Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host,
Trevor Wow. I have a very very interesting episode in
store for you. I'm recording this introduction after a conversation
with Michael C. Weist at Wellesley College. Mike is a
professor of neuroscience who has done some really just I mean,
you'll hear me just shower him with flattery the whole episode.
But he's just done some really interesting experiments, and he
is a very mainstream neuroscientist, asking sort of paradigm shifting questions,
and he really had to put up with a lot
of my armchair philosophizing. You know, I kind of I
sometimes I kind of felt like a little kid at
a campfire and the village elder. He's not an elder.
I just he's my intellectual elder. I felt like I
was at a campfire asking him questions and he was like, well,
well son, that's not exactly it. So anyway, and of
course we didn't. You know, you know, I have sort
of complex philosophical and theological views and ideas on things,
and there's certain theories of physics and consciousness that really
appealed to me. I think this is one of them,
I think so, and I hoping I'm hoping it will
appeal to you too, So without further ado, I think
we'll just get into it and then maybe we can
sort of think about this and talk about it more
than a follow up episode. I will if you will
just allow me to sort of pre apologize. This is
a disclaimer. This is not false modesty, This is real.
I had one of the worst nights of sleep of
my life last night, So I hope that's not too obvious,
you know. I sometimes I would ask questions I was
sort of having a hard time cognitively, and Mike very
kindly would say something like, well, you know, I did
sort of already answer that, but let me just read
it anyway. So it was hopefully it's not too bad,
Hopefully it's not too brutal. Hopefully you'll forgive your favorite
podcast host me, if I could presume that that's me
one of your favorite podcast hosts. Anyway, So Mike was
very generous with this time, very smart, and I kind
of steered him in a lot of different directions. It
was sort of stochastic, you know. I think he probably
would prefer to give like a lecture with the logical
sequence and flow. Unfortunately I didn't really permit him to
do that because I was just sort of like like
that dog and up squirrel. But you know, I hope
maybe this is a naive hope. I hope that that's
kind of how most of us feel about this topic.
It's just it's so abstract and so complex, and there's
of course a lot of spiritual implications, and there's a
lot of paradigm shifting implications for science, and so I hope,
I hope I did that justice. Anyway, email me at
God's Eye view Book at gmail dot com if you
have any questions for Mike, and without further ado, Michael Seweist, Well,
I was kind of hoping I could start with some
flattery if you'd permit permit that, oh please. So I
don't have a you know, a professional interest in the
topics we're going to talk about, but like any human being,
of course, I'm casually interested in the idea of consciousness.
And from my perspective as an outsider looking in, it
kind of seems like you're doing something maybe a little
unique in a field that's kind of dominated by philosophers
and theologians, And you know, also maybe neuron obsessed reductionists,
you know, on the other side of things. So it
seems to me like you're doing you're asking and answering
really interesting research questions empirically on a topic that traditionally,
at least in my experience, that doesn't seem to be
done a whole lot. Is that is that the case?
Is that my misconception.
Speaker 2: Well, we've been making prog progress, good progress for the
past one hundred, one hundred and fifty years, but in
the last century this was kind of a taboo topic
for most neuroscientists before they were even called that, I guess.
But still we made fundamental discoveries during that era of
so called behaviorism where scientists didn't even want to say
the word consciousness, right, But for example, the split the
discovery of split brain phenomena, where surgical separation of the
two hemispheres of the brain can lead to apparently two
different people in there at least you know, sort of
temporarily or in specific conditions. So we've had, you know,
steady accumulation of some real progress, real fundamental results about
how our brain relates to our consciousness. But it wasn't
until the nineties that the nineteen nineties that it got
kind of bumped back into an acceptable, somewhat acceptable scientific
object of study by Francis Crick, the co discoverer of
the DNA structure. He and Christoph Koch, who's still working
in the field, wrote a paper that kind of said
it's time we go back to talking about this fundamental
question again. And so since then, you know, there is
still a sort of hangover where there are many conservative
scientists who still feel it should be outside the realm
of science to try and address these kinds of questions.
But at the same time it's become more and more
acceptable in the side of the community. So there's I
think you overstated a bit when you said it's all
philosophers and theologians. There's definitely a whole field now of
neuroscientists who are using empirical methods to try and address
this question. On the other hand, you're right they are
mostly going to be physicalists or materialists, which I take
to be synonymous. Yeah, and we can talk more about
what that might mean exactly, because people argue about it,
but it's not that straightforward to define exactly what you
mean by it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I certainly think from what I've read of
your stuff that is also a you know, a materialistic
and a physical explanation is just very unique, and it's
falsifiable and testable in a way that some of the
other theories don't seem to be, perhaps right.
Speaker 2: So I think maybe it's worth talking about the word
a bit because I think in the public at large,
you know, you just said that my point of view
seems materialistic, because yes, I think the brain is involved,
and in some way it's contentious to say the brain
generates consciousness, but anyway, in some sense that you've got
to look at the brain to understand consciousness. That is
my point of view. But on the other hand, I
am not a physicalist or materialist as the philosophers define it,
because because in that understanding, what it means is that
only that you get a complete description of physical and
mental properties or including consciousness, you can completely account for
that with only physical properties of physical systems, whereas my
non physicalist position is that no, we need to add
fundamental new, a fundamental new mental property to our scientific
ontology list of what things there are, what kind of
properties there are, in order to account for consciousness. So
that is what makes it non materialist in that sort
of strict sense where a materialist says everything comes from
matter or from the physical, including the mental, whereas I
do not think that you can derive mind from only
physical variables.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's fascinating. Well, if you'd permit me just about
sixty seconds of preamble, I'm hoping I could sort of
outlay my AIM's my goal, and then we can take
right into to orco are and your research and all
of this interesting stuff. So I work in a neurology department,
you know, not you know, studying clinical stuff at a
medical school. And if I were to pull a colleague
aside in the hallway and start talking about, you know,
quantum resonance in the microtubules and things, I think there
would be like a sort of a knee jerk visceral
reaction like what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: So I'm hoping my goal kind of two aims, and
one would be you know, they'll never listen to this
because they don't know about the podcast, and I plan
to keep it that way. But if they were listening,
could you help me convince them that the microtubules probably
are key or fundamental or at least intrinsically related somehow
to the subjective experience of consciousness beyond synaptic transmission or
some like more mundane thing that we already know they do.
And then two this might be harder, like how do
we why is quantumness important to that? That idea? So
I watched a video of yours. I thought the overton
you know, solubility thing was a great kind of segue
into this topic. Is your research, but I'll just kind
of step back and let you take it away.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, yeah, why microtubules and why quantum? From my perspective,
the why quantum is the more fundamental thing, and the
microtubules just look like the best light and the most
likely candidate forgetting the kind of quantum process that I
think is necessary to account for consciousness, And so maybe
I should start there. So, you know, there's conceptual considerations
that convinced me thirty years ago it had to be quantum,
But nobody believes. I use the word conceptual, but if
you don't want to engage it, you call it philosophical
and you dismiss it. Right, So I have conceptual reasons
that I think it had to be quantum. What I
would tend to refer to as the substrate of consciousness
in the brain has to be quantum. And then there
was the immediate there's the immediate reaction from smart, educated
people about why that can't be right about the brain.
And I think those theoretical arguments were never conclusive. But
now in recent years we've started to get experimental evidence,
so you don't have to convince people of the theoretical
arguments or motivation for expecting something like this to turn
out to be true. But still, if you don't express
the theoretical motivation, then people have a tendency to go
back to the old way of making fun of this idea,
which is you've got consciousness that's missed serious and you've
got quantum physics that's mysterious. Let's just jam them together
and declare both mysteries solved. But the point or the
import of the theoretical arguments is that what quantum physics
has is exactly what a theory of consciousness needs, namely,
some way to account for irreducible wholism of our conscious experiences.
And so to just that's a pretty abstract little phrase,
but to say what I mean by that, I mean
every moment of my conscious experience when I'm looking at
my laptop and looking around my office. Every moment of
my conscious experience somehow includes multiple elements, multiple features, multiple
concepts I might have in mind, sounds, smells, tactile, feels,
my mood. All that is somehow unified into one field
of experience, including the visual field with lots of things
in different positions and colors. All of that is somehow
unified with all the pieces in relation to each other.
And it's from my singular point of view, and I
think rigorous reflection reveals that a classical model cannot account
for something like that, because in classical physics, anything big
is reducible to just little bits pushing on their neighbors.
And so when you have a classical model of something big,
like a wave or a tornado, giving it that name
for the big thing is just a in principle, is
a convenience, because the thing is so complicated with all
the little bits of wind pushing on each other. In principle,
the classical theory never needs to have a name for
the tornado because it's completely described by the bits of
wind pushing on each other. And the relevance of that
to consciousness is if you say, well, I think or
my theory of consciousness is that when the brain isn't
an certain pattern of electrical activity, it feels like this
or I experienced such and such. In a classical theory,
you never need to make reference to this holistic experience,
because the entire dynamics of what that brain does and
what it makes your body do and what it makes
me say, is it, in principle, in a classical model,
entirely determined just by the little neurons pushing on their neighbors,
so to speak, without any need in principle to ever
refer to this putative holistic thing that goes along with it.
And so that means if there is this holistic thing
that goes along with it, it couldn't be doing anything
in a classical model.
Speaker 1: Is is this where the idea of you know, a
lot of classical theories of consciousness will describe it as
as like an emergent property or sort of like a
just almost like an illusory like, uh, you know, unavoidable
thing that just sort of happens when you have these
like this complex interaction of all these different things in
your brain.
Speaker 2: Okay, is it this idea. I you, you kind of
mentioned three distinct ideas.
Speaker 1: That okay, thank you, pleasure, and I would.
Speaker 2: Love to dispute every one of them. So the first
one is when people say consciousness is illusory. That's the
worst one.
Speaker 1: I kind of think, like an illusion for who, like,
who's being fooled by this?
