1
00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:01,680
Speaker 1: Are you a Stuff to Blow your Mind fan? Are

2
00:00:01,680 --> 00:00:03,880
Speaker 1: you a New Yorker? Do you plan to attend this

3
00:00:03,960 --> 00:00:06,800
Speaker 1: year's New York Comic Con. If so, then you've got

4
00:00:06,800 --> 00:00:10,600
Speaker 1: to check out our exclusive live show NYCC presents Stuff

5
00:00:10,640 --> 00:00:14,000
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind Live Stranger Science. Join all three

6
00:00:14,080 --> 00:00:16,840
Speaker 1: of us as we record a live podcast about the

7
00:00:16,920 --> 00:00:21,640
Speaker 1: exciting science and tantalizing pseudo science underlying the hit Netflix

8
00:00:21,640 --> 00:00:25,840
Speaker 1: show Stranger Things. It all goes down Friday, October six

9
00:00:26,239 --> 00:00:29,240
Speaker 1: from seven pm to eight thirty pm at the Hudson

10
00:00:29,280 --> 00:00:32,279
Speaker 1: Mercantile in Manhattan. Stuff You missed in History class has

11
00:00:32,280 --> 00:00:34,920
Speaker 1: a show right before us, so you can really double down,

12
00:00:35,080 --> 00:00:37,920
Speaker 1: learn more and buy your tickets today at New York

13
00:00:37,920 --> 00:00:46,239
Speaker 1: Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to

14
00:00:46,560 --> 00:00:55,600
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com.

15
00:00:55,600 --> 00:00:57,560
Speaker 1: Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

16
00:00:57,600 --> 00:01:00,000
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In. Today,

17
00:01:00,120 --> 00:01:02,840
Speaker 1: we're gonna be returning to one of our favorite mind

18
00:01:02,840 --> 00:01:05,040
Speaker 1: blowing topics here on the show, and that's going to

19
00:01:05,120 --> 00:01:09,280
Speaker 1: be the problems inherent in our experience of consciousness. Yeah,

20
00:01:09,280 --> 00:01:10,880
Speaker 1: this is a great one because there's no danger of

21
00:01:10,959 --> 00:01:14,759
Speaker 1: us really explaining it and figuring out consciousness anytime soon.

22
00:01:14,840 --> 00:01:16,720
Speaker 1: And there have been so many different approaches to it,

23
00:01:16,840 --> 00:01:20,760
Speaker 1: right from the neuroscientific to the psychological to the philosophic,

24
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:25,160
Speaker 1: everyone trying to understand this question. Who am I? What

25
00:01:25,280 --> 00:01:27,560
Speaker 1: am I? What is this thing I'm experiencing? One of

26
00:01:27,600 --> 00:01:30,600
Speaker 1: the most persistent and fascinating questions in the study of

27
00:01:30,640 --> 00:01:34,520
Speaker 1: mind and biology is the question of the function of consciousness,

28
00:01:34,560 --> 00:01:36,880
Speaker 1: not just what is it? But what does it do?

29
00:01:37,600 --> 00:01:41,399
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that you have an internal subjective experience,

30
00:01:41,440 --> 00:01:44,199
Speaker 1: that you're aware of your awareness, that you can turn

31
00:01:44,280 --> 00:01:48,120
Speaker 1: your mind's eye to work over content in this deep

32
00:01:48,120 --> 00:01:51,480
Speaker 1: place in your brain. And by analogy, you believe everybody

33
00:01:51,480 --> 00:01:54,160
Speaker 1: else has this ability as well. They seem to have it.

34
00:01:54,400 --> 00:01:58,920
Speaker 1: But biologically speaking, why does anybody have it? Now? You

35
00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:01,800
Speaker 1: might think it's just necessary part of being an animal

36
00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:04,280
Speaker 1: with a brain, right, Like I've got stuff to do.

37
00:02:04,400 --> 00:02:06,600
Speaker 1: I've got to eat, gotta go get the groceries, got

38
00:02:06,600 --> 00:02:09,200
Speaker 1: to seek shelter, got to check the coin returns in

39
00:02:09,240 --> 00:02:12,520
Speaker 1: all these candy machines. So my brain needs to be

40
00:02:12,560 --> 00:02:15,760
Speaker 1: able to think about doing that stuff in order to

41
00:02:15,800 --> 00:02:19,240
Speaker 1: do it right. But hold up for a second. I

42
00:02:19,240 --> 00:02:21,560
Speaker 1: wonder if you've ever had this experience, Robert, tell me

43
00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:24,160
Speaker 1: if you have. Do you ever have that experience where

44
00:02:24,240 --> 00:02:28,200
Speaker 1: you're driving a car and you arrive at your destination

45
00:02:28,360 --> 00:02:31,520
Speaker 1: and you suddenly realize and sort of like the transition

46
00:02:31,560 --> 00:02:34,840
Speaker 1: between activities when you get there, that you were not

47
00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:38,840
Speaker 1: conscious of the act of driving. Oh yeah, yeah, you

48
00:02:39,200 --> 00:02:42,040
Speaker 1: go on a sort of autopilot. I've had that happen

49
00:02:42,080 --> 00:02:45,400
Speaker 1: with generally with routine tasks. Uh, it might be driving,

50
00:02:45,600 --> 00:02:49,120
Speaker 1: it might be emptying a dishwasher, loading a dishwasher, that

51
00:02:49,240 --> 00:02:54,160
Speaker 1: sort of thing, you know, taking dealing with laundry. Yeah,

52
00:02:54,240 --> 00:02:56,639
Speaker 1: and so when in the example with driving, this is

53
00:02:56,680 --> 00:02:59,560
Speaker 1: often known as highway hypnosis. Maybe you were lost in

54
00:02:59,600 --> 00:03:01,840
Speaker 1: your thought bots while on the road and you just

55
00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:06,040
Speaker 1: managed to drive from one place to another without consciously

56
00:03:06,200 --> 00:03:09,280
Speaker 1: thinking about driving at all, and yet you did it.

57
00:03:09,480 --> 00:03:13,760
Speaker 1: Driving is this highly complicated mental task. It involves massive

58
00:03:13,800 --> 00:03:17,760
Speaker 1: integration of sense, information, and coordination of different parts of

59
00:03:17,760 --> 00:03:20,400
Speaker 1: the body. You've got a time, everything just right, and

60
00:03:20,520 --> 00:03:23,160
Speaker 1: yet your brain has the power to make your body

61
00:03:23,280 --> 00:03:27,519
Speaker 1: do it without you thinking about it at all. And

62
00:03:28,200 --> 00:03:31,680
Speaker 1: unlike dealing with laundry or unloading the dishwasher. If you

63
00:03:31,720 --> 00:03:35,240
Speaker 1: do it wrong, people die, so right, it's it's I

64
00:03:35,240 --> 00:03:37,160
Speaker 1: think it's one of the reasons we tend to highlight

65
00:03:37,240 --> 00:03:38,960
Speaker 1: it is because you think about the fact, Oh, I

66
00:03:39,360 --> 00:03:41,960
Speaker 1: don't really remember driving to work, I just kind of

67
00:03:42,040 --> 00:03:47,080
Speaker 1: did it. And it's such a dangerous thing for us

68
00:03:47,080 --> 00:03:50,240
Speaker 1: to engage in and seemingly turn our brain off to. Yeah,

69
00:03:50,240 --> 00:03:52,960
Speaker 1: it can be a terrifying experience for multiple reasons. I mean,

70
00:03:53,040 --> 00:03:55,560
Speaker 1: one is the danger, but the other is just how

71
00:03:55,680 --> 00:03:59,440
Speaker 1: alien it feels to realize that your body is capable

72
00:03:59,480 --> 00:04:03,640
Speaker 1: of doing complex behavior without your knowledge, essentially without you

73
00:04:03,760 --> 00:04:07,600
Speaker 1: really being aware of the entire time. So now the

74
00:04:07,640 --> 00:04:09,680
Speaker 1: next step I want to take you on is very simple.

75
00:04:10,400 --> 00:04:19,479
Speaker 1: Just imagine everything you do is like this, cooking, cleaning, working, talking, fighting, parenting.

76
00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:23,880
Speaker 1: Imagine your brain is just as capable of doing everything

77
00:04:23,920 --> 00:04:28,320
Speaker 1: it does, but simply without reflecting upon those actions within

78
00:04:28,360 --> 00:04:32,039
Speaker 1: the mental theater of your consciousness. So it's highway hypnosis

79
00:04:32,360 --> 00:04:36,880
Speaker 1: for your entire life. It's total behavior hypnosis. Is it

80
00:04:36,920 --> 00:04:40,200
Speaker 1: possible for you to imagine this? It's difficult to imagine

81
00:04:40,200 --> 00:04:43,839
Speaker 1: this sort of thing, for sure, because because in this scenario,

82
00:04:43,960 --> 00:04:46,479
Speaker 1: being conscious of your drive like that would be the

83
00:04:46,520 --> 00:04:51,320
Speaker 1: abnormality you're talking about, you know, an abnormal state of

84
00:04:51,320 --> 00:04:54,520
Speaker 1: consciousness or or even a lack of consciousness really would

85
00:04:54,520 --> 00:04:58,839
Speaker 1: be the normal, that would be the predominant human experience exactly.

86
00:04:58,880 --> 00:05:02,000
Speaker 1: And now that you're considering that possibility, we ask again,

87
00:05:02,600 --> 00:05:06,760
Speaker 1: if that's possible, what does consciousness do and where does

88
00:05:06,800 --> 00:05:09,680
Speaker 1: it come from? And why? You know, I think we

89
00:05:09,760 --> 00:05:14,480
Speaker 1: often turn to various metaphors to partially explain our thought processes. Yeah,

90
00:05:14,560 --> 00:05:16,200
Speaker 1: how often, I mean, how often do we fall back

91
00:05:16,240 --> 00:05:19,680
Speaker 1: on computer program, movie or or written fiction as a

92
00:05:19,720 --> 00:05:22,440
Speaker 1: loose means of understanding at all? But one of the

93
00:05:22,800 --> 00:05:25,080
Speaker 1: you know, the real damnable things about trying to understand

94
00:05:25,120 --> 00:05:27,880
Speaker 1: consciousness is that like we're stuck within it. It's like

95
00:05:28,160 --> 00:05:32,680
Speaker 1: it's like trying to understand that the Earth is not flat, right, Like,

96
00:05:32,800 --> 00:05:35,520
Speaker 1: we have all of these various means of of you know,

97
00:05:35,600 --> 00:05:38,760
Speaker 1: of of testing it, of of looking at the data

98
00:05:38,800 --> 00:05:40,279
Speaker 1: and knowing for a fact that the world is not

99
00:05:40,400 --> 00:05:43,520
Speaker 1: like just a flat plane, and we can even send

100
00:05:43,520 --> 00:05:46,400
Speaker 1: a satellite or even a human being up into orbit

101
00:05:46,440 --> 00:05:48,520
Speaker 1: to look back down on the Earth and see it

102
00:05:48,800 --> 00:05:52,040
Speaker 1: for us. But with consciousness, it's not that easy. Uh,

103
00:05:52,720 --> 00:05:55,839
Speaker 1: you know, despite whatever different tools you might be using neuroscientific,

104
00:05:55,880 --> 00:06:00,400
Speaker 1: psychological philosophical to step outside of our consciousness and understand

105
00:06:00,440 --> 00:06:02,880
Speaker 1: what it actually is. Yeah, I mean one of the

106
00:06:02,880 --> 00:06:06,600
Speaker 1: problems is you can't really be conscious of the fact

107
00:06:06,640 --> 00:06:10,680
Speaker 1: that you do things unconsciously, Like you can't feel what

108
00:06:10,839 --> 00:06:12,680
Speaker 1: that's like in the moment, because as soon as you

109
00:06:12,720 --> 00:06:15,680
Speaker 1: pay attention to it to feel it, you're conscious again. Yeah,

110
00:06:15,720 --> 00:06:19,440
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't be the same thing, really. Perhaps you

111
00:06:19,520 --> 00:06:23,520
Speaker 1: agree or disagree as not remembering doing something, right, you

112
00:06:23,520 --> 00:06:25,560
Speaker 1: could have been conscious of doing something and then had

113
00:06:25,600 --> 00:06:27,880
Speaker 1: amnesia and forgotten about it. Yeah, Or you know, you

114
00:06:27,920 --> 00:06:31,640
Speaker 1: hear people about here about people who consume too much

115
00:06:31,680 --> 00:06:35,680
Speaker 1: alcohol and expand have a blackout experience, or accounts of

116
00:06:35,680 --> 00:06:39,440
Speaker 1: people who who use ambient to sleep and uh and

117
00:06:39,640 --> 00:06:41,960
Speaker 1: they do something that they do not remember, and you know,

118
00:06:42,040 --> 00:06:44,880
Speaker 1: various other psychological factors that can create that experience like

119
00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:49,039
Speaker 1: this order thirty frying pans on Amazon, right, right. But

120
00:06:49,120 --> 00:06:51,240
Speaker 1: for for the for what we're talking about here, this

121
00:06:51,279 --> 00:06:53,520
Speaker 1: is a case where yes, you remember driving to work,

122
00:06:54,279 --> 00:06:58,279
Speaker 1: but you weren't really there for it. Yeah. Yeah, you

123
00:06:58,320 --> 00:07:03,000
Speaker 1: know it happened, but it just your mind was not present, right, likewise,

124
00:07:03,040 --> 00:07:07,120
Speaker 1: it's not like undergoing anesthesia and just being out for

125
00:07:07,279 --> 00:07:09,760
Speaker 1: the course of a surgery. In thinking about all this,

126
00:07:09,800 --> 00:07:12,200
Speaker 1: you know, I often come back to a quote from

127
00:07:12,240 --> 00:07:15,480
Speaker 1: the author are Scott Baker, who was recently on our show,

128
00:07:15,600 --> 00:07:19,120
Speaker 1: and he he said this about consciousness. The magic can

129
00:07:19,120 --> 00:07:21,920
Speaker 1: only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained.

130
00:07:21,960 --> 00:07:25,720
Speaker 1: In this case, we are the magic. So, uh, I

131
00:07:25,720 --> 00:07:28,000
Speaker 1: have to think about that when trying to unravel consciousness,

132
00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:31,640
Speaker 1: Like we're we're within consciousness, we're creatures of consciousness, and

133
00:07:31,680 --> 00:07:34,000
Speaker 1: then to try and take it apart is to take

134
00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:38,040
Speaker 1: about ourselves. Well. I know Scott has some anxieties about

135
00:07:38,120 --> 00:07:39,880
Speaker 1: the Well I don't want to put words into his mouth,

136
00:07:39,920 --> 00:07:42,520
Speaker 1: but I think he has some anxieties about, you know,

137
00:07:42,600 --> 00:07:46,440
Speaker 1: the consequences of explaining consciousness too much, Like if you

138
00:07:46,480 --> 00:07:49,480
Speaker 1: do explain it, does that create a sort of crisis

139
00:07:49,640 --> 00:07:53,760
Speaker 1: of of meaning of existence? Yeah, the semantic apocalypse. Yeah.

140
00:07:54,120 --> 00:07:56,880
Speaker 1: So this leads us in to what we're gonna be

141
00:07:56,960 --> 00:07:59,240
Speaker 1: talking about for the next two episodes of the show.

