Camp Gagnon - Every Theory of Consciousness Explained | Dr. Richard Brown

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

🚨Don't Forget to Rate Us 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Dr. Richard Brown is a professor in the Philosophy Program and an Adjunct Professor in the Psychology Program at LaGuardia Community College. Today, he joins us to discuss the origin of consciousness, consciousness in animals, philosophy of God, and other interesting questions about life. WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsors: Magic Spoon, Morgan & Morgan and Bluechew!MagicSpoon: https://magicspoon.com/camp🏕️GET YOUR CAMP MERCH HERE: https://campgoods.co/🏕️ FREE NEWSLETTER HERE: https://camp.beehiiv.com/TIMESTAMP: 0:00 What Is Consciousness?8:57 What Is An Animal's Conscious Experience?18:25 Difference In Visual Perceptions33:07 Neuroscience In Psychology37:05 Integrated Information Theory39:14 Attention In Consciousness + Psychology Experiments44:14 Recurrency In The Brain46:27 Higher Order of Philosophy + Seeing Red As Green50:06 Example of Order of Philosophy1:04:46 Galileo's Error + Panpsychism1:19:58 Challenges For Panpsychism and Dualism1:23:31 Evolution of The Idea of Consciousness1:26:44 Is Knowledge Validity?1:34:52 Neutral Monism1:36:15 Agnosticism1:41:09 The Speed of Light1:42:40 Astrology1:44:15 Basis of Belief + God1:54:38 Philosophy and Comedy1:56:06 Hypnotism1:59:49 Psychological Explanations For NHI Encounter2:09:31 Empirical Evidence For Supernatural Events2:17:45 Sensing People Staring + Double Slit Experiment

I would like to know what consciousness is. Does it exist? Does it exist? Oh, all right. You're awake right now. We say you're conscious. But if I hit you over the head, knocked you out, we'd say you're unconscious. I won't do that, obviously. Thank you.

I'm showing great restraints. The third idea, I would say, attention-based processes. There's a very famous example of there's two basketball teams, one wearing white jerseys and one wearing black jerseys. And subjects are told to count the number of times that the players in white pass the basketball to each other. During the time when they're following the basketball around as it's being passed, a guy in a guerrilla suit walks out. He stops in the middle of the players, he waves at the camera. And the surprising result is that they just don't notice it.

They're shocked. Some people don't believe hypnosis is real, and sometimes it isn't real. But then there are other cases where there is real hypnotism. I think the evidence is there that this is a real phenomenon. And only some people can be hypnotized. I can't. So don't try. Now, there are other people that I've talked to on this very podcast.

Great people. but then they tell me truly unbelievable things. For example, alien abduction. And that breaks my brain. How do you parse this experience? One possibility is that there are these aliens, most likely lizard overrulers in the government, obviously. You can have very profound experiences that seem real, but they're hallucinatory.

Richard Brown. How are you, sir? I'm great. How are you? I'm excellent. Thank you so much for joining me. All right, let's just jump into it. Okay?

I would like to know what consciousness is. does it exist and if so where and could you just lay out some of the different theories that people have about consciousness and kind of just like really walk me through how I can even start to wrap my mind around this question uh-huh okay so does it exist oh shit all right um so the word consciousness is like multibly ambiguous so first of all before you would do any of those things that you were asking you sort of have to ask what you meant by the word consciousness. So, for example, you're awake right now. We say you're conscious. But if I hit you over the head and knocked you out, we'd say you're unconscious. I won't do that, obviously.

Thank you. Well, it depends. I'm showing great restraints. But so when you go to sleep by night, you're unconscious. Okay, so in one sense of the word conscious means being awake versus being asleep. In the literature, sometimes people call that creature consciousness, because the word conscious is applying to the whole organism. On the other hand, we could say that you're conscious when you're aware of something. So when you're aware of something in the environment, like you set your, I guess that's ice coffee, strange choice in the middle of the winter, but okay, you set your ice coffee on the table, so you were aware of the table in some sense. So awareness in this sense, we could say is like being informationally responsive to the environment in an appropriate way.

But of course, psychologists and neuroscientists like to say there's such a thing as being unconsciously aware. So, you know, famously, maybe Freud started this in the West at least talking about unconscious beliefs and desires. But it's kind of, you know, we've come a long way since Freud. And cognitive psychology generally posits that there are many unconscious states in your mind, which are guiding your behavior or maybe even influencing the things that you say, but of which you have no awareness. So there's conscious versus unconscious in the state of a mental state being conscious or a mental state. being unconscious. So that's already three different senses of the word conscious, whether apply to the creature, whether it applies to being aware of something in the environment, or whether it applies to you being aware of some internal state of yours. On the other hand, people talk

about self-consciousness or introspective consciousness, where self-consciousness is kind of being aware of yourself as a self. Introspective consciousness involves access to your own mental state, sort of knowing what you're thinking, what you feel. Like, you know, if you're in pain, you can sort of tell where the pain is, like what the intensity of the pain is. And whatever mental activity you're engaged in in that moment, we call introspection. So those four things, if I'm counting correctly, maybe five, we would want to, I would want to distinguish from what philosophers are generally interested in when they talk about consciousness. And that is what we call phenomenal consciousness. Femomominal consciousness is a jargon tech word that we may

up, but it's supposed to like name something, which is ordinarily common sense, namely experience. And the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who's Emeritus at NYU, wrote a paper called What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he introduced this locution that we use a lot, and it's something that it's like. So we say that there's phenomenal consciousness when there's something that's like from your point of view, when there's a distinctive experiential quality or aspect attached to each one of these things. And so each one of those things that I was previously mentioning, it looks like we could at least have some way that they come apart from phenomenal consciousness. So, for example, when you're unconscious in the creature sense, you could have a dream. And dreams are plausibly

phenomenally conscious, like you're having an experience in the dream state. On the other hand, there are some cases maybe where you could be creature conscious without phenomenal consciousness, or at least where it looks, maybe that's the case. For example, sleepwalking. What's up, camp family? What's up, campers? Two big announcements. Don't skip this. Two massive announcements. The merch store is back open. That's right. Camp Goods is back in stock. We got these hats that I'm wearing right now. I've been rocking them both on here. I'm on flagrant. I've been wearing them on stage. We got a bunch more hats like the ones behind me. You can see them all here on the website. We also got some shirts. Oh, man. What is this one right here? Come on now. Come on now. Camp gear for all terrain. We got some other ones. What is this one right here? Oh, this one's beautiful. This one might be one of my favorites. The The colors are absolutely crazy. This is Camp Gagnon, vintage wisdom across the globe. Come on now.

We got all that and more on the store. We also got these sick mugs right here. You might have seen me maybe sipping from one of these in some of the recent episodes. These are sick. They are all available on the website, campgoids.com. Check it out. The link is in the description. And by supporting the merchandise, you are obviously supporting the show.

You're supporting me and you're obviously, you know, supporting all the amazing people to make the show happen like Christos, who is currently throwing. me T-shirts from underneath this desk here. So please check that out. Additionally, I'm on the road. That's right. I'm doing my one hour of stand-up comedy. Some of the greatest jokes ever written, okay? That's not true, but they are my jokes, and I wrote them. And I'll be in Rochester, New York, March 26, and I'll be in Portland, Maine on April 27th. And that one, I'm doing with Joey Avery. You know Joey Avery, a friend of the show. He sat across from me many times, and I'm explaining some things to him. And he might be my dumb friend, but he is a brilliant stand-up comedian, and we will be there

in Portland, Maine. If you are in these areas, please come out and we're adding a ton of dates all through the summer. So check out my website, themarkgagnon.com for all tour dates and updated info. Come hang out with me. I talk to every single person after the show. If you want to kick it with me, maybe have a drink. I'll be there and I will see you guys on the road. Now let's get back to the show. So people who sleepwalk are aware of the environment in some sense as they walk into the, you know, an embarrassing story. When I was young, I would sleepwalk and we had this big potted plant in our living room when I would go and pee in plant. Yeah, it happens. So if you're thinking that the potted plant is a toilet, then there's got to be some sense in which you're aware of the environment you're in, but in some weird, distorted way.

And we sort of know that people who are sleepwalking are not acting out their dreams. So they're not dreaming at that time. So that opens the question. Are they like alert in some sense, aware of the environments? Alertness comes on a scale. You could be more alert or less alert. But are they not experiencing anything. So I think that there is a good question whether you could have phenomenal consciousness in the absence of these other things. It's also the way I think of like Roomba and self-driving cars. So Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner, is clearly in my view aware of the environment that it's in. It drives around your house. It has sensors. It has sensors. Exactly. It processes information. When the batteries get low, it goes and charges itself. When its bags are full,

it empties itself. When it goes from the hardwood onto the carpet, it changes modes. So these are all doing- Are you being paid by Roomba? I mean, that's a lot of sales pitching for the Roomba. No. I can't even afford a Roomba. But I do watch a lot of Roomba videos on YouTube where they playfully interact with cats, which I find hilarious.

You see when they Roomba fight? Yeah. That one's fine. I like that one guy who like built tanks, like a cardboard, like things that he put on top of the Roomba's and the cats get inside of them. Oh, wow. Swipe at each other. I made $150 bucks out of a Roomba knife fight.

And that's for real. That was actually awesome. But this is a digression. Yes. Sorry. Get yours today at Rumba.com. Well, I was also going to mention self-driving cars, which are showing some awareness. I would say they're creature conscious.

They're kind of alert. They're aware of the environment. They stop at the stop sign, turn left at the light or whatever. But they don't have any experience as far as I can tell. So there's nothing that it's like from the Rumba's point of view, from the robotic vacuum cleaner, not to mention a brand. I guess, okay. From the robotic vacuum cleaners point of view, there's nothing that it's like to change modes or to go back to its charging base or whatever. So what we want to understand then

is where does phenomenal consciousness in the sense of experience, in the sense of there being something that it's like from your point of view, fit into these other more tractable kinds of consciousness-related problems? And the philosopher David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness. Because all of those other things that I was mentioning, it looked like they could be explained by analyzing some function, by talking about, okay, so this is what it means to be alert and aware. What it means is you respond to the environment in the appropriate way. And then we, as scientists, go, and we try to see what mechanisms are in play when you're alert and response to the environment. And we can give a theory.

You can look in the brain and be like, this part lights up when this happens and this part does this. Exactly. But when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, it's not as clear that that can be done. And so, for example, there's a phenomenon called Locked In Syndrome, which has recently been discovered, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, where some patients who seem to be in a coma, when you put them in the FMRI machine and you say, for example, imagine playing tennis. In a regular person, a neurologically intact person, when you say imagine playing tennis, your motor cortex lights up. So the part of the brain that controls the arm and the legs, et cetera, will start to become more active. And some of these patients who were seemingly non-responsive show that same kind of activation. Not as great and not exactly the same,

but still to a level that is very surprising. So it looks like they were aware of the instruction to imagine playing tennis, and it looks like they tried to follow that instruction, and the brain is responding in the appropriate way. But there's a question about whether they have experience. So are they hearing the sound of the voice in the way that you're hearing my voice,

or is it just automatic processing that's unconsoring? conscious in some sense, which they are not experiencing. And of course, to answer a question like that, what we would need is a theory of what phenomenal consciousness is and what kinds of brain activity would be associated with that. And there's many different approaches to trying to answer this question. But that's basically what philosophers are really interested in, whether it's even possible to give an account of that kind of consciousness in terms of what the brain is doing. I mean, that is a phenomenal explanation that I feel like gets the average person. No pun intended.

Well, it was intended, okay? Now that you pointed out, okay, now that I can get credit for it. I mean, no, that is a phenomenal explanation. For the average person that doesn't understand where the current state of philosophical study of consciousness, I think that gets people kind of up to speed as to why this is being a question and what really the discussion, the delineations are. And experience is the most interesting thing. People talk about that like experiencing redness. Yes.

Or like, you know, these different sort of qualities of things. Exactly. Now, this paper, what does it mean to be a bat? What does it like to be a bat? What does it like to be a bat? It's an interesting question. Can you sort of expound on why that paper was so seminal and why it's so important to understanding this idea of experience?

Yeah. So it was written in the 70s, if I'm not mistaken, maybe earlier actually. So I should check my sources. But so at the time, people were very enthusiastic about so-called reductive theories of consciousness, whereby to reduce one thing to another is to show how, in some sense, it really is nothing over and above the other thing. So, for example, water can be reduced to H2O in this sense, because you have some phenomena that you identify in some common sense way, and then you have some way of identifying from a scientific point of view. And to reduce it is to simply show

in some sense that all the properties of the common sense level thing can be explained in terms of the lower level phenomena. So, for example, water is liquid at a certain temperature. And we can explain why that is because of the way H2O, the properties that it has. By atomizing everything, things can sort of be reduced in an explainable way. Yeah, exactly. And so people were sort of optimistic at this time that you could do that with consciousness. And the main question was like, so how is this going to be done? Like, what activity in the brain or in the body? body, when that's a whole different story because there's a long tradition of, you know, us working our way to the brain. But for example, if you feel pain in your toe, the old days,

they used to think the pain was in the toe. And so if you have a paralyzed person who is able to wiggle their toe when you tickle their foot and then they say they don't feel it, there was a real life question about whether is there consciousness in the toe, like is there some sort of experiential aspect that the main person is cut off from? And I think that this is still a question, I would say, but I think the majority consensus is that we've worked our way into the idea that there's no pain in the toe, but there's pain in the brain, which represents or somehow makes you think or feel as though the pain is in the toe. So that's a whole different story. But anyway, so we're focused on the activity of the brain. And Nagle wrote this paper saying, okay, so when there's a

conscious state, there's something that it's like to be in that state. And he said, consider the bat. Bats are mammals, so we sort of assume that they're conscious, but they are very different from us in many different ways. Obviously, echolocation was the big thing that he was pointing out. And so bat could fly around the room and avoid all the obstacles, hone in on, you know, a moth or some tasty berry or something like that, go right for it, grab it, put it in its mouth. But what is it like from the bat's point of view? And his idea was that even if we knew everything about the bat's brain, even if we understood in extraordinary detail everything that was going on, we still wouldn't be able to answer the question,

what was the bat's experience like? So to make it a bit more concrete, the bat is using echolocation. So it's making this high-pitched sound and the sound is coming back and it's guiding its behavior. But is the bat doing something which is like seeing? Is it using sound to generate visual images in its brain

so that it sees with sound? Or is it more like what we would think of as hearing? Is it, you know, like a blind person tapping a stick on the, on the street and using the sound to judge how far things are away? Or is it some other kind of mode of experience that we can't imagine that's neither like sight nor like hearing. And the idea is that even if we knew everything about the bat's brain, we would still have this question of, all right, so what's going on in the mind of the bat? What is it like for the bat to engage in these ideas? Like birds can see different colors. I think that is true.

I'm not a scientist. I think they have a different number of rods and cones on their eyes. And so they're able to sort of see. Or I've actually even heard the theory that they can almost see magnetic waves. Or in some way interact or feel magnetic waves. And it's an interesting question. You say, okay, yeah, sure. They can do that.