Speaker 2: Right? So you think of an illusion of an oasis
means you're seeing an oasis, but the oasis is not
really there. But an illusion of consciousness means you're seeing consciousness,
but the consciousness is not really there. So it sounds
like they're saying consciousness doesn't exist without exception. In my experience,
when you press them on that, they say, oh, that's
not what I meant. I just mean it doesn't exist
in the way you thought. And then I don't think
they have much more to say than that, right, Y're okay,
So that's illusionism. The older version of that was illimitativism,
where we should just get rid of the word because again,
it doesn't really exist if you imagine the brain is
doing everything, but that's maybe muddling the water. Muddying the
water's a bit. But so, yeah, I don't think it's
helpful to say consciousness is an illusion, but a lot
of neuroscientists will say it's an emergent property. And as
you just did, relate it to complexity. When things get
very complicated, the information processing gets very complicated, somehow this
new feature blossoms into his existence. Now that might be
okay as a theory if you just admit that that
is not physicalism. You know, interesting, our physical theory has
rules for how things push on each other. And if
you're saying this emergent property then changes how they push
on each other, that's not in our current physic in
our current physics theory. You know, from that point of view,
it's just magical thinking to just think if you've got
something that's really simple, switches pushing on each other, and
you just add more of them, suddenly you get a
new magical property that I don't think is coherent, but
you could postulate as that as a new law of
nature in your theory. And then you've got to decide
is that an emergent property going to violate the laws
that we already have and you got to see how
you're going to make it consistent with what we already know,
or are you're going to bite the bullet and say, Okay,
it's an emergent property, but it's epi phenomenal. It doesn't
actually do anything. It just for some reason pops into
existence when thing gets things get complicated, but doesn't actually
change how that system behaves physically.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of calling it magical thinking. That is,
that is really what it is.
Speaker 2: The word magic gets thrown around by illusionists, so it's
it's there's a there's a real rhetorical aspect uh magic
and related words, they'll say that a non physicalist neuroscientist
like me is engaging in magical thinking, imagining there's some
ghost that goes along with the physical properties in a sense,
I'm saying that, but I'm making it consistent with physics. Yeah,
I think I've got a way to see it as
consistent with physics, which a classical model, in my view,
would just leave you with just kind of arbitrary ad
hoc rules that these certain weird brains that appear when
they get complicated enough, you get this mind thing that
pops into existence, but it can't do anything, and therefore
we can't understand evolutionarily. You know why fire hurts and
ripe fruit tastes good. You know, your conscious sensations seem
to be giving you pretty good advice about what to do,
like take your hand out of the fire. But if
your model doesn't give consciousness anyway to participate in taking
your hand out of the fire, it seems there's no
way to account for how it could have provided a
evolutionary benefit so that it could have evolved.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of something that happened recently that I
think you might be able to sort of fix this,
this logical error that a famous evolutionary biologists made recently,
I think Dawkins. So he recently got in a lot
of trouble for basically seemingly thinking that he was engaging
with like a conscious agent talking to his clawed AI
and so he said that if AI agents weren't conscious
but yet could demonstrate human level intelligence and emotional nuance,
this would sort of undermine the idea that consciousness evolved,
since these AI bots didn't evolve and yet they display consciousness. Therefore,
in his conclusion was therefore chatbots must be conscious. And
I think most people hear that and we think, oh,
that's kind of a reverse, you know, maybe way of
looking at it. Some people on the other end of
the spectrum may say, well, maybe it means conscious there
is no evolutionary pressure for consciousness. I imagine you sort
of have an answer that's sort of in the middle
ground with your theory that yes, there is evolutionary pressure
for consciousness. We know that because we're conscious. However, this
just proves that we need some new theory. But we
can't just assume that, you know, AI parameters and complexity
result in consciousness.
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's an evolutionary argument that I'm not used
to coming at it that way about whether the llms
might be conscious or not, whether it's relevant that they
evolved or not. In my view, that's not relevant because
even if we evolved, if we have we I think
think we evolved to our present form of consciousness. But
still if we just in principle duplicated this physical system
by engineering, it should be conscious too. I mean, that's
a meta form of magical thinking to think what happens
in the past makes a difference if it didn't actually
leave in the present, that would be again I think
magical thinking or new physics where different times talked to
present times in current physics, but the way. I So
a lot of people, it seems, are inclined to think, well,
we don't have a good theory of consciousness, and so
if you don't have a good theory of consciousness, you
can't be sure when you think that the LLM or
a fancier version of the LLM with a world model,
or whatever is conscious is not conscious. You can't be
sure because you don't we don't have a final, rigorous
theory of consciousness. Yet nobody agrees everyone's argument. But I
think we know enough already to say that a classical computer,
classical physical system can never be conscious in the way
we are, which again involves holistic states where you can
be one thing that nevertheless has multiple properties that are
irreducibly connected to each other. That only happens in quantum physics.
In a sense, quantum physics is just the dynamic theory
that describes how irreducible holes do stuff, apparently in the
real world, because quantum physics describes the real world really well.
But again, there are no irreducible holes w H O,
L e s in classical physics. And that's my main
argument about why it has to be quantum. That's where
we started why quantum and why microtubules. We haven't gotten
to microtubules yet, but this was all fairly theoretical about
why I think it has to be quantum, and in
a word, it's the binding problem, the problem with counting
for the unity of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Okay, and so I mean this is because neurons, you know,
they're these little discrete units. They don't even touch each other.
You know, our visual stream goes to the back of
our head or auditory stream to the side. We have
self awareness in the front. How do we tie this
all together into a hole? And quantumness and microtubules might
answer that question? Yes, okay, awesome, Well I'd love to
hear more about that.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm trying to say. So the first objection though,
is okay, so, as you just outlined, Yeah, the signals
are going to all sorts of places all over the brain,
and so if I'm going to use a quant if
I'm hypothesizing there's a quantum state in the brain that
could unify those signals, it has to be able to
cross neurons. It can't just be in a couple of
microtubules in one neuron, because that neuron may only know
about the red color of the chair over there and
everything else that as part of my perception, is in
other neurons, and in my hypothesis, in the microtubules of
those other neurons. So if there's going to be a
quantum state in there, I need it to span multiple neurons,
many neurons, And so that makes it highly implausible to
most people that know what they're talking about, because usually technologically,
when we want to make a quantum state to do
something with, to do experiments with, we so far had
usually needed to cool it down to super cold temperatures.
And the brain is too hot, it seems, and neurons
seem to be too big already, even though they're pretty
small by our standards, they're big compared to molecules and atoms.
Where we tend to think that quantum physics applies. It
does apply there, But in our modern, our contemporary scientific
theory of the world, it applies to the whole everything,
not just small things. And in any case, big things
are made out of small things. In the reductionist point
of view, yes, and on that reductionism, you know, so
I think you may have to feel like materialism and
reductionism are closely related. They are closely related, but we
can recognize that even if you're a physicalist, quantum you know,
physics is sort of the reductionist method applied to the world.
The reductionist method discovered its own limits in quantum physics.
The reductionist method went all the way and found out
that reductionism does not apply in terms of spatial reduction
or causal reduction. Does not apply to this world we
live in. We have non local coordination or influences among
things at a distance. The spooky action at a distance
that Einstein, that Einstein really didn't like. It seems to
have been experimentally verified that twenty twenty two Nobel Prizes
were about that, although there are still many smart, educated
people that are trying to find ways to deny the conclusion,
which is that there is non locality wholism objective wholism
in our world.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're just on the precipice of getting into
the quantum, which is where I stuff really gets over
my head. So I might ask you to I pushed
us into the deep end fast. That's my fault. So
I want to can we take a step back, what
what are micro tubules.
Speaker 2: Okay, do you want me to say, give a brief
primer on just quantum itself?
Speaker 1: Uh? Sure, sure, whatever you think is a lot of Okay.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we've been I've been talking about quantum physics,
and now I'm going to say why I think microtubules
are a good candidate for instantiating or implementing this quantum physics.
But what is quantn physics? We think of it as
you look it up, it's the physics of atoms and molecules.
And you hear that it's different than our than our
classical physics. Uh Newtonian physics, where the F equals m a.
You push on stuff and it moves, and that's how
you understand everything. What's the same, or let's see in
classical physics, every classical physics theory is basically just a
differential equation. And I'm not going to assume our audience
knows exactly what that is, except it's an equation that says,
if you're given the state of some system at a
certain time, it tells you how to evolve it forward
in time. It tells you how to say what it's
going to do at the next time step, and then
from that you can figure out what we'll do at
the next time step. And so it's a determinate stick
equation that tells you how to evolve the universe.
Speaker 1: Computer scientists might think of it like an if then statement,
just over and over and over and over through time.
Speaker 2: It's more like a fore loop. It has no ifs
in it. Okay, Okay, it's deterministic.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's a four loop going through time, okay,
and just tells you what to change, what to move
at each moment. And there's no in the pure version
of the theory, there's no randomness or.
Speaker 1: Choices, and that's important, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the other well yeah, So every classical theory
is just an equation that tells you how to get
the next timestep from the current timestep. Okay. In quantum
physics we still have an equation like that. The most
basic one is called the Schrodinger equation, and it tells
you if you're given the state of a system at
time t zero, tells you how to get it at
later times, with one difference from the classical case. So
in the classical case, that equations the whole theory. In
the quantum case, there's two parts. You've got that deterministic
equation that tells you how to evolve through time, but
it only applies when something called a measurement is not
happening and when a measurement happens. So it turns out
what the Schrodinger equation is describing is so called wave
function that describes the probabilities of different things that could
happen different outcomes of your measurement, your experiments. And then
when you do a measurement, you refer to the wave
function that the Schrodering equation gave you to see what
the probabilities are of the different outcomes. And so that's
the first thing we recognize as a difference from classical
physics is this determinism now has a determinist Quantum physics
has a deterministic part, but when you do a measurement,
there seems to be this randomness that there's no way
to get it out of the theory. It just seems
to be in the universe.
Speaker 1: It sort of feels like a metaphor might be for
the collapse of the wave function, like for any feature
of a quantum system, you know, position, momentum, spin, whatever,
it is. It's when you measure it or observe it
or whatever you want to say. You're you're reaching into
a a a basket of you know, like like at
a fare when they drive your ticket, you know, and
there's more probabilistic outcomes and less probabilistic outcomes, and so
you're just sort of reaching into the scrabbag and pulling
out the answer. It sort of seems like that's what
the collapse of the way function is in a weird way.