142
00:07:59,280 --> 00:08:00,880
Speaker 1: This is going to be the first part of a

143
00:08:00,960 --> 00:08:04,080
Speaker 1: two part series where we're going to be discussing a

144
00:08:04,160 --> 00:08:11,240
Speaker 1: fascinating hypothesis in the history of psychology known as bicameralism. Now, specifically,

145
00:08:11,280 --> 00:08:13,280
Speaker 1: we're gonna be looking at the work of the American

146
00:08:13,320 --> 00:08:18,000
Speaker 1: psychologist Julian Jaynes in his nineteen six book The Origin

147
00:08:18,040 --> 00:08:21,880
Speaker 1: of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The

148
00:08:21,960 --> 00:08:24,080
Speaker 1: two episodes that we're gonna do, we're gonna break down

149
00:08:24,160 --> 00:08:27,080
Speaker 1: roughly like this. In the first episode, we're going to

150
00:08:27,320 --> 00:08:31,800
Speaker 1: just try to explain what Julian Jane's theory of the

151
00:08:31,880 --> 00:08:36,360
Speaker 1: bicameral mind and of modern consciousness is and how he

152
00:08:36,440 --> 00:08:39,320
Speaker 1: gets there from the problem of consciousness. And then in

153
00:08:39,360 --> 00:08:42,320
Speaker 1: the second episode, we want to discuss his argument, like

154
00:08:42,440 --> 00:08:45,760
Speaker 1: his evidence for the theory of the bicameral mind, how

155
00:08:45,840 --> 00:08:48,800
Speaker 1: he sees evidence of this in history, and maybe some

156
00:08:48,880 --> 00:08:52,640
Speaker 1: reactions to the idea since the bicameral mind. And we

157
00:08:52,679 --> 00:08:55,480
Speaker 1: should be super clear here at the beginning that this

158
00:08:55,720 --> 00:08:59,960
Speaker 1: was and still is a controversial hypothesis. For the purposes

159
00:09:00,040 --> 00:09:02,480
Speaker 1: of discussion today, we're going to be entertaining it as

160
00:09:02,480 --> 00:09:05,520
Speaker 1: a hypothetical, but you should not take this to be

161
00:09:05,720 --> 00:09:09,480
Speaker 1: uh an endorsement of the hypothesis as fact. It's not

162
00:09:09,640 --> 00:09:12,559
Speaker 1: widely believed to be correct and full though it has

163
00:09:12,600 --> 00:09:15,320
Speaker 1: had many supporters, and even if it's not correct and full,

164
00:09:15,360 --> 00:09:18,439
Speaker 1: which is probably not, it might be correct in part. Yeah. Indeed,

165
00:09:18,440 --> 00:09:20,560
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a lot of points in this episode

166
00:09:20,559 --> 00:09:24,160
Speaker 1: where we're discussing the theory of the bicameral mind as

167
00:09:24,200 --> 00:09:27,600
Speaker 1: if it is something that we are totally convinced of. Yeah,

168
00:09:27,600 --> 00:09:30,120
Speaker 1: and this book I just mentioned the origin of consciousness

169
00:09:30,160 --> 00:09:32,600
Speaker 1: in the Breakdown of the bicameral Mind. I would compare

170
00:09:32,600 --> 00:09:37,040
Speaker 1: it to the work of, for example, James Fraser because

171
00:09:37,080 --> 00:09:39,439
Speaker 1: I think it's one of those books that's worth reading

172
00:09:39,600 --> 00:09:43,920
Speaker 1: even if it's almost completely wrong, because it's just such

173
00:09:43,960 --> 00:09:47,520
Speaker 1: a fascinating synthesis of so many disciplines. Today and the

174
00:09:47,559 --> 00:09:54,600
Speaker 1: next episode, we're gonna be diving through history, archaeology, ancient literature, philosophy, psychiatry, neuroscience,

175
00:09:54,880 --> 00:10:00,640
Speaker 1: and just direct phenomenological experience. I read the Dawkins criticis well,

176
00:10:01,040 --> 00:10:02,880
Speaker 1: what Dawkins said of the book is that it's either

177
00:10:03,040 --> 00:10:05,760
Speaker 1: Richard Dawkins either said that it's brilliant or it's rubbish,

178
00:10:05,800 --> 00:10:09,560
Speaker 1: and that there's no in between. I disagree with that, Yeah,

179
00:10:09,600 --> 00:10:12,000
Speaker 1: I would. Yeah, I think that it's very possible that

180
00:10:12,080 --> 00:10:15,280
Speaker 1: it is both brilliant and wrong. Yeah, if nothing else,

181
00:10:15,320 --> 00:10:19,679
Speaker 1: I think it serves as a fascinating thought experiment. What

182
00:10:19,720 --> 00:10:22,480
Speaker 1: if this is true? What if this were true? And

183
00:10:22,559 --> 00:10:25,680
Speaker 1: how does it force us to reinterpret the past and

184
00:10:25,720 --> 00:10:28,600
Speaker 1: the legacy of our species? Yeah? So, even though I

185
00:10:28,640 --> 00:10:32,080
Speaker 1: suspect it's conclusions are probably wrong or at least wrong

186
00:10:32,240 --> 00:10:34,679
Speaker 1: in part, this is one of the most interesting books

187
00:10:34,679 --> 00:10:38,000
Speaker 1: I've ever read in my life. So, strap in, I

188
00:10:38,040 --> 00:10:40,640
Speaker 1: think we should start just by giving a straight version

189
00:10:40,840 --> 00:10:44,440
Speaker 1: of Jane's conclusion and then work our way back to it.

190
00:10:44,480 --> 00:10:46,600
Speaker 1: Does that make sense to you, Robert, Oh, Yeah, that's

191
00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:48,880
Speaker 1: pretty much what he does in the book. Here's this

192
00:10:49,040 --> 00:10:54,080
Speaker 1: amazing theory of what consciousness consists of and what it

193
00:10:54,480 --> 00:10:57,160
Speaker 1: used to consist of or not consist of, and then

194
00:10:57,160 --> 00:10:59,840
Speaker 1: he works backwards from there. Right, And so here's the

195
00:11:00,040 --> 00:11:03,320
Speaker 1: us basic summary I can give of his conclusion. Until

196
00:11:03,480 --> 00:11:08,360
Speaker 1: roughly three thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious.

197
00:11:09,679 --> 00:11:14,640
Speaker 1: Around that time, modern human consciousness began as a cultural invention,

198
00:11:15,080 --> 00:11:18,920
Speaker 1: probably in Mesopotamia that's spread across the world over time.

199
00:11:19,440 --> 00:11:23,520
Speaker 1: And before that time, for thousands of years, almost all

200
00:11:23,760 --> 00:11:26,800
Speaker 1: humans were not conscious in the way we are, but

201
00:11:26,920 --> 00:11:32,280
Speaker 1: instead we're commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices

202
00:11:32,600 --> 00:11:35,400
Speaker 1: that they called gods. And I just want to drive

203
00:11:35,440 --> 00:11:38,600
Speaker 1: home the impact of this. The argument is that ancient

204
00:11:38,640 --> 00:11:43,280
Speaker 1: people's did not think like we think. The god run human,

205
00:11:43,760 --> 00:11:46,880
Speaker 1: as he refers to him, at one point experience something

206
00:11:46,920 --> 00:11:48,880
Speaker 1: that for us would feel like an altered state of

207
00:11:48,880 --> 00:11:53,160
Speaker 1: consciousness or spiritual event. Is if we were hypnotized by

208
00:11:53,200 --> 00:11:55,640
Speaker 1: a voice like that of a god and they just

209
00:11:55,720 --> 00:11:59,319
Speaker 1: told us what to do, and then catastrophe forces us

210
00:11:59,320 --> 00:12:02,760
Speaker 1: to learn consciousness, and in doing so, we ceased hearing

211
00:12:02,760 --> 00:12:05,640
Speaker 1: the voices of the gods as we once did. Yeah. So,

212
00:12:06,040 --> 00:12:08,640
Speaker 1: just to be clear about this, what is being proposed

213
00:12:08,760 --> 00:12:11,640
Speaker 1: is in this period, which he calls the period before consciousness,

214
00:12:11,720 --> 00:12:14,760
Speaker 1: is the period of the bicameral human being. In the

215
00:12:14,800 --> 00:12:20,280
Speaker 1: bicameral mind, there was no consciousness. There was just action

216
00:12:20,679 --> 00:12:25,680
Speaker 1: commanded by hallucinated voices from another part of the brain

217
00:12:25,920 --> 00:12:28,160
Speaker 1: that was believed to be a god. Yeah. And what

218
00:12:28,240 --> 00:12:31,320
Speaker 1: we'll get into the idea of schizophrenia as it released

219
00:12:31,360 --> 00:12:35,280
Speaker 1: all of this in the second episode. But James does

220
00:12:35,360 --> 00:12:37,880
Speaker 1: say that, like straight up, this was a time when

221
00:12:37,960 --> 00:12:41,480
Speaker 1: everybody was essentially schizophrenic. Now one of the things that's

222
00:12:41,480 --> 00:12:44,280
Speaker 1: interesting about this is it runs counter to a lot

223
00:12:44,320 --> 00:12:47,360
Speaker 1: of what we do when we read ancient literature and

224
00:12:47,360 --> 00:12:51,200
Speaker 1: and flip through ancient history. Is that here's I would

225
00:12:51,240 --> 00:12:53,680
Speaker 1: describe my experience this way. Maybe maybe you'll tell me

226
00:12:53,720 --> 00:12:55,720
Speaker 1: whether you think it's the same for you. When I

227
00:12:55,800 --> 00:13:00,320
Speaker 1: read a work of ancient poetry or I read out

228
00:13:00,400 --> 00:13:03,439
Speaker 1: you know, very very ancient, like the ancient Egypt or

229
00:13:03,520 --> 00:13:06,520
Speaker 1: ancient Mesopotamia, stuff that goes way way back from before

230
00:13:06,520 --> 00:13:10,880
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire. Say, I feel like, on the face

231
00:13:10,920 --> 00:13:16,320
Speaker 1: of it, I encounter humans who are completely alien to me.

232
00:13:16,920 --> 00:13:20,040
Speaker 1: I feel like I can't identify with them, and I

233
00:13:20,080 --> 00:13:24,440
Speaker 1: don't understand the way they're being described. And what usually

234
00:13:24,480 --> 00:13:26,640
Speaker 1: happens is I say, okay, well this is just a

235
00:13:26,679 --> 00:13:30,199
Speaker 1: problem of translation, Like I'm not getting some things about

236
00:13:30,200 --> 00:13:33,320
Speaker 1: the cultural ways that their lives are communicated through this

237
00:13:33,440 --> 00:13:36,840
Speaker 1: literature and recorded. Um so I just need to find

238
00:13:36,960 --> 00:13:40,400
Speaker 1: ways of seeing the analogies between people like us and

239
00:13:40,400 --> 00:13:43,600
Speaker 1: people like them and say, Okay, here they were really

240
00:13:43,640 --> 00:13:47,240
Speaker 1: more like us, and here's why things are being misunderstood.

241
00:13:47,679 --> 00:13:53,040
Speaker 1: But another way, do you kind of have that same experience? Um? Yeah,

242
00:13:53,040 --> 00:13:55,440
Speaker 1: well it depends. I mean definitely. I would say the

243
00:13:55,480 --> 00:13:59,240
Speaker 1: oldest civilization that we continually discuss here, it's probably, you know,

244
00:13:59,280 --> 00:14:01,640
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt, and you know, we've touched on the fact

245
00:14:01,640 --> 00:14:04,280
Speaker 1: that like the religion of ancient Egypt did not did

246
00:14:04,320 --> 00:14:08,000
Speaker 1: not travel well beyond its borders, and that that's they were.

247
00:14:08,040 --> 00:14:11,360
Speaker 1: They were really alien people to try and understand. So yeah,

248
00:14:11,360 --> 00:14:14,240
Speaker 1: I definitely feel that when I'm whenever we're researching the

249
00:14:14,280 --> 00:14:16,960
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians, uh, and to a certain extent, I felt

250
00:14:16,960 --> 00:14:20,240
Speaker 1: that when we were talking about, uh, the ancient ancient

251
00:14:20,240 --> 00:14:25,320
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia as it relates to the Tower of Babel. But

252
00:14:25,320 --> 00:14:28,360
Speaker 1: but there's I feel like there's often also this issue

253
00:14:28,400 --> 00:14:31,440
Speaker 1: that I guess is best summed up by the various

254
00:14:31,520 --> 00:14:34,800
Speaker 1: medieval pieces of art where you know, such as you know,

255
00:14:34,840 --> 00:14:37,440
Speaker 1: the stuff by Brugal the Elder, where you have some

256
00:14:37,480 --> 00:14:40,440
Speaker 1: sort of mythic thing going on, like the Tower of Babel,

257
00:14:40,720 --> 00:14:43,280
Speaker 1: but then you also have scenes of everyday life. And

258
00:14:43,320 --> 00:14:45,840
Speaker 1: so I think, well, if I'm encountering something that doesn't

259
00:14:45,880 --> 00:14:49,000
Speaker 1: feel very human and looking at an ancient culture, then

260
00:14:49,040 --> 00:14:52,920
Speaker 1: perhaps that's because this is just like the skeleton of experience.

261
00:14:52,920 --> 00:14:55,960
Speaker 1: This is just the heroes, the gods, the myths, and

262
00:14:56,440 --> 00:15:00,400
Speaker 1: very little is recorded of daily struggles and daily life. Yeah,

263
00:15:00,440 --> 00:15:03,640
Speaker 1: but what if the issue is not so much that

264
00:15:04,040 --> 00:15:07,400
Speaker 1: the ways they're similar to us is being lost in translation,

265
00:15:07,960 --> 00:15:11,960
Speaker 1: but it's that we're reading that basically correct at face value,

266
00:15:12,120 --> 00:15:15,200
Speaker 1: and they just weren't like us. Yeah. I feel like

267
00:15:15,240 --> 00:15:17,520
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of a challenging perspective to try and

268
00:15:17,520 --> 00:15:21,360
Speaker 1: wrestle with because I want to humanize figures of the past,

269
00:15:21,720 --> 00:15:25,240
Speaker 1: especially you know, people in other cultures. It feels wrong

270
00:15:25,400 --> 00:15:31,120
Speaker 1: to say, look at at at ancient Egyptians, individuals, and

271
00:15:31,360 --> 00:15:35,600
Speaker 1: you know, in ancient civilizations of Asia or Africa, and

272
00:15:35,600 --> 00:15:37,680
Speaker 1: and think of them as alien, to think of them

273
00:15:37,680 --> 00:15:40,520
Speaker 1: as having a different thought process than than we have, right.

274
00:15:40,560 --> 00:15:42,960
Speaker 1: I Mean, one way I think that we're resistant to

275
00:15:43,000 --> 00:15:45,880
Speaker 1: that is that there's a sort of implied like denigration

276
00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:48,080
Speaker 1: in that saying like, oh, if they were very different

277
00:15:48,120 --> 00:15:50,840
Speaker 1: from us, they weren't as good as us. And we

278
00:15:50,880 --> 00:15:54,080
Speaker 1: certainly don't want to think that way, but we it

279
00:15:54,200 --> 00:15:58,680
Speaker 1: might just be the case that their internal mental life

280
00:15:58,720 --> 00:16:01,440
Speaker 1: was very different than the internal mental life of people

281
00:16:01,480 --> 00:16:04,360
Speaker 1: on Earth today. Yeah, And before we dive in any deeper,

282
00:16:04,360 --> 00:16:06,160
Speaker 1: I do want to point out that, yes, The bicameral

283
00:16:06,200 --> 00:16:10,000
Speaker 1: mind is referenced in HBO's Westworld, UH, And I really

284
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:12,880
Speaker 1: love Westward. I think it's a wonderful show. However, I

285
00:16:12,920 --> 00:16:16,080
Speaker 1: think you'll find that the the idea of the bicameral

286
00:16:16,200 --> 00:16:21,880
Speaker 1: mind and the ramifications of bicameralism are far more complex, rewarding,

287
00:16:21,960 --> 00:16:26,360
Speaker 1: and terrifying, uh than anything that's explored in that show.

288
00:16:26,760 --> 00:16:29,040
Speaker 1: I totally agree. I remember that it came up, but

289
00:16:29,080 --> 00:16:33,120
Speaker 1: I don't remember there being much about it in the show. Well, Robert,

290
00:16:33,160 --> 00:16:36,840
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should start where Jane's starts in

291
00:16:37,080 --> 00:16:40,240
Speaker 1: his book, which is with the problem of consciousness. And

292
00:16:40,320 --> 00:16:42,920
Speaker 1: he's got he's got an introduction to his book that

293
00:16:43,040 --> 00:16:45,880
Speaker 1: just gives a brief history of all the solutions that

294
00:16:45,920 --> 00:16:48,440
Speaker 1: people have tried to offer to the problem of consciousness

295
00:16:48,440 --> 00:16:51,000
Speaker 1: over the years, which, even if you don't if you're

296
00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:54,360
Speaker 1: not interested in his bicameral theory, this is a cool

297
00:16:54,440 --> 00:16:57,400
Speaker 1: intro to read because it's such a well written and

298
00:16:57,520 --> 00:17:01,320
Speaker 1: concise summary of the history of people trying to deal

299
00:17:01,400 --> 00:17:04,440
Speaker 1: with with what consciousness is and where it came from

300
00:17:04,520 --> 00:17:07,520
Speaker 1: up until the mid nineteen seventies. And he's got a

301
00:17:07,560 --> 00:17:10,520
Speaker 1: quote where he describes the the you know the question

302
00:17:10,560 --> 00:17:12,760
Speaker 1: at the root of the problem of consciousness that is

303
00:17:12,800 --> 00:17:15,280
Speaker 1: so good I had to read it. So consciousness is

304
00:17:15,400 --> 00:17:20,320
Speaker 1: quote a secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel,

305
00:17:20,760 --> 00:17:25,160
Speaker 1: an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an

306
00:17:25,240 --> 00:17:29,880
Speaker 1: infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries, a whole kingdom where

307
00:17:29,920 --> 00:17:33,920
Speaker 1: each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will,

308
00:17:34,359 --> 00:17:37,760
Speaker 1: commanding what we can, A hidden hermitage where we may

309
00:17:37,800 --> 00:17:40,320
Speaker 1: study out the troubled book of what we have done

310
00:17:40,400 --> 00:17:44,400
Speaker 1: and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself

311
00:17:44,440 --> 00:17:47,840
Speaker 1: than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness

312
00:17:47,880 --> 00:17:51,120
Speaker 1: that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet

313
00:17:51,200 --> 00:17:53,960
Speaker 1: nothing at all. What is it? And where did it

314
00:17:54,000 --> 00:17:57,680
Speaker 1: come from? And why? I should also say that the

315
00:17:57,760 --> 00:18:02,320
Speaker 1: description infinite resource of disappointments and discoveries a perfect review

316
00:18:02,400 --> 00:18:08,679
Speaker 1: for Disney World. Wait, what are the discoveries the discoveries

317
00:18:08,720 --> 00:18:12,159
Speaker 1: of disappointments or no, no no, the discoveries are you are discoveries.

318
00:18:12,200 --> 00:18:15,600
Speaker 1: It's full of just wonders and disappointments. So I mean,

319
00:18:15,640 --> 00:18:18,280
Speaker 1: I loved it, but yeah, it's a it's a it's

320
00:18:18,320 --> 00:18:21,359
Speaker 1: it's hard to contemplate the discovery of what other people

321
00:18:21,400 --> 00:18:24,919
Speaker 1: throw in the trash. Maybe, isn't that one of the

322
00:18:24,920 --> 00:18:27,520
Speaker 1: most interesting things about going to an amusement park is

323
00:18:27,560 --> 00:18:30,080
Speaker 1: looking in the trash can and seeing what people throw away.