But what does that experience like? How do they interact with these magnetic waves when they're flying north or south for winter or summer? Or like, is it just, is it a vibration they feel? Is it sound? Is it put into visual, you know, sort of tracking on the earth? Exactly. So there is a big debate about which animals in nature have phenomenal consciousness. I think it's safe.

Well, I would say it's safe to say mammals, definitely in some birds. But a lot of people will dispute that. And so it ranges all the way from only humans have it all the way down to, no, worms and bees have it all the way down to, well, no, it's pervasive and anything that's living in a has it. So there is a wide range, even plants. So I know some people who would say even plants have consciousness in a sense. So there's a wide range of dispute here. And I think part of the problem is because we don't really understand what phenomenal consciousness is. I mean, we all have it, so we're immediately acquainted with it. It's obviously there. But like what its conditions to arise

are is still a mystery. But my favorite example is chickens. So chickens can see an ultraviolet light, whereas we can't. So we just get the Roy G. Biv. And I don't know about you, but when I found out about these other kinds of light energy, I was very annoyed that I wasn't able to see in them. It's like a sliver. It's like a sliver.

It's such a sliver. It's so annoying. So it's like all of this infrared light snakes have some ability, some snakes have the ability to use infrared light. Bees and chickens have the ability to use ultraviolet light. There's all sorts of, you know, x-rays. This phone can pick up radio waves. I can.

That's annoying. So maybe you are. Yeah, exactly. That's a problem. Positive goodness question. But so if you think about a chicken who's looking at an apple and assume that you believe chickens can have experience, that they can see colors, a good, and their chickens are very intelligent, probably smarter than pigs, according to some scientists. Anyway, so imagine that you're looking at the apple, and so is the chicken. Now, the apple's reflecting light of all these different frequencies.

Some of it's in what we call the visible spectrum, and some of it's in the ultra-exam. and some of it's in the ultraviolet spectrum. So all of that light's hitting my eye and the ultraviolet light is invisible to me and I see the apple is red or reddish yellow or whatever. But a different subset of that same light is hitting the chicken's eye. So is it having a color experience,

one that I can't imagine? Or is it somehow producing like a red or an orange but using ultraviolet light? So these are the kind of questions that Nagel was bringing up. And his idea was, well, it's kind of paradoxical according to him because we have good reasons to think that something physical is going on that explains

or accounts for consciousness. But at the same time, we don't really know how to complete a theory, which would allow us to say what that would link the physiological goings on to the consciousness is going on. And his official diagnosis in that paper was that it has something to do with subjectivity and that there's a kind of tension here because when we try to do science, what we're trying to do is become more and more objective. We're trying to reach what he famously called the view from nowhere, which is we sort of go from the way we see things, and then we transcend that to a more and more abstract level where we leave out our particular viewpoint. So our theory of electromagnetic radiation doesn't really mention us. It starts with us. We see colors, and we're like, what the hell is

light? But then by the time we get to Maxwell's equations, we're out of the picture, and it's just these relationships between these abstract things. And at the very abstractist level, if that's a word, the most abstract level, knowing English suddenly, at the most abstract level, the completed picture of the world from a physical point of view would not mention any points of view, subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, or anything like that.

So Nego kind of had this idea that there's this tension, but the more scientific you become, you kind of leave out the very thing that we're trying to explain. and maybe you can't even get to a point where you can explain phenomenal consciousness in terms of the physical goings-on, because to explain the physical goings-on is to necessarily abstract away from the subjective point of view. So it's almost like we're in this kind of very, as he puts it in the paper, it's like if you went back to Socrates and tried to tell him, Socrates being the philosopher in ancient Greece, and you said, oh, did you know that energy and mass? are identical in some sense.

And he'd say, bro, what are you talking about? Translating Lucy from the Greek. But we understand, because we have Einstein's theories that equals MC squared, and you have to know a lot of math and understand a lot of stuff. But to someone without those concepts, I mean, it's even hard for us to understand in some sense. But even not knowing anything about modern physics

and the trajectory, like Socrates would just have no chance of understanding what you mean when you say energy and mass are identical. And Nagel sort of thinks that's the position we're in when we say consciousness is physical. So it's like we just can't really understand what it would mean for consciousness to be physical because of this subjectivity stuff, which involves this subjective point of view, there being something that it's like and all that kind of stuff. So that kind of set off a lot of debate about this topic. It's related to the philosopher David Chalmers, what he calls the hard problem, which I mentioned earlier. But I think the Nagle version of it is, well, I like it a little bit better, but I like Chalmers version too.

So I'm curious, the experience component. How can we tell what things are experiencing senses or sensory input, right? Like, you could, my cat experiences things. You know what I mean? My cat's seen some shit in my house where I'm, you know, I'm sorry. I don't want to know. Sorry for what I had to see. But it's experienced something.

You know what I mean? Or like, you know, a chicken, right? Like, there's a loud noise. All of a sudden it runs away. Like, that is an experience. So how can we, I maybe like slice this. question of experience to be a little bit more clear to, you know, and obviously this is contested, so maybe even laying out a couple different theories as to why some people would say, you know,

chickens have experiential consciousness, or is it exclusively only to humans? And how can I frame, like, what are the criteria I can use to frame that question? Yeah. So I think when you talk about other animals, there's a harder problem here, not to use coin any weird, terms or anything, but the issue is that when you want to know what I'm experiencing, you ask me. So if you say, do you see this? What color is it? I can tell you, yes, it's reddish or no, I don't see anything at all. But you can't really do that with an animal. So all we have, the non-human animal. So all we have when it comes to non-human animals is their behavior. And as I think, well, the self-driving car in the Roomba example illustrate, it seems possible

to have behavior with no experience whatsoever. And in fact, the very idea of there being unconscious mental processing seems to be the kind of thing where you have behavior but no experience. So, for example, the sleepwalker that I mentioned, who's walking to the refrigerator to make a sandwich with cigarette butts and mayonnaise, is aware of the environment in some sense, but it's an open question whether they're having any kind of experience. My feeling is that probably not. I mean, we don't know for sure, but my experience,

having been sleepwalked, having been a sleepwalker, English is coming back to me slowly. Having been a sleepwalker, I could say that I certainly didn't seem at the time that there was any experiential component to it because when I woke up the morning and my mom was telling me, hey, you pissed in a fucking plant. I was like, what? No, I didn't. Like, you're crazy. And like I just completely, as far as I was concerned, not there. Now, maybe I had experience and I forgot it. You could always tell some story. But it's from my point of view, it's like there is this snap a finger and I woke up in the morning with nothing in between. So it seems at least a possibility that you could have behavior in the absence of experience. And another more

scientific example, I'm going to answer your question. No, no, no, this is great. But another more scientific example is the notion of blindsight, which was discovered in the 1980s by the scientist named Larry Weiss Kranz. So there is this subject, his name's G. Y. We always use the letters to preserve their anonymity, so we don't know his name. I mean, you don't know his name. But anyway, so the guy, G.Y, had some damage to the visual part of his brain. In particular, what's called the occipital cortex, which is the primary visual processing area. So if you know a little bit of anatomy, light hits your eyes, some stuff happens in the retina. It goes to the thalamus, and then from the thalamus to the cortex, and then from the cortex, it starts spreading out. And you

have these two pathways going either over towards your ears in the temporal area or up towards top of your head called the parietal area. Okay, so these guys, blind sight subjects have damage to the primary visual cortex, and they say that they're blind. So they say they can't see. And the way the visual cortex is organized, damage to one little area results in blindness in one specific part of your visual field. So if I just take out this part of your visual cortex, there'll be a little hole in your visual field here. Now, you won't notice the hole there. In fact, G.Y explained it as kind of like the back of your head. He was like, you can't see things behind your head, but you don't feel like there's a hole in your visual field. You just feel like, you know, if someone

holds something behind you, you don't see it. So if you present something to him in his blindfield, he says, I don't see it. And he's also not experiencing blindness, which is fascinating. Yeah, exactly. He's not like having this little black circle or this blank area there that's like missing something. Like, are you blinding your elbow? You know what I mean? You're like, no, I just don't see out of my elbow. I don't even have any frame of reference for what sight sight out of my elbow would be. Exactly. And so, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The weird thing is that when you present a stimulus in that area, and then you say, guess what it is? Well, he says, I don't know.

I already told you. And they say, yeah, but just like if you had to pick something, like say what it is. And so one example they'd use, they present pluses or X's. And they would say, so tell us which one it is. And he said, I have no clue. And they were like, just guess off the top of your head. And you say, I don't know, an X. And it was an X.

Is this like the snow and the chicken experiment as well? like the chicken claw and the snow. We're like, that's, oh, with the Ladoo thing, that's the split brain. Okay, sorry. I'm derailing us. No, no, no, that's related because the similar question could come up. But in those kinds of cases, what's happening is you sever the brain's connection between its two hemispheres.

And so information that comes in from the external world is being sorted in what's on the right side of the world goes to the left part of my brain. What's on that side of the world goes the right part of my brain. Those guys share information. So I have this unified visual. experience, but if you sever that and you cleverly present things to opposite sides in the right way, then the person, so the speech centers being on the left, so whatever they see that's on the right hand side, they'll be able to say that they saw it. But if you ask them to point with

their hand what they saw, they'll point to the thing that they deny seeing. So that's the chicken and the chicken claw in the shovel. If you present the chicken claw on one side and the shovel on the other, then if the chicken claws is on the right hand side, the subject will say, oh, I see a chicken claw. And they say, now point to what you saw, and they point to the shovel. And then they're like, huh, that's weird. And then they say, well, why did you do that? And then they'll say, well, because I don't know, you need a shovel to scoop the chicken shit or something like that. So they make up a story about why they behaved in that way, even though they deny that they saw the shovel.

And the question with respect to phenomenal consciousness, to bring it back to that would be, so is the left side, sorry, the right side of the brain, which is controlling the left, arm and causing it to point at the shovel, is that having an experience, which is detached from the other side? Or is it just an unconscious processing unit, which is computing some stuff and guiding behavior, but without any sort of experience at all. Now, without control to the, without access to the lips and the, you know, the mouth, it can't say anything to you. So all it can do is, is to express itself by using, you know, this side of the brain is controlling that? So there's a question about what's going on on that side of the brain. Like, is it, is it like a

separate self? Is it a separate center of consciousness, a phenomenal consciousness? Or is it just a fancy computer, basically, that's computing some informational stuff and using answering questions in the way that Siri or Alexa would, but without any kind of experience? So that would still tie in, but it's different than blindsight, because in blindsight, you're actually having damage to the visual part of the brain, whereas in the split brain cases, they've severed the connection between the two hemispheres, but the visual cortexes are intact. So there's no damage there. So they're related, but different. I see. So, but in blindsight, though, they, um, they are able to do things using information coming in from vision, but they don't see it. They, they say, like, I don't

consciously experience it. And there's even one very well-known case, which just came out recently, of a guy named T.N, who is the most complete case of a human, a human case that has the almost the entire visual cortex destroyed. And there's a video of him walking down a hallway where he like sidesteps trash can and avoids a printer that they put there. And he says he doesn't see anything. And so people have said,

well, maybe he's using echolocation. And it's like, well, it'd be very hard to do the task, namely to walk down this hallway. He was instructed to walk straight down the hallway and that there were no obstacles. And unbeknownst of him, they put all these obstacles in his way and he just meanders his way right around through them.

So this is a case where, if you take it seriously, a case where there's behavior, but no phenomenal consciousness. And so it does, and there's, I mean, I could go on and on about this, which I actually am doing, but I could go on even further. There's a lot of kind of evidence that you could have complex control of behavior in the absence of experience at all, which brings up the question, what's going on in some of these animal cases where there's a kind of complex behavior. So is your cat who is hearing a loud noise and turning in that way? Are they experiencing the sound of the noise? Or is it the case that they are kind of like a robotic vacuum cleaner that's processing information and orienting their head? Now, I personally believe that animals are conscious, so I'm not trying to argue that they aren't. But what I'm suggesting is that there's a scientific issue about what would count as evidence.

And one of the problems here is that if behavior can be produced unconsciously, like without experience, then you can't simply say there's behavior of a certain sort, therefore there's consciousness because it's possible that that could be explained by unconscious processes. So just to be clear, I am not advocating that we should think that cats are unconscious. What I'm saying is that you can't just naively say the cat behaves in a certain way, therefore it's obviously conscious. That's good enough for common sense. and the good reason not to kick the cat.

But it's not a good enough scientific reason that you could cite to say, this proves that they are conscious in this way. Because if you trace it all the way down, single-cell organisms behave too. Like a single-celled paramecium or some simple organism will move away from harmful stimuli,

will search out nutritive stimuli. And so if you want to say that those things have experience, I guess you could. But on the other hand, you might just say, no, they're just kind of mechanisms that are built in a certain way so that they, you know, if there's a concentration of sugar over here, they'll kind of motor towards it. And if there's some kind of acid over there, they'll motor away from it. So I think the question of what the right criteria is that would allow us to answer the question

you asked is very difficult. Now, that doesn't mean we should give up. And people have different opinions about this. My own view is that what we should do is try to understand phenomenal consciousness in our case. So if we knew what consciousness was in humans, then we could look around and go, okay, so this is what it is. Now is it over there? Is it in the cat? Is that same thing that we think is important in the cat?

Is it in the paramecium or, you know, in the plant, in the universe at large or whatever? So that would be the strategy that I think is the most fruitful, is to start with humans, to look at the theories of consciousness that we have, which is what you originally asked me about, and to try to identify which one of those is on the right track, and then once we had that

to try to look around at other creatures. Now not everyone agrees with that and some people think well we can do what they call a theory light sort of approximation where we look for some distinctive kind of behavior that could only be done

with respect to consciousness or when the animal is conscious. For example sometimes think learning is a universal associative learning is sometimes brought up in this case and simple organisms that could be like classically conditioned

trained to react to some stimulus, you know, that's a pretty low-level stuff. Maybe even plants can do that. But if you want to learn how to react to higher-level things, like, for example, I like getting my paycheck because it allows me to get other things. So I have this, like, higher-level ability to see the connection between the paycheck and PlayStation 6 that I want to get. Like a Raven problem-solving. Yeah, exactly.

It would be like a high-level equation that shows complexity. Exactly. So the problem with that, in my opinion, is that. that so far, we haven't found anything, which doesn't look like it can't be done unconsciously. So every time someone says, you need consciousness to do this, man, like creativity, like problem solving, anything of that nature, it looks like we can find cases where that is being done, but without consciousness. So for example, one kind of famous study in this area was having people think about mortgages on homes. And they were giving them, okay, so would you take this mortgage

or that mortgage, so 20 years with 9% interest rate or 10 years with 5% interest rate or things of that nature. And one group, they just let them sit around and hash it out for as long as they wanted to. In the other group, they gave them the conditions and then distracted it with some other task, like watch the screen and identify when there's a vowel and they flash a bunch of letters. And then, so instead of letting them think about it, they distracted them, whereas the other group they got to just sit around and think as much as they wanted to. And at the end, they said, now answer the question, which one would you prefer?

