Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
What did you guys think about that last episode? Huh?
Not bad? Not bad. I hope you're proud of your
guy here. I feel like I'm at a fork in
the road, you know, like I could we could do
shows like that all the time. You know, we have
free will maybe topic for another show. But you know,
there's there's a million geniuses out there now. Not all
of them are great at speaking. I like to believe
I'm probably one of them that would imply that I'm
a genius. I'm not sure, but I I feel much
smarter and written form than verbal form. But anyway, there
are lots of folks out there who we could probably
get on the show. But it's the double edged sword.
I'm gonna have to change. I would have to change
the show a bit. I'd have to get a little
bit more serious. You know, I say crazy stuff on here,
and people don't want to, you know, necessarily. I don't
think people really mind going on shows, you know. I
think people people know that things the host says does
not reflect on the guests. I think that's pretty well established. However,
I mean, you know, if I start interviewing scientists and
things like, it's kind of like my two worlds would collide.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It makes me nervous. You know. Even on that last
episode I did, our guest seem to know who I was,
so I, I mean, it wouldn't be that hard to
figure out. You just google, you know, I'm sure you
could figure it out. But he was familiar with the
type of research I did and stuff. So it's like, oh,
I don't know, I better shape up now. Not that
we say anything too crazy, but science is such a
reputation game. It's such a reputation game. If you're applying
for grants, your names on them, your peers know who
you are, and you're totally at the mercy of peer review,
in publication, in grant application. So you're totally like, there's
nowhere where reputation matters more professionally than in the sciences,
in the professional sciences. Unfortunately, I think it should all
be anonymous personally, but that's not a popular viewpoint anyway.
So I don't know. I wrestle. I need advice, email
me odds, I view book at gmail dot com. I
need advice because on the other hand, the counter argument
you know. The one argument would be like, Trevor, you're crazy,
stop podcasting, Just focus on your career. Got to feed
your family, you know what I mean, That's like the
responsible thing to do. But then also it's like, man,
life's too short. Why why modulate the things you say? Like,
just say what you believe and be will and even
say things you're not sure if you believe, be willing
to speculate. I wish that's how the world worked. But anyway,
so I hope you guys like that episode. My plan
is to get back into some kind of I think,
weird but valid things about you know, I guess what
you might call the simulation hypothesis. I think that is
not a good word for it. I think it probably
does more harm than good. But get back into some
Thomas Campbell, my big theory of everything, my big toe
guy stuff talk about take just take the video game
metaphor to it's a logical extreme. But I'm just it's
a four hour clip and I don't have I don't
have clips yet. So we'll do that next time or
in the next few episodes. We'll get to that. Now,
what we're gonna do today, your friend, everybody's favorite Alex
O'Connor and everybody's least favorite Sean Carroll. No, Sean Carroll's
very cool. He is like beloved by the hyper reductionist,
hyper materialistic folks. And this interview exchange, Alex is in
the position I'm normally in, which is like, you can
acknowledge there's something about subjective experience that just can't be explained,
And of course Sean Carroll completely disagrees, and so I
feel like I'm always in this position everywhere I go.
Even I even brought up the microtubule stuff at work
that I regret it because everyone's like, what are you
talking about? And I'm trying to say, there's these studies,
these studies, and they're like, yeah, whatever, dude, so and frankly,
the microtubule thing doesn't do anything in my opinion. Now
you go back and listen to the last episode, you know,
Mike disagrees, and I think he makes a really good point,
and it might just be that his point and his
solution is beyond my comprehension. But I just still can't.
I still can't get there, you know, maybe that's my issue. Anyway,
I thought this episode was a pretty good reflection you
just two people talking past each other to the nth degree.
Speaker 2: Have you seen the clip of Richard Feynman being asked
about magnets. I've mentioned this before on the show.
Speaker 3: A long time ago.
Speaker 1: I don't remember it.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well, it's just it's quite it's quite entertaining
because it's somebody some interviewers sort of saying like, so,
you know, Magnet's like, what what's going on there? Like
why do they do that? And Firemond's like, oh, you know,
something about a magnetic field and whatnot. And the guy's
like but like but why, but why does that happen?
Why is there that field? Why does it do that?
And Firemond's like that that's it, man, Like that's that's
all there is. And it's really funny because I like
I kind of I kind of associate myself with both sides.
I totally understand that the physicists saying like, look, man,
you've reached rock bottom, like that's it, that's the that's
the ground, ground floor. But I'm also kind of still
like there's got to be something that it is. So
it's it's a I do feel a little bit in
limbo in these conversations, but I think that's quite an
interesting example of the same kind of phenomenon. Of course,
that self same Philip Goff that I've just mentioned, uses
this as a route to say that, well, the isness
of the universe is consciousness, because there's only one thing
that we sort of know for what it is in itself.
There's one thing that we experience like directly, and that
is experience itself. We know what experience is, and we've
got this big gap in the bottom of physics that
we don't know what it is. We only know what
it does. So maybe we can just plug up that
gap with consciousness. I know you're not a panpsychist, but
presumably you believe in consciousness. I know some people people don't.
I've heard you talk about consciousness in a way that
I'd be surprised if you took the sort of illusion
root or the or something that says that it literally
doesn't exist. And yet you're a physicalist. You think that
there is this sort of field of stuff, the physical matter,
even if we don't quite know what that is, that somehow.
