Modern Wisdom - #663 - Erik Hoel - A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind

Episode Date: August 5, 2023

Erik Hoel is a research professor at Tufts University, theoretical neuroscientist, and an author known for his work on understanding consciousness and the complexity of the brain. Consciousness and free will are two of the most puzzling aspects of human existence. The question now is whether emerging scientific discoveries and technological advancements can unravel what's going on under the hood of our experience. Expect to learn what the newest cutting edge research on consciousness can teach us, the impact AI will have on our understanding of the Self, why it is so difficult to explain our inner thoughts out loud, whether science can prove that we have free will, how to overcome your deterministic fatalism and much more... Sponsors: Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Hoel. He's a research professor at Tufts University, theoretical neuroscientist and an author known for his work on understanding consciousness and the complexity of the brain. Consciousness and free will are two of the most puzzling aspects of human existence. The question now is whether emerging scientific discoveries and technological advancements can unravel what's going on under the hood of our experience. Expect to learn what the newest cutting-edge research on consciousness can teach us. The impact AI will have on our understanding of the self, why it is so difficult to explain our inner thoughts out loud, where the science can prove that we have free will, how to overcome your deterministic fatalism, and much more. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. how to overcome your deterministic fatalism, and much more.

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first purchase by going to houseofmacadamias.com slash modern wisdom and using the code mw20.com. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eric Coal. Give in your background, give in the work that you've done. How would you describe the current status of consciousness research and the theories around it? Well, we're at a very interesting time. I believe it was just widely reported that a longstanding bet over whether or not consciousness would be resolved was notoriously not resolved. Who made the bet?

I believe it was Chambers and Christophe Cok, if I'm not mistaken. Christophe Cok being a very famous neuroscientist in the field and then David Chambers being a very famous philosopher in the field. Who was for which? Oh, Chomer's was of course, the philosopher was against it,

and the scientist was for it. And if you think about sort of where we are, in the search for a scientific theory of consciousness, it wasn't even on the table that you could do something like that, that you could look for a scientific theory of consciousness. You know, it wasn't even on the table that you could do something like that, that you could look for a scientific theory of consciousness. You know, as I talk about in the book, consciousness was very explicitly split off from science early on in the beginning. I mean, particularly by Galileo, who basically said, you know, let's not worry about qualitative aspects of the world. Let's not worry about the redness of red or how a peach tastes, you know, or the sound

of a trombone. Let's just focus on the quantitative aspects of the world, which we can describe mathematically. And let's just bracket this problem aside. And to him, he was a religious man, right? He would have said it as, you know, it's just not science as business to go poking around in the soul. Just put it aside and let's you focus on this universe that God has created for us. And that strategy has actually been the fundamental strategy of science. And is one of the things that has made it so successful

and so able to sort of proceed without people without essentially annoying philosophers coming in and saying, well, you're not really explaining this, right? But of course, there is a science where you do need to explain qualitative properties and that's neuroscience to figure out how the brain works. You need to understand how consciousness works. And we simply don't. And for a long time, neuroscience has been hobbled by the fact that it has been fundamentally behaviorist

and people have been incredibly scared to talk about or mention consciousness. And it really took two different men winning two different Nobel Pri prizes, Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA, and Gerald Edelman, who was one of the people who really figured out how the immune system functions. And they both got their Nobel prizes in a different field, and they looked at neuroscience and said, there is a big on-answered scientific question here, which is, how does the brain

create consciousness? And they both started up their own institutes and their own ways to approach this problem. But had it not had the weight of two Nobel prizes behind it, I don't, I think that there still wouldn't even be any serious scientific attempt to understand consciousness. And neuroscience, and I think without that, neuroscience struggles a great deal. I mean, that's another thing that's that chunk of the book is about is just about the essentially the scandal that is modern neuroscience given that the stream of consciousness is what your brain, you know, that's the main function of the brain is generating

