to interact

662
00:45:06,119 --> 00:45:09,519
with the membrane potential on the one hand, to find

663
00:45:09,559 --> 00:45:13,199
out what's going on outside, what should what's what am

664
00:45:13,239 --> 00:45:18,679
I seeing? And on the other hand, to help guide

665
00:45:18,920 --> 00:45:25,519
my behavior by firing action potentials that activate certain muscles

666
00:45:25,559 --> 00:45:31,480
to speak or with my hands. So, and we do

667
00:45:31,559 --> 00:45:36,360
have evidence that that is the case. That is uh,

668
00:45:36,480 --> 00:45:41,280
there's been recordings of electromagnetic resonances of the microtubules. So

669
00:45:41,320 --> 00:45:46,760
the microtubules are made out of a bunch of identical subunits,

670
00:45:47,760 --> 00:45:51,760
protein subunits which each have an electric dipole, and so

671
00:45:51,840 --> 00:45:59,039
they can wiggle in an electromagnetic field. And to get

672
00:45:59,079 --> 00:46:02,159
back to the issue of how they could become entangled

673
00:46:02,199 --> 00:46:08,840
across different neurons or even within one microtubule, it's through

674
00:46:08,840 --> 00:46:13,719
the electromagnetic field, you know, like like two magnets talk

675
00:46:13,800 --> 00:46:17,920
to each other without touching. Electric dipoles do that too.

676
00:46:19,960 --> 00:46:23,480
You could say it's by exchanging photons or changing the

677
00:46:23,519 --> 00:46:28,000
photon field, or just we can call it the electromagnetic field.

678
00:46:28,639 --> 00:46:33,960
And so various models have shown that these dipoles in

679
00:46:34,039 --> 00:46:40,360
the microtubules can get into collective vibrations where all those

680
00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:44,719
little electric dipoles become coordinated. And that's also felt in

681
00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:49,679
the photon field inside and around the microtubule. And so

682
00:46:49,880 --> 00:46:58,960
that's how they could interact across that little gap between neurons.

683
00:46:59,519 --> 00:47:04,840
It's still sounds implausible again, but I was leading up

684
00:47:04,840 --> 00:47:07,360
to saying, we have experimental evidence that this happens on

685
00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:12,239
your bond Bandio Padier and his colleagues have recorded these

686
00:47:12,320 --> 00:47:16,880
resonances in the microtubules and shown moreover that they do

687
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:21,960
affect the spiking activity on the membrane, and not only

688
00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:25,679
that they span multiple neurons. So so far it's only

689
00:47:25,679 --> 00:47:28,920
in a dish that he's shown that multiple neurons in

690
00:47:28,960 --> 00:47:34,119
a dish with their microtubules, But that shows that it

691
00:47:34,159 --> 00:47:40,079
can happen that the microtubule resonance, collective oscillatory state of

692
00:47:40,239 --> 00:47:46,119
the microtubules and different neurons can condense they say, into

693
00:47:46,199 --> 00:47:50,119
a unified quantum or entangled quantum state.

694
00:47:51,119 --> 00:47:54,480
Speaker 1: Well, that's fascinating. How is that measured? I mean, you

695
00:47:54,519 --> 00:47:57,320
don't necessarily need to give me the two detail of

696
00:47:57,320 --> 00:48:00,280
an answer, but is this like is this can't be

697
00:48:00,280 --> 00:48:02,880
BEEG or anything that be electrical? How do you measure

698
00:48:03,159 --> 00:48:03,920
something like that.

699
00:48:05,480 --> 00:48:08,159
Speaker 2: You mentioned EG. He's got a way of trying to

700
00:48:08,199 --> 00:48:12,400
measure these same resonances outside the head and people that

701
00:48:12,480 --> 00:48:17,800
he calls DDG for because unlike EEG, it goes over

702
00:48:17,880 --> 00:48:21,679
twelve orders of magnitude and frequency to very high frequencies.

703
00:48:22,360 --> 00:48:28,360
But in the neurons, he's started with these probes, physical

704
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:31,480
probes that he would touched two spots on an actual

705
00:48:31,519 --> 00:48:35,480
microtubual inside of neuron and was measuring resonances in the

706
00:48:35,920 --> 00:48:39,159
electrical conductivity. I think was one of the first ways

707
00:48:39,199 --> 00:48:42,880
he did it found resonances, But then he graduated to

708
00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:48,880
a non touch, wireless way of stimulating, so just it's

709
00:48:48,880 --> 00:48:59,079
still electromagnetic stimulating frequencies and seeing resonances in things he

710
00:48:59,079 --> 00:49:04,199
could measure on the microtubules, and then he combined that

711
00:49:04,320 --> 00:49:07,760
with more traditional kinds of measurements of the spiking or

712
00:49:07,760 --> 00:49:12,119
electrical activity on the membrane of the neurons to show

713
00:49:12,159 --> 00:49:16,960
that they were coupling and that resonances or bursts of activity,

714
00:49:17,079 --> 00:49:25,920
bursts of oscillatory activity in the microtubules was preceding neural

715
00:49:26,039 --> 00:49:31,800
spikes on the membrane. Wow, hearing to drive them, but yeah,

716
00:49:31,800 --> 00:49:33,920
he's tried to develop this to something that can be

717
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:36,559
done non invasively on people, and so they've got some

718
00:49:36,599 --> 00:49:41,119
preliminary results there there. The challenge is to relate what

719
00:49:41,159 --> 00:49:46,800
you're seeing outside to the mechanisms inside and give evidence

720
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:51,920
that it's really microtubules that are generating the signal. But

721
00:49:52,159 --> 00:49:56,239
that's farther along than most people know in terms of

722
00:49:56,280 --> 00:50:01,920
evidence that microtubules are participating in the electrical activity on

723
00:50:02,119 --> 00:50:07,000
the membranes of neurons. That the most neuroscientists focus on.

724
00:50:07,840 --> 00:50:11,760
That same researcher, Bondiopadia says, trying to understand the brain.

725
00:50:12,360 --> 00:50:15,280
By studying only the membranes of neurons is like trying

726
00:50:15,320 --> 00:50:17,760
to understand an animal by only studying its skin.

727
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:20,719
Speaker 1: Reah, wow.

728
00:50:21,119 --> 00:50:26,039
Speaker 2: We you know, in defense of traditional neuroscience, we sort

729
00:50:26,039 --> 00:50:28,159
of had a reason that we thought we could ignore

730
00:50:28,559 --> 00:50:31,119
what was going on inside the cell, which is that

731
00:50:31,199 --> 00:50:35,239
in the last century, the pioneers showed that they could

732
00:50:35,239 --> 00:50:39,280
make action potentials in a membrane of a neuron, the

733
00:50:39,320 --> 00:50:41,800
axon of a neuron that had been hollowed out and

734
00:50:41,840 --> 00:50:46,679
replaced with artificial internal fluids. So we can make action

735
00:50:46,760 --> 00:50:50,320
potentials without the microtubules. And so we thought, oh, well,

736
00:50:50,480 --> 00:50:55,119
they're not doing anything, but that seems to have been premature.

737
00:50:54,880 --> 00:50:57,639
Speaker 1: Yes, in their defense, of course, you know, once you

738
00:50:57,760 --> 00:51:00,639
first see a neuron and see what it does, I

739
00:51:00,880 --> 00:51:03,280
I too would think, well this is this is it?

740
00:51:03,400 --> 00:51:08,480
You know, and it is and it's relevant? Y yeah, yeah,

741
00:51:08,559 --> 00:51:10,400
well okay, well that's that's fat.

742
00:51:10,400 --> 00:51:10,599
Speaker 2: You know.

743
00:51:10,719 --> 00:51:15,440
Speaker 1: I can't help but escape sort of like the philosophical uh,

744
00:51:15,679 --> 00:51:19,639
synergy with with maybe just like the subjective experience of

745
00:51:19,679 --> 00:51:23,719
being a conscious agent, or or maybe even some deeper

746
00:51:23,760 --> 00:51:27,960
ideas about like clearly, the brain in one sense is

747
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:31,880
a classical computer, like it like we have, we have synapses,

748
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:35,920
we have neurons or almost like little binary switches, you

749
00:51:35,960 --> 00:51:38,639
know that that oscillate a different frequency. So so it

750
00:51:38,679 --> 00:51:42,679
is and clearly a lot of things can be explained

751
00:51:43,440 --> 00:51:48,360
with with simple neural schematics or complex neural schematics. But

752
00:51:48,400 --> 00:51:51,639
then there just is the experience of like, yeah, I'm speaking,

753
00:51:51,719 --> 00:51:54,639
but i'm speaking, and yes I'm listening to you, but

754
00:51:54,800 --> 00:51:59,719
I'm witnessing it. I'm process I'm somehow witnessing my processing,

755
00:51:59,760 --> 00:52:03,159
my association of words meanings with memories. It just it

756
00:52:03,239 --> 00:52:06,840
just feels very you feel very embodied. So you kind

757
00:52:06,840 --> 00:52:08,639
of are left with this sense that there is like

758
00:52:09,719 --> 00:52:13,639
clearly a classical machine that does all of the things

759
00:52:13,639 --> 00:52:16,440
the brain does, but there's almost like something on top

760
00:52:16,519 --> 00:52:19,599
of that, like another layer, or I guess in this case,

761
00:52:19,679 --> 00:52:24,880
within that, another layer that sort of explains subjective experience

762
00:52:24,920 --> 00:52:30,360
and neurons alone just can't can't do that. You much

763
00:52:30,360 --> 00:52:34,480
more eloquently described it as this wholeism idea. So I'll

764
00:52:34,480 --> 00:52:38,000
stop interrupting you, but it just it just feels intuitive

765
00:52:38,039 --> 00:52:42,719
that there would be more to the story than just synapsis.

766
00:52:43,639 --> 00:52:47,440
Speaker 2: Right, But I want to be clear that the mic

767
00:52:47,480 --> 00:52:51,840
tubules are just another physical thing. They are, so there

768
00:52:51,880 --> 00:52:54,400
is an issue there that I'm prepared to address. I

769
00:52:54,440 --> 00:52:58,599
want to note that in terms of we are talking

770
00:52:58,639 --> 00:53:01,559
mostly at a concept level, and so in terms of

771
00:53:01,599 --> 00:53:04,599
making contact with the empirical evidence, I hope we touch

772
00:53:04,679 --> 00:53:08,679
on anesthesia, which is how I really got into the discussion.

773
00:53:08,719 --> 00:53:13,159
But as far as that, there seems to be something

774
00:53:13,199 --> 00:53:15,599
more than neurons. And now I'm saying, in a sense,

775
00:53:15,639 --> 00:53:22,960
there's something more than just physical microtubules. You know, we're

776
00:53:22,960 --> 00:53:25,840
getting to what it's known as the hard problem. That is,

777
00:53:26,199 --> 00:53:30,000
you've got the physical description, nowhere does it make reference

778
00:53:30,039 --> 00:53:33,039
to this conscious thing that goes along with it in

779
00:53:33,079 --> 00:53:40,440
our case, and that includes quantum physics. So I sort

780
00:53:40,440 --> 00:53:43,800
of already alluded to how I see the solution to this,

781
00:53:43,920 --> 00:53:48,039
but to outline it, the hard problem is just a

782
00:53:48,079 --> 00:53:51,880
new way of formulating the same mind body problem that

783
00:53:52,000 --> 00:53:55,639
people have been arguing about for thousands of years by

784
00:53:55,719 --> 00:53:59,559
David Chalmers. And it's the idea that I just said

785
00:53:59,559 --> 00:54:02,159
that once you've got the entire physical description of some

786
00:54:02,199 --> 00:54:06,079
physical system like a brain, it does not entail or

787
00:54:06,159 --> 00:54:12,000
imply this consciousness that we observe comes along with our brain.

788
00:54:15,960 --> 00:54:19,119
So that's that is called the hard problem with capital

789
00:54:19,760 --> 00:54:23,519
HP because it seems to be insoluble from a physicalist

790
00:54:23,599 --> 00:54:26,840
point of view. And I think it really is insoluble

791
00:54:27,159 --> 00:54:30,039
from a physicalist point of view. And again, what I

792
00:54:30,119 --> 00:54:33,000
mean now about physicalist is not just that you think

793
00:54:33,039 --> 00:54:38,119
the brain is relevant to understanding consciousness, but that all

794
00:54:38,159 --> 00:54:41,400
you need to know is the physical brain to account

795
00:54:41,480 --> 00:54:44,360
for consciousness. I think that's wrong.

796
00:54:46,519 --> 00:54:50,320
Speaker 1: It's so insoluble that I often hear neuroscientists say that

797
00:54:50,480 --> 00:54:52,320
maybe there is no such thing, maybe there is no

798
00:54:52,400 --> 00:54:53,719
heart problem, which is just to me.

799
00:54:54,159 --> 00:54:58,880
Speaker 2: That's what the illusion is to do. And and and

800
00:54:59,079 --> 00:55:01,960
it's possible to be confused like that, because I think

801
00:55:01,960 --> 00:55:05,159
that's first of all, I think that's a confusion. Unfortunately,

802
00:55:05,199 --> 00:55:09,400
they're very often very confident about that intuition. But I

803
00:55:09,440 --> 00:55:14,840
think and they'll they'll call what I'm they'll call my

804
00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:17,199
what I am claiming as an insight. They'll try to

805
00:55:17,239 --> 00:55:22,360
deride it as an intuition that is wrong, But I

806
00:55:22,360 --> 00:55:25,760
think it's an actual insight. And and the way you

807
00:55:25,800 --> 00:55:28,440
can be confused about it is by not being clear

808
00:55:28,639 --> 00:55:32,119
what a physical property is. And so you can imagine, well,

809
00:55:32,159 --> 00:55:35,239
maybe this conscious thing is just another physical property, or

810
00:55:36,199 --> 00:55:39,119
or it's some combination of the ones we've already got.

811
00:55:40,159 --> 00:55:42,119
But if you get clear in your head that what

812
00:55:42,159 --> 00:55:46,840
a physical property is is something that participates in determining

813
00:55:46,960 --> 00:55:53,360
movement in space, then you can reflect and realize that

814
00:55:54,039 --> 00:55:58,480
to have a concept of what this consciousness is, you

815
00:55:58,639 --> 00:56:01,760
never need to make reference to make to movement in space.

