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 Lamb, and I'm Julie Duns. Julie,
Speaker 1: do you ever just stop and think for a few moments?
Speaker 1: I imagine you, dude, we all do um just start
Speaker 1: to stop and think about your thinking, and stop and
Speaker 1: think about your your being meta thinking. Yeah, bit, you know,
Speaker 1: you're just you're you're setting there and maybe you're just
Speaker 1: doing something you do every day. You're almost an autopilot.
Speaker 1: And then you stop and you think, and it's like
Speaker 1: and you realize, I'm this individual in this homined species.
Speaker 1: It's evolved to this state where I'm I'm standing here
Speaker 1: in this artificial structure, uh, that other people built for me,
Speaker 1: other people designed for me, standing on the backbones of
Speaker 1: other designers. I'm I'm wearing clothes for some reason, and
Speaker 1: I'm loading a dish dishwasher, and I'm thinking about my thoughts. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, how you could not work on this podcast
Speaker 1: and not have this sort of self awareness to that degree?
Speaker 1: I have to say, because of everything that we are researching,
Speaker 1: sometimes it is a matter of just being really overly
Speaker 1: aware of your conscious and what you're doing, and wondering
Speaker 1: if the thing that you're doing at that very moment
Speaker 1: is even uh something that is free will, or you're
Speaker 1: doing it because you're subconsciously colored by some other experience. So, yes,
Speaker 1: and I think it's fascinating, this idea of consciousness because,
Speaker 1: as David Eagleman says, we're the only species that that
Speaker 1: takes our own operating system and then sort of looks
Speaker 1: at it, like the operating system comes up and sort
Speaker 1: of looks at the screen and says, what are you?
Speaker 1: What am I? So we're talking about we're talking about
Speaker 1: the operating system in the screen. We're obviously talking about
Speaker 1: this mind brain problem. Yes, yeah, the mind brain problem,
Speaker 1: the mind body problems. I feel like mind brain problem
Speaker 1: is more of an accurate description, because what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here is, of course that, uh, inside of this
Speaker 1: squishy meat body, we have this physical brain. This this
Speaker 1: this brain that is a part of a part of
Speaker 1: our body, all right, and out of this brain, this
Speaker 1: brain manifests the mind. The mind, of course, is our thoughts.
Speaker 1: The things that happened to us every day are wanting
Speaker 1: to do something, our experience of doing something, are wishing
Speaker 1: we had not done something. All of these things that
Speaker 1: come together into this storm of consciousness. Yeah, because on
Speaker 1: the one hand, you have this very concrete, uh, three
Speaker 1: pounds of gelatinous goose stuff right stuff cock. The neuroscientist
Speaker 1: calls it the most complex object in the known universe,
Speaker 1: right because it's composed of roughly one billion neurons that
Speaker 1: each electrically spike in response to outside stimulus. You have
Speaker 1: all this going on, and then you have the concept
Speaker 1: of mind or the concept of self or self awareness
Speaker 1: that you know that all these things are going on
Speaker 1: outside of you and inside of you. Yes, so one
Speaker 1: is not the other, but certainly one arises from the other. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We study, we continue to study the brain NonStop. We
Speaker 1: continue to study the mind. Psychologists or working neuroscientists or
Speaker 1: working philosophers are working theologians, are working in in in
Speaker 1: our own part and our own individual work. We're struggling
Speaker 1: to sort of figure it all out. But we just
Speaker 1: continue to to wrangle uh and and fail to comprehend
Speaker 1: the psycho physical nexus between the two. And this is
Speaker 1: where we get into the mind body problem. Um, we
Speaker 1: work towards the answer, but we can't grasp it, not
Speaker 1: yet and why is it important? Because to me it
Speaker 1: is the holy grail of our existence. If we could
Speaker 1: find the center of consciousness, if we could pinpoint it,
Speaker 1: then we could somehow, we think, explain how it is
Speaker 1: that we came to be here perhaps what it all means. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it opens up this one door opens up
Speaker 1: portals to too many other doors of our existence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, our consciousness is our experience of the world
Speaker 1: is our experience. It is it is us so in
Speaker 1: a sense, is figuring out what we are really on
Speaker 1: on a deeper level than pure organism. I mean, and
Speaker 1: it's easy. This is a question that trails off at
Speaker 1: all the ends into into various uh less scientific fields
Speaker 1: as well. I mean, it's easy to spill over. I
Speaker 1: mean because because again it's the It's the subject of
Speaker 1: not only neuroscience and uh and end of and of psychology.
Speaker 1: It's also the stuff of philosophy and theology. It's stuff
Speaker 1: that we've wrangled with since our ability to to question
Speaker 1: what consciousness is and to grasp some notion or at
Speaker 1: least grasp after the question of consciousness. Okay, so before
Speaker 1: we use an overview of various philosophies behind consciousness or
Speaker 1: ideas about consciousness. Let's talk about something called a mirror test,
Speaker 1: which you actually have a video on right now, Yes,
Speaker 1: which highly enough does not feature a mirror. But but uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, So we're always trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: kind just his obviously and one of the hallmarks of
Speaker 1: consciousness one of the things that we can say, yes,
Speaker 1: this is definitely on the list when we try and
Speaker 1: figure out the attributes of human consciousness self awareness, because
Speaker 1: again I looked at the ideas. I look in a mirror,
Speaker 1: and what do I see? I say, Hey, that's me.
Speaker 1: Who's that handsome devil? Or who's that weirdo with with
Speaker 1: the ketchup on his face? You know, we we see
Speaker 1: that that that's us and uh and at the very
Speaker 1: least we're it makes us think about ourselves. Right. So
Speaker 1: you have this mirror test, which is again a measure
Speaker 1: of self awareness. This is developed by Gordon Gallup Jr.