your stream of consciousness. So imagine you're trying to figure out an organ and you're not allowed to talk about its main function. You would be like being a... Yeah, it would be like being a Formula One racing reporter, but all of your discussions being about the grass on the side of the track and the temperature of the air and the flags waving in the wind. Exactly. And so people tried to sort of skirt around it by taking aspects of how consciousness works, like attention, and saying, okay, we're allowed to talk about attention. We can focus on attention. And we can focus on memory, right? We can do things sort of without reference to this dream of consciousness. But of course, when you remember something, you're conscious of it. And when you

attend to something, you're conscious of it. These are all things that are thinking. Not just something that happened as a phenomenological experience, which is associated with it. Exactly. And so people tried to sort of preserve the non-subjectivity of science and not let subjectivity in by sequestering away a lot of these mental properties and sort of them pretending that consciousness doesn't exist. But it has not. I'll just be very honest. I have a PhD in neuroscience.

It has not been very successful. I mean, I don't think neuroscience has made, really, I'll say it, any significant advancement since I really entered the field in terms of, not in terms of everything, but in terms of understanding most of the major questions that people want to know about how the brain operates. So stuff at a very high cognitive level, how does the brain operate? Neuroscience has not made a significant progress. And it's probably because you're not really even allowed in most areas of neuroscience to talk about

the main function of the brain. What do you mean when you say not allowed? Is there some policeman that comes and slaps you on the back of the wrist as soon as you start typing about it? Like what you're on about? Well, within science there are all sorts of, you know, structures that prevent somebody from getting too crazy. I think more fundamentally it's just been that due to legacies of things like

behavior is talking about consciousness has been considered sort of too dangerous and it's been actively discouraged and you can still go and find a neuroscientist and you'll ask them, what are your thoughts on consciousness? And they'll either say, I don't have any. Or they'll say, it's sort of woo. And then the conversation gets very strange very quickly because you say, well, what do you mean by that? You're saying that we're not conscious?

Or what are you saying? And then they have to have some sort of convoluted definition where you get to keep attention and memory and all these other things, but you're not allowed to talk about consciousness. But there are, it's not a conspiracy to keep consciousness out of the field, is just how the intellectual lineage of the field developed is that any real discussion of consciousness, which should be the major part of neuroscience, is kept as this very sort of minor set of, now thanks to the big names of the field, not everyone in it is considered a very strange weirdo,

but in 1985, like 1985, you could not just go and get a PhD like I did studying the neuroscience of consciousness. That was not a thing that could happen. In fact, my generation is the first generation to really be able to actively get into the field in order to study consciousness and then actively work on that throughout our careers rather than essentially having to become neurofamous, you know, for some other thing, and then sort of transition once no one can criticize you. And science is very conservative. Like, I don't think people should be surprised. Again, it's not conspiratorial. You know, the same sort of stuff happens in theoretical physics,

where maybe there are some promising approaches, and they're just like not favored by the field, or sort of viewed as crazy and so on. And so it's very difficult to do work in it. But I think if you look at neuroscience as a whole and where it is, it has all sorts of problems that crop up almost endlessly within it. And you have these repeating narratives and these sort of neuro myths that don't die and so on. And I think a lot of it is just that there's no big target of neuroscience, there's no big target of what to figure out because what to figure out is how to brain generate consciousness

and only a small subfield of neuroscience even looks at that now. Feeling the aftershock of Galileo, still all of these millennia later? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. But he would of course, I think it's more likely that it had you, a philosopher named Phil Koff makes this thought experiment of like, if you brought Galai to the modern age. And you said, okay, we're trying to do this neuroscience of consciousness. You probably say, well, no, stop. You're not supposed to do that. This is weird perversion of science, right? Like you, that's the domain of the soul. Of course, you're not finding any satisfactory

answers. It feels like, you know, it feels like to me as you're talking about it. Obviously, all of the problems of consciousness, a myriad and very difficult to try and come up with. And as you've said yourself, your entire field that you have a PhD in and have worked him for almost all your life until he just left has made basically very little progress with it. It feels a little bit like, you know, when you hear about in UFC or in boxing, there's this one fighter that no one wants to call out.

