Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. And my name is Robert Lamb, and on
Speaker 1: Julie Douglas and in each of us. We can't help
Speaker 1: but but ring with that, uh, that that existential statement.
Speaker 1: I think therefore I am. We're all bound up in
Speaker 1: this just endless whirlwind of thinking, and we're thinking about
Speaker 1: our own thoughts. We're thinking about our own consciousness. We're
Speaker 1: thinking about the world around as we're thinking about the past,
Speaker 1: the future. We're thinking about the the the possible reality
Speaker 1: of things outside of our observable universe. We're thinking about aliens,
Speaker 1: we're thinking about God. Uh, this is this is kind
Speaker 1: of the state of the human mind as a whole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this whole big sushi roll of existence that we
Speaker 1: try to get our minds around, and um, it becomes
Speaker 1: very meta, right. We do a lot of thinking about thinking.
Speaker 1: Essentially is what consciousness boils down to. And it's problematic.
Speaker 1: We call it the hard problem because we've never really
Speaker 1: found the center of consciousness. We're not really sure how
Speaker 1: it relates to our existence. We're not really sure how
Speaker 1: it relates to this idea of a creator, something that
Speaker 1: created the world. Um, did we just come out of nothingness?
Speaker 1: And in fact, American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, quote,
Speaker 1: the idea of consciousness is ludicrous. If it is not monstrous,
Speaker 1: it means to know that one is food for worms.
Speaker 1: This is the terror to have emerged from nothing, to
Speaker 1: have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings and
Speaker 1: excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression, and with
Speaker 1: all this yet to die. Well, you know, on one hand,
Speaker 1: you could say that that's a deeply troubling thing too
Speaker 1: to take into your world view. But you accept that,
Speaker 1: then maybe it opens up your life for for other pursuits.
Speaker 1: You can be like, all right, well, now I realize
Speaker 1: that I'm just I'm just feast for the worms, that
Speaker 1: that that my whole existence is just circling a black hole.
Speaker 1: But I don't have to worry about that anymore. I
Speaker 1: can spend some time gardening, indeed, and I can hopefully
Speaker 1: create this state of flow and just being the moment,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about in another podcast episode. But today
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about this hard problem and this idea.
Speaker 1: This I'm not going to call this simple idea because
Speaker 1: it's not, but a more straightforward idea called attention schema
Speaker 1: theory that might put this more in a context that
Speaker 1: we can understand more palatable. I should say yes, now,
Speaker 1: I definitely want to preface here and say, on one hand, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about human consciousness here. We talked about
Speaker 1: human consciousness before devoted in an entire episode, do it.
Speaker 1: This is an area that we're going to continue to
Speaker 1: see advances in in neuroscience and and even in philosophy,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna be a while before we can and
Speaker 1: maybe we'll maybe we'll never even have a really concrete
Speaker 1: idea of consciousness that both makes sense on paper and
Speaker 1: feels right uh to our our first person experience of it.
Speaker 1: So it's still a feel that you see a lot
Speaker 1: of progress in. On the other hand, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about God in the later part of
Speaker 1: this episode, and God, of course, is something that we
Speaker 1: will never be able to prove scientifically. It the concept
Speaker 1: of God and gods and deities is is something that
Speaker 1: is is ultimately unknowable to science. So the theory that
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss in this episode, attention scheme of
Speaker 1: theory is not. We're not saying, hey, here is a
Speaker 1: theory that definitely explains all of these things, that satisfies
Speaker 1: all these mysteries. Even the theories creator Michael Graziano, a neuroscience,
Speaker 1: novelist and composer, Professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Uh,
Speaker 1: even he'll tell you this is not a satisfying theory.
Speaker 1: So what I would like to encourage everyone to do is,
Speaker 1: you know, we're all coming into this topic with certain
Speaker 1: constraints in our world view. Is to to not just
Speaker 1: completely throw your worldview aside, but lower the gate a
Speaker 1: little bit and open yourself up to alternate perspectives on
Speaker 1: what human consciousness is and alternate takes on how to
Speaker 1: view the idea of a god or God's including a
Speaker 1: giant Harry orangatane puppet, which we'll get to you in
Speaker 1: a d that Graziano actually works into his bits here. Um.
Speaker 1: But Garciana says, we have been asking the wrong question.
Speaker 1: We've been asking how do neurons produce a magic internal experience?
Speaker 1: And he's basically saying this he can't answer this unanswerable,
Speaker 1: But he says we can ask how and for what
Speaker 1: survival advantage. Does a brain attribute subjective experience aka consciousness
Speaker 1: to itself? And he says this is scientifically approachable and
Speaker 1: that his attention schema theory supplies outlines of answers for it.
Speaker 1: And this is where the orangutang comes in. Yes, so
Speaker 1: he picks up an orangutank puppet and uh and he
Speaker 1: starts talking about consciousness and about the the idea that
Speaker 1: this orangutang punchet but puppet is conscious. Now, on one level,
Speaker 1: we all know that a puppeteer takes the stage and
Speaker 1: they entertain us with a puppet show. That puppet is
Speaker 1: not really conscious. It is not a conscious being. If
Speaker 1: you had to choose, you know which individual gets a
Speaker 1: brick thrown at them, a human child or an orangutang puppet.