Speaker 2: It seems like that, but in fact it's more weird
than that because in the grab bag, say it's white
and black balls, there's a certain number of white balls
and a certain number of black balls. But in the
quantum case, the balls haven't yet decided whether they're going
to be in real life. It's not just we don't know.
So there are different points of view on this. There
are people that are still trying to maintain what the way,
you know, if it was that they are really white
and black balls in the bag, that's and then the
probabilities just come because we don't know what's in the bag.
That's an epistemic interpretation as opposed to an on tick interpretation.
That No, those probabilities are really objective tendencies out in
the world, not in your lack of not in your ignorance. Right,
that's thing one. That's an irreducible certainty or indeterminism that
is not just because we don't know what the state
of the system really is.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: There is a way of trying to maintain that interpretation.
Speaker 1: Well, we don't need to.
Speaker 2: I think I'll set that aside. I don't think it's viable,
but there are a certain segment of physicists who subscribe
to it that point of view, where you could still
think of it that way and in the sense evade
the indeterminacy. So there might be a way to evade
the indeterminacy in a theoretical way. I think there's no
way to evade the next feature of quantum physics that
I'm going to mention that is fundamentally different from classical physics,
and that's the wholeism that I've already alluded to, the
non locality. It's coordination between things that have no time
to talk to each other. So it's very spooky if
you want, if you will, But that's the more important
thing from my point of view. The more essential difference
between quantum physics and classical physics is that in classical physics,
everything's local little bits pushing on each other. In quantum
physics there are irreducible holes. And why I care about that,
or one of the reasons I care about that, is
it seems to be exactly what we need to account
for the holistic experiences that we have consciousness.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't want to jump ahead, but I
think for the first time it just sort of clicked
what people mean when they say things like that. It's
these microtubules are still distinct structures in that they also
do not touch one another, you know, they don't leave
them or on. However, if they if they are, I'm
going to have their incorrectvocabulary. But if there are quantum systems,
theoretically there could be some degree of entanglement between these structures.
Is that how we get the wholism? Yes word, Yes,
that's cool.
Speaker 2: Entanglement among microtubules in different neurons. Okay, you still need
those things to interact, so it's not okay. So to
approach this, let me say a few words.
Speaker 1: Please.
Speaker 2: You've been asking me the whole time about microtubules, and
I I kept putting it off. So let's just get
some basics about microtubules. Sure, you know, they're in all cells,
not only in neurons in our brain, so they're in
plants and single celled organisms as well, and they're in
every cell in our body. And they are literal tubes
made out of protein. And the stereotype of them in
biology is that they are you know, they are considered
part of the so called cytoskeleton, and so the metaphor
is that they're like the bones of single cells that
are giving them their shape shape, or like tent poles
that are keeping them from just collapsing, although the water
inside would do that too.
Speaker 1: I've told many people that exact thing as an undergraduate
anatomy instructor years ago. So I feel guilty, we'll do that.
Speaker 2: They certainly do that, but you know, like our bones,
they also do other things. But I think they do
even more other things than our bones. But I'm probably
ignorant about real bones. I know they have some stuff
in the middle that's important for your blood or something. Anyway,
that may be your field day you're a cardiac looking
at cardiac interactions.
Speaker 1: With the brain, yes, yes, yeah, well I wouldn't I
wouldn't pretend to know a whole lot about the bones.
But yes, comatopoetic stem cells that's where all are wide
and red blood cells can for yess absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, But so in single cells you got microtubules helping
form the shape of the cell. But what I want
to emphasize is that already in single cells, microtubules are
performing multitudinous functions that we can summarize as integrating sensory
information and coordinating movement, and.
Speaker 1: So fascinating, which is this is the basis of conscious
This is what it means to be conscious to well.
Speaker 2: It's what we would do. So is what our brain
seems to be for integraating sensory signals and coordinating movement.
And so yeah, I'm saying, so you don't in principle
need microtubules or even consciousness to integrate central sensory signals
and coordinate movement. We can make a robot that does that.
But in terms of relating our fancy consciousness to biological
processes that were already happening in biology, this is a
way to see I'm also going to refer to the
physical properties of microtools that seem to make them appropriate
for the kind of quantum process I think we need.
But just in terms of biology, they seem to already
be carrying out functions that I would be asking them
to do for my theory of consciousness. They're already doing
that in single cells. And so it's it's sort of
in that sense evolutionarily plausible that they are repurposed or
you know, elaborated in order to get a fancier kind
of sensory integration and motor coordination. Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because they sort of form the very first on
the maybe the evolutionary timeline, the very first mechanisms for movement,
you know, acilia and flip flagella, and in their highly
evolutionary conserved I mean, they're in every cell right essentially.
Speaker 2: I think just about everything you might. Yeah, so when
you get to viruses, then they don't have microtubules, but
they might I think they might stell some kind of
tubular protein. Now, they can't do it alone. They do
need a bunch of other machinery to do their stuff,
but it but they're always there at the center of
amazing things like the mitosis that I guess you taught
and your well, I don't know if that was a
neuroscience course or a biology course, but you know, the
microtubules are core choreographing that amazing dance they're doing it.
And also the microtubule organizing centers are the actual or
along with other proteins, but they are appear to be
the conductors, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I never I always dreaded a student asking
a question like what is the center zone? You know,
like I just never wanted to answer that question because
it's like, well, you know, it's there's all this tubula
in and all these mitotic spindle and kineticore tubules grow
out of it. But what's orchestrating that?
Speaker 2: Who does that? Yeah? Yeah, it looks like more than
just things diffusing around. Yes, there's I'll mention briefly, there's
some amazing work by a guy named Gunter Albrecht Buehler
who's got a series of papers that appear to show
single cells a rudimentary form of cellular vision that is
detecting electromagnetic light signals and not just like so, one
thing they do is reach out or move towards an
infrared light source, which is sort of trivial. Maybe it's
just going towards the heat or something. But there's this
amazing phenomenon where they appear to orient. There's these elongated
I think they're called T cells anyway, some elongated type
of cells. He puts them on two sides of a
glass barrier and they orient perpendicular to each other across
the barrier. And he did a bunch of controls to
try and rule out other signals they might have been using,
and concluded it was electromagnet an electromagnetic signal, and he
has arguments to support that. The I might get the
term wrong here, but I think it's the centurial that
has the T shaped arrangement. Okay, microtubules, he argues, that's
exactly how you would want to arrange your antennas to
be able to tell what directions a light signal are
coming from. Oh that's fast, so it could be the eye.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're always they're always drawn at a right angle
to one another. The two show up. Yeah, and I've
always wondered about that. I'm like, what what's the They're
not connected, they're just sort of floating at a right angle.
What is the mechanism? Wow? That is fascinating.
Speaker 2: So that might have a use. Yeah, So all that
is to say, microtubules seem to be in the right
place and do the right kind of thing that I'm
asked that I would want for my hypothot hypothetical quantum
process in the brain to underline underlay consciousness. And now
in neurons, they you know, they have specialized proteins that
go with them that aren't in other cells. They show
up in different arrangements than in other cells. They tend
to be associated with synapses where the different neurons talk
to each other, communicate with each other. But as you said,
there's a space there and the actual signals are the
release of chemicals that diffuse across and trigger an electrical
response from the target neuron. Now another requirement, I said,
if we're I'm developing this, I made a theoretical argument
why I think there has to be something quantum in
my head to account for my holistic experiences. And I'm
focusing on the microtubules. There's a bunch of other reasons
they are prime suspects. Maybe I can get to those
as we go, But if that's going to be true,
those microtubules need a way to talk to the electrical
signals on the neural membranes. We can't just say, oh,
the neuroscientists have been completely off track the whole time,
and our mind has nothing to do with those neurons.
It's the microtubules inside. Can't say that because the way
I know what's going on outside my head is through
the electrical signals on the membranes of neurons, and the
way I move my hands and my mouth and make
words is through action potentials sent to my muscles. So
the action potentials being the electrical signals on the membranes
of the neurons. So if this microtubule hypothesis is going
to be viable, those microtubules need a way to interact
with the membrane potential on the one hand, to find
out what's going on outside, what should what's what am
I seeing? And on the other hand, to help guide
my behavior by firing action potentials that activate certain muscles
to speak or with my hands. So, and we do
have evidence that that is the case. That is uh,
there's been recordings of electromagnetic resonances of the microtubules. So
the microtubules are made out of a bunch of identical subunits,
protein subunits which each have an electric dipole, and so
they can wiggle in an electromagnetic field. And to get
back to the issue of how they could become entangled
across different neurons or even within one microtubule, it's through
the electromagnetic field, you know, like like two magnets talk
to each other without touching. Electric dipoles do that too.
You could say it's by exchanging photons or changing the
photon field, or just we can call it the electromagnetic field.
And so various models have shown that these dipoles in
the microtubules can get into collective vibrations where all those
little electric dipoles become coordinated. And that's also felt in
the photon field inside and around the microtubule. And so
that's how they could interact across that little gap between neurons.
It's still sounds implausible again, but I was leading up
to saying, we have experimental evidence that this happens on
your bond Bandio Padier and his colleagues have recorded these
resonances in the microtubules and shown moreover that they do
affect the spiking activity on the membrane, and not only
that they span multiple neurons. So so far it's only
in a dish that he's shown that multiple neurons in
a dish with their microtubules, But that shows that it
can happen that the microtubule resonance, collective oscillatory state of
the microtubules and different neurons can condense they say, into
a unified quantum or entangled quantum state.
Speaker 1: Well, that's fascinating. How is that measured? I mean, you
don't necessarily need to give me the two detail of
an answer, but is this like is this can't be
BEEG or anything that be electrical? How do you measure
something like that.
Speaker 2: You mentioned EG. He's got a way of trying to
measure these same resonances outside the head and people that
he calls DDG for because unlike EEG, it goes over
twelve orders of magnitude and frequency to very high frequencies.