Speaker 1: Can we just briefly pause here pan psychism. Pan psychism
is in a it star is rising, you know, I
think it's been generally just mocked, you know, like, oh,
you think everything's conscious, Like what about this coffee cup?
You know, But I mean, I think that's probably a
little unfair, you know. I think it's reasonable to think
that consciousness, whatever it is, you know, the ability, I
won't go there for now, but whatever it is, it
probably exists on some type of spectrum like most things.
You know, most things are continuous variables. It's not yes, no,
you know, there's shades of gray, and so yeah, I'm
willing to sort of entertain the idea that maybe humans
are one of the most conscious things, like we're the
most embodied first person subjective experiencers. But I would assume
that dogs probably aren't far behind. You know. I think
we probably just have more the ability for more self
referential things. I'm not sure if that's relate. I mean,
maybe that isn't what consciousness is, right, So it's very complicated,
I guess, is what I'm saying. And there is a spectrum,
and so I think we could theoretically extend that spectrum
all the way down to like protozoa in single cells,
and maybe I guess beneath that, I mean, but the
thing is I just wouldn't even know what that would mean,
Like I wouldn't know what a poink conscious is, you know,
like the minimum unit of consciousness. I would just I can't.
That is just such an abstract thing that I can't
even begin to comprehend what that might be. The question is,
I guess, how do we how do we think about
panpsychism in the context of like religious thinking, spiritual thinking.
Does that violate anything about what it means to be human?
I don't think so, because I think the spiritual conception
of what a soul is is that humans have a
particular soul that has a particular nature, and just like consciousness,
the quality of the soul sort of exists on a spectrum.
Like we have a we have a rational soul, we
have the knowledge of good and evil. And dogs are
also in soul, but in a different way. You know,
they're they're they don't have the knowledge of good and evil,
they don't maybe have the degree of self referential thinking
that we have. They're not made in God's image, you know,
there isn't an afterlife for them. They're just a distinct thing.
Yet we kind of both have this, uh something that's
of the same substance. You know, I'm using a lot
of hand waving in quotes right now, but they have
something like a soul personally. I don't see any reason
why these two things we're talking about can't sort of
just be different words for the same thing. Of course,
if you know a lot of people would disagree with that.
Let's see what Sean thinks.
Speaker 2: Bumps together in the right kind of way and then
gives rise to something that isn't just like you know,
a rock crumbling off a cliff or something, but is
experience famously, the redness of red, the taste of coca cola,
the sound of children's laughter, whatever it is. What is
going on there in your view? What is giving rise
to this? Sui generis to use the same term that
you did, I quit my job at Legal Zoom.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you quit your job at legal Zoom. Okay,
thank you. Skip in the inn.
Speaker 2: That's called experience.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's any different than tables and chairs.
I think that experiences and conscious awareness of things is
a set of vocabulary words that we use to describe
collective behavior of particles and forces in the universe under
the right circumstances. I can say that the table has
a certain height, that it has a certain tensile strength,
things like that. In the same way I can say
that this particular person is having an experience of seeing
the redness of red?
Speaker 1: Do we How do we feel about the statement? It's
a To me, it just it just it feels like
we're talking past each other. It feels like a category error,
like I think we I'll say we, maybe not, but certainly,
I too think that consciousness is a property of a
physical thing that's happening. But that doesn't mean it doesn't
exist or it is merely like it is just merely
a like emergent property of a physical system. To me,
it is like this distinct thing that I am ex experiencing,
and I think it demands an explanation. I think all
of this is just an attempt to not explain the
phenomenon of experience, you know, because you could sort of
interpret what Sean's saying here as a type of panpsychism,
which I know I would assume he is not a
pan psychist. But you know, but to say, like, hey,
it's no different than a table or a chair, it
almost kind of implies that that a table in a
chair could also be having a conscious experience. I don't
think that's what he's saying, but that is one way
you could sort of interpret it, like, yeah, you know,
when your neurons come together in a certain not your neurons, sorry,
when your atoms come together in a certain way, Like
you have a subjective experience. That's just a property of
the physical arrangement of atoms. So you have a particular
conscious experience. Well, a chair has a different configuration of atoms, therefore,
does it have a different conscious experience or as a
neuron required for consciousness? Well, I think we kind of
know that's that's not true. If you look at some
of the things that even very simple life is capable of,
you know, it's capable of of certain behaviors that sort
of seem their behaviors that conscious agents do. I guess,
I guess we don't know for sure that they need
consciousness to do them, but you know, they can seek nutrients,
they can act with this self preservation instinct avoid danger,
retain memories. And these are like unicellular organisms with no neurons.
So we're kind of conflating a lot of different ideas.
But I just I don't know, it's something about his face.
I'm sorry, Sean will never hear this because we have
only two hundred listeners, But it's just something about his face.
It's like this this need to like strip subjectivity, like
if we were doing an experiment like I'm all for
I'm all for it, like strip the subjective experience. But
we're literally talking about the phenomenon of subjective experience. We're
talking about consciousness. So why why do we feel the
need to act like it doesn't exist. I'm so confused
by his position because he's he says he's not an illusionist.
I mean, he thinks consciousness is an illusion. I haven't
heard him use the word emergent property, but I think
maybe that would be his claim. Let's keep listening bitterly.