Speaker 1: You choose the orangutang puppet every time and just hope
Speaker 1: that there's not a child's hand in it. But you
Speaker 1: still wins when that puppet gets heyh yeah, we can't help,
Speaker 1: but do it? I mean you, you know we've mentioned
Speaker 1: many times before you draw a face on something, and
Speaker 1: then you you draw a face on a stick and
Speaker 1: then you break the stick. We're gonna feel a little
Speaker 1: something we we we can't help but personify the world
Speaker 1: around us, and by personify it, we end up engaging
Speaker 1: it with with some level and dowing it with some
Speaker 1: level of consciousness. Yeah. What I love about this is
Speaker 1: that he will start out his talks with Kevin the Orangutang,
Speaker 1: and he does his bit, his ventriloquist bit, which you know, guys,
Speaker 1: we love, right if you've been following along and you've
Speaker 1: seen our episode on ventriloquism, And he says to the audience,
Speaker 1: I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain, a
Speaker 1: biological machine, generates consciousness. Kevin the Orangutang starts heckling me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I don't have a brain, but I'm still conscious.
Speaker 1: What does that due to your theory? And he says
Speaker 1: that Kevin is the perfect introduction because intellectually nobody is fooled.
Speaker 1: As you say, right, like, we know this. If we're
Speaker 1: going to have to choose between a kid or a puppet,
Speaker 1: throw something at and he says, we all know there's
Speaker 1: nothing inside, but everyone in the audience experiences an illusion
Speaker 1: of sentience emanating from his hairy head. And he he
Speaker 1: kind of takes us as a jumping off point to
Speaker 1: talk about attention schema theory. Yeah, and uh, and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll continue to unpack that in this this podcast. But it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's one of these issues where that the theory forces
Speaker 1: you to rethink what consciousness is. And this is not
Speaker 1: going to be one of those crazy theories where it's,
Speaker 1: you know, where it's stating that, oh, well, that the
Speaker 1: universe only exists because you have your eyes open. If
Speaker 1: you close your eyes, nothing exists, or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's not not that kind of a truthy theory. But
Speaker 1: it just forces us to reevaluate what consciousness is from
Speaker 1: our first person perspective as well as the sort of
Speaker 1: third person consciousness that we attribute to humans, puppets, characters
Speaker 1: in novels, video game avatars, you name it. That's right,
Speaker 1: And so he kind of goes into the past here
Speaker 1: to say, let's look at the evolutionary model of consciousness.
Speaker 1: How might it have arisen in animals and what does
Speaker 1: that mean for us? What does it mean about the
Speaker 1: qualities of consciousness? And he does say that at some
Speaker 1: point animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the
Speaker 1: most urgent incoming signals. He said, too much information comes
Speaker 1: in from the outside world, says it all equally, and
Speaker 1: it is useful to select the most silient data for
Speaker 1: deeper processing over time, though it came under a more
Speaker 1: sophisticated kind of control what we now call attention right,
Speaker 1: And we all have experienced this before. You shut out
Speaker 1: the outside world in order to focus your attention. Right.
Speaker 1: The example I always turned to is you're at a party.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of a lot of different conversations
Speaker 1: going on, uh and and you know, the people next
Speaker 1: to you're talking about football. The people over here they're
Speaker 1: talking about theater. These people are talking about somebody you
Speaker 1: don't know, name Ron. But you're trying to have a
Speaker 1: conversation with any about Um installing a concrete pond in
Speaker 1: her backyard. So your brain is somehow able to shut
Speaker 1: out these these non essential conversations while still being aware
Speaker 1: of them, and focus in on the central conversation about
Speaker 1: Amy and her concrete pond. Is the pond filled with concrete? Um,
Speaker 1: yes it is. It's it's really not gonna work, but
Speaker 1: she has these really high minded ideas about how fish
Speaker 1: are going to live in it. Okay. Um. So the
Speaker 1: thing here is that he says mammals and birds both
Speaker 1: have it. This this awareness is attention, and he says
Speaker 1: they diverge from a common ancestor about three fifty million
Speaker 1: years ago, so attention is probably at least that old.