So the group that got to think about it performed worse. They pick the overall worse mortgage, whereas the group that was distracted by the letter kind of thing picked the better mortgages on average. So they picked the ones that were actually in their benefit. But they didn't sit around deliberate, whereas the other ones did. So that kind of looked like there was some kind of complex problem solving without like a conscious experience of doing it because they were distracted by this other thing. So there were unconscious processes guiding their behavior.

And commonsensically, this happens all the time. Like if I want to solve a problem, I go and do the dishes. Or I play Resident Evil. You know, I'm distracted by something else and so like, oh, right, this is how I want to put that sentence in that paragraph or this is what I need to do. And it's like, okay, but I wasn't sitting there thinking about it. It just pops up. Yeah, it's counterintuitive. There's the whole notion of overthinking doesn't seem like it should exist.

Exactly. Right? Like, how can you get in the way of your own conscious thought? Exactly. And by doing other activities to distract yourself, you actually come up to better, you know, solutions. Yeah, exactly. So there are people who would dispute, you know, there's ins and outs and quibbles, but that's sort of the way that I think of these things. So I wouldn't say we want to immediately jump into the hard cases of bees and octopuses or octopi or whatever you want to

call them. Those, that stuff is very hard. So, you know, octopies, octopuses, whatever. Hmm. James Bond. Okay. So those guys have, you know, neurons in their, in their tentacles and there's no centralized brain and they solve problems and do interesting things, but are they conscious? That's to me a very hard question because they could be very complex machines. And in some sense, the human brain is a kind of machine. That comes with a kind of experience as well. So my view is we should look at the theories that we have on offer. And now I'm just kind of focusing on cognitive neuroscience and psychology, not really get into the metaphysics of it, but we can shortly.

But we kind of have like a handful of big ideas. So if I can go into that part of the spiel, I will. I'll prefer if you didn't. Okay. So we'll just leave it at that. All right. See you. It's been fun.

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Or you can go to magic spoon.com slash camp CAMP for $5 off. And let's get back to the show, you fatty. So I think in neuroscience and psychology generally, the most venerated idea is something called a global workspace. So global workspace theory was kind of invented by this guy named Bernard Barr's and been championed by another guy named Stanislaw Dahan. He wrote this book, came out 10 years ago, something called consciousness in the brain. So he's sort of a well-known guy, French guy. We won't hold that against him. But he's a well-known scientist and his lab is very interested in this idea.

that when you have conscious experience, there is a kind of competition amongst low-level processors in the brain and for getting the information sent out to a wide array of user systems, of consumer systems. And the traditional way that has been formatted is to think of, like, for example,

you have various states in the visual cortex which are connected to the prefrontal cortex. And up here in a prefrontal cortex, we have parts of the brain that control behavior, planning, attention, working memory, all of these things that we think of as very cognitively oriented used for controlling behavior. And what they have shown in their lab is that if you present a stimuli to someone that's subliminal so that you flash it very quickly or use a mask, which is a weird image that comes right after it,

which blocks, excuse me, the conscious processing, subjects will say, I didn't see it. And what you see in the brain is like localized activity but not widespread activity. Whereas when someone's conscious of it and they say, oh, I saw it. But then you have projections to the prefrontal cortex, which become lit up, in other words, the information looks like it's been shared with a lot of user systems. And so the idea that what consciousness is is kind of widespread sharing of information amongst these various information processing subsystems is a kind of idea that we'll start in the 80s.

And there's some evidence for it. But it's not like established to be true, but it certainly is like an area where a lot of people are interested in looking. The problem, I would say, is that it's, it's not 100% clear that in cases like TN, who's walking down the hallway, that he doesn't have kind of some information that's being widespread and shared because he's using that information to guide his behavior. He's avoiding that. His legs are aware of it. It seems like everything based off his behavior has some type of sensory experience. Exactly. But yet there's no experience that can be documented. Exactly. So that may be as a problem for global workspace theory. Of course,

another problem for it is that the people who test it don't really try to think about what would falsify it. Instead, what they think of is, is this consistent with the theory? Like, we would expect this. Do we find it? Oh, we do. But they don't really come out and say, if my theory were wrong, then you would expect to find the following things and then look for those things. So it's those kinds of tests I think that we need. And there's been a lot of siloing of researchers, like people who like global workspace theory,

tend to use certain experimental designs and work with certain people. And people who like other theories tend to work with different people and use different experimental designs. And so there is kind of a growing recognition, yes, that there needs to be more cross-talk between these camps. And I'm involved actually in a couple of, you know, multidisciplinary groups of people that are trying to work on something like this. But before I get to that, let me finish the perusal. So global workspace theory, I think, is one of our main theories of phenomenal consciousness. On the other hand, sometimes people think that information and integration of information is important. So this has led to what's called integrated information theory, which is kind of a controversial theory.

Some people don't like it. Some people really like it. Some people are indifferent to it, I guess, but not very many. Most of them are kind of on one side or the other. but the integrated information theory basically says that when you have information in a system, and so take a simple example, you have three components, A, B, and C, and they're interconnected in some way, and they can perform some task, like light up a light. If you sever the connection between A and C and the system can still do all the same jobs, then that connection between A and C wasn't really important.

But if you sever the connection between A and C, and it can't do what it did before, then the information and that connection is somehow integral or integrated into the system in an important way. And their idea is that the brain has areas. They quantify this notion with something called phi, which is a measure of how integrated a system. There's a lot of math behind this theory. So we don't need to go into that unless you want to. But that's one of the reasons people like it is because there's a lot of math and it's not like wishy-washy in that sense.

But anyway, so if a system has high phi, as they say, then they say that system is conscious. Now, there's some really weird predictions that the theory makes. So, for example, one of the weird predictions is that you could have some system of logic gates, like, for example, simple and or gates, which could have very high-fi. So, and they don't even need to be, like, instantiated in a physical system. They just need to, like, you could write them down on a paper, and the way that the theory says is, like, that system is conscious. So some people have said, well, that's like a reductio of the theory.

Other people have said, no, we want to test it. And if it's right, then you have to accept that consequence. That these equations on a piece of paper could be conscious, more conscious than you, actually. Oh, wow. It is a higher five than a human. Yes, exactly. So that's, and so some people think, yeah, is this really a scientific theory of con? And so there's some debate about that.

But still, it's an idea that people are pursuing. Right. The third idea, I would say, is attention and attention-based processes. So some people have the idea that, well, maybe attention is what consciousness is. And it certainly intuitively seems that the things we attend to are the things we experience. And there's some work in cognitive science that suggests that maybe when you don't attend to something, you don't see it. So I don't know if you're familiar with inattentional blindness or what's called change blindness. But there's a very famous example of this where this guy, Dan Simon's a psychologist, he set up this experiment where he had two basketball teams, one wearing white jerseys and one wearing black jerseys.

Do you know this one? The invisible gorilla. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, could you explain that, though? Yeah. If anyone doesn't know. Okay.

So you have the two teams and subjects are told to count the number of times that the players in white pass the basketball to each other. And so they're all moving around, you know, hood, hood, hood, like globe trotter style. They're passing the ball back and forth. And you're counting. I do this to my students and they're very proud. They're like, 19, professor, that's how many? And we're like, but did you see the gorilla? And they're like, huh?

So during the time when they're following the basketball around, as it's being passed, a guy in a gorilla suit walks out. He stops in the middle of the players. He waves at the camera. Where's the camera? I can't wave to it. But anyway, he waves at the camera and then walks off. So he goes all the way across, stops right in the center, and then exits.

And the surprising result is that some number of people don't, some people spot it right off the bat because accidentally they happen to be looking right there. But to someone else who's paying attention to the ball going from here to here and the gorilla's here, they just don't notice it. And when you say, did you see the gorilla, or actually when you say, did you notice anything strange about this video, they'll say no. And then you say, watch it again, but don't count. And then they see the grill and they go, what the? That's a different video. Yeah, exactly. They're shocked. Like, it's bizarre. So that's inattentional blindness. It's closely related to change blindness, which my favorite example of has to do with tastes. So they did

this at a supermarket where they had people come up and taste jams. And they gave them two different jam. They say, pick your favorite one. Like, which one do you think taste better? And then they would say, well, I like the plum one or I like the raspberry one. And they'd be like, okay, so can you taste it again and like really focus on the taste and tell me why you pick that one? Like, what is it about this one? Now, unbeknownst to them, in 50% of the cases, they switch the jam for the other one. So if you tasted plum and said you like that, they gave you raspberry instead. And the surprising thing is that people taste and they go, yeah, you know, I just like this one better because it's more fruity, like this fresher, tastes less sugary, I think. It's like, just got a really nice flavor.

And then they're like, well, that's the other one. They're like, oh. So that's a very striking phenomenon where, like, you would think you would, and some people do notice. They're like, hey, man, that's not the one I tasted. Similar but different. I read a study where they asked people if they could tell the difference between two red wines. Yes. Have you heard of this? Yes. Well, they tell one's expensive and one's cheap. Similar but different. Okay. They said, okay, two red wines, here are the two cups, have a drink. They were actually Somaliase when they did this. And And they tasted one. They said, oh, this one has this in it and this one has this. They had to try to guess the regions. Unbeknownst to them, one of the red wines is actually a white wine that was dyed red with food coloring. And if I were to ask you, could you tell the difference between red and white wine? You'd be like, yeah, of course. Yeah. But if I'm asking you to tell the difference between two red wines and one happens to be white, they had no idea. They had no idea. And they sort of just assessed like, oh, this must be a Bordeaux and this one's a Pino or something like. Wow. And these are like trained Somalia. Yeah, these guys know what they're supposedly doing. And based off of what their focus was, they were completely blind to whatever the actual sort of perceptive experience was.

Exactly. So these are very striking phenomena. And so some people take these kind of results and they say, look, what a consciousness is is just what you're attending to. So if you didn't notice the gorilla, it's because you were attending over here. And so what you were conscious of, what you experienced is where your attention was located and the gorilla is invisible. So there's a big controversy about this, though, because some people say, no, you did experience. the gorilla, you just didn't notice your experience of the gorilla. So they say you had a phenomenally conscious experience. It was outside of your attention, so you can't report on it or say that you saw it,

but it was there. You just didn't know about it. And so this gets back to this question of how does phenomenal consciousness relate to awareness and all those things that we're talking about earlier. But so this is the debate about attention. A more modern version of this is associated with the neuroscientist Michael Graziano. And he argues that consciousness is not attention. but it's our model of attention in the sense that we have like a model of our body in the brain. We also have a model of what we're attending to.

He calls it the attention schema theory. And so the idea is that while attention and consciousness are strictly separate, we have a kind of internal representation of what we're attending to and that's what consciousness is. So I'd say that's our third big idea, something about attention.

Our fourth big idea, I'm just going through these quickly so we can go back to any of these. Sure. Our fourth big idea involves something called recurrency, which is feedback loops in the brain. So it's actually kind of surprising. I mean, the brain is very interesting. And they're like, you know, the average person has 86 billion neurons as far as we can tell.

You know, people change that level. And I saw some like American textbooks say it's 100 billion. So obviously we're smart. But actually, anyway, I don't want to get distracted. The point is that there's very many of these cells called neurons and they're highly interconnected. But surprisingly, there's more feedback connections than there are feed forward connections. So there are a lot of connections between this part of the brain and this part of the brain, but there are more connections going back, feedback.

So feedback is something that's very important for how the brain operates. Otherwise, there wouldn't be more of those kinds of connections. Like there's something going on there. And what we find out when we study how these neurological processes unfold in time is that when you see something, there's an initial activation in the sensory area, so visual stuff here, auditory stuff here, et cetera, and then it starts sweeping forward. So there's what we call the forward sweep. And then there's the feedback, the reentrant feedback loops, as we say it. And so some people think that rather than global broadcasting, what you need are these feedback loops,

that there's something important about the information going back to the lower areas and modifying it in some way. But that could happen relatively locally. So, you know, you don't need to send information to the prefrontal cortex. It could all just be looping around in the visual areas, like, you know, visual area V4, as we call it, and V1, kind of looping back and forth. So that's what's called local recurrency. And it's most associated with a neuroscientist named Victor Lama. So there's been a debate, okay, how widespread does brain activation have to be in order for you to experience

something? Does it have to activate all the way to the prefrontal cortex? does it only need to activate some relatively local areas in the visual areas? Does it have to involve attention? Does it have to involve integrated information? So those are four big ideas that come from the neurosciences. And then finally, I would say there's a fifth big idea, which comes from philosophy, actually, and these other ideas all originate in neuroscience, and they're kind of put forward by neuroscientists.

But the fifth big idea is what we call higher order theories of consciousness. So higher order theories of consciousness has. a long history and philosophy, both Eastern and Western traditions. It's not so, depending on who you talk to, it could go back to various philosophers. But the basic idea is that instead of just being aware of the environment, we also need to be aware of our awareness. So that just simply seeing the, whatever, that she, Shia, Shay, shish, just seeing that on the table could happen unconsciously. for me to experience it, I need to somehow be aware of that thing happening in my brain and what I call an inner awareness, an awareness of our awareness. I've heard this quote, the consciousness and not the voice

in your head. Consciousness is the thing that hears the voice. Yeah. And I guess that would be somewhat similar, exactly. Uh-huh. So that there's a kind of higher order process, which is somehow aware of what's happening at the brain. And that's a very confusing idea to a lot of people because they say, like, you know, the squirrel doesn't need to think about its own or be aware of its own experience. It just experiences the world. But how do we know that? So a lot of my work actually is kind of focused on clarifying the higher order theory in neurological terms and saying, well, what would you expect to see in the brain if a higher order theory was right? One of the interesting kind of things is that if you have these two layers of content, like if you see red,

what happens if you're aware of that is seeing green? So what if your higher order awareness misrepresents what's happening at the lower order level. And a lot of people have said, like, that's an objection to these kind of theories. That's kind of ridiculous. Whereas what I do is I say, no, that's an empirical prediction of these kinds of theories. So it actually is something we would expect to see that you could find cases where someone is acting as though they're seeing red but experiencing green. Very counterintuitive idea.

But, of course, many of our best empirical theories have these extraordinary counterintuitive predictions, people thought, like, you know, this is ridiculous, and then you test it and find out, oh, lo and behold, look what happens? So that case, could you just clarify that? Like, what exactly does that mean that you're saying that you're experiencing green, but you're actually experiencing red or vice versa? Yeah. So according to the higher order view, we have these two layers of awareness. One, an awareness of the external world, which is probably largely responsible for controlling behavior. And the other, an awareness of that first level of awareness, the way that, I would put it in terms of representation.