See no gap there at all. This is just one
of the sets of vocabulary words to describe what happens
in the world at a higher level. Yeah, do you
feel like your subjective experience like do you feel like
that's just a vocabulary word? Like, don't get me wrong,
I understand subjective experience is a vocabulary word, but it's
a symbol that rep resents something like all words, right,
and so the thing it represents you're feeling that you have,
that you're in a body looking out. Is that just
a vocabulary word.
Speaker 4: I don't think so, because it it doesn't need to exist,
and therefore the fact that it does exist, I think
proves that it is a real thing.
Speaker 1: Right. You can't just describe it as an epiphenomenon or
an emergent property. You don't need to be conscious to
look conscious, to act the way you act, to do
the things you do. It's not strictly necessary to have
a first person perspective. You could build a robot that
does the exact thing, that has eyes and reacts to
a scary image. You know, you could program all of
this in. You could program in like an aesthetic. You
can make it drawn to certain beautiful things, like if
you were a skilled enough programmer, and I don't think
it's intuitive to think that it would just spontaneously a
first person perspective would emerge. I agree with our last
guest Mike, that that's actually magical thinking, not what I'm doing,
what these people are doing, the physicalists. That is magical thinking,
because you're saying yay, yeah, yeah, when you put things
together in a certain configuration. These interesting properties just e merge.
It's like, Okay, that's magical thinking, that's superstition, this is
this is it's a silly thing to say. It's even
sillier to pretend like that is the reductionist physicalist approach
to consciousness.
Speaker 2: I mean, you'll be familiar, of course, with the reasons
why people are suspicious of this, but perhaps we can
try to be specific and make it interest I mean,
for a start, it seems as though I could give
a complete description of the activities of a brain. I
could describe the sort of electrochemical processes and the way
that neurons fire and connect with each other, and the
brain regions and all that kind of stuff. And were
it not that we already knew there was this thing
called experience that sort of came along with that, I
wouldn't expect or predict that there would be this thing
that the philosophers called qualia, you know, the redness of red.
I would just predict that there would be some atoms
and neurons moving around and bumping into each other in
various ways. It seems, in other words, that like a
physicalist description of the brain would not predict, at least
on its own that there is this thing called experience
that goes along with the neurons moving around in physical space.
What do you think of that?
Speaker 3: I don't see why not. I think that's just because
you're not very good at predicting things, but neither am I.
Because it's very, very complicated. I mean, we're literally.
Speaker 1: Do you do you agree with this? I just I
really struggle with this. No, you're wrong. You're wrong, Sean.
There is no way you would ever predict a first
person's subjective experience from what it basically amounts to computation.
I mean, the sort of the classical idea of what
the brain is. You know, it's a very advanced processing
unit with little binary switches, little neurons that oscillate. And
so I don't, I don't. I think I get what
he's saying. He's saying, like, well, if you really knew everything,
you could predict it. I don't think you can get
away with just saying that, you know. I said this
years ago on the Brothers of the Serpent podcast, and
I was really happy to hear Mike say it. On
the last episode he sort of called this, I don't
remember if you was referring to this exact idea. So
I don't want to say that he said something he didn't,
but he used the phrase category air, and I agree
because I don't it's a distinct category. Subjective experience is
a completely distinct category, and you would never make the
prediction that a complex enough network would lead to a
first person subjective experience. So I kind of disagree. I mean,
he says, you're just not good at predicting things. Well, fair,
you know, fair, but you I think I think like
if we didn't know consciousness existed, and you proposed that
it would exist if you could just build a complex
enough circuit, like processing circuit, I think people would laugh
at you. They'd be like, what what are you talking?
It's ridiculous. And so I don't know if this is
a great argument, but I could be wrong. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Speaker 3: Trying to compare two things. One is a physicalist understanding
of nature at its most fundamental, which, as we said,
currently takes the form of some quantum mechanical theory of
fields and particles and stuff like that, which is literally
the best understood feature of all of science. Because we
can absolutely make precision measurements, we can set things up
we can simplify things, we can get rid of all
the complications. We can test things to twelve decimal places
and we have We can push our experiments well beyond
our everyday realm of experience, and we still get the
right answer. And it's all beautiful, pristine. It makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, we have consciousness and the brain,
which is literally the least well understood thing in all
of science. It's incredibly complex. We don't know exactly what's
going on even at the physical level in the brain,
much less the emergent level of psychology and experience it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he is saying, at the emergent level, yeah,
I just I think this is magical thinking. This is
my new favorite thing to say, to call something an
emergent property, specifically in this way, because there are emergent
properties that very clearly are not magical thinking. We talk
about a school of fish, or a flock of birds,
or an ant colony. You know, you get these very
complex phenomena that occur without any of the ants having
any knowledge of the phenomena or any of the birds.
Right that the cool, spiraling, geometric shapes of a school
of fish. You know, no single fish has any concept
of that, yet it emerges from some smaller foundational property
that here's the difference. There's no category air there. We're
talking about a spatial like a discreet spatial principle like, Okay,
I'm going to stay equidistant between all of my neighbors.
If I'm a fish, right, I'm going to stay right
in the middle of all of them. Okay, this is
sort of a geometric or a spatial feature or principle.
And then the bigger thing, the ball of spinning fish
that sort of oscillates in response, like maybe one fish
is triggered to move because whatever, you know, it sees something,
it gets confused, there's a predator, it's it's adjusting itself,
it's an accent, whatever, and that triggers the sort of cascade,
and the whole school sort of starts bawling up and changing.