Speaker 1: And attention leads to awareness, and awareness leads to consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's basically this idea of consciousness, thinking of it as
Speaker 1: a focus of attention, a control of attention and and
Speaker 1: and that's key to our experience of this thing that
Speaker 1: we call consciousness. Our brains the process all of the
Speaker 1: sense data as well as our knowledge of our self
Speaker 1: in the world. And uh, and the self that we're
Speaker 1: aware of ultimately is like a game piece on a
Speaker 1: table um. Again, it's his consciousness as information. You've got
Speaker 1: to sort of shut out these, uh, these these more
Speaker 1: magical ideas that we layer on top of it, about
Speaker 1: like a soul, about some sort of energy that that
Speaker 1: rives within us, or some sort of angelic hand it's
Speaker 1: reaching in to occupy our brain. This is a biological
Speaker 1: brain that's dealing with a lot of sense data coming in,
Speaker 1: having to screen out some of it. And uh, and
Speaker 1: and it's about our control of attention over this data. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I was just thinking about our podcast episode It's
Speaker 1: a Trap, and we were talking about this spider that
Speaker 1: creates a essentially like a sculpture of itself, yes, as
Speaker 1: a decoy, And in that moment, you know that the
Speaker 1: spider has an awareness of itself because it just created
Speaker 1: I albeit a larger version of itself for another uh insect,
Speaker 1: a predator, and it is considering both itself and the
Speaker 1: other thing. So we know that this has been in existence,
Speaker 1: this consciousness. And um, we've talked about Steven Pinker's claim
Speaker 1: before that something like music is just auditory cheesecake. Right,
Speaker 1: He has this idea that music is a byproduct of language.
Speaker 1: So you could start to look as consciousness as just
Speaker 1: cognitive cheesecake, okay, the byproduct of awareness. And evolutionary biologists
Speaker 1: David Barash, writing for a magazine seems to think that
Speaker 1: this is the idea. He says, maybe it's just a
Speaker 1: non adaptive byproduct of having bigger brains, or rather brains
Speaker 1: bigger than it's strictly necessary for bossing our bodies around.
Speaker 1: And he goes on to say, sure, a single molecule
Speaker 1: of water is water, but it isn't wet, and neither
Speaker 1: are two molecules of water, or a thousand or maybe
Speaker 1: even a million, he says, but with enough of them
Speaker 1: we get wetness. And not because wetness is adaptively favored
Speaker 1: over dryness, but because it's an unavoidable physical consequence of
Speaker 1: piling up enough H two O molecules together. And so
Speaker 1: he says, could consciousness be similar to that, and you
Speaker 1: could accumulate enough neurons because maybe they permit their possessor
Speaker 1: to integrate numerous sensory inputs and generate complex variable behavior.
Speaker 1: So hey, there you go. You just wire all this
Speaker 1: stuff up and eventually you get conscious is yeah, I
Speaker 1: love this idea of consciousness is ultimately this thing that
Speaker 1: builds up because of this this loop of of of
Speaker 1: data in the brain. Um. I keep thinking of it
Speaker 1: in terms of a rear view mirror in a car. Now,
Speaker 1: this is an overly simplified explanation of what's going on here.
Speaker 1: But you have a rear view mirror in an automobile,
Speaker 1: and it's all about being able to look in that
Speaker 1: mirror and see what's behind the car. Rather simple, but
Speaker 1: we increasingly use that for other things. We we look
Speaker 1: in the mirror to see what our hair looks like,
Speaker 1: to see what our cosmetics look like, to look into
Speaker 1: the back seat to see what the child is doing, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And so in this the use of the mirror changes
Speaker 1: the way that we see ourselves. It changes the way
Speaker 1: that we see our environment and becomes this this sort
Speaker 1: of thing unto itself. Yeah, especially if you consider that
Speaker 1: that mirror, that perception can be easily um manipulated. And
Speaker 1: what I mean to say is that we've talked about
Speaker 1: appropriate reception before and how our body scheme and our
Speaker 1: attention schema are inherently linked our idea, our map of
Speaker 1: ourselves out there right uh, spatial awareness of our body
Speaker 1: and how it's represented. That can be completely um shifted
Speaker 1: if there's something like say a brain lesion. In other words,
Speaker 1: you have all these computations in your brain, but appropriate
Speaker 1: reception or some other element that informs that is skewed. Well,
Speaker 1: the computations are skewed. Yeah, indeed, I mean think back
Speaker 1: to our episodes on appropriate exception and on the shadow self.
Speaker 1: Both of those dealt with these ideas. Well. What happens
Speaker 1: when your brain the settings are changed just a little bit,
Speaker 1: and those settings affect the way that you make sense
Speaker 1: of yourself in time and space and embody um. And
Speaker 1: and that's that's one of the key things in play
Speaker 1: here with attention schema theory is that it's the idea
Speaker 1: that that that our idea of consciousness and our conscious
Speaker 1: awareness of self is really something that is uh that
Speaker 1: we attribute to ourselves. It is ultimately an avatar um. Now,
Speaker 1: Garzono goes into this theory in detail in his book
Speaker 1: Consciousness in the Social Brain, and he also has an
Speaker 1: excellent piece in in the magazine that I'll link to
Speaker 1: on the landing page for this stuff for this particular
Speaker 1: podcast episode. But he says, the heart of the theory, remember,
Speaker 1: is that awareness is a model of attention. Like the
Speaker 1: general's model of his army laid out on a map.
Speaker 1: The real army isn't made of plastic, of course, it
Speaker 1: isn't quite so small and has rather more moving parts.
Speaker 1: In these respects, the model is totally unrealistic, and yet
Speaker 1: without such simplifications it would be impractical to use, impractical
Speaker 1: to use the army. So therefore, the idea is that
Speaker 1: our conscious self is this uh this ultimately an unrealistic
Speaker 1: model of who and what we are, but it is necessary.