Speaker 1: In the seventies and he used it to ascertain consciousness
Speaker 1: and animals as well as identify when children were entering
Speaker 1: into the mirror stage of self awareness. So the idea
Speaker 1: is you put a mark on an animal, yeah, on
Speaker 1: the face somewhere where they can't see it without a mirror,
Speaker 1: and they also can't feel it, So like you couldn't
Speaker 1: just like stab him with something because they're going to
Speaker 1: feel it, right, So you'd have to use a little subterrafugia. Right,
Speaker 1: So presumably they look into the mirror before the mark
Speaker 1: is on them, right, and then they have the mark
Speaker 1: on them, they turn and they look, and it's then
Speaker 1: observed whether or not the animal is reacting in amanner
Speaker 1: consistent with being aware that the mark is located on
Speaker 1: their body. Are they turning around to get a better
Speaker 1: angle on it? Are they seeing that something is awry
Speaker 1: or amiss um? So, animals that have passed the mirror test,
Speaker 1: we're talking about chimpanzees, Binobo's, orangatangs, dolphins, elephants, and possibly
Speaker 1: even pigeons. Yeah, European magpies on the list. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: of course this we've had an extensive conversations about personhoods.
Speaker 1: We won't go into that. Um. If you're interested in
Speaker 1: learning more about that, definitely check that out. But there's
Speaker 1: this idea that consciousness exists not just in humans but
Speaker 1: in another species, and it complicates things in a way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I mean one of the ones that I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to is the octopi, which if you give
Speaker 1: an octopus a straight up mirror tests, that going to
Speaker 1: fail it because their brains have evolved almost entirely separately
Speaker 1: from from the million brains. So they're they're not, as is,
Speaker 1: clued into these visual to a visual understanding of the
Speaker 1: world around them. Uh. They can reference a mirror, but
Speaker 1: they don't see it as themselves. But then there are
Speaker 1: a number of other tests that you can give an octopus,
Speaker 1: and and you know, stuff like tool use and learning
Speaker 1: and uh, and some other attributes begin to line up
Speaker 1: to really make an argument for octopus consciousness. So it,
Speaker 1: like a lot of this stuff, it comes down to
Speaker 1: how are you going to measure it? How are you
Speaker 1: going to and how are you going to judge the measurement? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean the same thing with guerillas. They tend to
Speaker 1: not look at each other in the eyes with themselves
Speaker 1: in a mirror in the eyes because it's a sign
Speaker 1: of aggressiveness. So they fail the test, even though they
Speaker 1: probably have a conscious right as self awareness. Um, so
Speaker 1: you're right, that's it's not a full proof way to
Speaker 1: say definitively, this is what consciousness is at least in
Speaker 1: this one aspect and the following species have it. So
Speaker 1: he thought it was would be interesting to look at
Speaker 1: a couple of brain mapping projects in the context of
Speaker 1: this conversation, because the brain mapping projects which we talked
Speaker 1: about before, like the Blue Brain project, Um, this is
Speaker 1: this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human
Speaker 1: brain and you could begin to see all these processes
Speaker 1: happening inside of it. And uh, you know, much like
Speaker 1: some of the fmr I technology that we talked about
Speaker 1: in terms of crime and you know, trying to figure
Speaker 1: out whether or not someone had committed a crime based
Speaker 1: on what was going on in their hippocampus in their memory,
Speaker 1: the same thing could happen in a sense where you
Speaker 1: could begin to understand the mysteries of the human brain.
Speaker 1: This idea of consciousness, like maybe this would manifest itself
Speaker 1: in these projects. So we're talking about the Human Brain Project,
Speaker 1: and this is an attempt to construct a massive computer
Speaker 1: simulation of the Brainness is the European initiative and and
Speaker 1: remark from is the coordinator of this. He's also the
Speaker 1: Bluebrain guy. Yes, And then there's also this Brain Activity
Speaker 1: MATT project and this is a decade long scientific effort
Speaker 1: to examine the workings of the human brain. This is
Speaker 1: what Obama back in I think April announced something like
Speaker 1: a three billion UM budget against that. And so that
Speaker 1: is this idea that you can build a comprehensive map
Speaker 1: of its activity and try to do the same thing
Speaker 1: for the brain that was done for the Human Genome project.
Speaker 1: So we'll talk more about that later. But we are
Speaker 1: so interested in the brain, how it works, and again
Speaker 1: these mysteries that are wrapped up in it, including consciousness,
Speaker 1: that we can't help but to to try to decode it.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's back up just a little bit, um,
Speaker 1: you know, just a few centuries or so, and talk
Speaker 1: about some some various various philosophical ideas about what consciousness
Speaker 1: is and uh and and how we're supposed to deal
Speaker 1: with the with the mind body problem. And it's worth
Speaker 1: the worth noting that so many of the philosophers were
Speaker 1: gonna point out here they weren't only philosophers, they're also
Speaker 1: also some of his mathematicians, biologists, just general men of science.
Speaker 1: And then part of the questing after these answers involved
Speaker 1: a multi disciplinary approach. Um. And these were. I should
Speaker 1: also mention that these particular examples were brought up by
Speaker 1: philosopher Column again. Uh this year's World Science Festival in
Speaker 1: the Whispering Mind, the Enduring a conundrum of consciousness. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about McGain himself in a bit
Speaker 1: as well. So let's go back to the days of
Speaker 1: renetic arts. It's I think therefore I am. He was
Speaker 1: a duelist. He saw the mind and body is separate.