324
00:18:30,240 --> 00:18:32,600
Speaker 1: Maybe this is just me um, Maybe this is a

325
00:18:32,680 --> 00:18:35,359
Speaker 1: huge Joe. I don't know. I don't remember the trash

326
00:18:35,400 --> 00:18:39,440
Speaker 1: cans of Disney World some that much. But maybe that's

327
00:18:39,480 --> 00:18:42,280
Speaker 1: just because it was, you know, stimulation overload. No, it's

328
00:18:42,320 --> 00:18:44,159
Speaker 1: great when you let you see a pair of glasses

329
00:18:44,240 --> 00:18:48,280
Speaker 1: in there or something and it's like, huh hm. Anyway

330
00:18:48,800 --> 00:18:51,919
Speaker 1: back to the problem of consciousness. So, in other words,

331
00:18:51,960 --> 00:18:55,880
Speaker 1: it's not hard to understand where human beings came from.

332
00:18:56,040 --> 00:18:59,960
Speaker 1: Biology and evolution seemed totally sufficient to explain the exist

333
00:19:00,000 --> 00:19:04,160
Speaker 1: a stence of bipedal primates eating and reproducing and making tools.

334
00:19:04,480 --> 00:19:07,320
Speaker 1: But the question is not why are those creatures here?

335
00:19:07,359 --> 00:19:10,760
Speaker 1: It's why are we here? These entities of reflection and

336
00:19:10,800 --> 00:19:15,040
Speaker 1: awareness that seemed to inhabit the bodies of these bipedal primates.

337
00:19:16,200 --> 00:19:19,160
Speaker 1: So one can easily imagine, as we talked about earlier

338
00:19:19,160 --> 00:19:22,160
Speaker 1: in the introduction, bipedal primates that do all the same

339
00:19:22,200 --> 00:19:26,400
Speaker 1: stuff we do, but our automata, there's no inner awareness

340
00:19:26,480 --> 00:19:30,600
Speaker 1: or capacity for deliberative thought or reflection. So if if

341
00:19:30,640 --> 00:19:34,280
Speaker 1: we're evolved beings, at what point in our evolution did

342
00:19:34,359 --> 00:19:38,280
Speaker 1: consciousness appear? And so he he offers a few thoughts

343
00:19:38,280 --> 00:19:40,600
Speaker 1: of this. One of them is the idea that consciousness

344
00:19:40,960 --> 00:19:43,960
Speaker 1: is a property of matter. Right, so the relationship of

345
00:19:43,960 --> 00:19:48,320
Speaker 1: consciousness to what we are conscious of is not fundamentally

346
00:19:48,359 --> 00:19:52,600
Speaker 1: different from the relationship between objects interacting physically by contact

347
00:19:52,680 --> 00:19:56,440
Speaker 1: or by gravity. It's only different in complexity. Of course,

348
00:19:56,600 --> 00:20:00,240
Speaker 1: Jaynes is not persuaded by this view, and I I

349
00:20:00,240 --> 00:20:03,720
Speaker 1: would just say, if consciousness is an inherent property of matter,

350
00:20:03,880 --> 00:20:07,160
Speaker 1: like a can of baked beans is in some way conscious,

351
00:20:07,680 --> 00:20:12,000
Speaker 1: why do we completely lose consciousness under general anesthesia? Like

352
00:20:12,040 --> 00:20:14,399
Speaker 1: if you've ever been put under for surgery, you know

353
00:20:14,440 --> 00:20:17,800
Speaker 1: what it's like. There's no consciousness whatsoever. It's just a

354
00:20:17,880 --> 00:20:22,480
Speaker 1: black hole in your in your experience. But so yeah,

355
00:20:22,520 --> 00:20:25,720
Speaker 1: there's no reflection, no internal experience, no memory, no choice,

356
00:20:25,800 --> 00:20:28,920
Speaker 1: no dreams. Your mind just ceases until you wake up.

357
00:20:29,080 --> 00:20:32,439
Speaker 1: But while you're under anesthesia, you still have the same

358
00:20:32,520 --> 00:20:37,040
Speaker 1: mass you did. So if it's something about matter that

359
00:20:37,080 --> 00:20:41,359
Speaker 1: would see I don't see why changing the chemical uh,

360
00:20:41,600 --> 00:20:44,879
Speaker 1: you know, chemicals flowing through your brain would cause you

361
00:20:44,920 --> 00:20:47,639
Speaker 1: to completely lose consciousness. It's just that some part of

362
00:20:47,640 --> 00:20:50,040
Speaker 1: the brain has been chemically deactivated. This signals to me

363
00:20:50,160 --> 00:20:53,479
Speaker 1: that consciousness has something to do with something happening in

364
00:20:53,520 --> 00:20:56,960
Speaker 1: the brain. Yeah. And I think distinctions like this tend

365
00:20:57,000 --> 00:20:59,639
Speaker 1: to make a lot of sense to modern humans, in

366
00:20:59,720 --> 00:21:02,680
Speaker 1: large part because we have that handy metaphor of hardware

367
00:21:02,680 --> 00:21:05,399
Speaker 1: and software. Right, so it's really easy for us to

368
00:21:05,440 --> 00:21:10,280
Speaker 1: think of of consciousness arising as essentially like software arising

369
00:21:10,320 --> 00:21:14,120
Speaker 1: from the hardware um of the of the brain. Yeah,

370
00:21:14,160 --> 00:21:16,639
Speaker 1: it's not there in the hardware. It has to it

371
00:21:16,680 --> 00:21:20,959
Speaker 1: has to be run by the hardware. Okay, so so

372
00:21:21,119 --> 00:21:23,800
Speaker 1: maybe it's not there in all living matter. But maybe

373
00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:26,399
Speaker 1: Jane says, what if it's a property of all living

374
00:21:26,520 --> 00:21:30,359
Speaker 1: things like amba's have some form of consciousness. It's just

375
00:21:30,400 --> 00:21:33,920
Speaker 1: when life arises, that's when you start having consciousness. Apparently

376
00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:37,000
Speaker 1: Darwin was fond of this idea. He's he sort of

377
00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:41,760
Speaker 1: saw a rudimentary consciousness in all living things. But according

378
00:21:41,800 --> 00:21:43,440
Speaker 1: to Jane's and I think I'd probably have to agree

379
00:21:43,480 --> 00:21:45,960
Speaker 1: with them, there is just not any evidence that simple

380
00:21:46,080 --> 00:21:50,920
Speaker 1: organisms possess consciousness. Our tendency to project consciousness onto them

381
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:54,200
Speaker 1: is just some fallacy of sympathy. Like we see behavior

382
00:21:54,720 --> 00:21:58,959
Speaker 1: and sympathizing with the consciousness behind similar types of behaviors

383
00:21:58,960 --> 00:22:03,200
Speaker 1: in human beings, we assume consciousness is behind those similar

384
00:22:03,240 --> 00:22:07,359
Speaker 1: behaviors in all creatures. In Amiba's because you know a

385
00:22:07,440 --> 00:22:10,800
Speaker 1: human being fleeing a needle would be conscious, you imagine

386
00:22:10,840 --> 00:22:13,400
Speaker 1: an amiba fleeing a needle would be conscious. But there's

387
00:22:13,440 --> 00:22:16,640
Speaker 1: just no evidence that that's true. Yeah, I think it's

388
00:22:16,640 --> 00:22:19,840
Speaker 1: important to remember that as humans, we we anthropomorphize like

389
00:22:19,960 --> 00:22:22,960
Speaker 1: mad gods. We're wired to see faces, but we're also

390
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:27,320
Speaker 1: wired to detect minds totally even when there's nothing there. Right, Okay,

391
00:22:27,359 --> 00:22:31,240
Speaker 1: So maybe here's another theory. Jane says, what if consciousness

392
00:22:31,480 --> 00:22:35,359
Speaker 1: is learning. He says a lot of people were persuaded

393
00:22:35,440 --> 00:22:38,520
Speaker 1: this by this view for many years. And here's a quote.

394
00:22:39,160 --> 00:22:42,080
Speaker 1: If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis

395
00:22:42,119 --> 00:22:46,080
Speaker 1: of its experience, it must be having an experience. It

396
00:22:46,200 --> 00:22:49,240
Speaker 1: must be conscious. Thus, if one wish to study the

397
00:22:49,240 --> 00:22:53,200
Speaker 1: evolution of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning.

398
00:22:53,680 --> 00:22:56,560
Speaker 1: And in fact, James himself, along with many other psychologists

399
00:22:56,560 --> 00:22:59,640
Speaker 1: worked under this assumption for many years of psychological research

400
00:22:59,680 --> 00:23:02,840
Speaker 1: before or rejecting it. For example, he tells stories about

401
00:23:02,840 --> 00:23:05,679
Speaker 1: how he did experiments to see if a mimosa plant

402
00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:08,760
Speaker 1: could be trained through conditioning, and he in the end

403
00:23:08,760 --> 00:23:12,359
Speaker 1: determined that the mimosa plant was not conscious. Uh. He

404
00:23:12,680 --> 00:23:18,080
Speaker 1: he found that species with synaptic nervous systems like fish, flatworms, earthworms,

405
00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:21,320
Speaker 1: and so forth, could learn, and originally he took this

406
00:23:21,400 --> 00:23:25,199
Speaker 1: as evidence that they possessed some form of consciousness, but

407
00:23:25,520 --> 00:23:28,520
Speaker 1: later research has shown this to be just obviously wrong.

408
00:23:29,160 --> 00:23:32,440
Speaker 1: You don't need consciousness for learning, because we can show

409
00:23:32,480 --> 00:23:35,840
Speaker 1: in human beings that there's a tremendous amount of totally

410
00:23:36,040 --> 00:23:40,840
Speaker 1: unconscious learning, unconscious conditioning. Yeah. Plus we need only think

411
00:23:40,880 --> 00:23:43,679
Speaker 1: to the slime mold for an example of learning taking

412
00:23:43,720 --> 00:23:46,600
Speaker 1: place in the absence of a brain. So um, yeah,

413
00:23:46,720 --> 00:23:49,399
Speaker 1: I feel like we've we've moved beyond that. Okay, the

414
00:23:49,440 --> 00:23:53,080
Speaker 1: next one is just consciousness is a metaphysical, metaphysical imposition.

415
00:23:53,640 --> 00:23:57,960
Speaker 1: It's it's magic, you know. And Okay, well, if if

416
00:23:58,000 --> 00:24:02,080
Speaker 1: you think it's magic in joy, but uh, that's that's

417
00:24:02,119 --> 00:24:04,880
Speaker 1: not really something that's very productive to proceed with from

418
00:24:04,920 --> 00:24:07,560
Speaker 1: a scientific point of view, it's hard to do experiments

419
00:24:07,600 --> 00:24:11,960
Speaker 1: to see if consciousness is magic. So uh so you

420
00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:14,760
Speaker 1: believe that if you want, but that's not really going

421
00:24:14,800 --> 00:24:18,160
Speaker 1: to give you a program of experimentation to work with. Yeah,

422
00:24:18,240 --> 00:24:20,560
Speaker 1: I think we can only engage in dualism so far

423
00:24:20,760 --> 00:24:23,679
Speaker 1: from a scientific standpoint, because the mind that stands apart

424
00:24:23,800 --> 00:24:27,560
Speaker 1: from body must still be rooted in our universe. Uh So,

425
00:24:27,600 --> 00:24:30,040
Speaker 1: we can't really do much with magic. Here's another one.

426
00:24:30,119 --> 00:24:31,960
Speaker 1: We've talked about this one on the show before. Here's

427
00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:36,680
Speaker 1: the helpless spectator theory. Consciousness does nothing, and in fact

428
00:24:36,800 --> 00:24:39,680
Speaker 1: it can do nothing. So the idea is that at

429
00:24:39,720 --> 00:24:43,120
Speaker 1: some point in evolution, sufficiently complex brains begin to create

430
00:24:43,200 --> 00:24:46,679
Speaker 1: this sense of awareness of deliberate thought. Uh And the

431
00:24:46,720 --> 00:24:50,280
Speaker 1: relationship between this sensation of experience and the actions in

432
00:24:50,320 --> 00:24:55,040
Speaker 1: your body is a complete illusion. Your consciousness does not

433
00:24:55,240 --> 00:24:57,960
Speaker 1: in fact control your body. Your body acts, and your

434
00:24:57,960 --> 00:25:02,640
Speaker 1: consciousness watches you act. It's a helpless passenger. You're essentially

435
00:25:02,680 --> 00:25:06,040
Speaker 1: watching a movie of your own mind, suffering from the

436
00:25:06,080 --> 00:25:09,880
Speaker 1: delusion that you're participating in the movie. This is also

437
00:25:09,960 --> 00:25:15,720
Speaker 1: known sometimes as epiphenomenalism, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal uh,

438
00:25:15,880 --> 00:25:20,880
Speaker 1: by product of mental processes. Yeah. Thomas Huxley was fond

439
00:25:20,880 --> 00:25:24,240
Speaker 1: of this, and he would compare conscious mind and the

440
00:25:24,240 --> 00:25:27,639
Speaker 1: physical brain to a genie in a lamp. Yeah. But

441
00:25:27,840 --> 00:25:30,920
Speaker 1: so a lot of people have found this not very productive.

442
00:25:30,960 --> 00:25:34,399
Speaker 1: I mean, one would one question would be well, but

443
00:25:34,600 --> 00:25:38,240
Speaker 1: still what is it? Another thing would be the American

444
00:25:38,240 --> 00:25:41,240
Speaker 1: psychologist William James, the guy who wrote The Varieties of

445
00:25:41,240 --> 00:25:45,040
Speaker 1: Religious Experience. He argued against this view, as paraphrased by

446
00:25:45,119 --> 00:25:48,960
Speaker 1: Jane's quote. If consciousness is the mere, impotent shadow of action,

447
00:25:49,119 --> 00:25:52,720
Speaker 1: why is it more intense when action is most hesitant?

448
00:25:53,240 --> 00:25:56,919
Speaker 1: And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual?

449
00:25:57,600 --> 00:26:01,199
Speaker 1: I think that's a reasonable question. So James ends up

450
00:26:01,200 --> 00:26:03,840
Speaker 1: saying that he thinks any viable theory of consciousness should

451
00:26:03,840 --> 00:26:08,520
Speaker 1: at least try to explain a relationship between consciousness and behavior. Okay,

452
00:26:08,520 --> 00:26:10,600
Speaker 1: we're getting close to the end of this timeline. How

453
00:26:10,640 --> 00:26:14,719
Speaker 1: about consciousness as an emergent property. We've talked about this

454
00:26:14,760 --> 00:26:18,679
Speaker 1: idea before too, Right, So, hydrogen is not wet, oxygen

455
00:26:18,800 --> 00:26:21,120
Speaker 1: is not wet, but you combine them into H two oh,

456
00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:23,840
Speaker 1: and you can create the property of wetness with enough

457
00:26:23,840 --> 00:26:26,680
Speaker 1: of these atoms. So in that sense, consciousness would be

458
00:26:26,720 --> 00:26:30,479
Speaker 1: a property of certain arrangements of matter. Uh, that is

459
00:26:30,680 --> 00:26:32,639
Speaker 1: more than the sum of its parts. It's sort of

460
00:26:32,640 --> 00:26:37,560
Speaker 1: a feature emerging from interactions, like from a sufficiently complex

461
00:26:37,600 --> 00:26:42,480
Speaker 1: biological system. Exactly. So this may be true. And for James,

462
00:26:42,560 --> 00:26:45,760
Speaker 1: I think he correctly reacts to this by saying, well,

463
00:26:47,080 --> 00:26:49,200
Speaker 1: it's not that that's false, it's just that that doesn't

464
00:26:49,240 --> 00:26:53,040
Speaker 1: answer the question. Consciousness may in fact be emergent, But

465
00:26:53,119 --> 00:26:56,280
Speaker 1: so what if it is? Still what is it? And

466
00:26:56,359 --> 00:27:00,320
Speaker 1: what does it do? Then we get into the the

467
00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:05,720
Speaker 1: the twentieth century with a really really distressing viewpoint consciousness

468
00:27:05,760 --> 00:27:10,040
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. This is often identified with the behaviorist school

469
00:27:10,040 --> 00:27:12,680
Speaker 1: of psychology like B. F. Skinner, very strong in mid

470
00:27:12,720 --> 00:27:17,080
Speaker 1: century psychology. Uh Jane's says, quote, it is an interesting

471
00:27:17,119 --> 00:27:19,520
Speaker 1: exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of

472
00:27:19,560 --> 00:27:23,240
Speaker 1: what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. Yeah,

473
00:27:23,280 --> 00:27:28,240
Speaker 1: you know, some would call that kind of mental exercise meditation. Yeah, okay.