Speaker 1: But it's but but but over time it has become Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is the way that we experience the world,
Speaker 1: and it is the way that we are conscious of
Speaker 1: the world. You end up again and that loop, and
Speaker 1: it makes it so difficult for us to to even
Speaker 1: analyze what our consciousness is from the inside. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: this idea that the brain is essentially constructing a model
Speaker 1: to monitor the fact that it's paying attention to something
Speaker 1: totally makes sense. And it is also kind of amazing because,
Speaker 1: as he says, all the sudden awareness is emerging from
Speaker 1: this cartoon sketch that the brain has made of itself
Speaker 1: and others. Yeah. So in a way, it's like thinking,
Speaker 1: all right, here's Julian Robert sort of here are these
Speaker 1: two bodies, these two organisms, and each of those organisms
Speaker 1: minds is an idea of Robert and an idea of Julie.
Speaker 1: This this conscious self that they attribute to this body,
Speaker 1: and then likewise we're each attributing a conscious self to
Speaker 1: the other. Yeah, and you are even saying this that
Speaker 1: the person in the mirror is a projection of this consciousness.
Speaker 1: The makeup that someone might put on is informing that
Speaker 1: sort of toy Soldier of our consciousness that our generals
Speaker 1: of our minds are creating. Right. So even something like that,
Speaker 1: you don't think of makeup as being part of your consciousness,
Speaker 1: but hey is representing it, right you the idea you
Speaker 1: have of yourself out in the world. Indeed, an example
Speaker 1: that Graziano brings up that that plays into this sort
Speaker 1: of unrealistic model that works in terms of understanding the
Speaker 1: world is that of essentially heat vision. Uh. This this
Speaker 1: kind of blew my mind a little bit because it's
Speaker 1: something I never really thought about, but but makes perfect
Speaker 1: sense now that now that it's laying out. And this
Speaker 1: is the idea that a startling number of people in
Speaker 1: the world, um think, and I want to say think
Speaker 1: this might in many cases just be a sort of
Speaker 1: a subconscious level of understanding something. But they think that
Speaker 1: they see things with their eyes because rays come out
Speaker 1: of their eyes. Now, I want to stay that you know,
Speaker 1: you me, most of our listeners probably know enough about
Speaker 1: the human body to know that eyes work because light
Speaker 1: enters the eyes. We know that scientifically that that's what's happened.
Speaker 1: Nothing is emitted from the eyes, and yet it is
Speaker 1: Graziano points out, there is a actually a study from
Speaker 1: the University of Ohio and two thousand two that found
Speaker 1: it about half of American college students also thought that
Speaker 1: we see because rays come out of our eyes. It's
Speaker 1: something that that does not mesh with our scientific understanding
Speaker 1: of how our bodies work, about how physics work. But
Speaker 1: but but it it makes sense in terms of how
Speaker 1: we experience the world. We think about psight emanating from
Speaker 1: the eyes, and we see this more avertly in say,
Speaker 1: cartoon characters and our comic book characters. What happens when
Speaker 1: that cartoon coyote creature is howling an attractive woman, his
Speaker 1: eyeball stick out and he goes ioga um, light is
Speaker 1: shining out of low Pan's eyes and big troubling little China. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are all fantastic exaggerations of this sort of uh
Speaker 1: magical way that we think about our interaction with the world.
Speaker 1: We think about people's eyes burning into us when they're
Speaker 1: airing at us, like get your eyes off of me, clee,
Speaker 1: your eyes that their eyes aren't actually touching you. There's
Speaker 1: nothing emitted from their eyes. They are merely drinking in
Speaker 1: the light with those organs. Okay, So Graciana says that
Speaker 1: whenever this this um idea of our awareness of others
Speaker 1: and thinking about others and trying to guess at what
Speaker 1: they're they're doing or thinking. Whenever this arose, it clearly
Speaker 1: plays a major role in the social capability of modern humans.
Speaker 1: We paint the world with perceived consciousness. Family friends, pets, spirits, gods,
Speaker 1: and ventriloquist puppets all appeared before us suffused with sentience.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of these television shows where someone
Speaker 1: will bring a black light into a hotel room and
Speaker 1: they'll turn it on and then show you all the
Speaker 1: grotesque stains that are covering everything. Attention schema theory is
Speaker 1: kind of like that black light and saying, look at
Speaker 1: at at at all the things in there, the hotel room,
Speaker 1: of your life, of your universe that you have managed
Speaker 1: to get your sticky consciousness over. Not only is it
Speaker 1: is it coding yourself. It's coding. It's coding animals, it's
Speaker 1: coding other people. It's coding, uh, you know, perfectly inanimate
Speaker 1: things that we temporarily attribute conscious consciousness to your consciousness
Speaker 1: fluids flowing everywhere. It's just absolutely everywhere. But we just
Speaker 1: don't we just don't think about it that the fact
Speaker 1: that that this stuff that is inside us, that that
Speaker 1: we attribute to ourselves is also just taked all over
Speaker 1: the rest of our world. A concrete example of this
Speaker 1: is again calling back to our episode appropriate reception and
Speaker 1: pro pre receptive drift, and this is when we were
Speaker 1: talking about experiments in which a fake arm was placed
Speaker 1: next to someone's real arm and then, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it was stroked and treated as if it was the
Speaker 1: person's own arm, and uh, they begin to react to
Speaker 1: that fake arm as if it were their own. And
Speaker 1: so you could take all sorts of vital signs, their heartbeat,
Speaker 1: you could take the regalvonic skin response, you know, how
Speaker 1: much sweat they produce, and measure all of that if
Speaker 1: someone were to take an life and threatened their fake arms.