816
00:56:02,119 --> 00:56:07,440
It's not involved in the concept of consciousness. And so

817
00:56:09,679 --> 00:56:15,119
those really are conceptually distinct categories. I hate to say

818
00:56:15,239 --> 00:56:18,239
category error because this is strapped and it just sounds

819
00:56:18,280 --> 00:56:20,519
like you're giving a rule. You just broke a rule,

820
00:56:20,599 --> 00:56:23,119
the category rule. But no, it's I think it's an

821
00:56:23,159 --> 00:56:28,719
actual mist confusion. So yes, I think the hard problem

822
00:56:28,760 --> 00:56:31,360
is real. On the other hand, I think we have

823
00:56:31,400 --> 00:56:37,039
a solution, a solution you could call panpsychism or dual

824
00:56:37,199 --> 00:56:41,679
aspect monism, and that is just how I said it earlier.

825
00:56:42,159 --> 00:56:44,639
We just have to add a new property to our

826
00:56:45,239 --> 00:56:48,519
scientific theory. We've done it before when we added electric

827
00:56:48,639 --> 00:56:51,519
charge with then we added spin. We've got all these

828
00:56:51,880 --> 00:56:58,119
weak isospins and new fangled physical properties in our in

829
00:56:58,159 --> 00:57:02,760
our quantum theory, but they are all still recognizably physical

830
00:57:02,800 --> 00:57:07,000
properties because ultimately they're in the theory because they help

831
00:57:07,079 --> 00:57:10,559
decide where in space things are going to turn up

832
00:57:10,599 --> 00:57:15,360
when we measure them in our physical experiments. So I'm

833
00:57:15,360 --> 00:57:18,440
saying adding a new fundamental property is not cheating. We've

834
00:57:18,440 --> 00:57:23,639
done it before. It seems almost trivial, but we've done

835
00:57:23,679 --> 00:57:29,440
it before, so it's a legal way of making progress. Admittedly,

836
00:57:29,719 --> 00:57:33,400
we have never added a new non physical property, but

837
00:57:33,519 --> 00:57:36,239
I'm saying we have to do that to account for consciousness.

838
00:57:37,239 --> 00:57:42,199
Now this has been considered before, and when it's called panpsychism,

839
00:57:42,840 --> 00:57:46,679
it goes under these different names panpsychism or dual aspect monism,

840
00:57:47,119 --> 00:57:52,079
which I'm treating as synonymous when people have thought of

841
00:57:52,119 --> 00:57:58,440
that before. The immediate objection, and aside from the there's

842
00:57:58,480 --> 00:58:02,519
the cartoon objection, just like with the quantum hypothesis. The

843
00:58:02,599 --> 00:58:07,159
cartoon objection is two mysteries and solve each other. The

844
00:58:07,519 --> 00:58:09,480
way to make fun of a pant psychist is, oh,

845
00:58:09,719 --> 00:58:14,719
so you think rocks are conscious, but a serious panpsychist

846
00:58:14,800 --> 00:58:19,840
or dual as most does not think that. But if

847
00:58:19,880 --> 00:58:23,199
you're introducing a new fundamental mental property into physics and

848
00:58:23,239 --> 00:58:28,639
saying something like, yeah, even electrons have some mental property

849
00:58:28,679 --> 00:58:32,239
to them, then the the immediate problem is known as

850
00:58:32,320 --> 00:58:39,360
the combination problem, what decides which combination of things will

851
00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:43,840
be experienced? And for example, in a brain, why isn't

852
00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:48,400
my experience just a bunch of individual electron experiences instead

853
00:58:48,400 --> 00:58:53,360
of this one big experience I have? And William James,

854
00:58:53,800 --> 00:59:00,280
the psychology American psychologist, had already articulated that binding problem

855
00:59:00,400 --> 00:59:05,920
or combination problem beautifully before quantum physics in his Principles

856
00:59:05,920 --> 00:59:10,679
of Psychology book, and he's got some nice examples of

857
00:59:10,800 --> 00:59:13,719
you know, if you have ten men next to each other,

858
00:59:13,760 --> 00:59:17,000
each thinking one word very intently, they don't add up

859
00:59:17,039 --> 00:59:19,440
to a sentence. It's the same for our neurons. As

860
00:59:19,440 --> 00:59:21,840
you said, they're not even touching. You could push the

861
00:59:22,199 --> 00:59:24,039
men up against each other and at least they would

862
00:59:24,039 --> 00:59:28,000
be touching, but neurons aren't even touching. But so the

863
00:59:28,079 --> 00:59:31,519
answer I think to that binding or combination problem that

864
00:59:31,679 --> 00:59:39,360
is a problem for panpsychism is entanglement. The quantum entanglement

865
00:59:39,599 --> 00:59:45,000
is the objective is the structure of the objectively holistic

866
00:59:46,840 --> 00:59:50,480
aspect of that physical system, So that can be what

867
00:59:50,679 --> 00:59:53,559
maps on. So that is what gives us something in

868
00:59:53,599 --> 00:59:58,599
the physical theory that could map on to these experiences

869
00:59:58,639 --> 01:00:03,360
we have. Every physical thing has both its physical properties

870
01:00:03,719 --> 01:00:08,760
and also a mental property. That that's what the name

871
01:00:08,880 --> 01:00:12,320
dual aspect monism refers to. There's just one kind of

872
01:00:12,360 --> 01:00:15,679
stuff in the universe, but it has physical properties and

873
01:00:15,880 --> 01:00:19,159
mental properties, and the fact that they are both properties

874
01:00:19,159 --> 01:00:23,719
of one thing is what explains why they match. Why

875
01:00:23,960 --> 01:00:26,280
when I'm thinking a certain thing, my neurons are doing

876
01:00:26,360 --> 01:00:31,880
something that corresponds. So that's the panpsychic's point of view.

877
01:00:32,880 --> 01:00:36,360
If you think about it for a while, it might

878
01:00:36,400 --> 01:00:41,039
seem to have the same problem with regard to evolutions

879
01:00:41,400 --> 01:00:46,840
as I said the classical models had. That is in

880
01:00:46,880 --> 01:00:48,920
the picture. I haven't said it explicitly, but in this

881
01:00:49,000 --> 01:00:58,440
picture the mental property does not actually directly participate in

882
01:01:00,360 --> 01:01:04,760
changing how things move. Right, So it appears like it's

883
01:01:04,800 --> 01:01:08,760
just going to be just as epi phenomenal, just as ineffectual,

884
01:01:08,920 --> 01:01:12,719
impotent as the classical mind that we tacked on and said,

885
01:01:12,800 --> 01:01:15,159
whenever a brain's in this state, it has a mind.

886
01:01:15,880 --> 01:01:18,360
It seems like we're going to have the same problem

887
01:01:18,960 --> 01:01:23,239
with the quantum theory. I'm still just making a postulate

888
01:01:23,320 --> 01:01:28,320
that whenever you have a particular physical state, it comes

889
01:01:28,320 --> 01:01:32,800
with this mental state. The property that goes along with it,

890
01:01:32,840 --> 01:01:37,159
mental experience that goes along with it. My improvement is

891
01:01:37,199 --> 01:01:40,199
that I have a way to account for the wholism

892
01:01:40,320 --> 01:01:45,320
of that mental state. But I'm not claiming that there's

893
01:01:45,360 --> 01:01:51,400
a causal interaction between the mental properties and the physical properties.

894
01:01:52,159 --> 01:01:56,840
So that's kind of the argument between Spinoza and Descartes.

895
01:01:57,800 --> 01:02:02,679
Descartes imagining the soul, the consciousness pushing on the pineal

896
01:02:02,719 --> 01:02:07,920
body in the middle of the brain. That kind of

897
01:02:08,519 --> 01:02:12,599
theory is known as interactionist dualism, where you imagine the

898
01:02:12,679 --> 01:02:18,519
consciousness can actually change how things move in space. Under

899
01:02:18,559 --> 01:02:24,440
my conception, that would make that new physics not mind,

900
01:02:25,199 --> 01:02:27,679
because if it pushes on things in space, it's just

901
01:02:27,719 --> 01:02:31,679
another kind of physical property. Right in this definition or

902
01:02:31,679 --> 01:02:38,199
conception where Spinosa is a dual aspect monus and he

903
01:02:38,760 --> 01:02:44,079
has some lovely paragraphs where he's making fun of Descartes

904
01:02:44,239 --> 01:02:47,519
and with great respect, but you know, how do you

905
01:02:47,559 --> 01:02:50,079
imagine that this little bit of soul is going to

906
01:02:50,159 --> 01:02:55,840
push on this little bit of matter? And so his

907
01:02:55,920 --> 01:02:59,400
answer is it's this dual aspect kind of solution. But

908
01:02:59,440 --> 01:03:03,639
it seems to leave you. It might feel like we're

909
01:03:03,679 --> 01:03:07,400
just along for the ride and not actually participating in

910
01:03:07,440 --> 01:03:09,679
all these debt decisions and so on, and that the

911
01:03:09,719 --> 01:03:15,840
consciousness is irrelevant. There's at least two ways to respond

912
01:03:16,000 --> 01:03:20,480
to that, but I think I'll start with coming at

913
01:03:20,519 --> 01:03:24,400
it from the evolutionary perspective. That one way of formulating

914
01:03:24,400 --> 01:03:28,519
this problem that it seems like consciousness doesn't do anything is,

915
01:03:28,559 --> 01:03:31,199
as I said earlier, we can't account for how it

916
01:03:31,239 --> 01:03:36,679
could have evolved to apparently be giving good advice about

917
01:03:36,719 --> 01:03:39,000
taking my hand out of the fire if it never

918
01:03:39,119 --> 01:03:41,760
actually helped me take my hand out of the fire.

919
01:03:46,840 --> 01:03:51,079
The way we can now under the quantum model, account

920
01:03:51,280 --> 01:03:56,840
for the evolution of you know that fire hurts is

921
01:03:56,880 --> 01:04:03,440
that the I'm claiming this objective holism. I haven't said

922
01:04:03,440 --> 01:04:06,519
this explicitly yet, but this objective holism that I was

923
01:04:06,599 --> 01:04:11,679
using to account for, and this might bring us back

924
01:04:11,719 --> 01:04:16,360
to your question about Richard Dawkins. But the objective holism

925
01:04:16,360 --> 01:04:24,360
that I say is in entangled quantum state that I

926
01:04:24,480 --> 01:04:28,960
used so far to account for the experienced holism of

927
01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:33,159
my each moment of consciousness, but I also want I'm

928
01:04:33,199 --> 01:04:36,960
going to now use it to account for objective advantages,

929
01:04:37,440 --> 01:04:42,880
advantages of being a conscious physical system and they come

930
01:04:42,920 --> 01:04:48,199
from advantages like what a quantum computer has over a

931
01:04:48,280 --> 01:04:53,280
classical computer, and those are usually discussed in terms of

932
01:04:56,119 --> 01:05:00,280
speed advantages, and that is definitely one way. But there's

933
01:05:00,320 --> 01:05:04,519
a tendency to think that quantum computation is overhyped because

934
01:05:04,880 --> 01:05:09,280
we only know of a couple good quantum algorithms and

935
01:05:09,320 --> 01:05:13,800
they are mostly useful for robbing banks and breaking codes

936
01:05:13,800 --> 01:05:17,400
and stuff. So it seems like maybe these quantum computers

937
01:05:17,400 --> 01:05:20,320
are kind of theoretically interesting but maybe not practically useful.

938
01:05:21,599 --> 01:05:26,960
But there's another advantage they can have, which is for memory.

939
01:05:30,360 --> 01:05:35,280
I'll just say this briefly that there's a quantum algorithm

940
01:05:35,320 --> 01:05:40,840
that marries a well known quantum search algorithm called Grover's

941
01:05:40,880 --> 01:05:45,280
algorithm with the neural network architecture, and by doing that,

942
01:05:45,440 --> 01:05:50,239
it makes like a quantum neural network that has exponentially

943
01:05:50,360 --> 01:05:56,000
more memory capacity than the equivalent classical neural network, which

944
01:05:56,039 --> 01:06:04,400
is how we model our own That's interesting. So you

945
01:06:04,480 --> 01:06:07,440
started also with asking about, you know, how would you

946
01:06:07,519 --> 01:06:11,480
convince someone who's sort of scientifically literated or whatever, But

947
01:06:12,440 --> 01:06:17,880
this sounds like out of left field and crazy. Unfortunately,

948
01:06:19,400 --> 01:06:21,719
it is sort of a detailed argument. I mean, if

949
01:06:22,079 --> 01:06:25,920
they don't believe the binding problem argument, and there's a

950
01:06:25,960 --> 01:06:29,280
tendency not to because it's just armchair theorizing or whatever.

951
01:06:30,400 --> 01:06:33,719
And then we can go to the experimental evidence, which

952
01:06:33,760 --> 01:06:37,320
we've talked about a bit of it, but there's also

953
01:06:37,360 --> 01:06:42,880
from the behavioral point of view, I'm claiming this quantum

954
01:06:42,920 --> 01:06:46,719
thing in there evolved because it gave us an advantage,

955
01:06:46,760 --> 01:06:48,719
and so I should be able to or ultimately we

956
01:06:48,719 --> 01:06:50,760
should be able to say what kind of advantages it

957
01:06:50,800 --> 01:06:54,760
would give and maybe even model how it gives those advantages.

958
01:06:55,400 --> 01:07:00,000
And so so, just to summarize what I think, those

959
01:07:00,000 --> 01:07:04,400
advantages are advantages of speed, being able to integrate a

960
01:07:04,400 --> 01:07:07,760
lot of information very quickly, which we do every two

961
01:07:07,800 --> 01:07:11,599
hundred milliseconds. We're making a new inference about what's going

962
01:07:11,639 --> 01:07:17,559
on and what to do about it consciously. And so

963
01:07:17,599 --> 01:07:21,119
there's a detailed argument to be made, which I've made

964
01:07:21,159 --> 01:07:25,559
in a couple of papers, that our classical neural models

965
01:07:26,320 --> 01:07:28,519
are too slow to be able to do the fancy

966
01:07:28,559 --> 01:07:31,760
things we know our brain is doing. But that's something

967
01:07:31,800 --> 01:07:34,280
that you know, it's not a slam dunk, it's just

968
01:07:34,360 --> 01:07:37,880
a it doesn't look like a lot so far can't

969
01:07:37,880 --> 01:07:41,280
do it. Maybe we're going to make improvements. So that's

970
01:07:41,320 --> 01:07:43,360
a detailed argument. It's not something you're going to be

971
01:07:43,400 --> 01:07:45,199
able to convince someone in the hallway. Probably.

972
01:07:46,559 --> 01:07:49,480
Speaker 1: You know, I'm realizing I sort of lied to you

973
01:07:49,519 --> 01:07:51,239
because I said that that was my aim. But the

974
01:07:51,320 --> 01:07:54,559
truth is that I just really want to satisfy all

975
01:07:54,599 --> 01:07:56,039
my curiosities and questions.

976
01:07:56,400 --> 01:07:58,119
Speaker 2: Time. You can do that, we can do that.