But in the neurons, he's started with these probes, physical
probes that he would touched two spots on an actual
microtubual inside of neuron and was measuring resonances in the
electrical conductivity. I think was one of the first ways
he did it found resonances, But then he graduated to
a non touch, wireless way of stimulating, so just it's
still electromagnetic stimulating frequencies and seeing resonances in things he
could measure on the microtubules, and then he combined that
with more traditional kinds of measurements of the spiking or
electrical activity on the membrane of the neurons to show
that they were coupling and that resonances or bursts of activity,
bursts of oscillatory activity in the microtubules was preceding neural
spikes on the membrane. Wow, hearing to drive them, but yeah,
he's tried to develop this to something that can be
done non invasively on people, and so they've got some
preliminary results there there. The challenge is to relate what
you're seeing outside to the mechanisms inside and give evidence
that it's really microtubules that are generating the signal. But
that's farther along than most people know in terms of
evidence that microtubules are participating in the electrical activity on
the membranes of neurons. That the most neuroscientists focus on.
That same researcher, Bondiopadia says, trying to understand the brain.
By studying only the membranes of neurons is like trying
to understand an animal by only studying its skin.
Speaker 1: Reah, wow.
Speaker 2: We you know, in defense of traditional neuroscience, we sort
of had a reason that we thought we could ignore
what was going on inside the cell, which is that
in the last century, the pioneers showed that they could
make action potentials in a membrane of a neuron, the
axon of a neuron that had been hollowed out and
replaced with artificial internal fluids. So we can make action
potentials without the microtubules. And so we thought, oh, well,
they're not doing anything, but that seems to have been premature.
Speaker 1: Yes, in their defense, of course, you know, once you
first see a neuron and see what it does, I
I too would think, well this is this is it?
You know, and it is and it's relevant? Y yeah, yeah,
well okay, well that's that's fat.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I can't help but escape sort of like the philosophical uh,
synergy with with maybe just like the subjective experience of
being a conscious agent, or or maybe even some deeper
ideas about like clearly, the brain in one sense is
a classical computer, like it like we have, we have synapses,
we have neurons or almost like little binary switches, you
know that that oscillate a different frequency. So so it
is and clearly a lot of things can be explained
with with simple neural schematics or complex neural schematics. But
then there just is the experience of like, yeah, I'm speaking,
but i'm speaking, and yes I'm listening to you, but
I'm witnessing it. I'm process I'm somehow witnessing my processing,
my association of words meanings with memories. It just it
just feels very you feel very embodied. So you kind
of are left with this sense that there is like
clearly a classical machine that does all of the things
the brain does, but there's almost like something on top
of that, like another layer, or I guess in this case,
within that, another layer that sort of explains subjective experience
and neurons alone just can't can't do that. You much
more eloquently described it as this wholeism idea. So I'll
stop interrupting you, but it just it just feels intuitive
that there would be more to the story than just synapsis.
Speaker 2: Right, But I want to be clear that the mic
tubules are just another physical thing. They are, so there
is an issue there that I'm prepared to address. I
want to note that in terms of we are talking
mostly at a concept level, and so in terms of
making contact with the empirical evidence, I hope we touch
on anesthesia, which is how I really got into the discussion.
But as far as that, there seems to be something
more than neurons. And now I'm saying, in a sense,
there's something more than just physical microtubules. You know, we're
getting to what it's known as the hard problem. That is,
you've got the physical description, nowhere does it make reference
to this conscious thing that goes along with it in
our case, and that includes quantum physics. So I sort
of already alluded to how I see the solution to this,
but to outline it, the hard problem is just a
new way of formulating the same mind body problem that
people have been arguing about for thousands of years by
David Chalmers. And it's the idea that I just said
that once you've got the entire physical description of some
physical system like a brain, it does not entail or
imply this consciousness that we observe comes along with our brain.
So that's that is called the hard problem with capital
HP because it seems to be insoluble from a physicalist
point of view. And I think it really is insoluble
from a physicalist point of view. And again, what I
mean now about physicalist is not just that you think
the brain is relevant to understanding consciousness, but that all
you need to know is the physical brain to account
for consciousness. I think that's wrong.
Speaker 1: It's so insoluble that I often hear neuroscientists say that
maybe there is no such thing, maybe there is no
heart problem, which is just to me.
Speaker 2: That's what the illusion is to do. And and and
it's possible to be confused like that, because I think
that's first of all, I think that's a confusion. Unfortunately,
they're very often very confident about that intuition. But I
think and they'll they'll call what I'm they'll call my
what I am claiming as an insight. They'll try to
deride it as an intuition that is wrong, But I
think it's an actual insight. And and the way you
can be confused about it is by not being clear
what a physical property is. And so you can imagine, well,
maybe this conscious thing is just another physical property, or
or it's some combination of the ones we've already got.
But if you get clear in your head that what
a physical property is is something that participates in determining
movement in space, then you can reflect and realize that
to have a concept of what this consciousness is, you
never need to make reference to make to movement in space.
It's not involved in the concept of consciousness. And so
those really are conceptually distinct categories. I hate to say
category error because this is strapped and it just sounds
like you're giving a rule. You just broke a rule,
the category rule. But no, it's I think it's an
actual mist confusion. So yes, I think the hard problem
is real. On the other hand, I think we have
a solution, a solution you could call panpsychism or dual
aspect monism, and that is just how I said it earlier.
We just have to add a new property to our
scientific theory. We've done it before when we added electric
charge with then we added spin. We've got all these
weak isospins and new fangled physical properties in our in
our quantum theory, but they are all still recognizably physical
properties because ultimately they're in the theory because they help
decide where in space things are going to turn up
when we measure them in our physical experiments. So I'm
saying adding a new fundamental property is not cheating. We've
done it before. It seems almost trivial, but we've done
it before, so it's a legal way of making progress. Admittedly,
we have never added a new non physical property, but
I'm saying we have to do that to account for consciousness.
Now this has been considered before, and when it's called panpsychism,
it goes under these different names panpsychism or dual aspect monism,
which I'm treating as synonymous when people have thought of
that before. The immediate objection, and aside from the there's
the cartoon objection, just like with the quantum hypothesis. The
cartoon objection is two mysteries and solve each other. The
way to make fun of a pant psychist is, oh,
so you think rocks are conscious, but a serious panpsychist
or dual as most does not think that. But if
you're introducing a new fundamental mental property into physics and
saying something like, yeah, even electrons have some mental property
to them, then the the immediate problem is known as
the combination problem, what decides which combination of things will
be experienced? And for example, in a brain, why isn't
my experience just a bunch of individual electron experiences instead
of this one big experience I have? And William James,
the psychology American psychologist, had already articulated that binding problem
or combination problem beautifully before quantum physics in his Principles
of Psychology book, and he's got some nice examples of
you know, if you have ten men next to each other,
each thinking one word very intently, they don't add up
to a sentence. It's the same for our neurons. As
you said, they're not even touching. You could push the
men up against each other and at least they would
be touching, but neurons aren't even touching. But so the
answer I think to that binding or combination problem that
is a problem for panpsychism is entanglement. The quantum entanglement
is the objective is the structure of the objectively holistic
aspect of that physical system, So that can be what
maps on. So that is what gives us something in
the physical theory that could map on to these experiences
we have. Every physical thing has both its physical properties
and also a mental property. That that's what the name
dual aspect monism refers to. There's just one kind of
stuff in the universe, but it has physical properties and
mental properties, and the fact that they are both properties
of one thing is what explains why they match. Why
when I'm thinking a certain thing, my neurons are doing
something that corresponds. So that's the panpsychic's point of view.
If you think about it for a while, it might
seem to have the same problem with regard to evolutions
as I said the classical models had. That is in
the picture. I haven't said it explicitly, but in this
picture the mental property does not actually directly participate in
changing how things move. Right, So it appears like it's
just going to be just as epi phenomenal, just as ineffectual,
impotent as the classical mind that we tacked on and said,
whenever a brain's in this state, it has a mind.
It seems like we're going to have the same problem
with the quantum theory. I'm still just making a postulate
that whenever you have a particular physical state, it comes
with this mental state. The property that goes along with it,
mental experience that goes along with it. My improvement is
that I have a way to account for the wholism
of that mental state. But I'm not claiming that there's
a causal interaction between the mental properties and the physical properties.
So that's kind of the argument between Spinoza and Descartes.
Descartes imagining the soul, the consciousness pushing on the pineal
body in the middle of the brain. That kind of
theory is known as interactionist dualism, where you imagine the
consciousness can actually change how things move in space. Under
my conception, that would make that new physics not mind,
because if it pushes on things in space, it's just
another kind of physical property. Right in this definition or
conception where Spinosa is a dual aspect monus and he
has some lovely paragraphs where he's making fun of Descartes
and with great respect, but you know, how do you
imagine that this little bit of soul is going to
push on this little bit of matter? And so his
answer is it's this dual aspect kind of solution. But
it seems to leave you. It might feel like we're
just along for the ride and not actually participating in
all these debt decisions and so on, and that the
consciousness is irrelevant. There's at least two ways to respond
to that, but I think I'll start with coming at
it from the evolutionary perspective. That one way of formulating
this problem that it seems like consciousness doesn't do anything is,
as I said earlier, we can't account for how it
could have evolved to apparently be giving good advice about
taking my hand out of the fire if it never
actually helped me take my hand out of the fire.
The way we can now under the quantum model, account
for the evolution of you know that fire hurts is
that the I'm claiming this objective holism. I haven't said
this explicitly yet, but this objective holism that I was
using to account for, and this might bring us back
to your question about Richard Dawkins. But the objective holism
that I say is in entangled quantum state that I
used so far to account for the experienced holism of
my each moment of consciousness, but I also want I'm
going to now use it to account for objective advantages,
advantages of being a conscious physical system and they come
from advantages like what a quantum computer has over a
classical computer, and those are usually discussed in terms of
speed advantages, and that is definitely one way. But there's
a tendency to think that quantum computation is overhyped because
we only know of a couple good quantum algorithms and
they are mostly useful for robbing banks and breaking codes
and stuff. So it seems like maybe these quantum computers
are kind of theoretically interesting but maybe not practically useful.
But there's another advantage they can have, which is for memory.
