Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, Hello, is
Speaker 1: there anybody in there? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bob,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey everybody. Yeah, Joe, I have
Speaker 1: a question for you, ask away, Are you conscious? Barely? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna make a similar statement, but I will
Speaker 1: say that I am confident that I'm conscious. I'm not
Speaker 1: confident that that's my preferable state of being right at
Speaker 1: this very moment. Well, I'm not conscious. Um, so you're
Speaker 1: just I just wanted the You're just speaking unconsciously? You
Speaker 1: are you are channeling some sort of unconscious mind. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm what philosophers, some philosophers might refer to as a
Speaker 1: p zombie. I display all of the outward appearance of
Speaker 1: being a conscious entity, but I have no inner experience.
Speaker 1: I have no quality of They might say, ah, got you. Well,
Speaker 1: the whole purpose of this, uh, this charming intro where
Speaker 1: we discover that our friend and compatriot Joe is in
Speaker 1: fact not what he seems to be. He only that's
Speaker 1: all he is. I guess it is really so. I
Speaker 1: guess it's the opposite that he's exactly what he seems
Speaker 1: to be and no more than that. Uh, we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about consciousness, and as it turns out, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a subject that has been a matter of
Speaker 1: discussion in philosophical circles for centuries. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: one of those things like, yeah, exactly what there's there
Speaker 1: there's evidence of preliterate cultures having at least some concept
Speaker 1: of things that tie into consciousness. And there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a lot of vague discussion in this episode, mainly because
Speaker 1: consciousness is it's tricky to even define it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's sort of a question here. Is consciousness a matter
Speaker 1: of philosophy something we just sort of reason and talk
Speaker 1: about in the abstract, or is it a question that
Speaker 1: is susceptible to science? Can you scientifically? Is there a
Speaker 1: mechanism that is consciousness? Is there is there something that
Speaker 1: we can point to in the brain and say this
Speaker 1: is where consciousness comes from and this is what it means.
Speaker 1: So for the longest time, this was sort of the
Speaker 1: realm of the philosophers. There were really weren't a whole
Speaker 1: lot of scientific inroads to consciousness. Yeah. I mean it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher,
Speaker 1: was talking about how consciousness had to be essential for
Speaker 1: thought and for personal identity. This isn't, by the way
Speaker 1: of you, that many philosophers, but not all philosophers share.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking a lot about philosophers early in
Speaker 1: this episode and just kind of the different perspectives when
Speaker 1: it comes to consciousness. Well, yeah, I think the philosophical
Speaker 1: perspectives are a good way to begin this discussion because
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about some new scientific discoveries, yeah,
Speaker 1: that are related to consciousness. So there's this idea you
Speaker 1: may have heard of. It's called the hard problem of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with this? It's usually what I think
Speaker 1: when I'm trying desperately to go to sleep and insomnia
Speaker 1: has taken hold. Right, that's the hard problem. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: basically right. No, that's not it at all. So okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I have a fundamental misunderstanding. Joe Pray, do elaborate and
Speaker 1: enlighten me. Okay, So for a while now, some philosophers
Speaker 1: have divided questions about consciousness into basically two categories. You
Speaker 1: have the hard problem and then you have the easy problems.
Speaker 1: Problems plural with easy. So the Australian philosopher David Chalmers,
Speaker 1: he's written a lot about this, and in the nineteen
Speaker 1: paper called Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness he
Speaker 1: defined the easy problems as the ones that pretty much
Speaker 1: everybody can admit can potentially be solved by science. So
Speaker 1: the easy problems include things like locating the mechanisms behind
Speaker 1: individual cognitive functions, for example, the ability to discriminate, categorize,
Speaker 1: and react to environmental stimuli. These are his words. Now, uh,
Speaker 1: the integration of information behind a cognitive system, the reportability
Speaker 1: of mental states, the ability of a system to access
Speaker 1: its own internal states, the focus of attention, the deliberate
Speaker 1: control of behavior, the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Those
Speaker 1: are just some examples he listed. So the idea is, okay,
Speaker 1: I think pretty much everybody's on board. We can find
Speaker 1: the things that are happening in the brain that cause
Speaker 1: each of those, the regions of the brain responsible, and
Speaker 1: the actual processes that manifest. Yeah, these might be now
Speaker 1: he called them easy sort of in context. These might
Speaker 1: in practice be very very hard to solve, easy in
Speaker 1: the sense that it is probably possible rather than something
Speaker 1: that is probably impossible. So as difficult as these might be,
Speaker 1: to suss out what is his hard problem yea. So
Speaker 1: Chalmers defines the hard problem as quote the problem of experience,
Speaker 1: and he goes on to say, when we think and perceive,
Speaker 1: there is a whir of information processing, but there is
Speaker 1: also a subjective aspect, as Nagel has put it in
Speaker 1: he's referring to the philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is quote
Speaker 1: something it is like to be a conscious organism. This
Speaker 1: subjective aspect is experience. So he he also later on
Speaker 1: in the paper sort of tries to say, maybe it's
Speaker 1: easier to just use the term experience rather than consciousness,
Speaker 1: because that's really what the hard problem of consciousness is
Speaker 1: all about. What generates this thing we know as experience.