977
01:08:00,119 --> 01:08:01,719
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't want to abuse your time. Are

978
01:08:01,719 --> 01:08:03,360
you doing okay on time?

979
01:08:04,079 --> 01:08:05,480
Speaker 2: I'm okay, I'm flexible.

980
01:08:06,079 --> 01:08:08,840
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up memory because if you'll let

981
01:08:08,880 --> 01:08:11,079
me just kind of spin my wheel here for a minute.

982
01:08:11,119 --> 01:08:11,519
Speaker 2: Yeah.

983
01:08:11,559 --> 01:08:14,119
Speaker 1: You know, I have a tendency to say like this

984
01:08:14,239 --> 01:08:17,159
is completely unrelated to the type of stuff I study.

985
01:08:17,199 --> 01:08:19,239
But it dawns on me that one of the proteins

986
01:08:19,279 --> 01:08:22,960
I spend the most time reading about is a microtubul

987
01:08:23,000 --> 01:08:28,960
associated protein. Wow. Yeah right, yes, I If you had

988
01:08:28,960 --> 01:08:30,439
a chance to read that, I hope you thought it

989
01:08:30,479 --> 01:08:30,960
was interesting.

990
01:08:31,920 --> 01:08:32,239
Speaker 2: I did.

991
01:08:33,640 --> 01:08:36,199
Speaker 1: And so so it's like people, I often find we

992
01:08:36,239 --> 01:08:39,079
struggle from like a poor definition of consciousness in the

993
01:08:39,119 --> 01:08:43,840
general public. You know, people people might almost describe it

994
01:08:43,880 --> 01:08:47,600
as conscience, like morality. Some people will describe it as

995
01:08:48,439 --> 01:08:51,079
is memory other things. And I've always liked the idea

996
01:08:51,079 --> 01:08:54,840
of like, oh, it's just this first person perspective, subjective experience,

997
01:08:54,920 --> 01:08:57,319
inner world, outer world idea. That makes sense to me.

998
01:08:57,359 --> 01:09:00,439
But I realized that's not quite right, because you know,

999
01:09:01,039 --> 01:09:03,399
if I were to jump out of a plane. Maybe

1000
01:09:03,399 --> 01:09:06,079
this is a thought, you know, a metaphor you've heard before.

1001
01:09:06,119 --> 01:09:08,319
But if I were to jump out of a plane,

1002
01:09:08,479 --> 01:09:12,960
if I had absolutely no capability of making memory, even

1003
01:09:13,000 --> 01:09:16,680
from one millisecond to the next, would I know I'm falling?

1004
01:09:16,720 --> 01:09:19,000
And you'd say, well, of course you would, because the

1005
01:09:19,039 --> 01:09:22,199
wind is rushing past you. But there's a temporal aspect

1006
01:09:22,279 --> 01:09:23,880
to that, right, you need to be able to feel

1007
01:09:23,920 --> 01:09:29,039
the air. So memory is simply archived subjective experience. That's

1008
01:09:29,079 --> 01:09:35,520
what memory is. It's consciousness archived through time. So if

1009
01:09:35,600 --> 01:09:38,960
this does something for this mystery of memory, I would

1010
01:09:39,000 --> 01:09:43,119
say that is a huge evolutionary advantage. The ability to

1011
01:09:43,239 --> 01:09:45,680
archive subjective experiences is right.

1012
01:09:46,720 --> 01:09:50,079
Speaker 2: And what's special about the subjective experience is that you're archiving,

1013
01:09:50,199 --> 01:09:54,960
is that they are holistic representations, interpretations as opposed to

1014
01:09:55,399 --> 01:10:02,239
just a bunch of raw data. Right. Let's see, Oh,

1015
01:10:02,319 --> 01:10:03,600
so you made the connection to TAO.

1016
01:10:03,680 --> 01:10:07,039
Speaker 1: I mean, sorry, I just I dispewed some thoughts at you.

1017
01:10:07,119 --> 01:10:10,760
Speaker 2: That's great, No, I mean, yes, Alzheimer's is a memory disease.

1018
01:10:11,119 --> 01:10:16,239
We can't figure it out, but it's the darn microta.

1019
01:10:16,840 --> 01:10:18,640
I don't know, I mean, I don't have proof of that,

1020
01:10:18,720 --> 01:10:22,319
but you might want to follow a hammer off because

1021
01:10:23,960 --> 01:10:28,479
they've been trying a bunch of clinical stuff with ultrasound

1022
01:10:28,840 --> 01:10:34,000
to try and vibrate the microtubules essentially into a healthier state.

1023
01:10:34,880 --> 01:10:37,800
And uh, and I'm not totally up to date on

1024
01:10:37,800 --> 01:10:39,720
that stuff, but it seems like they're having some success

1025
01:10:39,760 --> 01:10:45,359
with that. And absolutely there there's a whole quantum angle

1026
01:10:45,439 --> 01:10:49,640
on memory as well. And I think the fact that,

1027
01:10:51,600 --> 01:10:56,279
I mean, we know storing memories involves microtubule associated proteins

1028
01:10:56,319 --> 01:11:00,800
like MAP two. We know this memory disease involves TAO,

1029
01:11:00,960 --> 01:11:04,239
which is a microso tubule associated protein. So there's a

1030
01:11:04,239 --> 01:11:05,800
bunch of clues like that that.

1031
01:11:05,720 --> 01:11:09,840
Speaker 1: It's huge, like signals, just blinking arrows pointing out the

1032
01:11:09,840 --> 01:11:14,239
microt Yeah, yeah, you just can't escape at mean schizophrenia. Also,

1033
01:11:14,359 --> 01:11:18,199
all these diseases are in some sense related to microtubule dysfunction.

1034
01:11:18,319 --> 01:11:21,680
Speaker 2: Is amazing but also anesthesia. We should mention that because

1035
01:11:21,720 --> 01:11:24,920
I think that is a big thing, that that points

1036
01:11:24,920 --> 01:11:28,960
to microtubules in addition to the circumstantial evidence that I

1037
01:11:29,079 --> 01:11:39,159
that I sketched earlier so amazingly, the medically miraculous gases

1038
01:11:39,319 --> 01:11:43,119
chemicals that we use to put ourselves asleep without killing

1039
01:11:43,119 --> 01:11:51,439
ourselves surgery. They work on everybody, I mean, including single

1040
01:11:51,520 --> 01:11:58,760
cells and plants. They arrest or slow movement, and they

1041
01:11:58,800 --> 01:12:03,239
seem to impair sensory responsiveness.

1042
01:12:03,880 --> 01:12:07,000
Speaker 1: So you know, I was a judge the gavel right there.

1043
01:12:07,479 --> 01:12:08,600
All right, that's it, I.

1044
01:12:08,560 --> 01:12:12,399
Speaker 2: Mean, right, So you know, we talk about anesthesian people,

1045
01:12:12,479 --> 01:12:15,239
and unconsciousness is one of the end points that you

1046
01:12:15,239 --> 01:12:20,000
talk about. You can also talk about amnesia and analgesia,

1047
01:12:20,079 --> 01:12:23,680
not feeling pain and stuff. But when you want to

1048
01:12:23,800 --> 01:12:26,520
compare the effects to things that where we don't know

1049
01:12:26,560 --> 01:12:29,399
if they're conscious or not, you can sort of generalize

1050
01:12:29,560 --> 01:12:34,680
the definition that says unconscious and immobile. For us, unconscious

1051
01:12:34,680 --> 01:12:40,039
and immobile is features of anesthesia in things where we

1052
01:12:40,079 --> 01:12:42,520
don't know if they're conscious or not, we can say

1053
01:12:42,720 --> 01:12:48,479
immobile and unresponsive to things they would normally be responsive to.

1054
01:12:50,199 --> 01:12:54,319
And we can investigate from there, and so amazingly, even

1055
01:12:54,359 --> 01:12:56,880
though we've been using this again, as I say, as

1056
01:12:57,039 --> 01:13:05,720
really a medical miracle, we don't fully understand how it works,

1057
01:13:06,560 --> 01:13:10,680
how they work, this class of chemicals. They're chemically diverse,

1058
01:13:11,399 --> 01:13:14,079
which sort of suggests that they're not working the way

1059
01:13:14,119 --> 01:13:18,119
many drugs do by binding lock and key with some

1060
01:13:18,239 --> 01:13:22,960
very specific protein shape into some very specific protein receptor.

1061
01:13:23,560 --> 01:13:28,800
Instead you get even single elements like xenon can act

1062
01:13:28,840 --> 01:13:32,560
as an anesthetic even though it's just one atom without

1063
01:13:32,600 --> 01:13:39,920
any without molecular structure. So it's working on everybody and

1064
01:13:39,960 --> 01:13:44,960
it's this chemically diverse molecules that do it. What does

1065
01:13:45,000 --> 01:13:49,800
everybody have. Everybody's got microtubules, now, in fairness, everybody also

1066
01:13:49,960 --> 01:13:53,319
has ion channels and mitochondria and a bunch of other

1067
01:13:53,359 --> 01:13:59,640
things that are affected by these anesthetics. Focusing on the

1068
01:13:59,720 --> 01:14:08,159
so called volatile anesthetics, and there are other kinds. So

1069
01:14:09,960 --> 01:14:14,439
neurologists neuroscientists tend to focus on ion channels because that's

1070
01:14:14,479 --> 01:14:17,439
what is involved in making the spikes. So ion channels

1071
01:14:17,439 --> 01:14:22,399
are little holes in the neural membrane where elect electrically

1072
01:14:22,479 --> 01:14:26,399
charged particles can go in and out of the cell,

1073
01:14:27,279 --> 01:14:29,720
which is what changes the voltage of the cell and

1074
01:14:29,800 --> 01:14:37,119
makes it an electrical signal. So medically or neurologically, people

1075
01:14:37,159 --> 01:14:42,239
tend to focus on the ion channels and how and

1076
01:14:42,359 --> 01:14:49,760
receptors in the membrane and how anesthetics affect those. But

1077
01:14:49,880 --> 01:14:57,640
another hypothetical molecular target of these volatile anesthetics is microtubules.

1078
01:14:57,680 --> 01:15:02,880
Because the hypothesis is that consciousness is a property of

1079
01:15:02,920 --> 01:15:06,279
this vibrational state of the microtubules, and so if you

1080
01:15:06,319 --> 01:15:11,279
have some particular kind of molecule that can dampen those vibrations,

1081
01:15:11,960 --> 01:15:18,319
that would be predicted to make you unconscious. Now, I

1082
01:15:18,640 --> 01:15:24,399
think I want to clarify that the hypothesis that microtubules

1083
01:15:24,399 --> 01:15:30,920
are the substrate does not require that all or even

1084
01:15:31,039 --> 01:15:38,359
any anesthetics work by directly targeting that microtubule state. But

1085
01:15:38,840 --> 01:15:42,479
it turns out that is so that is to protect

1086
01:15:42,479 --> 01:15:46,640
myself in a sense, you know, if there are some

1087
01:15:46,920 --> 01:15:51,439
anesthetics that their primary effect might be on gabba receptors,

1088
01:15:51,479 --> 01:15:55,840
the inhibitory receptors and kind of just turn down activity overall.

1089
01:15:56,159 --> 01:16:00,800
That is a way to make yourself unconscious. Under this hypothesis.

1090
01:16:00,840 --> 01:16:03,640
The reason you went unconscious when you did that is

1091
01:16:03,680 --> 01:16:08,000
that the microtubules were indirectly caused to go into a

1092
01:16:08,039 --> 01:16:12,760
state that's not the conscious state. Sure, but it seems

1093
01:16:12,760 --> 01:16:16,399
to have turned out that some of these molecules actually

1094
01:16:16,399 --> 01:16:22,840
are operating directly on microtubules. There's theoretical modeling work of

1095
01:16:22,960 --> 01:16:28,760
binding of a bunch of different anesthetic molecules to tubulin,

1096
01:16:29,720 --> 01:16:33,640
and that that study predicts the effectiveness of these molecules

1097
01:16:33,680 --> 01:16:39,920
as anesthetics according to how well or stably they bind

1098
01:16:40,119 --> 01:16:44,439
and dampen particular resonances in the microtubules. I don't think

1099
01:16:44,479 --> 01:16:50,479
there's any other candidate target that can say something like

1100
01:16:50,520 --> 01:16:53,279
that that it can count for the different potencies of

1101
01:16:53,399 --> 01:16:57,079
different anesthetics in terms of their binding to one of

1102
01:16:57,119 --> 01:17:03,039
the targets the Yeah, so that's related to the Meyer

1103
01:17:03,119 --> 01:17:06,880
Overton relation that you mentioned earlier, where a bunch of

1104
01:17:06,920 --> 01:17:13,800
different anesthetics their potency or their their strength of act

1105
01:17:14,439 --> 01:17:18,800
as anesthetics is predicted by how well they dissolve into

1106
01:17:19,359 --> 01:17:25,960
olive oil or some other lipophilic substance.

1107
01:17:26,239 --> 01:17:28,119
Speaker 1: I didn't believe that the first time I heard it

1108
01:17:28,439 --> 01:17:30,560
was that can't be the way it's done.

1109
01:17:31,279 --> 01:17:34,800
Speaker 2: So because of that, the first focus was on the membrane.

1110
01:17:35,000 --> 01:17:39,520
Maybe consciousness is in the membrane, and because it's oily,

1111
01:17:39,640 --> 01:17:44,119
you kind of lipid membrane, that seems to be ruled out.

1112
01:17:44,760 --> 01:17:51,520
And then the focus turned to hydrophobic pockets inside proteins.

1113
01:17:51,560 --> 01:17:57,840
And these anesthetic chemicals bind promiscuously to many different proteins,

1114
01:17:58,159 --> 01:18:01,880
including tubulin, the protein that makes up microtubules, but also

1115
01:18:01,960 --> 01:18:07,359
including a bunch of ion channels and receptors, and so

1116
01:18:07,439 --> 01:18:10,079
the yeah, the sort of the mainstream view is it's

1117
01:18:10,119 --> 01:18:13,960
just a combination of effects on different receptors and ion

1118
01:18:14,119 --> 01:18:18,000
channels that adds up to the anesthetic effect instead of

1119
01:18:18,960 --> 01:18:22,119
one primary effect on one target, like the microtubules.

1120
01:18:24,680 --> 01:18:26,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, if only, if only there is someone who could

1121
01:18:27,039 --> 01:18:32,199
come along and like systematically test this by administering some

1122
01:18:32,319 --> 01:18:34,800
drug that binds to microtubules and then sen.

