Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today we're going to be having a conversation about consciousness,
Speaker 1: probably one of the thorniest, most controversial, and most difficult
Speaker 1: subjects in all of scientific investigation. But we want to
Speaker 1: start in a in a thoroughly unscientific way by just
Speaker 1: trying to manipulate your experience a little bit. We'll see
Speaker 1: if we can get any traction or you game Robert
Speaker 1: It okay, So if you are able, if you're not
Speaker 1: operating a vehicle or juggling hatchets or something like that
Speaker 1: at the moment, please try this weird little meditation exercise
Speaker 1: with us. I want you to focus on an object
Speaker 1: in front of you. Can be any object. It should
Speaker 1: be something that stays in place that you can continually
Speaker 1: return your gaze. You. Yeah, so look at look at
Speaker 1: a detail on the wall. Don't look at your own reflection.
Speaker 1: Maybe don't look outside the window and passing cars. Your
Speaker 1: own reflection is just too interesting, right, and it's gonna
Speaker 1: move and then you're gonna fall over it's just too beautiful. No, okay,
Speaker 1: so yeah, pick an object, focus on it, look at
Speaker 1: it and think for a little bit. Just contemplate the
Speaker 1: physical processes involved in sight. You don't have to know
Speaker 1: all the science. Just think about the light passing from
Speaker 1: that object to your eyes, reflecting off that object coming
Speaker 1: into your eyes, being filtered through the lenses of your eyes,
Speaker 1: coming onto the retina, this layer of light sensitive cells
Speaker 1: being turned into information electrical impulses that are transported into
Speaker 1: the brain via europtic nerve. And look at your object
Speaker 1: and think about the light passing through all the stages
Speaker 1: it goes through to get to your mind to form
Speaker 1: the image that you're seeing right now, not just the
Speaker 1: object itself, but your perception of it. Here's the question,
Speaker 1: where does it feel like this process ends physically? Where
Speaker 1: does it feel like this process ends scientifically? You might
Speaker 1: know something about the visual processing center of your brain,
Speaker 1: but don't worry about that. Where does it just subjectively
Speaker 1: feel like the image is going or where does it
Speaker 1: feel like you are seeing it? Where's the part of
Speaker 1: your mind that recognizes what you're looking at, or even
Speaker 1: just the part of your your body To go beyond that, Sure, now,
Speaker 1: for me, i'd say default, if I'm not trying anything weird,
Speaker 1: I guess it feels sort of like it's located somewhere
Speaker 1: near the front of my skull, sort of hovering behind
Speaker 1: my face. But I often wonder if it only feels
Speaker 1: that way because I've sort of been taught to think
Speaker 1: of my brain and specifically my prefrontal cortex as the
Speaker 1: seat of higher thought. And if you feel something similar
Speaker 1: or really no matter where you feel like this seeing
Speaker 1: is taking place, try a weird experiment see if you
Speaker 1: can move it. I sometimes find that if I relax
Speaker 1: and focus my attention, I can, Though this sounds weird,
Speaker 1: subjectively move the center of seeing back in my head
Speaker 1: where I tricked my mind into feeling like I'm really
Speaker 1: seeing it somewhere further back in my skull, pushing that
Speaker 1: perceptive mind space further and further back, maybe just going
Speaker 1: outside the skull. Can you imagine feeling that like you
Speaker 1: are seeing in a place outside of your own head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I've experienced this sort of thing before. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you can. You can also in addition to moving this, uh,
Speaker 1: this sort of imagined spot of consciousness, besides moving it
Speaker 1: around in the skull, and outside of the skull, there's
Speaker 1: also the ability to move it down your spot mine,
Speaker 1: into your heart, into your belly, uh, and then again
Speaker 1: moving it outside of the body. Yeah. And now, of course,
Speaker 1: seeing isn't the only mental activity that we have conscious
Speaker 1: awareness of, so you could try similar experiments with perceptive
Speaker 1: activities other than just the imagination of the mind's eye.
Speaker 1: You could try to move the part of you that
Speaker 1: perceives sounds, or you could try to move your internal monologue.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about meditative states here, really, and it's
Speaker 1: important to note that there are multiple forms of meditation
Speaker 1: and tailing varying methods of closed eye, open eye, visually
Speaker 1: aided meditation, audibly aided meditation, walking meditation, yoga meditation, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And in terms of imagining, we're gonna get into some
Speaker 1: of the different views that have existed throughout time about
Speaker 1: different places in the body that consciousness is centered. But
Speaker 1: also it's worth noting that out of body states factor
Speaker 1: into a number of different faiths and supernatural world views.
Speaker 1: There's actually an interesting version of this in scientology that's
Speaker 1: called the exteriorization. Oh boy, So the idea here is
Speaker 1: that uh, and this is This is right off of
Speaker 1: what is scientology dot org the state of the theting
Speaker 1: being outside of his body, with or without full perception,
Speaker 1: but still able to control and handle the body. When
Speaker 1: a person goes exterior, he achieves a a certainty that
Speaker 1: he is himself and not in his body. And to
Speaker 1: explain that er scientology of theting is essentially the concept
Speaker 1: of a soul not to be confused with a body, theting,
Speaker 1: which is like a disembodied theting that's lodging in your
Speaker 1: body and it's causing physical and mental problems and you
Speaker 1: have to exercise it via auditing. Yeah, this sort of
Speaker 1: interrogation process, right, Yeah, which we touched on in our
Speaker 1: episode on religious technology if you want to go back
Speaker 1: and listen to that. But that the idea here is
Speaker 1: like this is just one example of a of a
Speaker 1: a supernatural mode of viewing the world or or religious
Speaker 1: state of mind that in evolves a system of of
Speaker 1: imagining the seat of consciousness exiting the body. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: even if you have some success with this experiment, if
Speaker 1: you can do it, if you can move the place
Speaker 1: where you're thinking outside your head, we are certainly not
Speaker 1: trying to suggest or at least I'm not. I think
Speaker 1: you'll be on the same page here, Robert. We're not
Speaker 1: trying to suggest that anything is actually moving, or the
Speaker 1: thought takes place outside the body, or the existence of
Speaker 1: an immaterial soul or anything like that. I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty clear that information processing is performed by the nervous system,
Speaker 1: primarily the brain, and your brain isn't leaving your head.
Speaker 1: So whatever the organ is in the body that's generating
Speaker 1: the experience of consciousness does seem to be stuck in
Speaker 1: your skull. But today we wanted to explore this odd
Speaker 1: feature of human consciousness that it sometimes feels like it
Speaker 1: has the subjective experience of a place of a sort
Speaker 1: of self and an identity, even though it's this immaterial concept.
Speaker 1: It's an experience we know created by a material brain.
Speaker 1: But but why is it that you might be able
Speaker 1: to feel like you can move your seat of thought
Speaker 1: around two different locations. Um, And if you had, like
Speaker 1: if you were living in ancient times and all you
Speaker 1: had to go on was your own subjective reflection, where
Speaker 1: would you believe your mind was? Yeah, because I believe
Speaker 1: we we take it for granted with our with our
Speaker 1: modern scientific understanding of the human nervous system and then
Speaker 1: the brain. Like most of the time, I don't even
Speaker 1: really think about where I'm thinking from, though I do
Speaker 1: find myself at times falling into the idea that I'm
Speaker 1: if I'm feeling like particular love or warmth, uh, that
Speaker 1: this is somehow emanating from my heart, not in a
Speaker 1: rational sense, but in kind of a literary romantic sense.
Speaker 1: You know, this is a kind of crazy thing to suggest,
Speaker 1: but I've sometimes wondered if the idea of the heart
Speaker 1: as the seat of emotion and emotional warmthing connection is
Speaker 1: something that is derivative from the cultural institution of hugging,
Speaker 1: in that when you embrace someone, you bring them into
Speaker 1: your torso like your chest area, and you you close
Speaker 1: the distance between chests, essentially creating this sense that you're
Speaker 1: bringing hearts together. I've I've wondered if it's actually backwards
Speaker 1: like that, that, like the hugging leads to the belief
Speaker 1: that the heart is the seat of emotional connection, and maybe,
Speaker 1: knowing what we know about the brain, that's where we
Speaker 1: get these scenes in movies where like two very manly
Speaker 1: individuals were like one will grab the other by the
Speaker 1: head and they'll kind of like do this slight head
Speaker 1: butt in all their foreheads to each other. You know,
Speaker 1: they're like having this this manly bond of minds. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's not just it's not just men. Forehead hugging is
Speaker 1: like a kind of cool thing. I remember there's a
Speaker 1: scene in Mad Max Fury Road and there where like
Speaker 1: Furiosa and and Max sort of put their heads together
Speaker 1: for a minute. It's sweet. Okay, Well, what we'll think
Speaker 1: about that is we proceed here. So in terms of
Speaker 1: thinking about like how ancient people thought about the seat
Speaker 1: of consciousness, we we have to begin with the ancient Egyptians.