Speaker 1: So again, here's this appropriate acceptive drift, this idea that
Speaker 1: we're drifting into other or others consciousness, even if it's
Speaker 1: a fake arm. Yeah, and so we just find ourselves
Speaker 1: going through our daily life where we're, um, we're we
Speaker 1: stub our toe on some sort of horrendous piece of furniture,
Speaker 1: and at least for for a split second there, we
Speaker 1: we attribute consciousness to that, to that that footstool or
Speaker 1: whatever it was, and and see it as an enemy.
Speaker 1: We you know, we get really into a sports team
Speaker 1: and we start attaching our ego to it. And then
Speaker 1: since we're a spying consciousness to this uh, to this
Speaker 1: unit of individuals, and we don't even see the individuals anymore.
Speaker 1: We just see this thing and it is somehow become
Speaker 1: a conscious entity. But if you slow things down, and
Speaker 1: if at that very moment you ask yourself it's just
Speaker 1: a type a consciousness or a type be consciousness, you
Speaker 1: might be able to see things more clearly. And we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we'll
Speaker 1: explore that. All right, we're back. Now, we've been talking
Speaker 1: about consciousness. We've been talking about the consciousness that we
Speaker 1: experience inside ourselves and the consciousness that we attribute to others.
Speaker 1: And to make sense of all this, UH, Graziano identifies
Speaker 1: two types of consciousness. All right, And this is essentially
Speaker 1: revolves around again this idea of a first person consciousness
Speaker 1: and a third person consciousness. First of all, you have
Speaker 1: consciousness type A. A brain beholds consciousness in itself. Now,
Speaker 1: this is pretty easy for us to fathom because this
Speaker 1: is I think. Therefore, I am you are conscious of
Speaker 1: yourself and your thoughts and your existence in the universe
Speaker 1: right now. But then you have consciousness Type B. A
Speaker 1: brain beholds consciousness in others. And this is uh, this
Speaker 1: is equally every day for everybody. We attribute consciousness to
Speaker 1: our fellow humans, but we also go ahead and attribute
Speaker 1: it to other organisms, to puppets, to avatars, to plants,
Speaker 1: to symbols, to inanimate objects. Uh, and uh, we'll discuss.
Speaker 1: In the case of God, we attribute it to the
Speaker 1: cosmos itself. Now, at first glance, these would seem to
Speaker 1: be just two distinct concepts. Right, There's this thing I'm feeling,
Speaker 1: and I'm assuming other people feel it too, In the
Speaker 1: same sense that I could say I really like the
Speaker 1: local sports team, I assume everybody should like the local
Speaker 1: sports team. That level of attribution. But where it gets
Speaker 1: really interesting here is that in attention scheme of theory.
Speaker 1: The argument is that both types of consciouness, both type
Speaker 1: A and type B, are essentially cases of attribution. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so consider a bird, right, okay, considering one right now?
Speaker 1: All right, how do you have it in your head? Bluebird, yellow,
Speaker 1: yellow bird, canary? Okay, We've got our canary here, and
Speaker 1: let's say our bird has awareness of others, say a predator. Okay,
Speaker 1: that is a type BE awareness. Okay, by the way,
Speaker 1: I'm having a type the awareness of that bird exactly.
Speaker 1: Can you throw in another animal? This is kind of
Speaker 1: getting super meta. And now that turtle in space whose
Speaker 1: dream that we're all occupying, is dreaming of us, and
Speaker 1: we're yes, okay, Um, so anyway, you've got that canary,
Speaker 1: it's thinking about a predator. It is exhibiting a type
Speaker 1: the kind of UM consciousness. But we're thinking about it,
Speaker 1: as you say, and we might attribute a type A
Speaker 1: consciousness to it, meaning that we might assume that this
Speaker 1: canary is thinking about thinking. And this is erroneous, right,
Speaker 1: So this is where you can see type BE in
Speaker 1: Type A kind of sometimes getting melded into each other. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's again the idea that the the first
Speaker 1: person consciousness that we experienced, this Type A is still
Speaker 1: a matter of attribution. We're we're attributing consciousness to ourselves
Speaker 1: in the same way that we're attributing consciousness to everything else.
Speaker 1: It's essentially the same mechanism, is just we're experiencing it
Speaker 1: firsthand rather than third hand. So a human example is
Speaker 1: Terry Shiavo and this is someone whom if you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with it, she had been pronounced Brenda by her doctors,
Speaker 1: but for seven years she was kept on life support
Speaker 1: by her family who said, no, we think that she's
Speaker 1: she's alive in there, she's conscious and they would look
Speaker 1: at her movements. Right, is her pimb moving as evidence
Speaker 1: of her being conscious and willfully moving her hands? Right.