So we have a representation of the red stimuli in the environment, and then a representation of ourselves as seeing the red thing. So the higher order theory says that's where the consciousness is. It's not down here at the representation of the environment, but it's up here at the representation of our representation of the environment. The interplay between the perception and the representation. Yeah. Well, perception is a word that might apply to the first level, depending on how you want to use

it. But yes, some kind of higher order perception, perception of the first order stuff. So, you know, my own version of this, I call it the horror theory, the higher order representation of a representation so that we have representations of the environment, and then we have a representation of those representations, a higher order representation. And the idea is that's where the consciousness is. It's not at the first order level. It's at the higher order level. And those two things can vary. with respect to each other. Is it possible to use a example that could kind of walk us through

the representation of the representation? Yeah. So, well, let's take one example. Let's start with common sense and then go to something more scientific. So my wife likes blue cheese dressing and I like ranch dressing. And so we often have both of these kinds

of dressings in our house. and every once in a while I'll accidentally eat her salad. And I'm expecting for there to be a ranch taste, vegan ranch for anyone listening, but okay, whatever. They're still good. And instead, I bite into it and I get this disgusting taste. And I'm like, this ranch dressing is awful, dude, it's bad. And then my wife says, oh, you're eating blue cheese.

And then I go, oh, it's good. So the exact same taste in my mouth when I was expecting... ranch taste and I get this other taste. I'm like, this ranch is bad, it's horrible. This is disgusting. This is awful. But then when I find out, oh, no, it's actually blue cheese and I reassess my experience and I go, oh, this is actually delicious blue cheese dressing. So, but the same chemicals are in my mouth, the same taste is going on in my experience. It's just that the way I expected it to be changes how I experience it. Now, that could be the case that it's my awareness of that. So empirically, we don't really know. But one possibility is that the same first

order representation of the taste is there. But I'm aware of it in different ways at each time. Another kind of case that people like to talk about is something called dental fear, which I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it's a phenomenon that happens at the dentist where you go into the dentist chair and they anesthetize you. And so your nerve is numb. And then they come in to start drilling. And the patient says, I feel pain. and the dentist says, well, actually, you can't be feeling pain because the nerve is numbed. And then they go, oh, yeah, it's not pain. So now, usually the typical explanation from the dentist is that they experience vibration

and they have fear and they erroneously interpret that fear plus vibration as a painful experience. But once you, they don't give you more anesthesia. Once they explain it to you, then you kind of realize, oh, yeah, that wasn't pain. You had the same vibration in fearful state, but now you recognize it as a fearful vibration state, not as a painful state. And for a long time, actually, I was in grad school, I heard about this, and I actually read a bunch of dental articles on this. It's a real phenomenon. And then I actually experienced it in the dentist when I had my first root canal. It's a long story, but I bit into an olive that had a pit and crap my tooth that's fucked up. So I had to get a root canal, and I was in the dentist chair.

and he like the nerve was dead. I was completely anesthetized and I was like, this hurts. And he was like, oh, I'll give you some more Novocaine. And he put the needle in my mouth and then he took it out. And he's like, is that better? And I was like, did you really give me more Novakane or are you messing with me? And he was like, yeah, I didn't give you more Novakane. And I was like, oh, but it felt better though.

Like I recognize that it wasn't like it's a real mind trippy thing when the thing that you thought was pain turns out not to be pain. So. I mean, not the exact same thing, but the placebos might function in a similar way. Yeah, exactly. Your perception that this thing will have a certain effect, then cause it to have the effect despite the thing not creating any effect at all. Exactly.

And that your perception and awareness can create physiological feelings. Like this thing not causing you pain or causing you pain will actively change whether or not you're feeling pain. Exactly. So there's a debate about what's actually having pain. happening in the brain when this is going on. That could be the awareness thing of like the third big idea that we're talking about. Exactly.

That's exactly right. So one idea is that when you originally have the vibration state, the fear somehow causes the vibration state to turn into a pain state. So maybe these people really did feel pain. Or on the other hand, maybe they were aware of something that wasn't pain as being painful. And there are all sorts of interesting cases where pain and painfulness come apart. So one is called pain asimbole, which is a fancy way of saying it's asymptomatic pain. So these people who have pain asymbolia can tell you that something hurts.

They can tell you whether you're burning them or poking them with a needle, but they don't care about it. In fact, they often smile when you're doing it. And researchers are very hesitant. They're like, I'm going to burn you now. Tell me, you know, on a scale of one to ten, how painful is it? And they'll be like, yeah, it's a ten. But not nervous chuckling, but like they just don't.

don't experience the painfulness of the pain. They know it's pain. They can say it's pain, but they don't experience it as painful. So how to interpret this is a big debate. Like people are really, I mean, you get similar cases in like morphine, you know, where you have a gunshot wounded to the gut and you're like, I don't get a fuck. It doesn't bother me. I can tell it hurts, but I don't care about it. So obviously pain is a complicated state that involves like a sensory component, an emotional component, what's called an affective component that you evaluated as good or bad. And, you know, usually these three come together. Because you can work out and you're like, oh, this hurts really bad, but I'm liking that it hurts, but it was good for me. Exactly. It hurts

that. That's the affective part. Exactly. Wow. So anyway, these things are very complicated. And we don't know what the right way, a lot of these things, like we're looking at them and they're going, okay, so it could be, you know, supporting a higher order theory. It might support. an attention theory, it might support global workspace, but what we need to do, in my opinion, is look more closely at, like, the predictions the theories make and test them. So one group I'm involved in, just to take one example, we're actually trying to use hypnosis. The researcher doesn't like the word hypnosis. He prefers what he calls phenomenological control. His theory, basically, is that some people have the ability to control what they experience. And if you

suggest to them a certain thing, they'll experience it that way. So, So, okay, one example is you show them a happy face or a sad face. So, you know, cartoon-like, you can just show like a cartoon happy face or a frowny face. And then you try to hypnotize them into seeing it as a happy face. So you show them the sad face, but you hypnotize them into seeing the happy face. And then we want to put them in the ephemera machine and say, well, what happens to the set of people who experience it in the opposite way? And if a higher order theory like the one I have been talking about is right,

then you would expect to see some representation in the brain of the happy face and then somewhere else in their brain a representation of that as a sad face and they should be able to come apart in that way as opposed to having competing representations in the visual areas. Maybe it's in the prefrontal cortex or some other where this higher order awareness is located. So that's... Could it be imaged in an fMRI, these two sort of states acting simultaneously but in hierarchy? Yes.

Uh-huh. So if they're located in different, I mean, fMRI is very crude. People think it's very advanced, but it's actually very crude. When you're doing this type of very specific work. Yeah, because we don't really know what we're looking at. So what we're looking at is blood flow. And we're sort of saying, well, blood's going there. So there must be some shit happening there.

But it's like, you know, what's happening there? I don't know. Like stuff, dude. It's stuff. But if we, that's clearly more complicated. And it's the particular kind of activity that's going on there. which is going to be important, not just that it's happening there, but like what's happening there? And that we're not really at a level or anywhere near the level of being able to say,

like, what kind of activity would we expect? Like literally, what would the neurons be doing if it were this way or that way? So instead, we're limited to these crude ideas that, oh, cognition occurs roughly up here. So if it's cognitive, then it would be up here. And so if you think of higher order wellness awareness as like self-consciousness, then we would look for areas in the brain related to self-consciousness. If you think of higher order awareness as like metacognition, so like tip of the tongue phenomena where you say,

I know the name of that actor, but I can't remember it. What was his name? He was, you know, in fight club and, uh, uh, uh, so they're clearly aware of something in your own mind, but you can't like say it. That's the tip of the tongue. So is it more like that?

Then you would look in areas associated with that. So all these questions are extremely complicated and require like a level of care that hasn't really been shown yet. So instead people kind of crudely say, is it in the front or is it in the back, ogga bugga? And it's like, okay, well, that's extremely crude. And it still is a way to get some data. I'm not, you know, knocking neuroscience.

But it's not like going to, until we know more about what the brain does and what these various theories predict, then we're not sure. Like just, for example, the global workspace, theory says, information has to be broadcast to the prefrontal cortex. Okay, great. Attentional theories say attention is located in the prefrontal cortex, probably. Higher order theories say, well, maybe awareness of those states is in the prefrontal cortex. So now you see something happen in the prefrontal cortex. Is it an awareness of the lower order state? Is it attention to the lower order state? Is it globally broadcasting the lower order state? Well, we don't know

until we know more about what those things actually are in the brain. And that's just in humans. So taking it to animals, of course, just complicates things enormously because the animal can't say, I see blue or like, I don't see nothing. So that's why I think even in the case of humans, the job is very complicated. And that's why, in my opinion, we should start there. We should really try to understand which of these ideas is right. Maybe none of them are.

Maybe they have to be combined into some like conglomerate. Maybe we'll find out like, we've been on the wrong track. And the story I tell about this is, well, if you looked at neuroscience a thousand years ago, they would be talking about fluid in the body being vaporized and hydraulics, you know, the fluid flowing down and your arm moving because there's fluid filling it up. And then. Humors that. Yeah, exactly.

And that was a thousand years of that theory where people are like, does, like memories located in this fluid and thinking's located in that fluid and the blood is not, you know, there's the nutritive part of the blood which is red and then there's the vital spirits, which is the blue stuff. We're like, no, it's the oxygenated blood. So a thousand years later, we're like,

dude, you're kind of dumb. But a thousand years from now. They might be like, dudes, you're kind of dumb. And it's really hard to think about that. You feedback thing mattered at all, you idiots? That may be the case we're in where the scientists of a thousand years look on us like the way we look on Aristotle.

Aristotle said the brain's irradiated. and we're like dunts. And we're like, the brain's a computer, and they may be like, dunt. So I'm not saying we're wrong, but what I'm saying is like, as someone empirically minded, you have to sort of play the long game here.

And so I just think that these questions are so vexed that we don't, we're at the very beginning. So we have some promising ideas. But we're like, we're like inching across the start line. We're nowhere near the finish line. Yeah, it's a fascinating area of study

because on the one hand, it is really a paradox is the way I see it, because on the one hand, it is this experiential thing that all human beings ostensibly have. Yes. That we all can sort of vaguely put our hand near what this thing of consciousness is, that I'm having a conscious experience sitting in a pey tent talking to you and vice versa. The subjective, the subjectivity of that experience is obviously a case by case, but we can agree that there is some type of sort of parity with our experiences. So everyone agrees on that. Yeah. But then simultaneously, We don't understand what's happening neurologically.

Exactly. From a scientific perspective, our brains are still so shrouded in mystery. And then now we're doing incomplete philosophy based off of incomplete science to explain a phenomenon that is fundamental and intrinsic to the human condition. Exactly. This is a, this is a very weird place to be. Exactly. And even worse is like for a long time consciousness was almost taboo in science.

It was not to be like, you know, unscientific or like woo-woo, wishy-washy. like, oh, you're a hippie now, you're talking about consciousness, like talking about something serious, you know. And especially in America, there was this period of behaviorism where the behaviorists were a bunch of psychologists who thought that, look, all this talk about consciousness is just not required. You want to explain what the behavior is in response to a stimulus. So you present a stimulus and then you get a behavior and that's how you explain the mind.

You don't need to talk about anything inside. You don't have to go inside the black box. It doesn't matter what's happening in there. It's just stimulus response. That's serious. Why? Because conscious, I can't see your consciousness. That's measurable.

Yeah, exactly. That's what's measurable. You can shine a light, the rock doesn't move. There's no consciousness. Exactly. So that attitude kind of still is around. You know, I have a, you know, you talk to Joe Ludeau, and he famously said, when it comes to behavior, I'm a behaviorist.

When it comes a consciousness, I'm a consciousness guy. So it's like, okay. The attitude that behavior is really still going to be explained in terms of stimulus and response is still out there. It's not the dominant view and a lot of people will disown behaviorism and say it's like it's a bad word, but it's still there. The idea that what you want to do is operationalize, like, for example, if you want to study fear in a rat, well, what are you talking about, dude? You can't say, are you scared to the rat? Well, you operationalize it and you say, when the rat's afraid, it freezes. what's freezing, a type of behavior.

So what you're studying is the animal's behavior, but you're using a word like fear. So when you hear the word fear, you're thinking, oh, is it afraid? But the psychologists are saying, I don't know. All I know is that it's doing this. Yeah, and is the analog for a rat's experience of fear

even remotely similar to a human's experience of fear? And, you know, I even think about this with animals sometimes where you'll see like a gazelle getting eaten alive. Yeah. And they look sort of peaceful. I don't know about that. You see a lion eating a gazelle. And sometimes they're not, but sometimes you're just like, all right, like, is their experience of being eaten by line the same as my experience is getting your by line?

Yeah. And, yeah, it like raises all these bizarre questions. Exactly. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I need to tell you about how you are potentially entitled for some compensation. That's right. You may have been injured without even knowing it. And I think statistically most Americans have been injured by this.

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Now let's get back to the show. I'm curious, there's one theory that I'm reading now, Galileo's Air, that we didn't touch on. Are you able to explain that a little bit, this idea of panpsychism? Yeah. So the stuff that we've been talking about so far are the theories of consciousness that are taken serious by neuroscientists. But there's kind of a tradition in philosophy that these theories can't really fully succeed in explaining consciousness because of the hard problem and the Nagel bat problem that we talked about at the beginning. So, for example, in Chalmers' work, Pete argues that. We can tell when something's awake or when it's asleep.

We can tell when something retains information and uses it to guide its behavior. Those are so-called easy problems because they are analyzable in terms of some function and some mechanisms that perform that function. And in fact, that's what science does. What science does is explain functions in terms of mechanisms, roughly speaking. Okay, great. But when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, it sort of seems like it can't be explained in terms of some kind of function.

And to illustrate this, people usually use thought experiments. The most famous, I think, is Mary the super scientist, which I don't know if you're familiar with the thought experiment. Okay. So the rough idea here is that you take this super scientist. She's allegedly like the world's greatest scientist, better than Einstein, better than Edwitt and, you know, super brilliant mind.

But you raise her in a black and right room. So she's held captive. It's a thought experiment. It's not going to really happen. You could science fiction it up as much as you want to make sure that she never sees colors. So do you need to put some of her lenses in her eyes? Do you need to make sure she doesn't ever cut herself? Like you can, whatever.

So we just sort of pretend that she doesn't know anything about colors. The experience of color. But she knows everything that there is to know about how the brain processes information. And she's aware of the phenomena of color? Yeah. So she can interact with people outside of a room via a black and white TV screen is how. the traditional idea is put. And so she will know that people say fire trucks are red,

and she will know that people say the sky is blue and the grass is green. And she will know that when they say that, there's light being reflected into their eye, which is affecting their brain in X and blah and Y and Z way. And we even imagine that she knows everything, like, you know, a complete, like actually way beyond what we know.