Speaker 1: He's had the essence of mind is thought and body
Speaker 1: is an extension off it. Thoughts are not extended in space,
Speaker 1: but the body is. Uh. There was leading Is born
Speaker 1: in sixty six. He made this analogy of the mill. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you walk through the meat of the brain, or
Speaker 1: more likely, I guess just pod your hand around in it,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't see thoughts. You'd only see electrochemical mechanisms. So
Speaker 1: he stated that the mind exists invisible, but there's harmony
Speaker 1: between mind and body. Uh. Then you had Thomas Huxley
Speaker 1: born in and he compared the conscious mind and the
Speaker 1: physical brain to a genie and a lamp. You rub
Speaker 1: the you rub the lamp in this case the physical brain,
Speaker 1: and out of it manifest this this uh ephemeral genie,
Speaker 1: this consciousness. Okay, and uh, and so the the argument
Speaker 1: that he's making here is that, uh, that we just
Speaker 1: cannot equate the two because here we just have irritating
Speaker 1: nervous tissue and here we have the wonders of human consciousness.
Speaker 1: And Hutley was an epiphenomenalist, so he was a duelist,
Speaker 1: but he saw the mind is kind of a byproduct
Speaker 1: of the brain, uh, not necessary to the day to
Speaker 1: day operations, but kind of a shadow cast by by
Speaker 1: this by this organ which I think is very interesting
Speaker 1: when we we think back to some of what we've
Speaker 1: done about free will and about subconscious activities in the brain,
Speaker 1: and this idea that that our experience of thought and
Speaker 1: even body is kind of what happens above the surface
Speaker 1: of a dark sea. And there's a lot that goes
Speaker 1: on underneath the waves that we're not privy to, but
Speaker 1: that's where most of the sausage is being made. Then
Speaker 1: there's author Eddington born in two and he uh he
Speaker 1: argued that consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness.
Speaker 1: And then you have then you have some contemporary philosophers
Speaker 1: worth any mentioning saw Crypti. He said that mind and
Speaker 1: brain are not identical, and you can just look at pain.
Speaker 1: If we look at pain as it's experienced in the brain, uh,
Speaker 1: the scans and the neural activity, it's rather different from
Speaker 1: the way we experience it. So we have we have
Speaker 1: problems when we start trying to rate pain, like what
Speaker 1: is what is a level seven pain? And there's some
Speaker 1: efforts right now to try and do just this, but
Speaker 1: but it's not as as simple as just saying what
Speaker 1: did that hurt? How much did that hurts? That A
Speaker 1: five or six and expecting that to pan out among
Speaker 1: everyone's experience. It's the subjective nature of consciousness. And then
Speaker 1: you had Nagel who are you? Said that to consciousness
Speaker 1: cannot be reduced to the brain. And then finally Colin mcgainuh,
Speaker 1: the new mysterianism guy, and we're gonna talk about him
Speaker 1: in a bit. You know what, there's also this idea
Speaker 1: that day different brain, right, I mean that there is
Speaker 1: not this illusion that we have a stasis in both
Speaker 1: our concept of ourselves, our self awareness in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: this changes from day to day based on our experiences. UM.
Speaker 1: Not to mention chemical changes in the brain. Yeah, our
Speaker 1: mind changes constantly. We're we're not the same person we
Speaker 1: were a year ago, five years ago. We're not necessarily
Speaker 1: the same person we were yesterday and uh, and the
Speaker 1: brain changes as well. A lot of the duellist arguments
Speaker 1: are that the mind and brain are separate entities, but
Speaker 1: that they are, that the mind can change the brain,
Speaker 1: and the brain can change the mind. UM. I tend
Speaker 1: to really like that, Like the idea of the of
Speaker 1: the mind is the shadow cast by the brain. Um.
Speaker 1: That one seems to resonate more with my own personal experience. Well,
Speaker 1: especially when you look at something like the placebo effect.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this before about how someone can take
Speaker 1: the side effects, um, and they can take a cebo
Speaker 1: drug and consider those side effects, right, the ramification who
Speaker 1: you know, their self awareness, how they're going to operate
Speaker 1: in the world with this knowledge that they could fall
Speaker 1: asleep at the wheel or get hives or whatever other
Speaker 1: side fact available to them, and then it manifests in
Speaker 1: them physically. So here you have the brain and the
Speaker 1: in the mind acting on each other. And it really
Speaker 1: does blow the mind when you start thinking about it.
Speaker 1: It's because and you can see where the problem of
Speaker 1: resident rectifying these two things really grows and just becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly difficult to wrap your mind around. All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we can begin at the beginning. When do we become
Speaker 1: truly conscious? All right, we're back, and we are going
Speaker 1: to talk about the darkness that comes before consciousness, right uh,
Speaker 1: specifically in the womb. Uh uh. Neuroscientists Christoph coch or
Speaker 1: Cock I believe, yes, yeah, And he was on this
Speaker 1: panel at World Science and he's quite the firebrand he is.
Speaker 1: He is so much fun to listen to and to watch.
Speaker 1: Actually uh he is uh writing for Scientific American as well,
Speaker 1: And in the article when does Consciousness Arising Human Babies?
Speaker 1: He talks about something called the thalamo cortical complex and
Speaker 1: he says this provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content,
Speaker 1: and it begins to be put into place between the
Speaker 1: two and the week of gestation, okay, within the womb.