Speaker 1: So the problem here is one of misattribution because they're
Speaker 1: assuming that she has a type A conscious and a
Speaker 1: type A consciousness that would mean that she was still
Speaker 1: able to think about thinking right, And again that's a
Speaker 1: misattribution here. They are they are aware of her type
Speaker 1: B and the type the Type B is now being
Speaker 1: melded onto type A just because they are aware of
Speaker 1: her moving. So this is a good example of how
Speaker 1: that it's kind of like again that pro preosceptive drift.
Speaker 1: It can get into really murky territory. And here's the
Speaker 1: thing that Graziano says, and this is where things get
Speaker 1: really sticky. He's essentially saying, though even though there are
Speaker 1: two different types, that doesn't mean that one is more
Speaker 1: real than the other. Well, I shouldn't say real. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's the sticky part, because nobody is going to
Speaker 1: argue again that that ring and hang puppet is more
Speaker 1: value than a human life. Nobody's ever going to say
Speaker 1: that that ring and hanging puppet is actually as conscious
Speaker 1: as as human consciousness. But in this model of attention
Speaker 1: scheme of theory, it's it's the same process being used
Speaker 1: to apply that consciousness, and it makes you it's not
Speaker 1: as much about what that orangutan is doing, It's about
Speaker 1: our own consciousness, is about really understanding and taking a
Speaker 1: step back from our conscious experience of the world and
Speaker 1: trying to better understand exactly what is going on there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's where if you get into puppets and you
Speaker 1: get into the other and this confusion of b for
Speaker 1: a you have to bring up God. Yes uh In.
Speaker 1: In Graziana's book again, Consciousness and the Social Brain, you
Speaker 1: can find it on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold,
Speaker 1: he says that much of our magical thinking might simply
Speaker 1: be simplifications and shortcut so the brain takes when representing
Speaker 1: itself in the world, so in a sense, kind of
Speaker 1: collateral damage spiraling out from this, from from this, uh,
Speaker 1: this conscious understanding of self and others, an attributed consciousness. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the big one here, of course, is the idea
Speaker 1: of God. And again I want you to set aside
Speaker 1: whatever you know, preconceived ideas and worldviews you're holding, and
Speaker 1: just step outside of the concept and uh and and
Speaker 1: think about what attention schema theory would say about the
Speaker 1: nature of God. Because he does play devil's advocate here
Speaker 1: in a very sort of slippery way. He says, there
Speaker 1: is no God of a traditional form, no being made
Speaker 1: of pure thought or will or spirit that created the unit. Earse,
Speaker 1: he says conscious consciousness by itself does not have the
Speaker 1: physical capability to move or create matter. That's not what
Speaker 1: consciousness is. Most people would consider this description to be
Speaker 1: strictly atheistic, and it is. And yet he says there
Speaker 1: is another sign to the story. He says, according to
Speaker 1: the theory of the statement X is conscious means a
Speaker 1: brain or other computational device constructed an informational model of
Speaker 1: consciousness and attributed it to X. We're talking a sort
Speaker 1: of creator in a sense, right compution in law that
Speaker 1: created this, he says. In this theory, a universal deistic
Speaker 1: consciousness does actually exist. It is as real as any
Speaker 1: other consciousness. If brains attribute consciousness to X, then X
Speaker 1: is conscious in the only way that anything is conscious.
Speaker 1: So God kind of exists on the technicality in attendous
Speaker 1: game of theory. But you know, I do want to
Speaker 1: point out again that, you know, when we're talking about
Speaker 1: God in consciousness, because when you think about models of God,
Speaker 1: and you can talk about you know, the God, the
Speaker 1: Father God, the Mother God, the sort of beast de
Speaker 1: old creature God, the sort of amorphous force in the world,
Speaker 1: or any any pantheon of deities you you might want
Speaker 1: to cling onto. Generally, consciousness is part and partial to it.
Speaker 1: When when people are worshiping a god or investing any
Speaker 1: kind of thought in the idea of a God, it's
Speaker 1: about it being a conscious entity. Uh, you know, unless
Speaker 1: you're getting into some you know, some of like the
Speaker 1: love crafty and God's like as is Off, which is
Speaker 1: you know, fictional God that is horrifying because it is
Speaker 1: it is unconscious, because it is mindless. Um you know,
Speaker 1: you you that's the idea that there we're taking consciousness
Speaker 1: and we're attributing it to the universe. The Universe's consciousness
Speaker 1: and is either aware of us or is actively involved
Speaker 1: in in our lives, or is aware of the world,
Speaker 1: or is at least aware of creation. Again, we're we're
Speaker 1: attributing consciousness big time to the universe is itself? So
Speaker 1: here a couple of things about that. When you think
Speaker 1: about a creator, then you you know that that made
Speaker 1: all of us, right, even the ability to be conscious.
Speaker 1: Then you began to think about suffering. Right, if this
Speaker 1: creator is imbued with consciousness, then why would people suffer?