And all of the fighters are calling out the other ones that they know are kind of a bit shitter than this one. But there's this one guy, and he's just a nightmare. He's a phenom, and no one can handle him. It feels a little bit like consciousness is the difficult fighter that no one wants to call out. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one reason why I don't always

encourage younger people to go into the field, despite the fact that it's one of the biggest open questions in science, which is that it's also probably, if not the most difficult question in science, it's one of the most difficult question in science, it's one of the most difficult questions in science. And we're still waiting on our Einstein.

We're waiting on our Darwin. And it's sort of sad because neuroscience is entering this period, particularly with AI, where people aren't able to predict various things off of brain states, right? Like you might think, well, you know, how come Eric is saying that, you know, neuroscience hasn't been in progress? Didn't I just see something about how AIs can now reach your mind off of neuroimaging

or something like that, right? And the answer is that all that stuff is statistical. So it's sort of like, like first, it's the AIs are, you know are very, very good at extrapolating from minimal data. So if you actually look at what it's predicting, it's actually not the same at all, and it's sort of like how it's able to autocomplete the next paragraph of text. But the thing is, is that there is some law. There is some law of nature wherein the neural activity that your brain is undergoing

now is associated with, generates, you can sort of come up with various relational terms here, but is related to the conscious things that you are experiencing. So if you're listening to this podcast, the auditory cortex is going through various sort of stages of processing, there is some, there is somewhere there, a law of nature that tells us, okay, what sounds are now being experienced, right? That is a question. It's not just, can I throw machine learning at it and sort of like get the sound back or tell that someone is experiencing something. It's very similar to the laws of physics, right? Despite all the complexity that you of, you know, leaves falling from trees, there are natural laws behind those. And science knows most of those natural laws, particularly at the scales that are relevant.

Within the brain, we don't have anything like that. And one way to tell this is that you ask neuroscientists to explain things, and I used to do this, I was a menace in graduate school, so I would do this all the time, where I would ask some prominent neuroscientist who's an expert at some highly particular field to explain that phenomenon, right?

Like auditory processing or something. And then they would give their explanation and I would ask them, please explain it again, but don't refer to location. Right, don't just tell me where in the brain this is happening. Tell me how it's happening, right? Like, because what is the spatial information?

Tell us that it's over there or over there? This isn't that's not real scientific understanding. That's sort of like, well, if I damage that part of the brain, this no longer works, right? And if you remove localization, what you'll find is that the outside of some very early sensory processing that we know how it works, things like edge detection in vision, but that's very primary sensory-corticy stuff. This is the showers of the brain. Once you start moving beyond the showers of the brain, and you talk about the deep areas of the brain, and you get people talking about them, you'll notice, and you remove something like localization, and there's almost nothing to Yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking

about back to a lot of the conversations that I've had on neuroscience with neuroscientists, the stuff that I've listened to or read. And an awful lot of it does sort of come in with a slam dunk in a way, which is a particular thing happens and here is the area of the brain which is activated, or you take a particular substance, and this is the pattern of behavior within the brain, which is turned down, and this is the pattern which is turned up, and it's almost like cranial geography more than it is like an explanation

of the phenomenological experience of being a human. Right, and you could imagine that you sort of swapped and it is like an explanation of the phenomenological experience of being a human. Right. And you could imagine that you sort of swapped around all those locational tags. Well, what would that change? Right. You would say, oh, well, the auditory processing occurs in the front, right? And then another stuff occurs far in the back, right? You could swap around all that stuff and you wouldn't feel any different about the system.

And that's a good indication that your explanations are not very meaningful. And the fundamental truth is that we don't even know there is no good way to even understand how artificial neural networks function once they get past a certain size. They become mathematical black boxes. And this is a really big problem. It's a big problem for AI safety. I know you've had on guests who've talked about AI safety. That's a cause area I care quite about, but quite a bit about. But, you know, one thing that makes that so difficult is that it's almost impossible to figure out what a feed-forward AI, which is made of structured sets of effectively neurons, mathematical representations of neurons, where we can know all the connections.