Speaker 1: You are having an experience right now, Lauren, and you
Speaker 1: are having one, Jonathan, but I am not having one
Speaker 1: because I'm a p zombie uh or or Rock probably
Speaker 1: is not having one as far as we know. What
Speaker 1: causes this. Now, there's this group of people who are
Speaker 1: often referred to maybe disparagingly. Maybe not as the new mysterians,
Speaker 1: they're the philosophers who have basically concluded that the second problem,
Speaker 1: the hard problem of consciousness or experience, will never be
Speaker 1: solved by humans. In other words, while we may learn
Speaker 1: more and more about the brain and the individual functions
Speaker 1: of the brain, we're just never really going to be
Speaker 1: able to understand the origins of this, uh, this complex
Speaker 1: final product of brain called experience. So there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways you could arrive at this conclusion.
Speaker 1: There might be some people who could see like a
Speaker 1: technical problem with the inquiry or the questions, say you're
Speaker 1: not framing it right. Or they might define consciousness in
Speaker 1: such a way that makes the search for a mechanism impossible.
Speaker 1: Or you could have duellists who that means somebody who
Speaker 1: thinks that the mind and the brain are actually separate substances.
Speaker 1: There's like a soul or an over spirit, some kind
Speaker 1: of other spiritual thing that controls consciousness and it's just
Speaker 1: not found in the brain. Or you might have people
Speaker 1: who accept the problem and the framing of the question
Speaker 1: and they agree that there might be a physical basis
Speaker 1: for the mind, but they just simply don't think that
Speaker 1: human minds are capable of solving the task. So, for
Speaker 1: an example of the final one, I found a quote
Speaker 1: by the British philosopher Colin McGinn in a two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve piece for The New Statesman called all Machine and
Speaker 1: No Ghost question mark um. So he says, paleo anthropologist
Speaker 1: have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from
Speaker 1: ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centering on
Speaker 1: the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and
Speaker 1: constrained to the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls,
Speaker 1: as the lifestyle of other species form their set of
Speaker 1: cognitive skills. Chance is there that an intelligence geared to
Speaker 1: making stone tools and grounded in the contingent particularities of
Speaker 1: the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe. Can omniscient spring from an opposable thumb?
Speaker 1: It seems unlikely, So why presume that the mysteries of
Speaker 1: consciousness will be revealed to a thumb shaped brain like ours?
Speaker 1: The quote mysterianism unquote I advocate, is really nothing more
Speaker 1: than the acknowledgement that human intelligence is a local, contingent temporal,
Speaker 1: practical and expendable feature of life on Earth, and incremental
Speaker 1: adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one
Speaker 1: would regard as fairly omniscient. Um I would argue that
Speaker 1: just his ability to frame it in such a way
Speaker 1: kind of dismisses his own argument at some extent, because
Speaker 1: what sort of how would you how would you say
Speaker 1: that if you take his premise that that you know,
Speaker 1: all of our achievement is and I know he's making
Speaker 1: a point, he's oversimplifying, but if you take this premise
Speaker 1: that a lot of our achievements are all due to
Speaker 1: this whole opposable thumb approach, you would never have reached
Speaker 1: a point where you could even frame an argument in
Speaker 1: that sense. It's I think it helps disprove itself. I
Speaker 1: get it. It's sort of an agnosticism of of we
Speaker 1: don't know and we can't know. I find that I
Speaker 1: find that personally a little pessimistic. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: of some of the achievements that have we have already
Speaker 1: as a species scene I mean not even recent ones,
Speaker 1: I'm talking throughout all of human history. That to me
Speaker 1: suggest that you should never really underestimate human ability and achievement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to dismiss this point of view out
Speaker 1: of hand. At the point of view express McGain in
Speaker 1: the quote, I read like, I think there's some intelligence
Speaker 1: behind it, that there is some interesting thinking. But in
Speaker 1: the end I can't really go along with Yeah, I
Speaker 1: apprec sheet what he's saying, and and let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and say this. I am absolutely certain that he is
Speaker 1: far more intelligent than I am. I do not I
Speaker 1: do not mean to suggest otherwise, I just do do
Speaker 1: not agree with that particular philosophy. Well as as science
Speaker 1: minded people, or rather to science minded people and some
Speaker 1: kind of weird automaton um, we we have to believe that,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we like to believe generally that
Speaker 1: science is going to come up with answers. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: mysteries of the universe. So I guess that forces us
Speaker 1: to ask the question, has science found anything interesting that
Speaker 1: might bear on this question? So? Is there anything we
Speaker 1: can come back that the mysteriens with right now? Well,
Speaker 1: before we get into that, let's first just address the
Speaker 1: fact that this has been a difficult problem for science,
Speaker 1: not just for philosophy, because the human brain, as we
Speaker 1: have discussed in previous episodes of forward thinking is a
Speaker 1: complex little critter and too kind of Devil's advocate for yes,
Speaker 1: I've verb that now and all the time. Please please
Speaker 1: that advocate devilishly Lauren for the point of view that
Speaker 1: we can't figure this kind of thing out. We certainly
Speaker 1: haven't yet, Like we've got a few leads and there's
Speaker 1: one in specific that we're going to be talking about.