1123
01:18:34,920 --> 01:18:37,640
Speaker 2: What I tried to do. Yes, Okay, So we've had

1124
01:18:37,640 --> 01:18:43,279
these drugs for a long time because they are anti

1125
01:18:43,319 --> 01:18:47,439
cancer drugs. They're chemotherapy drugs, drugs that bind the microtubules

1126
01:18:47,840 --> 01:18:52,279
and either stabilize them or destabilize them. Destabilized would mean

1127
01:18:52,319 --> 01:18:55,800
making them tend to fall apart into their subunits in

1128
01:18:55,840 --> 01:19:01,560
the extreme case. And yeah, they're they're used against cancer

1129
01:19:01,640 --> 01:19:05,479
because in my superficial understanding cancer is runaway cell division,

1130
01:19:05,880 --> 01:19:08,520
and the microtubules are a major part of that cell division.

1131
01:19:08,840 --> 01:19:11,079
So you mess with the microtubules to try to mess

1132
01:19:11,119 --> 01:19:12,039
with the cells.

1133
01:19:12,680 --> 01:19:13,319
Speaker 1: That's interesting.

1134
01:19:13,359 --> 01:19:18,920
Speaker 2: Okay, So these are well known drugs, but until somewhat recently,

1135
01:19:19,520 --> 01:19:22,000
most of them did not penetrate well into the brain.

1136
01:19:24,039 --> 01:19:26,960
But now more recently they developed some that go into

1137
01:19:27,000 --> 01:19:28,680
the brain, and so they can try to treat brain

1138
01:19:28,760 --> 01:19:33,079
cancers and tumors with those. But we took advantage of

1139
01:19:33,119 --> 01:19:39,640
those to try to test the hypothesis that microtubules are

1140
01:19:39,720 --> 01:19:46,199
one of or maybe the main functional target of isofluorane,

1141
01:19:46,319 --> 01:19:53,000
one of these gases anesthetic gases. We tested the involvement

1142
01:19:53,039 --> 01:19:55,279
of microtubules by, as you say, giving this drug that

1143
01:19:55,319 --> 01:20:01,359
binds to microtubules and just noting that it took rats

1144
01:20:01,359 --> 01:20:05,199
and mice longer to fall unconscious if they had this

1145
01:20:05,640 --> 01:20:09,119
microtubule binding drug EPO B in them.

1146
01:20:09,520 --> 01:20:11,600
Speaker 1: And does EPO be bind to a lot of other

1147
01:20:11,640 --> 01:20:14,079
targets or is it pretty specific to.

1148
01:20:14,159 --> 01:20:19,199
Speaker 2: My it can have nonspecific effects, But my understanding is

1149
01:20:19,239 --> 01:20:22,640
that they are I might be missing something, but I

1150
01:20:22,640 --> 01:20:27,600
think they're all through Its effects on microtubules. It's known

1151
01:20:27,640 --> 01:20:29,439
as a microtubule binding drug.

1152
01:20:29,520 --> 01:20:32,079
Speaker 1: Well, because it just seems like such an open and

1153
01:20:32,119 --> 01:20:34,239
shut way of doing it. That's why I was trying

1154
01:20:34,239 --> 01:20:37,520
to think, what would the criticisms be of that of

1155
01:20:37,560 --> 01:20:40,159
this study, And it seems like maybe that could be

1156
01:20:40,159 --> 01:20:43,039
an angle someone might take. But maybe I should ask you,

1157
01:20:43,079 --> 01:20:45,319
I mean, what has there been criticism of this idea?

1158
01:20:45,439 --> 01:20:46,640
It seems so clear to me.

1159
01:20:46,800 --> 01:20:51,600
Speaker 2: So well, Okay, first of all, we do have evidence

1160
01:20:51,760 --> 01:20:59,079
of involvement of other targets in isofluoranine and other anesthetics,

1161
01:20:59,560 --> 01:21:03,439
so I need to reconcile. Yes, my evidence seems to

1162
01:21:03,479 --> 01:21:07,840
say microtubules are one of the targets, but maybe they're

1163
01:21:07,880 --> 01:21:10,760
just one of the targets, maybe not the main one

1164
01:21:10,800 --> 01:21:12,920
even but it was a pretty strong effect, so they

1165
01:21:12,920 --> 01:21:20,800
seem to be one of the main ones. So but

1166
01:21:20,880 --> 01:21:23,840
I want to start off by saying my evidence does

1167
01:21:23,880 --> 01:21:26,720
not pertain to the quantum part. It is just implicating

1168
01:21:26,920 --> 01:21:34,680
microtubules in as possibly a substrate for consciousness, or at

1169
01:21:34,760 --> 01:21:38,600
least as part of the way that anesthetics make you unconscious.

1170
01:21:39,920 --> 01:21:43,640
But that evidence by itself does not implicate a quantum

1171
01:21:44,399 --> 01:21:50,680
solution or model. Okay, but if we're considering the quantum model,

1172
01:21:51,279 --> 01:21:55,840
we're comparing, so we're comparing how the quantum model would

1173
01:21:55,840 --> 01:22:00,000
explain that messing with microtubules tends to make you unconscious,

1174
01:22:00,600 --> 01:22:04,840
versus how a classical model might explain why messing with

1175
01:22:04,920 --> 01:22:07,960
microtubules could make you unconscious. And I'm not saying a

1176
01:22:08,000 --> 01:22:11,760
classical model can't do that. It can, you know, classically

1177
01:22:12,560 --> 01:22:16,640
the way people understand and everyone agrees with this me

1178
01:22:17,000 --> 01:22:22,000
and quantum people included, agrees that you go unconscious when

1179
01:22:22,000 --> 01:22:24,319
the activity in the different parts of your brain has

1180
01:22:24,359 --> 01:22:29,840
become functionally disconnected, so that the activity in different areas

1181
01:22:29,920 --> 01:22:34,960
is more statistically independent. However, you make that happen. When

1182
01:22:34,960 --> 01:22:37,439
you make it happen, you're going to be unconscious, right,

1183
01:22:37,680 --> 01:22:42,319
And so that's the discussion at sort of the higher level.

1184
01:22:42,520 --> 01:22:44,920
But then there's a question at the molecular level, what

1185
01:22:45,079 --> 01:22:53,359
are specific molecular mechanisms involved in causing that disconnection? And

1186
01:22:53,399 --> 01:22:57,960
the disconnection is related to lower activity, I mean just

1187
01:22:58,239 --> 01:23:02,560
lowering or raising activity is too simplistic of an idea

1188
01:23:02,680 --> 01:23:06,399
to say you're just unconscious when it's low activity and

1189
01:23:07,119 --> 01:23:10,840
conscious when it's high activity. Because when you're in deep

1190
01:23:10,880 --> 01:23:14,960
sleep there are moments when you have very high activity. Sure,

1191
01:23:15,239 --> 01:23:17,800
so it's a little more complicated than that, but this

1192
01:23:17,920 --> 01:23:20,399
disconnection is a way to think about it. When the

1193
01:23:20,439 --> 01:23:29,800
activity is kind of lowered such that it becomes disconnected. Okay,

1194
01:23:29,840 --> 01:23:35,319
So so yeah, my microtubual evidence is not going to

1195
01:23:35,359 --> 01:23:40,119
be sufficient to decide between the quantum and classical explanations,

1196
01:23:40,119 --> 01:23:43,159
but we can review what evidence we have so far

1197
01:23:44,079 --> 01:23:48,000
under a classical model. The way we would the natural

1198
01:23:48,000 --> 01:23:50,880
way to think that messing with microtubules might mess with

1199
01:23:51,600 --> 01:23:55,359
consciousness is that microtubules, one of their functions and neurons

1200
01:23:55,399 --> 01:24:01,560
is to act as train tracks for transport of, among

1201
01:24:01,600 --> 01:24:06,479
other things, the neurotransmitters that get released at synapses. So

1202
01:24:07,119 --> 01:24:09,640
we could imagine if you disrupt, if you mess up

1203
01:24:09,640 --> 01:24:13,920
the microtubule enough that the motor proteins are not able

1204
01:24:13,960 --> 01:24:18,560
to run up and down and bring synaptic vesicle contents

1205
01:24:18,760 --> 01:24:25,960
to the synapses, that would eventually reduce successful synaptic transmission,

1206
01:24:26,279 --> 01:24:31,560
and plausibly, that would reduce over all activity and contribute

1207
01:24:31,560 --> 01:24:38,399
to unconsciousness. So it turns out isofluorane does interfere with

1208
01:24:38,640 --> 01:24:43,319
synaptic transmission. However, the studies I found so far about

1209
01:24:43,399 --> 01:24:48,479
how it does so are through mechanisms that are not microtubules.

1210
01:24:49,439 --> 01:24:53,239
Protein either syntax in A is one of the targets

1211
01:24:54,079 --> 01:24:58,640
implicated in one study, and that's a protein that's involved

1212
01:24:58,640 --> 01:25:03,439
in the release at at synapses release of umer transmitter,

1213
01:25:04,239 --> 01:25:10,119
and another paper implicated mitochondria, So so far no direct

1214
01:25:10,319 --> 01:25:16,119
evidence that microtubules are involved. On the other hand, both

1215
01:25:16,159 --> 01:25:25,199
mitochondria and synapses are an intimate communication with microtubules, so

1216
01:25:25,239 --> 01:25:27,640
it's still it's I don't consider it ruled out that

1217
01:25:28,119 --> 01:25:32,600
such a classical mechanism could be part of the explanation.

1218
01:25:32,840 --> 01:25:34,880
Speaker 1: And it'd be tough to tease a part anyway, since

1219
01:25:34,960 --> 01:25:38,239
you know, in this theory the microtubules are so related

1220
01:25:38,319 --> 01:25:40,680
to all of these other things. You know, they're so

1221
01:25:40,920 --> 01:25:41,920
related to synaptia.

1222
01:25:42,039 --> 01:25:46,079
Speaker 2: They're usually considered negligible on fast time scales, and that

1223
01:25:46,119 --> 01:25:49,119
would be part of how we would try to to

1224
01:25:49,159 --> 01:25:52,600
determine if this was a viable explanation, is would it

1225
01:25:52,640 --> 01:25:55,760
be fast enough to account for how fast we fall asleep?

1226
01:25:56,520 --> 01:25:59,800
And that's answerable, it's not super easy, but you could

1227
01:26:00,000 --> 01:26:06,399
measure how quickly changes in synaptic transmission happening and whether

1228
01:26:06,520 --> 01:26:11,880
that's enough to account for how much the neurons slow down,

1229
01:26:11,960 --> 01:26:12,600
so to speak.

1230
01:26:13,039 --> 01:26:16,199
Speaker 1: And this criticism would sort of be undermined a bit

1231
01:26:16,479 --> 01:26:19,880
by the fact that anesthetics seem to do things to

1232
01:26:20,159 --> 01:26:22,960
organisms that don't have synapses, correct.

1233
01:26:22,920 --> 01:26:26,720
Speaker 2: I think, so if you think it's all about synaptic transmission,

1234
01:26:26,960 --> 01:26:30,039
you need to so it's the way you can make

1235
01:26:30,079 --> 01:26:34,000
it consistent is just by adhering to the idea that

1236
01:26:34,039 --> 01:26:38,119
it's a different cluster of targets in every species or

1237
01:26:39,319 --> 01:26:42,680
you know, every animal, or a single cell. So in

1238
01:26:42,720 --> 01:26:46,479
other words, you it would then from my point of view,

1239
01:26:46,520 --> 01:26:51,840
it's a remarkable coincidence that in different species the effectiveness

1240
01:26:51,920 --> 01:26:56,960
is not that different. Even though different animals and then

1241
01:26:57,359 --> 01:27:06,520
different kingdoms have very different sets of machinery, we're getting

1242
01:27:06,720 --> 01:27:15,079
similar effects across very diverse organisms. Suggest some conserved mechanism

1243
01:27:15,119 --> 01:27:19,880
to me. But the explanation from the more orthodox point

1244
01:27:19,880 --> 01:27:23,800
of view would just be, yeah, they happen to hit

1245
01:27:23,920 --> 01:27:28,000
a different cluster of targets in all these different organisms,

1246
01:27:28,720 --> 01:27:32,960
but the net effect is to slow you down in

1247
01:27:33,000 --> 01:27:36,439
all of them. But I don't think that many people

1248
01:27:36,479 --> 01:27:41,560
who are thinking about anesthesia in mammals are necessarily thinking

1249
01:27:41,560 --> 01:27:43,520
about how it works in a paramesium.

1250
01:27:44,479 --> 01:27:47,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, of course, wow.

1251
01:27:48,000 --> 01:27:51,840
Speaker 2: Similar things. Yeah, for people who emphasize gabba receptors. A

1252
01:27:51,840 --> 01:27:54,760
paramesium it turns out does have gabba receptors, which is

1253
01:27:55,199 --> 01:27:59,920
amazing in itself because because there's no because as you say,

1254
01:28:00,000 --> 01:28:01,840
they don't have synapses, but they use it to talk

1255
01:28:01,840 --> 01:28:06,840
to themselves in a certain sense. Yeah, I don't.

1256
01:28:06,920 --> 01:28:09,439
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not sure I really see the reluctance

1257
01:28:09,520 --> 01:28:15,920
to embrace this idea that that microtubules might be related

1258
01:28:16,000 --> 01:28:19,920
to consciousness beyond mirror, you know, vesicular trafficking or something.

1259
01:28:20,000 --> 01:28:21,560
It seems I.

1260
01:28:21,479 --> 01:28:24,800
Speaker 2: Think there's a sense that that what that the neurons

1261
01:28:24,960 --> 01:28:27,840
as we understand them so far, are enough. That's what

1262
01:28:27,920 --> 01:28:30,319
I meant when I you know, you said there's lots

1263
01:28:30,359 --> 01:28:33,159
of things we can explain with these classical models. It's true.

1264
01:28:33,199 --> 01:28:36,960
There's all kinds of cool memory phenomena, perceptual phenomena. You

1265
01:28:37,039 --> 01:28:41,239
can explain an outline, and I'm I'm claiming it's not

1266
01:28:41,399 --> 01:28:45,760
till you get to the details that you'll see that

1267
01:28:45,760 --> 01:28:48,479
the classical model can't perform as well as an animal.

1268
01:28:49,079 --> 01:28:53,119
I'm predicting and that's true in certain cases that the

1269
01:28:53,159 --> 01:28:55,800
models are are still falling short even though they can

1270
01:28:55,880 --> 01:28:58,760
do things that look like memory and decision making, and

1271
01:28:58,800 --> 01:29:02,399
they are memory decision making, but I don't think they

1272
01:29:02,520 --> 01:29:07,119
account for the our speed and flexibility.