Speaker 1: And then he goes on to say that a lot
Speaker 1: of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place
Speaker 1: by the third trimester. But he says, because there's this idea, well,
Speaker 1: you know, could could a fetus be conscious could have
Speaker 1: some sort of awareness. He says that the fetus is
Speaker 1: suspended in a warm and dark cave connected to the
Speaker 1: placenta that pumps blood, nutrients, and hormones into its grow
Speaker 1: body and brain. The fetus is asleep. So it's a
Speaker 1: very interesting article. I encourage everybody to check it out,
Speaker 1: but I just wanted to highlight a couple of points
Speaker 1: from it. He goes on to detail the various ways
Speaker 1: in which the fetus essentially is sedated within the womb,
Speaker 1: and then he says the dramatic events attending delivery by
Speaker 1: natural vaginal means cause the brain of the fetus to
Speaker 1: abruptly wake up. The release from anesthesia and sedation that
Speaker 1: occurs when the fetus disconnects from the maternal placenta arouses
Speaker 1: the baby so that it can deal with its new circumstances.
Speaker 1: It draws its first breath, wakes up, and begins to
Speaker 1: experience life. Yeah, and it's it's pretty much the biggest
Speaker 1: wake up of all time. Like it's really difficult to
Speaker 1: even try and like put it in like adult human terms.
Speaker 1: Like the closest thing I can think of is my
Speaker 1: mind goes back to some of the recent experiments with
Speaker 1: psilocybin that have been conducted where they're injecting individuals with psilocybin.
Speaker 1: So there's like this blast off moment where they're just
Speaker 1: suddenly experiencing intense psychedelic experience. Like that has got to
Speaker 1: be at least similar to what's going on here, because
Speaker 1: they're just going from zero to a hundred just like that.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they are sensing the world. They are, in a
Speaker 1: limited sense, seeing the world, and everything's just coming at
Speaker 1: them there there, and they're they're they're unhooked from this
Speaker 1: life support system that has previously sustained them. You know.
Speaker 1: I couldn't help but think about the matrix. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly when they're waking up out of that the tank,
Speaker 1: right and ripping things out of canoe, Guiano reeves neck
Speaker 1: right right, because otherwise they were just sitting there in
Speaker 1: that in that sort of sedative um state, providing energy, right. Um.
Speaker 1: So I did think it was interesting though that that
Speaker 1: he talks about this, that cop talks about this emergence
Speaker 1: into life and and and all the stimuli. And I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but be reminded of cognitive psychologist Alice and
Speaker 1: goth Nick And when she talks about the baby's brain
Speaker 1: being completely soaked in neurotransmitters because everything matters. You know,
Speaker 1: they don't have a neural pruning yet, and so they're
Speaker 1: differently conscious from adults. And she makes the argument that
Speaker 1: they are much more conscious than adults, which really kind
Speaker 1: of puts a whole tale spin on this idea of
Speaker 1: consciousness and self awareness. Of course, because if you give
Speaker 1: them the test, the mirror test, it's eight months before
Speaker 1: generally more or less eight months before they're going to
Speaker 1: pass that thing. Right, they'll be interested in their image,
Speaker 1: but they won't necessarily know that that's them staring back
Speaker 1: at them. Um, we think, right, yeah, because earlier than that, though,
Speaker 1: the ceiling fan is a big hit. I've been hanging
Speaker 1: out with some baby afficiently and the ceiling fan is
Speaker 1: apparently just amazing. It's like watching uh, it's it's like
Speaker 1: the adult version of watching Baraka on an HD screen
Speaker 1: with Blu Ray is just watching that ceiling fan go
Speaker 1: around and around. You know, my daughter, when she was
Speaker 1: an infant, was so interested in these trees. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't know that they're crepe myrtles, but you know they're
Speaker 1: very vertical trees. Outside of her windows. So when I
Speaker 1: would feed her, she would just be absolutely engaged in this.
Speaker 1: And then I learned later that the neurons that we
Speaker 1: have in our visual cortex are much more dedicated to
Speaker 1: the x y plane than diagonal, So it makes sense
Speaker 1: that these really strong verticals appealed to children. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: is a side note to consciousness here. Now we're talking
Speaker 1: about the the the infant in the womb being asleep, um,
Speaker 1: and in the course that instantly makes you think, well,
Speaker 1: what are they dreaming about? Uh? Probably nothing, because one
Speaker 1: of the studies we're looking at American and a psychologist,
Speaker 1: David Folks, study the dreaming and cognitive development UH in
Speaker 1: preschoolers and he believes preschoolers dreams are are generally static
Speaker 1: and playing with no characters that move in act and
Speaker 1: hardly any feelings or in no memories because what's to
Speaker 1: be processed. I mean not to turn this into a
Speaker 1: dream podcast, but the dream is a byproduct of cognition
Speaker 1: and UH. And then to to look at preschoolers dreams
Speaker 1: and there's like nothing going on. There's just not enough
Speaker 1: deterial to process. But there is stimuli to be processed.
Speaker 1: There is cognition in the womb because you have auditory
Speaker 1: uh stimuli, and you do have light. Right. Um. I
Speaker 1: guess you could to a degree say there's taste as well,
Speaker 1: because you have the some of the molecules of taste
Speaker 1: crossing over in the placenta. But anyway, the point is
Speaker 1: that there's no context for it, right right, all right,
Speaker 1: So back from dreams in the womb, back from the
Speaker 1: explosive psychedelic experience of birth. Um, talking more about the
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness. Now you can you can really divide
Speaker 1: consciousness problems up into the easy problems of consciousness and
Speaker 1: then the really hard problem of consciousness. Now, Uh, if
Speaker 1: I may, I'll just run through the easy problems of
Speaker 1: consciousness for us real quick. Um. The ability to discriminate, categorize,
Speaker 1: and react to environmental stimuli. All right, we can do that.