Speaker 1: But but there's so much, so much about the brain
Speaker 1: that we don't know. Yeah. I described it in the
Speaker 1: episode as if we have a general map that's missing
Speaker 1: tons of detail. So we have we know the general
Speaker 1: parameters of the human brain, we know some of the regions.
Speaker 1: We know what some of the regions do, or at
Speaker 1: least we have very strong evidence supporting what those regions
Speaker 1: of the brain do. But when you start getting beyond that,
Speaker 1: it gets really murky, really fast. And it's not like
Speaker 1: one of the GPS units is down or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's more like there be dragons exactly. This is this
Speaker 1: is the earliest days when cartographers were making observations of
Speaker 1: landscapes and doing their best to represent that so that
Speaker 1: future generations won't run their their ships upon the breakers. Right,
Speaker 1: They're not they That's the whole kind of place we're
Speaker 1: in neurologically speaking, as far as brain science goes. That's
Speaker 1: not to say that we don't have top scientists working
Speaker 1: on right now. We do, but it is one of
Speaker 1: those things where we can't just easily say this is
Speaker 1: exactly how this particular brain function works. I mean, in
Speaker 1: our discussion about memory, we talked about how we've made
Speaker 1: a lot of of progress towards understanding memory, but that's
Speaker 1: just progress toward it. We don't have a full working
Speaker 1: like documents saying this is how we encode and uh
Speaker 1: and decode memory, how we recall memory, how we re
Speaker 1: encoded so that we can recall it again later, and
Speaker 1: exactly what the mechanism is. If we had that and
Speaker 1: we knew exactly how it worked, we could probably even
Speaker 1: work on ways to improve memory so that it's actually reliable.
Speaker 1: But but you know, we we can't, So we have
Speaker 1: to first be completely honest about that that the brain
Speaker 1: is still very much at large a thing of mystery
Speaker 1: to us. One of the other things I think we
Speaker 1: should acknowledge is the limitations that some are practical, some
Speaker 1: might be ethical on what we can do with the brain.
Speaker 1: I mean, so you can do f M R. I.