And we know exactly what neurons are firing and so on. We have perfect information, and we're still stumped in a significant number of cases. neuroscience is a thousand times harder than figuring out how some feed-forward neural network is. Not only is the brain much larger in terms of the parameter size, you know, probably it's something like a hundred trillion synapses. We're also, you know, it's also occluded behind an opaque wall of bone and it's incredibly delicate and it's all folded up. And then, and so, you know, another question that I like

to ask neuroscientists is, okay, so why should we feel that the brain will be so much more easier to figure out than like a relatively much smaller artificial neural network that we have perfect information in our access to, and we still can't figure out that. So why would you not expect that black box aspect to exist in the brain? I've never gotten like a good answer to something. Eric, I can't imagine why you are now out of academia given that you've made every

academic that you've worked with for the last decade life a nightmare. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I just got a lovely email from a graduate student, from a former graduate student. That was just that was an absolute treat to read about how great workman he was. I'm sure, I'm sure. No, no, I think you're right in the sense of I think you're right in the sense of, in the sense of, you know, what one has to distinguish between being a dad fly and actually offering something positive. So the thing is, is that it's very easy to sit on your high horse and critique a field

like neuroscience, which is trying to understand the most complex system. They don't know this and they don't know this and this is useless and blah, blah, blah. Right. And so what I also focused on, what one of my career was, was that, well, one way to understand the complexities of the brain is that probably that consciousness has something to do with it.

So pursuing a scientific theory of consciousness should help you answer these questions. Because in theory, there is some sort of natural law that relates experiences. And much of the, much of the fluff of neuroscience is just that the field is in philosophy of science terms, it's just pre-paradigmatic. So because it's pre-paradigmatic,

it has all these problems, but that doesn't mean you should stop working on the field. What it means is that you should work very hard to try to develop a new paradigm. What's just for the people that don't know? What's pre-paradigmatic? That would be that there's no overarching paradigm to explain. There's no sort of like big theory that everyone can key off of and understand. So a great example of this would be biology before Darwin. So until you have the theory of natural selection, you do have biology, right? People are out there collecting tax monies and making scientific observations and you know relating the lineages of species and so on. But once

you get the theory of evolution by natural selection, the whole thing clicks into place, and you're sort of able to fit everything within this overarching structure. Which I suppose also includes criticism. Yes, yes, certainly. And just because you advanced to one paradigm does not mean that the science is now over. In fact, what usually happens is that science advances to a paradigm, and then all sorts of errors begin to crop up in various places. And Kun, Thomas Kuhn was one of the people who really wrote a lot about this. These errors crop up, and once the errors reach a certain point where like no one can really deny them anymore, finally, people are sort of forced to search for some new paradigm

and they get some sort of replacement. And you've seen this happen in physics, right? Where it's like, the early, almost solar system-esque models of atoms that you might have seen in textbooks. Of course, that's not really what atoms look like. That's sort of an earlier, more, you know, easily to understand paradigm of what atoms look like. And we went through, you know, succession of paradigms. But I think within neuroscience, it's still very much waiting on its big theory. It's still very much waiting on a theory of consciousness. And that would be the thing that catapults it to being post-pair dramatic.

And so that's where I hope that the criticism that I'm offering for, including some in this book, do have a positive purpose, which is to sort of re-orientate people towards where can we actually move in order to solve some of these sort of problems instead of just continuing down doing exactly what we're doing. Okay, so explain to me the intrinsic and the extrinsic perspective and how does Tyin and how they're related. Sure, so if we go back to Kalea, the intrinsic is what he removed, right, is what he cut out.