474
00:27:28,280 --> 00:27:32,520
Speaker 1: I believe it's u Ekartole who frequently advises one to

475
00:27:32,840 --> 00:27:36,040
Speaker 1: think the following, I wonder what my next thought is

476
00:27:36,080 --> 00:27:39,400
Speaker 1: going to be in order to clear the mind and Uh,

477
00:27:39,600 --> 00:27:43,080
Speaker 1: what I paralyzing thought? Well, no, I wouldn't say paralyzing

478
00:27:43,200 --> 00:27:45,200
Speaker 1: is liberating. You know, if you just sort of set

479
00:27:45,240 --> 00:27:47,000
Speaker 1: there and if you start if you ask yourself what

480
00:27:47,320 --> 00:27:48,760
Speaker 1: my next thought is going to be? What's my next

481
00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:50,800
Speaker 1: thought gonna be? And then you kind of or at

482
00:27:50,840 --> 00:27:53,679
Speaker 1: least I kind of feel things that feel like the

483
00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:57,840
Speaker 1: weight of the default mode network, the weight of consciousness

484
00:27:58,119 --> 00:28:01,240
Speaker 1: kind of lifting for a second. It's kind of like

485
00:28:01,280 --> 00:28:04,520
Speaker 1: standing on one leg to relieve the weight on the other. Yeah,

486
00:28:04,560 --> 00:28:08,400
Speaker 1: that's appealing. So James has a fairly substantial discussion about

487
00:28:08,400 --> 00:28:11,520
Speaker 1: the influence of behaviorism, and so the behaviorist school of

488
00:28:11,520 --> 00:28:15,119
Speaker 1: psychology had a research program that, just to summarize it,

489
00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:20,119
Speaker 1: tried to focus exclusively on externally measurable behaviors, and it

490
00:28:20,240 --> 00:28:23,119
Speaker 1: posited that these behaviors could be explained by the interplay

491
00:28:23,160 --> 00:28:28,120
Speaker 1: of mere instinctual reactions and stimuli, or not just instinctual ones,

492
00:28:28,160 --> 00:28:31,600
Speaker 1: I mean conditioned reactions. It was big on conditioning and

493
00:28:31,720 --> 00:28:35,000
Speaker 1: it was not really interested in inner experience. And Jane

494
00:28:35,040 --> 00:28:37,480
Speaker 1: says that in the beginning, what behavior iss we're really

495
00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:41,440
Speaker 1: saying was consciousness is not important. And this sort of

496
00:28:41,480 --> 00:28:46,240
Speaker 1: transformed into the doctrine that consciousness does not exist, and

497
00:28:46,360 --> 00:28:49,760
Speaker 1: James actually believes that by focusing on these externally measurable actions,

498
00:28:49,800 --> 00:28:53,400
Speaker 1: behaviorism was very useful. It sort of got psychology out

499
00:28:53,400 --> 00:28:57,040
Speaker 1: of that squashy realm of philosophy that you think about

500
00:28:57,040 --> 00:28:59,560
Speaker 1: with like Freud and Young and made it a more

501
00:28:59,640 --> 00:29:04,760
Speaker 1: respect actable experimental science. But Jane says, quote, but having

502
00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:07,200
Speaker 1: once been part of its major school, I confess that

503
00:29:07,240 --> 00:29:10,400
Speaker 1: it was really not what it seemed off the printed page.

504
00:29:10,480 --> 00:29:14,680
Speaker 1: Behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody

505
00:29:14,760 --> 00:29:18,239
Speaker 1: really believed he was not conscious. So the way I

506
00:29:18,280 --> 00:29:21,080
Speaker 1: interpret that is that behaviorism was in fact a method,

507
00:29:21,320 --> 00:29:23,280
Speaker 1: not a theory, and it did a lot of good

508
00:29:23,280 --> 00:29:26,480
Speaker 1: for psychology. But now that psychology has sort of like

509
00:29:26,640 --> 00:29:29,400
Speaker 1: had had its room cleaned up by this process of

510
00:29:29,440 --> 00:29:34,120
Speaker 1: going through a behaviorist phase, you can return to introspective experience,

511
00:29:34,160 --> 00:29:37,880
Speaker 1: the internality. What is consciousness? What does it do? Where

512
00:29:37,880 --> 00:29:40,520
Speaker 1: did it come from? Now, one last thing he deals with,

513
00:29:40,560 --> 00:29:42,120
Speaker 1: and I think this is a very good point to make,

514
00:29:42,240 --> 00:29:45,840
Speaker 1: is he focuses on neuroscience. So that you may have

515
00:29:45,920 --> 00:29:50,640
Speaker 1: read studies, or not studies, maybe news reports that say, like, hey,

516
00:29:50,640 --> 00:29:55,400
Speaker 1: scientists have identified the X as the source of consciousness

517
00:29:55,400 --> 00:29:59,040
Speaker 1: in the brain. Maybe it was the reticular activating system,

518
00:29:59,160 --> 00:30:02,600
Speaker 1: or maybe it was closs strum or something else in

519
00:30:02,640 --> 00:30:04,800
Speaker 1: the brain. There's some region of the brain that some

520
00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:09,240
Speaker 1: neuroscientists now think they've identified as the place where consciousness

521
00:30:09,240 --> 00:30:13,320
Speaker 1: happens or is made possible. You they may be right.

522
00:30:13,720 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: It may be that you can isolate some sort of

523
00:30:16,240 --> 00:30:19,800
Speaker 1: on off switch for consciousness in the brain. But yet again,

524
00:30:19,840 --> 00:30:23,120
Speaker 1: I would say, this doesn't answer the fundamental question. You've

525
00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:26,440
Speaker 1: just basically narrowed down the physical space of the tissue

526
00:30:26,560 --> 00:30:29,360
Speaker 1: that generates it. You still have the question of what

527
00:30:29,560 --> 00:30:31,640
Speaker 1: is it, where did it come from, and what does

528
00:30:31,680 --> 00:30:34,600
Speaker 1: it do? Yeah? If I draw a hole through um

529
00:30:34,640 --> 00:30:37,640
Speaker 1: like a hard drive, am I necessarily drilling a hole

530
00:30:37,680 --> 00:30:41,320
Speaker 1: through like the seat of the center of computation? Or

531
00:30:41,360 --> 00:30:46,000
Speaker 1: I mean just disrupting the integrated system that makes it possible? Yeah? Yeah,

532
00:30:46,040 --> 00:30:49,880
Speaker 1: you could identify some part of a computer that says

533
00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:51,920
Speaker 1: you say, well, without this part of the computer, it

534
00:30:51,960 --> 00:30:54,480
Speaker 1: couldn't compute. Yeah, I mean I can. I can steal

535
00:30:54,960 --> 00:30:57,560
Speaker 1: like the battery off of somebody's laptop, right, But that

536
00:30:57,640 --> 00:31:00,800
Speaker 1: really doesn't necessarily answer this, like d per question, of

537
00:31:00,840 --> 00:31:03,560
Speaker 1: like what is the nature of computing and why does

538
00:31:03,560 --> 00:31:06,960
Speaker 1: it occur? Much easier to answer in the nature in

539
00:31:07,040 --> 00:31:09,640
Speaker 1: the discussion of the nature of a computer. Yeah, and

540
00:31:09,680 --> 00:31:11,080
Speaker 1: I have to say we we went into this a

541
00:31:11,080 --> 00:31:13,600
Speaker 1: little bit in the episode Where Is My Mind? Yeah,

542
00:31:13,840 --> 00:31:15,400
Speaker 1: there is a good one to refer back to if

543
00:31:15,400 --> 00:31:19,200
Speaker 1: anyone wants more on this topic. Alright, and I know

544
00:31:19,280 --> 00:31:21,160
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,

545
00:31:21,760 --> 00:31:27,080
Speaker 1: we will dive right back into consciousness. Alright, we're back.

546
00:31:27,240 --> 00:31:30,360
Speaker 1: All right. We've been discussing in trying to work our

547
00:31:30,360 --> 00:31:33,200
Speaker 1: way up to Julian Jane's theory of the origins of

548
00:31:33,200 --> 00:31:36,160
Speaker 1: consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. We're starting

549
00:31:36,160 --> 00:31:40,480
Speaker 1: with his discussion of what consciousness is um So another

550
00:31:40,560 --> 00:31:42,560
Speaker 1: thing that he points out in his book is that

551
00:31:42,600 --> 00:31:46,880
Speaker 1: there's an important distinction to be made between consciousness and reactivity.

552
00:31:46,920 --> 00:31:49,320
Speaker 1: So this is something interesting to think about. You know,

553
00:31:49,360 --> 00:31:52,040
Speaker 1: we talked about the the high the highway hypnosis state

554
00:31:52,080 --> 00:31:54,800
Speaker 1: where you can drive without really being conscious of it.

555
00:31:54,800 --> 00:31:59,040
Speaker 1: It's a fact that people in some nambulistic states, meaning sleepwalking,

556
00:31:59,680 --> 00:32:03,560
Speaker 1: can react without being conscious, like you put an obstacle

557
00:32:03,600 --> 00:32:05,480
Speaker 1: in their path and they might go around it, or

558
00:32:05,520 --> 00:32:08,520
Speaker 1: they can they can react to their environment and yet

559
00:32:08,600 --> 00:32:11,200
Speaker 1: not be conscious the entire time. That people don't know

560
00:32:11,280 --> 00:32:15,280
Speaker 1: what they're doing, and so we react unconsciously to all

561
00:32:15,360 --> 00:32:19,880
Speaker 1: kinds of things. For example, unconscious learning through conditioning and

562
00:32:20,040 --> 00:32:23,880
Speaker 1: reactivity can also be explained through neurology and behavior, but

563
00:32:23,960 --> 00:32:28,480
Speaker 1: consciousness not so easily. I've got another thing to ask you,

564
00:32:28,480 --> 00:32:33,800
Speaker 1: you listener, right now, Where are you now? Before I

565
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:37,240
Speaker 1: ask you that question, I think it's very likely that

566
00:32:37,320 --> 00:32:40,920
Speaker 1: you were not conscious of where you were. And that's

567
00:32:40,960 --> 00:32:43,080
Speaker 1: not the same thing as saying you didn't know where

568
00:32:43,120 --> 00:32:46,680
Speaker 1: you were. Like, if somebody asks you, you can turn

569
00:32:46,760 --> 00:32:49,640
Speaker 1: your attention to the answer to that question and immediately

570
00:32:49,720 --> 00:32:53,920
Speaker 1: provide the answer. But you were not thinking about where

571
00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:57,800
Speaker 1: you were. The fact of your physical location was not

572
00:32:58,040 --> 00:33:01,000
Speaker 1: present in the theater of your mind at that moment,

573
00:33:01,080 --> 00:33:03,600
Speaker 1: unless it just happened to be by chance. Yeah, like

574
00:33:03,640 --> 00:33:05,760
Speaker 1: it kind of a more extreme example of this would

575
00:33:05,760 --> 00:33:08,880
Speaker 1: be if I am reading a really exciting book in

576
00:33:09,000 --> 00:33:12,040
Speaker 1: my living room. Am I really in my living room?

577
00:33:12,160 --> 00:33:14,200
Speaker 1: Or am I on that you know that that epic

578
00:33:14,200 --> 00:33:17,080
Speaker 1: battlefield that I'm reading about. Yeah, that's a great example.

579
00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:19,840
Speaker 1: I mean one of the interesting things about engaging with

580
00:33:19,880 --> 00:33:23,560
Speaker 1: fiction and like watching a movie or reading a book,

581
00:33:23,600 --> 00:33:26,680
Speaker 1: is that you enter this kind of unconscious flow state

582
00:33:26,800 --> 00:33:30,160
Speaker 1: or what what you're unconscious about is your own physical

583
00:33:30,240 --> 00:33:34,240
Speaker 1: life and your surroundings, and that you're engaged deeply with

584
00:33:34,400 --> 00:33:37,760
Speaker 1: the ongoing narratives, such that you forget yourself and where

585
00:33:37,760 --> 00:33:40,360
Speaker 1: you are, yeah, or you know. Another example would be

586
00:33:40,400 --> 00:33:43,120
Speaker 1: if someone is played by traumatic memory. You know, you

587
00:33:43,520 --> 00:33:47,000
Speaker 1: you're aware of your actual physical surroundings, though your mind

588
00:33:47,120 --> 00:33:50,400
Speaker 1: is continually going back to this one place or time

589
00:33:50,440 --> 00:33:53,920
Speaker 1: and experience. So with those really simple experiments, you can

590
00:33:53,960 --> 00:33:58,240
Speaker 1: demonstrate that consciousness is actually a much narrower part of

591
00:33:58,280 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 1: your mental experience than your entire mental life. Right, Not

592
00:34:02,160 --> 00:34:05,560
Speaker 1: everything you do with your brain is conscious. In fact,

593
00:34:05,680 --> 00:34:07,800
Speaker 1: most of what you do with your brain is not

594
00:34:07,880 --> 00:34:11,920
Speaker 1: conscious consciousness. James uses this one image that I think

595
00:34:12,040 --> 00:34:14,960
Speaker 1: is very effective. It's sort of like a flashlight shining

596
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:17,720
Speaker 1: around in a dark room. The whole room is there,

597
00:34:18,360 --> 00:34:21,440
Speaker 1: but you can use your you can use the flashlight

598
00:34:21,480 --> 00:34:24,799
Speaker 1: to shine on any individual object. And then once you

599
00:34:24,840 --> 00:34:27,600
Speaker 1: shine it there and you try to imagine, Okay, what

600
00:34:27,600 --> 00:34:29,759
Speaker 1: what is going on in my brain that's not conscious?

601
00:34:29,760 --> 00:34:32,479
Speaker 1: So you move the flashlight around to look at things

602
00:34:32,560 --> 00:34:35,880
Speaker 1: that you're not conscious of, you immediately become conscious of

603
00:34:35,920 --> 00:34:38,080
Speaker 1: them when you shine the light on them. Yeah. This

604
00:34:38,080 --> 00:34:40,799
Speaker 1: gets into ideas too that we've discussed about consciousness as

605
00:34:40,840 --> 00:34:44,040
Speaker 1: being potentially being just like basically an aspect of who

606
00:34:44,280 --> 00:34:48,120
Speaker 1: of awareness, which is not exactly the same as James

607
00:34:48,160 --> 00:34:50,680
Speaker 1: is going to propose for the definition of consciousness. But

608
00:34:50,880 --> 00:34:54,440
Speaker 1: we're getting there. So James gives this list of things

609
00:34:54,440 --> 00:34:57,960
Speaker 1: saying what consciousness is not. So he says, it's not

610
00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:01,320
Speaker 1: mental activity. We have demonstrate that tons of mental activity

611
00:35:01,400 --> 00:35:06,760
Speaker 1: is Unconsciousness is unconscious. Uh, it's not recording information because

612
00:35:07,080 --> 00:35:10,359
Speaker 1: a whole lot of memory is clearly established unconsciously. Think

613
00:35:10,360 --> 00:35:13,600
Speaker 1: about the ways that, Uh, there are things that you

614
00:35:13,760 --> 00:35:17,560
Speaker 1: could not physically draw a picture of because you don't

615
00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:20,120
Speaker 1: remember what they look like, but you would notice if

616
00:35:20,160 --> 00:35:22,839
Speaker 1: something was wrong with them. To think about, like if

617
00:35:22,880 --> 00:35:25,640
Speaker 1: you came home from your house today and somebody had

618
00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:28,319
Speaker 1: moved the pictures around on the wall. You might not

619
00:35:28,400 --> 00:35:31,400
Speaker 1: be able to consciously recall where all the pictures are

620
00:35:31,440 --> 00:35:33,400
Speaker 1: if you tried to draw a picture of it right now,

621
00:35:33,640 --> 00:35:37,240
Speaker 1: but you might notice something was off if they'd been moved. Huh.

622
00:35:37,560 --> 00:35:39,319
Speaker 1: You know, it kind of reminds me how some you know,

623
00:35:39,400 --> 00:35:42,160
Speaker 1: some books you read there is a very detailed description

624
00:35:42,200 --> 00:35:46,040
Speaker 1: of a particular character. Other times there's not. And I

625
00:35:46,640 --> 00:35:48,319
Speaker 1: know when I was younger, I used to engage in

626
00:35:48,320 --> 00:35:51,759
Speaker 1: an exercise where I would basically pick a movie star

627
00:35:52,320 --> 00:35:56,120
Speaker 1: and slot them in as that character. Oh yeah, and uh,

628
00:35:56,160 --> 00:35:59,239
Speaker 1: I don't. I haven't done that really in years. Occasionally,

629
00:35:59,280 --> 00:36:01,280
Speaker 1: like there'll be an or some you know, a particular

630
00:36:01,320 --> 00:36:04,080
Speaker 1: face that kind of becomes that character in my mind

631
00:36:04,239 --> 00:36:08,440
Speaker 1: always Jeff Goldblum universe is full of Goldblums. It's not

632
00:36:08,480 --> 00:36:11,200
Speaker 1: a bad choice. But but I find a lot of

633
00:36:11,200 --> 00:36:13,879
Speaker 1: times if if the author is not giving a very

634
00:36:13,920 --> 00:36:16,839
Speaker 1: detailed description, I kind of have a loose idea of

635
00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:18,959
Speaker 1: what that character looks like. And I don't think about

636
00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:21,160
Speaker 1: it much. But if you were to present me with

637
00:36:21,200 --> 00:36:24,879
Speaker 1: an artist sketch of that character, I could instantly tell

638
00:36:24,920 --> 00:36:26,520
Speaker 1: you if I liked it or not, or if you

639
00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:30,680
Speaker 1: know that, whether it matched my, uh my vision of

640
00:36:30,719 --> 00:36:32,560
Speaker 1: what that character would be. Even though my vision of

641
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:35,240
Speaker 1: the character is rather abstract, like in your mental theater,

642
00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:38,400
Speaker 1: it's like they're wearing the scramble masks from a scanner darkly.

643
00:36:38,800 --> 00:36:40,799
Speaker 1: You know that they look like many things at once.

644
00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:44,120
Speaker 1: It's kind of a blur, but you can identify particular

645
00:36:44,280 --> 00:36:46,520
Speaker 1: that you think it does not fit that character as

646
00:36:46,520 --> 00:36:49,720
Speaker 1: soon as you see it. Okay, So it's not recording

647
00:36:49,760 --> 00:36:53,560
Speaker 1: of information, he says, it's not the basis for forming concepts.