Speaker 1: You can put somebody in a scanner and look at
Speaker 1: which parts of the brain are getting blood flow and
Speaker 1: lighting up with activity. You can do experiments like that,
Speaker 1: But those kinds of experiments only show you so much, right,
Speaker 1: And to get really into the nitty and or a
Speaker 1: gritty of the brain, one often has to pop the top,
Speaker 1: as in, remove part of the skull and put some
Speaker 1: probes on in there and chemical sensors. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta, you gotta zapps themselves essentially, is what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. And here's the issue here. Um, it's
Speaker 1: hard to get people to volunteer to be part of
Speaker 1: such an experiment. Yeah, that's not a nice thing to
Speaker 1: do to somebody unless they've agreed to it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're right, So if you're not, if they haven't agreed
Speaker 1: to it, and and be right, that's not really my
Speaker 1: idea of a fun Tuesday, right, If I'm if I'm
Speaker 1: going like I think about, I take the train to
Speaker 1: and from work, right, And every time I take the train,
Speaker 1: there's always some advertisements somewhere for some sort of medical study,
Speaker 1: and they're targeting students mainly who are able to have
Speaker 1: the time and the willingness to put themselves through some
Speaker 1: sort of study, and they get a small compensation for
Speaker 1: doing so. I cannot imagine a compensation great enough for
Speaker 1: your average students to say, yeah, I don't mind if
Speaker 1: you shave my head, cut open my skull and start
Speaker 1: a probe and mess around. So it's really hard to
Speaker 1: do fundamental research on living brains in an ethical and
Speaker 1: responsible way. So that's one of the big reasons why
Speaker 1: are our our knowledge is so limited. It's that practically speaking,
Speaker 1: it's hard to do. So that being said, we can
Speaker 1: we can definitely talk about some efforts that science has
Speaker 1: made in order to really understand consciousness, and one of
Speaker 1: them totally blows my mind. Are Yeah, our our buddy
Speaker 1: tech Mark, Max tech Mark of m I T. By buddy,
Speaker 1: I mean someone that has no idea who we are,
Speaker 1: and we have never met. But Max tech Mark of
Speaker 1: m I T has proposed that we think of consciousness
Speaker 1: as a new state of matter. So we've got you know,
Speaker 1: we've got solid liquid gas plasma consciousness. Yeah. So he
Speaker 1: he has proposed a let's let's call it a hypothetical
Speaker 1: form of of matter called he Yeah, he calls it
Speaker 1: a hypothesis. He's not saying there really is. But it's
Speaker 1: called perceptonium, which, like an obtanium and transformium, is largely
Speaker 1: an imaginary substance. But the reason why he proposes it
Speaker 1: is so that scientists can start to think about consciousness
Speaker 1: as if it is a physical substance in order to
Speaker 1: start applying various scientific and mathematical principles to the various
Speaker 1: elements of consciousness. It's really all about, Yeah, it's sort
Speaker 1: of the same way that dark energy, dark matter, or
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson until we discovered it, not not us personally.
Speaker 1: I mean, we were busy that day, I didn't know,
Speaker 1: but scientists discovered it. So it's really a placeholder. But
Speaker 1: it's meant to be something that allows scientists to kind
Speaker 1: of conceive of consciousness in a way that makes it
Speaker 1: more uh more solid in a way, an idea where
Speaker 1: they can actually start forming various scientists think theories about
Speaker 1: it and testing them. I think what he sort of
Speaker 1: said he wanted was to create a framework where we
Speaker 1: could do mathematics with respect to thinking. Yeah, the idea
Speaker 1: of exploring how the physical laws of the universe themselves
Speaker 1: could give rise to consciousness and also ultimately allow us
Speaker 1: to better understand how it is we perceive the world
Speaker 1: the way we do and why we do. And by
Speaker 1: the way, if you guys listening at home ever here
Speaker 1: any rumbling. We're doing this apparently in the middle of
Speaker 1: an amazing thunderstorm that I don't I don't suggest that
Speaker 1: such thunderstorm is conscious by the way, I well, I okay,
Speaker 1: we can agree to discree. Yeah, if you're a panpsychist,
Speaker 1: you might think that that that cloud has some rudimentary
Speaker 1: form of consciousness at any rate. Um, okay. So we've
Speaker 1: been talking about consciousness as with the potential that it
Speaker 1: is a physical bit of matter. Perhaps, so if it's
Speaker 1: a physical thing, and if perhaps it operates vaguely like computers,
Speaker 1: does it have an on off switch. That's a interesting
Speaker 1: question that you asked, and I'm glad you did, because
Speaker 1: the answer appears to be maybe. I'm definitely hedging my
Speaker 1: bets on this one, because, as you'll see when we
Speaker 1: talk about this case, there are a lot of things
Speaker 1: you have to take into consideration, which means that making
Speaker 1: any kind of yes or no statement would be uh premature.
Speaker 1: As a preface, Yeah, We're about to tell you a
Speaker 1: story that is very interesting, but we don't know for
Speaker 1: sure if it means what we think it means, but
Speaker 1: it's certainly exciting. So here here's the story. Once upon
Speaker 1: a time, there was a team of doctors who were
Speaker 1: working at George Washington University, and they were working with
Speaker 1: a patient who suffered from epilepsy. Now, epilepsy is call
Speaker 1: caused by having abnormal activity in the brain. The neurons
Speaker 1: fire abnormally. Usually you can think of it as, uh,
Speaker 1: just an overload of of discharging neurons in a way,
Speaker 1: and it manifests itself in various types of symptoms. Not
Speaker 1: all of them are the dramatic seizures that we often
Speaker 1: think of as an epileptic fit. Some of them are
Speaker 1: things where someone just loses focus, but it often will
Speaker 1: be accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Now, these doctors
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily looking for anything that had to relate to consciousness.