So she knows what the brain actually does, okay, where we don't. And we just, we say vague things like there's activity in that area and she knows what that activity is and what it's doing. Okay. So, but she's never seen the color. And then we imagine that she comes out of her room one day and you show her traditionally it's a tomato. I would say, you know, maybe he wants some more exciting than that, but you show her the tomato. And then Mary says, the question is, does she learn anything? And many people have the intuition that, yeah, she's going to learn what it's like to see red. She will go something like, oh,

That's what red looks like. Like I knew all about all of this stuff in my room, but whoa, Jesus, it's red. It's amazing. I love it, you know. So the intuition that she learns something new. And some people have argued that this sort of is a problem for physical theories of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, because, well, if she knew all the physical facts in her room, but she didn't know what it was like to see red, then it seems like maybe there's more to seeing red

then what physical facts can account for. That's usually the way this thought experiment is presented as sort of a troubling, a troubling explanatory point for the person who wants to say consciousness is physical. Okay. So on the other hand, people like David Chalmers have introduced

what they call philosophical zombies. So philosophical zombies are imaginary creatures that are physical duplicates of you or me, but they lack consciousness. this altogether. So you hit them, they say, ouch, they fall on their skateboard, they say, what the fuck, ow, that sucks, but they don't experience anything. They're literally, the lights are off inside. But behaviorally, functionally, physically, computationally, whatever other Lee you want to add, all of that stuff is identical. So Chalmers says,

well, if zombies are conceivable, right, if you can really imagine this scenario where the exact same physical stuff is there but no experience, then it seems like our world could have been a zombie world. And then you have to answer this question. Why isn't it? Why is our world not a world where there's just, you know, Rumba's running around, not experiencing anything but behaving in complex ways? Instead, there's us having these kind of conscious experiences saying, you know, look at that red. It's amazing. Now, zombies would also say, look at that red. It's amazing. But they wouldn't have any experience. But functionally, they'd be identical. Like an AI, so to speak. But like a biological.

Yeah. So it's a physical manifestation of view, perhaps, like an AI mind. No, with the same brain. So it has to be physically identical to you. So every neuron you have, it has. Every connection between those neurons, it has. Every chemical in your brain, it has. Chalmers also thinks that AI could be conscious.

Right now. Yeah. And he thinks maybe there's a small chance that chat TBT is conscious and that if it's not, then in the future, it will some system that precedes it, will be conscious. Anyway, so the zombies and the Mary Thought Experiment are the kind of, there's another one from Kripke, we could ignore that. But these are kind of the classic arguments against physical accounts of consciousness. Now, myself, I don't really

succumb to those arguments. I think that they can be resisted. But a lot of people find them very convincing. Not a tremendous amount in the sense that physicalism or the idea that consciousness is physical is still the overall dominant view. view in philosophy and science. According to some surveys done by Chalmers, actually, that's a minority view. But a significant minority, and vocal, by the way, very vocal, especially on YouTube's. So, exactly. So, and we haven't even mentioned the third camp here, which is idealism.

Okay. But anyway, so if you take this hard problem stuff seriously in the way that Chalmers and Nagle and Frank Jackson's, the originator of the merry argument, he renounced it later in his life, at the beginning, he was very gung-ho about it. So if you take those ideas seriously, then it sort of seems like you're left with this idea that consciousness is not something that can be understood in physical terms, that you could know everything about the physical workings of the brain and still not understand consciousness because it's somehow non-physical, somehow not a part of the physical world. Now, the Chalmers response to this is to say,

yeah, but it's still a natural phenomenon. So it's not supernatural. It's natural. So there's got to be some laws which govern the relationship between the non-physical properties and the physical properties of our brain because it's well established that there are these correlations that whenever you see red, some physiological activity is occurring. And when you see blue, different activity is occurring. We don't know what it's doing, but we can see the correlations. We can see that the brain is activated in these differential ways. So there's got to be some kind of law. of nature, which relates the non-physical properties to the physical properties. And then Chalmers says, well, but what could that be? So he kind of canvases several possibilities. So one is what's called

property dualism, that the brain has physical properties, but also non-physical properties. Experiential properties. Yes, experiential properties. And that leads to a view called epiphenomenalism, which is a very strange view that the conscious properties don't have any physiological effects, but the physical properties all have their effects. But the physical properties all have their effects, but the experience doesn't. It just kind of along for the ride, which is a very weird view that we would like to avoid if possible. It's not logically contradictory, but it's very counterintuitive to say that my conscious experience of being thirsty doesn't produce my movement to get the water, but rather the physical stuff does, and then afterwards it produces

the experience. So that's weird. Speaking of which, so the second kind of view that you could have is a kind of dualism like Descartes, the philosopher, who thought the mind was a non-physical substance, something which was unexended in space and time, not governed by physical laws, but which is where your conscious experience occurred. In my opinion, that conflicts with some stuff we know about the brain. I think we would expect to see in the brain certain anomalous occurrences if that kind of dualism were true. Like if the non-physical mind were interacting with the physical brain, then there would be some neuron, which, suddenly started doing something and we would say, why did that happen? And the answer would be like,

we don't know. But instead, what we find is every time there's a neuron doing something and we say, why did that happen? It's because some other neuron did something because the environment did something, et cetera. So it doesn't seem like there's room for that, although we could be wrong. And I always admit that, you know, on analogy with the discovery of electrical activity in the brain, which was discovered in the 1790s, hence, you know, people. people were blown away that this new force of nature, electricity, which they had just previously discovered, showed up in here. And they were like, what the way that? The lightning, huh? So hence, you know, Frankenstein being brought back by lightning and all that weird ideas about electricity

comes from our discovery that the brain is an electrical organ. And it was actually endogenous to us this entire time. Exactly. And so something like that could happen again. There could be some mysterious fifth force of nature. Maybe dark matter is a clue. We don't know. So who knows. but we could discover it tomorrow and be like, oh, did you know that there's this other weird thing that's always been happening and we just never noticed it. So we can't rule that out.

But as of right now, I don't think there's a lot of reason to think about a non-physical mind being present. Anyway, so Chalmers thinks that's the second option. The third option is panpsychism. And panpsychism is the source, in the modern version, gets his influence from the philosopher Bertrand Russell,

who was kind of a famous, a analytic philosopher at the turn of the last century important in logic and a lot of other areas wrote a letter with Einstein against a nuclear bomb, okay, all this very interesting stuff. He was actually, I'm digressing,

but he was actually hired by CUNY and he taught at the city college in CUNY, but he preached free love. And he said that, you know, people should have as much sex as possible before marriage. And it freaked a lot of people out

and he got fired from CUNY. They booted him and he went to UCLA after that. You know, okay, wasn't more open to us. He's got sick veiled. It's got super chill. Well, sadly, he wasn't because he was kind of, you know, his daughter wrote an autobiography and she said that growing up with him was really rough. And one of the things I'll never forget from this book that she wrote was that it was like,

she said, being around him, we were always separated by an invisible veil of concentration. Like he was always thinking about something. His mind was always on some problem of philosophy or logic trying to solve it. And you could be in the same room with him and he would just be like focused on this other problem. So as, as she said, it was like being separated by this invisible veil of concentration. It really was struck me. That's kind of sad actually. So he wasn't super chill in that sense.

Think about free love all the time. Yeah, exactly. But for logical, rational reasons. Anyway, so Russell famously wrote this paper called, the analysis of matter. And he wanted to know, what is it? What is matter? Like, we talk about it a lot. Our science claims to study it, but what the fuck is it? Like, what does it mean to say that things have material basis? And his answer was, well, we don't really know. Because when we say that, for example, there's an electron and that an electron has a negative charge, what are we really saying?

Well, what we're saying is that when it's in a magnetic field, it will behave in this way. And when it comes into contact with a positive charge, it will behave in that way. And really, it's all kind of relationally defined in terms of all these other physical properties. But we never really say what those properties are. We simply say how they respond to these other things. Like, what is mass? Well, mass is the type of thing which in a gravitational field acts in this way. Mass the type of thing, blah, blah, blah. And so we have all these relational definitions of it, which are symbolized in our equations. But when you actually want to say, what is the material stuff, You don't get an answer, not from physics.

Physics doesn't tell you, like, what electrons are. They tell you what electrons do. Physics doesn't tell you what mass is. It tells you how mass behaves. So, Russell said, that's interesting. Like, we don't really know what these material objects are. We simply know what they do. And the panpsychists then jump up and say, well, hmm,

what if what mass really is, is consciousness? So maybe, in the sense of there being something that it's like, Maybe electrons are simply little bits of consciousness. And then the fundamental aspects of reality will be these little bits of consciousness. And then they get put together to make bigger things. And then we have this experience. So the modern version of panpsychism doesn't say everything is conscious. It says consciousness is a fundamental part of reality, which has to be sort of inputted at the beginning to get the explanation of everything else.

So it doesn't say like this cup is conscious. It says the atoms composing the cut have as their like intrinsic nature is the way that the author you're reading Philip Goff. In his book would put it their intrinsic nature as consciousness so that it's a way to try to fit into at the base level of reality aspects of consciousness. I mean, it is an interesting question in that regard because you know you've seen the table of, you know, taking all of the math. that makes up a human being, you know, this much carbon and, you know, this much H2O and this much hydrant, all these different sort of molecular compounds. Yeah. Putting it on a table and saying, this is what a human is. Exactly. But there's no consciousness that exists on the table, but when you assemble it into this sort of complex organism that is a human being. Right. Now all of a

sudden it does have consciousness. Exactly. So I could see sort of where that philosophy is coming from that, you know, is it possible that these things have these sort of particulates of consciousness that when assembled in this correct way, then arises this experience. Exactly. So that's roughly the panpsychist view. So the particulates do have aspects of consciousness. They are consciousness. But just, you know, incredibly simple, very, like our consciousness is sort of complex

and interesting. The consciousness of an atom, of an electron, is extremely simple according to this view. So that, you know, panpsychism is a view that's out there. For myself, I don't really take any of these views super seriously. I mean, I take them seriously enough. But the only reason that you would want to think about these types of views, panpsychism, dualism, of any kind, actually, is because you really take seriously this hard problem of consciousness. So the idea that science only explains structures and functions,

and consciousness doesn't, can't be explained by any kind of structure or function. So I want to challenge kind of both of those premises. So first of all, I would say, why do we need an explanation in order for it to be so? Some things may just be that way. So the idea that we need an explanation in order, that's got to be intelligible to us in order to be true of the world, just strikes me as very hubristic in a way, overstepping our bounds. The world may not be intelligible.

It may be, it may be, but it may not be. And at the bottom level, certain things just are. You know, it's like that the comedian who's at it, you know, having a conversation with a small child is like getting into a philosophical debate. Why is the sky blue? Because Adams reflecting light. Why do they reflect light? And you finally get to the point where you say, because some things just are. Some things just are that way.

It may be that way. Now, of course, we have a history, I mean, humans have a long. long history of wanting the world to be understandable. Aristotle famously said, all people by nature desire to know, which I take as a kind of idea that we want explanations. But some things just are. So if you say, why is the electrons experience this way and not that way, the panpsychist is going to say because it's fundamental.

It just is that way. So every road leads to a stopping point, a point where you have to say, It just is that way. No further explanations are necessary. So I say if you have to stop there at some point, what makes you think it has to be at that level? Why can't it be at the other level? So maybe consciousness is a physical phenomenon and it will never understand it.

It just is that way. In the literature, this is called brute identities that, you know, consciousness is some kind of thing and it just is that way. My view would be that that that's a possibility that consciousness could be brutally identical to something physical without explanation because it just is that way. Yeah, I feel the desire to want to explain things. But I don't, I just find it very odd

that people think that if I can't understand it, then it's false. Sure. And that strikes to me as just like, who the fuck are you? Like, what do you, what do you, what? It's got to be understandable by you. Like, how could it be something in the brain? Well, I don't know.

Like, why do you have to? Anyway, so I get very irritated by that demand. I can see that being hubristic. Exactly. So I would say very hubristic. On the other hand, as our discussion from before has been illustrating, we're at the very beginning of understanding what the brain is actually even doing. And we don't have a full theory of what the brain does.

We don't fully have like a worked out. We have a vague metaphor. The brain is a computer that information processes. We go, okay. But how? What is it actually doing? We don't have an account of that. So it is possible that in the advance of neuroscience,

we would come to understand why this particular brain state is seeing red and experientially so and why that one over there is the feeling of pain and experientially so. And so I think that people who say, look, we haven't explained it yet, therefore you can't do it,

is kind of really, again, hubristic. And we have in science many examples of people say you'll never be able to do this and then guess what they did it. And I think the biggest thing that the biggest one that people point to is life itself. So in the old days, people used to say, you can't explain life materialistically. There's got to be some vital force, some Ilan Vatal, some magic non-physical essence that makes the living things live. And now we scientifically,

at least, think that's not true. In fact, being alive is simply having metabolism, having a genetic code allows you to reproduce and so and so forth and so on. And, you know, sure, the average person on the street may say, no, that's not good enough, but the scientists are happy with it. And the problem of life is not something that scientists are saying, you can't explain physicalistically. They think they have an explanation of it. Even if there's weird cases like viruses where we don't know what to say, is it alive, is it not alive? It's not really an important, and interesting question from the scientific point of view. It's got some attributes of it. It doesn't have other attributes of it. So something similar may happen with consciousness. And it may be the

fact that one of the theories that we have now shows us, ah, if this were the way things were, then we would understand why consciousness is the way that it is. So when the, and it is striking that the arguments for dualism are all based on these like what are called a priori considerations, namely experiences from the armchair without doing any science at all. It's very striking that every argument against consciousness being physical involves what you can imagine. like can you imagine a zombie? Not if consciousness is physical, you can't. So are you begging the question when you say,

yes, I can. Are you sort of assuming already that consciousness is not something that can be explained physicalistically or something that is physical? I would say, yeah, it sort of sounds like you are because I have a hard time imagining a conscious agent, excuse me, a biological agent without consciousness. The philosopher Dan Dennett once said, It's like asking someone to imagine a duplicative view, but without health.

It's like, what does that mean? Yeah, it seems inherently paradoxical in some type of way. Yeah, exactly. If you duplicate you, it'll have the same health as you. That's what it means to be a duplicate. So would something like that be the same with consciousness? My own view is that we don't know, that we should have some humility here. But at the same time, if we don't know, then we don't know if consciousness is physical.

And that's what I really want to push back against is the idea that we already know that consciousness is not a physical thing, so much so that we have to opt for one of these other views. Hey, if you're convinced, go ahead. Don't go around telling me that physicalism is contradictory or inherently false because of some stuff you imagined. Like, that's great for you. But I don't think it like settles the question.

Sure, I think that's fair. Yeah. Now, could I rephrase that hubristic statement that I think we both sort of resent this idea that if I don't understand it, then it's obviously not. true. Yeah. Is it possible to say that if no one can explain it or understand it, then it is incomplete? Would you accept that? Um, on some days I would, but on other days, I would say,

no, it's not. Because, for example, take quantum mechanics, that are cutting edge physical theory. Does anyone truly understand quantum mechanics? Um, I would say, you know, the famous quote, if you think you understand it, you're wrong, um, still kind of holds true. There is a quest to try to understand quantum mechanics. What does it mean for a particle to be in a superposition of two states? Is there some classical theory which could explain that a comfort? I don't know. Maybe not. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong. So even if no one could understand how it could be true, it might still be true. And that was kind of the point of Nagle's original bat article. He was saying, look, we don't have any way of understanding how consciousness could be physical,

but even so we have good reason to think that it is physical. So we're in a weird paradoxical position where we think something is true, but we don't understand how it could be true. And I sort of feel like that may be where we end up. Now, it would be disappointing for sure, but I don't think that that would convince me that dualism was true. I mean, I am open to certain forms of dualism. I would like think quantum mechanics would be an area where I would most want dualism to be true. Like maybe the non-physical mind play some role in collapsing the wave function. That would be fantastic. But what would count as the evidence for that is more something that I'm worried about. And I don't really trust these a priori things because they seem like

disguised theoretical intuitions. Like what you think of as conceivable seems to be really bound up with, well, what you know and what theories you accept. So if I went, you know, if you went back to ancient Greece and found Aristotle and you said, what is water Aristotle? He'd say water is a simple substance that has no parts. It's a basic element of reality. And you would say, no, It's made of hydrogen and oxygen in a certain configuration. And Aristotle will say, no, it's not. Like, look at it. Like, you know, I can imagine the world being exactly like this, but with H2O, but with no water.