648
00:36:53,600 --> 00:36:56,520
Speaker 1: I think he's right about this because how about the

649
00:36:56,560 --> 00:37:00,000
Speaker 1: concept of a tree. Now he talks about the idea

650
00:37:00,200 --> 00:37:03,120
Speaker 1: that no one has ever seen a tree. In fact,

651
00:37:03,200 --> 00:37:05,799
Speaker 1: you've only seen this tree or that tree. But he

652
00:37:05,880 --> 00:37:07,920
Speaker 1: sort of disagrees with it because he says, you know,

653
00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:11,600
Speaker 1: animals have to have categories of things that they react

654
00:37:11,680 --> 00:37:14,560
Speaker 1: to in a certain way. So it would kind of

655
00:37:14,680 --> 00:37:17,399
Speaker 1: be hard to imagine the life of a squirrel if

656
00:37:17,400 --> 00:37:20,440
Speaker 1: a squirrel did not have something like the concept of

657
00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:22,919
Speaker 1: a tree. It's got to be able to scramble into

658
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:26,239
Speaker 1: a tree that's never scrambled into before by recognizing it

659
00:37:26,360 --> 00:37:28,520
Speaker 1: as a thing that can be scrambled into, which is

660
00:37:28,560 --> 00:37:30,719
Speaker 1: a tree. Yeah. And it's difficult, I think for us

661
00:37:30,760 --> 00:37:33,239
Speaker 1: to think about that kind of thing because it's very

662
00:37:33,239 --> 00:37:36,120
Speaker 1: difficult for us to think about it outside of language. Yeah.

663
00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:39,920
Speaker 1: So Jane says that consciousness is not in fact the

664
00:37:39,960 --> 00:37:42,319
Speaker 1: basis of learning, and we we know this to be

665
00:37:42,360 --> 00:37:46,799
Speaker 1: true through experimentation. Now, signal learning happens automatically. Now that's

666
00:37:46,840 --> 00:37:50,400
Speaker 1: just like you know, conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning. You see a

667
00:37:50,440 --> 00:37:54,240
Speaker 1: signal and you expect something to happen according to association

668
00:37:54,280 --> 00:37:57,439
Speaker 1: with it. Uh. Skill learning also seems to happen when

669
00:37:57,440 --> 00:38:00,440
Speaker 1: we're least conscious. Think about training. You ever trained for

670
00:38:00,520 --> 00:38:02,600
Speaker 1: like some kind of athletic feed or trained on a

671
00:38:02,680 --> 00:38:06,600
Speaker 1: musical instrument, you probably know from experience that you can't

672
00:38:06,680 --> 00:38:09,680
Speaker 1: focus too much on your actions. You have to sort

673
00:38:09,680 --> 00:38:15,719
Speaker 1: of let go and not overthink it. How about solution learning, uh,

674
00:38:15,760 --> 00:38:18,759
Speaker 1: He he talked about how even even the solutions to

675
00:38:19,640 --> 00:38:23,200
Speaker 1: like working toward a goal or a problem, the solutions

676
00:38:23,200 --> 00:38:25,920
Speaker 1: are things we arrive at unconsciously. So he describes this

677
00:38:26,040 --> 00:38:30,680
Speaker 1: experiment where UH students were performing an experiment on their professor,

678
00:38:30,760 --> 00:38:33,120
Speaker 1: where every time the professor moved to the right side

679
00:38:33,120 --> 00:38:36,360
Speaker 1: of the room, the students, instead of being board, paid

680
00:38:36,440 --> 00:38:38,960
Speaker 1: wrapped attention and they laughed really hard when he would

681
00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:41,520
Speaker 1: make a joke. And so by you know, the end

682
00:38:41,520 --> 00:38:44,000
Speaker 1: of a week, he's basically so far to the right

683
00:38:44,040 --> 00:38:46,400
Speaker 1: of the room that he's going out the door, and

684
00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:48,759
Speaker 1: he was not aware that they had been training him

685
00:38:48,760 --> 00:38:53,600
Speaker 1: this way. He says, consciousness is also not the process

686
00:38:53,680 --> 00:38:58,200
Speaker 1: of thinking, thinking, like making judgments. So here's a quick test.

687
00:38:58,520 --> 00:39:01,160
Speaker 1: Hold two objects in each and or one sorry, one

688
00:39:01,200 --> 00:39:05,279
Speaker 1: object in each hand? Which one is heavier? All right?

689
00:39:05,320 --> 00:39:07,719
Speaker 1: So you think about that and you make a judgment,

690
00:39:08,200 --> 00:39:12,080
Speaker 1: but you're not conscious of how the judgment arises. Your

691
00:39:12,120 --> 00:39:15,000
Speaker 1: brain just sort of presents the answer to you. Right,

692
00:39:15,120 --> 00:39:18,920
Speaker 1: one feels heavier, and your brain tells you that's the

693
00:39:18,920 --> 00:39:21,719
Speaker 1: one that's heavier. But you you don't, like you've done

694
00:39:21,760 --> 00:39:24,560
Speaker 1: some kind of unconscious arithmetic and you're not aware of

695
00:39:24,600 --> 00:39:27,319
Speaker 1: the process by which the answer was generated. Yeah, it's

696
00:39:27,360 --> 00:39:30,560
Speaker 1: kind of difficult to show your work exactly. It's sort

697
00:39:30,560 --> 00:39:34,920
Speaker 1: of like saying, why is too greater than one? Or

698
00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:37,479
Speaker 1: like I give you two numbers, you know, six and four?

699
00:39:37,640 --> 00:39:42,440
Speaker 1: Which one is larger? You can't explain a conscious process

700
00:39:42,480 --> 00:39:45,160
Speaker 1: of deciding which one was larger? Well, I mean I

701
00:39:45,200 --> 00:39:47,800
Speaker 1: intrinsically know that that six is greater than one and

702
00:39:48,120 --> 00:39:50,239
Speaker 1: I and those are small enough numbers two that I

703
00:39:50,280 --> 00:39:54,120
Speaker 1: can I can visualize the quantity. Yeah, I can imagine

704
00:39:54,120 --> 00:39:56,440
Speaker 1: six eggs and four eggs. So I can engage in

705
00:39:56,440 --> 00:40:00,840
Speaker 1: that kind of like basic visual uh judgment. But you

706
00:40:00,880 --> 00:40:03,120
Speaker 1: didn't have to do that, did you. You just had

707
00:40:03,160 --> 00:40:05,960
Speaker 1: the answer immediately. Yeah, I guess. You guess it does

708
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:09,719
Speaker 1: become tricky like that because you because because I'm doing

709
00:40:09,719 --> 00:40:11,959
Speaker 1: it all right in uh in reverse, I'm looking back

710
00:40:12,080 --> 00:40:15,400
Speaker 1: on my decision making, looking back on my judgment and

711
00:40:15,520 --> 00:40:17,680
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how it took place in the mind. Yeah,

712
00:40:17,719 --> 00:40:22,359
Speaker 1: you're trying to consciously reverse engineer your unconscious thought process. Uh.

713
00:40:22,440 --> 00:40:24,880
Speaker 1: So here's another one. He he mentions, let's go with

714
00:40:24,920 --> 00:40:28,560
Speaker 1: a pattern. Tell me if you say what comes next

715
00:40:29,160 --> 00:40:35,480
Speaker 1: A B A B A question mark B. Right, everyone

716
00:40:35,520 --> 00:40:38,160
Speaker 1: can get the answer. It's totally simple. But notice how

717
00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:41,520
Speaker 1: you're not consciously aware of how the answer is generated.

718
00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:44,440
Speaker 1: You can consciously reflect on the answer once you have it,

719
00:40:44,840 --> 00:40:49,040
Speaker 1: but it's not generated by consciousness, it's just there. Yeah.

720
00:40:49,120 --> 00:40:52,400
Speaker 1: This is actually a standard part of of of testing

721
00:40:52,400 --> 00:40:55,279
Speaker 1: for kindergarteners. By the way, my son just went through this,

722
00:40:55,400 --> 00:40:57,360
Speaker 1: and I get to see like the questions he was asking,

723
00:40:57,719 --> 00:41:00,000
Speaker 1: and one of them involves a couple of different round

724
00:41:00,200 --> 00:41:01,840
Speaker 1: of this to see if they what can a pattern

725
00:41:01,880 --> 00:41:05,359
Speaker 1: recognition they have? Yeah? Uh, so here's a crazy thing.

726
00:41:05,440 --> 00:41:09,600
Speaker 1: He says that consciousness is not even the process of reasoning.

727
00:41:10,680 --> 00:41:13,160
Speaker 1: How would that be the case. Surely we think reason

728
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:15,160
Speaker 1: has something to do with consciousness, and it may have

729
00:41:15,239 --> 00:41:18,680
Speaker 1: something to do with consciousness, like, for example, reasoning may

730
00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:23,080
Speaker 1: require conscious laying of the groundwork of sort of the

731
00:41:23,160 --> 00:41:26,680
Speaker 1: reasoning space. But it is curious to pay attention to

732
00:41:26,719 --> 00:41:30,600
Speaker 1: stories of scientists coming up with answers to like complex

733
00:41:30,640 --> 00:41:36,040
Speaker 1: mathematical problems or physics problems. They very very often report

734
00:41:36,120 --> 00:41:38,760
Speaker 1: that the solutions come to them out of the blue

735
00:41:39,160 --> 00:41:42,239
Speaker 1: when they're doing unrelated activities. Like there's a story about

736
00:41:42,239 --> 00:41:44,840
Speaker 1: how Einstein had to be careful when he was shaving

737
00:41:45,360 --> 00:41:48,960
Speaker 1: because suddenly solutions to problems in physics would leap into

738
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:52,120
Speaker 1: his mind and surprise him when he hadn't been thinking

739
00:41:52,120 --> 00:41:53,840
Speaker 1: about them, and he had to be careful not to

740
00:41:53,880 --> 00:41:56,360
Speaker 1: cut his own throat with his razor when this happened.

741
00:41:57,680 --> 00:41:59,799
Speaker 1: That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think we can all

742
00:41:59,840 --> 00:42:03,040
Speaker 1: rely to situations where you you know, you go out

743
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:04,680
Speaker 1: on a walk, or you engage in some of their

744
00:42:04,680 --> 00:42:07,520
Speaker 1: activity and yeah, that's when the thoughts begin to come. Yeah,

745
00:42:07,560 --> 00:42:09,799
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's in the bath that you have

746
00:42:09,920 --> 00:42:14,400
Speaker 1: your Eureka moment. So having excluded all that stuff in

747
00:42:14,440 --> 00:42:17,719
Speaker 1: deciding what consciousness is, it's time to to get to

748
00:42:17,760 --> 00:42:21,359
Speaker 1: the bones here, Jane says, or would this be the meat?

749
00:42:21,400 --> 00:42:23,440
Speaker 1: Would it be the bones? Would it be the fat

750
00:42:23,520 --> 00:42:26,400
Speaker 1: to chew on? M let's go with Let's go with

751
00:42:26,440 --> 00:42:28,359
Speaker 1: the meat, the meat. Okay, maybe this is the meat,

752
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,880
Speaker 1: so Jane says again, I'll just hit you with it

753
00:42:31,920 --> 00:42:34,520
Speaker 1: and then we can try to explain it. Consciousness is

754
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:39,120
Speaker 1: a metaphor based model of the world and it arises

755
00:42:39,239 --> 00:42:43,360
Speaker 1: from language. Without language, according to Jane's you could not

756
00:42:43,560 --> 00:42:46,719
Speaker 1: have consciousness, uh. And it comes from the way we

757
00:42:46,840 --> 00:42:50,680
Speaker 1: use language to create metaphors and how those metaphors themselves

758
00:42:50,760 --> 00:42:54,359
Speaker 1: lead to new ways of thinking. So how does this work? Well,

759
00:42:54,440 --> 00:42:57,680
Speaker 1: let's explore real quick. So a metaphor is actually, when

760
00:42:57,680 --> 00:42:59,680
Speaker 1: you think about it, one of the most fascinating things

761
00:42:59,719 --> 00:43:02,640
Speaker 1: about out language. It's a thing that without language we

762
00:43:02,840 --> 00:43:08,319
Speaker 1: cannot do. Right. Language makes metaphors possible, And it's the

763
00:43:08,440 --> 00:43:11,600
Speaker 1: use of a term for one thing to describe another

764
00:43:11,760 --> 00:43:14,920
Speaker 1: because of some kind of similarity between them or between

765
00:43:14,960 --> 00:43:18,160
Speaker 1: their relations to other things. That sounds kind of complex,

766
00:43:18,200 --> 00:43:20,600
Speaker 1: but you use metaphors in your life. You basically know

767
00:43:20,640 --> 00:43:24,400
Speaker 1: what they are, right, So uh. He introduces two terms

768
00:43:24,440 --> 00:43:26,520
Speaker 1: for the two halves of a metaphor. You've got the

769
00:43:26,600 --> 00:43:29,759
Speaker 1: meta frand, which is a new thing, a thing to

770
00:43:29,800 --> 00:43:32,440
Speaker 1: be described that you don't already know about. And then

771
00:43:32,480 --> 00:43:35,640
Speaker 1: you've got the meta fire and that's the known thing,

772
00:43:35,800 --> 00:43:38,520
Speaker 1: the thing in relation used to describe the new thing.

773
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:41,320
Speaker 1: So here's an example. Let's say there's a new species

774
00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:44,919
Speaker 1: of beetle that's got a large horn, protuberants branching off

775
00:43:44,960 --> 00:43:48,319
Speaker 1: of its head. That's the meta frand it's something new.

776
00:43:48,440 --> 00:43:51,080
Speaker 1: You've got the meta fire something you're familiar with, a

777
00:43:51,160 --> 00:43:56,560
Speaker 1: stag and its antlers, and the metaphor is a stag beetle. Okay,

778
00:43:56,640 --> 00:43:58,840
Speaker 1: but I'm guessing this also applies to say, like, the

779
00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:01,879
Speaker 1: meta frand could be a feeling that I have exactly,

780
00:44:01,880 --> 00:44:06,040
Speaker 1: and the metaphere is say a tiger. I've seen a tiger,

781
00:44:06,480 --> 00:44:08,920
Speaker 1: but this, this emotion that I'm feeling is new to me.

782
00:44:09,280 --> 00:44:11,560
Speaker 1: But I can use the tiger as a way to

783
00:44:11,600 --> 00:44:15,839
Speaker 1: describe what I'm feeling exactly now. That is is one

784
00:44:15,880 --> 00:44:19,880
Speaker 1: of his key insights. We use meta fires based on

785
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:25,400
Speaker 1: the natural physical world around us to understand the metaphrans

786
00:44:25,480 --> 00:44:30,120
Speaker 1: of inscrutable internal consciousness. So you have mental activity that

787
00:44:30,320 --> 00:44:34,480
Speaker 1: is turned into a metaphor through comparison to some concrete

788
00:44:34,520 --> 00:44:38,799
Speaker 1: action in the world, and this process gives rise to

789
00:44:38,920 --> 00:44:42,120
Speaker 1: conscious thought. So here's a version of that. How about

790
00:44:42,600 --> 00:44:45,160
Speaker 1: you're you're trying to solve a problem and you've you've

791
00:44:45,200 --> 00:44:47,400
Speaker 1: got going on in your mind what we just described,

792
00:44:47,520 --> 00:44:50,240
Speaker 1: like you the A B A B A B problem,

793
00:44:50,360 --> 00:44:53,560
Speaker 1: what comes next? If you think A comes next, you

794
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:57,719
Speaker 1: don't understand what happened in your brain to to give

795
00:44:57,760 --> 00:45:00,400
Speaker 1: you that answer. So that might be the metaphor brand

796
00:45:00,560 --> 00:45:03,279
Speaker 1: the thing that needs to be described, the unfamiliar thing.