Speaker 1: And I just to clarify, we're not going to do
Speaker 1: an exhaustive study of of ancient cultures and how they
Speaker 1: thought about the mind. But but we're gonna go through
Speaker 1: a few just quick examples. Well, the ancient Egyptians are
Speaker 1: a good one to feature because they had lots of
Speaker 1: thoughts on the mind. Oh yes, and the and ultimately
Speaker 1: the soul. For for them, the human soul wasn't so
Speaker 1: much a single entity but a composite. So you had
Speaker 1: you had to bob the human headed bird combined with
Speaker 1: cod a life force coup the spiritual intelligence, seek them
Speaker 1: the power cohibit to the shadow and Wren, which was
Speaker 1: your name. Uh and isn't many of you might know
Speaker 1: or remember from our episode on the Egyptian Mummy. While
Speaker 1: other organs were removed and placed in canopic jars for
Speaker 1: use in the afterlife, the brain was removed and discarded.
Speaker 1: Only the heart was left in the body, as this
Speaker 1: was the seat of the mind. Uh. And in this
Speaker 1: they were cardiocentrics. The heart is the center that and
Speaker 1: and they also believe that the heart would be eventually
Speaker 1: be weighed on a scale against the head dress of
Speaker 1: mock the goddess of truth. Yeah. I love this, this
Speaker 1: story about the afterlife where you're a part of your soul,
Speaker 1: one of these aspects. Uh, this sort of like heart
Speaker 1: mind thing gets weighed on the scale against I think
Speaker 1: it's like an image of a feather usually or something.
Speaker 1: And if you're you're too heavy, if you're too heavy
Speaker 1: with sin or with burdens whatever. The conception they had
Speaker 1: was that weighed down this part of your soul, you
Speaker 1: get eaten by this hybrid monster that's part hippopotamus and
Speaker 1: part crocodile. Isn't that great? I love it? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Egyptian cosmology is just fabulous. Now let's turn to another ancient,
Speaker 1: UH civilization that that did a lot of thinking, not
Speaker 1: just about the state of the mind, but just in general.
Speaker 1: And that would be, of course, the the ancient Greeks.
Speaker 1: The Greeks thought a great deal about the seat of
Speaker 1: consciousness between the sixth century BC and the second century CE.
Speaker 1: And we could essentially spend an entire hour discussing the
Speaker 1: various models proposed by the great minds in those eight centuries. Uh.
Speaker 1: But just to boil it down, I'm gonna refer to
Speaker 1: a two thousand seven paper Soul, Mind, Brain, Greek Philosophy
Speaker 1: and the Birth of Neuroscience, by authors Crivolto and Rebody,
Speaker 1: and they boiled down Greek perceptions of the brain to
Speaker 1: the following. So under our Camion and the fifth century
Speaker 1: b C, there's this idea that that the brain is
Speaker 1: the seat of sensation and understanding. And then under Hippocrates
Speaker 1: around four b C, the mind is the interpreter of things.
Speaker 1: The brain is the interpreter of things, the messenger of
Speaker 1: understanding um. And then under Plato three forty seven b C.
Speaker 1: The brain is the seat of the rational soul. Under Aristotle,
Speaker 1: three four through two B c E. The brain is
Speaker 1: the cooling agent of body heat. Okay, under Herophilus through
Speaker 1: two A d b c it commands the center of
Speaker 1: the body. And under Galen about nine to two uh
Speaker 1: fifteen c E it's uh the seat of hegemonicon. And
Speaker 1: this is the this is the idea that that So
Speaker 1: the brain is the hedgemonicon, the ruling principle of the body,
Speaker 1: the regent or hedgemonica. I know it needs to That's
Speaker 1: that's the band name right there for sure. So we're
Speaker 1: talking Galen or Galen of Pergammon again sixteen his lifespan.
Speaker 1: Central to his interpretation of the human nervous system is
Speaker 1: this idea of the hegemonicon. Now, the term itself was Stoic,
Speaker 1: but Galen firmly believed in the brain central role, which
Speaker 1: was in sharp contrast to the stoics largely cardiocentric views.
Speaker 1: So the Stoic philosophers would be more like the Egyptians
Speaker 1: that saw the heart has played some role in empowering
Speaker 1: the mind and thought, yeah, they believe that the heart
Speaker 1: that's where you found the human soul, the intellect, uh,
Speaker 1: and in the the numa around the heart, and in
Speaker 1: this the micro world reflects the macro world. So they believe,
Speaker 1: you know, here's here's the heart as the sun of
Speaker 1: human life. And thus it was regarded as as the
Speaker 1: seat of the logos, the universal intelligence. And they offered
Speaker 1: various bits of rhetorical argument and support this, as well
Speaker 1: as the argument that the voice clearly rises from the
Speaker 1: heart via the throat. Oh that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: but Galen was not having it. You know, with lots
Speaker 1: of ideas like that, I'm always like they're funny in retrospect,
Speaker 1: but it must have seemed incre doubly clever at the time.
Speaker 1: So yeah, obviously you think with something down in your
Speaker 1: chest instead of in your brain. Otherwise, why would speech
Speaker 1: come from down there If it's coming from the part
Speaker 1: of you that's thinking, it has a It would be
Speaker 1: very circuitous for information to be going from the head
Speaker 1: down there and then coming out of speech. Yeah, understanding
Speaker 1: what they knew and did not know at the time,
Speaker 1: it has a certain truthiness to it. Right. So again
Speaker 1: Galen was was not having any of this, and uh,
Speaker 1: and he may have engaged in the first experiment to
Speaker 1: to to produce evidence that the brain controls behavior and thought.
Speaker 1: So he offered up a rigorous and objective anatomical demonstrations,
Speaker 1: such as such as noting the disappearance of voice in
Speaker 1: a pig after an incision of the inferior laryngeal nerves.
Speaker 1: And he also stressed that the heart produced neither sensation
Speaker 1: nor modification of consciousness when touched. So he was he
Speaker 1: was all about, let's get down though I would think
Speaker 1: it would produce some kind of effect when touched. But
Speaker 1: but the take home here is that Galen will listen
Speaker 1: to these ideas, and he said, well, let's put them
Speaker 1: to the test. Let's actually conduct experiments and uh and
Speaker 1: and see if if there's any truth to this idea
Speaker 1: that the heart is uh is the seat of consciousness.
Speaker 1: And he concluded that it was not. Now one thing
Speaker 1: that we could look at and separate. Here is is
Speaker 1: back to the classical hard problem of consciousness, the one
Speaker 1: you're going to encounter every time, which is that, like
Speaker 1: if you're doing experiments on animals or something like that,
Speaker 1: you can never get inside the animal and really know
Speaker 1: whether you're affecting its consciousness or not. You can just
Speaker 1: look at its behavior. Um, you can even really say
Speaker 1: that ultimately you'd have the same problem with other human beings,
Speaker 1: except human beings can at least tell you they can
Speaker 1: claim to experience consciousness or not. Um But yeah, so
Speaker 1: we are dealing with these sort of related but different concepts.
Speaker 1: On one hand, there is activity of the nervous system,
Speaker 1: as in the central command of the body that produces behavior,
Speaker 1: and then the other thing is the subjective experience of being.