And we would say, no, you can't actually. You think you can do that because you don't know chemistry. But if you knew enough chemistry, you would know that any world like ours that had H2O is a world that has water. And it may be the same with respect to the brain. We may get to a point where we realize, oh, these things that we. thought we could imagine, we can't because the world turns out to not be that way. Right. Yeah. And then now we're in the same position as Aristotle, which is to say, okay,

what is hydrogen? Exactly. And you go, hydrogen is the basic part of this thing that is no longer reductive. Yeah, exactly. And then in a thousand years ago, well, there's actually this other thing and planks or whatever that actually make up hydrogen atoms. Exactly. Okay. So it seems like we're in sort of like this eternal, what is it, Agrippa's Trilema? Yeah. Where it like, thinking, are rather circular or there's this infinite reduction. I forgot what the third one is. That is brute. Oh, it just is because it is.

Yeah. And so it's inherently unknowable. Exactly. And it may be that way. Now, on the other hand, so my view is split between maybe it's just that way because reality said so. The philosopher Hume famously said, nature retains the right to trump all of your intuitions. And I kind of really take that seriously that you could, like, with all sincerity, think the world can't be that way.

And then the world would be like, oh, yeah, like quantum mechanics is true. And, you know, what's interesting is right before quantum mechanics and relativity were discovered, physicists were saying, we're done. Like, we know everything. And then the two biggest theories that we've ever discovered 10 years later. And the same thing happened with logic. Manuel Kant said, logic is settled. We'll never, all we need to do is, like, mop up around the outside. And then we discovered modern logic and our mathematical logic.

So anyway, so there's always a possibility we'll have some new theory which revolutionizes the way that we see things. Almost a certainty, in my opinion. Yeah. And changes what we think is possible because with new theoretical understanding, with new concepts, comes new way of conceptualizing the world. I see. And I can accept that. Like, that doesn't bother me. Maybe in the same way that it would bother someone that sort of subscribes strictly to one.

theoretical view of consciousness. Yeah. That maybe I think I agree with you and tell me if I do. Okay. You do. Done. All right. But I guess you are no, you're not necessarily saying there is one specific view,

whether it is, you know, neurological or scientific or these sort of philosophical higher order things, you lean more to one side. But you don't necessarily say like one theory is affirmatively describing what this consciousness question is. Exactly. But more so, you know, it's difficult to really pin one down. And furthermore, it's probably unknowable forever because it is infinitely reductive. Yeah, almost, almost, yeah. I mean, I sort of. Where would you, where would you? So maybe it's not unknowable forever. Because if you, if I imagine,

like, what would it be like to know everything? Which I sort of think I can't imagine. Like one time someone told me that I couldn't really imagine that. And I was like, yeah, it would be just like how I am right now, where you ask me a question and I simply say an answer, except I'd always be right. So, you know, knowing everything in that sense is just saying the right answer. So, okay. So if we really knew everything, we could give the right answer to everything.

If we had like the full worked out theory of everything, which was just like nailed everything, then what would a person in that position, so-called ideal conceivers, ideal theorists, in ideal conditions, who are fully rational, what would their position be? And if I put my, like, I'm a semi-rational creature at best, so I'm nowhere near being perfectly rational or knowing old stuff.

But if I kind of imagine what such a creature would be, I sort of think, could they know that consciousness was physical? I kind of think, yeah, maybe they could. And when Mary comes out of her room, when she learns something, what I say is, well, maybe what she learns is like a new concept, which allows her to think about it, experience in a way that she couldn't do from inside her room. And once you had that concept,

could she know on the basis of that that it was physical? I sort of think, yeah, why not? Like maybe she would suddenly know, oh, that's why this state is like red, because something that I don't know about. So I can't put myself in a position where I think that it's possible that we could know the answer to these questions. It would require having a good theory of phenomenal consciousness. On the other hand, I also sort of think, well, maybe we'll never get to a a final theory. Maybe there's always just, you know, turtles all the way down, there's always a theory and another one and always something else to know and new theories bring up new questions and new questions bring up further questions. That's kind of how I feel. Yeah, so I think that's a

possibility, which is they will never know part. So I'm kind of split. And my official position is we don't know. And especially we don't know if consciousness is physical. We don't know if it isn't physical, but we should approach the problem with that kind of humility of not knowing. Yeah. And what I most react to is when people say, oh, you're a physicalist. You think consciousness is physical. You poor moron, don't you know about the hard problem and like conception zombies and married the super scientist?

And I'm like, dude, yeah, I know about all that stuff. And it could turn out your way, but it also might not. And it also could be both. It's sort of, right? I don't want to like tout the dualism thing, but it, you know, there is a, a way to hybridize both where, okay, we've advanced the physical understanding, which then advances the non-physical questions. And then we solve the non-physical question that turns into a physical understanding that then sprouts another non-physical question. It's possibly, that's a, that's a

possibility. And there's also a view we haven't even talked about at all, which is called, um, uh, I'm blinking on what people call this, but, oh, neutral monism. So there, there is a view out there that says like both what, what we think of as mental and what we think of as physical are both like not fundamental and that there's something more fundamental that's neither mental nor physical out of which both of those things arise. A kind of neutral thing, which is neither physical,

it's not physical, but it's not mental either. So it's not consciousness, so it's not panpsychism. But that neutral thing, which we can't really conceive of because we think in terms of this dualism of mental and physical, maybe we're wrong about that. And as of you, I also take seriously. So my problem is I take all these views seriously, but I spend a lot of time arguing against dualism because a lot of duelists are so sure that the other side is wrong.

And I'm like, you should be equally unsure about your own side. It's fine to have your own personal beliefs, like, you know, to pick a side. But it seems to me to be overstepping to say, look, the case is so shut and dry that you guys are confused, you're making an error, a contradiction in your view. And so that's what I want to push back against and say, no, consciousness could be physical for all we know right now. It might not be, but it's an open, it's an open possibility, especially when all it's based on are these conceivability notions. Yeah. And maybe this is my own personal bias that obviously has errors in its own way,

but I am sort of reactively resistant to certainty when it comes to these types of matters, even matters of like, you know, religion and God, which is why like I find the idea or the possibility of God to be, you know, some type of creator, not necessarily some religious tradition, but just this idea that there is this unmoved mover. I find that to be comforting and I like that, but I also don't tell with any type of 100% certainty that this is the case. I just find it to be an effective catch-all for the very end of this reductive thing to this brute thing to say, there is a God that created all of this in motion and it just is. And that's where I, stop. Right. Which, again, is inherently, you know, it's arbitrary that I stop there and someone else

stops at this physical form. Exactly. But that's just the place that I personally find the most comfort in stopping. But I also don't tell with some type of 100% certainty that, you know, the Christian God of the Bible is absolutely what the thing is. It could be. Yeah. But it also could not be. And I just choose to believe it because of faith. And it makes me comfortable. And that's how I was raised. And I like that. Yeah, very cool. But I do, anytime you meet some type of like, you know, real hardcore, you know, acolyte or apologist that says like, no, this is what it is and all these other things are actually not what it is. Yeah. I get a little bit like, all right, I like that you like that. That's fine. But you do you. I just can't immediately jump on board and be like, yes, this is,

that thing. I mean, in my official position about creators is agnosticism. So, and that's kind of of the view I've been advocating this whole time. Gnosticism is the view that I don't know. And to try to put it back into philosophy, I think like when talk about philosophy, we can mean many things. But the thing that I take as most fundamental, the most important thing related philosophy

comes from Socrates. And it's admitting that you don't know. So Socrates famously said, I know that I don't know and that makes me a little bit wiser than you because you claim that you do know. And that's a bit of a paradoxical statement to say, I know that I don't know.

But I think it's very important because one of the things that I take from Socrates, the idea is that if you think you know already, you're going to stop asking questions. This is kind of the paradox of inquiry, right? If you're really certain that astrology is bullshit, then you're not going to take any evidence for or against it seriously. So you might be closing yourself off. I mean, I'm not advocating for astrology. I do think it's bullshit. But you might be closing yourself off in that way. So by thinking you know, it's kind of a real, a real.

limits on what you can explore. So I think that we should kind of admit that we don't know and like fully say, I'm comfortable not knowing. And with like so with respect to consciousness, I say, I don't know. I have my leanings, as you said, but I think that we should all sort of admit that we don't know. And with respect to whether there's a creator or not, my position is we don't know, I think. but I'm more of an agnostic than people like Bertrand Russell who also famously advocated for agnosticism but he said he was agnostic about Zeus as well as to Christian God and I think that we can kind of rule Zeus out I'm not agnostic about you know those kinds of things I think Zeus no but the idea of theism that there's a kind of creator for our world

is something that I take there's kind of some reason to think that it's true and I also think there's some reason to think that it's false. And I think that I as a limited creature am not sure what to think in the countervailing winds of these two pieces of evidence. So the problem of evil, suffering seems to me overwhelming evidence

that there can't be any kind of good God around. The order in nature seems to me to be not overwhelming, but somewhat decent evidence that there's some kind of creator of the world that we in. They also might be overweighted by various things, But I take that very seriously, cosmological arguments. Maybe there's an unmoved mover.

Maybe it just goes back for infinity. I'm sort of open to both of them. But I don't know how we're supposed to resolve those kinds of questions. So I remain neutral and I say, I just don't know. And it's okay to not know. And if there is a creator, it might be the creator of the simulation. Maybe that's the creator. It might be the Christian God.

It might be Allah. It might be Krishna. I don't know. But we have to be open to that possibility. because, well, I think life is a lot stranger than fiction and that the world that we live in is magical, not in the sense of actually containing magic, but just in the way that it is.

Like learning about the way biology works, learning about the way physics is, if that's not enough magic for you, if you need to put into that fairies and gnomes and ghosts as well, then I don't know, like, what's your problem? It's already enough here. But quantum mechanics is literally magic. I mean, it feels that way.

It does feel that way. These things can be entangled and they move fast in a space, speed of light, you're like, all right, magic to me. They technically don't move faster than a speed of life. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I thought that was the case.

No. Oh. What happens is if you measure entangled particles, so if you have two entangled particles and you measure it one way, then instantaneously, if the other person measures it that way, then it'll come up in a certain way. So if you measure it down, they'll get up and vice versa. But there's no thing which travels at the speed of light. But the information between these two things is traveling instantaneously.

Well, you know, I don't know, that's debated. So some people say it's like, you know, if you have a pair of socks and I take one of those pairs of socks with me and then I look at it and I notice it's the left sock, then I instantly know that you have the right one. But does there any magic there or weird? Like, so it's like, yeah, they might have interacted in some way previously that determines how they're going to end up later. I see. So there's a lot of debate about this. I don't mean to dismiss it. No, no, no, no, no, I, yeah, that's actually a good clarification.

Yeah, so, so we don't know. That's again, but I mean, we don't know the right way to interpret quantum mechanics. We don't know whether there's a creator. We don't know what the nature of consciousness is. And the more that we are allowed to say that, the more I think that we're open to various roots. So, yeah, I'm against that kind of certainty as well. And it's nice to hear that you're open to that as well. Oh, absolutely.

Now, I just view everything on, like, percentages of, like, how much I believe. and almost nothing is zero. And simultaneously almost nothing is 100. Yeah, exactly. Which puts, I can accept, and I operate sort of, you know, fine, more or less. Yeah. But it does cause me a little bit of anxiety in my day-to-day life. Yeah.

Because the comfort of saying, this is 100% is way nicer. Yes. So as a result, like, you know, if you bring up astrology, that's not something I ascribe to. I don't really think that there's any type of, you know, the astrism. you know, truth or prophetic nature to the stars and sort of when you're born, et cetera. But I don't say it's zero. Right. I might say it's two or three percent.

That is that that explanation is the truth, so to speak. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I'm sitting here in my beautiful tent. As you can see, every week, day in, day out. And people always ask, they say, Mark, how do I have a tent like that? I want to sit in a beautiful tent and invite a lover, a friend, you know, someone that I appreciate and adore. I want to give them a good time inside my tent. Well, it's easy.

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and we thank Bluchu for sponsoring this podcast. All right, now let's get after it, and let's get back to the show. I spent some time as a kid trying to come up with a physicalistic explanation for astrology. So my basic idea was that if the moon can influence the tides, that's through gravity, then maybe the relation of these astrological bodies could influence neurochemistry. So maybe if the moon enters the stun or whatever is in some position, then the neural chemistry might be in some way. I don't know. So do I take that very seriously? No. But do I rule it out completely? No. There might be some, I mean, it certainly is true that as a certain astrological sign, I notice that a lot of my friends happen to be the ones that they say I'm compatible with. And the guys I hate happen to be those other signs. And you go, okay. Okay. There's some empirical generalization here. But then the issue that I fall into is that now I sort of hear everything and I go, all right, go ahead.

Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know if that's good or bad. My friends that are sort of like more strict materialists, well, they don't describe themselves that way. They're just like, you know, Joe from the coffee shop that's like, no, this is this, this is that. And you know what I mean? Like they just sort of exist and sort of like, you know, things are what they are. Yeah. That they look at me like a crazy person because I'm like, is telepathy real?

I just listen to a nine-hour podcast that says that it is. Yeah. And they're bringing up interesting evidence. And perhaps there's, you know, scientific parameters that they're using and they're testing that's not double-blind. So it doesn't actually stand up to some type of scientific, you know, credulity. But I look at this and I say, maybe. But I'm open to all of these things. Exactly.

Which then sometimes sends me down rabbit holes where I'm like, I'm not just losing my mind that. I mean, I was once on this podcast, not your very good podcast, but some other inferior podcast. Thank you. And one of the people that were watching it said, of me, they were like, this guy's mind so open his brain fell out. Right. I've heard that before. Okay.

About me? Yeah. I thought that actually just now. I wrote that comment. No, but I've felt that about myself. People have said the same thing about me. Because, you know, on the one hand, I'm like, you know, God, demons, the God of, you know, the Old Testament, that could be true.

But then simultaneously, these other gods could also be true. And then simultaneously, nothing is true. Like, this whole thing is a simulation. You're not even real. You're an MPC. the only person with consciousness, like, cool. All of these things existing simultaneously, and I'm sort of engaging with them in their own time.