Speaker 1: What they were looking for was what part of the
Speaker 1: this patient's brain was responsible for triggering these seizures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were doing a case study, so they were kind
Speaker 1: of basically poking around and stimulating different bits of her
Speaker 1: brain exactly in order to kind of see what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of uh it makes me think of the
Speaker 1: scene and buckeru an Zai where they're performing brain surgery
Speaker 1: and Buck rubonds I says to one of his fellow surgeons, No, no,
Speaker 1: don't touch that. You never know what's connected to uh So,
Speaker 1: in this case, what they were doing was they were stimulating,
Speaker 1: like you said, different regions of the brain, and at
Speaker 1: one point they reach a part of the brain called
Speaker 1: the clostrum, and when they used the the electrodes to
Speaker 1: stimulate that part of the brain, the patient would stop
Speaker 1: whatever she was doing. She would gradually lose consciousness. It
Speaker 1: didn't sound like it was a instant thing. It sounded
Speaker 1: more like it was a process. So she would lose
Speaker 1: consciousness and then just sort of stare off into the distance,
Speaker 1: not at anything in particular, until they stopped stimulating that
Speaker 1: part of the brain, in which case she would recover
Speaker 1: but have no recollection of the moments that had passed
Speaker 1: while that part of our brain was being stimulated, almost
Speaker 1: as if it had just never happened. Yeah. So, if
Speaker 1: anyone's ever had one of those moments where know, you've
Speaker 1: blacked out for one reason or another. It could be
Speaker 1: a reaction to medication. It could be head trauma, it
Speaker 1: could be an epileptic seizure. Whatever. If it's one of
Speaker 1: those moments where you aren't now alert, you remember exactly
Speaker 1: what you were doing before you had that moment, but
Speaker 1: you have no recollection of what happened in between, and
Speaker 1: other people have to tell you, and you just have
Speaker 1: to go on what they said, that's what was going
Speaker 1: on scientifically in the lab at this moment. And again
Speaker 1: the doctors were not looking for this. They just happened
Speaker 1: to stumble upon it. And so it was at that
Speaker 1: point where they said, you know, it's possible that the clostroum,
Speaker 1: this thin membrane it's under the neo cortex in the brain,
Speaker 1: this thin membrane, it may be the key, the on
Speaker 1: off switch for consciousness. Not to say that it's ultimately
Speaker 1: responsible for what we call consciousness, but it might be
Speaker 1: one element that without it you can't have consciousness. It
Speaker 1: doesn't It might be like the lynch pen that ties
Speaker 1: everything together. Right, because there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: ways of explaining what consciousness exactly would be, or if
Speaker 1: it would have a location within the brain. But in
Speaker 1: an interesting way, of thinking about it is okay. So
Speaker 1: you have lots of different things going on in your
Speaker 1: brain at any given time. You're processing visual data, you're
Speaker 1: processing auditory data, you're accessing memories from the past, you
Speaker 1: are having motor control, you're speaking, and somehow all of
Speaker 1: these things come together in our brain to create this
Speaker 1: thing we think of as experience. But all of these
Speaker 1: things are separate. So what's combining them for us in
Speaker 1: this way? What's creating the thing that that that makes
Speaker 1: a continuous, conscious, single experience. It could be that there
Speaker 1: is one organ in the brain that takes everything and
Speaker 1: smashes it together and makes you an experience, and previous
Speaker 1: research has suggested that that thing might in fact be
Speaker 1: the class stroom. Uh. Back in two thousand four, Francis Krick,
Speaker 1: who's one of the guys who helped sess out the
Speaker 1: structure of DNA back in the nineteen fifties along with
Speaker 1: Christoph Koke, who is a prominent neuroscientist, noted that the
Speaker 1: classroom receives input from and projects output to almost all
Speaker 1: of the regions of the cortex, and they speculated that
Speaker 1: if you know, the philosophical concept of consciousness is indeed
Speaker 1: the sum of cooperative activity of the senses and the
Speaker 1: nervous system together that the classroom might be certainly worth
Speaker 1: further study. This was backed up in when another group
Speaker 1: of researchers published a paper hypothesizing that, I mean, well,
Speaker 1: basically that these guys were correct based on studies that
Speaker 1: they did of signals that were being relayed into and
Speaker 1: out of the classroom. They observed it receiving signals from
Speaker 1: from several areas of the brain and sending signals out
Speaker 1: specifically to the motor cortex, and so therefore thought that
Speaker 1: it might be controlling lots of interactive process is through
Speaker 1: the brain and voluntary behavior as well. Um, they were