1273
01:29:07,760 --> 01:29:09,640
Speaker 1: I have I have. I was talking about this with

1274
01:29:10,319 --> 01:29:15,439
someone recently, and this idea came up, and they brought

1275
01:29:15,520 --> 01:29:18,119
up they brought up as kind of like a foil

1276
01:29:18,399 --> 01:29:20,399
to this idea that you know, hey, we kind of

1277
01:29:20,560 --> 01:29:26,439
know that it must be related to synaptic transmission and

1278
01:29:26,479 --> 01:29:30,079
functional connectivity and things, because you know, you could you could.

1279
01:29:30,840 --> 01:29:33,239
They mentioned anesthesia. You know, you could give someone anesthesia

1280
01:29:33,279 --> 01:29:35,640
and you get this sort of disintegration of the default

1281
01:29:35,640 --> 01:29:38,680
mode network. But also there's other drugs that affect consciousness,

1282
01:29:38,720 --> 01:29:43,279
like psychedelics, and so we know those affect synaptic transmission.

1283
01:29:43,720 --> 01:29:48,840
I think I don't know, but certainly functional connectivity is uh.

1284
01:29:49,279 --> 01:29:51,159
I mean, I guess you probably couldn't do this study

1285
01:29:51,159 --> 01:29:53,199
in America. But is there any reason to believe that

1286
01:29:53,279 --> 01:29:57,159
maybe the microtubules might be involved in those situations too,

1287
01:29:57,319 --> 01:30:01,800
or is this just a functionally distinct thing. I don't know.

1288
01:30:01,880 --> 01:30:06,279
Speaker 2: I'm saying I mean, yes, yeah, I'm saying the microtubules

1289
01:30:06,279 --> 01:30:10,239
are involved anytime you're having a conscious experience, regardless of

1290
01:30:10,279 --> 01:30:11,319
what drugs you're on.

1291
01:30:12,800 --> 01:30:16,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it dawns on me. I generally don't even

1292
01:30:16,680 --> 01:30:18,399
like to talk about stuff like this because you know,

1293
01:30:19,279 --> 01:30:21,319
anytime you're talking about a new theory, you want to

1294
01:30:21,359 --> 01:30:24,520
avoid certain topics. But it does dawn on me that

1295
01:30:24,640 --> 01:30:27,279
like a drug like d M T is as it's

1296
01:30:27,319 --> 01:30:28,720
basically like trypta fan.

1297
01:30:30,560 --> 01:30:34,199
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to be able to sure give

1298
01:30:34,239 --> 01:30:37,319
you the exact distinction there, but yeah, there are a

1299
01:30:37,319 --> 01:30:40,600
bunch of topics. There's some topics that I tended to

1300
01:30:40,640 --> 01:30:44,840
avoid myself, but I'm happy. I'm not scared of any topic.

1301
01:30:44,880 --> 01:30:46,840
I'll tell you that if you want to ask me, well,

1302
01:30:46,920 --> 01:30:50,359
the religious or the parapsychological questions, I'm there for that time.

1303
01:30:50,600 --> 01:30:52,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm not sure what my question is.

1304
01:30:52,239 --> 01:30:54,720
I just I wish someone would sort of maybe do

1305
01:30:54,800 --> 01:30:59,039
an experiment like yours with with things besides anesthesia. That'd

1306
01:30:59,039 --> 01:31:02,880
be interesting to me. But but that will happen, do

1307
01:31:02,960 --> 01:31:03,319
you think so?

1308
01:31:04,119 --> 01:31:07,880
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean, yeah, so anesthesia is one avenue, but

1309
01:31:07,960 --> 01:31:13,600
I'm looking at others, not psychedelics. But there's other windows

1310
01:31:13,720 --> 01:31:21,840
or angles into trying to test these ideas empirically. There's

1311
01:31:21,920 --> 01:31:27,439
ways people have used MRI regular MRI machines to claim

1312
01:31:27,520 --> 01:31:32,840
evidence for entanglement in the living human brain. So that's

1313
01:31:32,880 --> 01:31:36,800
out there in the literature right now. I wish more

1314
01:31:36,800 --> 01:31:42,439
people were at least arguing about it. Yeah. So, yeah,

1315
01:31:42,479 --> 01:31:45,680
there's a bunch of other ways. There's some sort of

1316
01:31:45,960 --> 01:31:50,159
standard ways already in neuroscience that people try to study consciousness,

1317
01:31:50,840 --> 01:31:55,119
binocular rival neural correlates of consciouness, like binocular rivalry if

1318
01:31:55,119 --> 01:31:55,720
you've heard of that.

1319
01:31:55,920 --> 01:31:59,279
Speaker 1: Yeah, being shown different things in different eyes, right right?

1320
01:31:59,520 --> 01:32:02,199
Speaker 2: And oh yeah, if you showed very different things in

1321
01:32:02,199 --> 01:32:05,000
the two eyes such that you're not able to fuse

1322
01:32:05,000 --> 01:32:08,000
them into a three D image, then instead of seeing

1323
01:32:08,039 --> 01:32:11,239
them just superimposed on each other, you tend to alternate.

1324
01:32:12,479 --> 01:32:15,279
And so that's a situation where the stimulus that your

1325
01:32:15,319 --> 01:32:17,479
eyes are getting is staying the same the whole time,

1326
01:32:18,000 --> 01:32:22,119
but your state of consciousness is changing. And so it's

1327
01:32:22,479 --> 01:32:24,960
sort of advantageous way to try and get at what

1328
01:32:25,000 --> 01:32:27,159
are the neural correlates of when you're seeing one thing

1329
01:32:27,239 --> 01:32:30,760
versus the other, even though that what's actually shining into

1330
01:32:30,760 --> 01:32:35,319
your eyes is not changed. That's interesting And I guess

1331
01:32:35,319 --> 01:32:39,800
I brought it up because I think there might be

1332
01:32:39,840 --> 01:32:46,880
a way to reveal quantum like statistics in the statistics

1333
01:32:46,920 --> 01:32:53,319
of those perceptual alternations. It's not totally deterministic, like you

1334
01:32:53,319 --> 01:32:56,039
don't just see one thing for one second and then

1335
01:32:56,239 --> 01:32:58,319
another the other thing for the one second. It has

1336
01:32:58,359 --> 01:33:01,560
a certain randomness in it, and I think there might

1337
01:33:01,600 --> 01:33:05,319
be a way to give evidence that it's quantum like,

1338
01:33:05,560 --> 01:33:10,199
if not quantum physical. Well, it's interesting anyway. That is

1339
01:33:10,239 --> 01:33:12,680
to say, yes, there are a bunch of other ways

1340
01:33:12,720 --> 01:33:18,439
to try and rule out or provide empirical evidence for

1341
01:33:18,520 --> 01:33:22,159
this idea. So I don't think it's as hopeless as

1342
01:33:23,119 --> 01:33:24,760
many people often.

1343
01:33:25,159 --> 01:33:28,279
Speaker 1: I have to say. I mean your ideas and ideas

1344
01:33:28,319 --> 01:33:31,680
from people, you know, unrelated topics. It is sort of

1345
01:33:31,680 --> 01:33:34,880
like an optic to me. It's kind of optimistic that

1346
01:33:34,960 --> 01:33:36,800
we might be able to make some progress in this

1347
01:33:36,840 --> 01:33:39,239
area because I'm just not I don't know, I'm not

1348
01:33:40,399 --> 01:33:43,560
you know, global workspace theory and I you know, although

1349
01:33:43,600 --> 01:33:46,359
they might be related to some of the things you're

1350
01:33:46,399 --> 01:33:49,159
talking about, I'm not really left with like a sense

1351
01:33:49,159 --> 01:33:52,600
of understanding like it. I'm always like, wait, what, I'm

1352
01:33:52,600 --> 01:33:56,119
not sure I quite can reconcile this. But sort of

1353
01:33:56,119 --> 01:34:00,000
this iterative empirical thing that you and others are doing

1354
01:34:00,239 --> 01:34:02,520
to me. Just it makes a lot of sense. Now,

1355
01:34:02,720 --> 01:34:06,159
of course, we still have this kind of chasm between

1356
01:34:07,359 --> 01:34:12,560
resonance tubulent subunits and subjective experience. You know, there's still

1357
01:34:13,319 --> 01:34:15,279
hard to make sense of that. Do you have thoughts

1358
01:34:15,279 --> 01:34:17,520
on that? I mean, there's someone like Bernardo cast Strip

1359
01:34:17,640 --> 01:34:20,039
would say, well, this is just what it looks like

1360
01:34:20,079 --> 01:34:22,840
from the outside, this is just what subjective experience looks

1361
01:34:22,880 --> 01:34:24,600
like from the outside. What are you How do you

1362
01:34:24,640 --> 01:34:26,079
speculate on these ideas?

1363
01:34:26,479 --> 01:34:30,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again you're expressing what we could call the

1364
01:34:30,880 --> 01:34:36,520
heart called the heart problem, and Bernardo Castrup's point of

1365
01:34:36,600 --> 01:34:41,920
view is is called idealism. So so far we talked

1366
01:34:41,960 --> 01:34:46,239
about physicalism, where you say both mind and matter arise

1367
01:34:46,359 --> 01:34:49,640
from physical stuff, and then I said, I would like

1368
01:34:49,720 --> 01:34:54,199
to change that to panpsychism or dual aspect monism, where

1369
01:34:54,239 --> 01:34:57,399
you admit there is a physical world with physical properties,

1370
01:34:57,399 --> 01:35:01,119
but it also has mental properties. And then on the

1371
01:35:01,159 --> 01:35:04,039
other side of the spectrum is idealism, where you say, no,

1372
01:35:04,159 --> 01:35:08,880
there's only mental and what appears to be physical is

1373
01:35:09,399 --> 01:35:12,800
just some form of mental properties. And I think it

1374
01:35:12,840 --> 01:35:17,439
has a similar hard problem as physicalism that spinos are

1375
01:35:17,479 --> 01:35:25,199
basically articulated or yeah said, Essentially, it goes both ways.

1376
01:35:25,239 --> 01:35:29,000
You can't derive mind from matter that like the physicalist

1377
01:35:29,000 --> 01:35:31,680
wants to do. But you also can't derive the laws

1378
01:35:31,680 --> 01:35:35,359
of physics just by making postulates about agents and consciousness,

1379
01:35:35,760 --> 01:35:38,239
which is what I think people like Donald Hoffman and

1380
01:35:38,720 --> 01:35:42,760
castrophists say they're trying to do. So they had like

1381
01:35:42,800 --> 01:35:46,239
a reverse hard problem of their own, and so I

1382
01:35:46,239 --> 01:35:49,640
think the middle ground there is the you know, to me,

1383
01:35:49,760 --> 01:35:53,039
when you realize that materialism is not going to be

1384
01:35:53,039 --> 01:35:57,000
sufficient to account for consciousness, going all the way over

1385
01:35:57,039 --> 01:35:59,680
to idealism is throwing out the baby with the bath

1386
01:35:59,760 --> 01:36:04,119
wall being physical properties. I think it's still, you know,

1387
01:36:04,159 --> 01:36:07,680
we don't have to toss out all of these centuries

1388
01:36:07,720 --> 01:36:10,800
of progress we've made in physics just because we haven't

1389
01:36:10,840 --> 01:36:13,720
figured out mind yet. We can keep that and ask

1390
01:36:13,800 --> 01:36:20,239
how mind fits into that picture. And so I do

1391
01:36:20,279 --> 01:36:22,600
think we have a solution, a conceptual solution to this

1392
01:36:22,720 --> 01:36:27,800
hard problem that has a reputation for being insoluble. And

1393
01:36:27,840 --> 01:36:31,399
you're you're even though I kind of expressed the solution earlier,

1394
01:36:31,439 --> 01:36:37,920
you're still saying it seems insoluble. I'm saying The answer

1395
01:36:38,000 --> 01:36:40,039
to makes the way the way you expresses is how

1396
01:36:40,039 --> 01:36:41,920
are we going to make sense of it? I think

1397
01:36:41,920 --> 01:36:43,840
the way to make sense of it is to imagine

1398
01:36:44,279 --> 01:36:48,760
the reality has both physical and mental properties, and so

1399
01:36:48,880 --> 01:36:53,199
there's a there's a psychophysical law that says how they

1400
01:36:53,239 --> 01:36:56,199
relate to each other. I didn't express it that way earlier,

1401
01:36:56,199 --> 01:37:00,479
but I'm saying that the psyche, the psychophysical law or

1402
01:37:01,199 --> 01:37:09,039
bridging principle is unity. You need the unity. You need

1403
01:37:09,199 --> 01:37:12,039
unity to have a complex conscious experience. You have to

1404
01:37:12,159 --> 01:37:17,960
unify that and experience. What are the relationships among all

1405
01:37:17,960 --> 01:37:21,920
these things I'm registering This color is on the left

1406
01:37:21,960 --> 01:37:24,039
and that color is on the right, and et cetera.

1407
01:37:25,319 --> 01:37:29,159
That's the mental unity. But you need the physical unity

1408
01:37:29,159 --> 01:37:36,039
in order to have advantages, evolutionary advantages, computational behavioral advantages.

1409
01:37:36,720 --> 01:37:39,520
And so the bridging principle between the mind and the

1410
01:37:39,560 --> 01:37:44,640
matter is that unity. And if you allow yourself to

1411
01:37:44,800 --> 01:37:51,560
postulate that mental property, that is a solution to this

1412
01:37:51,720 --> 01:37:55,800
mind matter problem, and the rest is details about how

1413
01:37:55,840 --> 01:37:57,760
it maps onto the physical.

1414
01:37:59,039 --> 01:38:01,279
Speaker 1: I think that's fantastic. I mean, what you're buting up

1415
01:38:01,279 --> 01:38:06,640
against is just the limits of my cognitive capacity. No,

1416
01:38:06,800 --> 01:38:09,239
that makes perfect sense to me. Well, we're kind of

1417
01:38:09,720 --> 01:38:12,760
nearing the end of my ability to ask interesting questions,

1418
01:38:12,760 --> 01:38:14,640
but I will ask. That won't stop me from asking

1419
01:38:14,680 --> 01:38:17,560
a couple more, and then I'll let you go. And

1420
01:38:18,159 --> 01:38:21,720
this is not your theory, obviously, that I'm going to

1421
01:38:21,720 --> 01:38:24,119
ask you about, so feel free to pass. But you know,

1422
01:38:24,199 --> 01:38:27,239
I've heard folks like Roger Penrose and maybe hammer Off.

1423
01:38:27,279 --> 01:38:30,399
I said this too. I don't know describing, you know,

1424
01:38:30,840 --> 01:38:35,560
this phenomenon of consciousness as the collapse of the wave function.