Speaker 1: We can do that. I just didn't now. Uh. The
Speaker 1: integration of information by a cognitive system. I've got information
Speaker 1: coming in from three D ways. Like an individual is
Speaker 1: telling me one thing, but their face is saying another.
Speaker 1: How am I supposed to interpret to interpret that into
Speaker 1: a general idea of what's going on? Um? The reportability
Speaker 1: of mental states. You know, you can talk about how
Speaker 1: you feel and how you feel. You that you feel
Speaker 1: the ability of a system to access its own internal states.
Speaker 1: I'm aware of how I'm feeling. The focus of attention.
Speaker 1: I can focus my attention on this, that or the other. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes given the right amount of coffee. Uh. The deliberate
Speaker 1: control of behavior. I'm not just a self moving soul.
Speaker 1: I I am. It's just caught in the river of actions.
Speaker 1: I can actually think about what I'm doing. I think
Speaker 1: you're tamping down right now, the fact that you really
Speaker 1: want to dance, right, Yeah, but all that gesticulation is right,
Speaker 1: And even though that's on the easy problems list, you
Speaker 1: have to admit that one really spills out into the
Speaker 1: whole issue of free will as well. But still dancing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it comes on, I can't help myself. Well in a way,
Speaker 1: you're you're right. To what extent can you disobey the beat?
Speaker 1: I don't know. But then the final one of the
Speaker 1: easy problems of conscious the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Um,
Speaker 1: we've talked about this enough, so we're not going to
Speaker 1: dive back into that one. But obviously being away can
Speaker 1: being a sleeper to different states, different types of conscious
Speaker 1: and unconscious is going on there, but but being aware
Speaker 1: of the difference. Yeah, my top is still spinning, So
Speaker 1: I think this is a dream reference. Uh So the
Speaker 1: really hard problem, right, and this is David J. Chalmers
Speaker 1: from the University of Arizona. He talks about this hard
Speaker 1: problem of being experienced, right, because we think we perceive
Speaker 1: there's a wre of information processing, but there is a
Speaker 1: largely subjective aspect of this. Yeah, my experience of the
Speaker 1: universe is not going to be like yours. And there
Speaker 1: are ways that we can compare those experiences, but we
Speaker 1: can't definitively really line them up one to one. And
Speaker 1: then when you start looking at other species, this is
Speaker 1: where you get into into naples work, which we've actually
Speaker 1: mentioned before in our episode on bats. He had that
Speaker 1: article what is it Like to be a bat? That's
Speaker 1: a huge argument in the whole um problem of consciousness debate.
Speaker 1: Uh for those of you don't remember, his whole thing
Speaker 1: is that we're looking at We can look at it bad.
Speaker 1: We can see how a bat's mind works. We can
Speaker 1: we can we form all these theories and create an
Speaker 1: understanding of how the bat experiences the world around it.
Speaker 1: But we can never really know what it's like to
Speaker 1: be a bat. We can never line up our experience
Speaker 1: of the world, our consciousness with with with that bat
Speaker 1: level of consciousness. Yeah, philosopher Bertrand for us all said
Speaker 1: this about seventy years ago or so. He said, we
Speaker 1: know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except
Speaker 1: when these are mental events that we directly experience. Right,
Speaker 1: so we can we can look at the bat and
Speaker 1: all of its glory. But until we can you know,
Speaker 1: physically embody this and mentally embody the bat, we don't
Speaker 1: know what the deal is with the bat. Yeah, Nagel said,
Speaker 1: But fundamentally, an organism has conscious mental states if and
Speaker 1: only if there is something that it is to be
Speaker 1: that organism, something it is like for the organism. So
Speaker 1: he head spinning even just reading that. You know, Okay,
Speaker 1: so yeah, let's let's let's gather in all of these threads.
Speaker 1: What are we starting to uh sort of story starting
Speaker 1: to weave here? The limits of understanding, yes, limits, And
Speaker 1: that's where Colin McGain comes back into a British philosopher. Um.
Speaker 1: He was on the panel at World Science and he
Speaker 1: kept him, him and Christoph Cock. They were the ones
Speaker 1: to Really they kept going at each other, uh in
Speaker 1: in a fun way, in a very academic debate kind
Speaker 1: of way, because both of them were were rock solid
Speaker 1: on their their their views and their their opinions of
Speaker 1: the world. Ones and neuroscientists, Ones a philosopher and uh
Speaker 1: And it was a fabulous interaction. You can catch that
Speaker 1: whole discussion online. Is that the one where McGann is
Speaker 1: trying to really pin down Hawk on whether or not
Speaker 1: he's a reductionist or and like Hawk is like, no,
Speaker 1: don't try to label me. Yeah, yeah, and then he
Speaker 1: kept saying I'm really, I'm really surprised you're actually a
Speaker 1: do list and uh and yeah. That they kept kind
Speaker 1: of picking each other. It was it was wonderful to
Speaker 1: bold Um. And that's the great thing about the World
Speaker 1: Science festivals. They'll put these panels will have people of
Speaker 1: different disciplines on there. So it's not just a panel
Speaker 1: of physicists talking about a topic or um neuroscientists talking
Speaker 1: about a topic. There's a you know, a theologian or
Speaker 1: in this case, a philosopher or two to spice things up.