Speaker 1: a little bit less philosophical about it than some of
Speaker 1: the other people we've been talking about. They kind of
Speaker 1: concluded that the classrooms control quote, may include the neural
Speaker 1: correlates of consciousness. But but that's still, I mean, for
Speaker 1: science duds, pretty pretty high philosophical. Y. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's that's proper scientific rhetorical humility. Right, Yes. And so
Speaker 1: this this result here, you know, I hesitated. I can't
Speaker 1: really call it a study because again, that wasn't necessarily
Speaker 1: what they were looking for. But this result that the
Speaker 1: doctors found at George Washington University. Yeah, uh, that that
Speaker 1: seems to again give more evidence for support for that
Speaker 1: particular point of view. Uh, it definitely feels like this
Speaker 1: gives more support for that the idea that consciousness is
Speaker 1: a manifestation of neurophysical processes, that there is something to
Speaker 1: do with the rain, that the mind and the brain
Speaker 1: are one and the same, the mind itself as a
Speaker 1: manifestation of the brain. That's what it seems to support. Now,
Speaker 1: all that being said, here are some of those facts
Speaker 1: that we we mentioned at the top. We were going
Speaker 1: to have to bring into context in this discussion because
Speaker 1: you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based upon this
Speaker 1: one incident, right, This this was a case study, and
Speaker 1: a case study, if you have never heard that particular
Speaker 1: medical term before, means that you are looking at a
Speaker 1: single patient at a single point in time, and you're
Speaker 1: not even trying to draw any other data into the argument. Right. So,
Speaker 1: when you have a a you know, it's a nifty observation. Right,
Speaker 1: You've got one example and that's it. Uh. So that
Speaker 1: means that, first of all, you can't definitely conclude that
Speaker 1: that one example is representative of everyone's experience as a whole. Right, Also,
Speaker 1: it makes a really boring chart. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's well, you have a right because the one person participants, Yeah,
Speaker 1: of one participant. Yeah, So you have to keep in
Speaker 1: mind the sample sizes a sample size of one, so
Speaker 1: you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based on the
Speaker 1: sample size of one. On top of that, I think
Speaker 1: I read somewhere, Jonathan, you might be able to confirm
Speaker 1: this that this particular patient's brain was probably not what
Speaker 1: we would call typical. Right. She had had a previous
Speaker 1: surgical procedure done where part of her hippocampus had been removed. Now,
Speaker 1: the hippocampus, as we've discussed in our optogenetics episode, is
Speaker 1: the part of the brain that's associated with forming memory,
Speaker 1: and so she had had part of that removed in
Speaker 1: a previous surgery, So her experience may not be typical
Speaker 1: of someone else's experience for that reason as well. Also,
Speaker 1: I mean she had a pre existing neurological condition suffering
Speaker 1: from So it might be that this particular individual's brain
Speaker 1: is affected by stuff in the way that somebody else's
Speaker 1: brain might not be. Right, So you have to take
Speaker 1: all those sort of caveats into mind before you you
Speaker 1: go any further, and to make matters more complicated, we
Speaker 1: get back round to that problem we mentioned earlier. To
Speaker 1: do further study would require some pretty invasive procedures, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like we can easily say, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: get Jim in here and let's find out if it
Speaker 1: works on him too. Yeah, yeah, I'm really interested in this.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to sign up for that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense in this case because this
Speaker 1: was sort of a byproduct of attempted therapy, right right.
Speaker 1: This wasn't This wasn't a case of, well, this person
Speaker 1: has is already in this particular situation, let's see if
Speaker 1: we can get them to agree to help us just
Speaker 1: do some exploratory research. That wasn't the case. The case
Speaker 1: was they were specifically trying to make this woman's life better.
Speaker 1: They're trying to figure out what is it that's causing
Speaker 1: these epileptic seizures, so we can understand that better and
Speaker 1: not only help her, but potentially, if we learn enough
Speaker 1: about epilepsy and general help future people who suffer from epilepsy.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out, this study might help even
Speaker 1: more people than that. Yeah, as it turns out, if
Speaker 1: in fact, this cloths Stroum ends up being that on
Speaker 1: off switch, if it ends up being the kind of
Speaker 1: the gateway for us to understand more scientifically about what
Speaker 1: consciousness is and its role and and how the mechanisms work.