Like this is also a spatial phenomenon, right, So it's
a it's a macrocosm of the microcosm, right, It's it's
you have a space something spatial that's fundamental, which is
a fish wanting to remain equidistant from all his neighbors.
And then you zoom out and you have a different
emergent spatial property. No magical thinking there, that's totally straightforward. Okay,
let's apply this to to the brain into neurons. Okay, Hey,
so we have this spatial principle or you know, temporo spatial.
It's it's it's things happen in space and time. Neurons
are stimulated by inputs, and there's some sort of decision
making process that you know, not with agency. It's it's
all autonomous, right. If a certain voltage threshold is reached,
the next neuron in the chain activates and that serves
as an input on the next neuron in the chain,
and so on and so forth. So you have all
these interacting switches that transmit electrical signals and chemical signals,
and you have this amazing, really classical computer. You know,
there's there's sensory inputs, there's output, there's stimulus integration. It's
just this really phenomenally fascinating computer. But this is all
temporo spatial, right, So then to call consciousness an emergent
property of that, to me is there's no other word
for it than a category err, because it's it's just
a completely different thing. Like if you wanted to say,
like the EEG, Like I put a cap of electrodes
on your head and measure sort of the cumulative electrical
signal of the brain. I would call that an emergent property, right,
because no single neuron is generating that signal. Their signals
are very unique. But out of this complex interaction of
millions and millions and millions of neurons, you get this
sort of emergent phenomenon, which is you know, gamma and
theta and beta and alpha waves that can be measured
at your scalp with electrodes. Okay, that's an emergent property.
Subjective experience what the feeling, the feeling of being embodied,
the feeling of having will, being able to witness your emotions,
to replay archived subjective experience in your mind in a
way that's like sort of visual. But not, this is
not an emergent property. I'm not denying that it has
a physical basis. I want to be clear, like, yeah,
if you poke the right neurons in your brain, you
can get a subjective experience, but they aren't the same thing.
One is not an emergent property or the other. I
just feel like this is lost on people and maybe,
I mean, maybe it's just a difference of opinion, but
ultimately this is gonna be Sean's argument.
Speaker 3: So let's listen and things like that, and you're saying, well,
I am a little bit unsure how to connect one
to the other. And I'm gonna say that is the
completely unsurprising result of this, Like, why in the world
would you expect to, with our current state of the art,
to be able to make explicit that connection, And the
fact that you don't is certainly not any reason to
change our fundamental notion of how reality works. It's obviously
to admit that we don't understand how the brain works.
Speaker 1: I kind of agree with this, and maybe that maybe
this is why people like Sean kind of get on
the defense, because they're feeling like people who acknowledge the
mystery of consciousness and sort of deny that it could
be a product or it could be an emergent product
of complexity in the brain. I think they think we
are insisting that we need to throw away everything we
know about reality, and I don't. I think I think
that's crazy. I think I think, like when it comes
to airplanes and space travel, like Newtonian physics all day.
You know, I don't I don't want a philosopher designing
my aircraft, you know what I mean, Like like, hey,
if we're if we're trying to get in a translunar
injection to something's weird with my microphone to rendezvous with
the moon because we're trying to land on the moon. Like, yeah,
let's keep the philosophers at bay, right. I think science people,
people like Sean, they'll say, like the bit and I've
heard docins say this, like the ability to make predictions
proves all of the all of the scientific worldview. I
just think that's totally absurd. I think it's totally absurd.
I mean, even if even if my sort of idea
of what reality is we're right, and of course we
don't know what it is, but that basically this is
sort of like a you know, it's a created universe
and there are there is a rule set, call those
what you want, the constants, the laws of physics, whatever
you want. Even if that were true, the only way
to fly an airplane would be conventional physics, right, you
know what I mean? We can change the way we
view the nature of reality without changing the way we
interact with reality. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?
I mean, And the reason we know that's true is
we still use Newtonian physics to do space travel, even
though we now have Einsteinian physics. We have new physics
that explains gravity and the bending of space and time.
We don't use that, No, I mean, maybe there are
some unique situations where we do, but no, when we're
when we're trying to get somewhere, we use you know,
for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction,
and delta V and you know, pro grade retrograde, Like
we're using simpler Newtonian physics because it works so clear
So clearly that's true. Clearly you can have different understandings
of the nature of reality and still acknowledge that there
are simpler tools, better tools, perhaps for the job. Knowing
that this is a simulated world would change nothing about
the way you do things, about the way you build
a car, about the way you build a plan, like,
because these are the rules, these are the rules of
the system we're in. We don't need new rules for
the system. So maybe that's why Sean kind of feels threatened.
And if you listen to him and I'll try to
shut up. If you listen to him, he seems like
he's always speaking from that perspective or he's like, well, yeah,
but it doesn't change the fact that you know, when
you when you see a sunset, certain neurons light up.
So clearly those neurons are related to seeing a sense
and it's like, oh yeah, no, doy dude, you know,
no doi. I don't think anyone's denying that. I mean,
maybe some people are that I don't know about, But
but what does it have to do with what we're
talking about, Like, it's not it's not intuitive that certain
electrical signals occurring in your brain in a region that
we know is associated with a visual you know, processing
and visual associated associative memory and things, would result in
a subjective experience. There's just no way to think that's true.
