Speaker 1: Because with heat, now that you really do have something
Speaker 1: for which measurement was absolutely critical, and which when reliable
Speaker 1: measurements were possible, he became expressible along a single dimension.
Speaker 1: Life is not the kind of thing that is measured
Speaker 1: on a single scale. And that's fine. That's just the
Speaker 1: kind of thing life is. And I suspect consciousness maybe
Speaker 1: more like life than like temperature. Hello, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome doctor Arnold Seth on
Speaker 1: the show. Doctor Arnold Seth is the Professor of cognitive
Speaker 1: and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he's
Speaker 1: also co director of the Saker Center for Consciousness Science.
Speaker 1: His research has been supported by the European Research Council,
Speaker 1: the Welcome Trust, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Speaker 1: Doctor Seth's twenty seventeen Mean Stage TED talk is one
Speaker 1: of the most popular science ted talks of all time,
Speaker 1: with more than thirteen million views. His latest book, which
Speaker 1: has received numerous accolades, is called Being You, a New
Speaker 1: Science of Consciousness. In this episode, I talked to doctor
Speaker 1: Anil Seth about the new science of consciousness. Although we
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how or why consciousness exists. Doctor Seth
Speaker 1: thinks this shouldn't stop us from exploring its properties. One
Speaker 1: of the things he explores in his research is the
Speaker 1: conditions for consciousness. He talks about a concept called perceptual diversity.
Speaker 1: He believes perceptual diversity exists and that we would be
Speaker 1: misguided to try and standardize consciousness on a single dimension
Speaker 1: for everyone. We also touch on the topics of intelligence, panpsychism,
Speaker 1: free will, AI, technology, and the afterlife. This was a
Speaker 1: really poignant episode for me and very informative. I've been
Speaker 1: willing to chat with doctor Seth for a really long time.
Speaker 1: We have mutual friends in common, we have a mutual
Speaker 1: mentor doctor Nicholas Macintosh in common, and we really were
Speaker 1: in full geek out mode in this episode. So I
Speaker 1: think you'll really gain a lot from it and learn
Speaker 1: a lot about his roundbreaking research on the nature of consciousness.
Speaker 1: So that further ado I bring you Doctor Unill Seth.
Speaker 1: It's nice to finally meet you. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, people in our in our circle, and
Speaker 1: and lots of mutual interests. There are so many things
Speaker 1: we could talk about today, and I promise you will
Speaker 1: get to some of your most the things that are
Speaker 1: most pressing on your mind these days. Actually know, I
Speaker 1: know what things are most pressing on your mind these days,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to it. So have patience. We'll get there.
Speaker 1: But i'd great to start just a little bit more
Speaker 1: rudimentary if you don't mind for list, of course, buy
Speaker 1: more rudimentary. I'm going to ask you, what do you
Speaker 1: think is the real hard problem of consciousness. That's what
Speaker 1: I mean by more rudimentary, the real hard problem with consciousness.
Speaker 1: That is actually a new one on me. I mean
Speaker 1: there's the hard problem and the easy problems, which David
Speaker 1: Chalmers is famous for coining these terms, and the real
Speaker 1: problem is somewhere in the middle. So the heart problem,
Speaker 1: paneling David Chalmers, is the problem of how and why
Speaker 1: is it the case that any physical system system made
Speaker 1: of stuff, whether that stuff is neurons or whether that
Speaker 1: stuff might be silicon. Now, any kind of physical system
Speaker 1: could give rise the conscious experience, the cycled qualitia that
Speaker 1: the redness have read, the feeling of anything. How can
Speaker 1: physical systems give rise to consciousness? The easy problems are
Speaker 1: all the problems in neuroscience of how the brain works
Speaker 1: as a physical system. How its inputs get transformed into
Speaker 1: outputs through complicated circuitry, and the intuition in dividing things
Speaker 1: up this way the gamers at any rate, is that
Speaker 1: solving all the easy problems of neuroscience, which of course
Speaker 1: aren't easy at all. They're incredibly challenging to do. But
Speaker 1: even at the end of neuroscience, the hard problem would
Speaker 1: still seem as pristine and as mysterious as ever, This
Speaker 1: big explanatory gap would still be there between the physical
Speaker 1: and the experiential, the phenomenal, the consciousness. And I tend
Speaker 1: to resist this idea that you can cleave consciousness off
Speaker 1: as one big scary mystery from all the other problems
Speaker 1: of neuroscience. The issue with the easier science would say it, maybe,
Speaker 1: but I think the issue is that we can still
Speaker 1: address many things about consciousness without necessarily facing the hard
Speaker 1: problem head on. I like to think of this analogy
Speaker 1: with life. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think
Speaker 1: it's illustrative. Which is, wasn't that long ago that biologists
Speaker 1: and chemist physicists of the day thought that life couldn't
Speaker 1: be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, in terms
Speaker 1: of things happening in physical systems. There was this hard
Speaker 1: problem of life, and in search of an answer, people
Speaker 1: were proposing things like, well, there must be an immaterial
Speaker 1: spark of life on details something like that that breeds
Speaker 1: fire into physical systems to bring them to life. And
Speaker 1: of course that wasn't how things panned out in biology.
Speaker 1: People didn't find the spark of life. They instead didn't
Speaker 1: even look for it. They said, Okay, life exists, there
Speaker 1: are living systems, they have various properties. Let's try and
Speaker 1: explain those properties. And as they did this, the hard
Speaker 1: problem of life baded away and it became less mysterious
Speaker 1: and eventually just disappeared. It was never solved directly. And
Speaker 1: I think the same strategy is what might work in consciousness.
Speaker 1: And that's what I coin or describe as the real
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, but instead of
Speaker 1: looking for the spark of consciousness, let's identify the various
Speaker 1: properties that consciousness has. And these can be both functional
Speaker 1: properties what can we do and other creatures do in
Speaker 1: virtue of being conscious? But crucially they can also be
Speaker 1: experiential or the longer word phenomenological. Why visual experience is
Speaker 1: the way it is and different from an emotional experience,
Speaker 1: the things that really capture the experiential aspects of consciousness.
Speaker 1: And as we can sort of explain those things why
Speaker 1: particular conscious experiences are the way they are and not
Speaker 1: some other way, then the hope is that this hard
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness will begin to fade away too. Whether
Speaker 1: it dissolves entirely in a puff of philosophical smoke or not,
Speaker 1: that's hard to say in advance. But rather than presuming
Speaker 1: one way or the other, I think we have to
Speaker 1: do the hard work of trying to build explanations about
Speaker 1: the properties of consciousness in terms of processes in the
Speaker 1: brain and the body and see how far we get. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like how you integrate lots of different areas of
Speaker 1: psychology and different way levels of analysis. That always seemed
Speaker 1: like the obviously right approach when when I look at
Speaker 1: just correlations between brain you know, quality and raining activations
Speaker 1: and and and kind of just stop there, and you know,
Speaker 1: and kind of triumphantly publishing your paper and saying we're done.
Speaker 1: You know that that never felt quite satisfying, never felt
Speaker 1: deeply satisfying. I'm a cognitive scientist, but I'm also a
Speaker 1: humanistic psychologist, and these are two areas I've been trying
Speaker 1: to combine, which I have I just don't see combined
Speaker 1: and and I see a little glimmer of it in
Speaker 1: your book with you know, you bring in a sort
Speaker 1: of a humanistic appreciation of inner experience and understanding and
Speaker 1: trying to understand different ways that it can it can
Speaker 1: be to it can feel to be alive, different ways
Speaker 1: it can feel to be alive. And to me, that's
Speaker 1: a humanistic approach. And I'm also a cognitive scientist, as
Speaker 1: are you. So I think we have lots to geek
Speaker 1: out on today. I'm glad to hear. I haven't heard
Speaker 1: the term humanistic psychologists before. But if it described what
Speaker 1: you just said, that an interest to focus in the
Speaker 1: lived experience of being a human being it is, then
Speaker 1: well then I think I agree, And I think there
Speaker 1: is this is the central question of understanding the nature
Speaker 1: of how we experience the world and the self. Is
Speaker 1: the overlap of this N diagram, Then I guess between
Speaker 1: humanistic psychology and cognitive science. I mean I started out
Speaker 1: when I was an undergraduate studying experimental psychology in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties. It was all very was a mixture of
Speaker 1: behavior isn't frankly still about just how we understand stimulus
Speaker 1: responses in rats and cognitive psychology, which at the time
Speaker 1: was very exciting, but it was all just boxes and
Speaker 1: arrows and the dominant metaphor of the brain as a
Speaker 1: computer and information processing happening. That was the basis for
Speaker 1: all the cognitive functions like memory and attention. Consciousness was
Speaker 1: just not there, and I suppose the lived experience of
Speaker 1: being human wasn't there either, So yeah, I think where
Speaker 1: these things come together, that that is the bullseye of
Speaker 1: my interest certainly. Yeah, and I hear you, by the way,
Speaker 1: I mean, I actually am and trained in the British
Speaker 1: tradition of of psychometrics and experimental psychology. I did my
Speaker 1: experimental psychology degree at Cambridge. Studying with Nicholas McIntosh was
Speaker 1: my way. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the same. He was
Speaker 1: my advisor to wait, no, get out of here, yeah
Speaker 1: you stay. Yeah. He was at King's College, he was
Speaker 1: the head of king Psychology, right, and he was at
Speaker 1: King's College, and that was my college. So that's my
Speaker 1: college privilege. That was amazing. As an undergraduate, we had
Speaker 1: this incredible privilege of being shooated by one of the
Speaker 1: most eminent psychologists of the of the twentieth century, although
Speaker 1: who I lighted it had a very different use from
Speaker 1: But I remember Nick Macintosh very very well. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: a guy. I had no idea that we had that
Speaker 1: connection in common, that was totally spontaneous. I not many
Speaker 1: people I could spontaneously say that we can bond over
Speaker 1: our wall of and appreciation and respect for Nichol's Macintosh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's He's been my main mentor in my life and
Speaker 1: in psychology. And what is cool about him is I mean,
Speaker 1: he came from a very traditional British behaviorist tradition with rats,
Speaker 1: you know, and operant conditioning, But what I studied with
Speaker 1: him was intelligence and IQ testing and the nature of
Speaker 1: human intelligence and and so, you know, trying to think
Speaker 1: a lot about some of the themes in your book,
Speaker 1: and how I very much agreed with this notion that
Speaker 1: the royal route to understand consciousness is probably not going
Speaker 1: to come simply through an understanding of information processing. I weok.