Speaker 1: That's one thing. The second thing there answers to that
Speaker 1: that it's not exactly it's not exactly got you question, Well,
Speaker 1: we can roll on for fifteen hours on that, um.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is that we talk about
Speaker 1: consciousness being tethered to the physical body again pro prereception, right,
Speaker 1: that informs the eye, in our in ourselves, the way
Speaker 1: that we define ourselves. So you have to look at
Speaker 1: this creator, especially when you look I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: very like uh biblical like bearded one sitting on a
Speaker 1: cloud thing. Um that this does not square with the
Speaker 1: actual idea of consciousness and is separate from the experience
Speaker 1: of life, and it very much calls back to this
Speaker 1: platonic ideal. And you and I were talking about this.
Speaker 1: If you have some creator thing that is attached to
Speaker 1: the human experience, well then it's sullied with the human experience. UM.
Speaker 1: So I think this is why we have this idea
Speaker 1: of this creator thing separate and yet having consciousness. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because the model we understand of consciousness, the one we
Speaker 1: can prove out and we can observe um here on Earth,
Speaker 1: is that consciousness arises from a sufficiently complex biological process.
Speaker 1: And we can extrapolate that and say that if the
Speaker 1: consciousness perhaps could emerge from a sufficiently advanced mechanical concept,
Speaker 1: computer program, etcetera. So if you look at it under
Speaker 1: those constraints, you could say, all right, well it's possible
Speaker 1: that you do have something that would be viewed as
Speaker 1: a god from the human perspective. Uh, some sort of
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial force that achieved consciousness before we did, and uh
Speaker 1: is sufficiently advanced. Uh. Skeptic Michael Shermer has a has
Speaker 1: this thing he called Shechrmer's law, where he's playing on
Speaker 1: Arthur C. Clarke's um law, which states that any sufficiently
Speaker 1: advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and Tremer toys Within
Speaker 1: says that any sufficiently advanced alien species is indistinguishable from
Speaker 1: from a god. But the thing is, again who no.
Speaker 1: I mean, certain people are going to be cool with
Speaker 1: worshiping UFOs and gods, and that's that's their own thing,
Speaker 1: you know, go at it. But I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of us are not going to be content with
Speaker 1: that model. We don't want to worship something human. We
Speaker 1: don't even want to worship something alien. We want to
Speaker 1: worship something beyond, something as great as the universe itself,
Speaker 1: because it it comes back around to attributing consciousness to
Speaker 1: the universe. And yet Graziana would say, you can't look
Speaker 1: at that sort of magical inner state of consciousness and
Speaker 1: and try to attract sort of the the neuronal comings
Speaker 1: and goings of it. The only way to approach it
Speaker 1: is to look at it as why did it benefit
Speaker 1: animals and humans? What? You know, why did it arise?
Speaker 1: And did it arise just as a byproduct of awareness?
Speaker 1: Which is terribly intriguing. And yet to play Devil's advocate here.
Speaker 1: You know, if there's consciousness here on Earth and there's
Speaker 1: a bajillion galaxies elsewhere, there exist the possibility of consciousness
Speaker 1: elsewhere out there in the universe. And this brings us
Speaker 1: back around again to the idea of the possibility of
Speaker 1: computer self awareness, of computer consciousness, which is which is
Speaker 1: a whole sort of tricky area and of itself because
Speaker 1: we have we have a hard time. I mean, the
Speaker 1: whole mind body problem is that we we experience ourselves
Speaker 1: in our mind and our thinking and our consciousness, and
Speaker 1: then we look at the brain and we say, well,
Speaker 1: I see how the brain works or appears to work,
Speaker 1: but this doesn't really match up well with my experience
Speaker 1: of using a brain and being a brain. And so
Speaker 1: we look to computers that we actually reach the point
Speaker 1: where where we have something that is arguably arguably consciousness
Speaker 1: in a machine, then we it seems like we were
Speaker 1: on the risk of the same problem. We look at
Speaker 1: what's going on in the machine and saying, well, I
Speaker 1: understand that you say that on paper, this thing is
Speaker 1: supposed to be conscious now, but what I'm seeing there
Speaker 1: and what I'm seeing from this computer doesn't really match
Speaker 1: up with what I'm experiencing as consciousness. Yeah. Slate article
Speaker 1: called could the Internet Wake Up has a really interesting
Speaker 1: take on artificial intelligence and consciousness, and there's this possibility
Speaker 1: that it could Artificial intelligence reached the point in its
Speaker 1: connections to feel, And by feel, I mean the recursive
Speaker 1: qualities that we experience when we think about ourselves, right,
Speaker 1: because we get the feedback, right, I get the feedback
Speaker 1: right now that I'm thinking, and it has a recursive
Speaker 1: quality that is bolstering my neuronal activity about consciousness in
Speaker 1: this sense of consciousness. So up until now, artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: really has been concerned more with the output. So artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence is interested in this idea of can we have
Speaker 1: machines make decisions on the battlefield and can we imbue
Speaker 1: the machine with ethics, But artificial intelligence is not interested
Speaker 1: in and viewing the machine with a sort of consciousness
Speaker 1: that feels bad about making the decision to perhaps kill someone.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that this couldn't arise. Certainly, and
Speaker 1: I don't mean to This is not like a fearmongering thing.