Speaker 1: So call them again. Is the most prominent of the
Speaker 1: new mysterians. Um and uh, the new mysterian argument is
Speaker 1: essentially that the the brain cannot conceive the natural coexistence
Speaker 1: of mind and brain. And it's not that we're really
Speaker 1: necessarily that we're dumb. It's not like that we're just
Speaker 1: too stupid for this, but we've only evolved to carry
Speaker 1: out certain cognitive feats. Okay, so we can navigate a
Speaker 1: changing world. We can, we can do all of these
Speaker 1: things that we mentioned in the the the easy problems
Speaker 1: of consciousness. You know, we can. We can deal with
Speaker 1: all this sense data and make sense of it. But
Speaker 1: what is the possible evolutionary advantage of of gaining an
Speaker 1: advanced understanding of the nature of consciousness? Of like, what
Speaker 1: is the evolution very advantage to solving the mind body problem?
Speaker 1: So he's saying this lines up really closely with the concept,
Speaker 1: the philosophical concept of cognitive closure, that humans can only
Speaker 1: hope to understand certain aspects of the universe, and we
Speaker 1: simply lack the brains to understand everything. So you and
Speaker 1: I were talking earlier, and I mentioned that perhaps this
Speaker 1: is just me, you know, sitting here gobbledygooking, but perhaps philosophizing. No,
Speaker 1: I think gobbledygooking with the capital g uh that perhaps
Speaker 1: the reason why we have these limits is we can't
Speaker 1: go beyond and really figure out what consciousness is and
Speaker 1: pin it down is because it really is only helpful
Speaker 1: to us in the context of theory of mind. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about theory of mind, is is disability to
Speaker 1: not just occupy our own perspective, but to occupy other
Speaker 1: people's perspective, like me trying to figure out how Julie thinks,
Speaker 1: or how Noel thinks, or how Bad thinks. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't have one without the other. You have to have
Speaker 1: a self awareness another in order to be aware of others.
Speaker 1: So from an evolutionary perspective, perhaps there are limits to that,
Speaker 1: to the understanding. You know, perhaps there's this sort of
Speaker 1: line where it's like, okay, and now it's not useful
Speaker 1: to us anymore. Yeah, it's it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that on one level it does. It rings kind of
Speaker 1: true to me, you know where, and I think it
Speaker 1: rings more and more true with our our modern world,
Speaker 1: you know, like you go back. Uh. I love looking
Speaker 1: at the like retrofuturist stuff and looking at our our
Speaker 1: our ideas about what the future would be like safe
Speaker 1: in the fifties, sixties and seventies and eighties. Uh, and
Speaker 1: now we're a lot were for the most part, we're
Speaker 1: a little more limited and what we dare to dream
Speaker 1: uh for ourselves in the future. Uh. And a lot
Speaker 1: of that is realizing that there are limits, and if
Speaker 1: if there are not hard and fast limits, then there
Speaker 1: at least limitations on how quickly we can advance and
Speaker 1: how quickly and into what extent we can will ourselves
Speaker 1: to move forward. So that lines up really closely with
Speaker 1: I can feel like how Ris arreencing the world and
Speaker 1: how it's matching up with our dreams of where we
Speaker 1: would be. But then uh, it's also something that Christoph
Speaker 1: Cock was very strongly opposed to the idea during the talk,
Speaker 1: and he said, this is just a featist, you know,
Speaker 1: and because it does go right completely against the can
Speaker 1: do attitude of science, the idea that like, yes, we're
Speaker 1: gonna study this and we're gonna we're gonna buy God
Speaker 1: figure it out. And then along comes the new mysterion
Speaker 1: to say, ah, there's some things we'll never figure out.
Speaker 1: Go home, you know, Okay, So which brings to this
Speaker 1: to the table, this conversation about these brain projects the
Speaker 1: reverse engineering of the brain. So if we're going to
Speaker 1: try to move forward with us and try to understand
Speaker 1: what the brain is, what the mind is, and where
Speaker 1: consciousness ultimately sits in there, then hey, can't we just
Speaker 1: throw a supercomputer at it? Right? Yeah? This is this
Speaker 1: is an important topic to discuss because, uh, cognitive closure
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, you know, the idea that we can only
Speaker 1: hope to understand so much. One of the things that
Speaker 1: stands outside of cognitive closure is the steady of accumulation
Speaker 1: and preservation of scientific data over the course of human history.
Speaker 1: And in this I love to get a little um
Speaker 1: fantastic with the with my imaginings of this, but I
Speaker 1: tend to think of like science as this kind of
Speaker 1: super intellect that we're building outside of ourselves. It's not
Speaker 1: limited by the capacity of a single human mind or
Speaker 1: even a dozen human minds. It's not limited by the
Speaker 1: lifespan of an individual or even though the lifespans of
Speaker 1: whole cultures. It stands outside of that, it grows larger
Speaker 1: and larger. It's like the Internet itself, and the Internet
Speaker 1: is a part of it, and it's becoming this kind
Speaker 1: of super intellect. So it's this collective data of both
Speaker 1: humans and machine, right, and it's affected by our own
Speaker 1: cognitive closure, but it's not limited by cognitive closure. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that you could get enough data here
Speaker 1: going right, you could study the human brain. You could
Speaker 1: try to have the supercomputer take every data point it
Speaker 1: could and string together some sort of understanding of how
Speaker 1: the brain actually works. And I say actually, because honestly,
Speaker 1: we're at a point right out that neuroscience is still
Speaker 1: very like this is a very young field. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1: Every day, especially if you follow any science feeds out there,
Speaker 1: including our own, it's like they're always some sort of
Speaker 1: new exciting bit of neuroscience coming out, and we talked
Speaker 1: about a lot of them here. But and so it's
Speaker 1: easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we
Speaker 1: are we are much closer to a full understanding than
Speaker 1: we are. Yeah. And so even if you could produce
Speaker 1: the data by the machines into something we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily mean that our mind, in its limited understanding,
Speaker 1: could recognize the pattern that emerges. Right. It's like we
Speaker 1: we create this this genie of science that stands outside
Speaker 1: of ourselves, and then it reaches the point where it
Speaker 1: can say, hey, I figured out that whole consciousness thing
Speaker 1: for you, let me explain it to you, and then
Speaker 1: it explains it to us, and we still have the
Speaker 1: cognitive closure in place to where we still can't understand
Speaker 1: what the the explanation is. So I wanted to bring
Speaker 1: John Horgen into the conversation. Um. He is a writer
Speaker 1: for Scientific and he has a blog called cross Check.