Speaker 1: I agreed with that one thousand percent. And that's probably
Speaker 1: because we're both the bulls by Nicolas Maagandize. That's so
Speaker 1: for you. I never thought of that possibility that indeed Macatinua,
Speaker 1: coming from a pre cognitive science era in many ways,
Speaker 1: was at least making us both implicitly aware that accepting
Speaker 1: all information processing metaphor was not necessary. There've been psychology
Speaker 1: before it that could be psychology after it too, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and also just not reducing consciousness to IQ type processing,
Speaker 1: because we can make computers very easily to solve like
Speaker 1: IQ test type items, you know, like you can you
Speaker 1: know Patricia Carpenter who was one of my other mentors
Speaker 1: at CARNEGIMIL and like she easily showed that you can
Speaker 1: make computer solve the Ravens Advanced Progressive Metricy's test, you know,
Speaker 1: like one of the gold standard measures of general and diligence.
Speaker 1: Not a big issue, not a big hard thing to do.
Speaker 1: But the question can you make computers conscious? You know?
Speaker 1: I mean it really does get the heart of what
Speaker 1: consciousness is. And you have a well, maybe I should
Speaker 1: ask you how do you conceptualize consciousness? Like what you
Speaker 1: what do you see as some of the necessary and
Speaker 1: some of the necessary we won't even say sufficient, but
Speaker 1: what are some of the necessary features of consciousness? Of
Speaker 1: human human conscious Let's start with human consciousness I did
Speaker 1: jump into the AI deep end, but I didn't mean
Speaker 1: to do that yet. Now I'm glad you did. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll get back to that, because it does
Speaker 1: the way we define consciousness as very immediate implications for
Speaker 1: how we might think about the possibility of machine consciousness
Speaker 1: or artificial intelligence is being conscious. But just stepping back
Speaker 1: then to the necessary components of consciousness, the humans at least, well,
Speaker 1: I think they're fairly minimal to describe. So this is
Speaker 1: this is the question of definition. And I've always been
Speaker 1: attracted by the definition that the philosopher Thomas Nagel uses
Speaker 1: when he says that for a conscious organism, whether this
Speaker 1: is a human or some other creature, it feels like
Speaker 1: something to be that organism, or rather, he says, there
Speaker 1: is something it is like to be that organism. There's
Speaker 1: something it's like to be me, there's something it's like
Speaker 1: to be you, But there's nothing it is like to
Speaker 1: be a table or a chair or a laptop computer.
Speaker 1: And this definition is super simple, right, It's just there's
Speaker 1: some kind of experiencing going on for a conscious system.
Speaker 1: And it seems on the face of it that this
Speaker 1: is too rudimentary to ballistic, almost circular to be of
Speaker 1: any use. But I think it's really useful because of
Speaker 1: what it leaves out It consciousness doesn't necessarily involve intelligence,
Speaker 1: at least not with human level intelligence. It doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: involve any specific kind of behavior, doesn't necessarily involve language,
Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily involve any particular function that we might
Speaker 1: describe as cognitive. It's just the presence of raw experience. Now,
Speaker 1: what the necessary conditions are in the stuff under the
Speaker 1: hood in terms of brain mechanisms and processes, well, that's
Speaker 1: still an open question. But just defining consciousness of that
Speaker 1: minimally in terms of any kind of experience going on
Speaker 1: at all, I think that's a helpful place to start,
Speaker 1: but that we don't get driven down avenues that seem
Speaker 1: more appealing because they're easy to study. It's tempting to
Speaker 1: associate consciousness with intelligence because, as you said with Nick Macintosh,
Speaker 1: we can write down various criteria for what intelligence consists
Speaker 1: in at least for humans, and we can define it
Speaker 1: functionally in terms of what systems do. And it's also
Speaker 1: tempting because of this residual human exceptionalism that I think
Speaker 1: Bill hard to get away from. This is the idea that, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're humans, we're special with at the center of everything,
Speaker 1: and we're intelligent. We have this this fantastic generalized intelligence,
Speaker 1: and so surely that must be associated with this other
Speaker 1: really special thing, precious thing for us, which is being conscious.
Speaker 1: And over history people have often used intelligence as a
Speaker 1: proxy for consciousness, and I think that's it's a real mistake.
Speaker 1: They're both fascinating, they're both very interesting, they're both actually
Speaker 1: quite poorly defined, but they're absolutely not the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'm getting a little bit of a pant psychism vibe
Speaker 1: from you as you say that. Do you are you
Speaker 1: like a big Are you a proponent of pant psychism? Oh? No,
Speaker 1: I don't think panpsychists see me as a particular ally.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of middle ground between not
Speaker 1: being sort of a human chauvinist but consciousness and being panpsychist.
Speaker 1: I don't find pan psychism very appealing at all. I
Speaker 1: think I just I think that it's an easy, kind
Speaker 1: of an easy out to the hard problem. If you're
Speaker 1: struggling to explain how it is that consciousness can be
Speaker 1: identical to or emerged from, material stuff, then well, of
Speaker 1: course you can just say, well, we don't have to
Speaker 1: explain that, because it's everywhere, in everything, ubiquitous and fundamental.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't really explain anything when you do that.
Speaker 1: It's I think an idea or a philosophical perspective in
Speaker 1: this area, or in any area of science, really is
Speaker 1: not judged so much by whether it's demonstrably right or wrong,
Speaker 1: because very few are. I mean, you can't prove pan
Speaker 1: psycheism right or wrong. You can't prove materialism right or wrong.
Speaker 1: But to take out belief out of the philosopher of
Speaker 1: science Inrey Lacotoche, he would evaluate programs based on how
Speaker 1: productive they are. It does a particular view generate testible
Speaker 1: hypotheses that shed light on the phenomenon in question. And
Speaker 1: here I think materialism has many resources to help us
Speaker 1: understand consciousness. I mean, this is the whole hope and
Speaker 1: agenda of this real problem approach, and of many other
Speaker 1: neuroscientists as well, who might not agree with the exact
Speaker 1: details of what I suggest, but broadly the idea that
Speaker 1: materialism can shed light on consciousness, whereas panpsychism just doesn't
Speaker 1: do this. It doesn't lead to any novel testable experiments,
Speaker 1: at least I haven't heard of any yet, and I
Speaker 1: can't quite see how it would because you take panpsychism
Speaker 1: really seriously, at least some of the most the nest
Speaker 1: expressions of it. And here I'm thinking about people like
Speaker 1: Philip Gough, who's I've argued with many times about panpsychism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he will say that that consciousness, in his view of panpsychism,
Speaker 1: is the intrinsic nature of things, and it's not really
Speaker 1: observable in any interactions between things. Yeah, and if it's
Speaker 1: not going to make any difference to anything that actually
Speaker 1: happens by definition, then it's you're just bootstrapping it away
Speaker 1: from any kind of testability or explanatory power. So no,
Speaker 1: I'm definitely not not a I'm not a great proponent
Speaker 1: of pansychism. It's safe to say, Yeah, I take that
Speaker 1: intuition back then, Yeah, because I mean you clearly in
Speaker 1: your book argued correct me if I'm wrong. It seems
Speaker 1: like you really believe life is a necessary condition for
Speaker 1: a consciousness. You know that almost sense I get? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I struck this was very interesting for me part of
Speaker 1: writing the book and just the evolution of how I've
Speaker 1: been thinking over the last ten years or so. I
Speaker 1: didn't set out with the idea that life would be
Speaker 1: so central, And it's kind of interesting when the experiments
Speaker 1: and the theories they lead you to somewhere where you
Speaker 1: don't expect to go at the beginning. Doesn't mean it's
Speaker 1: right or wrong. It just means that it's like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, this is interesting. This wasn't something that I
Speaker 1: just assumed beforehand. So the whole trajectory of ideas has
Speaker 1: led me to recognize a very intimate relationship between life
Speaker 1: and consciousness. And the more that relationship becomes fleshed out,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a strange metaphor. The more it
Speaker 1: becomes fleshed out, I think, the less appealing the information
Speaker 1: processing metaphor becomes. You can sort of see how it
Speaker 1: might be life rather than information processing that bridges this
Speaker 1: gap between the material and the phenomenlogical. But I'm still
Speaker 1: a bit cautious about how far to make claims for
Speaker 1: that relationship. So there is a version, or the equivalent
Speaker 1: rather of panzygism for this view would be biopsychism, and
Speaker 1: biopsychism is the view that everything that is alive is
Speaker 1: also conscious consciousness just is a ubiquitous property of living systems.
Speaker 1: I think that's going too far. It may be true,
Speaker 1: but I don't see a reason to believe that. Then
Speaker 1: there's the weaker position, which is biological naturalism what you
Speaker 1: just said, which is that life is necessary. Everything that
Speaker 1: is conscious is alive, but not sufficient, but not sufficient.
Speaker 1: And I'm tented by that, but I'm still you know,
Speaker 1: I'm still I still wonder. What I definitely think is
Speaker 1: the case, is that an understanding of consciousness as it's
Speaker 1: expressed in humans and other animals absolutely relies on looking
Speaker 1: at it through the lens of our nature as living systems,
Speaker 1: and that our nature's living systems shapes our conscious experiences
Speaker 1: at all levels. Let's see how far understanding neural activations
Speaker 1: can get us in answering some of those deep questions.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of debate in the field, as
Speaker 1: you know, about which are the most essential bits of
Speaker 1: the brain for consciousness. I mean, it's just all over
Speaker 1: the point. Everyone. It seems like almost every neuroscientist has
Speaker 1: their own favorite, you know, Like some people are like,
Speaker 1: it's the brainstem. My friend Daniel Bohr at University of
Speaker 1: Cambridge is like it's the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you read his book The Ravenous Brain
Speaker 1: by any chance. Yeah, No, Dan's a good friend of mine.
Speaker 1: In fact, question too. Yeah, there's another one. All right.
Speaker 1: So Dan was a post ug with me for a
Speaker 1: while many years ago, and yes, of course now he's
Speaker 1: the independent researcher for a long time. I read his
Speaker 1: book in the early early days. It's great. Actually, it's
Speaker 1: been around for a while. We wrote a paper together
Speaker 1: once actually about the neural correlative consciousness, exploring the more
Speaker 1: frontal parietal view. But what's fascinating to me is indeed,
Speaker 1: like out there there's the full range. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are people, as you say, like Mark Sims, who argue
Speaker 1: for the sufficient basis for consciousness being pretty much in
Speaker 1: the brain stem all the way to the advocates that
Speaker 1: that has made me in the prefrontal cortex. And then
Speaker 1: you've got range. You got the range. Yeah. So I'm
Speaker 1: just trying to I'm just trying to like just explore
Speaker 1: with the where all that, where we're at right now,
Speaker 1: where it takes us in understanding it, you know, we
Speaker 1: that's why I think we're at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: both of us really think we need to we need
Speaker 1: to go past this. We need to have lots of
Speaker 1: other levels of analysis to integrate here, to really get
Speaker 1: to a deeper understanding. But I mean, one area of
Speaker 1: the brain that I don't think has received as much
Speaker 1: love in understanding consciousness is the default mode brain network.