I'll just say this briefly that there's a quantum algorithm
that marries a well known quantum search algorithm called Grover's
algorithm with the neural network architecture, and by doing that,
it makes like a quantum neural network that has exponentially
more memory capacity than the equivalent classical neural network, which
is how we model our own That's interesting. So you
started also with asking about, you know, how would you
convince someone who's sort of scientifically literated or whatever, But
this sounds like out of left field and crazy. Unfortunately,
it is sort of a detailed argument. I mean, if
they don't believe the binding problem argument, and there's a
tendency not to because it's just armchair theorizing or whatever.
And then we can go to the experimental evidence, which
we've talked about a bit of it, but there's also
from the behavioral point of view, I'm claiming this quantum
thing in there evolved because it gave us an advantage,
and so I should be able to or ultimately we
should be able to say what kind of advantages it
would give and maybe even model how it gives those advantages.
And so so, just to summarize what I think, those
advantages are advantages of speed, being able to integrate a
lot of information very quickly, which we do every two
hundred milliseconds. We're making a new inference about what's going
on and what to do about it consciously. And so
there's a detailed argument to be made, which I've made
in a couple of papers, that our classical neural models
are too slow to be able to do the fancy
things we know our brain is doing. But that's something
that you know, it's not a slam dunk, it's just
a it doesn't look like a lot so far can't
do it. Maybe we're going to make improvements. So that's
a detailed argument. It's not something you're going to be
able to convince someone in the hallway. Probably.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm realizing I sort of lied to you
because I said that that was my aim. But the
truth is that I just really want to satisfy all
my curiosities and questions.
Speaker 2: Time. You can do that, we can do that.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't want to abuse your time. Are
you doing okay on time?
Speaker 2: I'm okay, I'm flexible.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up memory because if you'll let
me just kind of spin my wheel here for a minute.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a tendency to say like this
is completely unrelated to the type of stuff I study.
But it dawns on me that one of the proteins
I spend the most time reading about is a microtubul
associated protein. Wow. Yeah right, yes, I If you had
a chance to read that, I hope you thought it
was interesting.
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 1: And so so it's like people, I often find we
struggle from like a poor definition of consciousness in the
general public. You know, people people might almost describe it
as conscience, like morality. Some people will describe it as
is memory other things. And I've always liked the idea
of like, oh, it's just this first person perspective, subjective experience,
inner world, outer world idea. That makes sense to me.
But I realized that's not quite right, because you know,
if I were to jump out of a plane. Maybe
this is a thought, you know, a metaphor you've heard before.
But if I were to jump out of a plane,
if I had absolutely no capability of making memory, even
from one millisecond to the next, would I know I'm falling?
And you'd say, well, of course you would, because the
wind is rushing past you. But there's a temporal aspect
to that, right, you need to be able to feel
the air. So memory is simply archived subjective experience. That's
what memory is. It's consciousness archived through time. So if
this does something for this mystery of memory, I would
say that is a huge evolutionary advantage. The ability to
archive subjective experiences is right.
Speaker 2: And what's special about the subjective experience is that you're archiving,
is that they are holistic representations, interpretations as opposed to
just a bunch of raw data. Right. Let's see, Oh,
so you made the connection to TAO.
Speaker 1: I mean, sorry, I just I dispewed some thoughts at you.
Speaker 2: That's great, No, I mean, yes, Alzheimer's is a memory disease.
We can't figure it out, but it's the darn microta.
I don't know, I mean, I don't have proof of that,
but you might want to follow a hammer off because
they've been trying a bunch of clinical stuff with ultrasound
to try and vibrate the microtubules essentially into a healthier state.
And uh, and I'm not totally up to date on
that stuff, but it seems like they're having some success
with that. And absolutely there there's a whole quantum angle
on memory as well. And I think the fact that,
I mean, we know storing memories involves microtubule associated proteins
like MAP two. We know this memory disease involves TAO,
which is a microso tubule associated protein. So there's a
bunch of clues like that that.
Speaker 1: It's huge, like signals, just blinking arrows pointing out the
microt Yeah, yeah, you just can't escape at mean schizophrenia. Also,
all these diseases are in some sense related to microtubule dysfunction.
Speaker 2: Is amazing but also anesthesia. We should mention that because
I think that is a big thing, that that points
to microtubules in addition to the circumstantial evidence that I
that I sketched earlier so amazingly, the medically miraculous gases
chemicals that we use to put ourselves asleep without killing
ourselves surgery. They work on everybody, I mean, including single
cells and plants. They arrest or slow movement, and they
seem to impair sensory responsiveness.
Speaker 1: So you know, I was a judge the gavel right there.
All right, that's it, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, right, So you know, we talk about anesthesian people,
and unconsciousness is one of the end points that you
talk about. You can also talk about amnesia and analgesia,
not feeling pain and stuff. But when you want to
compare the effects to things that where we don't know
if they're conscious or not, you can sort of generalize
the definition that says unconscious and immobile. For us, unconscious
and immobile is features of anesthesia in things where we
don't know if they're conscious or not, we can say
immobile and unresponsive to things they would normally be responsive to.
And we can investigate from there, and so amazingly, even
though we've been using this again, as I say, as
really a medical miracle, we don't fully understand how it works,
how they work, this class of chemicals. They're chemically diverse,
which sort of suggests that they're not working the way
many drugs do by binding lock and key with some
very specific protein shape into some very specific protein receptor.
Instead you get even single elements like xenon can act
as an anesthetic even though it's just one atom without
any without molecular structure. So it's working on everybody and
it's this chemically diverse molecules that do it. What does
everybody have. Everybody's got microtubules, now, in fairness, everybody also
has ion channels and mitochondria and a bunch of other
things that are affected by these anesthetics. Focusing on the
so called volatile anesthetics, and there are other kinds. So
neurologists neuroscientists tend to focus on ion channels because that's
what is involved in making the spikes. So ion channels
are little holes in the neural membrane where elect electrically
charged particles can go in and out of the cell,
which is what changes the voltage of the cell and
makes it an electrical signal. So medically or neurologically, people
tend to focus on the ion channels and how and
receptors in the membrane and how anesthetics affect those. But
another hypothetical molecular target of these volatile anesthetics is microtubules.
Because the hypothesis is that consciousness is a property of
this vibrational state of the microtubules, and so if you
have some particular kind of molecule that can dampen those vibrations,
that would be predicted to make you unconscious. Now, I
think I want to clarify that the hypothesis that microtubules
are the substrate does not require that all or even
any anesthetics work by directly targeting that microtubule state. But
it turns out that is so that is to protect
myself in a sense, you know, if there are some
anesthetics that their primary effect might be on gabba receptors,
the inhibitory receptors and kind of just turn down activity overall.
That is a way to make yourself unconscious. Under this hypothesis.
The reason you went unconscious when you did that is
that the microtubules were indirectly caused to go into a
state that's not the conscious state. Sure, but it seems
to have turned out that some of these molecules actually
are operating directly on microtubules. There's theoretical modeling work of
binding of a bunch of different anesthetic molecules to tubulin,
and that that study predicts the effectiveness of these molecules
as anesthetics according to how well or stably they bind
and dampen particular resonances in the microtubules. I don't think
there's any other candidate target that can say something like
that that it can count for the different potencies of
different anesthetics in terms of their binding to one of
the targets the Yeah, so that's related to the Meyer
Overton relation that you mentioned earlier, where a bunch of
different anesthetics their potency or their their strength of act
as anesthetics is predicted by how well they dissolve into
olive oil or some other lipophilic substance.
Speaker 1: I didn't believe that the first time I heard it
was that can't be the way it's done.
Speaker 2: So because of that, the first focus was on the membrane.
Maybe consciousness is in the membrane, and because it's oily,
you kind of lipid membrane, that seems to be ruled out.
And then the focus turned to hydrophobic pockets inside proteins.
And these anesthetic chemicals bind promiscuously to many different proteins,
including tubulin, the protein that makes up microtubules, but also
including a bunch of ion channels and receptors, and so
the yeah, the sort of the mainstream view is it's
just a combination of effects on different receptors and ion
channels that adds up to the anesthetic effect instead of
one primary effect on one target, like the microtubules.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if only, if only there is someone who could
come along and like systematically test this by administering some
drug that binds to microtubules and then sen.
Speaker 2: What I tried to do. Yes, Okay, So we've had
these drugs for a long time because they are anti
cancer drugs. They're chemotherapy drugs, drugs that bind the microtubules
and either stabilize them or destabilize them. Destabilized would mean
making them tend to fall apart into their subunits in
the extreme case. And yeah, they're they're used against cancer
because in my superficial understanding cancer is runaway cell division,
and the microtubules are a major part of that cell division.
So you mess with the microtubules to try to mess
with the cells.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 2: Okay, So these are well known drugs, but until somewhat recently,
most of them did not penetrate well into the brain.
But now more recently they developed some that go into
the brain, and so they can try to treat brain
cancers and tumors with those. But we took advantage of
those to try to test the hypothesis that microtubules are
one of or maybe the main functional target of isofluorane,
one of these gases anesthetic gases. We tested the involvement
of microtubules by, as you say, giving this drug that
binds to microtubules and just noting that it took rats
and mice longer to fall unconscious if they had this
microtubule binding drug EPO B in them.
Speaker 1: And does EPO be bind to a lot of other
targets or is it pretty specific to.
Speaker 2: My it can have nonspecific effects, But my understanding is
that they are I might be missing something, but I
think they're all through Its effects on microtubules. It's known
as a microtubule binding drug.
Speaker 1: Well, because it just seems like such an open and
shut way of doing it. That's why I was trying
to think, what would the criticisms be of that of
this study, And it seems like maybe that could be
an angle someone might take. But maybe I should ask you,
I mean, what has there been criticism of this idea?
It seems so clear to me.
Speaker 2: So well, Okay, first of all, we do have evidence
of involvement of other targets in isofluoranine and other anesthetics,
so I need to reconcile. Yes, my evidence seems to
say microtubules are one of the targets, but maybe they're
just one of the targets, maybe not the main one
even but it was a pretty strong effect, so they
seem to be one of the main ones. So but
I want to start off by saying my evidence does
not pertain to the quantum part. It is just implicating
microtubules in as possibly a substrate for consciousness, or at
least as part of the way that anesthetics make you unconscious.