Speaker 1: And he wouldn't, I don't think, paint himself as a
Speaker 1: new mysterian, but he brings some very interesting arguments into
Speaker 1: the limits of our understanding vs. The these brain projects. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you mentioned Henry Markham earlier, the head guy at
Speaker 1: the Blue Brain Project, and uh and Horgan was was
Speaker 1: quite critical this gentleman. Yeah, he made the point of
Speaker 1: well Markham actually he read a couple of Horgan's blog
Speaker 1: because this is such likes this science gossip, the contents
Speaker 1: he's founded in the comments and basically saying like, I
Speaker 1: think there's something like the lack of vision basically on
Speaker 1: Horgan's park. And Horgan said, well, I'm going to take
Speaker 1: some of the comments that you made about another brain project,
Speaker 1: like a mouse brain project, I believe, Yeah, and saying
Speaker 1: that it wasn't doable, and then you know, but now
Speaker 1: you're sort of heralding this brain project is being the
Speaker 1: end all be all, this sort of like, can we
Speaker 1: get to the unified theory of the brain, And so
Speaker 1: Horrigan says, look, we you know, neuroscientists can't mimic brains
Speaker 1: because they lack basic understanding of how the brains work
Speaker 1: or how the brain works, and they don't know what
Speaker 1: to include in the simulation and what to leave out.
Speaker 1: In other words, he's saying that the neural code that
Speaker 1: they're trying to figure out, they don't even have the
Speaker 1: basic understandings to figure out what that code might consist of.
Speaker 1: And so he's saying, you can't say that this is
Speaker 1: an Apple's apples thing when it comes to like the
Speaker 1: Brain project or the Human Genome project, because he's saying
Speaker 1: that when the Human Genome Project began, uh, there was
Speaker 1: already a basic understanding of genetics, and the genetic code
Speaker 1: had already been deciphered, so they could make some real progress.
Speaker 1: But he's saying, look, you have all sorts of factors
Speaker 1: here that affect the brain. You have neural transmitters, hormones,
Speaker 1: neural growth factors, chemicals, um. He says that there are
Speaker 1: neurons that display a dizzing variety of forms and functions,
Speaker 1: and that researchers have discovered scores of distinct types of
Speaker 1: neurons just in the visual system. So he's basically saying,
Speaker 1: if we don't know all the components yet, well, we
Speaker 1: know the components, but we don't know necessarily how they operate,
Speaker 1: then how can you reverse engineers something like that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he made a fabulous comparison Horgen did, comparing it to
Speaker 1: the cargo cults um South Pacific, the Milanesian cults, where
Speaker 1: the idea, of course is that they would see planes
Speaker 1: flying over during the Second World War and they were
Speaker 1: inspired by them, you know, supposedly they thought they these
Speaker 1: were wholly magical things, and so they created versions of
Speaker 1: them themselves. They created models out of out of you know,
Speaker 1: straw materials and what have you around them, and they
Speaker 1: could create, of course, the form of an airplane, the
Speaker 1: shape of an airplane. They're understanding their model of what
Speaker 1: an airplane is. But they couldn't take often and it
Speaker 1: didn't fly. The function of it was was was not present.
Speaker 1: So they could create a model, but not a working model.
Speaker 1: They could create a model based on their limited understanding
Speaker 1: of the thing. Now this is this is highly critical, right,
Speaker 1: but there's some I think that there's some weight to
Speaker 1: what he is saying is like, you know, this could
Speaker 1: be premature and trying to do into reverse engineer the brain.
Speaker 1: And he brought up neuroscientist Donald Stein the University of
Speaker 1: Excuse Memory University, and in saying that they're completely ignoring
Speaker 1: multiple levels of the brain. And we're talking about the
Speaker 1: glial cells, and you and I talked about the glial
Speaker 1: cells at length, and when we are talking about what
Speaker 1: makes genius genius? Right, because the more white matter, the
Speaker 1: more glial cells that you have. It's a great word
Speaker 1: to just to say it sounds like something the nuttie
Speaker 1: professor would would belt out glial cells, um, but sort
Speaker 1: of this fiber optic system that can transport things really quickly.