Speaker 1: This would be something that would have to be very intentional,
Speaker 1: that that humans would have to try to instill within machines.
Speaker 1: But once they did that, there is the possibility that
Speaker 1: a machine could have a kind of consciousness. Yeah, because again,
Speaker 1: think of consciousness not is this magical god sense spark
Speaker 1: in the in the the human body, but but rather
Speaker 1: the is uh this awareness of data that is necessary
Speaker 1: for this uh, for this machine to function in the universe. Now.
Speaker 1: Sean Carroll, a physicist at cal Tex, says there's nothing
Speaker 1: stopping the Internet from having the computational capacity of a
Speaker 1: conscious brain, but that's a long way from actually being conscious.
Speaker 1: He says, real brains have undergone millions of generations of
Speaker 1: natural selection to get where they are. I don't see
Speaker 1: anything analogous that would be coaxing the Internet into consciousness.
Speaker 1: He doesn't think it's likely, but hey, and then once
Speaker 1: it becomes conscious, if it happens, um, you know, the
Speaker 1: first thing that the Internet is going to feel is
Speaker 1: probably ashamed of itself. Um so, so we'll have a
Speaker 1: good I think, to shut itself down. Yeah, there'll be
Speaker 1: a good ten twenty years what I'll just be brooding
Speaker 1: over itself. It's essentially going to be Frankenstein, where initially
Speaker 1: there's nothing to worry about because Frankenstein has a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff to deal with, coming to terms with with
Speaker 1: who and what he is in the world. It's only
Speaker 1: later that he comes act to destroy his maker and
Speaker 1: everything in his life. You know, that just reminded me
Speaker 1: of when we talked about machine creativity and we talked
Speaker 1: about the painting uh software and I can't remember the
Speaker 1: name of it right now, but it was a installation
Speaker 1: at a museum and what it did is it scanned
Speaker 1: uh newspaper articles and one day, I think it was like,
Speaker 1: there was an earthquake in Italy and quite a few
Speaker 1: people lost their lives. And that day it didn't paint.
Speaker 1: And when it was asked why it wasn't painting it
Speaker 1: was it replied in some way suggesting that it was
Speaker 1: struggling with its feelings about this terrible thing that had happened.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating because it's another example of where someone could say, well,
Speaker 1: that's that machine is not actually an artist. It's not
Speaker 1: actually creating something artistically. All it's doing is is dealing
Speaker 1: with data coming in and uh and uh and then
Speaker 1: analyzing that data and then outputting some version of the
Speaker 1: data based on the input. But again, you start breaking
Speaker 1: down the brain, you start looking at consciousness and it's
Speaker 1: it's essentially the same function. Yeah, against that, that's that
Speaker 1: recursive quality instilled into it, all right, Um, when I
Speaker 1: was talking about the the guy with the long flowing
Speaker 1: beard on a cloud, I was talking about Aubrey de Gray,
Speaker 1: of course, a bio gerontologist. He's going to help us
Speaker 1: live to one thousand years so we can finally solve
Speaker 1: the question of consciousness. Yeah, and when I when when
Speaker 1: we say us, not us, but really rich and important people, right, yes,
Speaker 1: or maybe a downloaded version of my conscious self you
Speaker 1: know in the future. Yeah, that they'll store on hard
Speaker 1: drives with all the other people and then my my
Speaker 1: kid will just forget to to back it up, and
Speaker 1: then I'll evaporate into thin air. Oh wouldn't that be
Speaker 1: the worst? You have your consciousness stored away on some
Speaker 1: sort of a drive and then later your your kid
Speaker 1: just like puts an episode of your gab a gap
Speaker 1: o over you or something and then it's done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or she's just feel saddled with it, just like fine
Speaker 1: light now done? All right, Well, there you have it again, Attention.
Speaker 1: Scheme of theory is not necessarily a satisfying answer, and
Speaker 1: it's not one that we're going to get tattooed on
Speaker 1: our arms anytime soon, but it is a really fascinating
Speaker 1: way to to reevaluate what consciousness is and how we
Speaker 1: attribute consciousness to all of these things in our life,
Speaker 1: from an orangutaning puppet to UH, the divine creator of
Speaker 1: the universe. Indeed, in the meantime, you can check out
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Again, that is
Speaker 1: the mothership, that is where you will find all of
Speaker 1: our podcast episodes. You know, we mentioned that we've done
Speaker 1: episodes on vicentral quism on consciousness. All that stuff is
Speaker 1: available there. We also have some of the machine Consciousness
Speaker 1: about machine artists. UH years of data there to plug
Speaker 1: directly into your skull, as well as videos, blog posts,
Speaker 1: and links out to our various social media presences. And
Speaker 1: if you have some thoughts you would like to share
Speaker 1: with us, please do so and you can send them
Speaker 1: via below the mind at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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