1425
01:38:36,520 --> 01:38:39,039
And I've always struggled with that because I guess I

1426
01:38:39,079 --> 01:38:42,279
don't know exactly what that means, because I always think

1427
01:38:42,319 --> 01:38:45,239
of the collapse of the wave function as occurring when

1428
01:38:45,279 --> 01:38:48,720
you take a measurement. But of course I'm not. Maybe

1429
01:38:48,720 --> 01:38:51,439
I am, but I'm not taking measurements of my microtubules

1430
01:38:52,720 --> 01:38:55,079
thousands of times per second or whatever it would take

1431
01:38:55,159 --> 01:38:58,319
to provide this subjective experience. So do you know what

1432
01:38:58,359 --> 01:39:00,199
he means? Or maybe you can help me understand the

1433
01:39:00,239 --> 01:39:00,800
idea better.

1434
01:39:01,399 --> 01:39:04,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's two things I want to say

1435
01:39:04,239 --> 01:39:06,479
about that. I want to clarify what they mean by

1436
01:39:06,560 --> 01:39:11,279
objective reduction as an answer to the measurement problem. And

1437
01:39:11,319 --> 01:39:14,920
then I think I will differ in the way I

1438
01:39:14,960 --> 01:39:18,479
word it a little bit to answer your question. So

1439
01:39:19,760 --> 01:39:23,199
I sketched what quantum physics was earlier and said it

1440
01:39:23,199 --> 01:39:26,079
has a shrouding or equation that says how probabilities change

1441
01:39:26,119 --> 01:39:29,039
over time, and then when a measurement happens, you look

1442
01:39:29,079 --> 01:39:32,920
at those probabilities to see which are the likely outcomes.

1443
01:39:37,279 --> 01:39:39,640
So there's different points of view about what a measurement

1444
01:39:39,760 --> 01:39:44,319
actually is since the textbook doesn't tell us. And the

1445
01:39:44,319 --> 01:39:46,920
point of view of Penrose that I agree with is

1446
01:39:46,920 --> 01:39:54,840
that measurement is any time the way is an objective process.

1447
01:39:55,560 --> 01:39:58,439
When the wave function collapsing is something that just happens

1448
01:39:58,439 --> 01:40:04,560
in physical systems before we talk about observers or agents

1449
01:40:04,640 --> 01:40:10,760
or measurements by people experimenters, collapse of the wave function

1450
01:40:10,920 --> 01:40:14,039
is an objective process. So that's what the term objective

1451
01:40:14,119 --> 01:40:17,640
reduction refers to. There, and he's got his own theory

1452
01:40:17,640 --> 01:40:21,880
about how it happens. There are other people with other theories,

1453
01:40:21,920 --> 01:40:24,880
and so we can do experiments to try and see

1454
01:40:25,439 --> 01:40:30,239
who's right, but that they are different from people like

1455
01:40:30,439 --> 01:40:34,119
many worlds theorists or people who think the wave function

1456
01:40:34,159 --> 01:40:39,560
collapse doesn't ever really happen. I'm rejecting those kinds of

1457
01:40:39,600 --> 01:40:44,800
models for objective collapse or objective reduction models, and so

1458
01:40:45,159 --> 01:40:49,560
purely in the physics, there's some kind of threshold where

1459
01:40:49,800 --> 01:40:52,319
the electron that's in a superposition of being in two

1460
01:40:52,359 --> 01:40:55,159
places decides where it's going to actually be at a

1461
01:40:55,239 --> 01:40:58,239
certain moment, and that would be what would correspond to

1462
01:40:59,079 --> 01:41:02,079
what has been called the measurement. So far, that makes sense.

1463
01:41:02,079 --> 01:41:05,359
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe if two quantum systems are forced to interact,

1464
01:41:05,399 --> 01:41:07,840
and maybe they bump into each other, or they interact

1465
01:41:07,880 --> 01:41:10,520
with each other in some way, they might collapse by

1466
01:41:10,600 --> 01:41:12,880
nature of that interaction or something not due to.

1467
01:41:12,920 --> 01:41:16,199
Speaker 2: There are there are theories like that where something about

1468
01:41:16,199 --> 01:41:20,880
the interaction might trigger the collapse or even just amount

1469
01:41:20,920 --> 01:41:30,199
to the collapse. But Penrose's theory is not just about interactions. Yeah,

1470
01:41:30,199 --> 01:41:33,560
it's some it's more intrinsic that even if this is

1471
01:41:33,600 --> 01:41:36,000
the only thing in the universe, eventually it's going to

1472
01:41:36,079 --> 01:41:39,239
decide where it is or what stated is and out

1473
01:41:39,239 --> 01:41:42,960
of the possibilities in the superposition. And so it's a

1474
01:41:43,039 --> 01:41:46,640
dynamical mechanism. We don't need to go into the details.

1475
01:41:46,640 --> 01:41:51,159
But so that's an answer to the measurement problem. Okay.

1476
01:41:52,079 --> 01:41:55,000
A solution to the measurement problem is to say collapse

1477
01:41:55,079 --> 01:41:59,960
is a real physical process, and you give some form

1478
01:42:00,279 --> 01:42:02,880
for how it works, which he did, and there are

1479
01:42:02,920 --> 01:42:06,079
other candidates that we can try to test. Well.

1480
01:42:06,119 --> 01:42:08,760
Speaker 1: I wouldn't expect the answer to a question like this

1481
01:42:08,920 --> 01:42:11,359
to be simple, So that's totally acceptable to me. That

1482
01:42:11,479 --> 01:42:14,560
sounds be what so simple? You know, I wouldn't expect

1483
01:42:14,560 --> 01:42:17,800
it to be, you know, easy for anyone to understand.

1484
01:42:17,840 --> 01:42:19,159
I mean, these are deep, deep.

1485
01:42:19,079 --> 01:42:25,680
Speaker 2: Questions, somewhat straightforward, but people resist believing that that really

1486
01:42:25,680 --> 01:42:31,720
happens in nat Yes, yes, yeah, So at this point,

1487
01:42:31,840 --> 01:42:34,760
you know, we haven't mentioned consciousness. It's just this physical

1488
01:42:34,800 --> 01:42:38,279
process how nature decides what it's going to do. So

1489
01:42:38,399 --> 01:42:42,680
when they say the collapse is the conscious moment, I

1490
01:42:42,680 --> 01:42:48,119
would prefer to say the collapse the conscious the conscious

1491
01:42:48,199 --> 01:42:52,520
experience is a property of the physical collapse. So the

1492
01:42:52,560 --> 01:42:56,439
physical collapse is a purely physical process. And Penrose will

1493
01:42:56,439 --> 01:42:59,800
say things like that himself, that is or is just

1494
01:42:59,800 --> 01:43:05,800
a physical theory. So that's a purely physical process. And

1495
01:43:06,119 --> 01:43:08,359
if that's all we had, we would still have the

1496
01:43:08,399 --> 01:43:11,000
hard problem. It's still a physical process. It does not

1497
01:43:11,199 --> 01:43:15,159
explain that consciousness is there. We still need to make

1498
01:43:15,199 --> 01:43:20,319
that as a new postulate, And in my view, the

1499
01:43:20,399 --> 01:43:24,880
consciousness I would not I prefer not to say the

1500
01:43:24,920 --> 01:43:29,880
consciousness is the collapse, because in my view, the consciousness

1501
01:43:29,960 --> 01:43:34,079
is a non physical property. It's not directly moving anything,

1502
01:43:34,119 --> 01:43:37,079
whereas the collapse is about where things end up being

1503
01:43:37,319 --> 01:43:43,079
in space, considered as a purely physical process. So the

1504
01:43:43,119 --> 01:43:49,800
way I would edit their claim that or a proposal

1505
01:43:49,840 --> 01:43:55,800
that each collapse KR is a moment of proto consciousness,

1506
01:43:56,279 --> 01:43:59,680
I would say it corresponds to or the proto consciousness

1507
01:43:59,720 --> 01:44:01,760
is a property of that.

1508
01:44:02,760 --> 01:44:06,079
Speaker 1: I find that much more easy to excite. I imagine

1509
01:44:06,079 --> 01:44:08,600
they probably would agree on that idea, but.

1510
01:44:09,039 --> 01:44:13,159
Speaker 2: I think I may differ. So Penrose is very careful

1511
01:44:13,199 --> 01:44:17,319
not to go past what he absolutely knows, but I

1512
01:44:17,359 --> 01:44:20,359
think I differ a little bit from the way Hamroff

1513
01:44:20,359 --> 01:44:24,199
describes it bit because I think he is still has

1514
01:44:24,239 --> 01:44:29,439
a kind of interactionist idea in his mind where the

1515
01:44:29,479 --> 01:44:35,720
pleasure of the experience causes the body to move towards

1516
01:44:35,880 --> 01:44:40,439
the pleasure and the pleasant state. And I think that's

1517
01:44:41,199 --> 01:44:47,600
colloquially illly true, But so the way I'm expressing it

1518
01:44:47,720 --> 01:44:52,159
raises a very a big problem. I'm saying, there really

1519
01:44:52,199 --> 01:44:56,600
is no mind body causal interaction. And so you reflect

1520
01:44:56,640 --> 01:44:59,279
on that for a second, you're saying and you think, wait,

1521
01:44:59,359 --> 01:45:01,880
so you're saying, when I decide to raise my arm,

1522
01:45:02,039 --> 01:45:04,199
when I mentally decided to raise my arm and then

1523
01:45:04,279 --> 01:45:08,640
goes up, it wasn't my mental decision that made that happen.

1524
01:45:10,199 --> 01:45:14,960
And so here's why colloquially you can still talk that

1525
01:45:15,000 --> 01:45:17,520
way and it will still make sense. You won't run

1526
01:45:17,520 --> 01:45:23,640
into contradiction because under this dual aspect picture, there's a

1527
01:45:23,680 --> 01:45:27,239
complete causal story. And Spinoza already says this in his

1528
01:45:28,560 --> 01:45:32,560
book in the seventeenth century. There's a complete causal story

1529
01:45:32,600 --> 01:45:36,560
that you can tell in terms of the physical properties.

1530
01:45:36,640 --> 01:45:39,560
That's the one we usually tell our causally story in

1531
01:45:39,640 --> 01:45:42,720
terms of But according to Spinoza, you should also be

1532
01:45:42,800 --> 01:45:45,560
able to do that in terms of the mental properties. Okay,

1533
01:45:46,960 --> 01:45:51,960
I can't do that, but I accept I by I

1534
01:45:52,039 --> 01:45:56,000
hypothesize that it's possible along with Spinoza, but that if

1535
01:45:56,039 --> 01:45:59,600
that's true, and it's plausible to me because we're hypothesizing

1536
01:46:00,079 --> 01:46:03,399
both sets of properties are just different expressions of the

1537
01:46:03,479 --> 01:46:08,640
same underlying reality. So it's like the identity theorists who says,

1538
01:46:09,359 --> 01:46:12,840
you know, consciousness is just what the brain looks like

1539
01:46:12,880 --> 01:46:17,560
from the inside or something. But we can't go all

1540
01:46:17,600 --> 01:46:21,319
the way with the identity theorist to say the mental

1541
01:46:21,359 --> 01:46:26,000
properties are actually identical to the mental properties. The physical

1542
01:46:26,000 --> 01:46:29,279
properties and the mental properties are distinct. We have to

1543
01:46:29,359 --> 01:46:33,600
recognize that, but we can understand the relationship between them

1544
01:46:33,680 --> 01:46:36,239
by seeing them as two aspects of the same thing.

1545
01:46:37,359 --> 01:46:41,479
And that's why if you only know, you know, I

1546
01:46:41,520 --> 01:46:45,359
know about my conscious experience. I don't know what my

1547
01:46:45,439 --> 01:46:49,399
microtubules are doing, and I know what my hand is doing.

1548
01:46:50,000 --> 01:46:54,239
So in this theory, my hand is moving this way

1549
01:46:54,279 --> 01:46:57,199
because of what the microtubules did. But the only way

1550
01:46:57,239 --> 01:46:59,960
I know about what they did is from the kind

1551
01:47:00,199 --> 01:47:03,119
just experience that goes along with it, that has to

1552
01:47:03,199 --> 01:47:07,119
go along with it. That's interesting, it's a bit slippery,

1553
01:47:07,199 --> 01:47:11,279
but I think it ultimately accounts for how our consciousness

1554
01:47:11,279 --> 01:47:18,119
could evolve without resorting to causal interactions between mental and

1555
01:47:18,199 --> 01:47:22,479
physical degrees of freedom, which I think ultimately are incoherent.

1556
01:47:23,640 --> 01:47:28,760
Even though we very naturally think that our mind is

1557
01:47:28,800 --> 01:47:30,680
what is telling our body what to do, and in

1558
01:47:30,720 --> 01:47:36,840
a certain sense, it's true, but not at this Fine.

1559
01:47:37,119 --> 01:47:39,159
Speaker 1: You've been very generous with your time, so I promise

1560
01:47:39,239 --> 01:47:43,000
this is my last question. But listening to you talk

1561
01:47:43,039 --> 01:47:45,439
about this, I can't help but think about I forget

1562
01:47:45,439 --> 01:47:47,920
when this would have been. It sounds like something that

1563
01:47:47,960 --> 01:47:49,600
would have been done in like the seventies, but I

1564
01:47:49,600 --> 01:47:55,640
have no idea the libits experiments, yes, for you will experiments. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

1565
01:47:55,640 --> 01:47:59,359
And I forget the exact but it's something like, you know,

1566
01:48:00,359 --> 01:48:04,800
they see a a EEG spike or I forget what

1567
01:48:04,840 --> 01:48:08,880
it was before the conscious awareness of something, you know,

1568
01:48:08,920 --> 01:48:10,600
like hey tell me what time it is, or hey,

1569
01:48:10,640 --> 01:48:13,600
move your hand and they move your hand, move your hand, okay,

1570
01:48:13,600 --> 01:48:18,239
and they sort of attribute this to like some because

1571
01:48:18,279 --> 01:48:20,560
you're not aware of it. It sort of exists outside

1572
01:48:20,560 --> 01:48:23,039
of your free will or something like that. Is that correct?

1573
01:48:23,760 --> 01:48:27,800
Speaker 2: Yeah? Okay, sorry, free will is even more slippery than

1574
01:48:28,199 --> 01:48:29,319
consciousness itself.

1575
01:48:29,640 --> 01:48:33,640
Speaker 1: But I just wonder, like the colleague or the scientist

1576
01:48:33,720 --> 01:48:38,000
you mentioned who's measuring microtubule resonance with a DDG, if

1577
01:48:38,039 --> 01:48:39,760
you were to team up with him and do like

1578
01:48:39,840 --> 01:48:42,199
a Libit style experiment, what do you think you would find?