Speaker 1: We assume those things are linked because when you know,
Speaker 1: we can think about our behavior and that experience is subjective.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, you could imagine that maybe animals are
Speaker 1: behaving as automata. They have behavior and even apparently some
Speaker 1: kind of information processing thought, but it doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: anything to be them. So I guess those are concepts
Speaker 1: to to sort of keep separate in the mind. But
Speaker 1: throughout the history of investigating the seat of consciousness, we're
Speaker 1: always going back into blurring them, aren't we. You sort
Speaker 1: of can't help but do it. Yeah, And now I
Speaker 1: like that you mentioned the objective and the subjective here,
Speaker 1: because to get back to this idea that most of
Speaker 1: us don't have any problem thinking about, the brain is
Speaker 1: the seat of the mind. In this the subjective and
Speaker 1: the objective tend to line up for most people, Like
Speaker 1: I haven't seen a cardiocentric argument made by even the
Speaker 1: most like the the most out there fundamentalist adherent to
Speaker 1: a faith. You know, I can't think of an example
Speaker 1: off hand where someone's saying, look, dinosaurs are fake. The
Speaker 1: world is three years old, and you think with your heart. Man, Like,
Speaker 1: nobody's making that argument. So we're kind of lucky too,
Speaker 1: if you will to to to largely live in a
Speaker 1: world where the subjective and the objective line up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean, to another extent, I kind of wonder, um,
Speaker 1: how to put this, Like I sort of wonder how
Speaker 1: you could think your mind was powered by your heart. Now,
Speaker 1: I know that's just my chauvinism as a as a
Speaker 1: you know, brain centric thinker, knowing what I know and
Speaker 1: having the cultural beliefs that I do. But I also
Speaker 1: have thoughts like, um, a strong blow to the head
Speaker 1: does seem to temporarily impair your consciousness to some extent,
Speaker 1: Like you lose lucidity, you're sort of harshly removed from
Speaker 1: the world and you're thinking. Even your subjective experience of
Speaker 1: thinking seems to kind of slow down and grind its
Speaker 1: gears a little bit. This doesn't really seem to happen
Speaker 1: when somebody hits you in the body, or at least
Speaker 1: not to the same extent. Or I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: you wouldn't agree, but just that kind of thing alone
Speaker 1: would seem to suggest that people should get the idea
Speaker 1: the thinking and the subjective experience of being has something
Speaker 1: to do with what's in the skull. Well, certainly a
Speaker 1: sort of a heart. Well, we'll stop you. Well, that's
Speaker 1: certainly true. Yeah, And and in pro wrestling you have
Speaker 1: the heart punch, which for a while and many territories
Speaker 1: was banned because you would you would you'd like you
Speaker 1: take the individual's arm and like folded behind them, thus
Speaker 1: exposing that the ribbed area, and then there would be
Speaker 1: like a very calculated punch to the heart and you
Speaker 1: would just go out like a light. So maybe, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I wouldn't put cardiocyentracism, uh you know, you know,
Speaker 1: out of the framework of professional wrestle, and in case
Speaker 1: if it seems like it could work in the context, Well,
Speaker 1: but I mean, do you do you generally agree or
Speaker 1: not that, like the something does feel very natural about
Speaker 1: thinking about thinking being in the head. Yeah, I largely
Speaker 1: agree because I can. It's it's hard to imagine a
Speaker 1: situation where you have have you know, not only intellectuals,
Speaker 1: but like working people and soldiers engaging in activities that
Speaker 1: would result in a in in cranial injuries that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't you know, be privy to this connection, right, But
Speaker 1: then again, I guess maybe in defense of the idea,
Speaker 1: maybe you could think about it more like it's just
Speaker 1: an injury to things like the eyes and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: You know, if we were primarily visually oriented in the world,
Speaker 1: if you if you hit the part of my body
Speaker 1: that has the eyes on it, maybe you could explain
Speaker 1: a loss of lucidity through that somehow. Now, this this
Speaker 1: leads to our next example. We're gonna We're gonna roll
Speaker 1: through here, uh, a spiritual supernatural idea, and that is
Speaker 1: of the seven chakras. Now, this is something I feel
Speaker 1: a little embarrassed that I think I should know about.
Speaker 1: I've always heard of chakras, but I really know almost
Speaker 1: nothing about them. So give me the the beginner's crash course, Robert.
Speaker 1: What what's the deal with the chakras? I know there
Speaker 1: are multiple chakras in the body, Yeah. Then this is
Speaker 1: another one of those topics that if we wanted to,
Speaker 1: we could explore just had nauseam. Uh. It shows up
Speaker 1: in Hinduism, Johnism, Buddhism, and of course your your local
Speaker 1: neighborhood yoga studio and uh or your local neighborhood tool
Speaker 1: album cover. Yeah. Yeah, the work of Alex Great It
Speaker 1: features into a lot of New Age belief systems as well.
Speaker 1: And uh. And this is something I've always I've always
Speaker 1: been fascinated by the metaphysics of chakras. They're various artistic
Speaker 1: representations and uh. And when I adjust to the my
Speaker 1: own perceptive lenses to the worldview and of these these models,
Speaker 1: I can certainly say that I believe in them and
Speaker 1: find the model useful for meditation in yoga, like when
Speaker 1: you put on the spiritual glasses. This makes good sense
Speaker 1: to Yeah, when I check and do a yoga class,
Speaker 1: I can engage in this this model of thinking. So
Speaker 1: chakras or wheels in Sanskrit, are concepts of the subtle
Speaker 1: spiritual body. The idea that you have energy points position
Speaker 1: down the body, from the top of your skull to
Speaker 1: the base of your spine roots roots chakra to crown chakra,
Speaker 1: so it would go root, sacred naval heart, your third eye,
Speaker 1: and then the crown. Whoa, Now, so these all go
Speaker 1: up sort of the center of your body, right, Like
Speaker 1: there's a line going up your spine from in the middle,
Speaker 1: from sort of from your butt to your forehead. Yes,
Speaker 1: and and I've seen it argue that that animals with
Speaker 1: tails would have more chakras, but maybe that's one of
Speaker 1: their more you know, their chill. That's when we turn
Speaker 1: to our pets for a little slices in My pet
Speaker 1: is not chill. Oh yeah, well not always okay, but
Speaker 1: sometimes at least he lives in the moment, right, that's true.
Speaker 1: That's the great thing about pets is they are very
Speaker 1: much in the moment. They don't care about past or future.
Speaker 1: That they don't have too much trouble with losing the self. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: with each chakra, each one is tied to different organs,
Speaker 1: different aspects of personality and human behavior. There's a whole
Speaker 1: system built up around this. Uh. The numbers vary, but
Speaker 1: but seven is pretty much the norm. And it's a reverent,
Speaker 1: rather different take than the two previous views. The idea
Speaker 1: that it's been that consciousness and everything that we are
Speaker 1: is based on neither the heart of the mind, because
Speaker 1: the energy of being flows through these points, and it
Speaker 1: can be focused in certain chakras. So, for instance, there's
Speaker 1: an exercise for opening a particular chakra, concentrating it, even
Speaker 1: breathing into or through one's third eye. And this is
Speaker 1: an interesting experience because in which I've I've engaged in
Speaker 1: because naturally you know that you're not actually breathing through
Speaker 1: a non existent aperture in your skull. But if you
Speaker 1: close your eyes and you focus on the concept, you
Speaker 1: can you can kind of feel it. You can imagine
Speaker 1: yourself as this ball of energy moving up and down
Speaker 1: your body. You can imagine and even feel your center
Speaker 1: of being pooled into different parts of your anatomy. I mean,
Speaker 1: part of me wants to ask, like, why is it
Speaker 1: that we can do that? But that sort of goes
Speaker 1: back to the question we started with at the beginning,
Speaker 1: to the extent that some people can move the location
Speaker 1: of their consciousness around and in this at least subjective sense,
Speaker 1: they can make it feel like they're thinking from outside
Speaker 1: their body. Why can they do that? But why why
Speaker 1: is that a feature of the human mind? Well, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it comes back to this whole
Speaker 1: the whole mind body connection there and this this tendency
Speaker 1: especially you know, you could say we have a definite
Speaker 1: advantage in modern civilizations of of knowing intrinsically that we
Speaker 1: think with our mind, but we also fall into that
Speaker 1: you mean think with the brain. Yes, yes, that we
Speaker 1: think with a we think with the mind, it's positioned
Speaker 1: in the brain within and ultimately that we think with
Speaker 1: the brain. But uh, in doing this we often fall
Speaker 1: into this model of the right are on a horse,
Speaker 1: where the rider is the brain and the horses the
Speaker 1: rest of the body, when really there we're connected. Really
Speaker 1: were a centaur. So the you know, study after study
Speaker 1: continues to you know, to to point out, oh, your
Speaker 1: your your digestion has a has a role to play in, uh,
Speaker 1: in what you're thinking and how you think and how
Speaker 1: your mind works. This is something I wanted to get
Speaker 1: into later in the episode. Maybe I'll save part of it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there is this idea of embodied cognition, which
Speaker 1: is one subset of the discipline of extended cognition. And
Speaker 1: this is just sort of ways of thinking about all
Speaker 1: the different ways that the human mind is really based
Speaker 1: in more than just the brain. Not not to say
Speaker 1: that the brain is not the primary organ doing the
Speaker 1: information processing, but that parts of information processing and body
Speaker 1: processes that inform information processing are offloaded to other things.