Speaker 1: And that's an area of the brain I've been studying
Speaker 1: which gives us a sense of self, you know, gives
Speaker 1: us our set. You know, this gets the heart of
Speaker 1: a lot of what you talk about in your book.
Speaker 1: You know. It gives us a sort of sense that
Speaker 1: there's a meaning, a continuity of meaning in ourself that
Speaker 1: we draw on our episodic memories for and we imagine
Speaker 1: the future self, you know, to draw on in order
Speaker 1: to imagine a future self. And well, I'm just wondering
Speaker 1: if you've thought much about the importance of the default
Speaker 1: mode network for for human consciousness, not as much as
Speaker 1: I probably should have. I've always been a little suspicious
Speaker 1: of the amount of weight the default mode network is
Speaker 1: supposed to carry when it comes to explaining things, because
Speaker 1: it's sort of it's just what you observe. Of course,
Speaker 1: spirically fascinating story. Right, It was observed in the bits
Speaker 1: in between when people were doing the real things they
Speaker 1: were supposed to be doing, when they were just resting
Speaker 1: and their mind was wandering. So you see this correlated
Speaker 1: activity between regions that's happening in these interstices between tasks,
Speaker 1: between activities, and this is fascinating. I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot more to the self than can be accounted for
Speaker 1: by this activity that is default mode, so to speak.
Speaker 1: There is super interesting work that I'm sure you know
Speaker 1: more about than me that can tie this sort of
Speaker 1: activity to mind wandering, to this inner narrative, which is
Speaker 1: certainly important when it comes to the self. But then
Speaker 1: there are so many other aspects of sealth that I
Speaker 1: think are easier to take for granted because they might
Speaker 1: not be so obvious as the voice in their head
Speaker 1: that are just as significant. And these range from experiences
Speaker 1: of the body the body is an object in the world,
Speaker 1: and the body from within with its emotions and moods,
Speaker 1: and back to the life thing, just the core experience
Speaker 1: of being a living organism, which I think is really
Speaker 1: difficult to describe, but maybe that's the bedrock of experiences
Speaker 1: of self. Note to things like first person perspective and
Speaker 1: free will, experiences of agency and volition, and then experiences
Speaker 1: of being part of a social network. All these different
Speaker 1: elements of self are likely to rely to different degrees
Speaker 1: on many different parts of the brain. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have things like the limbic system, the intul the core
Speaker 1: text for the body. We have the temperate parietal junction
Speaker 1: for first person perspective, we have prefrontal cortex for metacognition,
Speaker 1: and perhaps the more social elements of self. So trying
Speaker 1: to find where in the brain the self is, I
Speaker 1: think is just doomed to failure. And I have not
Speaker 1: focused that much, probably because my career just has not
Speaker 1: involved that much brain imaging, certainly not that much fMRI,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of brain imaging that tempts you
Speaker 1: to make claims about localization. I'm much more interested in
Speaker 1: processes rather than specific locations. And the whole idea that
Speaker 1: I leverage to try and explain properties of consciousness in
Speaker 1: terms of brain mechanisms is this idea of the predictive brain.
Speaker 1: The brain is a prediction machine. And that's more a
Speaker 1: claim about the type of process, the type of computation,
Speaker 1: at least type of thing we would describe in computational
Speaker 1: languages that's going on, rather than a claim about exactly
Speaker 1: where all this is happening, because I think that's probably
Speaker 1: quite fluid, quite changing, ending on what's happening in one's
Speaker 1: conscious field at any particular point. Well, that's a really
Speaker 1: good segue into the notion of perceptual diversity. You know
Speaker 1: what you just said, and I know that's really on
Speaker 1: your mind a lot these days. Look, this is really
Speaker 1: interesting because I've spent my career arguing for neurodiversity, and
Speaker 1: I'm really big in the neudiversity movement in schools as
Speaker 1: well and helping support kids who think differently. You have
Speaker 1: one sentence in your whole book where you give a
Speaker 1: head nod to neurodiversity, and you say, well, that movement
Speaker 1: is focused on more atypical or abnormal manifestations, but certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, we can, we can look at perceptual variations
Speaker 1: among everyone in the population. Why don't we today, Let's
Speaker 1: let's bridge these two fields, let's integrate them. Let's not
Speaker 1: treat them as though they're well, they're both different ends
Speaker 1: of a continuum, but they're both on the same continuum.
Speaker 1: I think in an important way. You know, we all
Speaker 1: differ in our perceptual diversity, and the idea that there
Speaker 1: are neurotypical people has always bothered me. That that phrase,
Speaker 1: you know, as though like, oh, they wouldn't understand they're neurotypical.
Speaker 1: I never liked that in the neurodiversity movement. So I
Speaker 1: feel like, Yeah, something we can do here today that
Speaker 1: that will be unique. I think that would be great
Speaker 1: because the more I've talked about perceptual diversity, I think
Speaker 1: there has been potential of confusion about terminology and agendas
Speaker 1: between people arguing for neurodiversity or arguing about the implications
Speaker 1: of it and so on. So yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I totally agree with you that we all differ.
Speaker 1: And the way I've tended to think of things is
Speaker 1: that there's distributions which can be just a long a spectrum,
Speaker 1: and we think of things like the normal distribution, the
Speaker 1: Galuxian distribution. There's more more stuff is going on in
Speaker 1: the middle than at the extremes or the edges, but
Speaker 1: the edges are easier to notice. And so, as far
Speaker 1: as I've understood, the history of the neurodiversity movement really
Speaker 1: came about through a recognition of some of these these edges,
Speaker 1: so conditions like autism, it was realized, Okay, there's a
Speaker 1: very different way of encountering the world here. It's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a worse way, a less accurate way. It's a
Speaker 1: different way, and in the way society is structured. It
Speaker 1: it comes with challenges. You don't realize that these ways
Speaker 1: are as different as they might be. But a focus
Speaker 1: on these tales of the distribution, all these these these
Speaker 1: expressions of diversity that become noticeable. Ironically, that's reinforced the
Speaker 1: view that you and I agree is problematic, which is
Speaker 1: that there is a neurotypical, single neurotypical alternative, and that
Speaker 1: if you don't associate with a neurodivergen condition, that you're neurotypical,
Speaker 1: you see the world as it is, you hear the
Speaker 1: world as it is, and that under sells that the
Speaker 1: fact that we are all different, we're all mist perceiving,
Speaker 1: we're almost perceiving, and we're almost perceiving ourselves and the world.
Speaker 1: But because of two things, we fail to recognize this.
Speaker 1: One thing is that the differences might not be very large,
Speaker 1: So most of us don't differ that much in height,
Speaker 1: and it usually doesn't make a difference. But at least
Speaker 1: we can see how different people are in height, but
Speaker 1: we can't directly see or experience what it's like to
Speaker 1: have somebody else's experience. Though these smaller differences, even if
Speaker 1: they exist, they are they're not visible to us, and
Speaker 1: they may not matter that much, and they don't surface
Speaker 1: into our language and our behavior unless they get beyond
Speaker 1: some sort of threshold. And the second reason is more subtle,
Speaker 1: but equally significant, I think, which is that our experience
Speaker 1: of the world has the character that it's just revealing
Speaker 1: objective reality as it is. I look out there, I
Speaker 1: see the world. It doesn't seem to me that the
Speaker 1: way I'm experiencing it is dependent on my brain, even
Speaker 1: though it is so. This kind of naive realism of
Speaker 1: our daily experience, coupled with the fact that differences may
Speaker 1: not be large enough to surface into behavior, I think,
Speaker 1: together causes to overlook the diversity that exists between all
Speaker 1: of us, and of which neurodiversity is a part, and
Speaker 1: probably the part that deserves the most attention. But I'd
Speaker 1: argue that to give it the attention it deserves, we
Speaker 1: really need to understand the nature of diversity across the
Speaker 1: whole distribution between all of us. I agree one thousand percent.
Speaker 1: And you've really put words to something that has bothered
Speaker 1: me about the NEU diversity movement for a long time.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't be more on board with your project,
Speaker 1: and I want to contribute to it. I want to
Speaker 1: do studies and help you. I want to be part
Speaker 1: of this movement that you're doing. The idea that we
Speaker 1: underestimate the extent to which seemingly small perceptual differences matter,
Speaker 1: I could agree more. I think we do underestimate of
Speaker 1: what I just said. I think we underestimate the extent
Speaker 1: to which small perceptual differences can over time, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe not in particular moments, but over time can lead
Speaker 1: to tremendous differences in political outlooks, can lead to tremendous
Speaker 1: differences and worldview differences in it can cause wars, can
Speaker 1: cause I mean this is it can lead to very
Speaker 1: important outcomes, different differentials. That's potentially true. I think it's
Speaker 1: very hard to demonstrate that, but I think the dynamics
Speaker 1: of that kind of processor are just there. And I've
Speaker 1: sometimes used the idea that just as we live in
Speaker 1: social media echo chambers, where we think the way the
Speaker 1: world is is just just is according to our beliefs,
Speaker 1: and we don't encounter information that challenges that. We also
Speaker 1: live in perceptual echo chambers. You know, we see the
Speaker 1: world in one way and we assume that's the way
Speaker 1: the world is. And of course there's this fluid boundary
Speaker 1: between perception and belief. We know that. You know, in
Speaker 1: cognitive science, now this whole idea that cognition is completely
Speaker 1: separate from perception is just not really true. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of examples of cognition perception affecting each other.
Speaker 1: So it may well be that literally perceiving things one
Speaker 1: way can lead to eventually believing things that particular way.
Speaker 1: And how do you counter that kind of dynamic. Well,
Speaker 1: the first step is to of course realize that it's
Speaker 1: going on, and in the biggest danger of social media
Speaker 1: echo chambers is not to realize that you live within
Speaker 1: one and to mistake whatever news channel you watch for
Speaker 1: being impartial, objective, fully accurate. And the same goes for
Speaker 1: our perceptual habits. If we just go along with the
Speaker 1: naive realism that our experience presents, that Okay, the way
Speaker 1: I see it is the way things are. Then it's
Speaker 1: really really hard to appreciate that people might experience things
Speaker 1: differently and perhaps then believe things differently. There is I
Speaker 1: think social and political value in this project of understanding
Speaker 1: perceptual diversity, because it can cultivate a nascent humility about
Speaker 1: the way each of us might encounter our own worlds
Speaker 1: through our experience, and that humility, I think it's a
Speaker 1: valuable it's a valuable recognition that can help us build
Speaker 1: platforms for empathy, for communication, whether it's with people with
Speaker 1: neurodiverse conditions or whether it's with people who mean to
Speaker 1: believe very different things. And we are trying to do this.