1579
01:48:43,399 --> 01:48:46,680
Speaker 2: I think we'd find something similar to what Libbert already found.

1580
01:48:47,359 --> 01:48:50,239
So it's that you see a build up of so

1581
01:48:50,479 --> 01:48:53,520
the the subjects are instructed to move their finger whenever

1582
01:48:53,520 --> 01:48:57,640
they feel like it. So that's the approximation of free

1583
01:48:57,680 --> 01:49:01,239
will that we're doing for this experiment, whenever they feel

1584
01:49:01,279 --> 01:49:08,520
like it. And he's recording EEG, and when you average

1585
01:49:08,560 --> 01:49:11,920
over many trials, you see a build up of EEG

1586
01:49:12,199 --> 01:49:17,479
over the motor cortex in the half second or so

1587
01:49:17,680 --> 01:49:21,239
before the time the average time or the time when

1588
01:49:21,439 --> 01:49:26,439
the person moves their finger, and then to try to

1589
01:49:26,560 --> 01:49:30,680
estimate so someone else had already done those experiments, but

1590
01:49:30,840 --> 01:49:33,600
what Libbett did is had the subjects, yeah, look at

1591
01:49:33,640 --> 01:49:37,640
a fast moving clock face and try to say where

1592
01:49:37,680 --> 01:49:41,039
the clock hand was at the moment they had the

1593
01:49:41,079 --> 01:49:46,079
conscious urge to move their finger. And that's somewhat problematic,

1594
01:49:46,199 --> 01:49:51,399
but the had ways of trying to validate that estimate

1595
01:49:51,439 --> 01:49:53,279
of when you made the urge, and it seemed like

1596
01:49:53,319 --> 01:49:56,560
it was probably pretty good within about fifty milliseconds, pretty

1597
01:49:56,560 --> 01:50:00,399
good estimate of when the conscious urge awry arose. And

1598
01:50:00,479 --> 01:50:04,359
so the conscious urge arose about two hundred milliseconds before

1599
01:50:04,399 --> 01:50:07,439
you actually flex the finger, but that was about three

1600
01:50:07,520 --> 01:50:10,239
hundred milliseconds after you could see the build up of

1601
01:50:11,079 --> 01:50:17,119
unconscious neural activity. So people argue this both ways, but

1602
01:50:17,600 --> 01:50:21,600
you could say, so you can talk about free will

1603
01:50:21,640 --> 01:50:23,079
in a bunch of different ways. But if we're talking

1604
01:50:23,079 --> 01:50:28,600
about whether you consciously decide something, not whether it's determined

1605
01:50:28,680 --> 01:50:30,840
or not, but just whether it went through your consciousness

1606
01:50:30,920 --> 01:50:33,880
before you did it, then you could say, well, this

1607
01:50:33,880 --> 01:50:36,199
seems to show there's you don't have that kind of

1608
01:50:36,239 --> 01:50:38,439
that kind of free will because there was this neural

1609
01:50:38,439 --> 01:50:41,479
activity that was building up, seemed to be leading up

1610
01:50:41,520 --> 01:50:44,079
to you moving your finger, and it was well before

1611
01:50:44,119 --> 01:50:46,039
you knew that you were going to move your finger.

1612
01:50:50,000 --> 01:50:52,000
The way you Libit it, there's a new way of

1613
01:50:52,560 --> 01:50:55,520
thinking about those data that I'll bring up. But the

1614
01:50:55,560 --> 01:50:58,960
way Libit interpreted that was that it's still left open

1615
01:50:59,079 --> 01:51:02,039
a possibility or a limited kind of free will that

1616
01:51:02,119 --> 01:51:06,199
he called free won't, which is a veto power. So

1617
01:51:06,359 --> 01:51:12,439
his his model was that the brain unconsciously generates candidate

1618
01:51:12,520 --> 01:51:16,279
things that you might do, and then your conscious mind

1619
01:51:16,279 --> 01:51:18,560
can veto them if it doesn't want to. And and

1620
01:51:18,840 --> 01:51:21,479
he could relate I think he related that to like

1621
01:51:22,119 --> 01:51:28,479
that religions tend to make their commandments as prescriptions don't

1622
01:51:28,520 --> 01:51:32,279
do this, let them do this I shall not, instead

1623
01:51:32,279 --> 01:51:36,239
of do good I shall. I think you could argue

1624
01:51:36,279 --> 01:51:41,640
that both ways, but anyway libit argued for maybe free

1625
01:51:41,680 --> 01:51:46,960
won't or kind of uh veto power of conscious consciousness.

1626
01:51:47,159 --> 01:51:51,399
Speaker 1: Do you do you think you would see microtubule resonance

1627
01:51:51,520 --> 01:51:54,319
change before neural activity changed.

1628
01:51:56,640 --> 01:51:59,800
Speaker 2: Yes, I think. I think Bondio Padi has seen that,

1629
01:51:59,880 --> 01:52:04,680
ind okay, and so we might predict that. I don't

1630
01:52:04,680 --> 01:52:07,239
think it would necessarily be universal. There could be lots

1631
01:52:07,279 --> 01:52:11,399
of behaviors that are primarily governed by the classical computer

1632
01:52:11,479 --> 01:52:16,000
of the neurons that you're talking about. But I bet

1633
01:52:16,119 --> 01:52:20,479
you could devise a situation where you would see the

1634
01:52:20,520 --> 01:52:25,079
microtubule signal before the neural signal in a living human,

1635
01:52:25,439 --> 01:52:27,399
not just in a dish like he's already seen it.

1636
01:52:29,359 --> 01:52:32,800
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I'm not sure what I would conclude from that,

1637
01:52:32,840 --> 01:52:36,159
because that would sort of imply that even the microtubules

1638
01:52:36,199 --> 01:52:41,159
become functionally active before you become consciously aware of it,

1639
01:52:41,359 --> 01:52:42,840
which is I don't know what that would mean. I

1640
01:52:42,960 --> 01:52:43,920
wouldn't know how to interpret that.

1641
01:52:44,680 --> 01:52:46,920
Speaker 2: I think it has to be that way. That is,

1642
01:52:47,039 --> 01:52:51,279
each moment of our conscious experience is the output. Yeah,

1643
01:52:51,439 --> 01:52:58,479
a little consciousness generating routine. It takes you know, you

1644
01:52:58,520 --> 01:53:02,199
get a bunch of sensory input that's ambiguous. We can

1645
01:53:02,600 --> 01:53:08,880
make exaggerated versions of this, like illusions where it can

1646
01:53:08,920 --> 01:53:13,640
look like it's a dimple or a how do I

1647
01:53:13,680 --> 01:53:15,000
want to say that. It can look like it's a

1648
01:53:15,039 --> 01:53:21,680
concave or a convex structure, or button or something. It

1649
01:53:21,720 --> 01:53:25,279
can look like it's a hole or a button. And

1650
01:53:26,199 --> 01:53:31,239
our visual field is generally ambiguous like that, So it

1651
01:53:31,359 --> 01:53:33,920
takes us a certain amount of time to take in

1652
01:53:33,960 --> 01:53:39,039
the signals and decide how we're going to see them consciously.

1653
01:53:39,119 --> 01:53:44,800
And you already saw that when you said earlier that

1654
01:53:46,319 --> 01:53:48,840
you can't perceive change without a little bit of memory

1655
01:53:48,880 --> 01:53:53,000
because change, perceiving change is comparing the position. If we're

1656
01:53:53,000 --> 01:53:55,680
talking about motion, it's comparing the position now to a

1657
01:53:55,680 --> 01:53:58,119
position at a different time. There's no getting around that.

1658
01:53:59,560 --> 01:54:01,640
So you got to integrate over a little bit of

1659
01:54:01,640 --> 01:54:04,640
time in order to generate a perception of motion. And

1660
01:54:04,680 --> 01:54:07,600
it looks like all of our perceptions take one hundred

1661
01:54:07,680 --> 01:54:11,119
or two hundred milliseconds to make that's interesting.

1662
01:54:11,760 --> 01:54:15,119
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, okay, man, Well, thank you so much for

1663
01:54:15,159 --> 01:54:18,800
putting up with my just my pleasureage podge of just

1664
01:54:19,760 --> 01:54:24,560
personal curiosities. So thank you for indulging me. You know,

1665
01:54:24,600 --> 01:54:27,159
stick around for just a brief moment after we hang up,

1666
01:54:27,199 --> 01:54:29,479
just so I can say say goodbye. But is there

1667
01:54:29,520 --> 01:54:32,880
anything you want to leave people with or if people

1668
01:54:32,960 --> 01:54:34,880
are interested in learning more? I mean, you're not selling

1669
01:54:34,920 --> 01:54:36,920
a book, so I can't give you an opportunity to

1670
01:54:36,960 --> 01:54:40,000
promote your book. Is there anything you'd like to mention?

1671
01:54:40,119 --> 01:54:46,000
Speaker 2: Well, well, I would encourage people to check out my journal,

1672
01:54:46,319 --> 01:54:51,319
my Neuroscience of Consciousness paper and papers about active inference.

1673
01:54:51,359 --> 01:54:53,199
We didn't get a chance to talk about that, but

1674
01:54:54,079 --> 01:54:58,680
those are freely available open access papers, one of them

1675
01:54:58,680 --> 01:55:03,239
talking about the binding problem microtubules, another one saying that

1676
01:55:03,600 --> 01:55:09,680
the Penrose hammer off theory is actually equivalent to the

1677
01:55:09,720 --> 01:55:15,399
dominant theory of cognition in cognitive neuroscience called predictive coding

1678
01:55:15,600 --> 01:55:21,239
or active inference or the free energy principle. I made

1679
01:55:21,279 --> 01:55:24,800
a case that that it does look like brains are

1680
01:55:24,800 --> 01:55:28,680
doing that, doing active inference, so to speak, But it

1681
01:55:28,840 --> 01:55:33,520
looks like classical neural models can't do those computations fast enough,

1682
01:55:34,000 --> 01:55:39,319
whereas orco R is mathematically equivalent to conscious active inference.

1683
01:55:39,359 --> 01:55:42,000
So it could be the implementation I think. I think

1684
01:55:42,039 --> 01:55:45,560
it is. And that's a way of seeing that what

1685
01:55:45,720 --> 01:55:51,439
our brains do is what quantum dynamics does, is at

1686
01:55:51,439 --> 01:55:58,600
each moment takes the physical situation and tries to optimize

1687
01:55:58,640 --> 01:56:03,039
in the sense of minimizing a physical quantity called the action.

1688
01:56:03,920 --> 01:56:10,119
So physics can be interpreted as an optimization process. And

1689
01:56:10,560 --> 01:56:16,199
I think orco R can be interpreted as evolution found

1690
01:56:16,199 --> 01:56:20,560
a way to map our personal problems onto that universal

1691
01:56:20,680 --> 01:56:22,239
optimization process.

1692
01:56:22,880 --> 01:56:23,239
Speaker 1: Wow.

1693
01:56:23,640 --> 01:56:30,760
Speaker 2: And so evolution orchestra evolved these structures that orchestrate the

1694
01:56:30,800 --> 01:56:35,359
microtrevils and the neurons orchestrate this wave function collapse process.

1695
01:56:35,399 --> 01:56:37,840
So it's not just deciding where an electron is going

1696
01:56:37,920 --> 01:56:42,520
to be, but it's deciding what's the most likely interpretation

1697
01:56:42,720 --> 01:56:45,000
of the sensory information. I just got.

1698
01:56:46,199 --> 01:56:49,279
Speaker 1: Wow, Well, that's fascinating. I look forward to reading that.

1699
01:56:49,279 --> 01:56:50,920
I haven't read that. I just I just listened to

1700
01:56:51,680 --> 01:56:55,119
three hours of a Neil Seth explain active inference to me.

1701
01:56:55,239 --> 01:56:57,880
So I'm almost almost ready for a paper like that.

1702
01:56:57,960 --> 01:56:59,479
I think I might need to do a little bit

1703
01:56:59,479 --> 01:57:02,520
more work, But uh, that that sound that sounds brilliant,

1704
01:57:02,720 --> 01:57:06,279
so well, thank you, thank you so much. I honestly

1705
01:57:06,279 --> 01:57:07,880
I could talk to you for eight hours. So maybe

1706
01:57:07,920 --> 01:57:08,960
you'll humor me someday.

1707
01:57:09,079 --> 01:57:12,279
Speaker 2: My favorite subject pretty much. So I'm happy to continue

1708
01:57:12,279 --> 01:57:13,119
to discussion if.

1709
01:57:13,039 --> 01:57:16,960
Speaker 1: You like, oh oh yeah, and today or another time

1710
01:57:17,039 --> 01:57:18,439
you're saying you got.

1711
01:57:18,279 --> 01:57:22,159
Speaker 2: A little more now, I am flexible this afternoon. But yeah,

1712
01:57:22,159 --> 01:57:24,039
if you think of other questions to send me, I'm

1713
01:57:24,079 --> 01:57:25,399
happy to continue.

1714
01:57:25,600 --> 01:57:26,680
Speaker 1: That sounds if.

1715
01:57:26,600 --> 01:57:28,560
Speaker 2: You have something else you want right now, I'm up

1716
01:57:28,640 --> 01:57:28,960
for it.

1717
01:57:29,479 --> 01:57:31,439
Speaker 1: I just I worry that I'm getting to the point

1718
01:57:31,439 --> 01:57:35,239
where every every question I have is just purely philosophical,

1719
01:57:36,720 --> 01:57:39,399
because it's it is just you're you're right. It's just

1720
01:57:39,560 --> 01:57:44,000
it is difficult for me to accept certain aspects of this.

1721
01:57:44,720 --> 01:57:47,399
And it's not even intentional, like there's I have no

1722
01:57:47,560 --> 01:57:50,880
reason to deny it. I have no like theological basis

1723
01:57:50,880 --> 01:57:54,880
for denying anything I'm hearing, but it just it's just

1724
01:57:54,920 --> 01:57:58,079
it's just so it's just so hard. I think you've

1725
01:57:58,119 --> 01:58:01,079
done a great job for posing the only solution I've

1726
01:58:01,119 --> 01:58:03,600
ever heard that makes any sense, but it is just

1727
01:58:03,640 --> 01:58:05,159
so hard for me to wrap my head around that

1728
01:58:05,199 --> 01:58:07,199
hard problem, which is like how do we get from

1729
01:58:07,239 --> 01:58:07,760
there to hear?