797
00:45:03,280 --> 00:45:06,440
Speaker 1: It's the inscrutable process of coming to comprehend the solution

798
00:45:06,600 --> 00:45:09,440
Speaker 1: to a problem, and you've got to metaphire something that's

799
00:45:09,480 --> 00:45:12,480
Speaker 1: totally familiar, to compare it to seeing with your eyes

800
00:45:13,160 --> 00:45:16,719
Speaker 1: something that happens in the physical world. The metaphor is

801
00:45:17,239 --> 00:45:21,759
Speaker 1: the conscious thought is now I see the answer. So

802
00:45:21,960 --> 00:45:26,319
Speaker 1: consciousness for James is something that is taking place in

803
00:45:26,520 --> 00:45:31,840
Speaker 1: a metaphorical mind space that is an analog of physical

804
00:45:31,920 --> 00:45:36,239
Speaker 1: space in reality. It's when we invent this metaphor of

805
00:45:36,280 --> 00:45:40,200
Speaker 1: a world inside to match the world outside, and we

806
00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:45,040
Speaker 1: use metaphors from the physical world to understand and describe

807
00:45:45,120 --> 00:45:49,400
Speaker 1: our own mental activity. And through these metaphors, we generate

808
00:45:49,560 --> 00:45:54,920
Speaker 1: this self reflective process, this spatialized stuff in the head,

809
00:45:55,360 --> 00:45:58,560
Speaker 1: the mind space where we create narratives. We reflect on

810
00:45:58,560 --> 00:46:03,080
Speaker 1: our behaviors and generate the circumstances that produce consciousness. And

811
00:46:03,120 --> 00:46:07,239
Speaker 1: for James, this is how consciousness arises. I think, I'm

812
00:46:07,280 --> 00:46:09,160
Speaker 1: not sure I agree with it, but I do think

813
00:46:09,200 --> 00:46:11,920
Speaker 1: this is one of the most fascinating propositions for the

814
00:46:11,960 --> 00:46:15,799
Speaker 1: origin of consciousness I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah, it's I

815
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:18,040
Speaker 1: agree with you, it's And I'm hesitant to, you know,

816
00:46:18,160 --> 00:46:21,439
Speaker 1: endorse it because I really, for one thing, I really

817
00:46:21,480 --> 00:46:26,239
Speaker 1: do like the the awareness explanation. But but but yeah,

818
00:46:26,239 --> 00:46:29,520
Speaker 1: when I started thinking about about the power of metaphors,

819
00:46:29,600 --> 00:46:32,360
Speaker 1: it it does. It does have a bit of it

820
00:46:32,440 --> 00:46:34,759
Speaker 1: does feel true. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing the way

821
00:46:34,800 --> 00:46:38,000
Speaker 1: metaphors do pervade are thinking about things. It's one of

822
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:41,040
Speaker 1: the funny things about languages that language makes metaphors possible,

823
00:46:41,320 --> 00:46:44,959
Speaker 1: but almost all language is built out of metaphors. Even

824
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:48,280
Speaker 1: the word metaphor is a metaphor. Like the word metaphor

825
00:46:48,400 --> 00:46:51,440
Speaker 1: comes from the Greek meaning to carry across. So you've

826
00:46:51,480 --> 00:46:54,680
Speaker 1: got this abstract action of taking the meanings of one

827
00:46:54,719 --> 00:46:57,560
Speaker 1: word and putting them on another word. But then it

828
00:46:57,719 --> 00:47:00,520
Speaker 1: is described in terms of a physical, conquer ead action

829
00:47:00,600 --> 00:47:02,960
Speaker 1: in the world that we're familiar with, carrying one thing

830
00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:05,440
Speaker 1: to another place. Yea. So even if you think you're

831
00:47:05,440 --> 00:47:09,240
Speaker 1: being very literal, uh yeah, you're still you're still walking

832
00:47:09,239 --> 00:47:12,560
Speaker 1: on metaphors. Yeah, I mean pretty much. The only language

833
00:47:12,560 --> 00:47:15,480
Speaker 1: that is not based on metaphors is that of the physical,

834
00:47:15,560 --> 00:47:20,439
Speaker 1: concrete world and basic activities in space. So uh so

835
00:47:20,760 --> 00:47:24,719
Speaker 1: James gets to what are the most important features of consciousness? So, like,

836
00:47:24,760 --> 00:47:27,640
Speaker 1: what what is consciousness? According to him, he says, one

837
00:47:27,640 --> 00:47:31,080
Speaker 1: of the main features is spatialization, and this means that

838
00:47:31,120 --> 00:47:35,000
Speaker 1: conscious thoughts metaphorically seem to take place in a quote

839
00:47:35,080 --> 00:47:39,239
Speaker 1: mind space, which is not a physical space, and within

840
00:47:39,280 --> 00:47:41,799
Speaker 1: the mind space of consciousness, things that do not in

841
00:47:41,880 --> 00:47:46,320
Speaker 1: reality have a spatial quality become what he calls spatialized,

842
00:47:46,480 --> 00:47:50,240
Speaker 1: that is imagined with spatial qualities. So, for example, time

843
00:47:51,200 --> 00:47:57,040
Speaker 1: in direct experience, we apprehend time as this continuous, impermanent

844
00:47:57,160 --> 00:48:00,759
Speaker 1: succession of moments. Right, it's hard to describe how you

845
00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:05,000
Speaker 1: experience time without using a conscious metaphor that turns it

846
00:48:05,040 --> 00:48:08,719
Speaker 1: into space. Like can you how how can you even

847
00:48:08,760 --> 00:48:12,440
Speaker 1: describe what time is without changing it into space in

848
00:48:12,480 --> 00:48:15,040
Speaker 1: your consciousness? Yeah, I mean you end up having to

849
00:48:15,040 --> 00:48:17,720
Speaker 1: come up with some sort of physical description like for instance,

850
00:48:17,880 --> 00:48:20,960
Speaker 1: car Vonnegut in The slaughter House five had the description

851
00:48:21,360 --> 00:48:24,800
Speaker 1: for for a linear experience of time of a man

852
00:48:25,040 --> 00:48:28,840
Speaker 1: on a train with blinders on looking at mountains rollby

853
00:48:28,880 --> 00:48:31,359
Speaker 1: and he can't turn his head. Yeah, exactly. So it's

854
00:48:31,600 --> 00:48:36,080
Speaker 1: much like that. In our unconscious direct experience, each moment

855
00:48:36,160 --> 00:48:39,480
Speaker 1: is sort of lived in and then disappears. But in

856
00:48:39,560 --> 00:48:43,919
Speaker 1: our conscious mind space we can organize temporal events into

857
00:48:43,960 --> 00:48:48,080
Speaker 1: a timeline, something that does not exist in any detectable

858
00:48:48,080 --> 00:48:50,200
Speaker 1: way in reality. There is no such thing as a

859
00:48:50,239 --> 00:48:55,080
Speaker 1: timeline in the world. It's only a mental uh construct.

860
00:48:55,600 --> 00:48:59,120
Speaker 1: So consciousness makes the past and the future comprehensible and

861
00:48:59,320 --> 00:49:02,880
Speaker 1: organize a to us. Suddenly, when you have consciousness, the

862
00:49:02,920 --> 00:49:06,359
Speaker 1: past and the future in some sense exist. Yeah, then

863
00:49:06,400 --> 00:49:08,719
Speaker 1: this is a This is cool because this ties into

864
00:49:08,800 --> 00:49:12,200
Speaker 1: some past discussions we've had about the difference between you know,

865
00:49:12,360 --> 00:49:16,080
Speaker 1: linear linear existence and um and and modern humans in

866
00:49:16,120 --> 00:49:20,400
Speaker 1: the more cyclical existence of the past. Yeah, totally. Another

867
00:49:20,440 --> 00:49:23,960
Speaker 1: feature he isolates of of being unique to consciousness. He

868
00:49:24,000 --> 00:49:27,000
Speaker 1: calls it exerption. So this is when you isolate a

869
00:49:27,120 --> 00:49:30,719
Speaker 1: detail for attention, using it to represent the whole. So

870
00:49:30,719 --> 00:49:33,279
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask you, Robert, what did you do the

871
00:49:33,320 --> 00:49:37,200
Speaker 1: summer after ninth grade? I have no idea. I have

872
00:49:37,280 --> 00:49:40,640
Speaker 1: no idea whatsoever. No, I'd have to really think about it.

873
00:49:40,680 --> 00:49:45,560
Speaker 1: I guess I probably summer hypnosis. Just totally totally. I

874
00:49:45,560 --> 00:49:47,800
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, if you if you ask the

875
00:49:47,880 --> 00:49:49,520
Speaker 1: question about earlier year, I could have said, oh, I

876
00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:50,960
Speaker 1: went to scout camp, you know, or I went to

877
00:49:51,040 --> 00:49:53,920
Speaker 1: this camper or another. But for ninth grade, I'm not

878
00:49:53,960 --> 00:49:55,800
Speaker 1: sure what I did. Well, Okay, So I want to

879
00:49:55,840 --> 00:49:59,520
Speaker 1: say for most memories of time period memories, I would

880
00:49:59,520 --> 00:50:02,480
Speaker 1: ask like that you probably have at least one image

881
00:50:02,600 --> 00:50:05,520
Speaker 1: rise to the top from the time I ask you about,

882
00:50:05,640 --> 00:50:09,040
Speaker 1: and that is the exert that represents the summer. And

883
00:50:09,080 --> 00:50:11,960
Speaker 1: then from that one exerpted memory might be an image,

884
00:50:11,960 --> 00:50:14,960
Speaker 1: you might be a specific episode you recall from that

885
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:18,680
Speaker 1: one exert you can associate around to others that have

886
00:50:18,840 --> 00:50:21,840
Speaker 1: something to do with it. Rather in this imagined physical

887
00:50:22,200 --> 00:50:26,799
Speaker 1: spatialized timeline or by you know, sort of theme associations.

888
00:50:26,840 --> 00:50:30,600
Speaker 1: And this is a process that we know as reminiscing. Right, So,

889
00:50:30,680 --> 00:50:34,720
Speaker 1: think about how a human like us without consciousness could

890
00:50:34,760 --> 00:50:39,160
Speaker 1: recall information about the past. It's impossible to imagine that

891
00:50:39,239 --> 00:50:43,280
Speaker 1: person reminiscing. Does that make sense? Like a person without

892
00:50:43,280 --> 00:50:47,000
Speaker 1: consciousness might be able to use information from their past

893
00:50:47,320 --> 00:50:51,080
Speaker 1: to make a decision about the future. But and so

894
00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:54,000
Speaker 1: they'd have memory, and the memory could be recalled, but

895
00:50:54,040 --> 00:50:57,480
Speaker 1: there would be no process of wandering through the mind

896
00:50:57,560 --> 00:51:00,799
Speaker 1: space of memory, of the memory theater, looking at one

897
00:51:00,880 --> 00:51:03,960
Speaker 1: exerpt of the past after another. Right. Huh, Well, that

898
00:51:04,160 --> 00:51:06,080
Speaker 1: it's crazy to try to imagine that, because it would

899
00:51:06,120 --> 00:51:09,000
Speaker 1: mean that you could not look longingly back on something

900
00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:13,120
Speaker 1: in the past. Exactly, couldn't experience nostalgia. You couldn't. I mean,

901
00:51:13,320 --> 00:51:17,719
Speaker 1: one would wonder even if you could be traumatized. I

902
00:51:17,719 --> 00:51:20,520
Speaker 1: mean maybe you could, because you could certainly have positive

903
00:51:20,520 --> 00:51:24,160
Speaker 1: and negative associations with events. Uh, And you you could

904
00:51:24,160 --> 00:51:28,680
Speaker 1: have things you wanted that would be associated with past stimuli.

905
00:51:29,239 --> 00:51:32,640
Speaker 1: But you couldn't. You couldn't wander through your memory because

906
00:51:33,200 --> 00:51:36,680
Speaker 1: what would you wander with? So a bicameral human who

907
00:51:36,680 --> 00:51:41,200
Speaker 1: had been you know, experienced horrific burn. They might they

908
00:51:41,239 --> 00:51:44,839
Speaker 1: might have a strong reaction to seeing fire, but they

909
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:48,520
Speaker 1: wouldn't just be setting there eating their you know, their

910
00:51:48,600 --> 00:51:51,120
Speaker 1: grass and their berries and then just think, out of

911
00:51:51,120 --> 00:51:54,319
Speaker 1: the blue, fire is terrifying and I am afraid of it. No,

912
00:51:54,440 --> 00:51:56,839
Speaker 1: I think they probably wouldn't. Yeah, they would not have

913
00:51:57,080 --> 00:52:01,839
Speaker 1: memories of that event. The memory would be accessible and

914
00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:05,319
Speaker 1: useful to their brain and behavior, but they wouldn't go

915
00:52:05,480 --> 00:52:08,840
Speaker 1: back to the memory and experience it with their attention.

916
00:52:09,440 --> 00:52:11,720
Speaker 1: Its kind of liberating because you you wouldn't be sitting

917
00:52:11,719 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 1: around constantly fretting about the past and the future. Right, Okay,

918
00:52:16,040 --> 00:52:18,799
Speaker 1: So I asked just the question, if you didn't have consciousness,

919
00:52:18,920 --> 00:52:21,640
Speaker 1: what would you wander through your memory with? The thing

920
00:52:21,719 --> 00:52:24,760
Speaker 1: you wander through your memory with is the next feature

921
00:52:24,800 --> 00:52:28,760
Speaker 1: Janes identifies the analog I. So, for James, an analog

922
00:52:28,920 --> 00:52:32,000
Speaker 1: is something that at every point is generated by the thing.

923
00:52:32,040 --> 00:52:34,439
Speaker 1: It's an analog of A good example would be a map.

924
00:52:34,600 --> 00:52:37,000
Speaker 1: A map is an analog of a part of the

925
00:52:37,040 --> 00:52:40,920
Speaker 1: surface of the earth. So the analog I that James

926
00:52:40,960 --> 00:52:44,799
Speaker 1: talks about is the mental analog of your body. In reality,

927
00:52:45,239 --> 00:52:48,920
Speaker 1: and it moves mentally through mind space to observe and

928
00:52:48,960 --> 00:52:53,640
Speaker 1: perform metaphorical quote action within the mind space. If if

929
00:52:53,680 --> 00:52:55,960
Speaker 1: that's thick, just think about it's the mental version of

930
00:52:56,040 --> 00:52:59,120
Speaker 1: you that does the looking. So when you wander through

931
00:52:59,160 --> 00:53:02,240
Speaker 1: your memory, it's your analog eye that does the wandering.

932
00:53:02,320 --> 00:53:06,680
Speaker 1: It's the mental representation of yourself as a subject. Yeah.

933
00:53:06,760 --> 00:53:09,080
Speaker 1: Worth noting that in his book, he he does stress

934
00:53:09,160 --> 00:53:11,440
Speaker 1: that the analog I came into being towards the end

935
00:53:11,480 --> 00:53:14,319
Speaker 1: of the second millennium BC. Yeah, and that's about the

936
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:18,080
Speaker 1: time that he's saying that the bi cameral mind largely

937
00:53:18,200 --> 00:53:22,960
Speaker 1: began to transition into the conscious mind after the analog eye.

938
00:53:23,040 --> 00:53:26,360
Speaker 1: He's also got a feature of consciousness is the metaphor me.

939
00:53:26,840 --> 00:53:30,840
Speaker 1: This is the metaphorical object version of yourself that you observe.

940
00:53:30,960 --> 00:53:33,640
Speaker 1: So when you say, when you say, I see myself

941
00:53:33,719 --> 00:53:37,240
Speaker 1: doing X in a memory, the eye and that sentence,

942
00:53:37,239 --> 00:53:40,120
Speaker 1: the subject is the analog eye. The the the analog

943
00:53:40,280 --> 00:53:43,040
Speaker 1: version of you that looks, and the me version of

944
00:53:43,080 --> 00:53:46,280
Speaker 1: yourself and that sentence is the metaphor me, the subject

945
00:53:46,400 --> 00:53:48,800
Speaker 1: version or sorry, the object version of yourself that gets

946
00:53:48,800 --> 00:53:51,960
Speaker 1: looked at. That's crazy because it's it forces you to

947
00:53:52,000 --> 00:53:54,600
Speaker 1: try to imagine what if you only had I or

948
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:58,560
Speaker 1: you only had me? Yeah, now that affects your your

949
00:53:58,600 --> 00:54:01,680
Speaker 1: conscious experience to the world, Well it seems to, at

950
00:54:01,719 --> 00:54:04,719
Speaker 1: least in his theory. The bicameral human has neither one

951
00:54:04,800 --> 00:54:07,480
Speaker 1: and the conscious human has both. So, yeah, what if

952
00:54:07,480 --> 00:54:10,880
Speaker 1: you're some kind of transitionary human where you you you

953
00:54:10,960 --> 00:54:15,160
Speaker 1: can't imagine yourself, but you can wander through mental space? Yeah,

954
00:54:15,239 --> 00:54:17,560
Speaker 1: or kind of like things only happened to me, But

955
00:54:17,680 --> 00:54:20,840
Speaker 1: I don't do things that. Yeah, I don't know. I

956
00:54:20,840 --> 00:54:24,680
Speaker 1: wonder if that's possible anyway. Two more features of consciousness

957
00:54:24,719 --> 00:54:28,640
Speaker 1: he identifies. So he says consciousness enables neurotization. So an

958
00:54:28,719 --> 00:54:34,400
Speaker 1: unconscious being could not form thoughts into coherent stories. You

959
00:54:34,480 --> 00:54:38,680
Speaker 1: make a narrative that makes sense. So the non conscious

960
00:54:38,680 --> 00:54:42,000
Speaker 1: brain would react to events of the present, perhaps based

961
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:44,600
Speaker 1: on things learned from experiences in the past. But the

962
00:54:44,640 --> 00:54:48,240
Speaker 1: conscious mind weaves past, present, and future into a story.

963
00:54:48,760 --> 00:54:51,680
Speaker 1: And this story also includes dependencies of cause and effect,

964
00:54:51,680 --> 00:54:54,920
Speaker 1: and a story, things didn't just happen, they happened for

965
00:54:54,960 --> 00:54:57,560
Speaker 1: a reason. So this is the part of the conscious

966
00:54:57,560 --> 00:55:02,560
Speaker 1: mind that makes us concerned with the question why a

967
00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:07,120
Speaker 1: final feature of consciousness is what he calls conciliation, or

968
00:55:07,320 --> 00:55:10,560
Speaker 1: later in his afterward he calls concilience. And this is

969
00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:15,239
Speaker 1: fusing exerpted mental contents together to make it spatially compatible

970
00:55:15,280 --> 00:55:17,800
Speaker 1: in a way that makes sense. So if I, Robert,

971
00:55:17,840 --> 00:55:19,560
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you to imagine a couple of things,

972
00:55:19,920 --> 00:55:24,120
Speaker 1: a plate and a bunch of spaghetti. Okay, now you're

973
00:55:24,160 --> 00:55:27,239
Speaker 1: probably imagining the spaghetti on top of the plate. It's

974
00:55:27,360 --> 00:55:30,200
Speaker 1: not the other way around. There was no hesitation there. Yeah,

975
00:55:30,360 --> 00:55:32,720
Speaker 1: but I didn't tell you to do that. That's concilience

976
00:55:32,760 --> 00:55:35,800
Speaker 1: in your mind. You're organizing things in your mind into

977
00:55:35,840 --> 00:55:37,799
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense. Yeah. I would never put

978
00:55:37,800 --> 00:55:40,320
Speaker 1: the plate on the spaghetti. At most, I would imagine

979
00:55:40,360 --> 00:55:42,839
Speaker 1: the spaghetti in a pile here and the plate over here.