And the extrinsic is in a way we're sort of more well versed in or we're more familiar with. So an engineering diagram would be extrinsic. The mathematics, you know, a physical description of some complex natural phenomenon. Now would be an extrinsic description. The circuitry of your laptop, that would be an extrinsic description. A causal model is extrinsic. Intrinsic are the subjective qualities that accompany, or basically are your conscious experience and your stream of consciousness. And neuroscience fits in this very strange position where it's trying to reconcile the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Something that is very interesting to me, and I devoted, again, some of the book is about this, is that if you look at the development of our civilization, you can, as in humanity

as a whole, you can view it as the development of these two different perspectives on the world. And they don't really go together, right? One is our development of the extrinsic, right? And the separation of the two. So if you look early on, of course, people are explaining things with gods, or magic, or these other sort of much more like supernatural phenomenon. And so we get honed down to only really wanting to give very clear extrinsic explanations of phenomena. And the best example of that is in science.

But meanwhile, we're also beginning to understand that we also, you know, over time, over the millennia, we get much better at describing not just the extrinsic world, like via science, so on. We also get better at describing the intrinsic world. So we get better at describing not just the ectrinzoquery, like via science, so on. We also get better at describing the entrance of quarrel. So we get better at describing ourselves and our own emotions and our own thoughts. And we have better theory of mind. We have better ability to express our own minds

and sort of the various details and and and and all sort of the the the the microquanta of your own conscious experience. We get much much much better at that. You know, if you go back and you read, you know, ancient Egyptian poetry or ancient Egyptian text, what you'll find is that descriptions of mind are incredibly sparse. They really don't get very many descriptions of emotions and the descriptions of emotions that you do get are extremely wooden. It's almost as if you have literature, but then you don't even know how to really talk about other minds. And it's just like with science, the ability to describe minds, of rockets for during the,

during the era of Ancient Greece and post the Homeric era, and you see Europe at ease and all these playwrights become, you know, extremely good at describing mines in ways that we would recognize now. And then, funnily enough, I mean, after the fall of the Roman Empire, during research for this book, I was sort of going through history and trying to find texts through which you would be good examples of how people talked about minds in different eras, right? And it was actually very hard to find any text at all that talks about minds post-Full of the Roman

Appar like when you're in the Dark Ages. And so you really sort of, you really sort of lose this ability almost outside of some, you know, religious text. You really lose this ability to really talk seriously about minds. I almost almost as if we like reverted back to ancient Egypt and then we develop it again just like with science you know during enlightenment and so on and and That was a really sort of fascinating story that I didn't sort of expect Expect a priory it really kind of fell out of out of my research and Looking at these these twin threads and the intrinsic perspective, just like

we took the extrinsic perspectives on the world and we boiled it away to its clearest form and that's science. We took the intrinsic perspective of the world and we boiled it away to the clearest expression of it and that's literature. And that's the if you go back and you read, you know, you know, 18th century novelist, right? They have such facility with describing internal states. And that would have been completely foreign to people 2000 years ago. And it's as if they sort of developed, you know, of viewpoint, just in the same way that science was developed, except that viewpoint is pointed towards

consciousness, is pointed towards accessing and describing our qualitative experiences. Yeah, that's very interesting that you could almost look at novels and the literature as probably more way, almost certainly is more of a direct window into the mind than the science of the brain and the science of consciousness. You learn an awful lot more functionally, experientially about what it's like to be a human by reading, back in can weathering heights or something, then you do by looking at neuroscience journals. Absolutely. There's just no doubt that Tolstoy knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologists, even like an evolutionary psychologist. You can take some sort of evolutionary psychologist, explain human nature, and then Tolstoy comes in with very sort of,

well, we would consider perhaps very strange archaic notions of true Christianity and how human beings work. And then he somehow is able to sort of explain people just so incredibly well and has such an eye for how humans actually function and can ride across all sorts of different divides. And I do think that what's really interesting there is that where that failure is is in the missing sort of neuroscience of consciousness, right? One reason that feels like such an obvious gap is because neuroscience is sort of continuously stuck, trying to explain everything via the extrinsic perspective. And we never quite get what we want from the brain