I mean, do you think that about your your Tesla
with self driving? I mean you have a camera and
the camera has been trained to stop the car if
you get close to the car in front of you.
So there's a visual there's a visual intelligence. But do
we think that tesla has a subjective experience? Are you going?
And then you can imagine Sean Carroll arguing like, well, well, clearly,
I mean, look at the computer software. When you get
close to a car in front of you, this code activates,
so clearly that code is responsible for the subjective experience.
You know what I mean, This is what I would mean.
You would never predict a subjective experience from these things,
but yet it is here, and so to just call
it an emergent property is absurd. Okay, I'm gonna shut.
Speaker 3: Up very well. I use the analogy. It's like saying
I can't find my car keys, I should buy a
new car. That's not the right strategy to use in
this situation. You have to be a little bit more
patient than that.
Speaker 1: People don't just walk up and say, Hi, I'm sexually
interested in you. Speak for yourself, lady. That was a funny.
That was a funny commercial above. Here we go, We're back.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I suppose for the person who thinks that consciousness is
inexplicable on physicalism, it's more like, yeah, I I don't
understand how a car could even possibly exist in the
universe as I understand it, and people sort of view
consciousness that way. And I think commonly people will say
and there are more and less sophisticated versions of this.
But they'll say, look, you know, consciousness is just something
science will explain, like it's no surprise, it's super complicated
and we haven't gotten there yet. Yeah, but there are
philosophers of mind who don't just want to say science
hasn't explained consciousness.
Speaker 1: This is just fundamentally not true. It's just again, it's
the same category over and over. It's like, no, I mean,
I for our last show, I mean, this is what
you would call the hard problem. But in our last show,
I think Mike gave an incredibly compelling explanation, a scientific
explanation for what consciousness is. But I don't actually think
maybe I just need to give up on this. But
I don't actually think it a us is the hard problem,
if you know what I mean. Like, like I accept
that it could be the physical explanation for consciousness. I
accept that, but it's like there were so clearly missing something,
and it might be that there is no way to
articulate an explanation because there is just something fundamental about this,
like like the way video game characters could never scientifically
articulate what their reality is from the inside. Now from
the outside it's easy. You know, it's very easy to
do from the outside, but from the inside it is
it is, it's not even within the realm of possibility
unless they did they come came up with some experience
like we came up with with, you know, the double slit,
and they have these sort of abstract ideas about me.
You know, maybe maybe like when we when we interact
with something, we sort of pull it out of like
an information state into a subjective experiential state. And that's
sort of where we live. We live in this subjective
experiential state of binary data that's stored somewhere, and it's like, Okay,
you know, that's pretty that'd be pretty cool if we
could do that. Oh wait, that we kind of have
done that, you know, And yet we're still denying that
there is any I don't know what is Sean actually denying.
I don't know, I'm not sure I understand what he's denying.
Speaker 2: Must say yeah, but that in principle cannot do. So
it seems to occupy a different kind of space. Thomas
Nagel is the sort of famous name here that I
think most succinctly puts this case. In what is it
like to be a bat. And one useful way of
getting at this is with the famous thought experiment that
I've heard you speak about before. But I had a
question about your interpretation or response to this. Mary's Room.
I talk about this all the time on the show,
and most people are familiar. You know. Mary is in
a room. It's totally black and white. She experiences no
color for all of her life. But she has given
every single piece of information that could possibly be written
down onto a piece of paper and understood and like
comprehended by her. She's given that, and she becomes an expert.
She learns about the wavelengths of light, she learns about
the biology of the eye and the brain chemistry and
all of that kind of stuff. But she's never seen blue.
And then at the end of her life, she steps outside,
she looks up, she sees the blue sky. And the
question is does she learn something new? And the implicit
answer is yes, she learns something new. She learns what
it's like to see blue, and whatever that extra thing
is that she's learned is what consciousness is. I've heard
you talk about this before, and I just want to
give you a space to respond to that. And then
I've got a follow up question if your answer remains
the same as it did when I last heard you
speak about that, So what do you think about about that?
Speaker 3: I'm a little bit thrown off my game because it's
always red that she's never seen, and you're making it
blue and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be sure
how to change gears so quickly, Alex. So let me
give it a try. And I think there's different I
have one opinion, but there's different ways of stadiums. Let
me state it this way, Mary's Room. Even though Frank Jackson,
who popularized the thought experiment, has repudiated the conclusion that
it has used to draw, many other people still stick
with it. I get that.
Speaker 2: I did not know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh no, he's totally a physicalist.
Speaker 2: Now, wow, do you know why like with that?
Speaker 3: Like a it's a bad argument. I can explain why
I think it's a bad argument. I cannot promise I
can explain why he changed his mind about it. But look,
it's supposed to be a refuge, a refuge, refutation or repudiation.
I was mixing up those two words together of physicalism.
It's supposed it's.
Speaker 1: Funny because I never really It's tough. Words are tough.
Sometimes I question if I even really understand what I think.
But I don't know if I ever If I interpret
it as a refutation of physicalism, that's a pretty big claim,
right to say that consciousness has no physical basis. You know,
I'm not I struggle with that. I would struggle with that.