980
00:55:42,880 --> 00:55:45,919
Speaker 1: But my mind didn't go there either. Yea. So here

981
00:55:45,960 --> 00:55:48,560
Speaker 1: we've finally worked our way up to Jane's idea of

982
00:55:48,560 --> 00:55:51,799
Speaker 1: what consciousness is. He says, it's quote an operation rather

983
00:55:51,880 --> 00:55:55,920
Speaker 1: than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates

984
00:55:55,960 --> 00:55:59,440
Speaker 1: by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog

985
00:55:59,680 --> 00:56:03,560
Speaker 1: space ACE with an analog I that can observe that

986
00:56:03,600 --> 00:56:07,560
Speaker 1: space and move metaphorically in it or the even shorter

987
00:56:07,719 --> 00:56:12,480
Speaker 1: version he says consciousness his quote an analog I neratizing,

988
00:56:12,680 --> 00:56:16,279
Speaker 1: so creating stories in a mind space, which I think

989
00:56:16,320 --> 00:56:19,839
Speaker 1: is a very elegant way of reckoning with what consciousness is.

990
00:56:20,080 --> 00:56:23,680
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that he's correct about the generative mechanism

991
00:56:23,719 --> 00:56:26,560
Speaker 1: that like language creates consciousness, though I do think it's

992
00:56:26,560 --> 00:56:29,879
Speaker 1: possible that he's correct about that. Um, I'm not sure

993
00:56:29,880 --> 00:56:31,680
Speaker 1: he's right about that, but I do think the way

994
00:56:31,719 --> 00:56:36,800
Speaker 1: he describes the phenomena of it is very credible. Yeah, alright,

995
00:56:36,840 --> 00:56:38,920
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and

996
00:56:38,920 --> 00:56:43,200
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're going to transition from james

997
00:56:43,280 --> 00:56:46,080
Speaker 1: views on what we have now and get into this

998
00:56:46,200 --> 00:56:51,280
Speaker 1: concept of the bicameral mind what came before. Thank alright,

999
00:56:51,280 --> 00:56:53,880
Speaker 1: we're back, all right, So it's time to explore the

1000
00:56:53,960 --> 00:56:58,399
Speaker 1: bicameral mind as proposed by Julian James. So, you we

1001
00:56:58,400 --> 00:57:00,359
Speaker 1: we talked at the beginning about how you can have

1002
00:57:00,400 --> 00:57:03,880
Speaker 1: this experience of highway hypnosis. Your body can perform complex

1003
00:57:03,920 --> 00:57:07,760
Speaker 1: behaviors with you really just not being aware that it's happening.

1004
00:57:07,800 --> 00:57:10,720
Speaker 1: Your brains work in all the stuff, it's pulling the levers.

1005
00:57:11,040 --> 00:57:13,640
Speaker 1: It's using your vision and your hearing, and it's making

1006
00:57:13,680 --> 00:57:16,640
Speaker 1: your body move, but you're just not there for it.

1007
00:57:17,320 --> 00:57:20,040
Speaker 1: You can do all that stuff almost perfectly unconscious of

1008
00:57:20,040 --> 00:57:23,440
Speaker 1: the process of driving, if it's highway hypnosis or whatever else,

1009
00:57:23,720 --> 00:57:27,680
Speaker 1: acting purely out of habit an instinct. When suddenly there's

1010
00:57:27,720 --> 00:57:30,200
Speaker 1: a mime in the middle of the street pretending to

1011
00:57:30,240 --> 00:57:32,880
Speaker 1: be stuck in a glass box, well that's gonna that's

1012
00:57:32,880 --> 00:57:34,880
Speaker 1: gonna shake you out of it right there. Yeah, yeah,

1013
00:57:34,920 --> 00:57:37,040
Speaker 1: So what do you do about this? Obviously, if you

1014
00:57:37,080 --> 00:57:40,640
Speaker 1: are a conscious human like us, you snap out of it.

1015
00:57:41,000 --> 00:57:44,920
Speaker 1: Your highway hypnosis goes away. You suddenly become very conscious

1016
00:57:44,920 --> 00:57:47,920
Speaker 1: of yourself. You become conscious of your driving. You start

1017
00:57:48,040 --> 00:57:52,920
Speaker 1: nerotizing your imagine self performing possible reactions to the situation.

1018
00:57:53,040 --> 00:57:56,080
Speaker 1: Right You're working through what should I do? And you

1019
00:57:56,200 --> 00:58:01,240
Speaker 1: compare these imagined hypotheticals to decide what's gonna happen. And

1020
00:58:01,280 --> 00:58:05,120
Speaker 1: this is one way we often find ourselves quote using consciousness,

1021
00:58:05,160 --> 00:58:08,760
Speaker 1: when we have to suddenly deal with novel stimuli. A

1022
00:58:08,800 --> 00:58:11,760
Speaker 1: thing you didn't expect, that isn't part of your habit

1023
00:58:11,840 --> 00:58:14,600
Speaker 1: process gets thrown in front of you, and now you've

1024
00:58:14,640 --> 00:58:18,320
Speaker 1: got a novelty problem. It's an outside context problem and

1025
00:58:18,360 --> 00:58:20,919
Speaker 1: you've got to deal with it. Yeah, mine in the street. Yeah,

1026
00:58:21,080 --> 00:58:22,800
Speaker 1: nothing has prepared you for this. How are you going

1027
00:58:22,840 --> 00:58:25,240
Speaker 1: to roll with this change? Right? So, in in Jane's

1028
00:58:25,320 --> 00:58:29,120
Speaker 1: vision of consciousness, this is what consciousness mainly does. We

1029
00:58:29,200 --> 00:58:33,600
Speaker 1: employ our consciousness in volition and decision making when we're

1030
00:58:33,680 --> 00:58:37,280
Speaker 1: encountering something that we were not used to. But so

1031
00:58:37,320 --> 00:58:40,120
Speaker 1: that's for us, that's conscious people. What if you were

1032
00:58:40,160 --> 00:58:43,760
Speaker 1: not capable of consciousness? What if you were entirely a

1033
00:58:43,760 --> 00:58:48,240
Speaker 1: creature of habit behaviors, like like you know, you're you're

1034
00:58:48,320 --> 00:58:50,120
Speaker 1: like you are when you're driving the car out of

1035
00:58:50,160 --> 00:58:53,400
Speaker 1: habit and you just can't turn to the internal nearrotization,

1036
00:58:53,560 --> 00:58:58,640
Speaker 1: What do you do well, Jane says the hypothetical bicameral

1037
00:58:58,680 --> 00:59:02,640
Speaker 1: person of antiquity. In this example, I've given um instead

1038
00:59:02,640 --> 00:59:05,320
Speaker 1: of being conscious when faced with the mim in the street,

1039
00:59:05,360 --> 00:59:09,040
Speaker 1: instead of becoming conscious of the novel stimuli, would instead

1040
00:59:09,160 --> 00:59:13,960
Speaker 1: unconsciously hear a voice telling them what to do about it,

1041
00:59:14,120 --> 00:59:19,200
Speaker 1: and they would obey avoid the mine. Yeah, it would say.

1042
00:59:19,280 --> 00:59:23,200
Speaker 1: It would be as if a parent said, like, go

1043
00:59:23,280 --> 00:59:26,080
Speaker 1: around it, and you hear the voice of maybe your

1044
00:59:26,120 --> 00:59:29,840
Speaker 1: mom or your dad, or some authority figure, your boss

1045
00:59:29,960 --> 00:59:35,120
Speaker 1: or your chieftain, and yeah, suddenly would tell you, okay,

1046
00:59:35,200 --> 00:59:37,000
Speaker 1: just drive to the left and go around it and

1047
00:59:37,040 --> 00:59:41,320
Speaker 1: then proceed as normal, and then you would obey. So

1048
00:59:41,840 --> 00:59:44,720
Speaker 1: in the next episode, we're going to go into the

1049
00:59:45,200 --> 00:59:49,000
Speaker 1: into great depth about the evidence that James presents for

1050
00:59:49,160 --> 00:59:51,920
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind in history. So we're gonna look at

1051
00:59:51,960 --> 00:59:54,680
Speaker 1: literature and archaeology and all this stuff about what what

1052
00:59:54,720 --> 00:59:57,200
Speaker 1: he thinks makes the case for the existence of the

1053
00:59:57,200 --> 00:59:59,960
Speaker 1: bicameral mind. But first I think we should just look

1054
01:00:00,040 --> 01:00:02,760
Speaker 1: a couple of objections you might have to how could

1055
01:00:02,760 --> 01:00:05,560
Speaker 1: this be possible? How could humans be like this? Yeah,

1056
01:00:05,640 --> 01:00:08,080
Speaker 1: and I mean, of course when all of this we

1057
01:00:08,120 --> 01:00:10,200
Speaker 1: have to state the obvious that it is just it

1058
01:00:10,360 --> 01:00:15,360
Speaker 1: is difficult to try and imagine a default, uh human

1059
01:00:15,480 --> 01:00:19,480
Speaker 1: mindset that is like this. Absolutely, So here's one objection.

1060
01:00:19,520 --> 01:00:23,560
Speaker 1: Can people really hear hallucinatory voices that are indistinguishable from

1061
01:00:23,560 --> 01:00:27,800
Speaker 1: real voices? The answer to this is undoubtedly, yes, just absolutely.

1062
01:00:27,920 --> 01:00:31,760
Speaker 1: If you doubt this, go read about auditory hallucinations. Auditory

1063
01:00:31,800 --> 01:00:35,440
Speaker 1: hallucinations are number one, They're very common. Even lots of

1064
01:00:35,440 --> 01:00:38,240
Speaker 1: people who don't normally hallucinate, at some point in their

1065
01:00:38,240 --> 01:00:41,600
Speaker 1: life will have an auditory hallucination, often in a period

1066
01:00:41,600 --> 01:00:46,320
Speaker 1: of intense stress. And auditory hallucinations are often perceived as

1067
01:00:46,440 --> 01:00:50,520
Speaker 1: absolutely real, not necessarily fuzzy or dreamlike, though they can

1068
01:00:50,560 --> 01:00:53,360
Speaker 1: be like that too, But in many cases they are

1069
01:00:53,400 --> 01:00:56,680
Speaker 1: perceived as as lucid and clear and real as the

1070
01:00:56,760 --> 01:01:00,600
Speaker 1: voices of people around them. Here's another question. You might

1071
01:01:00,640 --> 01:01:03,920
Speaker 1: be like, well, wait a minute, can hallucinatory voices really

1072
01:01:04,000 --> 01:01:07,480
Speaker 1: provide helpful information? Like don't they? Just if you're imagining

1073
01:01:07,840 --> 01:01:11,120
Speaker 1: the experience of a person with schizophrenia who is caused

1074
01:01:11,120 --> 01:01:14,480
Speaker 1: a lot of suffering by their condition, that certainly does happen.

1075
01:01:14,560 --> 01:01:18,080
Speaker 1: People can be, you know, told very nasty, negative, unpleasant

1076
01:01:18,080 --> 01:01:21,160
Speaker 1: things by voices in their head. But there are cases

1077
01:01:21,200 --> 01:01:24,080
Speaker 1: where these voices do seem to provide comfort and helpful

1078
01:01:24,120 --> 01:01:27,920
Speaker 1: information and to guide into into guide behaviors in a

1079
01:01:28,000 --> 01:01:30,960
Speaker 1: in a useful way. It just depends on the case. Well,

1080
01:01:31,000 --> 01:01:35,320
Speaker 1: and plus not every example James makes about the bicameral

1081
01:01:35,360 --> 01:01:37,800
Speaker 1: mind is a case where the voice or the voice

1082
01:01:37,800 --> 01:01:41,360
Speaker 1: of the gods is telling the individual to do something

1083
01:01:41,480 --> 01:01:44,680
Speaker 1: that's beneficial, right, right, I mean, just the same way

1084
01:01:44,720 --> 01:01:49,840
Speaker 1: that conscious humans can make bad decisions. Your bicameral human

1085
01:01:49,920 --> 01:01:52,320
Speaker 1: could have part of their brain tell them to do

1086
01:01:52,440 --> 01:01:55,000
Speaker 1: something that is a bad decision. It's just part of

1087
01:01:55,040 --> 01:01:58,240
Speaker 1: the human brain that sometimes it makes bad decisions, whether

1088
01:01:58,320 --> 01:02:01,120
Speaker 1: it's existing in a bicameral state or a conscious state.

1089
01:02:01,760 --> 01:02:04,600
Speaker 1: But so anyway, Yeah, these voices, it's not necessarily that

1090
01:02:04,600 --> 01:02:07,840
Speaker 1: they're omnipotent or godlike in their knowledge, but rather when

1091
01:02:07,920 --> 01:02:11,000
Speaker 1: they are helpful, they tend to command information and insight

1092
01:02:11,040 --> 01:02:13,760
Speaker 1: on about the level of a human brain. This is

1093
01:02:13,800 --> 01:02:16,520
Speaker 1: not really surprising because they are from a human brain.

1094
01:02:17,480 --> 01:02:19,400
Speaker 1: So then okay, So if you're with us so far,

1095
01:02:19,520 --> 01:02:22,880
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, okay, well, what actually causes hallucinations?

1096
01:02:23,040 --> 01:02:25,919
Speaker 1: Where do they come from? If you're hearing voices? Uh?

1097
01:02:26,120 --> 01:02:29,400
Speaker 1: It depends on many factors. Different people have vastly different

1098
01:02:29,480 --> 01:02:32,680
Speaker 1: levels of susceptibility to hallucinations. Some people are very prone

1099
01:02:32,720 --> 01:02:35,600
Speaker 1: to them experienced them all the time. Other people are

1100
01:02:35,680 --> 01:02:37,800
Speaker 1: not prone to them, but at some point in their

1101
01:02:37,800 --> 01:02:42,120
Speaker 1: life will experience one, and in almost all cases, Jane says,

1102
01:02:42,160 --> 01:02:46,600
Speaker 1: the trigger for hallucinations is stress. In hallucination prone people,

1103
01:02:46,600 --> 01:02:49,439
Speaker 1: it takes very little stress to trigger one. In less

1104
01:02:49,440 --> 01:02:52,480
Speaker 1: prone people. It takes a lot of stress, Jane says,

1105
01:02:52,560 --> 01:02:55,280
Speaker 1: quote during the eras of the bicameral mind, we may

1106
01:02:55,320 --> 01:02:59,040
Speaker 1: suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much much

1107
01:02:59,200 --> 01:03:03,600
Speaker 1: lower than either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only

1108
01:03:03,680 --> 01:03:07,000
Speaker 1: stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in

1109
01:03:07,080 --> 01:03:10,680
Speaker 1: behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation.

1110
01:03:10,800 --> 01:03:12,400
Speaker 1: This is what we were talking about with the mime

1111
01:03:12,440 --> 01:03:15,080
Speaker 1: in the road. You've suddenly had something that your habits

1112
01:03:15,160 --> 01:03:17,200
Speaker 1: do not account for, and you need to make a

1113
01:03:17,240 --> 01:03:22,400
Speaker 1: decision based on volition. So, resuming the quote, anything that

1114
01:03:22,440 --> 01:03:24,440
Speaker 1: could not be dealt with on the basis of habit,

1115
01:03:24,560 --> 01:03:28,400
Speaker 1: any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight,

1116
01:03:28,800 --> 01:03:31,440
Speaker 1: any choice between whom do obey or what to do,

1117
01:03:31,720 --> 01:03:34,960
Speaker 1: anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to

1118
01:03:35,040 --> 01:03:38,800
Speaker 1: cause an auditory hallucination. You know. To get back to

1119
01:03:38,800 --> 01:03:41,760
Speaker 1: to Westworld just a little bit, you know, I mentioned

1120
01:03:41,800 --> 01:03:45,200
Speaker 1: that they that they used the bicameral mind in that series,

1121
01:03:45,240 --> 01:03:48,200
Speaker 1: and the ideas that at at an earlier point, the

1122
01:03:48,360 --> 01:03:52,600
Speaker 1: robots essentially at a bicameral mind where the creators were

1123
01:03:52,640 --> 01:03:55,840
Speaker 1: speaking in their head. It does remind me of a

1124
01:03:55,880 --> 01:03:58,760
Speaker 1: lot of the modern science of drones where you have

1125
01:03:58,880 --> 01:04:03,320
Speaker 1: a quote man in a loop scenario, um, where you

1126
01:04:03,360 --> 01:04:06,000
Speaker 1: could have you have a machine that's going about it's

1127
01:04:06,080 --> 01:04:11,000
Speaker 1: business and when necessary a a human adjust the behavior

1128
01:04:11,080 --> 01:04:14,440
Speaker 1: of the machine. Yes, yes, totally. Or I think about

1129
01:04:14,720 --> 01:04:18,040
Speaker 1: like the hybrid machine human chess players. Have you read

1130
01:04:18,040 --> 01:04:21,120
Speaker 1: about this? Well, I don't know if it's still the case.

1131
01:04:21,160 --> 01:04:23,760
Speaker 1: For a while, so you had the point where suddenly

1132
01:04:23,840 --> 01:04:27,040
Speaker 1: the best chess programs could outperform the best human players.