But that evidence by itself does not implicate a quantum
solution or model. Okay, but if we're considering the quantum model,
we're comparing, so we're comparing how the quantum model would
explain that messing with microtubules tends to make you unconscious,
versus how a classical model might explain why messing with
microtubules could make you unconscious. And I'm not saying a
classical model can't do that. It can, you know, classically
the way people understand and everyone agrees with this me
and quantum people included, agrees that you go unconscious when
the activity in the different parts of your brain has
become functionally disconnected, so that the activity in different areas
is more statistically independent. However, you make that happen. When
you make it happen, you're going to be unconscious, right,
And so that's the discussion at sort of the higher level.
But then there's a question at the molecular level, what
are specific molecular mechanisms involved in causing that disconnection? And
the disconnection is related to lower activity, I mean just
lowering or raising activity is too simplistic of an idea
to say you're just unconscious when it's low activity and
conscious when it's high activity. Because when you're in deep
sleep there are moments when you have very high activity. Sure,
so it's a little more complicated than that, but this
disconnection is a way to think about it. When the
activity is kind of lowered such that it becomes disconnected. Okay,
So so yeah, my microtubual evidence is not going to
be sufficient to decide between the quantum and classical explanations,
but we can review what evidence we have so far
under a classical model. The way we would the natural
way to think that messing with microtubules might mess with
consciousness is that microtubules, one of their functions and neurons
is to act as train tracks for transport of, among
other things, the neurotransmitters that get released at synapses. So
we could imagine if you disrupt, if you mess up
the microtubule enough that the motor proteins are not able
to run up and down and bring synaptic vesicle contents
to the synapses, that would eventually reduce successful synaptic transmission,
and plausibly, that would reduce over all activity and contribute
to unconsciousness. So it turns out isofluorane does interfere with
synaptic transmission. However, the studies I found so far about
how it does so are through mechanisms that are not microtubules.
Protein either syntax in A is one of the targets
implicated in one study, and that's a protein that's involved
in the release at at synapses release of umer transmitter,
and another paper implicated mitochondria, So so far no direct
evidence that microtubules are involved. On the other hand, both
mitochondria and synapses are an intimate communication with microtubules, so
it's still it's I don't consider it ruled out that
such a classical mechanism could be part of the explanation.
Speaker 1: And it'd be tough to tease a part anyway, since
you know, in this theory the microtubules are so related
to all of these other things. You know, they're so
related to synaptia.
Speaker 2: They're usually considered negligible on fast time scales, and that
would be part of how we would try to to
determine if this was a viable explanation, is would it
be fast enough to account for how fast we fall asleep?
And that's answerable, it's not super easy, but you could
measure how quickly changes in synaptic transmission happening and whether
that's enough to account for how much the neurons slow down,
so to speak.
Speaker 1: And this criticism would sort of be undermined a bit
by the fact that anesthetics seem to do things to
organisms that don't have synapses, correct.
Speaker 2: I think, so if you think it's all about synaptic transmission,
you need to so it's the way you can make
it consistent is just by adhering to the idea that
it's a different cluster of targets in every species or
you know, every animal, or a single cell. So in
other words, you it would then from my point of view,
it's a remarkable coincidence that in different species the effectiveness
is not that different. Even though different animals and then
different kingdoms have very different sets of machinery, we're getting
similar effects across very diverse organisms. Suggest some conserved mechanism
to me. But the explanation from the more orthodox point
of view would just be, yeah, they happen to hit
a different cluster of targets in all these different organisms,
but the net effect is to slow you down in
all of them. But I don't think that many people
who are thinking about anesthesia in mammals are necessarily thinking
about how it works in a paramesium.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, of course, wow.
Speaker 2: Similar things. Yeah, for people who emphasize gabba receptors. A
paramesium it turns out does have gabba receptors, which is
amazing in itself because because there's no because as you say,
they don't have synapses, but they use it to talk
to themselves in a certain sense. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not sure I really see the reluctance
to embrace this idea that that microtubules might be related
to consciousness beyond mirror, you know, vesicular trafficking or something.
It seems I.
Speaker 2: Think there's a sense that that what that the neurons
as we understand them so far, are enough. That's what
I meant when I you know, you said there's lots
of things we can explain with these classical models. It's true.
There's all kinds of cool memory phenomena, perceptual phenomena. You
can explain an outline, and I'm I'm claiming it's not
till you get to the details that you'll see that
the classical model can't perform as well as an animal.
I'm predicting and that's true in certain cases that the
models are are still falling short even though they can
do things that look like memory and decision making, and
they are memory decision making, but I don't think they
account for the our speed and flexibility.
Speaker 1: I have I have. I was talking about this with
someone recently, and this idea came up, and they brought
up they brought up as kind of like a foil
to this idea that you know, hey, we kind of
know that it must be related to synaptic transmission and
functional connectivity and things, because you know, you could you could.
They mentioned anesthesia. You know, you could give someone anesthesia
and you get this sort of disintegration of the default
mode network. But also there's other drugs that affect consciousness,
like psychedelics, and so we know those affect synaptic transmission.
I think I don't know, but certainly functional connectivity is uh.
I mean, I guess you probably couldn't do this study
in America. But is there any reason to believe that
maybe the microtubules might be involved in those situations too,
or is this just a functionally distinct thing. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm saying I mean, yes, yeah, I'm saying the microtubules
are involved anytime you're having a conscious experience, regardless of
what drugs you're on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it dawns on me. I generally don't even
like to talk about stuff like this because you know,
anytime you're talking about a new theory, you want to
avoid certain topics. But it does dawn on me that
like a drug like d M T is as it's
basically like trypta fan.
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to be able to sure give
you the exact distinction there, but yeah, there are a
bunch of topics. There's some topics that I tended to
avoid myself, but I'm happy. I'm not scared of any topic.
I'll tell you that if you want to ask me, well,
the religious or the parapsychological questions, I'm there for that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm not sure what my question is.
I just I wish someone would sort of maybe do
an experiment like yours with with things besides anesthesia. That'd
be interesting to me. But but that will happen, do
you think so?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean, yeah, so anesthesia is one avenue, but
I'm looking at others, not psychedelics. But there's other windows
or angles into trying to test these ideas empirically. There's
ways people have used MRI regular MRI machines to claim
evidence for entanglement in the living human brain. So that's
out there in the literature right now. I wish more
people were at least arguing about it. Yeah. So, yeah,
there's a bunch of other ways. There's some sort of
standard ways already in neuroscience that people try to study consciousness,
binocular rival neural correlates of consciouness, like binocular rivalry if
you've heard of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, being shown different things in different eyes, right right?
Speaker 2: And oh yeah, if you showed very different things in
the two eyes such that you're not able to fuse
them into a three D image, then instead of seeing
them just superimposed on each other, you tend to alternate.
And so that's a situation where the stimulus that your
eyes are getting is staying the same the whole time,
but your state of consciousness is changing. And so it's
sort of advantageous way to try and get at what
are the neural correlates of when you're seeing one thing
versus the other, even though that what's actually shining into
your eyes is not changed. That's interesting And I guess
I brought it up because I think there might be
a way to reveal quantum like statistics in the statistics
of those perceptual alternations. It's not totally deterministic, like you
don't just see one thing for one second and then
another the other thing for the one second. It has
a certain randomness in it, and I think there might
be a way to give evidence that it's quantum like,
if not quantum physical. Well, it's interesting anyway. That is
to say, yes, there are a bunch of other ways
to try and rule out or provide empirical evidence for
this idea. So I don't think it's as hopeless as
many people often.
Speaker 1: I have to say. I mean your ideas and ideas
from people, you know, unrelated topics. It is sort of
like an optic to me. It's kind of optimistic that
we might be able to make some progress in this
area because I'm just not I don't know, I'm not
you know, global workspace theory and I you know, although
they might be related to some of the things you're
talking about, I'm not really left with like a sense
of understanding like it. I'm always like, wait, what, I'm
not sure I quite can reconcile this. But sort of
this iterative empirical thing that you and others are doing
to me. Just it makes a lot of sense. Now,
of course, we still have this kind of chasm between
resonance tubulent subunits and subjective experience. You know, there's still
hard to make sense of that. Do you have thoughts
on that? I mean, there's someone like Bernardo cast Strip
would say, well, this is just what it looks like
from the outside, this is just what subjective experience looks
like from the outside. What are you How do you
speculate on these ideas?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again you're expressing what we could call the
heart called the heart problem, and Bernardo Castrup's point of
view is is called idealism. So so far we talked
about physicalism, where you say both mind and matter arise
from physical stuff, and then I said, I would like
to change that to panpsychism or dual aspect monism, where
you admit there is a physical world with physical properties,
but it also has mental properties. And then on the
other side of the spectrum is idealism, where you say, no,
there's only mental and what appears to be physical is
just some form of mental properties. And I think it
has a similar hard problem as physicalism that spinos are
basically articulated or yeah said, Essentially, it goes both ways.
You can't derive mind from matter that like the physicalist
wants to do. But you also can't derive the laws
of physics just by making postulates about agents and consciousness,
which is what I think people like Donald Hoffman and
castrophists say they're trying to do. So they had like
a reverse hard problem of their own, and so I
think the middle ground there is the you know, to me,
when you realize that materialism is not going to be
sufficient to account for consciousness, going all the way over
to idealism is throwing out the baby with the bath
wall being physical properties. I think it's still, you know,
we don't have to toss out all of these centuries
of progress we've made in physics just because we haven't
figured out mind yet. We can keep that and ask
how mind fits into that picture. And so I do
think we have a solution, a conceptual solution to this
hard problem that has a reputation for being insoluble. And
you're you're even though I kind of expressed the solution earlier,
you're still saying it seems insoluble. I'm saying The answer
to makes the way the way you expresses is how
are we going to make sense of it? I think
the way to make sense of it is to imagine
the reality has both physical and mental properties, and so
there's a there's a psychophysical law that says how they
relate to each other. I didn't express it that way earlier,
but I'm saying that the psyche, the psychophysical law or
bridging principle is unity. You need the unity. You need
unity to have a complex conscious experience. You have to
unify that and experience. What are the relationships among all
these things I'm registering This color is on the left
and that color is on the right, and et cetera.