Speaker 1: For example, counting on your fingers, you are literally using
Speaker 1: your hand for part of the information processing right there.
Speaker 1: And is no matter how much we think of ourselves
Speaker 1: as a brain, we are not just a brain. We
Speaker 1: are a body. Like like who are you? You are
Speaker 1: your body. So I think that's one reason that the
Speaker 1: chakra model is is interesting and and why we can
Speaker 1: pour ourselves into it so easily. But I also like
Speaker 1: how this model lines up with the experience of of
Speaker 1: multiple cells and the ebb and flow of identity and emotion.
Speaker 1: The idea that you know the person you are first
Speaker 1: thing in the morning is not necessarily the exact same
Speaker 1: version of you right before you go to bed, the
Speaker 1: person that there's the person yesterday that you are yesterday
Speaker 1: versus the person you are today. And I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not using this as like a real hippie dippy model
Speaker 1: of of your multiple people. Man, and you've been multiple
Speaker 1: people throughout your lives. No, it's just the exact manifestation
Speaker 1: of who you are is gonna vary. Sometimes you're gonna
Speaker 1: be angry, Sometimes you're gonna be sad. Sometimes you're gonna
Speaker 1: be a more Um, you're gonna more me be more
Speaker 1: mentally engaged. Other times you're gonna be more heartfelt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's hippie dippy. I mean I think
Speaker 1: we've got two things in conflict, which is that, Um,
Speaker 1: On one hand, we feel a strong sense of the
Speaker 1: unity of our experience. We feel like I am the
Speaker 1: same person I was yesterday. Like, um, here's one example.
Speaker 1: If I told you, like, okay, uh, tonight, when you
Speaker 1: go to bed, your conscious experience will forever cease. Essentially
Speaker 1: you will die and your experience, but tomorrow morning your
Speaker 1: body will wake up and continue doing that thing, and somebody,
Speaker 1: some other consciousness will inhabit your brain. That maybe the
Speaker 1: that consciousness is identical to yours except yours just ends. Well,
Speaker 1: people don't like that idea. I mean, that would not
Speaker 1: be very enticing to most people. But then again, how
Speaker 1: can you prove that's not already what happens? Yeah, we
Speaker 1: have this like there there is no way in which
Speaker 1: you could know that you don't in fact die every
Speaker 1: night when you go to sleep and wake up with
Speaker 1: a new consciousness full of the old consciousness is memories.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of the the bizarre fleeting nature of consciousness.
Speaker 1: It's experienced as an endless succession of moments, and yet
Speaker 1: we have this strong sense that it's unified throughout our lives. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the kind of the trap of belief
Speaker 1: in a soul, or or even even outside of thinking
Speaker 1: like specifically of a soul, just the thinking of a
Speaker 1: mind state that it's this thing that could be taken off,
Speaker 1: put on a shelf, restored, saved, backed up, put in
Speaker 1: a new body, etcetera. Uh, and instead it's this. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the string. It's this, it's the it's a timeline. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: Just as a weird little side note, I also think
Speaker 1: that thinking like that, though it sounds kind of weird
Speaker 1: to people, this idea that you know, every every moment,
Speaker 1: your consciousness sort of dies and becomes something new, constantly
Speaker 1: rising from the ashes every time it goes down a
Speaker 1: new train of thought. That could sound kind of weird
Speaker 1: and depressing, but I think you could also think about
Speaker 1: it the other way. That can be a kind of
Speaker 1: exciting liberal rating thought that I think maybe could even
Speaker 1: help people, you know, people who have fear of death
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Just try try try getting around
Speaker 1: that by thinking about your whole experience is a series
Speaker 1: of moments that perish every second. Yeah, that's not something
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to do. It's some future schmuck version
Speaker 1: of you that's gonna have to do that. So you know,
Speaker 1: chill out right. Likewise, quit quit worrying about you know,
Speaker 1: some transgression you made, uh, you know, several years ago,
Speaker 1: because that that version of us gone. This is a
Speaker 1: different to you, moment to moment. It's all open for interpretation,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. It was the heat of the moment.
Speaker 1: All right, We should probably take a break at this point,
Speaker 1: and then when we come back, we will we will,
Speaker 1: we will leave the realm of ancient Egyptians and chakras
Speaker 1: and uh and cardiocentric stoics, and we'll get into some neuroscience. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: So note that there are two different things you could
Speaker 1: really be talking about when you talk about the location
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Right. One is what we were doing in
Speaker 1: that experiment at the beginning, the subjective sensation of the
Speaker 1: location of consciousness. Some people might be able to do uh,
Speaker 1: some kind of meditative exercise. They could be very skilled
Speaker 1: meditator and place their subjective experience of consciousness in somebody
Speaker 1: else's head. I could think that I'm thinking from Robert's brain.
Speaker 1: That would not mean that Robert's brain is what's generating
Speaker 1: that sensation, obviously, So the location that really and objectively
Speaker 1: physically generates consciousness is a different question that where than
Speaker 1: where it feels like you're thinking from um And as
Speaker 1: as always with our discussions of human consciousness, we've gotta
Speaker 1: stress again there's no final answer regarding what's true. We
Speaker 1: you know, we don't know that. There's no final insight
Speaker 1: as to the objective nature of it, certainly not yet,
Speaker 1: and there there may never be. We don't really know.
Speaker 1: But humans have have been banging on this nutshell for
Speaker 1: a long time trying to crack it, and there have
Speaker 1: been some interesting discoveries. Right. Oh, yeah, So the human
Speaker 1: brain contains about a hundred billion neurons, and neuroscientists have
Speaker 1: a general understanding of how that network of neurons computes information.
Speaker 1: But how and where does this computation computation transform into
Speaker 1: awareness into sentience, into the human condition. Uh, and this
Speaker 1: is the so called hard problem of consciousness. Right. One
Speaker 1: way of putting this might be you could easily explain
Speaker 1: how organisms with our behaviors would you know, would evolve,
Speaker 1: But why does it feel like something to be one
Speaker 1: of those organisms? Why aren't they just automata with with
Speaker 1: unfeeling intelligence, performing these behaviors in the universe where there's
Speaker 1: nothing like to be anything. So for starters, let's take
Speaker 1: a moment and refer back to to Galen and we'll
Speaker 1: go ahead and raise his hand in victory over the
Speaker 1: cardiocentric stoics. Yes, yes, yes, the brain is the seat
Speaker 1: of cognition, or rather, it's certainly the seating section for
Speaker 1: the concert. Right. We've already discussed a couple of the
Speaker 1: interesting qualifiers on that, but I think we can say
Speaker 1: without blushing too much, that the brain is where information
Speaker 1: processing primarily happens. Right, But if this is the seating
Speaker 1: section in the stadium, what are the exact seats? What
Speaker 1: does what does consciousness look like? From? Where does it arise?
Speaker 1: Neurologically speaking? Well, obviously something that we haven't dealt with
Speaker 1: much in this episode except to sort of ignore it.
Speaker 1: Maybe we will just continue this tradition is that for
Speaker 1: a lot of human history people have had some version
Speaker 1: of what's known as dual is um Cartesian dualism, the
Speaker 1: idea that the mind is the thing separate from the body,
Speaker 1: maybe a thing that controls the body, that it is
Speaker 1: in some sense immaterial, as it has no physical embodiment whatsoever,
Speaker 1: or or sometimes I think in the ancient world it
Speaker 1: was thought of not necessarily as immat he real, but
Speaker 1: it's certainly not as a solid object you could you know,
Speaker 1: extract with a scalpel or something. It was maybe more
Speaker 1: like a numa or a breath, some kind of gaseous thing.
Speaker 1: So this concept that we we talked about earlier, the
Speaker 1: scientology concept of a thetan, like that would be a
Speaker 1: duelist concept, right, because it is a thing outside of yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess so. Though I wonder in that case is
Speaker 1: it is the theting considered material or immaterial. I don't
Speaker 1: actually know the answer there. I think, based on what
Speaker 1: I was looking at earlier, I think it would be
Speaker 1: considered immaterial because I think there's a I think el
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard had some some writings where he's talking about
Speaker 1: it about it, you know, not having mass etcetera. But
Speaker 1: I am no expert on scientology on the details the
Speaker 1: theology of scientology. Now, obviously a lot of people are
Speaker 1: still very committed to dual is um today for various
Speaker 1: you know, faith reasons and things like that, and and
Speaker 1: that's cool, but I'm not aware of any good scientific
Speaker 1: evidence that has been produced in favor of dual is um.