Speaker 1: So it became clear thinking along these lines that there's
Speaker 1: quite a lot of work in psychology which looks at
Speaker 1: individual differences in one or two different things, like people
Speaker 1: might differ in their vividness of their mental imagery, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of research about that, or about let's say,
Speaker 1: synesthes with Macintosh. Really that's amazing, so many connections and
Speaker 1: sex differences and sex differences in there. Okay, okay, but
Speaker 1: there's not a whole lot out there that tells us
Speaker 1: about perceptual diversity in general, and what are the underlying
Speaker 1: factors like in your work with Macintosh, and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of the intelligence literature was about trying to
Speaker 1: find underlying factors that explain sort of intelligence in different
Speaker 1: domains as far as I understand that area. So the
Speaker 1: same thing might happen with perception. Are there underlying factors
Speaker 1: that might be traits that we have label traits that
Speaker 1: explain different ways of perceiving the world, whether it's in
Speaker 1: imagery or color perception, or time perception, or emotions or
Speaker 1: sound music. Though we have this project called the Perception Census,
Speaker 1: which is an online project. It's just a series of
Speaker 1: interactive illusions and little experiments that people can do come
Speaker 1: back to that are designed to tease out these dimensions
Speaker 1: of variation, to map out. But really, this first time
Speaker 1: I think, with this breadthon scale, what this hidden landscape
Speaker 1: of innodiversity really looks like. And I'm excited about this.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's tried to do this before. We
Speaker 1: have ten different sections, each looking at different types of perception,
Speaker 1: with about more than fifty little demonstrations and tests in total,
Speaker 1: all exploring different aspects of perception. And we've already had
Speaker 1: more than twenty thousand people take part from more than
Speaker 1: one hundred different countries. And people taking part, I mean
Speaker 1: they contribute massively to the data, but they also learn
Speaker 1: about their own powers of perception too, and it is
Speaker 1: fun to do and educational, so that's good. So we
Speaker 1: still are in the data collection phase. We still are
Speaker 1: waiting to see what the world looks like from this
Speaker 1: point of view. So if any of your listeners want
Speaker 1: to help us along this journey, then please do give
Speaker 1: the Perception Census a go. It's easy to find. You
Speaker 1: can just find it on my website analyst dot com
Speaker 1: or we'll just looked at Perception Census. But it'd be
Speaker 1: wonderful to get more people taking part. This is wonderfully exciting.
Speaker 1: Earlier in my career when I went full on on
Speaker 1: the job market, but my personal statement argued that the
Speaker 1: field of cognitive science needs to integrate with the field
Speaker 1: of individual differences research, because that seemed to me like
Speaker 1: a huge, huge missing integration in the field of psychology,
Speaker 1: like those two fields just didn't talk to each other.
Speaker 1: My PhD dissertation was taking all these cognitive science and
Speaker 1: plus it learning tasks and trying to ask the question
Speaker 1: are there individual differences and all these ways of processing
Speaker 1: information non consciously? And that was work I partly did
Speaker 1: with Nick McIntosh and partly did with Jeremy Gray at Yale.
Speaker 1: But it just feels like, what did you find? What
Speaker 1: did you find? I found there are absolutely reliable and
Speaker 1: predictive individual differences in all these cognitive science and PUS
Speaker 1: and learning tasks, not all of them, I didn't mean
Speaker 1: all them, and in some of them. I have a
Speaker 1: whole appendix of my dissertation of the ones where there
Speaker 1: aren't like artificial uh AG learning, And we really didn't
Speaker 1: as much as Reber. Actually that's in line with with
Speaker 1: Arthur Rieber's aybotsis so there shouldn't be evolution should not
Speaker 1: have put much individual differences in that. But we found
Speaker 1: like serial reaction time learning, for instance, predicted openness to
Speaker 1: experience the personality trait. But I just want to urge
Speaker 1: you in your research to to open the door to
Speaker 1: including the link between perceptual variability or perceptual diversity and
Speaker 1: personality variability, because I think that's a really area that's
Speaker 1: ripe that I wanted, that I desperately wanted to, you know,
Speaker 1: in my I wanted the field to pay more attention
Speaker 1: to that's fascinating. I will definitely do that. I must
Speaker 1: admit the whole personality area is not something I know
Speaker 1: anything about. I think we include some questionnaires that might
Speaker 1: address this a little bit, but I know it's not
Speaker 1: been a big focus of our work there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it should be. And I think, by the way, I
Speaker 1: think you're absolutely right. You're definitely ahead of the game
Speaker 1: on recognizing a need to integrate these two areas because
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a it's a bit of a
Speaker 1: strange thing if you think about it now. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, most psychology experiments that of studying unfunction, whether
Speaker 1: it's simplicit learning or attention or whatever it might be,
Speaker 1: typically in practice will take a group of people or
Speaker 1: usually psychology students, and an average over them so that
Speaker 1: you get one one finding, treating them as implicitly you
Speaker 1: know all the same or as or as stochastic variations
Speaker 1: on a single thing, just as you know this as
Speaker 1: in statistics, you can if the if the variation is random,
Speaker 1: you can add things together you get a better estimate.
Speaker 1: That's how statistics works. But that there's that aspect which
Speaker 1: is which is making the explicit assumption that individual variance
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, right, that it's noise on the distribution. And
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you've you've got individual differences, which
Speaker 1: makes entirely the opposite assumption of the course. The challenge
Speaker 1: is that to do individual difference research you need to
Speaker 1: sample diverse populations and you need large numbers. But that's
Speaker 1: that's just a methodological challenge. There's no conceptual problem with
Speaker 1: marrying these two things. I mean, the Perception Census project
Speaker 1: has been very challenging logistically and to get this scale
Speaker 1: that that we need. But it's yeah, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not like building the James Web telescope. It's it's quite
Speaker 1: possible to do. And psychology, i think, is a feel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's elements of it that can benefit from a more
Speaker 1: big science approach, from doing things with many groups at scale.
Speaker 1: It's it's not enough to just rely on individual, single
Speaker 1: experiments done in small groups anymore. Well, I agree. There
Speaker 1: there's so many deep implications of your project, and it's
Speaker 1: exciting to be able to just talk it through. One
Speaker 1: obvious big implication is is this notion that there is
Speaker 1: the the mad let's say, the special source of consciousness.
Speaker 1: The whole idea that that that we can measure the
Speaker 1: extent and standardized the extent to which this person's more
Speaker 1: conscious than this person. I just think kind of doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense in your world where we start to look
Speaker 1: at more perceptual areas of diversity, or maybe it makes
Speaker 1: sense just to a different level of analysis. I think
Speaker 1: there's just some really deep implications of your work on
Speaker 1: perceptual diversity for recognizing that different people may have different
Speaker 1: perceptual and conscious experiences, but it doesn't make one person's
Speaker 1: conscious experience any less conscious than another person in some
Speaker 1: sort of standardized way. Like what does it mean to
Speaker 1: put everyone on the same metric? Like when we put
Speaker 1: everyone in the same metric of IQ, and we say,
Speaker 1: and we would just measure deviations of intelligence based on
Speaker 1: one number that a lot of intelligence researchers have rightly
Speaker 1: point out, Like one of my mentors, Robert Sternberg cas
Speaker 1: rightly point out, well, you know that, like that really
Speaker 1: doesn't show the full complexity of intelligence. By doing that,
Speaker 1: could you make an analogous argument with consciousness? You know
Speaker 1: that by comparing everyone to a singular metric or number,
Speaker 1: we're not doing the very variety of consciousness justice, I
Speaker 1: think you might well do that. It's a pleasant myth,
Speaker 1: isn't it that you might have this single scale right
Speaker 1: for a property that seems a little bit mysterious. And
Speaker 1: sometimes that's worked. And I often have been thinking, especially
Speaker 1: when I was writing the book, it was much in
Speaker 1: my mind about this distinction in the history of science
Speaker 1: between how heat became understandable and how life became understandable.
Speaker 1: Because with heat, now there you really do have something
Speaker 1: for which measurement was absolutely critical, and which, when reliable
Speaker 1: measurements were possible, he became expressible along as single dimension
Speaker 1: and was fully accounted for. Or in terms of that
Speaker 1: in a mean molecular kinetic energy of whatever it is,
Speaker 1: that just is heat. And when we say something is
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty six degrees Calvin, I mean there's
Speaker 1: no other dimensions to worry about when it comes to heat.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's a full explanation. Now will this apply
Speaker 1: to consciousness? So some theories I don't necessarily think have
Speaker 1: explicitly made that claim directly, but used that as a
Speaker 1: sort of starting point. And of course it is omption well,
Speaker 1: and it may be a useful heuristic because there is
Speaker 1: a sort of global difference between losing consciousness entirety in
Speaker 1: general anesthesia, maybe being a little bit conscious in drowsiness
Speaker 1: or in light sleep, and being fully awake and aware.
Speaker 1: So it intuitively makes sense that there's some some level
Speaker 1: of globality, but it seems ambitious to think that's the
Speaker 1: whole thing, in the same way that temperature is the
Speaker 1: whole thing heat. But as a starting point, you know,
Speaker 1: you can begin to build very very early measures of
Speaker 1: global conscious level based on this idea, and we've done
Speaker 1: some of that work too. It's a measures of brain
Speaker 1: complexity or brain entropy that track conscious level in a
Speaker 1: very sort of coarse grained way. But then if you
Speaker 1: look in more detail and you realize, okay, actually global
Speaker 1: levels of consciousness are not just on a single dimension.
Speaker 1: Being drowsy is different from being let's say, in a
Speaker 1: trance state, and there's being in a psychedelic state, and
Speaker 1: there's being in a vegetative state, and there are all
Speaker 1: kinds of dimensions. The philosopher Tim Bain and with the
Speaker 1: neurologist Adrian Owen, you know, both colleagues published a very
Speaker 1: nice paper a few years ago now which try to
Speaker 1: identify the different global dimensions of consciousness and argued that
Speaker 1: a given consciousntate it cannot be reduced to a single dimension.