I think my view on the argument is very clearly
something is gained when you first see blue for the
first time. Now, I think what you could argue is like, well, yeah,
and I think this is what he'll argue. That's because
neurons that have never activated are now activating. It's like, okay,
you know, fair enough, But yeah, I would never deny
that neu You know, cone cells in your retina that
correspond to blue, we need to activate and send a
signal to your eccipital lobe in order for you to
have these subjective experience of blue. That's that's, of course clear.
Just like the camera that sees blue and your tesla
if you cut that cord, yeah, of course, of course
the data would never reach the computer to make a decision.
But again, I mean, I don't think we believe that
the tesla has a subjective, conscious experience of the phenomenon
of experiencing the color blue. Do we So? I don't
know if it refutes physically. I don't. I've never seen
this as refuting physicalism. I've seen it as a way
of distinguishing between like, you know, the hardware that allows
you to see blue and the experience of blue. You know,
it's funny, random, not funny, it's tragic. But a tesla
not too long ago, on a freeway used to travel
all the time. There was a semi truck that was
highly reflective. You know, some of those trucks are like
highly reflective, And because the sky was bright and blue,
and because it was so reflective, the camera of the
tesla interpreted it as just being open road in front
of it, and it slammed against the back of this truck.
The guy died. So those anyway, my point I'm telling
that horrible story is like the tesla, it has a
type of intelligence in regards to color. It is not
using radars, using cameras, so color binocular depth perception like it.
It has a sort of intelligence about all these things.
But you know what, if you're going to try to
tell me that the Tesla has an experience of vision
the way I do. I just we're not We're on
a different planet. We're on two different planets, and we
need to be on two different planet. We need to
build a ship and send it to Mars. You know
it's time because that is to me so absurd. But
every every year we get closer to this conclusion. My coworker,
who we jive on everything so much, he said something
like that to me, like heart, he started talking about
AI is becoming conscious. I'm like, oh, good lord, good lord.
Speaker 3: To be You're supposed to reach the conclusion that physicalism
can't be true. Okay, well, what is the physical list
saying about what's happening to marry the color scientist in
her room. He's saying that when she's in her room
and everything is black and white and she's reading all
the books on color theory and getting all of these
pieces of information, she's learning things. And what that means
to the physical list is there are certain connections between
certain neurons in her brain that are firing and strengthening
so that when you ask her questions, she can answer them,
et cetera, et cetera. A usual physicalist reductionist account of
what it means to be learning those things. Then she
steps outside blue light wavelength photons and pinge on her
retina for the first time, and she sees the color blue.
What happens to the physicalist? Different neurons fire in her
brain and different synapses are strengthened. No one disagrees with that,
And now she says, Oh, now I know what it's
like to see and experience the color blue. Where in
the world is there any problem with that?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: Where is the refutation of physicalism? The physicalist explains this
with one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean again, I don't know if we're refeating physicalism.
I think it's basically refuted by the explanation I just gave.
I mean, you plug a camera into your computer, and
you take a picture of yourself and you ask chat GPT,
you know, how do I look? Are there people out
there who really think like there is a subjective the
computer the server in San Mateo, California is like having
a subjective experience of what you look like. Is that's insane?
You know, that's absolutely insane. And I tend when people say, like, oh,
you're just crazy. I my instinct is to like think
that's a bad argument, because like, oh, contend contend with
the argument directly, don't just call me crazy. But I don't.
I don't know how as to approach this. Someone a
real philosopher explained to me, like, how do we contend
with people who who their instinct is to think like, well, yeah, yeah,
Like if I upload a photo to AI, it is
having a subjective experience. It's it's not doing statistical you know,
weighing of pixel position and color position, you know, and
and when there's a lot of black pixels clustered in
a tight circle, you know it's a pupil. And then
when it's surrounded by like blues or browns and a
sort of radial spoke configuration that this is probably an IRIS,
you know what I mean, Like, like, it's not doing
any of that. It's not making calculations even though we
know it is, even though we know it's making statistical calculations,
Like that's not in dispute. It's not doing that, or
it's not doing just that. It is having a subjective
experience of the photo I just uploaded. If the people
who think that, dude, I mean, it's fine. I don't
harbor any ill will, but I'm just never I'm never
gonna be able to have these types of conversations with them,
Like we're just we're literally living in different universes. And
it's so sad when I see like brilliant people feel
this way, but they probably feel the same way about me.
Speaker 3: Cent fidelity, there's nothing missing.
Speaker 2: I think the issue is quite specific. At least the
issue that I think is interesting, which is that.
Speaker 3: Nobody told you this, not your teacher, that's your scentist,
not even the tooth.
Speaker 1: But it's true.
Speaker 2: Once your teeth are gone, everyone says they're gone forever.
We're indebted to Galileo for telling us that maths is
the language of the universe, and the scientist wants to it,
sort of wants to say that everything which it's possible
to scientifically explain is something that you could in principle
formulate in the language of mathematics. I don't know if
you if you agree with that, but that's sort of
the tradition that we inherit from Galileo, Right, is this
idea that anything which is scientifically true can be mathematized.