Speaker 1: It seems like pretty much everything goes the opposite way.
Speaker 1: So I don't think we should really consider that their
Speaker 1: scientific grounding for the idea that thinking happens outside the
Speaker 1: brain in some other place and we're forced to try
Speaker 1: and figure out the connection the differences between how brain
Speaker 1: activity seems to work and how we actually experience consciousness.
Speaker 1: Right now, for my own part, I i've I've tended
Speaker 1: to favor the the epi phemonologist viewpoint of Thomas Huxley.
Speaker 1: So he was a duelist and believing in that the
Speaker 1: mind and the brain are not identical, but he also
Speaker 1: believed that the mind was an unnecessary byproduct of the
Speaker 1: of the brain, a sort of cognitive shadow, and I
Speaker 1: tend to like that that view of it. Now, some
Speaker 1: people react to epiphenomenalism with real rank or Some people
Speaker 1: are deeply offended by the idea that the mind doesn't
Speaker 1: actually do anything, that it's just an unnecessary byproduct of
Speaker 1: the brain. Yeah, or an accident, a happy accident, or
Speaker 1: a sad accident, depending on what your mood happens to be.
Speaker 1: I think you could also look at that is a
Speaker 1: very beautiful thing to believe. That's the kind I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the way I tend to interpret, Like wow, Like
Speaker 1: this shadow puppet on the wall is amazing. It's not that,
Speaker 1: you know the fact that it's it's accidental, it's it's
Speaker 1: caused by this just machinery moving to to make this,
Speaker 1: uh this ape body do its thing. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think that that takes away from the miracle
Speaker 1: of it all at all. Of course, the opposite of
Speaker 1: that view would be the idea that in some sense
Speaker 1: it would be hard to understand exactly what this is.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean it's wrong that in some sense
Speaker 1: consciousness is adaptive, that that consciousness plays some kind of
Speaker 1: role in the survival of the organism. It happens for
Speaker 1: a reason. But in general, we we struggle to comprehend
Speaker 1: this the psycho physical nexus between our immaterial consciousness or
Speaker 1: mind and the physical lump of brain in our head.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, consciousness does not make its nest
Speaker 1: in any one portion of the brain. Well some people
Speaker 1: might argue with that, but I think you're right. Okay,
Speaker 1: Well more on that argument in just a set can.
Speaker 1: But okay, this idea that there's no center of the brain,
Speaker 1: no brain of the brain where everything is aggregated. Uh,
Speaker 1: this mirrors what we know about memory, right, we have
Speaker 1: we we don't just have memory like this this one
Speaker 1: little uh you know, zip drive in our head. We
Speaker 1: have multiple systems, multiple regions of the brain. Uh. The
Speaker 1: brain can suffer damage in one area, in an entire
Speaker 1: system of memory can go offline. But the brain lives
Speaker 1: on by by the You live on by virtue of
Speaker 1: other routes of memory. I kind of like the way
Speaker 1: I think one episode in the past, I can't remember
Speaker 1: which one it was, we talked about the metaphor of
Speaker 1: the brain as almost like an office full of workers,
Speaker 1: where there are some people who maybe stopped showing up
Speaker 1: to work, and other office workers may be able to
Speaker 1: fill in for them, sort of pitch in and cover
Speaker 1: the bases. Now, some people may be more crucial than others.
Speaker 1: Like if your operations manager who keeps the power on
Speaker 1: doesn't show up, Uh, then you might be in real trouble.
Speaker 1: Other people might not show up and you can you
Speaker 1: can find ways to get around it. Yeah, Jim's not here,
Speaker 1: who's gonna make the coffee? Well, maybe Jane can do it.
Speaker 1: The coffee might not be as good, but there will
Speaker 1: still be a caffeinated beverage. Now, a lot of what
Speaker 1: we understand is as consciousness seems to boil down to
Speaker 1: awareness and integration of information. Yeah, this is often a
Speaker 1: model that's put forward. It's it's this idea of um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to define awareness. But that's a really hard
Speaker 1: to do, isn't it. Yeah, Because again we're getting to
Speaker 1: this this situation where we're trying to explain away the
Speaker 1: magic of the of the human experience and uh and
Speaker 1: take it apart into functional um aspects of itself. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, research into the effects of anesthesia and the
Speaker 1: brain suggests that integration of information across the brain this
Speaker 1: might be our best gauge of consciousness. And some argue
Speaker 1: that this might be consciousness that what we experience again
Speaker 1: the shadow cast by this integration. So in other words,
Speaker 1: that if this is happening, consciousness wouldn't necessarily be rooted
Speaker 1: in one particular place in the brain. If we're still
Speaker 1: talking about the location of consciousness, but it's more like
Speaker 1: a phenomenon arising when the brain is talking to itself
Speaker 1: across many different regions. Yes, yeah, well that does sort
Speaker 1: of tie into something I do want to get to
Speaker 1: in a second about a proposed localization. Now, one one
Speaker 1: interpretation of this that I really like this comes down
Speaker 1: to a book by a neuroscientist Michael Graziano title Consciousness
Speaker 1: in the Social Brain, and he breaks it down more
Speaker 1: or less to this. This is a This is the
Speaker 1: the elevator version of this. This is the crash course version.
Speaker 1: You take me up to the thirteenth floor. All right,
Speaker 1: up here we go. Animal nervous systems evolved to process
Speaker 1: incoming data more efficients efficiently, but a lot of data
Speaker 1: streams in so the brain has to sort it all
Speaker 1: out and apply deeper processing to what really matters. So
Speaker 1: this is, yeah, we all know this experience because there's
Speaker 1: a ton of stuff in your field of vision right
Speaker 1: now that you absolutely are not noticing you see way
Speaker 1: more than you really see. Yeah. For another great example,
Speaker 1: as of your are at a party and you can
Speaker 1: focus in on either the conversation you're having, or you
Speaker 1: can sort of loose depart from the conversation you're locked
Speaker 1: into and and fully engage and listen to another conversation
Speaker 1: that's more interesting. Yeah, you can keep going like yeah,
Speaker 1: uh huh, Well, really, what you're doing is evesdropping exactly so.
Speaker 1: But we see some more things in insects. We see
Speaker 1: it in our ability again to see yet not see,
Speaker 1: to hear yet not here, the less important bits of
Speaker 1: sense data in our surrounding. And so this focus, the attention,
Speaker 1: or the control of attention, Graziana argues, is key to
Speaker 1: our experience of consciousness. Our brains process all of this
Speaker 1: sense data, as well as our knowledge of self in
Speaker 1: the world. The self we're aware of is like a
Speaker 1: game piece on a table. Consciousness then it's just information.
Speaker 1: That's his argument anyway. I mean, that's a really interesting
Speaker 1: way to put it. But as with a lot of
Speaker 1: these explanations of consciousness, it's hard to feel it. I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting that's an argument against it. I don't think
Speaker 1: it is but a lot of times when people try
Speaker 1: to say, here's how you explain how consciousness is generated
Speaker 1: by the brain, however coherent the explanation might be, it's
Speaker 1: hard to make it feel like, oh, yeah, that feels right,
Speaker 1: that's what my consciousness is. Um um, I mean, how
Speaker 1: does it happen? Like? Where does it come from? You
Speaker 1: might be able to explain it as attention, But yet again,
Speaker 1: why is this not some kind of automated, non subjective experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anytime we actually try to see ourselves in these uh,
Speaker 1: these explanations of consciousness, that they almost always fall flat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mentioned a minute ago that there actually have
Speaker 1: been multiple attempts to locate the seat of consciousness in
Speaker 1: in one brain subsystem or brain region, uh you know,
Speaker 1: the place where you'd see the certain brain activity light
Speaker 1: up on the f M R I or whatever. And
Speaker 1: one example is that, I don't know if you remember this,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of hubbub back in about a
Speaker 1: brain region known as the clostrum I guess the clos
Speaker 1: drow because there are two of them, and how research,
Speaker 1: which was new at the time, might implicate it as
Speaker 1: the single region responsible for generating the experience of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I believe Francis Crick, who worked on you know, the
Speaker 1: d n A it was involved in investigating the idea
Speaker 1: that the clostrum played a major role or was the
Speaker 1: seat of consciousness. So the clostroom is a small little
Speaker 1: sheet of neurons underneath the neo cortex, the all important
Speaker 1: neo cortex, and it's very thin. It's completely surrounded by
Speaker 1: what's known as white matter, this connective tissue that's said
Speaker 1: to sort of wire different brain regions together. And there
Speaker 1: are two of them in your brain. As I said,
Speaker 1: these closter their their positions sort of anterior center location
Speaker 1: around around where the temples are on your head. And
Speaker 1: the classroom has been referred to as this quote neuronal
Speaker 1: super hub as a sort of central exchange where information
Speaker 1: from all other all over the brain travels to and from.