Yeah. I sometimes find myself in a position, like, what do I actually believe? What is my actual basis for reality? Yeah. And I'm just sort of, like, looking at every independent theory and sort of trying to pull out the things

that I find helpful to navigating my life and then kind of disregarding the rest. I mean, I would say that's a healthy place to be. I mean, I don't believe in the God of the Bible, and if I thought there was a creator, I certainly wouldn't think it was the God described in the Bible for various reasons. But, and I don't think there are demons

or things of that nature, but I know people that do, and they have reasons for thinking that, and they seem like serious people. So, I mean, some of them. So you have to have an open mind about that, I would say, that take those things seriously. And I, again, would say that if you,

that there's this kind of, you know, this false belief that a lot of people have that if you don't pick aside that is weakness on your part or like stupidity or gullibility or any other word that would describe a person who just believes whatever they hear. But I don't think that's true. I think that if you really have this position, that's because you're sensitive to different kinds of evidence. And if you want to really proportion your belief to the evidence, then you need to weigh the damn evidence. And the evidence may point to a position you don't want to hold. But, you know, that's the way science works.

And so I'm open to the idea of telepathy. I mean, I teach a psychology class and I tell students like, telepathy could be real, but what's the evidence for it? Like currently, we don't have a lot of reason to think that telepity is real, but I could imagine the kind of evidence that would convince people. Gone's old experiment proved it. Okay. That one is settled, unfortunately.

I mean, I would dispute that because it wasn't replicated. But I agree that that's the sort of thing that we would be looking for. So as scientists and scientifically minded people, you have to resist dogma. And dogma is simply the idea that I'm going to believe this and I don't need evidence for it or the evidence is already good enough. But the evidence can change. So that doesn't mean that you're like being led willy-nilly or that you need to have some like, you know, so online there are these people called presuppers. I don't know if you know of this movement or not. But they basically, they argue for a Christian worldview on the basis that they presuppose that God exists.

and the Christian God, the triune God. And then that explains the exactly your team. That explains logic and that explains like why there's a uniformity to nature and all these things. And then they say, well, how do you explain that? And if you can't explain it, then you have to admit that I'm right. And I just find that kind of a despicable way to argue because if you have an alleged explanation, that's great. I have them as well and they don't evolve a triune God. So on the other hand, it's perfectly fine to say, I don't know.

know. Like, I don't know what the foundation of logic is. In fact, it's a deep puzzle that we've been talking about for thousands of years. So, you know, welcome to the club. So anyway, I just find that this idea that certainty is better than non-certainty. So here's my, I'm certain in this, because it explains what I want to be explained. Right. Well, you can always poke holes in that explanation. And the inverse presuppositions I would consider, I mean, you're more despicable. Maybe it's harsh, but I hear what you're saying, that, you know, that there is no God. And I prove that through this way, so you explain to me how there is no God. It's like, well, why are you presupposing there's no God? Exactly. That seems like inherently, logically.

Exactly. So I, again, I've- Presupposing it either way, exactly. That's why, I mean, I do tend to lean towards there not being a God. Sure. But I tend to lead to the possibility that there is one. Precisely. And I think that's the rational position to hold. It just seems like that's what the evidence suggests and that people who say otherwise are like cherry-picking the evidence. Because what I agree with what you're saying is that you can't just say there's no evidence for God. Like people who believe in God are stupid. They're superstitious idiots. And you can't say, well, people who don't believe in God are suppressing the truth from

unrighteousness, which I hear a lot online actually. That's like, you are just want to be sinful, you know. So it's like, that's why you don't believe in God. It's like, no, I'm just trying to evaluate the evidence. And I really don't, I sort of see I'm being pushed in two directions and I just don't feel the need to be more than that, pushed in two directions. I think it's fine. So I really find it on both sides kind of regrettable that there's so much reaction, reactionaryism, people saying it's got to be this way and you're so, you're going to get destroyed. I'm going to own you. Like,

you know, it's like all these online discussions would benefit from people sort of admitting that, look, this is hard. We don't know. We would like to know. So what are the sources of evidence? And then you can thoughtfully make your own say, oh, I think, in my view, I would point over here, but then someone equally smart as you, maybe even smarter, might look at all the same evidence and come up with the other conclusion, which should mean something to us. Right. So that's, you know, it would be nice if everybody who knew the same facts came to the same conclusion, but it doesn't seem to be that way, which to me suggests we don't know. So we have to say, look, 99 yes. And I would want it to be 100, but I don't know how you get there.

Which is precisely why, just on a personal digression, why I love philosophy and comedy. Yeah. Because in my life growing up, those were the only two places that I found that these kinds of discussions were able to be entertained with openness. Yes. That, you know, I would go to a philosophy class and I would have a philosophy professor to say, like, why is it wrong for me to murder you? Yeah. And this is a great philosophical question, right? Like, okay, is there a God?

Is there not a God? Yeah. Perhaps that was a threat. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. It's a fun question, you know, to consider or, you know, there's even, you know, more wild ones, you know, like, you know, like heterosexual or homosexuals sibling incest. Why is that immoral? Exactly.

And these are questions that, again, have pervaded philosophy for a long time. Exactly. That to an average person, when they hear this, they are repulsed and sort of dogmatically close it off and say, it is because it is. Exactly. But every time I went to a philosophy class, it was open. And it was like, all, well, let's tease it out. Yeah. And comedy functioned the same way.

Exactly. Where I would go into a comedy club and I'd hear a guy, I'd be like, all right, what if this reprehensible thing isn't that way? You're right. And you'd be like, whoa. But it was a funny justification. And they make you laugh as to boot, unlike the philosophy professor. Yeah, exactly.

But many philosophy professors have made me laugh. Yeah, that's true. I find it, I find it to be very funny. Like, you know, an invalid syllogism despite being. It's hilarious. Like, they're objectively hilarious. Like, because they're sound, but they don't make sense. Now that I feel like I have an understanding of the current state of consciousness studies,

and obviously there's much more we've only scratched the surface. Yes. And we will continue only to scratch the surface of surfaces as time goes on as we've discussed. I'm curious about just different states of consciousness and how based off of what we've discussed, I can sort of use that framework to evaluate things. So like hypnosis, for example, as you had mentioned before, I find it to be a fascinating state. some people don't believe hypnosis is real. And sometimes it isn't real.

Like you'll do a hypnosis show and sometimes it's sort of like a, you know, a prompted improv thing. You know, like every time I say chicken, you'll laugh and maybe you get someone that wants to, you know, be a funny ham that wants to be on stage and, you know, laugh and make a funny show. But then there are other cases where there is real hypnotism

where people's conscious minds are taken offline. Like there is a case of a woman that was being assaulted by her hypnotist And so she went in for this therapeutic hypnosis session to quit smoking, I believe. And she was noticing when she would leave, like her clothes would be sort of misadjusted. And things would be different. And her husband said, bring a camera and put in your purse and film the interaction. And they found that this hypnotist was assaulting her. And a terrible story.

But it was concrete evidence to me that this woman was not in a conscious state, that this person hijacked. her mind. That's a bad way to put it. But put her into a state where she was not able to perceive what was happening to her. Right. So I'm curious. Or not able to remember it. Right. Oh, and there's this other idea of qualia, which I remember studying in college. So I'm curious, I guess, how does this state of hypnosis, you know, for legitimate hypnosis where someone is taken to a different place, how does that fit in our understanding of consciousness? It's a good question. And we don't know the answer to it. So there's a whole range of different accounts of what's going on in those sorts of cases. So one is that kind of, as you mentioned, I think maybe when we just before,

that is a kind of improv or like a playing along. We know that people in psychology studies want to be useful and helpful. They want to do what the researchers want them to do. So maybe they just sort of are, they feel like in this context, I should do this. So that's one theory about hypnosis. I don't think that's what's really going on in these kinds of cases. It could be, but I think there is like a genuine altered state of consciousness, which is brought about by the subjects themselves. And only some people can be hypnotized.

Like, for example, I can't. So don't try. I'm hip to that jive. But, like, people have tried to hypnotize me. And I just, my, I have ADHD or something. Like, I just, I can't detach from, like, the control. So I don't, I even went to a therapist once and they were like, You're going to feel some buzzing, like take a breath and see if your limbs start vibrating.

And I was like, nope. He's like, this works for most people. And I was like, that's social pressure. You're trying to. I know that trick. So it doesn't work for me. But some people have that ability where you don't even need to induce them. Inducing them is when you say you're getting sleepy and watch the pendulum.

You're just say, do this and they're able to do it. So I think the evidence is there that this is a real phenomenon. And what's going on there is an altered state of consciousness. that they are able to enter into an altered state, which is distinct from their wakeful state. So to me, that seems like a real phenomenon. It's debated in the sciences. So it's not, I wouldn't say, proven or conclusively known to be that way. But that's the way I would interpret those sorts of things. And I wonder if these states can be self-induced. Well, the theory is that that's what's going on. Yeah. That's exactly what's going on.

So now there are other people that I've talked to on this very podcast that I've said in this very chair that will tell me things with full conviction. Many of them, great people, wonderful people, smart people, and by all definitions of the term, rational and sane. Okay. But then they tell me truly unbelievable things. Like this alien guy that you talked to. Alien abduction.

I just saw that episode. I'm fascinated by this question. And I'm part of my desire to learn about these kinds of things, whether it's religious or alien or UFO. Again, I don't write it off. I have like some doubts that there are these sort of beings that are humanoid coming from other planets traveling at light speed. I don't really, I put that at a lower percentile of possibility, but it's still possible. Okay.

But I fully believe with 99 percent certainty that the people that are explaining these experiences to me had these experiences. And that breaks my brain. Right. Where there's a man sitting in front of me saying, I was abducted and there's an emotional response. And I'm empathetic to them. I say, this is horrible that this happened to you. and that you believe this happened to and that they are bearing the trauma of this thing

that seems impossible. Exactly. So I'm curious, and again, I don't, you're not a psychologist, you're not going to be able to diagnose what is occurring here, but I'm curious if you have a framework, you know,

if you were to speak to this person, uh, or people that believe or have you had these experiences, how can I parse, you know, I don't, you know, the liar lunatic lord thing. Yeah,

well, that's about Jesus, yeah. About Jesus, but I sort of apply it here. Okay. Either this person's lying to, me or they're insane or having some sort of mental instability or chemical imbalance or what happened to them is true. Yeah. And I don't think that they're lying and-

They don't seem insane. They don't seem insane, but I'm also not a psychologist, you know? But also the other possibilities seems just impossible. So I'm curious. How would you parse this experience? Yeah. I mean, and I know I have family members that have had experiences like this. I kind of remember seeing a UFO when I was young, but I don't fully trust that memory.

But so I'm always looking for naturalistic explanations. So one possibility is that there are these aliens, most likely lizard overrulers in the government, obviously. But I don't think we can rule out alien life. I think we have to take that seriously. Now, whether it's advanced alien life or microbial or whatever, who knows. But the, I mean, you know, so the universe is vast. I'm sure you're aware of the Fermi paradox and these kinds of things that people talk about.

It's like, where's all the alien life given the vastness of the universe? So I'm open to the idea that there are aliens. But also, we know that people have very strange experiences under normal conditions. So one is called sleep paralysis. So sleep paralysis occurs. It turns out that in the brain, the part of the brain that lets you go to sleep is different than the part of the brain that subserves your conscious experience. So for example, when you're dreaming about running your legs don't move. And the reason for that is because the brain paralyzes you as you sleep, not in the sense of you're being really,

paralyzed, but cutting off the input output to the external limbs. And in some cases, people become aware before their body has become unparalyzed. That's called sleep paralysis, where they wake up and they feel as though they are very heavy that sometimes they describe somebody sitting on their chest. The hag. Yeah, exactly. So these kinds of experiences, are they supernatural? Well, we have an explanation in terms of the brain function of what's going on. And a lot of times alien abduction stories are related to these kinds of naturalistic phenomenon. Not always. I don't think you're going to explain like, you know, fire in the sky type experiences and, you know, people. But still, in these weird dreamlike, trans-like states where you're in this in-between state, I've had very strange

experiences. In hypnagogic reverie, which is that in-between state where you're not fully awake and you're not fully asleep, you can have very profound experiences that seem real, but they're hallucinatory. So one way you can practice this is by holding your hand up as you fall asleep and just keeping your hand up like that. If it falls, it tends to wake you up so you can stay in this in-between state. And one time when I was doing that, I had the experience. I thought to myself, I need to move my car for the first alternate-sized parking. And I had the experience of picking my car up and putting it in my pocket.

And it seemed real. And then I woke up and I was like, oh, whoa, that was fucking gnarly. But it was like a real, like I felt like it was totally normal and natural that I picked my car up and put it in my pocket. You got to get ready for school. because I got to move my car. Right. I've done this to get ready for school. I'm like, okay, I'm getting ready.

I'm brushing my teeth and then I wake up in my bed. Yeah. I go, oh, that whole experience of getting ready never actually happened. Exactly. So some of it could be explained in those kinds of terms, possibly. I'm not saying that this guest that you had on who had some other bizarre experiences, that that explains it. But I'm saying that that's a wedge into trying to naturalistically explain these things.

We also know that if you stimulate like a part of the brain, you'll have out-of-body experiences. We also know that in certain dreams you could have out-of-body experiences. where you view yourself from the third person, so to speak. And if we stimulate a place called the temporal parietal junction in the brain, which is where this part of the brain and that part of the brain meet, sort of right above your ear there, then you'll have like an out-of-body experience.

You'll sort of feel like you're over there looking down on yourself. So we know that these experiences can be, these kinds of experiences can be generated by this kind of neural activity. So could it be a seizure, like an epileptic seizure, that doesn't result in Grand Mal, you know, like shaking and all that kind of stuff. Well, some people think that's what happened to Joan of Arc, some scientists think that that explains those kinds of phenomena that she might have had temporal, parietal, junction,

seizures, having out-of-body experiences, seeing voices, hearing these sort of things. So is that explaining every one of these things ironclad? No, probably not. But is it the beginning of a way that you could say, well, he's not crazy, but there's something neurologically going on, which explains the kind of experiences that they're having. I would say that seems to me to be the default view and that you would want to get rid of that before you accepted that there were aliens abducting you

or doing whatever else was going on. We have sleep paralysis, we have these kinds of ideas that there's kind of abnormal activity, which doesn't result in irrationality or craziness. So if you have a seizure, then you're not insane or crazy. It's just there's some abnormal activity. And it can result in these very profound experiences.

So that, to me, is where my default, be is to say, can we rule those out? And if we can't rule those out, then we have to, you know, when you rule out all the possible, would be impossible is left, you know, Sherlock Holmes. So if, if that's the way it works out, then that's fine. But I think that my default would be very skeptical, which I think is healthy and to want more evidence. So if we can't ever, you know, if we can produce that same kind of experience in these naturalistic ways, that would go some way to saying, okay, so maybe that's what's going on in these cases. On the other hand, I don't think we can fully rule out that, you know, that there needs to be some kind of naturalistic explanation

that doesn't evolve the aliens, especially at our moment in time where there's people talking about this in the government and there's all sorts of conspiracy theories, it may turn, you know, may turn out that we're going to find out about the aliens very soon. Who knows? I think you have to be open to that, and I don't want to be super in line with our earlier conversation. I don't want to be super dismissive of that. On the other hand, I also think we want to look very carefully at the kind of things we already know and whether any of those things can explain these occurrences. Yeah, I'm fascinated by all these types of things because I do think that there is an interplay with consciousness that it could explain them. But that explanation doesn't make them less

mystical. It makes them more grounded, but I find them to be equally as fascinating. Like precognition, remote viewing, telepathy, these sort of like, you know, fringe science that people There was a very famous experience about, experiment about precognition, done by the psychologist named Bem was his last name. And he seemed to show that people could anticipate events right before they happened. And then he argued that there were some evolutionary advantage to that, that if you couldn't sense the lion about to attack you right before attacks you that you would survive and the other person would get eaten. The problem was that experiment was never replicated. So he had some evidence. but then when other people try to produce that same evidence, they never got it.