Speaker 1: You know, not saying we're there yet, but if this
Speaker 1: happens to lead to more research that does extend that understanding,
Speaker 1: we might be able to see some practical applications that
Speaker 1: could demonstrably make people's lives better. For example, there are
Speaker 1: people who suffer various ailments that impact their ability to
Speaker 1: have awareness of themselves and the environment around them, for exactly,
Speaker 1: people who are in a comatose state. And it may
Speaker 1: be that by understanding more about the mechanisms of consciousness
Speaker 1: we can create new therapies that would help people come
Speaker 1: out of komato states, or people who have suffered from amnesia,
Speaker 1: which you know, it sounds pretty similar. The idea that
Speaker 1: you have lost big blocks of time you have no
Speaker 1: recollection of it kind of coincides with this idea of well,
Speaker 1: when you are unconscious, you're not collecting memories anymore. So
Speaker 1: maybe there's another relationship there in a relationship between memory
Speaker 1: and consciousness that we could further explore and perhaps help
Speaker 1: people who have suffered from these kind of these kind
Speaker 1: of ailments. One thing that I thought was really interesting
Speaker 1: and might bear on the potential applications is the distinction
Speaker 1: that you noted here in the notes, and I think
Speaker 1: it's a good one to make between wakefulness and consciousness. Right.
Speaker 1: This was something that was observed in this particular case. Right,
Speaker 1: it's the idea that being awake and being conscious are
Speaker 1: different things. You might say an even kind of a
Speaker 1: weird way that you could be considered conscious while you're asleep,
Speaker 1: say if you're having dreams or something. Right that you're
Speaker 1: you're still having an experience. So what if you were
Speaker 1: to flip that just say that you are in fact awake,
Speaker 1: but you're not conscious. And that was one of those
Speaker 1: things that has been a matter of debate and philosophy
Speaker 1: for for generations. Right. The idea a lot of philosophers
Speaker 1: kind of combined wakefulness and consciousness as very much inter
Speaker 1: related and that you could not have you couldn't you
Speaker 1: couldn't have consciousness without wakefulness, was the idea. But apparently
Speaker 1: you can have wakefulness without consciousness. Now, philosophically, perhaps you
Speaker 1: would debate whether or not the patient was truly wakeful, right,
Speaker 1: she was not asleep, But words, that's what philosophy does. No, No,
Speaker 1: I know, yeah. I mean if you wanted to define
Speaker 1: wakefulness is say, being able to say, have motor control
Speaker 1: like you you can say words. Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: if people do that in their sleep. It is hard
Speaker 1: to define. Brain stuff is tricky, yo. That was going
Speaker 1: to be the alternate title of this particular episode, brain
Speaker 1: stuff is tricky, yo, But I figured I could not
Speaker 1: pull that off. But all of all of that aside,
Speaker 1: even this research could help with the originally intended study. Um.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, the patient's loss of consciousness was
Speaker 1: associated with increased synchronized activity across a few different parts
Speaker 1: of her brain, and as we mentioned earlier, kind of
Speaker 1: similar things happened during epileptic seizures, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: an overwhelming electrical bit in the brain that happens. Okay. Um,
Speaker 1: So the researchers think that minor synchronized activity means the
Speaker 1: brain is binding different aspects of an experience together, but
Speaker 1: that too much here might be overwhelming and disrupt the
Speaker 1: cohesion of thoughts or even consciousness as a whole. So
Speaker 1: up next in the future there going to be investigating
Speaker 1: whether a more mild stimulus to the region might kind
Speaker 1: of jolt the brain activity back to normal and prevent
Speaker 1: the seizure from interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, sort of like
Speaker 1: a pacemaker for seizures. Wow. And then on top of that,
Speaker 1: our understanding of consciousness could extend beyond humans. We may
Speaker 1: be able to start looking at the concept of consciousness
Speaker 1: as it applies to other organisms. Yeah, because all of
Speaker 1: the mammals whose brains we've investigated so far have a classroom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that some animals probably don't write. Yeah, so non mammals
Speaker 1: may not have this. And so the question is, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, if you have to, you have to
Speaker 1: assume that the classroom does in fact play a key
Speaker 1: role in conscious discover that. Ye. So if that holds true,
Speaker 1: then does that mean that mammals have at least some
Speaker 1: level of consciousness? And again, this may mean that we
Speaker 1: have to start better defining what consciousness is, perhaps creating
Speaker 1: a spectrum of consciousness and whether you know, when you
Speaker 1: say an animal is conscious, what does that actually mean
Speaker 1: in in the within the spectrum right, Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: really interesting to have this very concrete thing to look