out of such explanations. We always feel that there's something fundamentally missing. We always feel that there's some ghosts that's been left out of the machine, whenever we sort of try to give anly extrinsic explanation of the brain. How is Descartes involved or important in this story? Well, I think Descartes is deeply important whenever you talk about whenever you talk about consciousness, but specifically for this, he actually has this really interesting interaction

where this problem of how does the intrinsic relate to the extrinsic? I mean, perhaps it's most, it's first historical formal discussion occurs in some letters that Descartes sends with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was a really, really interesting woman. She was a mathematician, she was a philosopher, she eventually became an abyss of a, I think I forget exactly in which country she was an abyss, but she lived this life that was filled with sort of political intrigue, she was a royal, and she met Descartes, and their letters are fascinating historical reading. I mean, one because there's almost like

this extremely romantic aspect of it, and of course, that age was very different and how people spoke to one another was very different, but you sort of get the sense that these are like two nerds, communicating over emails, but they're like stuck in the Renaissance. and after Descartes died, Princess Elizabeth never married and, and, and, and, and, and died a widow, and she turned down an offer of marriage, so I was giving to her, and, and, and she was reportedly just utterly heartbroken. But the

point is that in these letters, Princess Elizabeth, who was a very good philosopher in her own right, makes a point to Descartes about his metaphysics. And he is one of the people who really initially pushed this idea of dualism. It's almost a caricature at this point where he's like the soul interacts with the body through the pineal gland. His opinions were a bit more complicated than that,

but that's effectively how it's portrayed. And Princess Elizabeth has this point where she says, well, consider that physics and the world is extrinsic and the soul is intrinsic. How can one impact the other? If they really are, if you really are a dualist, and you really think there are two different types of substances, how can one sort of cause a wee control the other? That seems that seems nonsensical. That's the pillow talk that I want, by the way. That's all play for me. Just dismantle my life's work and use the word ridiculous. And you do sort of get the sense of that where she's both complimenting him, but

also clearly sort of had a bulldog, has got a hold of this point. And won't let go until Descartes really gives her the answer she's looking for. And he really doesn't do a good job of it. First, he sort of says, well, maybe this is like gravity where it's a force, right? And she immediately comes back with, well, if it's a force like gravity, then the mind would just be material, right? Because it would just be some physical force. So what again, what do you mean by saying it's two separate substances? How do they interact? And they never really resolve it. They cart sort of ducks the question and they, you know, their, their correspondents continues on other matters for a very long time until his death. But that, to me, is so interesting historically because it's a point where some of the paradoxes around consciousness come very clearly into play. Both of them have

the very strong intuition that you cannot reduce the intrinsic to the extrinsic fully. And so they're saying, you know, there's two separate substances. And Elizabeth never, you know, questions that she says the same intuitions. And in the modern day, you can go to philosophy of mind and you can find all sorts of arguments that argue exactly for that. So, are you exactly like example would be like the zombie argument that again the philosopher David Chalmers is very famous

for sort of articulating and defending very well. It is an example of something where it primes your intuition to believe that the entrance and the entrance are really fundamentally different. But Elizabeth also notes this paradox aspect, which is that, well, if they are really different, wait a minute, how could they even interact? How could our picture of the world even be sensible, right?

If there really are just like two fundamentally incompatible perspectives on the world, and we don't know how to reconcile them, how does that give us a cohesive ontology? It doesn't seem to do that. And so that's really the ultimate paradox of consciousness, which is that both that there are strong arguments and strong intuitions for why when you're talking about consciousness, you're dealing with something that's irreducible to the material.

But at the same time, it's totally unclear what the ontology of the world would even look like. If it were true, that consciousness was irreducible and the soul was moving around the neurons in the pineal gland or whatever, right? Because presumably we would just find the force coefficient or whatever of what the soul is doing and give it some mathematical description. And then actually, wait, it's just this force and we'd be dismissive of it and find it very boring and non-supernatural and so on.