That's the mental unity. But you need the physical unity
in order to have advantages, evolutionary advantages, computational behavioral advantages.
And so the bridging principle between the mind and the
matter is that unity. And if you allow yourself to
postulate that mental property, that is a solution to this
mind matter problem, and the rest is details about how
it maps onto the physical.
Speaker 1: I think that's fantastic. I mean, what you're buting up
against is just the limits of my cognitive capacity. No,
that makes perfect sense to me. Well, we're kind of
nearing the end of my ability to ask interesting questions,
but I will ask. That won't stop me from asking
a couple more, and then I'll let you go. And
this is not your theory, obviously, that I'm going to
ask you about, so feel free to pass. But you know,
I've heard folks like Roger Penrose and maybe hammer Off.
I said this too. I don't know describing, you know,
this phenomenon of consciousness as the collapse of the wave function.
And I've always struggled with that because I guess I
don't know exactly what that means, because I always think
of the collapse of the wave function as occurring when
you take a measurement. But of course I'm not. Maybe
I am, but I'm not taking measurements of my microtubules
thousands of times per second or whatever it would take
to provide this subjective experience. So do you know what
he means? Or maybe you can help me understand the
idea better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's two things I want to say
about that. I want to clarify what they mean by
objective reduction as an answer to the measurement problem. And
then I think I will differ in the way I
word it a little bit to answer your question. So
I sketched what quantum physics was earlier and said it
has a shrouding or equation that says how probabilities change
over time, and then when a measurement happens, you look
at those probabilities to see which are the likely outcomes.
So there's different points of view about what a measurement
actually is since the textbook doesn't tell us. And the
point of view of Penrose that I agree with is
that measurement is any time the way is an objective process.
When the wave function collapsing is something that just happens
in physical systems before we talk about observers or agents
or measurements by people experimenters, collapse of the wave function
is an objective process. So that's what the term objective
reduction refers to. There, and he's got his own theory
about how it happens. There are other people with other theories,
and so we can do experiments to try and see
who's right, but that they are different from people like
many worlds theorists or people who think the wave function
collapse doesn't ever really happen. I'm rejecting those kinds of
models for objective collapse or objective reduction models, and so
purely in the physics, there's some kind of threshold where
the electron that's in a superposition of being in two
places decides where it's going to actually be at a
certain moment, and that would be what would correspond to
what has been called the measurement. So far, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe if two quantum systems are forced to interact,
and maybe they bump into each other, or they interact
with each other in some way, they might collapse by
nature of that interaction or something not due to.
Speaker 2: There are there are theories like that where something about
the interaction might trigger the collapse or even just amount
to the collapse. But Penrose's theory is not just about interactions. Yeah,
it's some it's more intrinsic that even if this is
the only thing in the universe, eventually it's going to
decide where it is or what stated is and out
of the possibilities in the superposition. And so it's a
dynamical mechanism. We don't need to go into the details.
But so that's an answer to the measurement problem. Okay.
A solution to the measurement problem is to say collapse
is a real physical process, and you give some form
for how it works, which he did, and there are
other candidates that we can try to test. Well.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't expect the answer to a question like this
to be simple, So that's totally acceptable to me. That
sounds be what so simple? You know, I wouldn't expect
it to be, you know, easy for anyone to understand.
I mean, these are deep, deep.
Speaker 2: Questions, somewhat straightforward, but people resist believing that that really
happens in nat Yes, yes, yeah, So at this point,
you know, we haven't mentioned consciousness. It's just this physical
process how nature decides what it's going to do. So
when they say the collapse is the conscious moment, I
would prefer to say the collapse the conscious the conscious
experience is a property of the physical collapse. So the
physical collapse is a purely physical process. And Penrose will
say things like that himself, that is or is just
a physical theory. So that's a purely physical process. And
if that's all we had, we would still have the
hard problem. It's still a physical process. It does not
explain that consciousness is there. We still need to make
that as a new postulate, And in my view, the
consciousness I would not I prefer not to say the
consciousness is the collapse, because in my view, the consciousness
is a non physical property. It's not directly moving anything,
whereas the collapse is about where things end up being
in space, considered as a purely physical process. So the
way I would edit their claim that or a proposal
that each collapse KR is a moment of proto consciousness,
I would say it corresponds to or the proto consciousness
is a property of that.
Speaker 1: I find that much more easy to excite. I imagine
they probably would agree on that idea, but.
Speaker 2: I think I may differ. So Penrose is very careful
not to go past what he absolutely knows, but I
think I differ a little bit from the way Hamroff
describes it bit because I think he is still has
a kind of interactionist idea in his mind where the
pleasure of the experience causes the body to move towards
the pleasure and the pleasant state. And I think that's
colloquially illly true, But so the way I'm expressing it
raises a very a big problem. I'm saying, there really
is no mind body causal interaction. And so you reflect
on that for a second, you're saying and you think, wait,
so you're saying, when I decide to raise my arm,
when I mentally decided to raise my arm and then
goes up, it wasn't my mental decision that made that happen.
And so here's why colloquially you can still talk that
way and it will still make sense. You won't run
into contradiction because under this dual aspect picture, there's a
complete causal story. And Spinoza already says this in his
book in the seventeenth century. There's a complete causal story
that you can tell in terms of the physical properties.
That's the one we usually tell our causally story in
terms of But according to Spinoza, you should also be
able to do that in terms of the mental properties. Okay,
I can't do that, but I accept I by I
hypothesize that it's possible along with Spinoza, but that if
that's true, and it's plausible to me because we're hypothesizing
both sets of properties are just different expressions of the
same underlying reality. So it's like the identity theorists who says,
you know, consciousness is just what the brain looks like
from the inside or something. But we can't go all
the way with the identity theorist to say the mental
properties are actually identical to the mental properties. The physical
properties and the mental properties are distinct. We have to
recognize that, but we can understand the relationship between them
by seeing them as two aspects of the same thing.
And that's why if you only know, you know, I
know about my conscious experience. I don't know what my
microtubules are doing, and I know what my hand is doing.
So in this theory, my hand is moving this way
because of what the microtubules did. But the only way
I know about what they did is from the kind
just experience that goes along with it, that has to
go along with it. That's interesting, it's a bit slippery,
but I think it ultimately accounts for how our consciousness
could evolve without resorting to causal interactions between mental and
physical degrees of freedom, which I think ultimately are incoherent.
Even though we very naturally think that our mind is
what is telling our body what to do, and in
a certain sense, it's true, but not at this Fine.
Speaker 1: You've been very generous with your time, so I promise
this is my last question. But listening to you talk
about this, I can't help but think about I forget
when this would have been. It sounds like something that
would have been done in like the seventies, but I
have no idea the libits experiments, yes, for you will experiments. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And I forget the exact but it's something like, you know,
they see a a EEG spike or I forget what
it was before the conscious awareness of something, you know,
like hey tell me what time it is, or hey,
move your hand and they move your hand, move your hand, okay,
and they sort of attribute this to like some because
you're not aware of it. It sort of exists outside
of your free will or something like that. Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Okay, sorry, free will is even more slippery than
consciousness itself.
Speaker 1: But I just wonder, like the colleague or the scientist
you mentioned who's measuring microtubule resonance with a DDG, if
you were to team up with him and do like
a Libit style experiment, what do you think you would find?
Speaker 2: I think we'd find something similar to what Libbert already found.
So it's that you see a build up of so
the the subjects are instructed to move their finger whenever
they feel like it. So that's the approximation of free
will that we're doing for this experiment, whenever they feel
like it. And he's recording EEG, and when you average
over many trials, you see a build up of EEG
over the motor cortex in the half second or so
before the time the average time or the time when
the person moves their finger, and then to try to
estimate so someone else had already done those experiments, but
what Libbett did is had the subjects, yeah, look at
a fast moving clock face and try to say where
the clock hand was at the moment they had the
conscious urge to move their finger. And that's somewhat problematic,
but the had ways of trying to validate that estimate
of when you made the urge, and it seemed like
it was probably pretty good within about fifty milliseconds, pretty
good estimate of when the conscious urge awry arose. And
so the conscious urge arose about two hundred milliseconds before
you actually flex the finger, but that was about three
hundred milliseconds after you could see the build up of
unconscious neural activity. So people argue this both ways, but
you could say, so you can talk about free will
in a bunch of different ways. But if we're talking
about whether you consciously decide something, not whether it's determined
or not, but just whether it went through your consciousness
before you did it, then you could say, well, this
seems to show there's you don't have that kind of
that kind of free will because there was this neural
activity that was building up, seemed to be leading up
to you moving your finger, and it was well before
you knew that you were going to move your finger.
The way you Libit it, there's a new way of
thinking about those data that I'll bring up. But the
way Libit interpreted that was that it's still left open
a possibility or a limited kind of free will that
he called free won't, which is a veto power. So
his his model was that the brain unconsciously generates candidate
things that you might do, and then your conscious mind
can veto them if it doesn't want to. And and
he could relate I think he related that to like
that religions tend to make their commandments as prescriptions don't
do this, let them do this I shall not, instead
of do good I shall. I think you could argue
that both ways, but anyway libit argued for maybe free
won't or kind of uh veto power of conscious consciousness.
Speaker 1: Do you do you think you would see microtubule resonance
change before neural activity changed.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think. I think Bondio Padi has seen that,
ind okay, and so we might predict that. I don't
think it would necessarily be universal. There could be lots
of behaviors that are primarily governed by the classical computer
of the neurons that you're talking about. But I bet
you could devise a situation where you would see the
microtubule signal before the neural signal in a living human,
not just in a dish like he's already seen it.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I'm not sure what I would conclude from that,
because that would sort of imply that even the microtubules
become functionally active before you become consciously aware of it,
which is I don't know what that would mean. I
wouldn't know how to interpret that.