Speaker 1: It must be along it's best captured along many dimensions,
Speaker 1: and even fi even the quantity you alluded to earlier
Speaker 1: from integration integrated information theory. Yes, there there is a
Speaker 1: single number, but in the more recent versions of integrated information,
Speaker 1: what matters most is really the shape underneath that big number.
Speaker 1: There's this idea of a whole structure in this space,
Speaker 1: which they call cause effect space, and that determines the
Speaker 1: kind of consciousness, with the overall level being part of
Speaker 1: that story. But that's the theory that's among the current
Speaker 1: crop of theories of consciousness that to me is still
Speaker 1: most similar to the heat perspective, because it really does
Speaker 1: say this amount of five, you know, this amount of
Speaker 1: of irreducible integrated information, then such and such amount of consciousness,
Speaker 1: And there's an identity relationship between them too, in the
Speaker 1: same way there's an identity relationship between molecular kinetic energy
Speaker 1: and heat. But yeah, I think I find myself more
Speaker 1: attracted to the view that this idea of a global
Speaker 1: level is a good starting point and there are some
Speaker 1: globally useful distinctions like anesthesia and waking consciousness, but that
Speaker 1: it's more multi dimensional, and that again is a feature
Speaker 1: that's shared with life. Like life, you don't measure how
Speaker 1: much life something has. But that doesn't mean biology is
Speaker 1: any less scientific than the thermodynamics or the physics of temperature.
Speaker 1: Life is not the kind of thing that is measured
Speaker 1: on a single scale. And that's fine. That's just the
Speaker 1: kind of thing life is. And I suspect consciousness maybe
Speaker 1: more like life than like temperature. In this respect, I
Speaker 1: suspect the same thing. Lots of lots of implications. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a big push, especially in America for diversity and inclusion.
Speaker 1: And I mean it's not like the diversity inclusion movements
Speaker 1: talking about perceptual diversity. There. They're not. They're not in
Speaker 1: their meeting their their their meetings. They're not like, let's
Speaker 1: look at the latest research on neuroscience and see and
Speaker 1: and I just I love just integrating all sorts of
Speaker 1: different areas of life. Something. An argument I've been trying
Speaker 1: to make is that I don't understand why the the
Speaker 1: the inclusion diversity movement is so skin deep. You know,
Speaker 1: like even the neurodiversity movements not a part of it.
Speaker 1: I'd never understand. I don't understand, Like, what's why is it?
Speaker 1: Why are we just focusing on sexual and gender identity
Speaker 1: and and race. Do you think that there are going
Speaker 1: to show differences in or have you looked at demographics
Speaker 1: showing perceptual diversity differences that map onto different race or
Speaker 1: do you think it's just it's gonna We're gonna find
Speaker 1: it transcends race and gender and those are not the
Speaker 1: most important con structs to understand perceptual diversity. Have you
Speaker 1: thought about that at all? I've thought about it. I mean,
Speaker 1: we are collecting some demographics which we'll be able to
Speaker 1: shed some light on these kinds of questions. We haven't
Speaker 1: looked at I should say we haven't looked at the
Speaker 1: data yet. So we're trying to be good methodological scientists
Speaker 1: about this and not peak at the data until we've
Speaker 1: finished collecting it and have decided what the hypothesis are
Speaker 1: going to test that we don't just do sort of
Speaker 1: digging around in it. But yeah, we could look at that.
Speaker 1: And my suspicion is that you know, you've always find
Speaker 1: differences if you divide a population into two by some criteria,
Speaker 1: you'll probably find a difference. Is the question is is
Speaker 1: that a meaningful difference. It's like the the gender difference
Speaker 1: or the sex difference, things that people are always asking,
Speaker 1: is there a difference between men and women when it
Speaker 1: comes to X, And you can probably say, well, there
Speaker 1: usually is a difference, but you'll find much more variance
Speaker 1: within men and within than in general between though its
Speaker 1: predictive and explanatory value is often not very apparent, and
Speaker 1: is of course very open to being politicized. While I'm
Speaker 1: interested in it, I'm not sort of aggressively going after
Speaker 1: looking for differences that associate with these kinds of differences
Speaker 1: in race, in culture and so on. But do you
Speaker 1: think it's interruing? I mean, for instance, language I think
Speaker 1: would be a very fascinating thing to look at. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a whole story about the extent of which language
Speaker 1: influences perception that the Sapia wolf hypothesis as which was
Speaker 1: name checked brilliantly I thought in the film Arrival. I
Speaker 1: was so glad that they actually used the name the
Speaker 1: Sapa Wolf hypothesis and the dialogue, which is of course
Speaker 1: about these teptopod like creatures and how language affected their
Speaker 1: you know, the way in which they experienced time. This
Speaker 1: beautiful film, so that for me is a very rich
Speaker 1: terrain to look at. There may be other differences to
Speaker 1: I don't know. I also agree that this whole EDI
Speaker 1: emphasis should be much more than skin deep and should
Speaker 1: definitely consider perceptual and neural diversity. And here the other
Speaker 1: thing about neurodiversity that I remember from the bounding principles
Speaker 1: of it was the analogy with biodiversity. It's not this
Speaker 1: is not something that we should look at as a
Speaker 1: feature of the way the world is that we need
Speaker 1: to cater for somehow, But it's fundamental to the richness
Speaker 1: of society. Just as an ecosystem needs a diversity of
Speaker 1: plants and of species within it to flourish, though society
Speaker 1: needs a diversity of ways was perceiving too to flourish.
Speaker 1: But I'd like to see I mean, I speak as
Speaker 1: somebody with brown skin, which is an interesting to be
Speaker 1: in these EDI communities, because you know, I have a
Speaker 1: kind of countable diversity. But for me, you know, that's
Speaker 1: that's less it's certainly not very relevant. And differences in
Speaker 1: perception between people might be much more relevant than the
Speaker 1: fact that I've got brown skin. Look, I hear you,
Speaker 1: there's something that really feels incomplete to me about it is,
Speaker 1: no matter how well intentioned it is. You know that
Speaker 1: this big push in America to only look at those
Speaker 1: super I think, superficial characteristics of a human right. I
Speaker 1: think the first step in any discussion of diversity, of course,
Speaker 1: has to be understanding how that diversity is expressed and
Speaker 1: how it's actually manifest. Unless you know that it's there,
Speaker 1: you can't do anything about it or do anything with it,
Speaker 1: either positive or negative. But yeah, that's that's a good
Speaker 1: motivation to keep doing what we're doing, I hope, and
Speaker 1: looking looking at what perceptual diversity is are. But by
Speaker 1: the way, I should say that that you know, this
Speaker 1: is a big project. I don't want to give the
Speaker 1: impression that it's just my little group doing and we're
Speaker 1: collaborating with the philosopher in Glasgow, Fiona Macpherson, who's been
Speaker 1: brilliant co lead on this project. Really because these things
Speaker 1: have as well as implications in the two of mentioning,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of philosophy going on here as well
Speaker 1: in terms of how do we how do we phrase
Speaker 1: these things, how do we how do we understand the
Speaker 1: relationship between perception and illusion and hallucination. And we're also
Speaker 1: surveying people's implicit philosophical beliefs too. I think there's going
Speaker 1: to be some interesting variants there about the extent to
Speaker 1: which people have maybe unexamined philosophical ideas about perception and
Speaker 1: about the relationship between perception and objective reality that we'll
Speaker 1: also be fascinating in and of itself, but also maybe
Speaker 1: in relation to other aspects of perception, because that's what
Speaker 1: our project, I think, really enables, which is where the
Speaker 1: power is, which is not just looking at different aspects
Speaker 1: of perception and belief separately, but looking at them all together,
Speaker 1: that we can see what goes with what factor is
Speaker 1: underlie them, what's the sort of structure of the latent
Speaker 1: space of our perceptual differences. That's what I'm excited to uncover.
Speaker 1: You may want to look at Jered Clifton's work on
Speaker 1: primals come across it at all, but he's tried to
Speaker 1: look at different ways that people have world views or
Speaker 1: think the world is. You know, the world is dangerous,
Speaker 1: you know the world is safe, The world isn't tasting,
Speaker 1: the world is exciting. He's kind of come up with
Speaker 1: a whole list of all these kind of primals and
Speaker 1: how that influences how one lives one's life, how one
Speaker 1: lives one's life, how one one's politics. It might be
Speaker 1: really interesting to link up perceptual diversity with worldview diversity.
Speaker 1: Of these Thank you, Yeah, really really great stuff. I'd
Speaker 1: be remiss if we didn't discuss free will at all.
Speaker 1: And it's just a topic that I think both of
Speaker 1: us agree, uh is can get really irrelevant at a
Speaker 1: certain point some something, you know, like people are debating
Speaker 1: and arguing about things that don't really matter for to
Speaker 1: most humans living their lives, who are trying to do
Speaker 1: better in the world, you know, from where they were before.
Speaker 1: They're trying to reach their goals. They're trying to have
Speaker 1: this sense of agency. This the whole thing when it
Speaker 1: gets co opted by the thing. Do we have magical
Speaker 1: free will? We don't have magical free will. I think
Speaker 1: that's kind of like a red herring in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways from what people really really care about. Your
Speaker 1: approach to I like your approach to it. You kind
Speaker 1: of say that free will even consciousness, even the self.
Speaker 1: It's not the right question asking is are they illusions?
Speaker 1: Because you argue they're all perceptions. Well, I think that's
Speaker 1: a nice way to sidestep a lot of the debate,
Speaker 1: the aspects of the debate that I don't really think
Speaker 1: matter to most people. Do you agree, well, I agree
Speaker 1: with myself. Yes, And since you agree with this, that
Speaker 1: does not surprising. But you put it, yeah, you summarized
Speaker 1: it very, very beautifully. I think the most productive way
Speaker 1: to think about free will is as a variety of perception,
Speaker 1: and thinking that this way just rapidly dissolves a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that cause people confusion. The thing about
Speaker 1: free will, I think the reason it creates so much
Speaker 1: confusion is that it brings together a number of independently
Speaker 1: confusing things. On the one hand, we have this idea
Speaker 1: about whether the universe is deterministic or whether it's stochastic,
Speaker 1: with chance playing a role noisy things happening. Then there's
Speaker 1: the nature of free will as a conscious experience and
Speaker 1: it does it have causal influence on the world? What
Speaker 1: role do our conscious experiences of free will play in
Speaker 1: making things happen? And then there's the interaction with politics
Speaker 1: and law. When do we hold people responsible for their actions?