They did exactly what he did and didn't find the evidence. So that seems to me to suggest he, it was chance, it was some error in the recording equipment, or there's a giant conspiracy. I mean, I talked to this one guy on my podcast, Consciousness Live, that this guy said, oh, it's a big conspiracy. Like these things don't want us to find evidence. And if that's your view that we can never find evidence because they're hiding it from us, then there's no way to test that.

And it's sort of less interesting to me because I'm more. interested in what can we do? Like as an empirically oriented person, I think it's premature to rule any of these things out because what we want is to evaluate the evidence. So we want to take their first personal account seriously. We want to take into account the things we know about how the brain works and what natural phenomena there are. And we want to admit that some things can be explained, but we don't know how. And we want to admit that one of those explanations might be this weird thing you're talking about, and we want to take all of that serious at the same time. That would be the way that I would approach those sorts of things. So I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. I'm not going to

laugh at someone who says they're abducted by aliens, but I will sort of wonder, like, can we look at your brain a little bit? Like, would you have one of those experiences in an FMRI machine? And could we see whether in such a case this particular kind of activity was occurring, which we know is associated with those kinds of experiences? If so, then I'd be more skeptical. If not, then I'd be like, okay. Now, just for fun. Take me to your leader. Are there any, I guess you could say, I'm going to couch all of these types of things in like the parapsychological or the phenomena as sometimes people within that community will call it. Okay. High strangeness is what other people will call it.

Okay. Are there any of these things based off of any type of empirical research that you on a personal basis kind of are more open to or kind of lean towards? No. None at all. No. So I know one person, her name is Susan Blackmore. She's a psychologist who started out in parapsychology. And she set out to try to prove a lot of these phenomena.

And she became convinced that they weren't there. And now it's kind of just a regular consciousness person. And I'm not saying that disproves all of them, but I am saying that a lot of people have had that experience whereby they try to show that one of these phenomena is real using empirical methods. And they end up kind of going, oh, yeah, it's not there. And you know, we have this guy, the amazing Randy, who I think may be dead recently. James Randini.

Yeah, Randini, right. He offered a million dollars for anyone that could, like, replicate these sorts of things. Like his famous challenge was, can you see my aura? Yes. Well, so if I was standing behind a wall, that was exactly my height. Could you see my aura over that wall? Sure. Well, then let's do it.

I'll give you a million dollars. And they're like, can't do it. So I think that those kinds of things lead to the healthy skepticism because we haven't been able to empirically identify any of these things. At the same time, someone who was living 2,000 years ago and you told them the earth was moving, they should be highly skeptical of that. because there wasn't a lot of evidence for it. The evidence came later.

So maybe we will get to the point where we discover that there is some empirical basis for these kinds of things. We have to be open to that. But as of right now, my own view is all of these things can be explained in some naturalistic way, which doesn't require a phenomena outside of the natural realm of things. You know, but I don't know. Like, you know, I have family members that believe in demons and spirits and claim to have weird experiences that you can't explain. And I mean, I don't know, you know, what are you going to do?

Like, when I was a kid, my mom used to tell me that she would see a demon walking around in her house and that would stand at the foot of my bed trying to keep God away from me. And I was like, okay, that's an interesting thing to say to your teenage son. But like, so what are you going to do with that? Like, I'm very skeptical of those kinds of things. But at the same time, like, you know, she's not an idiot. She's not insane like you were saying. So what? What are you going to do? So what are you supposed to do with that kind of thing? Well, I would say we have ways to explain them naturalistically. We want to rule all of those out.

Another of my favorite examples is deja vu, which is, you know, or precognition in dreams. People say, well, I dreamt about this and then it came true. You know, my mom once, she called me in the middle of the night one night, and she was like, Richard, I had this dream about this guy, and then I saw him at the supermarket. Explain that, Mr. Science guy. And I was like, okay, well, actually, you know,

here's a good explanation for that. you're at the supermarket, so is that guy. You may have noticed them, but not consciously noticed them, and akin to all this change blindness stuff we were talking about. And we know that you typically dream about the things that you experienced her today. So you might have had a dream about that guy based on you seeing him, but not being aware that you saw him. And then, once you had the dream, you were like,

oh, that's that guy that showed up my dream. No, do I know that that's what happened? No. But I also know that when we try to evaluate empirically, like, for example, they did this one large study where they think, took missing children. Oh, they didn't take them, but they took the case. They took the case of missing children and people calling in saying, you'll find them here. They're dead. They're alive. And they just conglomerated all of these calls. And they said, at what rate are they correct?

If someone calls up and says, oh, that kid's dead. You'll find his body here. Or that kid's alive. He's in a trunk over there. Or, you know, all of these things that people say. They looked at hundreds of these cases. And what they found is they're 49% accurate, below chance. So they're as accurate as you would expect if they were guessing on a whole, like overall. So does that conclusively disprove that you dream about the future? No. But does it show we don't have any evidence to believe it? I'd say, yeah, that we're at a point right now where those sort of things remain to be demonstrated in a standard, which is consistent with our empirical standards that we already accept for other things. Now, a lot of times people say, oh, the establishment tries to hide this and

doesn't take a serious, that's wrong, actually. This Bem guy, his study was published. People tried to replicate it, and those studies didn't do it. So there was no conspiracy. Like scientists generally speaking, if there's some evidence, I mean, not all of them, but a lot of them, if there's evidence for something, they're like, holy crap, let's check that out. Can we do that in our lab? And if they can't, then they go, no, that's bullshit.

And if they can, they go, well, what do you know? Like, I wouldn't have thought that was the case. Now, is it a bit of a Kafka trap that, like, for example, it's like, James Randy's prize, that it's impossible to prove anything empirically that's not empirical. And so you prove hypothetically that telepathy is a real phenomenon that people can communicate through their minds. And then naturalistically, we prove, okay, there's some type of dark matter that's occurring and by our quantum entanglement, we can get some type of sense of what information is being transferred. And then they say, see, it's not supernatural. It is actually proven

empirically. Yes. And so then, therefore, they don't claim the supernatural prize. Well, I would say, yeah, so that's exactly how I hope it goes, because the idea is that, well, I wouldn't like there to be any supernatural things, because if there are supernatural, they can't be explained at all in terms of our normal explanatory things. You could still have evidence for them. But you're right. I think that Randy would have given the prize, even if it were demonstrated by some natural phenomenon. If you can really bend the spoon, read the aura, know what the next card is going to be. And it turns out. that there's some empirical explanation for that. That doesn't downplay it. It still is an amazing thing that no one thought was going to be the case. And so doesn't detract from the surprising nature of it. Yeah, right. It would naturalize it in some sense.

But it wouldn't take away from like the fact that for a thousand years people thought was bullshit. So that still is an important and interesting thing. Now, of course, if you really are holding out for some supernatural thing, in other words, can't be explained at all by any known naturalistic phenomena, then, well, that might be case too. You still expect evidence for it. Right. But by the parameters of our scientific method that it couldn't fit into that method of testing. Exactly. It's like if you told someone 2000 years ago like, hey, I can talk to somebody in China right now in real time. They would say,

yeah, right. They would say it's impossible. First, they say, what's China? It's fair. It's a place that's going to blow your mind. They got a big wall. Exactly. But if I could then pull out my phone and and then call someone and they had the same phone and the landline, da-da-da. Exactly. That would be supernatural, but then explained by a very natural phenomenon. So therefore, it's not supernatural. Yes. So, you know, this is that Carl Sagan quote that, you know, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right. So in that sense, you're right, it wouldn't be supernatural, but it would still be something which by what you thought was naturally possible would exceed those expectations. So in that sense, it would still be mind-blowing

to find that out. You know, if I found out that you could dream about the future or astral project or any of these other things that people talk about, it would change the way I think about stuff, like profoundly. I just don't think we have any reason to think it really is there because it's all based on anecdotes. And when you try to actually look for the evidence, you don't get more than the anecdotes. And the people that I speak to about this type of thing, they typically, when it happens to them, they say, I can't control it. Right. So I'll get into a study or, you know, if I were to be studied, they'd be like, have a precognitive dream. And they say, I can't control these dreams.

Exactly. I actually don't want these dreams to happen. They just happen at random. But that's why these people took thousands of these cases and looked at them. So we don't have the way for you to do it. You know, it's like if it happens once every, every six months, then we take a thousand people and look at them for one month. You know, so it's like, you don't, even if it's sort of random in that sense of not being controlled, we can still do these what's called longitudinal studies where we follow a large group of people over a large period of time and look for that kind of evidence. So I still think we would expect to find some kind of results.

Right. Are you familiar with Rupert Sheldrick? I've heard the name, yeah. He was on the Big Bang Theory, right? Just kidding. No. That's what I was going to bring up. I want to know.

What do you think of? No, he, I believe, and again, this is crackpot, you know, popular science that I'm going to try to explain. I have no idea. Okay. But he had done a study that I believe was valid, that he could, people could sense above random chance when they were being stared at. Yes.

Fill it on the back of their head. Right. That type of thing. Yeah. And perhaps there's a naturalistic explanation. But I think people look to that and say like, oh, there's some type of consciousness thing that's happening. And of course, there's a biological.

biological advantage for this. I'm curious if you're familiar with that work or anything. Yeah, I am. What do you make of that? Well, I think that it's not widely replicated. So this is a problem that we were talking about before with the BEM case and I think it's also applicable here, is that, yes, that study is very prerocative and should be taken seriously. But if I want to do it in my lab, using my equipment, how come I can't get the same result? And we don't, if we had done that, then it would be in every textbook. But it's not. So that suggests that the normal methods of science have sort of suggested that something funny was going on in the original experiment. Okay. Lastly, double slit experiment. Yes. Going down to the quantum side. Of course.

But again, people have kind of pointed to this to say, like, oh, is it possible that our observation of reality changes reality fundamentally? By observing these sort of, you know, light packets that we are disrupting the way that this, you know, pattern is being spread on this wall. I've also heard people make the explanation that, no, our measure. technology, just by the virtue of measuring, it's impossible to measure without disrupting it. Exactly. I'm curious. Is that the position that you take with that experiment specifically? No.

So there's a more complicated version of this called the quantum eraser. I don't know if you're familiar with this kind of experiment. But the quantum eraser involves setting up. So first of all, the double slit experiment, there's the two slits. You send the photon towards the slit. If you know which one it goes through, then it acts like a particle. if you don't know which one it goes through, it acts like a wave. It acts like a wave.

And so you get an interference pattern on the other side over there. So some people have said, well, what happens if you could control, like after the fact, whether you know that or not? Not which one I went through, but whether you know it. So one version of this is called the quantum eraser. And there's even one called the delayed quantum eraser, which is a fancier version of this. So on this version of the experiment, you send the photon through what's called a splitter. so it goes through a splitter and then it downgrades it

so that two photons come out. So you send one photon through then two photons come out. One of those photons goes through a series of mirrors and the other photon goes on its projected path. So you can set things up so that you don't know which way the photon went because one of the reflecting surfaces

has a random probability of it going left or going right and so you can't predict or determine in any way which way it actually went left or right. Okay. So you look at the result of that and the photons that went through the mirror cases, they just look like random photons. However, if you start pairing them

with the photons that they came from, like they got split from, that they're entangled with, in other words. So what happens? The two things are entangled. Well, then an interference pattern starts to show up. So it's almost like if you know which way that it went, then you get the particle behavior.

But if you don't have that knowledge, if you don't know it, then you get the interference pattern. So to me, that some people think, though, because this can be done after the experiment's over. You can erase that information, which way, what's called which way information, you could erase that, and then you still get this weird result, that by taking that information away, the interference pattern shows up. So some people argue that that that shows backwards causation, weird, trippy things from the future to the past. I don't think that's the case. But I do think it sort of suggests that knowing something is important in the quantum system. Some people think you can explain this in terms of decoherence, which is the idea that you don't need to have a conscious subject knowing about what's going on.

The thing just needs to interact with the environment in a certain sort of way. And some people think that's what a measurement is. That measurement of a system occurs when that system interacts with the environment in such a long way that it decoheres, which is to say that certain possibilities get ruled out because the measurement. things become so entangled. Now, that's a nice mathematical trick, I would say, but it doesn't necessarily really mean that the thing is in a non-superaposovo state.

It means there's limit to what you're going to, there's a limit on what you will observe when you go and look at it, but it doesn't mean that it's actually collapsed. That's how I interpret it. So I'm very open to this idea that there's something about, that there's something funky going on here

with respect to knowledge that are knowing. And Schrodinger kind of illustrates this with like his thought experiment. Yeah, exactly. He's trying to illustrate how weird it is, that the cat could kind of be in a superposition of live and dead. So I'm open to the idea, which a lot of people don't like, but that the fundamental nature of reality is this massive superposition

until it's observed, until it's somehow interacted with with a conscious agent. So I'm open to that idea. It would be a weird kind of thing for sure and not maybe consistent with physicalism, although maybe it could be as well. I think that remains a determinant. But I do sort of leave open to that. I've also interestingly thought that maybe this has some implications for God's knowledge if there's a God. So if God knows everything, then God knows which way these particles are going to go at all times,

in which case we should never see the interference pattern because they're always going to be collapsed into the particle pattern by God's knowledge. On the other hand, if God doesn't know which way these paths are going to go, if these things are truly random such that even an omniscient being doesn't know which way they're going to go, then it looks like maybe there's a limit to the knowledge that God has. So I do sort of think there's an interesting puzzle here for thinking about how a kind of creator would fit into our physical theory. But anyway, so that's, yeah, I guess I have more of a less of a mainstream view about that stuff. I don't think that my view is required to interpret things this way, but that is the way I would interpret them, that there's something about, it's not just that it's going through one path or not, but it's our ability to know and not whether we actually have the know. but it's our ability to find out which really seems to make a difference. Richard Brown.

Thank you so much. Thank you. This was really fun. Well, I appreciate it. I wanted to say one thing about qualia. Oh, yeah. If we have time before you say Richard Brown. You're the one that doesn't have time.

You got stuff to do. You're going to skateboarding or something? Oh, shit. Well, no, students that are about to take a test. So I guess I should probably go do that. We'll have to continue this later because I have now late. Qualia, free will. We're going to get to all of that another time.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Let's do it again soon. If you've made it to the end of this episode, that's because you rock with us. And for that, we rock with you. You are sophisticated. You enjoy honest, true communication, a high-browed type of person that understands this. History is not just dates and names.

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