And so to me, they're sort of the first like, almost like odd couple who fully recognize in their correspondence this paradoxical aspect of consciousness. And one of the things that makes it just so darn hard. Yeah, is this related in any way to the bicameral mind and like that perspective? That was something that I first learned about whilst watching Westworld,

which I guess might be the same for a lot of people. But I was fascinated by that. I was really, really fascinated by this idea of the bicameral mind. And again, it seems like there's almost a splitting up of what's going on there too. How does that kind of play into this story? Yeah. I think it was to paraphrase in Brutal Echo, a book is made of other books. Julian James wrote this classic, I mean, 1976 called The Origin of Consciousness

and the Breakdown of the Bycamel Mind. And one of the things that's great about it is that it's a beautifully written book. It's an example of a popular science book that does not suck. And it's really fascinating because he proposes, frankly, a wild hypothesis, which is that what we call modern consciousness only came about during the Homeric ages.

And if you examine the characters of the Iliad, they don't really talk about minds. In the same way that we do, they talk about God's commandments and so on. And so his speculation was that essentially the two hemispheres of the brain were still ultimately disconnected during these times and that they only sort of come together and that's how you get modern consciousness and modern humans. Now, that's an incredibly strong claim to make off of textual evidence, right? Because that's really all John James had.

And because of that, John James has always considered one of the first consciousness researchers because his ultimate interest was in consciousness. But also he was always sort of considered like it was a bit of a lark, right? A beautiful book, a book that most people get into consciousness research have read and are interested in, but sort of a crazy one. And even very early on, some initial reviews of it, you know, philosopher who are now, you know, still working and still very well, well, well, renowned like Ned Block wrote some reviews of it that pointed out, well, we don't have to have this complicated hypothesis

that consciousness has changed. It's just that how people have talked about consciousness has changed. And in a way, a lot of my book, a lot of what the world behind the world is about, is exploring this alternative view and maybe a slightly more tame and sensible one, to the evidence that Julian Jain's brought forth about how in the early end, no one was talking

about minds and they were talking about gods instead. And the way that I frame it is that philosophers have these two different notions of consciousness. One is our phenomenal consciousness, which is incredibly rich. So phenomenal consciousness includes everything it's like to be you right now, all the little details of your experience. And the other is your access consciousness. And that's all the stuff about consciousness that you can talk about, that you can express. But we all know that there's stuff within consciousness that you can't express well, right? Like you could talk about your emotions, but are you really fully capturing your emotions when you talk about them? Or you sort of just, it's just

tip of the iceberg stuff, right? And so in the, in sort of the narrative that I paint is that, you know, a lot of the stuff from Julian Jains is explained by thinking about it as the story of our ability to talk about consciousness gets richer and richer and richer. And then finally, it meets or begins to approximate our actual consciousness. In other words, we start out historically, our consciousness is very much like an iceberg

and we can only really talk about very, very top of the line stuff for it. And once you move on and once you keep going, eventually you uncover more and more of the iceberg and you get better and better at talking about your own consciousness. And in a way that I think historically parallels a lot of the development of science and sort of reaches its apotheosis in literature in the same way that the extrinsic perspective reaches its apotheosis in science. Do you think that this is going to be a cause of sort of not necessarily suffering, but definitely discontent among humans, the fact that the richness of our inner experience

and the capacity for us to explain and tell other people about it at the moment are doomed to be incredibly far apart. Well, I think we have it much better off than we did historically, right? I mean, I think it's very hard to express what the inner life of a Scandinavian peasant in the 1100s was. I think that that's a very difficult experience to express. And I don't think that they had very many good cognitive tools to express it. I think that we're sort of have been gifted and people don't realize that, right?

It's one of the things that makes modern human seem so much more intelligent than a lot of ancient texts. If you go back and you read historic literature, one of the things that you will think is sort of like why are people so seemingly dumb, right? Like the average Twitter user now seems far better to express their own inner states, you know, then like the very best poets of Babylon, right? And is that we've inherited a gift? We've inherited all sorts of cognitive tools and all sorts of language in terms of words and concepts that allow us to talk about our own inner states. And that's something that was developed. It was developed a lot by writers, I think. And that's an argument that I make.