Speaker 1: So it's got information coming in and out from all
Speaker 1: over the place, and that makes it kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: If we're going with the hypothesis you talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: that uh that the experience of consciousness is the integration
Speaker 1: of the activity of multiple brain regions, right, that's putting
Speaker 1: all this information together. Then there have been some really
Speaker 1: interesting case studies certainly not definitive, but things that make
Speaker 1: people in consciousness studies prick up their ears. One of them,
Speaker 1: for example, is this case of a woman who repeatedly
Speaker 1: lost conscious experience or reported doing so, when this region
Speaker 1: of her brain was electrically stimulated. But it was not
Speaker 1: the same kind of losing consciousness where usually when we
Speaker 1: say lose consciousness, it means like go to sleep, you know,
Speaker 1: or something like that, you sort of close your eyes
Speaker 1: and you lose all you stop acting, you just kind
Speaker 1: of fall over, and all that really continues is like
Speaker 1: breathing and heartbeat and digestion and stuff. This lady was
Speaker 1: not like that. She could, according to UH to the
Speaker 1: reports about this, she could continue very basic behaviors for
Speaker 1: a few seconds after the point where she claimed her
Speaker 1: conscious experience stopped. So if she was like doing simple
Speaker 1: movements or repeating a word, just very simple things like that,
Speaker 1: they could do this stimulation. Her memory of being conscious
Speaker 1: goes away, and yet her body continues doing the thing
Speaker 1: for a brief period of time. Wow, And so I'm
Speaker 1: assuming they're doing this with electromagnetic stimulation or some other
Speaker 1: similar I think it was. I think it was electrode stimulation. Um,
Speaker 1: this is this is scary if you start thinking about
Speaker 1: the possible implications of this in the same way that
Speaker 1: they're you know, the the the alleged god helmet. What
Speaker 1: if you had the zombie helmet where you just do
Speaker 1: you put it on and then your consciousness is out
Speaker 1: and you're just just go about about like, you know,
Speaker 1: cleaning an apartment, right, you act without awareness? Of course,
Speaker 1: would you really mind that? You might mind? You might
Speaker 1: mind missing that time later? Um? Yeah, So I don't
Speaker 1: know what to make about that. I I'm a little
Speaker 1: skeptical about the idea that you'd ever be able to
Speaker 1: pin consciousness on one particular part of the brain. But
Speaker 1: then again, I'm I'm not a neuroscientist. I mean, there
Speaker 1: might be something to that. I'm also sympathetic to the
Speaker 1: ideas that that consciousness is not one unitary thing, but
Speaker 1: is in fact as symboled out of different experiential components.
Speaker 1: This is also a controversial idea. It's but by no means,
Speaker 1: you know, widely accepted a lot of people don't like
Speaker 1: that idea at all. But I think this might be
Speaker 1: a good place to to come back to. This idea
Speaker 1: of extended cognition. You know that we mentioned earlier with
Speaker 1: the idea of of embodied cognition. So if you do
Speaker 1: something extremely simple like write down a note on a
Speaker 1: piece of paper to help you remember something, say you
Speaker 1: write down, you know, uh need need to buy five
Speaker 1: golf balls at target. Yeah, in what sense is that
Speaker 1: piece of paper and pencil not a part of your cognition,
Speaker 1: not a part of your information processing. It's only in
Speaker 1: the sense that you would make a perhaps arbitrary rule
Speaker 1: that says only stuff that happens inside the brain counts
Speaker 1: as cognition. But there are tons of external tools and
Speaker 1: phenomena that aid in our cognition, from calculators to hand
Speaker 1: gestures and even other people. You can use other people's
Speaker 1: cognition to supplement your own, and that would be sort
Speaker 1: of like computer adding on an extra processing core. In
Speaker 1: what sense is that not part of the information processing?
Speaker 1: And that's happening. And this is the main idea behind
Speaker 1: the concept of extended cognition. The brain is obviously the
Speaker 1: primary organ used in thinking, but thinking includes the activity
Speaker 1: if tons of external things hands, pen and paper, computers,
Speaker 1: other people. And with that in mind, I don't want
Speaker 1: to take a take this in a spooky direction. But
Speaker 1: could we not begin to see how extended cognition could
Speaker 1: imply a sort of willingness for the brain to engage
Speaker 1: in extended consciousness. If the subjective experience of the world
Speaker 1: is generated by information processing, and information processing involves external
Speaker 1: activity hands, pen and paper, other people, could part of
Speaker 1: the experience of consciousness be thought of as generated by
Speaker 1: something external to the brain. I do want to be
Speaker 1: clear here again, not not proposing anything supernatural or ghostly
Speaker 1: about that, just trying to introduce some more weirdness into
Speaker 1: this idea about where the mind resides. Yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you're doing a math on your fingers, then is there
Speaker 1: is there is their mind all over your fingers. It's
Speaker 1: got cognition over your your hands. I don't know that
Speaker 1: that might be a nonsensical idea, but I do think
Speaker 1: it's at least worth contemplating, at least maybe long enough
Speaker 1: to dismiss I'm not sure. All Right, we should probably
Speaker 1: take one more break at this point, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we'll discuss this topic a little bit more,
Speaker 1: and we'll even get into a little bit of Daniel Dinnett.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. Okay, one last thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about in this episode, Uh, about asking the
Speaker 1: question where is my mind? And it's a short story
Speaker 1: by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett's philosopher we've talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before. I always think he's a
Speaker 1: really interesting dude. Uh. He's written a lot about philosophy
Speaker 1: of mind. He's trying to He wrote a book in
Speaker 1: the nineties called Consciousness Explained, where he tried to outline
Speaker 1: a theory about how consciousness was generated from the ground
Speaker 1: up by these different cognitive processes sort of having additive
Speaker 1: properties adding up to consciousness, and how things could He
Speaker 1: had the idea that consciousness is not either just an
Speaker 1: either or like it's there it's not. He has this
Speaker 1: idea that things can be sort of conscious, there can
Speaker 1: be varying degrees of consciousness and uh, and that we
Speaker 1: represent some level of consciousness that is common to human animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because certainly when you start looking at at other animal specimens,
Speaker 1: you look at say dolphins, um various primates, or another
Speaker 1: example is is octopi, you start you have to ask yourself, well,
Speaker 1: to what extent do we dare take the human model
Speaker 1: of cognition and say, all right, octopus, do this make
Speaker 1: this shape with your with with your brain. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's the ridiculous. But then even if we get
Speaker 1: the octopus to do it, it's it's still hard to
Speaker 1: know what's going on inside the octopus's experience. I mean,
Speaker 1: I probably assumed that other animals are having some sort
Speaker 1: of experience. You can never really know for sure. It
Speaker 1: would just seem by analogy that they are to some extent, probably,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's hard to know. But anyway, I want
Speaker 1: to get into this. So Daniel denn it's this philosopher,
Speaker 1: but years ago he wrote a sci fi short story
Speaker 1: and this was to get into some of his weird
Speaker 1: ideas about the mind. So Dennett's main character in this
Speaker 1: story is a fictionalized version of himself who is delivering
Speaker 1: a lecture to an auditorium full of students and colleagues.