Speaker 1: Like the more you have that, the quicker you can
Speaker 1: think and the quicker you can put together ideas. So
Speaker 1: he's saying like this just is so nuanced, so complex,
Speaker 1: you know, how can you really get to where you
Speaker 1: need to go? And on top of that, there's the
Speaker 1: microbiome and this is something we've talked about too. This
Speaker 1: is this idea that we are colonized by microbial cells,
Speaker 1: bacterial cells, and they are affecting our brain. And we
Speaker 1: talked about this in the podcast about the gut being
Speaker 1: in the second brain, because those microbial cells can determine
Speaker 1: what sort of level of anxiety you're experiencing, um all
Speaker 1: sorts of mental states, and even your immune system which
Speaker 1: can dictate you know, neurological disorders. So it's just a yeah,
Speaker 1: it brings us right back. There's a whole mind body
Speaker 1: problem that we've talked not to buy mind body problem
Speaker 1: of the mind body connection, the whole centaur thing where
Speaker 1: we're not a rider on a horse, but we're a
Speaker 1: ride er fused with horse. And so anytime you if
Speaker 1: you really try to think of the brain cut off
Speaker 1: on its own, you're not getting the full picture of
Speaker 1: the organism. So yeah, like you say, it just gets
Speaker 1: more and more complex the closer you look. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then sometimes I do. I think the problem of consciousness
Speaker 1: is again it's subjective, and how do we all even
Speaker 1: define it for ourselves? So even just pinning down exactly
Speaker 1: what that is the hard problem, right The experience is
Speaker 1: sort of the first part of trying to figure it
Speaker 1: out or reverse engineering consciousness. Yet, like, are there are
Speaker 1: there truly varying levels of consciousness among humans? You know,
Speaker 1: because we getting into the realm of of of of
Speaker 1: theology and New Ages and and Buddhist philosophy, you get
Speaker 1: into the ideas that their individuals that higher states of consciousness.
Speaker 1: You know, like someone who has achieved buddhahood is at
Speaker 1: a different level of consciousness than than just somebody that's
Speaker 1: completely lost in their thoughts. Someone who can say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling angry right now? Why am I feeling angry?
Speaker 1: Is at a different level of consciousness than someone that
Speaker 1: is simply angry or someone who is dreaming in their
Speaker 1: angry right because they're in a they're sort of in
Speaker 1: that wound sedative uh, quality of being. Right, So how
Speaker 1: aware can you mean when you're dreaming? Yeah? And is
Speaker 1: it possible for there to be some sort of a
Speaker 1: super consciousness as well? And when will the Internet become
Speaker 1: self aware? Exactly? When when could the the Internet becomes
Speaker 1: the super consciousness? Again, this idea of we build all
Speaker 1: this science and then it eventually becomes the genie that
Speaker 1: we can ask this ever towering question about the nature
Speaker 1: of consciousness. At what point does it become that that
Speaker 1: that living genie, that that that just powerful intellect that
Speaker 1: we can quiz about this stuff. And at what point
Speaker 1: does it recognize that we can't even understand the data
Speaker 1: that it's giving us and say, oh, man, so maybe
Speaker 1: it just play gates as at that points and says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you'll you know, it's a I don't even know. I'm
Speaker 1: not even sure what what the the the answer would be,
Speaker 1: maybe they would just put us off. You're like, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you tomorrow. Banianna, Banianna. Maybe the super unelect at
Speaker 1: this point, I mean, essentially becomes God. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you're looking for a center, the seat of consciousness, you
Speaker 1: could say that you're looking for a cohesive thing being
Speaker 1: and that in some ways you're trying to cast off
Speaker 1: entropy and cling to this idea that there's some sort
Speaker 1: of stability a k A God the center. Right. So,
Speaker 1: in some as I do think that this search for
Speaker 1: consciousness is a bit of a red herring because these things,
Speaker 1: this is a construct, and it's not it will always
Speaker 1: be abstract. You're not going to be able to find
Speaker 1: it in the concrete. So there you have it. The
Speaker 1: quest to understand human consciousness. New Mysteriani is um and
Speaker 1: I should point out that, you know, we're talking about
Speaker 1: like building an imperfect model of something, but obviously building
Speaker 1: imperfect models that's on the road to figuring out how
Speaker 1: something works. And you look back through the history of
Speaker 1: science and science is filled with imperfect understandings and imperfect models,
Speaker 1: but those lead to two more perfected versions, like science
Speaker 1: is often wrong, but science is not a solid state.
Speaker 1: Science is a movement towards understanding. Yeah, And don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, I am very excited by these brain projects.
Speaker 1: And I would love to have, you know, be able
Speaker 1: to dump my brain into a machine and having a
Speaker 1: nice little backup. That would be great. I think that
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of really cool implications of this, but
Speaker 1: in the context of the hard problem and um and
Speaker 1: and as starting point to try to figure out what
Speaker 1: we don't quite understand, you know, it's it's a valid conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I also don't want to miscategorize Colin McGinn's new
Speaker 1: mysterianism approach. He's not saying that we cannot understand the stuff.
Speaker 1: He's just he's saying we should, uh, we should have
Speaker 1: our minds open to that possibility. All right, Well, um,
Speaker 1: consciousness it's the really the closest thing to us and
Speaker 1: also the most mysterious. Uh. And of course someone could
Speaker 1: say people have said the very same thing about God.
Speaker 1: So there you got more connection between the quest for
Speaker 1: understanding consciousness and the quest h to touch the face
Speaker 1: of God. Right there. So since it's that close to everyone,
Speaker 1: I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this particular topic
Speaker 1: and we would love to hear them. Uh, tell us
Speaker 1: how you perceive your own consciouness. How do you perceive
Speaker 1: consciouness around you? Do you buy into this new mysterianism
Speaker 1: or or the the cognitive closure or do you do
Speaker 1: you really think can do it? You think it's just
Speaker 1: a matter of time before we do crack that nut?
Speaker 1: Or do we have to create the genie to crack
Speaker 1: it for us and then we find it inedible? Anyway,
Speaker 1: let us know. You can find us online a number
Speaker 1: of different places. Of course, we're all over the social media.
Speaker 1: We're on Twitter, we're on what d plus, We're on
Speaker 1: uh tumbler, We're on Facebook. We're also on YouTube. That's
Speaker 1: where our videos are at mind Stuff Show on YouTube
Speaker 1: and then also the mothership, the main website, stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind dot com and you can always stop
Speaker 1: us a line let us know your thoughts at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, is it How stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com