1730
01:58:08,800 --> 01:58:12,039
Speaker 2: So the short answer is we're not actually we have

1731
01:58:12,079 --> 01:58:16,600
to postulate it. In other words, Yeah, it's just it's

1732
01:58:16,720 --> 01:58:21,640
like it's sort of like charge. We we saw these

1733
01:58:21,680 --> 01:58:25,760
things that push the repel each other, and we say, okay,

1734
01:58:25,920 --> 01:58:27,880
we'll give it a name. We'll call it charge, and

1735
01:58:27,920 --> 01:58:31,319
try to figure out what is. Now we got this elaborate,

1736
01:58:31,800 --> 01:58:35,880
well tested, sophisticated theory of electromagnetism, but arguably we still

1737
01:58:35,880 --> 01:58:41,159
don't know what charge is, right, and at bottom, everything's

1738
01:58:41,319 --> 01:58:43,279
like that. We give things names and we try to

1739
01:58:43,359 --> 01:58:45,720
understand how they relate to each other as best we can.

1740
01:58:45,800 --> 01:58:53,039
But it's all just there's some amazing, awesome mystery.

1741
01:58:53,119 --> 01:58:56,279
Speaker 1: It really is, you know, and we're just doing our best.

1742
01:58:56,279 --> 01:58:59,319
We're like carving ruins and stone cup with these words

1743
01:58:59,359 --> 01:59:01,680
coming up for symbols of what these things are.

1744
01:59:01,760 --> 01:59:04,560
Speaker 2: It is a beautiful thing is that it does seem

1745
01:59:04,600 --> 01:59:07,920
to make sense. So that's like, that's like the religious

1746
01:59:07,920 --> 01:59:11,439
faith of science is that it can make sense. We

1747
01:59:11,479 --> 01:59:15,880
can make sense of this stuff. Yeah, and it didn't

1748
01:59:15,920 --> 01:59:16,680
have to be that way.

1749
01:59:16,960 --> 01:59:18,840
Speaker 1: And when a theory doesn't make sense, you know, I

1750
01:59:18,840 --> 01:59:20,760
hope people are willing to sort of let go of it,

1751
01:59:21,119 --> 01:59:22,880
which doesn't always seem to be the case. But yeah,

1752
01:59:22,880 --> 01:59:27,199
this certainly does make sense. I think your empirical work

1753
01:59:27,479 --> 01:59:31,760
is really gone a big way. I remember I read

1754
01:59:31,760 --> 01:59:35,239
a paper from Stuart Hammeroff saying that orc O R

1755
01:59:35,399 --> 01:59:40,560
was the only falsifiable theory of consciousness, and I read

1756
01:59:40,600 --> 01:59:43,680
it and I kind of had a hold on me.

1757
01:59:43,720 --> 01:59:45,800
I was like, yeah, this is kind of this is

1758
01:59:45,880 --> 01:59:47,640
kind of my issue that I have with all these

1759
01:59:47,720 --> 01:59:50,279
other theories. It's like, how would we know, how would

1760
01:59:50,279 --> 01:59:52,760
we test it? So the fact that you've proposed a

1761
01:59:52,800 --> 01:59:54,239
mechanism I think is fantastic.

1762
01:59:55,239 --> 02:00:02,760
Speaker 2: I maybe the other one that what I is different

1763
02:00:02,760 --> 02:00:06,000
from all the others in that it's fun, it's attempting

1764
02:00:06,039 --> 02:00:07,399
to be a fundamental theory.

1765
02:00:07,840 --> 02:00:10,520
Speaker 1: I don't see that as mutually exclusive from what you're saying,

1766
02:00:10,600 --> 02:00:12,680
is it they seem like they could be related in

1767
02:00:12,720 --> 02:00:13,199
a way or.

1768
02:00:13,159 --> 02:00:18,600
Speaker 2: No, they are related, but I think they're sort of

1769
02:00:18,720 --> 02:00:24,760
mutually exclusive. OK, so they're related. So what I admire

1770
02:00:24,800 --> 02:00:30,359
about it is first that Tononi is unambiguous about this

1771
02:00:30,640 --> 02:00:34,880
is a candidate fundamental theory as opposed to almost every

1772
02:00:34,880 --> 02:00:38,720
other theory. Just says like global workspace it's about the

1773
02:00:38,720 --> 02:00:43,239
conditions in a brain for consciousness. It says when you

1774
02:00:43,319 --> 02:00:46,239
broadcast to the front frontal cortex or this and that,

1775
02:00:46,359 --> 02:00:49,079
and you have or you have feedback loops and stuff

1776
02:00:49,119 --> 02:00:53,199
like that. And now they try to apply it to

1777
02:00:53,239 --> 02:00:55,920
other things and say, oh, well, if my robot has

1778
02:00:55,960 --> 02:00:58,239
feedback loops, then maybe it would be conscious. But really

1779
02:00:58,319 --> 02:01:00,920
it wasn't formulated as a fundament mental theory. What's a

1780
02:01:00,960 --> 02:01:03,439
fundamental A way to know if it's a fundamental theory

1781
02:01:03,560 --> 02:01:06,399
or not is can it point? Can you point at

1782
02:01:06,399 --> 02:01:09,239
an arbitrary physical system and that theory tells you whether

1783
02:01:09,279 --> 02:01:13,119
it's conscious or not. I tries to do that. Global

1784
02:01:13,119 --> 02:01:16,720
Workspace didn't try to do that until later. It's really

1785
02:01:16,760 --> 02:01:18,880
a metaph it's really a metaphor. Most of them are

1786
02:01:18,960 --> 02:01:21,640
just metaphors. I T is trying to be more than

1787
02:01:21,680 --> 02:01:24,439
a metaphor. So that's thing one in its favor. It's

1788
02:01:24,479 --> 02:01:28,680
bold and it's take grabbing the bull by the horns

1789
02:01:28,760 --> 02:01:30,199
instead of just dancing around.

1790
02:01:31,640 --> 02:01:37,800
Speaker 1: I don't find people have any like instinctual repulsion to

1791
02:01:37,840 --> 02:01:40,760
I T. Like, I'll talk to people who are pretty pretty,

1792
02:01:40,880 --> 02:01:43,960
you know, materialistic reductions, whatever you want to call it,

1793
02:01:44,000 --> 02:01:46,239
physical lists, and they're they're pretty open minded to that.

1794
02:01:46,880 --> 02:01:48,239
Why do you what do you think the difference is?

1795
02:01:48,239 --> 02:01:50,039
Why do you think that is they're not because they're

1796
02:01:50,039 --> 02:01:51,479
not invoking quantumness.

1797
02:01:51,920 --> 02:01:55,239
Speaker 2: That's a large part of it. So yeah, quantum Immediately

1798
02:01:55,680 --> 02:01:59,520
you're in company with Deepak Chopra and lots of people

1799
02:01:59,520 --> 02:02:06,279
who have gone too far. But yeah, and whenever, even

1800
02:02:06,600 --> 02:02:10,079
in classical neuroscience, when people start saying neuro correlates of

1801
02:02:10,119 --> 02:02:14,880
consciousness were synchronized oscillations, those are still classical. But that

1802
02:02:15,000 --> 02:02:17,199
was already making a lot of people nervous because it's

1803
02:02:17,239 --> 02:02:22,560
sounding like new Age waves, good vibrations and stuff. It

1804
02:02:23,239 --> 02:02:28,199
really makes people nervous. And the connections to Eastern philosophy

1805
02:02:28,279 --> 02:02:33,359
and so on. Sure, wait, so what were we on it?

1806
02:02:34,119 --> 02:02:37,399
So I was saying, I is admirable because it's trying

1807
02:02:37,439 --> 02:02:39,439
to be a fundamental theory and we need to start

1808
02:02:39,479 --> 02:02:44,119
thinking in terms of fundamental theories, not just metaphors metaphorical models.

1809
02:02:44,840 --> 02:02:49,039
The other thing I love about it, and what Julio

1810
02:02:49,119 --> 02:02:55,359
Tononi did is he made it mainstream to take the

1811
02:02:55,520 --> 02:03:02,680
unity of consciousness seriously. A primary act of it is

1812
02:03:02,720 --> 02:03:06,039
about the integration. The integration is referring to the unity

1813
02:03:06,079 --> 02:03:11,199
that I've been obsessing about this whole discussion. He's trying

1814
02:03:11,239 --> 02:03:14,960
to count for that unity with his definition of integrated information.

1815
02:03:15,720 --> 02:03:20,359
The information part is corresponds to how I said, each

1816
02:03:20,800 --> 02:03:24,439
moment has many features in it, lots of information in it,

1817
02:03:25,439 --> 02:03:28,239
and the integration is corresponding to the unity that I

1818
02:03:28,319 --> 02:03:33,279
was emphasizing. And so he's looking for some statistical measure

1819
02:03:33,359 --> 02:03:36,640
of that unity, and he approaches it in terms of

1820
02:03:36,760 --> 02:03:39,199
the whole being more than the some of its parts.

1821
02:03:39,880 --> 02:03:46,039
Unfortunately it doesn't. It gets very mathematically sophisticated without getting

1822
02:03:46,159 --> 02:03:50,319
in my opinion, more conceptually sophisticated than the whole is

1823
02:03:50,479 --> 02:03:52,359
more than the some of its parts in some sense,

1824
02:03:54,039 --> 02:03:59,239
and so other people have found other reasons not to

1825
02:03:59,680 --> 02:04:04,159
think that it is. The answer is not viable. But

1826
02:04:08,119 --> 02:04:10,039
from the point of view of this emphasis on the

1827
02:04:10,159 --> 02:04:15,000
unity of consciousness, it simply fails because it's a classical

1828
02:04:15,079 --> 02:04:20,319
measure of the unity ultimately just as reducible as every

1829
02:04:20,319 --> 02:04:25,920
other classical dynamical phenomenon. That's problem one, and I think

1830
02:04:25,960 --> 02:04:30,680
it's fatal. But another way of seeing it as a

1831
02:04:30,720 --> 02:04:33,640
fatal problem, or another way of seeing what I think

1832
02:04:33,720 --> 02:04:38,239
is a fatal problem without making reference to the unity

1833
02:04:38,279 --> 02:04:43,319
that I am claiming can't be real or objective in

1834
02:04:43,359 --> 02:04:47,600
a classical model is that it's a statistical model. It's

1835
02:04:47,640 --> 02:04:51,600
all about transition probabilities. It's all formulated in terms of

1836
02:04:51,600 --> 02:04:56,119
probability transition probabilities. So, given the state that this physical

1837
02:04:56,159 --> 02:04:59,199
system is in, what are the probabilities that it will

1838
02:04:59,520 --> 02:05:03,840
go to state x, y or z in the next moment.

1839
02:05:04,840 --> 02:05:08,279
Problem with that is it's not just a description of

1840
02:05:08,319 --> 02:05:11,880
what the thing is now, it's some kind of average

1841
02:05:12,000 --> 02:05:17,960
over many experiments of what it did next. So the

1842
02:05:18,720 --> 02:05:22,680
actual thing that you're saying corresponds to consciousness in the

1843
02:05:22,760 --> 02:05:26,680
IT model is like a statistical average, a probability that

1844
02:05:26,760 --> 02:05:31,000
you got by averaging over many events, idealized events that

1845
02:05:31,079 --> 02:05:35,880
never even happened. But anyway, it's not a physical property.

1846
02:05:36,119 --> 02:05:38,680
It's not a property of the thing right now, the

1847
02:05:38,720 --> 02:05:42,319
physical system, And so in that sense, it's not a

1848
02:05:42,439 --> 02:05:48,039
viable candidate for consciousness happening right now because you need

1849
02:05:48,039 --> 02:05:50,119
to refer to things that happened at other times, or

1850
02:05:50,119 --> 02:05:55,199
that might have happened that didn't happen. So that's two

1851
02:05:55,239 --> 02:05:58,640
ways of seeing that. I think, although it's aiming in

1852
02:05:58,680 --> 02:06:01,000
the same direction as me, to try to account for

1853
02:06:02,319 --> 02:06:04,720
Penrose and hammer Off, to try to account for the

1854
02:06:04,800 --> 02:06:07,399
unity of consciousness. I think it ultimately fails.

1855
02:06:09,119 --> 02:06:13,119
Speaker 1: But we do love our constructs and abstractions. So there

1856
02:06:13,159 --> 02:06:17,520
is something kind of appealing about repackaging existing ideas in

1857
02:06:17,600 --> 02:06:19,000
a sort of novel way.

1858
02:06:19,159 --> 02:06:21,199
Speaker 2: Well, well, that's that's all I'm doing. You know, I'm

1859
02:06:21,239 --> 02:06:23,479
not claiming my own new theory of consciousness. That's a

1860
02:06:23,479 --> 02:06:25,840
bit of a pet peeve. It seems like there's a

1861
02:06:25,920 --> 02:06:29,319
million you know, everyone has to have their own theory

1862
02:06:29,319 --> 02:06:33,079
of consciousness with its own acronym and its own metaphor,

1863
02:06:33,520 --> 02:06:37,239
like consciousness is a controlled hallucination or this or that,

1864
02:06:37,359 --> 02:06:40,920
or it's an illusion, is the worst one. But I'm

1865
02:06:40,960 --> 02:06:43,479
not doing that. I'm just saying Penrose and hammer Off

1866
02:06:43,479 --> 02:06:43,960
are right.

1867
02:06:44,920 --> 02:06:47,520
Speaker 1: Well as we as we end here, I will give you,

1868
02:06:47,600 --> 02:06:50,079
try to give you a little bit more credit than that.

1869
02:06:50,359 --> 02:06:52,039
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there

1870
02:06:52,079 --> 02:06:55,239
is there is a way of asking and answering research

1871
02:06:55,359 --> 02:06:58,920
questions that is I think just like fundamentally different. You know,

1872
02:06:59,279 --> 02:07:02,479
there's not like a a ton of theory building and

1873
02:07:02,640 --> 02:07:07,039
it's like very simple, mechanistic research questions that have always

1874
02:07:07,319 --> 02:07:09,720
just been super appealing to me, so I appreciate that

1875
02:07:09,720 --> 02:07:13,279
that you and others like you have been doing that well.

1876
02:07:13,359 --> 02:07:16,680
Thank you so much, Mike. If folks have questions uh

1877
02:07:16,760 --> 02:07:19,760
for Mike, you can email me and I will I

1878
02:07:19,760 --> 02:07:22,600
will pass him on to him, And no promises, of course,

1879
02:07:22,640 --> 02:07:25,199
but I'll pass him on to him, and I hope

1880
02:07:25,279 --> 02:07:29,479
someday you'll uh decide you're a glutton for punishment and

1881
02:07:29,600 --> 02:07:31,840
decide to come back and tell us some some new

1882
02:07:32,079 --> 02:07:33,159
breakthrough you've made.

1883
02:07:33,479 --> 02:07:35,640
Speaker 2: Thank you all right, thanks for your interesting