Speaker 1: Is it ever right punish somebody for some transgression? And
Speaker 1: free will just takes all these controversial issues and boils
Speaker 1: them all up together in some sort of massive, unpleasant
Speaker 1: due of confusion. And it's no surprise that it generally
Speaker 1: tastes pretty bad. So to try and strip away that confusion,
Speaker 1: I think the starting point, you can think of it
Speaker 1: as a kind of psychological null hypothesis, is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: everything that we experience is a kind of perception. Let's
Speaker 1: try to refute that null hypothesis or or does that stand?
Speaker 1: And I think it kind of stands. Because the kind
Speaker 1: of free will that we want to find a place
Speaker 1: for in our explanations of brain, mind and consciousness. Isn't
Speaker 1: this magical free will or that I call it in
Speaker 1: the book, I think spooky free will, this kind of
Speaker 1: free will that swoops in and changes the course of
Speaker 1: physical events in the universe, a kind of uncaused cause
Speaker 1: from our Cartesian ghost that just swerves the universe in
Speaker 1: a different direction. I mean, that's the kind of free
Speaker 1: will that requires us to give up the law of
Speaker 1: cause and effect, that just we don't even need because
Speaker 1: to have it is to reinstate this kind of all
Speaker 1: knowing cartesian dualistic soul that knows what to do and
Speaker 1: exactly how to get it done. I mean, that's one
Speaker 1: thing we left behind or should have left behind a
Speaker 1: long time ago. So it really doesn't matter already whether
Speaker 1: the universe is deterministic or stochastic, because the only reason
Speaker 1: that could matter is if you want to find space
Speaker 1: for magic, spooky free will to come in and load
Speaker 1: the dice so that the universe goes one way rather
Speaker 1: than another way. Right, the only way you would want
Speaker 1: to do is if you want to be God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and some people do, but you know, most of us
Speaker 1: hopefully don't or certainly aren't the kind of free will
Speaker 1: that is worth hanging on to. And here I'm much
Speaker 1: in agreement with Daniel Dennett, who's also been one of
Speaker 1: my mentors and very watunate to say, who talks about
Speaker 1: degrees of freedom and points out that we are complex,
Speaker 1: distance complex biological creatures, and the things that we do
Speaker 1: voluntarily still have prior causes, but the causes might lie
Speaker 1: if you if you unfold them back in time, the
Speaker 1: causes will remain more within the organism than the coming
Speaker 1: in from outside the organism. So a good example is,
Speaker 1: just before recording this podcast, I made a cup of tea.
Speaker 1: Why did I felt like a voluntary decision to do that,
Speaker 1: But of course I didn't. I'd made a cup of
Speaker 1: tea because I wanted a cup of tea. Why did
Speaker 1: I want a cup of tea? Well, because I grew
Speaker 1: up in England where we're brought up to want to
Speaker 1: have a cup of tea. And I didn't choose to
Speaker 1: be born here or brought up here or any of
Speaker 1: this stuff. That's just the system that I am. But
Speaker 1: it felt like aol and to react. But no one
Speaker 1: forced me to make this cup of tea. It wasn't
Speaker 1: poured down my mouth. It was a voluntary action that
Speaker 1: aligned with my goals and desires, and it's an action
Speaker 1: that felt like it came from within. That's perfectly compatible
Speaker 1: with there being a deterministic universe, because I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that it's some immaterial me that parachuted in and made
Speaker 1: the tea universe unfold rather than the coffee universe unfold.
Speaker 1: It was always going to I was always going to
Speaker 1: have a cup of tea. That's just how things are
Speaker 1: but the nature of the free will experience is what's
Speaker 1: what's really plexing, because what does it feel like to
Speaker 1: make a voluntary action, to have this experience? It feels
Speaker 1: like I'm doing what I decided to do, what I
Speaker 1: decided to do, And what what is this I anyway,
Speaker 1: the eye is just a collection of perceptions, one of
Speaker 1: them being the experience of free will. That you know
Speaker 1: that the cause of the other way around here, the
Speaker 1: self isn't executing free will. The ability to make voluntary
Speaker 1: actions and the experience of doing so is part of
Speaker 1: the self. That feels like they come from within. It
Speaker 1: feels like they're aligned with my goals and desires, which
Speaker 1: I didn't choose. And it feels and here's the critical one,
Speaker 1: it feels like I could have done otherwise. That's the
Speaker 1: one that misleads people. But just because it feels like
Speaker 1: I could have made coffee rather than tea doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that I actually could have done. You can't replay the
Speaker 1: same tape and get a different outcome, even if you
Speaker 1: chuck a bit of noising, unless you believe in magic
Speaker 1: free will. To what's the utility of having this sort
Speaker 1: of feeling that I could have done otherwise. Well, it
Speaker 1: could be very useful for the organism because let's say,
Speaker 1: you know, I've just been building up this gradual intolerance
Speaker 1: to tea and I have this cup of tea and
Speaker 1: just feel terrible. Also, my brain will learn this, and
Speaker 1: so the next time a similar situation happens, next time
Speaker 1: I'm recording of a podcast, the universe will be different,
Speaker 1: my brain will be different, and that time I'll probably
Speaker 1: choose coffee instead, and it will again feel like I'm
Speaker 1: doing what I want to do. So we have the
Speaker 1: experience of the possibility of doing otherwise, not because in
Speaker 1: the moment we could, but because next time we might.
Speaker 1: And so here I think it sort of snapped together
Speaker 1: for me when I was thinking about the parallel with
Speaker 1: the experience of let's say a color. We open our eyes,
Speaker 1: we see a world that is beautifully filled with color.
Speaker 1: Objects have color, but we know colors don't exist in
Speaker 1: a mind independent way. The brain creates all these colors
Speaker 1: out of mixtures of just three wavelengths of light. Why
Speaker 1: does it do that? I mean, color depends on the
Speaker 1: brain and the universe. It doesn't exist objectively. But it's
Speaker 1: still very useful because it allows the brain to keep
Speaker 1: track of surfaces as lighting conditions change. There are all
Speaker 1: the good reasons why it's useful for the brain to
Speaker 1: construct color out of mere electromagnetic radiation, and I think
Speaker 1: the same thing goes for free will. It's very useful
Speaker 1: thing for the brain to give this sort of phenomenal
Speaker 1: character when it executes these kinds of actions, because it
Speaker 1: means that the organism pays attention to them and may
Speaker 1: do something different in the future. It doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: just because it seems as though in voluntary action that
Speaker 1: the experience actually causes the action, it doesn't mean that's
Speaker 1: what's going on. In just the same way that just
Speaker 1: because it seems that the car across the road is red,
Speaker 1: it actually isn't. It's really not red. It's not this
Speaker 1: direct mapping from the content of the experience for what's
Speaker 1: actually unfolding in the world. But that doesn't mean they're unrelated.
Speaker 1: I think they're related in a very powerful way. Like
Speaker 1: all perception, it's all indirect, but evolution has generally made
Speaker 1: it so that it's very useful for it. There's there's
Speaker 1: Daniel Dinnetz a freedom evolves idea. Yeah, yeah, look, I
Speaker 1: had a two part four hour debate with Sam Harris
Speaker 1: about this. So we're not going to solve in the
Speaker 1: next ten to fifteen minutes or not. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll have what we can We can do the keep
Speaker 1: let's keep up the conversation thing. But I will say
Speaker 1: one thing I really liked you said in your book,
Speaker 1: and you made it very clear. The experience of free
Speaker 1: will is not an illusion. Love that love that that's real.
Speaker 1: That's that's something that as in organism, a living organism,
Speaker 1: I can say, you know, at least say that's that's
Speaker 1: a real that's real. We don't need to deny that
Speaker 1: experience to people. Now, That's that's right, And I think
Speaker 1: that's that's so important. I've noticed over now many years
Speaker 1: of giving public talks about consciousness, and you can sort
Speaker 1: of show that the visual experience of the world isn't
Speaker 1: quite what's going on, and that colors might not exist.
Speaker 1: You can even show that experiences of the self aren't
Speaker 1: to be taken for granted, and that you can have
Speaker 1: all these fun manipulations of people experiencing their bodies in
Speaker 1: different ways or not at all. And first perspective can
Speaker 1: be manipulated and can give people out of body experiences.
Speaker 1: All of this it's quite challenging to take on board.
Speaker 1: But when you get to free will, that's where it seems, empirically,
Speaker 1: in my experience, is the point of most resistance. The
Speaker 1: idea that there is a neuro mechanistic basis for and
Speaker 1: therefore explanation of free will is where there's people feel
Speaker 1: most directly threatened by a science of consciousness. But I
Speaker 1: think it's it's the threat. It's a threat that's a losory,
Speaker 1: not the experience of free will, Because understanding how and
Speaker 1: why experiences of free will and voluntary actions happen doesn't
Speaker 1: deny the reality of those experiences, and importantly, it doesn't
Speaker 1: deny their utility either. Even when we know experiencing, even
Speaker 1: when we know red doesn't exist objectively in the world,
Speaker 1: nobody thinks that, oh damn it. Therefore, like red doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: so you know, my life is now a colorless nightmare. No,
Speaker 1: red still exists as a property of experience, and it
Speaker 1: still plays a role. I think exactly the same thing
Speaker 1: is true for experiences of free will. But the key
Speaker 1: thing here is it's experiences of free will, perceptions of
Speaker 1: free will that are real, not some sort of pre
Speaker 1: theoretical magic version of free will that sweeps in and
Speaker 1: violates the laws of physics. But what you're saying is
Speaker 1: lived experience matters humanistic psychology, isn't it. Yeah, there we go,
Speaker 1: boom love it just to put a pin in the
Speaker 1: free will thing. And something that you know, before we
Speaker 1: put a pin in and I should say, before we
Speaker 1: put a pin in it, And I want to say
Speaker 1: one more thing about it. The thing that kind of
Speaker 1: bothers me about the whole thing is similar to what
Speaker 1: bothers me about the intelligence debate. Semantics. It comes down
Speaker 1: to semantics at the end of the day. I don't
Speaker 1: like when certain free will philosophers or psychologists cognitive scientists
Speaker 1: act as though they have claim on the real definition
Speaker 1: of free will. I mean, at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's humans that are defining this term. And two, this
Speaker 1: is why I really like the idea Daniel Dennett's notion
Speaker 1: of there are free wills worth wanting in humans. The
Speaker 1: rewind the tape thing, Like, why do we have to
Speaker 1: get so stuck on that being the only definition and
Speaker 1: and and scope of free will that that matters to humans?
Speaker 1: Because I really don't think it is. And I and
Speaker 1: I've been developing a model with my colleague Colony on
Speaker 1: cybernetic free will and why that matters just as much.