And if something can be mathematized and explained or described
in a mathematical formula with letters and numbers, then in principle,
everything that there is to know could be written down
onto a piece of paper. Now I understand that, like
when Mary exits the room and there are like different
neurons that fire in her brain and that gives rise
to the experience, that's that's fine. But if there is
any kind of knowledge that she gains, anything that you
could class as knowledge, and if the scientific that the
scientist to use the sort of religious buzzword, believes that
anything which can be known can be described in the
language of mathematics, it would imply that the very knowledge
that she has of that experience of blue could in
principle have been written down onto a piece of paper,
such that when she read and understood that thing on
that piece of paper, she got that knowledge that she
gets when she walks out. She could get that just
from reading something that's written down. So like, the problem
for me is specifically the fact that it's not so
much about physicalism but more about scientific description. The idea
that one day science will be able to explain or
describe consciousness implies to me, and maybe I'm wrong about this,
that science will one day be able to take that
knowledge that Mary gains when she steps outside of the
room and write it down onto a piece of paper,
such that just by reading that thing on the piece
of paper you would get the same knowledge. I don't
think that's possible, and so my question to you is
do you think that's possible? And if it's not, then
what is like a scientific description that cannot be written
down in that way.
Speaker 3: I think this is just very clearly a problem with
getting mixed up linguistically.
Speaker 1: Not It's funny because I totally agree that this is
a problem of getting mixed up linguistically, but I come
to the exact opposite conclusion of Sean. So I don't
know this is an intractable disagreement.
Speaker 3: I think scientifically or philosophically, as I said, when Mary
reads about the science of color or the artistic descriptions
of color, certain neurons do certain things.
Speaker 1: Okay, this I totally agree with. I just don't think
he's addressing Alex's question.
Speaker 3: But in her brain when she sees the color blue,
different things do different neurons. Different neurons do different things
in her brain. I could write down what the neurons
are doing with no problem at all. But me writing
down what the neurons are doing doesn't make the neurons
do that. What makes the neurons do that is seeing
the color blue.
Speaker 1: I just I just feel like he's missing the entire
point now, and Alex kind of loses the pod a
little bit here, unfortunately. But yeah, like, yeah, you can.
We already do this. We already use fMRI to show
correlates of experience. You know, when this happens, these parts
of the brains light up. Yeah, we can totally describe
that what But that doesn't it's completely again the category
air that what. That doesn't explain anything. That doesn't explain
subjective experience at all. We know that it must happen
to get the subjective experience. But where does this subjective
experience go from? This needs this demands an explanation. I mean, like, yeah,
because neurons can fire in all sorts of ways in
your brain that you have no conscious experience of. So
it's clearly not just neuronal firing that causes consciousness. So
what is it? I mean, I think you know, I
do agree. I was. I've been listening to some videos
on I it's the first time I've heard an attempt
like a like a tacit acknowledgment, like, Okay, yeah, we
don't really have a physical explanation for consciousness. So I
think even Seanch needs to like own up to this,
that the field has moved on, like that no one
is arguing this way anymore. Like this is almost like
an outdated position that Sean is defending, Like the hard
problem is a actual hard problem. You know, he's basically
just denying that it exists. So that's the first attent.
And the idea is like you need a certain degree
and I always get it wrong, but like a certain
number of nodes need to be integrated at once to
have a conscious experience. So it's not just neuronal firing.
It's like this mass orchestration of neuronal firing in these
certain patterns to a certain degree that results in conscious experience. Now,
I still think category air doesn't address the heart problem.
I don't think the heart problem can be addressed, like
Alex is saying, I don't think you can write a
scientific description of subjective experience. I think it is just
fundamentally distinct. But alas, let's listen to the last minute.
Speaker 3: And again, I don't think the physicalist has any problem
capturing any of this.
Speaker 2: So but okay, so in agreement with that, you could
write down what the neurons do, but that's not going
to make the neurons fire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly when, like, has.
Speaker 1: Anyone actually made it to level four before? If you're
slightly congested commercial level one, I'm not.
Speaker 2: Even getting pent those neurons fire, And I can just
I could. I could describe to Mary what neurons will
fire in which way when she does step outside, such
that she has a complete understanding of the neurons that
are firing. Yet when the neurons actually do fire, she
will discover that it's not just that, oh wow, neurons
are firing.
Speaker 1: I think Alex is kind of missing the point here,
but it's okay, I'm still honest.
Speaker 2: In my brain, it's like, oh, and I'm having this experience.
In other words, yeah, like, those neurons don't fire until
she steps outside. But you could, you could describe what
those neurons are doing, and it seems like she would
still not expect or know what it's like to see
that blue even if she had a full understanding of
those neurons, implying that the whole totality of what you
could scientifically write down on a piece of paper would
still not include that experiential aspect of blue. And I
know if it do seem like we're kind of going
around in circles here, but I want to make sure
I'm being very specific here, because I understand what you're saying.
Those neurons won't fire until she steps outside. But the
point of a scientific explanation is that you should be
able to take that new thing that happens when those
neurons fire, that experience that comes with it, and sort
of reduce it onto the piece of paper, which I
just don't think is possible.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't give you the experience. Telling Mary about
what neurons fire when she sees the color blue doesn't
make those neurons fire. That's purely my only My point
is not to disagree that there's something new.
Speaker 2: Point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think Alex kind of made a mistake there.
I think there is a distinction between whether those neurons
are firing or not. Of course, of course there is, right,
So I don't really know where he was going with that.
The point is we have physical systems that essentially mimic.