Speaker 2: I think it has to be that way. That is,
each moment of our conscious experience is the output. Yeah,
a little consciousness generating routine. It takes you know, you
get a bunch of sensory input that's ambiguous. We can
make exaggerated versions of this, like illusions where it can
look like it's a dimple or a how do I
want to say that. It can look like it's a
concave or a convex structure, or button or something. It
can look like it's a hole or a button. And
our visual field is generally ambiguous like that, So it
takes us a certain amount of time to take in
the signals and decide how we're going to see them consciously.
And you already saw that when you said earlier that
you can't perceive change without a little bit of memory
because change, perceiving change is comparing the position. If we're
talking about motion, it's comparing the position now to a
position at a different time. There's no getting around that.
So you got to integrate over a little bit of
time in order to generate a perception of motion. And
it looks like all of our perceptions take one hundred
or two hundred milliseconds to make that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, okay, man, Well, thank you so much for
putting up with my just my pleasureage podge of just
personal curiosities. So thank you for indulging me. You know,
stick around for just a brief moment after we hang up,
just so I can say say goodbye. But is there
anything you want to leave people with or if people
are interested in learning more? I mean, you're not selling
a book, so I can't give you an opportunity to
promote your book. Is there anything you'd like to mention?
Speaker 2: Well, well, I would encourage people to check out my journal,
my Neuroscience of Consciousness paper and papers about active inference.
We didn't get a chance to talk about that, but
those are freely available open access papers, one of them
talking about the binding problem microtubules, another one saying that
the Penrose hammer off theory is actually equivalent to the
dominant theory of cognition in cognitive neuroscience called predictive coding
or active inference or the free energy principle. I made
a case that that it does look like brains are
doing that, doing active inference, so to speak, But it
looks like classical neural models can't do those computations fast enough,
whereas orco R is mathematically equivalent to conscious active inference.
So it could be the implementation I think. I think
it is. And that's a way of seeing that what
our brains do is what quantum dynamics does, is at
each moment takes the physical situation and tries to optimize
in the sense of minimizing a physical quantity called the action.
So physics can be interpreted as an optimization process. And
I think orco R can be interpreted as evolution found
a way to map our personal problems onto that universal
optimization process.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so evolution orchestra evolved these structures that orchestrate the
microtrevils and the neurons orchestrate this wave function collapse process.
So it's not just deciding where an electron is going
to be, but it's deciding what's the most likely interpretation
of the sensory information. I just got.
Speaker 1: Wow, Well, that's fascinating. I look forward to reading that.
I haven't read that. I just I just listened to
three hours of a Neil Seth explain active inference to me.
So I'm almost almost ready for a paper like that.
I think I might need to do a little bit
more work, But uh, that that sound that sounds brilliant,
so well, thank you, thank you so much. I honestly
I could talk to you for eight hours. So maybe
you'll humor me someday.
Speaker 2: My favorite subject pretty much. So I'm happy to continue
to discussion if.
Speaker 1: You like, oh oh yeah, and today or another time
you're saying you got.
Speaker 2: A little more now, I am flexible this afternoon. But yeah,
if you think of other questions to send me, I'm
happy to continue.
Speaker 1: That sounds if.
Speaker 2: You have something else you want right now, I'm up
for it.
Speaker 1: I just I worry that I'm getting to the point
where every every question I have is just purely philosophical,
because it's it is just you're you're right. It's just
it is difficult for me to accept certain aspects of this.
And it's not even intentional, like there's I have no
reason to deny it. I have no like theological basis
for denying anything I'm hearing, but it just it's just
it's just so it's just so hard. I think you've
done a great job for posing the only solution I've
ever heard that makes any sense, but it is just
so hard for me to wrap my head around that
hard problem, which is like how do we get from
there to hear?
Speaker 2: So the short answer is we're not actually we have
to postulate it. In other words, Yeah, it's just it's
like it's sort of like charge. We we saw these
things that push the repel each other, and we say, okay,
we'll give it a name. We'll call it charge, and
try to figure out what is. Now we got this elaborate,
well tested, sophisticated theory of electromagnetism, but arguably we still
don't know what charge is, right, and at bottom, everything's
like that. We give things names and we try to
understand how they relate to each other as best we can.
But it's all just there's some amazing, awesome mystery.
Speaker 1: It really is, you know, and we're just doing our best.
We're like carving ruins and stone cup with these words
coming up for symbols of what these things are.
Speaker 2: It is a beautiful thing is that it does seem
to make sense. So that's like, that's like the religious
faith of science is that it can make sense. We
can make sense of this stuff. Yeah, and it didn't
have to be that way.
Speaker 1: And when a theory doesn't make sense, you know, I
hope people are willing to sort of let go of it,
which doesn't always seem to be the case. But yeah,
this certainly does make sense. I think your empirical work
is really gone a big way. I remember I read
a paper from Stuart Hammeroff saying that orc O R
was the only falsifiable theory of consciousness, and I read
it and I kind of had a hold on me.
I was like, yeah, this is kind of this is
kind of my issue that I have with all these
other theories. It's like, how would we know, how would
we test it? So the fact that you've proposed a
mechanism I think is fantastic.
Speaker 2: I maybe the other one that what I is different
from all the others in that it's fun, it's attempting
to be a fundamental theory.
Speaker 1: I don't see that as mutually exclusive from what you're saying,
is it they seem like they could be related in
a way or.
Speaker 2: No, they are related, but I think they're sort of
mutually exclusive. OK, so they're related. So what I admire
about it is first that Tononi is unambiguous about this
is a candidate fundamental theory as opposed to almost every
other theory. Just says like global workspace it's about the
conditions in a brain for consciousness. It says when you
broadcast to the front frontal cortex or this and that,
and you have or you have feedback loops and stuff
like that. And now they try to apply it to
other things and say, oh, well, if my robot has
feedback loops, then maybe it would be conscious. But really
it wasn't formulated as a fundament mental theory. What's a
fundamental A way to know if it's a fundamental theory
or not is can it point? Can you point at
an arbitrary physical system and that theory tells you whether
it's conscious or not. I tries to do that. Global
Workspace didn't try to do that until later. It's really
a metaph it's really a metaphor. Most of them are
just metaphors. I T is trying to be more than
a metaphor. So that's thing one in its favor. It's
bold and it's take grabbing the bull by the horns
instead of just dancing around.
Speaker 1: I don't find people have any like instinctual repulsion to
I T. Like, I'll talk to people who are pretty pretty,
you know, materialistic reductions, whatever you want to call it,
physical lists, and they're they're pretty open minded to that.
Why do you what do you think the difference is?
Why do you think that is they're not because they're
not invoking quantumness.
Speaker 2: That's a large part of it. So yeah, quantum Immediately
you're in company with Deepak Chopra and lots of people
who have gone too far. But yeah, and whenever, even
in classical neuroscience, when people start saying neuro correlates of
consciousness were synchronized oscillations, those are still classical. But that
was already making a lot of people nervous because it's
sounding like new Age waves, good vibrations and stuff. It
really makes people nervous. And the connections to Eastern philosophy
and so on. Sure, wait, so what were we on it?
So I was saying, I is admirable because it's trying
to be a fundamental theory and we need to start
thinking in terms of fundamental theories, not just metaphors metaphorical models.
The other thing I love about it, and what Julio
Tononi did is he made it mainstream to take the
unity of consciousness seriously. A primary act of it is
about the integration. The integration is referring to the unity
that I've been obsessing about this whole discussion. He's trying
to count for that unity with his definition of integrated information.
The information part is corresponds to how I said, each
moment has many features in it, lots of information in it,
and the integration is corresponding to the unity that I
was emphasizing. And so he's looking for some statistical measure
of that unity, and he approaches it in terms of
the whole being more than the some of its parts.
Unfortunately it doesn't. It gets very mathematically sophisticated without getting
in my opinion, more conceptually sophisticated than the whole is
more than the some of its parts in some sense,
and so other people have found other reasons not to
think that it is. The answer is not viable. But
from the point of view of this emphasis on the
unity of consciousness, it simply fails because it's a classical
measure of the unity ultimately just as reducible as every
other classical dynamical phenomenon. That's problem one, and I think
it's fatal. But another way of seeing it as a
fatal problem, or another way of seeing what I think
is a fatal problem without making reference to the unity
that I am claiming can't be real or objective in
a classical model is that it's a statistical model. It's
all about transition probabilities. It's all formulated in terms of
probability transition probabilities. So, given the state that this physical
system is in, what are the probabilities that it will
go to state x, y or z in the next moment.
Problem with that is it's not just a description of
what the thing is now, it's some kind of average
over many experiments of what it did next. So the
actual thing that you're saying corresponds to consciousness in the
IT model is like a statistical average, a probability that
you got by averaging over many events, idealized events that
never even happened. But anyway, it's not a physical property.
It's not a property of the thing right now, the
physical system, And so in that sense, it's not a
viable candidate for consciousness happening right now because you need
to refer to things that happened at other times, or
that might have happened that didn't happen. So that's two
ways of seeing that. I think, although it's aiming in
the same direction as me, to try to account for
Penrose and hammer Off, to try to account for the
unity of consciousness. I think it ultimately fails.
Speaker 1: But we do love our constructs and abstractions. So there
is something kind of appealing about repackaging existing ideas in
a sort of novel way.
Speaker 2: Well, well, that's that's all I'm doing. You know, I'm
not claiming my own new theory of consciousness. That's a
bit of a pet peeve. It seems like there's a
million you know, everyone has to have their own theory
of consciousness with its own acronym and its own metaphor,
like consciousness is a controlled hallucination or this or that,
or it's an illusion, is the worst one. But I'm
not doing that. I'm just saying Penrose and hammer Off
are right.
Speaker 1: Well as we as we end here, I will give you,
try to give you a little bit more credit than that.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there
is there is a way of asking and answering research
questions that is I think just like fundamentally different. You know,
there's not like a a ton of theory building and
it's like very simple, mechanistic research questions that have always
just been super appealing to me, so I appreciate that
that you and others like you have been doing that well.
Thank you so much, Mike. If folks have questions uh
for Mike, you can email me and I will I
will pass him on to him, And no promises, of course,
but I'll pass him on to him, and I hope
someday you'll uh decide you're a glutton for punishment and
decide to come back and tell us some some new
breakthrough you've made.
Speaker 2: Thank you all right, thanks for your interesting