Speaker 1: It matters more to humans than magic free will. Cybernetic
Speaker 1: free will is really really what mattered the humans. Do
Speaker 1: we have the capacity to reach our goals? Do we
Speaker 1: have the capacity to choose between various options and make
Speaker 1: decisions that move us closer? You know, like I was influenced.
Speaker 1: I studied with herb Simon. You know that whole approach
Speaker 1: to like reducing you know, the means ends you know
Speaker 1: of between your starting state and your goal state. Look,
Speaker 1: humans want to be able to know that they can
Speaker 1: do that right, and to them, I think that's a
Speaker 1: free will worth wanting, and I think you completely agree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it'd be interesting to learn more, But I'm
Speaker 1: I have this sort of bias of being quite positive
Speaker 1: about the cybernetic approach to whatever it might be, because
Speaker 1: back to an earlier part of our conversation, it's another
Speaker 1: way to think about how complex systems operate, how brains, bodies,
Speaker 1: and environments conspire together to deliver adaptive behavior in a
Speaker 1: way that doesn't prioritize information processing. That looks at coupled
Speaker 1: systems and goal directed systems, and the importance of control
Speaker 1: and feedback and regulation, all these things which don't have
Speaker 1: an easy place in the computational information processing metaphor of
Speaker 1: their minds. And yeah, I mean I think sounds like
Speaker 1: you're thinking along lines. I find very appealing that free
Speaker 1: will or the experiences of free will arise in contexts
Speaker 1: where we are trying to reach our goals and where
Speaker 1: it requires the coordination of a complex system in order
Speaker 1: to do so, and those cognoive mechanisms are real. It's
Speaker 1: not an illusion that we have adorsal lot or pref
Speaker 1: on the I mean, there are certain things that do
Speaker 1: make us unique compared to turtles. You know. When it
Speaker 1: comes to free will, it's not like it's all an illusion,
Speaker 1: you know, that we're we have anything extra special that
Speaker 1: gives us that phenomenology, you know, No, it's real. Well,
Speaker 1: that's right. That's why I think it is a little
Speaker 1: more than semantics, because there are demonstrable cases of say,
Speaker 1: people you know, losing cognitive control. And you may say, well,
Speaker 1: that's got nothing to do with free will, but I
Speaker 1: actually think it has it has to do with free
Speaker 1: will in the real world, and that's the kind of
Speaker 1: free will that it's worth caring about. Yeah, okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna put a pin there, because that's a perfect place
Speaker 1: to put the pin in. I was waiting for the
Speaker 1: place to put the pin in in that right there,
Speaker 1: right there. I completely agree, completely. So let's let's end
Speaker 1: talking about artificial intelligence, because that's just you know, there's
Speaker 1: a New York Times article that came out the other day,
Speaker 1: this computer that says, I I deserve more respect for humans.
Speaker 1: Why do I not have my Why is no one
Speaker 1: attending to my needs? Now? Look, so we're not that
Speaker 1: far away off from computers starting to say this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I mean, we're there. We're there, or not,
Speaker 1: maybe not as full. You know, you know, not every
Speaker 1: computer you know rebellion yet rebelling yet, but you know
Speaker 1: it's the process is starting. So what are your thoughts
Speaker 1: on whether or not those computers are conscious, computers will
Speaker 1: ever be conscious? I mean, I know I read your books,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of your thinking on it, But
Speaker 1: you know all of our audiences has read your full
Speaker 1: book yet, can you just briefly summarize your position on that.
Speaker 1: I'm very suspicious and skeptical of the idea that machine
Speaker 1: consciousness is on the way in the n ATEN. But
Speaker 1: I do think there are plenty of things to worry
Speaker 1: about when it comes to machines, whether they're chatbots or
Speaker 1: other things giving us the impression that they are conscious.
Speaker 1: I think that could be very disruptive, even being totally
Speaker 1: agnostic about the ontological status of consciousness. Here why the
Speaker 1: skepticism was from many directions. One of them is this
Speaker 1: pre theoretical association of intelligence and consciousness that seems to
Speaker 1: drive a lot of the discourse, the idea that as AI.
Speaker 1: I mean I also just a tiny sidebar. I struggle
Speaker 1: with the term AI because it yeah, me too. It
Speaker 1: makes entities of things which aren't entities, and biases are
Speaker 1: thinking about them in a unhelpful way, But it is
Speaker 1: what it is, yes, yes, And it also kind of
Speaker 1: has bill into the assumption that the more intelligent robots become,
Speaker 1: the more conscious they'll become, which is a very erroneous assumption,
Speaker 1: right Exactly if you just use the word, I don't know,
Speaker 1: predictive statistic statistics or something like that, then it seems
Speaker 1: less intuitive that as these predictive statistical algorithms get more
Speaker 1: competent that at some point the lights come on, and
Speaker 1: they're also not only competent and smart, but conscious consciousness
Speaker 1: and intelligence are related in us in some interesting ways,
Speaker 1: but they're not related in principle. So just making something
Speaker 1: smart doesn't imply, at least not to me, that at
Speaker 1: some point they become conscious. And there are other clues
Speaker 1: here that often the point at which people think this
Speaker 1: transition to consciousness might happen also turns out to be
Speaker 1: the point at which AI reaches this potentially mythical generalized
Speaker 1: human intelligence level. Why would we think that's a threshold, Well, again,
Speaker 1: it signals a sort of residual human exceptionalism. Things that
Speaker 1: get smart don't necessarily get conscious. And then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, we have this whole skepticism about information processing
Speaker 1: as what brains in practice do and what consciousness depends
Speaker 1: on machine learning algorithms. Yeah, they do do information processing,
Speaker 1: but if that's not the best way to ultimately understand
Speaker 1: what brains do, then again, there's no reason to think
Speaker 1: that a form of information processing will instantiate consciousness done
Speaker 1: things when you might just have a simulation of it.
Speaker 1: And that's fine. I mean, we accept that in many
Speaker 1: other cases in science, right, we have weather forecasting systems
Speaker 1: that can be brilliantly detailed simulations of let's say, a tornado,
Speaker 1: but nobody thinks it actually gets wet and windy inside
Speaker 1: the weather computer. And for many things, simulation is not
Speaker 1: the same as instantiation. I'm skeptical that consciousness is going
Speaker 1: to be aligned with intelligence, or that it's necessarily something
Speaker 1: that information processing will give rise to. And finally, on
Speaker 1: the positive side, there's all this recognition that consciousness is
Speaker 1: intimately related to our nature as living systems. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to concede that this is not by no
Speaker 1: means proven. It's just where the ideas and experiments that
Speaker 1: I've been involved in have led. And if we prioritize
Speaker 1: the disrecognition and the possibility that it might be life
Speaker 1: rather than information processing that is breathing fire into the
Speaker 1: equainims of consciousness, then intelligent machines will need to be
Speaker 1: alive in order to be conscious in some biologically meaningful,
Speaker 1: perhaps bibernetic control oriented way. All of this is to
Speaker 1: say that that you know, I just I just think
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of a lot of science fiction,
Speaker 1: techno bro driven hype about the possibility of machine consciousness,
Speaker 1: and it's not even something we should be aiming for.
Speaker 1: Like if we did build conscious machines, what an absolute
Speaker 1: disaster that would be. Now we have generated the potential
Speaker 1: untold levels of suffering that we might not even recognize
Speaker 1: as suffering. My colleague and friend Thomas Metzinger is very
Speaker 1: vociferous on this point, basically saying there should be moratorium
Speaker 1: on all attempts to develop what he called synthetic phenomenology
Speaker 1: and to build conscious machines because it's just morally reprehensible
Speaker 1: thing to do, and he shouldn't. We see so often
Speaker 1: in technology that people build things because it's cool, because
Speaker 1: they think it's cool, and that is just the worst reason,
Speaker 1: you know, it's There are many things which might seem core.
Speaker 1: I imagine many people are, but I'm not sure he's listening.
Speaker 1: And you know that things have their are unintended consequences
Speaker 1: of things that can be built simply because they're core.
Speaker 1: So just on the outside chance that we might accident
Speaker 1: that you know, I very well might be wrong, and
Speaker 1: it might well be that, in fact, a sufficiently sophisticated
Speaker 1: information processing system suddenly becomes conscious. I think it's unlikely,
Speaker 1: but who knows, I might be wrong, which case we
Speaker 1: have all sorts of problems. I don't think we should
Speaker 1: be trying to do it, but fortunately I don't think
Speaker 1: it's really possible. But what is happening with all these
Speaker 1: chatbots is systance that are playing on our psychological tendency
Speaker 1: to anthropomorphize. Now, we can't help projecting mind into these systems,
Speaker 1: and it's unsurprising that we do that, because the brain
Speaker 1: is always trying to sort of find the most efficient
Speaker 1: cause of explanation for something and to interpret these utterances
Speaker 1: that these chatbots are producing unless you're trying to catch
Speaker 1: them out, which is still pretty easy if you're really trying.
Speaker 1: But if you're not really trying, then it's kind of
Speaker 1: reasonable that you project mind and therefore, for most people
Speaker 1: also consciousness into these things. And here again I think
Speaker 1: this tendency to enteritify them. I won't say personified, because
Speaker 1: they're not people, but to make it an entity just
Speaker 1: biases the debate. And if we recognize that these are
Speaker 1: tools and not entities, then I think that would change
Speaker 1: the discourse, It would change our relationships them. Dan Dannett
Speaker 1: again found great with them. He'd said what many years
Speaker 1: ago about AI, that we should remember we're building tools,
Speaker 1: not colleagues, and be mindful of the difference. And I
Speaker 1: think he's right now more than more than ever. You know,
Speaker 1: I saw this headline in the paper the other day
Speaker 1: about the possibility of it, said, will an AI be
Speaker 1: the first to discover alien life? And this was I
Speaker 1: think this was in Nature magazine. Actually it was a
Speaker 1: headline in Nature, which is, of course, you know, a
Speaker 1: very august scientific journal, And that wound me up a
Speaker 1: lot because it's again, it's making an algorithm an entity,
Speaker 1: and no one would ever say, will statistics be the
Speaker 1: first to discover terrestrial life? It doesn't even make sense
Speaker 1: as a question. So there's a lot to worry about.
Speaker 1: But it's not the kind of things that some people
Speaker 1: are worrying about. It's really the social impact of things
Speaker 1: that might appear to be conscious, plus all the other discourse,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure would be less controversial about. You know,
Speaker 1: this is going to be disruptive for people's jobs, for
Speaker 1: various industries, for truth. You know, these chatbots they can fabulate,
Speaker 1: you know, they make stuff up because they don't actually
Speaker 1: understand anything. They just regurgitate predictions that can be very disruptive.