1133
01:04:27,680 --> 01:04:29,760
Speaker 1: But then there was a period and we may still

1134
01:04:29,800 --> 01:04:33,000
Speaker 1: be in that period where in fact, better than the

1135
01:04:33,040 --> 01:04:38,640
Speaker 1: best chess programs are players that are chess programs assisted

1136
01:04:38,680 --> 01:04:42,080
Speaker 1: by human players. Okay, so it's almost like, you know,

1137
01:04:42,120 --> 01:04:44,920
Speaker 1: the chess program it basically knows what to do all

1138
01:04:44,960 --> 01:04:48,800
Speaker 1: the time, but maybe to introduce some novelty, the human

1139
01:04:48,800 --> 01:04:52,280
Speaker 1: player steps in and does something clever. Alright, well, what

1140
01:04:52,360 --> 01:04:56,760
Speaker 1: about neuro neurological evidence for this hypothesis? Right? So, this

1141
01:04:56,800 --> 01:04:58,720
Speaker 1: is one where I don't want to go into a

1142
01:04:58,720 --> 01:05:02,040
Speaker 1: whole lot of detail James hypothesis because for one thing,

1143
01:05:02,080 --> 01:05:03,600
Speaker 1: a lot of it. We don't want to get too

1144
01:05:03,600 --> 01:05:06,400
Speaker 1: bogged down here. And in the next episode we're gonna

1145
01:05:06,480 --> 01:05:10,400
Speaker 1: primarily talk about evidence for that James presents for the

1146
01:05:10,400 --> 01:05:14,960
Speaker 1: theory um but his neurological hypothesis may also just in

1147
01:05:15,000 --> 01:05:18,480
Speaker 1: some cases be proven wrong by later experiments, and we'll

1148
01:05:18,480 --> 01:05:20,840
Speaker 1: talk about that some more in the second episode, but

1149
01:05:21,160 --> 01:05:24,520
Speaker 1: here's the gist. There is generally a sense in which

1150
01:05:24,560 --> 01:05:27,440
Speaker 1: the two hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere in

1151
01:05:27,480 --> 01:05:32,120
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere are genuinely divided and can in some

1152
01:05:32,280 --> 01:05:37,480
Speaker 1: senses act independently, almost as if they were two separate persons. Now,

1153
01:05:37,520 --> 01:05:39,360
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about some of the evidence for

1154
01:05:39,400 --> 01:05:42,880
Speaker 1: this before and episodes in the past, right, Yeah, and uh,

1155
01:05:42,920 --> 01:05:45,919
Speaker 1: and we certainly have talked about and we've discussed uni

1156
01:05:45,960 --> 01:05:48,920
Speaker 1: himispheric sleep and what it would be like if a

1157
01:05:49,000 --> 01:05:51,960
Speaker 1: human experience uni himispheric sleep. There's a character in an

1158
01:05:52,000 --> 01:05:56,000
Speaker 1: Ian in Banks Culture novel that has that scenario going on,

1159
01:05:56,200 --> 01:05:59,200
Speaker 1: and they've essentially got two different personalities. When there's different

1160
01:05:59,240 --> 01:06:02,880
Speaker 1: personalities because if one side is active, they're they're one way,

1161
01:06:02,920 --> 01:06:05,080
Speaker 1: of the other side at active they're another way. And

1162
01:06:05,080 --> 01:06:07,840
Speaker 1: then the if both sides are active, you know, the

1163
01:06:07,840 --> 01:06:10,959
Speaker 1: standard human experience, you have a mix of both. Now,

1164
01:06:11,400 --> 01:06:14,800
Speaker 1: it's interesting that James points out that on the left

1165
01:06:14,840 --> 01:06:16,680
Speaker 1: hemisphere in most people this is going to be the

1166
01:06:16,720 --> 01:06:20,160
Speaker 1: dominant hemisphere, and you know, right handed people, generally this

1167
01:06:20,200 --> 01:06:22,400
Speaker 1: will be the left left hemisphere of the brain, though

1168
01:06:22,400 --> 01:06:26,200
Speaker 1: it can alternate for other people. Um the left hemisphere

1169
01:06:26,280 --> 01:06:30,480
Speaker 1: is where speech generally happens, but James turns his attention

1170
01:06:30,600 --> 01:06:34,360
Speaker 1: to the analog speech areas of the right brain in

1171
01:06:34,440 --> 01:06:38,680
Speaker 1: most people. So under Jane's schema, in the bicameral mind,

1172
01:06:39,040 --> 01:06:42,160
Speaker 1: the non dominant hemisphere, which is the right hemisphere and

1173
01:06:42,200 --> 01:06:48,640
Speaker 1: most people, generates auditory hallucinated voices perceived by the dominant

1174
01:06:48,640 --> 01:06:52,200
Speaker 1: hemisphere or the left hemisphere and most people. And his

1175
01:06:52,400 --> 01:06:56,480
Speaker 1: explicit neurological hypothesis is quote, the speech of the gods

1176
01:06:56,680 --> 01:07:00,560
Speaker 1: was directly organized in what corresponds to vernic the's area

1177
01:07:00,720 --> 01:07:04,280
Speaker 1: on the right hemisphere and spoken or heard over the

1178
01:07:04,360 --> 01:07:08,920
Speaker 1: interior commissures to or by the auditory areas of the

1179
01:07:09,040 --> 01:07:13,880
Speaker 1: left temporal lobe. And these commands are then obeyed more

1180
01:07:13,960 --> 01:07:17,680
Speaker 1: or less automatically, as an obedient child obeys the commands

1181
01:07:17,680 --> 01:07:19,960
Speaker 1: of a parent or a member of a social animal

1182
01:07:20,000 --> 01:07:23,600
Speaker 1: species submits to the authority of another individual higher up

1183
01:07:23,640 --> 01:07:26,760
Speaker 1: the dominance hierarchy. And he goes into great detail about

1184
01:07:27,800 --> 01:07:31,840
Speaker 1: about verbal dominance, like the uh the research on like

1185
01:07:31,960 --> 01:07:35,040
Speaker 1: how people obey commands and how you can control people's

1186
01:07:35,040 --> 01:07:37,479
Speaker 1: minds by getting right up in their space and giving

1187
01:07:37,520 --> 01:07:40,560
Speaker 1: them verbal commands. Um and you know, in in reading

1188
01:07:40,600 --> 01:07:42,760
Speaker 1: about all of this, I kept thinking back to UH

1189
01:07:42,840 --> 01:07:45,680
Speaker 1: to yoga class. I love going to I love doing

1190
01:07:45,760 --> 01:07:48,160
Speaker 1: yoga on my own where I'm essentially calling the shots

1191
01:07:48,160 --> 01:07:50,160
Speaker 1: and following a pattern. But I also love going to

1192
01:07:50,200 --> 01:07:52,520
Speaker 1: a class where there is a uh there, there is

1193
01:07:52,560 --> 01:07:55,800
Speaker 1: a leader, there is a teacher who is telling us

1194
01:07:55,840 --> 01:07:58,800
Speaker 1: how to move our bodies for for an hour and

1195
01:07:58,800 --> 01:08:01,080
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, an hour and a half, And it's something

1196
01:08:01,200 --> 01:08:05,000
Speaker 1: very liberating in that. Yeah. Uh So. In other words,

1197
01:08:05,680 --> 01:08:08,840
Speaker 1: in Jane's hypothesis about the neurology of this, the non

1198
01:08:09,000 --> 01:08:13,360
Speaker 1: dominant hemisphere does the integration of information in the difficult

1199
01:08:13,640 --> 01:08:17,240
Speaker 1: thinking about how to deal with stressful situations brought about

1200
01:08:17,240 --> 01:08:20,600
Speaker 1: by novel stimuli, and then that that right hemisphere or

1201
01:08:20,640 --> 01:08:24,720
Speaker 1: the non dominant hemisphere, tells the dominant hemisphere what to do,

1202
01:08:25,000 --> 01:08:29,760
Speaker 1: and the dominant dominant hemisphere incorporates that information and enacts it.

1203
01:08:30,720 --> 01:08:33,760
Speaker 1: So he offers five main pieces of evidence for his

1204
01:08:33,800 --> 01:08:37,680
Speaker 1: neurological hypothesis. I just want to present his summary of

1205
01:08:37,760 --> 01:08:40,080
Speaker 1: them very very quickly, and some of these will get

1206
01:08:40,120 --> 01:08:43,280
Speaker 1: into more detail in part two. Yes, so he says,

1207
01:08:43,360 --> 01:08:46,840
Speaker 1: the pieces of evidence are that, quote one, both hemispheres

1208
01:08:46,840 --> 01:08:49,800
Speaker 1: are able to understand language, while normally only the left

1209
01:08:49,920 --> 01:08:54,000
Speaker 1: can speak. That's kind of interesting too, that there is

1210
01:08:54,040 --> 01:08:57,600
Speaker 1: some vestigial functioning in the right Vernicke's area in a

1211
01:08:57,600 --> 01:09:00,479
Speaker 1: way similar to the voices of God. So he identifies

1212
01:09:00,560 --> 01:09:03,320
Speaker 1: that with like activity in the right hemisphere, and most

1213
01:09:03,320 --> 01:09:07,519
Speaker 1: people the non dominant hemisphere in this speech associated area

1214
01:09:07,960 --> 01:09:13,880
Speaker 1: being associated in say, people with schizophrenia hearing voices auditory hallucinations,

1215
01:09:14,280 --> 01:09:17,040
Speaker 1: for example, if there are somewhat severed or one is

1216
01:09:17,120 --> 01:09:20,799
Speaker 1: turned off essentially the other can behave as a person

1217
01:09:20,840 --> 01:09:26,560
Speaker 1: independently with some adaptation um for that, the contemporary differences

1218
01:09:26,640 --> 01:09:30,840
Speaker 1: between the hemispheres and cognitive functions at least echo such

1219
01:09:30,920 --> 01:09:34,160
Speaker 1: differences of function between man and God as seen in

1220
01:09:34,200 --> 01:09:37,679
Speaker 1: the literature of bicameral Man. So he's comparing. He's saying

1221
01:09:37,680 --> 01:09:40,320
Speaker 1: that there are some analogies between the functions of the

1222
01:09:40,400 --> 01:09:43,639
Speaker 1: left brain and right right brain to man and God,

1223
01:09:43,640 --> 01:09:47,000
Speaker 1: as we will see in some ancient literature and finally

1224
01:09:47,040 --> 01:09:49,719
Speaker 1: he appeals to the sort of plasticity of the brain

1225
01:09:49,840 --> 01:09:53,280
Speaker 1: that the environment shapes the way the brain functions to

1226
01:09:53,360 --> 01:09:56,000
Speaker 1: an incredible extent. A lot of what the brain does

1227
01:09:56,160 --> 01:09:59,280
Speaker 1: is not determined by your genes, but is determined by

1228
01:09:59,400 --> 01:10:02,720
Speaker 1: how you grow up in your social environment. All right,

1229
01:10:02,760 --> 01:10:05,599
Speaker 1: So those are the basics, alright. So yeah, so we've

1230
01:10:05,680 --> 01:10:07,799
Speaker 1: established that. In the next episode, we're going to explore

1231
01:10:07,960 --> 01:10:10,800
Speaker 1: what James presents is the evidence for the existence of

1232
01:10:10,840 --> 01:10:13,880
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind and the transition from the bicameral mind

1233
01:10:13,920 --> 01:10:16,680
Speaker 1: to the conscious mind. But I want to end just

1234
01:10:16,720 --> 01:10:20,000
Speaker 1: by comparing the ideas the bicameral mind versus the conscious mind.

1235
01:10:20,160 --> 01:10:22,400
Speaker 1: I think one of the hardest things to recognize and

1236
01:10:22,520 --> 01:10:25,640
Speaker 1: keep in mind here is that we have such a

1237
01:10:25,760 --> 01:10:30,080
Speaker 1: pro consciousness bias. I mean, we we just tend to say, like, well,

1238
01:10:30,080 --> 01:10:33,320
Speaker 1: consciousness is obviously what what you know, the good life

1239
01:10:33,400 --> 01:10:36,080
Speaker 1: is all about. But Jane's I don't think it's ever

1240
01:10:36,200 --> 01:10:39,920
Speaker 1: explicitly saying that one kind of mind is better than another,

1241
01:10:40,439 --> 01:10:43,000
Speaker 1: or even that one kind of mind is smarter than

1242
01:10:43,040 --> 01:10:46,120
Speaker 1: the other, because they do just seem to offer different

1243
01:10:46,160 --> 01:10:49,559
Speaker 1: adaptive capabilities, right, Yeah, I mean, and as will explore.

1244
01:10:49,600 --> 01:10:52,480
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a strong case that when the bicameral

1245
01:10:52,520 --> 01:10:55,800
Speaker 1: mind goes away, I mean that it's it has tremendous

1246
01:10:55,840 --> 01:11:00,360
Speaker 1: catastrophic consequences for these these early cultures. Right, So there's

1247
01:11:00,360 --> 01:11:02,880
Speaker 1: any truth to his theory, it may be the case that,

1248
01:11:02,920 --> 01:11:06,280
Speaker 1: for example, people of the bicameral mind have strengths like

1249
01:11:06,360 --> 01:11:09,240
Speaker 1: they work better in groups. They on average have greater

1250
01:11:09,400 --> 01:11:13,559
Speaker 1: mental endurance, you know, they can do things more and

1251
01:11:13,800 --> 01:11:16,240
Speaker 1: so they're sort of like tougher in keeping at tasks,

1252
01:11:16,760 --> 01:11:20,760
Speaker 1: and they have more creativity, more fluid linguistic creativity. They

1253
01:11:20,760 --> 01:11:23,599
Speaker 1: may have been better poets. They may have been just

1254
01:11:23,800 --> 01:11:26,600
Speaker 1: as we've been discussing, they may have been happier, if

1255
01:11:26,720 --> 01:11:29,000
Speaker 1: in a way that is not like our happiness. Right.

1256
01:11:29,080 --> 01:11:31,040
Speaker 1: And then on the other hand, of course, people with

1257
01:11:31,040 --> 01:11:34,480
Speaker 1: conscious minds he's saying, are probably on average more adaptable

1258
01:11:34,560 --> 01:11:37,479
Speaker 1: that are able to deal with new stimuli when it

1259
01:11:37,520 --> 01:11:41,160
Speaker 1: comes up and the mind appears in the street. Uh,

1260
01:11:41,280 --> 01:11:44,000
Speaker 1: you know, I M I won't stop and surrender to it. Right.

1261
01:11:44,560 --> 01:11:47,160
Speaker 1: But but the takeaway if there's any truth to Jane's theory,

1262
01:11:47,240 --> 01:11:50,360
Speaker 1: I just want to stress is not bicameral mind equals

1263
01:11:50,400 --> 01:11:54,479
Speaker 1: old stupid and bad and conscious mind equals new smart

1264
01:11:54,520 --> 01:11:58,760
Speaker 1: and good. They're they're subjectively different models of experiencing the

1265
01:11:58,800 --> 01:12:03,880
Speaker 1: world with different links and weaknesses. However, the message is

1266
01:12:03,920 --> 01:12:09,360
Speaker 1: still that ancient people were strange. Ancient people to us,

1267
01:12:09,439 --> 01:12:13,120
Speaker 1: we're alien to us. Yeah, So in the next episode,

1268
01:12:13,160 --> 01:12:18,959
Speaker 1: we're gonna run through historical, religious, and even modern cultural

1269
01:12:19,000 --> 01:12:22,680
Speaker 1: evidence that he says supports this theory. So if you

1270
01:12:22,720 --> 01:12:26,000
Speaker 1: thought there wasn't enough bloodshed in this episode, hang on,

1271
01:12:26,240 --> 01:12:31,519
Speaker 1: because empires will fall, uh, gods and goddesses will rage.

1272
01:12:32,439 --> 01:12:34,600
Speaker 1: The whole, the whole nine yards, the whole clash of

1273
01:12:34,600 --> 01:12:38,160
Speaker 1: the Titans will take place in the second episode and

1274
01:12:38,200 --> 01:12:40,080
Speaker 1: in the meantime. If you want to check out other

1275
01:12:40,080 --> 01:12:42,200
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, head on over

1276
01:12:42,439 --> 01:12:44,200
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is

1277
01:12:44,200 --> 01:12:46,360
Speaker 1: the mothership and that's where you can find all the

1278
01:12:46,400 --> 01:12:49,439
Speaker 1: episodes of the show. You also find videos and blog

1279
01:12:49,479 --> 01:12:52,320
Speaker 1: posts and links out to our various social media accounts

1280
01:12:52,360 --> 01:12:55,960
Speaker 1: such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, and Hey. On Facebook,

1281
01:12:56,000 --> 01:12:58,880
Speaker 1: we have a discussion group called the Stuff to Blow

1282
01:12:58,920 --> 01:13:01,160
Speaker 1: Your Mind Discussion Modu. Well, that's a great place for

1283
01:13:01,200 --> 01:13:04,519
Speaker 1: you to interact with other fans and with us uh

1284
01:13:04,600 --> 01:13:07,320
Speaker 1: in in more of a long form format and if

1285
01:13:07,320 --> 01:13:08,960
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with this directly the

1286
01:13:08,960 --> 01:13:11,519
Speaker 1: old fashioned way, as always, you can email us at

1287
01:13:11,560 --> 01:13:24,040
Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for

1288
01:13:24,200 --> 01:13:26,519
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it

1289
01:13:26,600 --> 01:13:50,520
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com