This a point I brought up many times. We have optics,
we have transmission lines, you know, we have little USB
cables that we can plug into optics, and we have
data processing units that can process the optical information and
with some degree of autonomy or maybe total autonomy, make
decisions in sort of like a reflexive way, in the
way like a human reflex works. And I think it
would be absolutely absurd to think that those systems have
like a conscious awareness and a subjective experience. So the
question is where does that subjective experience come from. That's
why I really like theories that at least contend with
this issue, like orchestrated objective reduction and integrated information theory.
I still think they all sort of fall short of
the ultimate mystery of what consciousness is. But I think
that's just always going to be the case. I think
at some point we're going to reach the limit, you know,
just like those video game characters are going to reach
a limit of how describing what the nature of the
reality is from the inside.
Speaker 3: Why does it disagree that physicalism has any difficulty describing
it whatsoever?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, Because the neurs have to fire to get
the experience. Okay, yeah, let me put it this way.
Then do you think that if you did explain to
Mary in her room exactly which neurons were going to
fire in what way when she stepped outside and she
understood the totality of everything that could be known about
the brain, that she would predict that she would have
this thing called like qualia and blueness would arise.
Speaker 1: She might be able to but again, that's insane. That's
the most insane answer of the whole interview should be
I might be able to. Yeah, you never know, you know,
kind of like a Laplace's demon thing, Like, yeah, if
you knew the position of every part article in the universe,
you could predict the future. And you know what's funny
is I actually agree with that because if we're talking
about things bumping into each other again, another great thing
Mike brought up, like, these are basically differential equations, right,
Like there are these local events things bumping into each other,
and if you know the totality of all those events,
you can model huge phenomenon across millions of light years,
right the formation of galaxies over time. Like, with enough
computational power, you could do all of that again, what
does that have to do with subjective experience? Like, you
could never predict subjective experience. You never could even if
you knew where every neurotransmitter was, you could predict exactly
what would happen. You could predict the formation of a
membrane potential and a downstream neuron. You could predict the
formation that the way that the action potentials would oscillate,
and some electrical activity of the brain, the power within
different frequency bands on an eg. You would never you
could never predict the subjective experience. Ever, how can he
be allowed to get away with this? The prob is
the problem is I would never be this confident in
real life. You know, I'd be like, oh, that's interesting,
because of course he's a famous scientist. But I just
I don't understand this is he should not be allowed
to get away with that comma at all.
Speaker 3: And the ability to go from a reductionist lower level
description to the higher level emergent description is very difficult,
and it's not like necessarily an easy step. The important
point for the philosophy.
Speaker 1: It's not very difficult. It is as of yet impossible.
There's a distinction. There's a distinction between Oh, yeah, that's tough.
But you know, I'm pretty smart. I can probably figure
it out. I don't know it is as of yet
fundamentally impossible.
Speaker 3: Topical point of the thought experiment is that all of
that knowledge that she gains doesn't make those neurons fire.
So you're using a linguistic construction to say she learned
something new even though she knew all the facts. But
that's an incorrect linguistic construction to the physical.
Speaker 1: List the physical, I do kind of agree, and or
the clips over, I do kind of agree that this
would certainly make me rethink the way I would talk
about this thought experiment, because it's it's true. I mean,
there's clearly a difference between knowledge in terms of the
physical events that happen in your brain. There's a difference
between the knowledge of something and the experience of it
in the purely physical sense, meaning like you know, action
potential's form and your retina, they get transmitted to the
eccipital lobe. And of course subjective experience is intrinsically tied
to visual processing. So there's no thought experiment you could
design where you know, you activate the visual pathways and
don't activate us directive experience again, because I do think,
of course, these things are like they cannot be separated.
They're fundamental to one another, you know, conscious experience and
the hardware that provides the mechanism for the sensory input
that you experience. One cannot exist without the other. Although interestingly,
maybe conscious experience can exist without stimulus. You might have
a dream that is somewhat visual, but even then I
think you're just sort of like reliving an archived subjective experience.
So I don't know about that anyway, God, what's the
point of this? What's the point of it all? You guys?
My favorite quote, one day you're gonna die and you'll
either stop asking or you'll know everything. Something like that.
One day you'll die and either all of your questions
will be answered or you'll stop asking questions. Anyway, I
just think it's interesting, and I'm frustrated by like life
is short, you know, so to like just dig your
heels in so hard on this like viewpoint that this
is just an emergent property, which first of all magical
thinking what does that mean? You know, that's insane, But
it's said in a way where like it saying it's
an emergent property is almost kind of like saying it
doesn't exist, you know, It's like, oh, you know, honestly, no,
saying emergent property is just it's just a mistake. I don't.
I think it needs to be rejected. It needs to
be deeply and profoundly rejected. Anyway, hope you guys are
doing good out there. Let me know what direction you
want the show to go in. A lot of you
guys like the theology stuff. A lot of you guys
don't like that, and you like the science stuff. You're
all good sports. You put up with both. We could
try to shift into like strictly an interview show, and
I could try to get interesting guests from sort of
both sides. That'd be cool. I would sort of need
to change my behavior a little bit because that would
almost i'd sort of become a more public figure. And
I wouldn't need to start a YouTube channel, because unfortunately,
audio only is a dying thing. There's just not enough people.
YouTube has discovery, you know, so if you're into weird
stuff like this, the show will get recommended to you,
you know, And I just don't think podcasting really has that.
It could be wrong anyway, you tell me the balls
in your court. You one hundred or two hundred listeners
out there. You let me know what you want me
to do. God's I view book at gmail dot com.
Stay safe out there, God bless