Speaker 1: Here's the setup. He says, several years ago he was
Speaker 1: recruited by the government to undergo a dangerous mission. And
Speaker 1: what it was was that the Department of Defense had
Speaker 1: developed a new type of weapon, which was an underground
Speaker 1: tunneling nuclear warhead. It sounds like a great centerpiece for
Speaker 1: a nineties movie, right, like the has Nicolas Cage in it. Maybe, yeah,
Speaker 1: Nicolas Cage, I think. I think it's it's like the
Speaker 1: sequel to con Air. They get him to come in
Speaker 1: there an con drill um and it's known as the
Speaker 1: Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device or STUD exactly. So. It was
Speaker 1: designed to tunnel through the core of the Earth and
Speaker 1: be capable of delivering a nuclear payload to weapons installations
Speaker 1: on the other side of the globe. But it became
Speaker 1: stuck about a mile beneath Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oh. So, the
Speaker 1: government wants dinn It to go disarm the device, and unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the device is known to emit, a type of radiation
Speaker 1: that is considered harmless to the body but fatal to
Speaker 1: brain cells. But the government has a solution. They want
Speaker 1: to remove Dinnett's brain from his body and store it
Speaker 1: in a jar full of liquid in a lab in Houston,
Speaker 1: allowing it to control his body remotely via a radio link.
Speaker 1: This is great now, so you think, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. Not really, they explained, because the body is
Speaker 1: already connected to the brain through a series of nerves.
Speaker 1: For all practical purposes, you can think of these as
Speaker 1: wires of varying lengths. So what if you just imagine
Speaker 1: making the wires a little bit longer, and a little
Speaker 1: bit longer, and a little bit longer still, and then
Speaker 1: eventually just skipping the wires altogether and substituting wireless radio
Speaker 1: waves that can do the same types of energy and
Speaker 1: information transmission that the nerves do, just like the communication
Speaker 1: between your computer and your WiFi router. See this, This
Speaker 1: blows another hole in the RoboCop to scenario where you
Speaker 1: had Tom Noonan's brain put into this this robotic war machine,
Speaker 1: and then RoboCop is able to defeat RoboCop too by
Speaker 1: reaching and pulling his brain out of the machine and
Speaker 1: crashing it on the smashing it on the ground. Why
Speaker 1: did Why did it? Because his brain was just connected
Speaker 1: by via wires to the rest of the robot. It
Speaker 1: could have been an a vault somewhere protected. Why So anyway,
Speaker 1: Dennett says, well, yes, I'm very curious about the mind
Speaker 1: and the brain, so I will undergo the procedure. So
Speaker 1: he wakes up from surgery and everything feels basically normal,
Speaker 1: as if nothing has changed, except he has some antenna's
Speaker 1: poking out of his head, but otherwise he feels like
Speaker 1: he is him. But then he goes to view his brain.
Speaker 1: There it is, He sees it sitting in a vat
Speaker 1: full of He describes what looks like root beer. Um,
Speaker 1: and or wait does he say ginger ale or root beer?
Speaker 1: I can't remember. It's sitting in something that looks like
Speaker 1: a delicious sugar yeah, okay um, And it's attached to
Speaker 1: a bunch of electrodes in antenna's. But then he is
Speaker 1: struck with a really odd thought. Why does he think, here,
Speaker 1: I am looking at my own brain instead of there's
Speaker 1: my body looking at me. After all, the brain is
Speaker 1: the thing doing the thinking. He's looking at the thing
Speaker 1: that is thinking right now. It's the organ responsible for
Speaker 1: generating the idea of the self, maintaining it through every
Speaker 1: environmental variation. And yet he cannot shake the idea that
Speaker 1: he is still, in some sense in his body. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in the sense he is because he's looking out
Speaker 1: through eyes that are attached to his body. But to
Speaker 1: answer the question where am I? He subjectively feels that
Speaker 1: he is in his head, but consciously knows that he
Speaker 1: is in the jar. Now for somebody who doesn't usually
Speaker 1: write science fiction. I think this is a really good
Speaker 1: setup for a story. Yeah, I'm digging it. I can
Speaker 1: I can imaginate at least as an Outer Limits episode. Now,
Speaker 1: can you only imagine how it would end if it
Speaker 1: were a Twilight Zone episode? Okay, So he's trying to
Speaker 1: sort out his feelings, and Dinnett decides to rename the
Speaker 1: two objects. So he names his body Hamlet and he
Speaker 1: names his brain Yorick. Good choices. If Dinnett is not
Speaker 1: strictly in Hamlet Hamlet, and he's not strictly in Yorick,
Speaker 1: where is he? Where? Where is the self that he's
Speaker 1: thinking from? Uh? And maybe maybe he's wherever his point
Speaker 1: of view is. He goes through a bunch of different
Speaker 1: options here, but then he also discovers there's a switch
Speaker 1: he can flip to turn off the antennas on his
Speaker 1: brain and sever the connection between his brain and body.
Speaker 1: Flipping the switch causes him to become groggy and collapse,
Speaker 1: and somebody else has got to flip it back on
Speaker 1: for him. And now eventually he's got to go face
Speaker 1: down the underground nuke, so controlling his body via a
Speaker 1: radio link just like before, then it goes down into
Speaker 1: the tunnel to disarm the stud but unfortunately, while down there,
Speaker 1: one by one his radio links begin to fail, So
Speaker 1: first he loses his hearing, then he loses control of
Speaker 1: his speech, then of various motor functions, eventually goes blind
Speaker 1: and loses all connection to his body. At this moment,
Speaker 1: he realizes something very weird has happened. Um his body
Speaker 1: has collapsed in the tunnel with nothing to control it,
Speaker 1: and he has become a disembodied mind nobody, only a brain.
Speaker 1: And the odd thing is that whereas before his intuition
Speaker 1: told them, he told him he was in his body,
Speaker 1: even though he knew otherwise, now he asked the question
Speaker 1: where am I, and his intuition tells him that he's
Speaker 1: in a jar in a lab in Houston. It's only
Speaker 1: by like subtraction of the rest of what's available that
Speaker 1: he starts to put himself in the brain. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this makes me wonder just as a side we we
Speaker 1: would usually assume that some version of this is possible,
Speaker 1: but should we, like, could you really think at all
Speaker 1: if your mind was confined to a total void, and
Speaker 1: you had no input or output or any kind any
Speaker 1: kind of anything whatsoever between your brain and the outside world.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that would actually preclude thinking somehow. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, Lovecraft actually got into this little bit and
Speaker 1: he hit a short story titled The Whisper and Darkness,
Speaker 1: and there's a plot concerning the ego. These alien fungal
Speaker 1: creatures from another world, and they have a habit of
Speaker 1: removing a human's brain, putting them into a mego brain
Speaker 1: canister so they can be uh, you know, stored away
Speaker 1: or shipped elsewhere, and you just go mad inside the canister. Well,
Speaker 1: this is something I think that's legitimate to worry about.
Speaker 1: When people talk about this sci fi trans human kind
Speaker 1: of idea of downloading your brain into a computer, Uh,
Speaker 1: a lot of people think this is really gonna happen someday.
Speaker 1: I remain highly skeptical about it. Um, but okay, let's
Speaker 1: say it is possible. I'm not sure that would be
Speaker 1: a good thing to do, because I mean, there you
Speaker 1: run the risk of putting your consciousness into a scenario
Speaker 1: where you would be uh possibly psychologically tortured by you know,
Speaker 1: lack of some kind of crucial input or output, and
Speaker 1: also at the same time unable to even kill yourself
Speaker 1: and escape it. Yeah, I mean you could have like
Speaker 1: a virtual sense of your body. But eventually you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to hire mcjag or to kidnap the MeV o
Speaker 1: este as from the past so he can occupy his brain.
Speaker 1: Is this the plot of Free Jack? I have Anthony
Speaker 1: Hopkins in it. Yeah, he plays the brain in question. Okay,
Speaker 1: so back to the story. We're getting close to the
Speaker 1: end now. So he's been in this brain. Now he's
Speaker 1: just a brain, and he goes into a dreamless sleep.
Speaker 1: He wakes up about a year later, and upon awaking
Speaker 1: in a hospital, he again finds himself having the sensation
Speaker 1: of being located in a physical body, but it's not
Speaker 1: his original one. He has the sense that his personality
Speaker 1: has been maintained. You know that he's the same person.
Speaker 1: This thing we're talking about earlier, the unity, the unity
Speaker 1: of conscious experience over time. But he's in this new body,
Speaker 1: supplied to him by the government from previous circumstances unknown. Uh,
Speaker 1: of course. And yet, of course the organ doing the
Speaker 1: thinking is still in the jar in Houston, connected to
Speaker 1: his body via new radio links just like the old one. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in keeping with his Hamlet theme, he names his
Speaker 1: new body Forton bra all right, now refresh me. I
Speaker 1: certainly remember that, of course Hamlets, the main character Yorick
Speaker 1: is the skull that how does Forton brought factor in?