Speaker 1: Lots of things to worry about, but consciousness nuns much.
Speaker 1: Are you worry that even if the computers aren't conscious,
Speaker 1: they still will be programmed to learn to and at
Speaker 1: some point and reach at a level where they try
Speaker 1: to seek out anyone who says statements such as they're
Speaker 1: not people you know as and view that as a
Speaker 1: sign of disrespect and have a program extremity. Like I
Speaker 1: feel like there's like a Pascal's wager here that I'm
Speaker 1: not willing to I'm not willing to be to have
Speaker 1: a quote here saying that they're not human. Even if
Speaker 1: they aren't human, I feel like you could see a
Speaker 1: world where they get programmed to be disrespect you know,
Speaker 1: the computer Lives matter hashtag like I see some day happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you could say this is just I mean,
Speaker 1: you could rightly, I think, accuse me of some hypocrisy
Speaker 1: or at least inconsistency here in In the one hand,
Speaker 1: I'm saying that consciousness is something that is much widespread
Speaker 1: in humans and we shouldn't be so human centric about it.
Speaker 1: But I seem to be massively prejudiced about carbon based
Speaker 1: things now and yeah, you're a little bit prejudiced prejudiced there,
Speaker 1: And you're right, it's it's hard to its one hundred
Speaker 1: assert the the merit of making that distinction. But but
Speaker 1: I think there are reasons for it, and we've we've
Speaker 1: discussed the reasons already. It won't reiterate them. I think
Speaker 1: it's a view that you know. I'm prepared to have
Speaker 1: my mind changed on. I'm not sure I'm necessarily going
Speaker 1: to hedge my bets in the pascaltic of me. No,
Speaker 1: But I think you do highlight something that may will happen,
Speaker 1: which is that these algorithms they can manipulate our behavior.
Speaker 1: They and that can be done in ways that that
Speaker 1: we might not even be aware of. One of the
Speaker 1: big problems for machine learning, as as I think many
Speaker 1: people know, is it's opacity. It's very hard often to
Speaker 1: know why these algorithms produce the particular outputs or make
Speaker 1: the decisions and classifications that they do. So we're seeding
Speaker 1: a lot of power the things that we don't quite understand,
Speaker 1: and that you may take off in in unforeseen directions.
Speaker 1: Those are certainly things to worry about. I'm worried about it.
Speaker 1: I'm worried about it. I'd rather be on the side
Speaker 1: of the computers. Well, I suppose the most realistic thing
Speaker 1: that will happen in the not so distant future. You
Speaker 1: know what neurolink is trying, you know, ways of a
Speaker 1: human computer like cyborgs. I don't think that's to science fiction.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. And when that happens, it will raise
Speaker 1: lots of interesting questions about what what part of the
Speaker 1: system is conscious? What can we upload our consciousness to
Speaker 1: some maternity method in some way where we can we
Speaker 1: can keep our consciousness going after the physical body, after life,
Speaker 1: biological life leaves us. Where do you kind of stand
Speaker 1: and you're thinking about the far future and the possibility
Speaker 1: of consciousness continuing, consciousness continuing beyond our biological selves. I
Speaker 1: think there's another kind of wager there isn't there. There
Speaker 1: are some people who the more transhumanist persuasion, who are hopeful, optimistic,
Speaker 1: betting to some extent on precisely the ability that they'll
Speaker 1: be able to upload their consciousness to the future cloud
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be. That's a bet I'm not
Speaker 1: prepared to take. I think it relies on all these
Speaker 1: assumptions that are very hard to know which way to
Speaker 1: take them. The fundamental assumption that matters here is the
Speaker 1: substrate dependency of consciousness. It could be that we upload
Speaker 1: a digital description of all my synapses and glial cells
Speaker 1: and whatever level of detail we might want about your
Speaker 1: brain my brain, We upload it and run it as
Speaker 1: a simulation in the cloud. Now, that could end up
Speaker 1: just being a simulation of me, without it feeling like
Speaker 1: anything to be that simulation. It seems very plausible that
Speaker 1: that's the case. I mean, there's no reason back to
Speaker 1: word discussion about simulation instantiation. There's a particular reason why
Speaker 1: consciousness needs to be substraight independent, and I think good
Speaker 1: reason to believe that it isn't. And that blows the
Speaker 1: idea of consciousness uploading right out of the water. If
Speaker 1: consciousness is substraight dependent in some way, So I would
Speaker 1: not make that wager of that being possible. I'd rather
Speaker 1: look after our worlds in the here and now. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a kind of rapture, isn't. It's got a religious
Speaker 1: dealing to it, this idea that we seek some non
Speaker 1: corporeal immortality, and I'm always suspicious of worldviews that go
Speaker 1: after that, to the exclusion of making a better world
Speaker 1: in the here and now. You know what's interesting there
Speaker 1: seems to be this for most people, this desire for
Speaker 1: the immortality. What is it really? It's an immortality of
Speaker 1: a sense of self perspective, But that seems to disappear
Speaker 1: when you do certain things like psychedelics, or you do
Speaker 1: certain in certain and certain self transcendent experiences. The fear
Speaker 1: of death seems to significantly go away when our sense
Speaker 1: of eye is going away. And I think there's things
Speaker 1: just so profound there. I can't one hundred percent articulate
Speaker 1: what is precisely so profound about that, but I think
Speaker 1: that there is something that that's telling us. And I
Speaker 1: know that your book ended with you know, your last
Speaker 1: line of your whole book is like you know. At
Speaker 1: this point, I think we should leave the afterlife to
Speaker 1: as a mystery. But I don't want to leave the
Speaker 1: end of this podcast. I don't want to leave that
Speaker 1: to a mystery. And I also don't want you to
Speaker 1: tell me for sure, well what happens one way or another.
Speaker 1: But isn't it kind of possible that after our biological
Speaker 1: self is dead, you know, after you know that you know,
Speaker 1: and and the eye perspective on consciousness is gone. There
Speaker 1: is still something that perhaps remains, and we just don't
Speaker 1: know what it form, it takes, what it experience is like.
Speaker 1: But that there's still something that that lasts. You don't
Speaker 1: know for sure, right, No, I mean I feel sympathy
Speaker 1: with your with your kind of cleaning to strows here
Speaker 1: be you. But we do, right, we do. But we
Speaker 1: I mean, and I'm sure I do too. It's it's
Speaker 1: against an internal procricy here, because I think we're designed
Speaker 1: at some level brains were evolved to stay alive, and
Speaker 1: so built into our psychological infrastructure is this desire to persist.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fundamental to our ability to persist. And
Speaker 1: that conflict with the knowledge that we have with a
Speaker 1: good reason, good well justified belief that we have that
Speaker 1: we won't persist forever. And of course that's a realization
Speaker 1: that each of us comes to in our lifespan, usually
Speaker 1: when we're a child. Isn't oh shit, I might die
Speaker 1: at some point, right and then? And then the sort
Speaker 1: of weirdness of the idea that we'll hold on a minute,
Speaker 1: There's been this whole span of time that happened before
Speaker 1: I was born, when I wasn't there, So why should
Speaker 1: Why isn't the span of time going to happen on
Speaker 1: the other side too? It seems we have this weird
Speaker 1: a symmetry with how we consider persistence of the self.
Speaker 1: We're not worried about typically, we're not worried. We don't
Speaker 1: have a fomo for all the time before we were born,
Speaker 1: but we do for the time after we die. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, everything that we know about the intimate dependency
Speaker 1: of the brain and consciousness really does suggest that when
Speaker 1: the brain stops, you stop. And I talk in the
Speaker 1: book at both ends of the book about anesthesia and
Speaker 1: general anesthesia as being as close to the oblivion of
Speaker 1: not existing as any of us are going to get
Speaker 1: without actually dying. And the thing about general anesthesia, the
Speaker 1: thing about oblivion is that it's not the experience of absence.
Speaker 1: It's the absence of all that experience. There is just
Speaker 1: nothing going on, nothing at all. And it's incredibly hard
Speaker 1: to project oneself into a situation where there's nothing going on,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't make any sense. You're projecting yourself to
Speaker 1: a situation where there is no self. Also, so we
Speaker 1: have to come at it indirectly, and here I think
Speaker 1: you're exactly right. There are different ways to come at this.
Speaker 1: When people take psychedelics, there's a sense of ego dissolution,
Speaker 1: which does sometimes to some people correlate with with the
Speaker 1: reduction of fear of mortality. There's a meditation where we
Speaker 1: realize through practice that this experience of self is not
Speaker 1: a stable, unchanging thing which could be lost, but it's
Speaker 1: always changing. It's always different. Is a construction too. And
Speaker 1: then there's the perspective from philosophy and neuroscience which is
Speaker 1: also veighing that message that the self is a process
Speaker 1: that's an assemblage of related perceptions, and that it's always changing.
Speaker 1: I think these things converge hopefully in reducing our our
Speaker 1: fear of non existence. I you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: would be hebristic of me to say that it can
Speaker 1: get rid of it. You know, I certainly don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable yet with the prospect of not existing. But I
Speaker 1: think my views on it have changed as my views
Speaker 1: on what the self are have changed. But here we
Speaker 1: here we roll back to an early part. Just because
Speaker 1: there are now these different perspectives on the self, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that I no longer experience myself as a
Speaker 1: as an entity that that persists over time. I do
Speaker 1: in the same way that Yeah, I still perceive red
Speaker 1: as a color out there in the world. But these
Speaker 1: these different perspectives on it, I think soften the implications
Speaker 1: of that experience. But how we might think about the
Speaker 1: end of life and how we might lessen our grip
Speaker 1: on the desire to just forever. It seems like we
Speaker 1: lessen that grip by changing our perspective of cleaning so
Speaker 1: hard to the eye, clinging so hard to the unique identity,
Speaker 1: cleaning so hard to the evolved desire for the self
Speaker 1: to persist, and just lessen that grip. You know, just
Speaker 1: there's no just about it. But if we can lessen
Speaker 1: that grip, it seems like we seem to make more
Speaker 1: peace with oblivion. On that note, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for being on a psychology podcast today. It was great
Speaker 1: to finally meet you, and I hope we can keep
Speaker 1: up the conversation. Thank you for having me. I'm really
Speaker 1: happy you've got the chance to talk and yeah, be
Speaker 1: happy to continue it. Thanks so much me too. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to react in some way to something you heard.
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusychology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: We also put up some videos of some episodes on
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Speaker 1: that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
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Speaker 1: the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.