Speaker 1: at as opposed to previous tests of consciousness that are
Speaker 1: a little bit more psychological. Um. There's, for example, what's
Speaker 1: called the mirror test, wherein you take a critter put
Speaker 1: a glob of something on its face sticking in front
Speaker 1: of a mirror. If the critter tries to wipe the
Speaker 1: thing off of its face, that means that it is
Speaker 1: recognizing itself in the mirror, uh, and realizing that it's
Speaker 1: got something there, and it's going like I get it off,
Speaker 1: get it up, as opposed to either thinking that whatever
Speaker 1: the thing is in the mirror is another creature or
Speaker 1: not recognizing it as something at all, right, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: And there are a few animals that can pass this
Speaker 1: mirror test, the great apes, dolphins, uh, orca elephants, and
Speaker 1: the European magpie. Actually, so one bird is in there
Speaker 1: as well. Interesting. But you know that's not always a
Speaker 1: terrific test, even for for all animals. Like if you
Speaker 1: did that to an octopus, it would fail the test. However,
Speaker 1: OCTOPI use tools and they show amazing ingenuity, yeah, problem
Speaker 1: solving skills. Yeah, and some might even I think question
Speaker 1: the definition of consciousness that's being approached there. I mean
Speaker 1: that seems to raise that that difference between consciousness and
Speaker 1: self consciousness, like is one having an experience versus is one, uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, having an image of the cell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: an awareness of the self in some form. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: this is where it gets all super fuzzy. Um. Not
Speaker 1: to mention some of the animals are also super fuzzy.
Speaker 1: They are then, especially octopy. So so the way I
Speaker 1: concluded the episode of the video episode is really how
Speaker 1: we're going to kind of wrap up this one to
Speaker 1: the idea that if we are in act on the
Speaker 1: pathway to getting a better grip scientifically speaking on the
Speaker 1: mechanisms of consciousness, if we get to a point where, uh,
Speaker 1: let's say ten to twenty years or however whatever you know,
Speaker 1: the the ex unit of time that means a long
Speaker 1: time from now, but not so long as right that's
Speaker 1: somewhere in that time frame, we get to a point
Speaker 1: where we have a really keen understanding of what's going
Speaker 1: on within the brain as far as consciousness is concerned.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like that far of a stretch. Granted,
Speaker 1: right now, we don't know anything, but that far of
Speaker 1: a stretch that we might be able to replicate that,
Speaker 1: to simulate that in some way, and then to give
Speaker 1: that that state to an artificial being, a machine and
Speaker 1: have machine consciousness kind of scary. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the big limitations right now that people say they're to
Speaker 1: having like an artificially intelligent machine that has that strong
Speaker 1: AI human like intelligence, which for a lot of people
Speaker 1: also includes this idea of sentience and self awareness. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have to have that, but for a lot of
Speaker 1: people's concept that usually goes hand in hand that a
Speaker 1: lot of people say, well, that's almost impossible to do
Speaker 1: because we don't understand it in ourselves. But it could
Speaker 1: be that the stuff we're seeing today is just that
Speaker 1: that gentle creak of the door opening, just a little
Speaker 1: tiny crack, and that maybe in a few decades we'll
Speaker 1: have actually understood enough where that will no longer be
Speaker 1: the limiting factor. Now, there may be some other limiting
Speaker 1: factor that eventually tells us we cannot create a simulation
Speaker 1: of this. But the interesting thing here is saying, look,
Speaker 1: we're starting to learn things scientifically about consciousness. And this
Speaker 1: was something that some philosophers thought was an impossibility, so
Speaker 1: I find it really exciting. I did try and and
Speaker 1: caution people saying this is the stuff is years or
Speaker 1: decades away from it ever being something that is practical,
Speaker 1: practical in any any use, because we're we don't even
Speaker 1: know what we know yet, and until we have that settled,
Speaker 1: we can't start building on it. But it is really exciting.
Speaker 1: Anyone anything else you guys want to add before we
Speaker 1: try and brave the terrible uh tsunami that's outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so too. I'm actually feeling pretty good about
Speaker 1: it right now, which is kind of why I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: there's a break in the clouds. We should conclude and
Speaker 1: get out of here alright. So on that note, ladies
Speaker 1: and gentlemen, remember if you have any suggestions for future episodes,
Speaker 1: or any questions for us anything like that, let us
Speaker 1: know on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Our handle at
Speaker 1: all three is f W Thinking and we will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. For more on this topic
Speaker 1: in the future of technology, it forward thinking dot com
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