Speaker 1: Forton Bra is the character who comes in at the
Speaker 1: end of Hamlet, and uh and just sort of survey.
Speaker 1: He's the conquering invader who comes into the castle at
Speaker 1: the end and sees the devastation and a sort of
Speaker 1: comments on it all. Oh, yes, yes, gotcha. So if
Speaker 1: Dennett's original body, the first body he had Hamlet, is
Speaker 1: dead in the tunnel in under a huge grave marker
Speaker 1: reading stud why why does he still feel that he
Speaker 1: is alive but with a new body, rather than feeling
Speaker 1: that he died and now some other person is being
Speaker 1: controlled by his brain? Uh? That that seems to root
Speaker 1: the idea of the location of the self in the brain.
Speaker 1: But then Dinnett, in his new body Forton bra goes
Speaker 1: to view his brain again. Once more, he tries to
Speaker 1: flip the switch to sever the connection between his brain
Speaker 1: and his body, and this time nothing happened. He doesn't
Speaker 1: become groggy and collapse. Here he discovers he has unwittingly
Speaker 1: been the subject of a secret side project scientists in
Speaker 1: the lab have made a computer copy of his brain
Speaker 1: named Hubert. Now, who knows if such a thing as
Speaker 1: possible to do in reality, But let's go along with
Speaker 1: it for just a second. Running on a computer attached
Speaker 1: to radio transmitter, is a piece of software that is
Speaker 1: a perfect duplicate of his brain, exactly replicating all the
Speaker 1: function and retaining all the memories. And the scientists have
Speaker 1: been been experimenting with it to see how closely it
Speaker 1: mirrors the actions of his real brain, and so far
Speaker 1: its behavior has been a d identical. Furthermore, he discovers
Speaker 1: that the reason he did not experience any problems upon
Speaker 1: severing the connection between Yorick and Forton Brough is that,
Speaker 1: in fact, Forton Braugh is not being controlled by Yorick
Speaker 1: the organic brain, but by Hubert, the computer copy. Both
Speaker 1: Yorick and Hubert are simultaneously fed the same input from
Speaker 1: the body, and they both react to it the same way,
Speaker 1: So it does not seem to matter which one of
Speaker 1: them controls the body. Forton bra Now where is den
Speaker 1: it Um? And so there's some more wonderfully fun things
Speaker 1: that happened at the end of the story. I don't
Speaker 1: want to spoil the very ending of it for you.
Speaker 1: But that's sort of like the meat of of the
Speaker 1: philosophical questions posed. But as interesting as it is, it
Speaker 1: makes me wonder like, can you ever really learn anything
Speaker 1: about the nature of consciousness purely through these kinds of
Speaker 1: thought experiments? You know, can can um can just coming
Speaker 1: up with scenarios and and sort of ratiocination in the
Speaker 1: chair get you to a place of understanding the nature
Speaker 1: of consciousness that say, you wouldn't have arrived at just
Speaker 1: by having the experience of being conscious. Yeah, it's an
Speaker 1: interesting argument because on one hand, like looking at your
Speaker 1: own consciousness, like your own CONSCIOUSNSS kind of like this
Speaker 1: weird ledge we've built out over a canyon, and it
Speaker 1: makes sense that maybe to perceive it, we've kind of
Speaker 1: got to build a new, uh, a new artificial ledge
Speaker 1: over the edge of the canyon, so that we can
Speaker 1: actually have the perspective to look back on the previous perspective.
Speaker 1: If that makes any sense. Yeah, I guess what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to say is if we kind of have a
Speaker 1: blinder up uh. In fact, our future guest are Scott Baker.
Speaker 1: I've talked a lot about this blind brain theory, about
Speaker 1: the brain not being able to perceive itself. It's just
Speaker 1: it has not evolved with the tools to study consciousness.
Speaker 1: That just is not relevant to survival. So we have
Speaker 1: to have a work around there. We have to sort
Speaker 1: of build new thought structures to try and perceive what
Speaker 1: we are. Yeah, but I mean, who knows if these
Speaker 1: thought structures really provide any insights. I mean, I I
Speaker 1: find this story really interesting, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing, A lot of this thought
Speaker 1: about consciousness. I mean, you know, a lot of times
Speaker 1: they're not doing scientific experience ements. Who knows of scientific
Speaker 1: experiments could give us any useful information about consciousness either,
Speaker 1: or maybe even that doesn't work. Um. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: this big, wonderful, juicy problem, and you're always tempted to
Speaker 1: come back to it and think you can have some
Speaker 1: new insight about it. But in the end, every time
Speaker 1: I have one of these conversations, I'm left wondering, like,
Speaker 1: was any new ground covered or we did we just
Speaker 1: kind of run in circles with this question that's so
Speaker 1: enticing but maybe never solvable. I don't know. Well, one
Speaker 1: of the great things about this, this story, which is
Speaker 1: essentially a thought experiment is one of those thought experiments
Speaker 1: that the cause that that if if you if you
Speaker 1: pay close enough attention and you read it and you
Speaker 1: think about it, you may reach that point where something
Speaker 1: kind of clicks and you you're suddenly viewing your own
Speaker 1: reality in a way that either you haven't before, are
Speaker 1: certainly in a way that you do not view it
Speaker 1: on a regular basis. It's not your default view of
Speaker 1: your subjective reality yea. And and that those movements can
Speaker 1: be magical where it takes you out. You're kind of
Speaker 1: taken out of the mud of who you are and
Speaker 1: you're able to to glimpse it almost like a imagine
Speaker 1: two dimensional being pulled out into a three dimensional world
Speaker 1: and and trying to just get a glimpse of everything
Speaker 1: before sinking back into place and to take it back
Speaker 1: to where we started at the beginning. This is what
Speaker 1: a lot of meditative practicees. I mean, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways to meditate, but one of the
Speaker 1: things people do when they meditate is to try to
Speaker 1: get out of themselves, to see themselves to and to
Speaker 1: to get out of you know, to shut down the
Speaker 1: default mode network too, to get out of this constant
Speaker 1: past versus present way of living and just be be present,
Speaker 1: to just set there and stare at an electrical outlet
Speaker 1: and and not even think about the electrical outlet, to
Speaker 1: just be this moment of perception. And another thing that's
Speaker 1: interesting to think about the location of consciousness is the
Speaker 1: idea of losing consciousness while being conscious, if this makes
Speaker 1: any sense, not not like going under general anesthesia or something,
Speaker 1: but uh, one way of thinking about it is that
Speaker 1: we're constantly losing consciousness whenever we become absorbed in something.
Speaker 1: You know, like when you're absorbed in watching a movie
Speaker 1: and you're you've you've hit that point where you stopped
Speaker 1: thinking about yourself, sitting there reflecting on things, and you're
Speaker 1: just in the story. You could look at that as
Speaker 1: a sort of loss of consciousness. You stop being, you
Speaker 1: stop being aware of the self, and you you're just experience,
Speaker 1: just pure experience. And the same thing happens in like
Speaker 1: some kind of creative projects, you know, you can be
Speaker 1: like writing or or painting or something. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of what the flow state often seems to be.
Speaker 1: Is it's like that physical location of consciousness disappears. You
Speaker 1: no longer have a sense that you're thinking is taking
Speaker 1: place somewhere. You just are what you're thinking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and there are different versions of it too, because
Speaker 1: like I'll experience this kind of flow state loss of consciousness,
Speaker 1: if you will, while maybe reading something really good or
Speaker 1: or hit or writing something and I'm really into the writing.
Speaker 1: But I'll also experience it when I'm painting a miniature sometimes.
Speaker 1: So it's so my consciouence has kind of becomes the
Speaker 1: tip of a paint brush, which which is is rather
Speaker 1: different than it becoming this, uh, this fictional framework. Um.
Speaker 1: And then also in like say a yoga class or
Speaker 1: even outside of a ya like a purely um you know,
Speaker 1: a purely secular, purely physical activity of say running on
Speaker 1: a treadmill or what have you. Um, this too can
Speaker 1: be a situation where you just become the act. You
Speaker 1: just become the physical thing that you're doing, and everything
Speaker 1: else can, at least for a little bit, melt away. Well, folks,
Speaker 1: I don't think we had any answers for you about
Speaker 1: the nature of consciousness. Somehow, that's always the case whenever
Speaker 1: we come back to the subject. But but I nevertheless
Speaker 1: I always feel called back to it anyway. That's it
Speaker 1: for this episode, but as always, you can head on
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