That some of the earliest, that not just did writers get better at expressing consciousness, but they were inventing the very terminology that you need in order to talk about consciousness. As you finally end up with people like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce who are able to discuss the incredible minutia of consciousness and transform it into beautiful stream of consciousness literature.

And that was their project, right? It wasn't just something that they, this is like their style of writing that they wanted to do. They specifically were like, we're going to be the generation of writers who gets the best at capturing all the little details of consciousness. And so I think we owe a lot of our language around consciousness and we have a debt to writers and then also to, you know, psychologists, people like Freud, although I think in some ways that that to him is negative just people like Freud, although I think in some ways that that to him is negative, that we have this set and we're able to therefore sort of express ourselves in ways that people

just couldn't before. What would happen if and when a satisfactory theory of consciousness gets found. Well, I would probably get very drunk in terms of celebration. It really is something I'll be waiting for my whole life. And I don't know if it will come in my life. I think first of all, it would be a revolution in the understanding of ourselves. We would finally know what we are. We don't because we don't have a good theory of consciousness.

So there's still this debate. What exactly are we? And we don't know. There's no good scientific answer to that question. There's answers around that question, but there's no direct scientific theory you can point to. And that's what a theory of consciousness would give us. So first of all, there would be the change in humanity's conception of itself.

And that would be, I think, as monumental as the theory of evolution by natural selection, which told us where we came from. And then there would be all sorts of incredible technological advancement to come out of that. I mean, the ability, what you could do with the theory of consciousness, I mean, first of all, you could make some of the best art that's ever been made in the history of humanity. You could make some truly incredible things. And second of all, I mean, it may turn out, as I've talked about on other podcasts and written about that, I am very worried about AI and where that's going. But it might be that certain types of AI

are impossible without consciousness. I think it's very, I think it's very debatable if contemporary systems are conscious. I think most people would say no. And I think most's very debatable if contemporary systems are conscious. I think most people would say no. And I think most of the scientific fields of consciousness research would also say no. So then the question is, well, how do you build conscious AI? Well, the only way to really do that is to know what consciousness is and how that works. So that's an example of something that could revolutionize AI, for instance. So the actual, the funny thing is about this is that there's basically no funding, and

both at a private level, but also at like a public level, right? If you look at like, you know, tax dollars, a huge amount of it goes to neuroscience, via the NSF and the NIH. Try applying for grant to do scientific research on consciousness to one of those organizations and see how it goes. They've gotten better over the years. Like I'll say that, like they have gotten better

don't take that as it's totally impossible, but it's so much easier to get rats to run amaze and you wanna look at the amygdala, you know, the chance of you getting a grant to do that is, you know, like, 10 times higher, right? So, so it's sort of astounding that there's still this really big gap in our understanding of the universe. It's not like the gap of, you know, what happened before the Big Bang or exactly how do you reconcile quantum physics with general relativity or something. These are very big questions and it's totally imaginable that the answers to them would

require building a supercliter the size of a solar system or something, right? For consciousness, it's like, listen, that we all do this every day. All of us, we wake up. Our brain, you know, the slow waves recede, right? You wake up from your dream, right? And maybe your consciousness continues from the dream, right? And then the consciousness as a dream gets to be your consciousness for the day, right?

You get some lucky dream that gets to exist until you until your head hits a pillow again, but that is that is something that's accessible and present and and yet still remains a really major scientific mystery. So I think it's like it's just sort of an obvious missed opportunity in my eyes. And I think you need to galvanize people a little bit about it. I mean,'s just sort of an obvious missed opportunity in my eyes. And I think you need to galvanize people a little bit about it. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm so critical about neuroscience in the book is because I want to galvanize people to actually address this. How is all of this related to free will?

We've decapitated a number of people's dreams so far today. Let's go in and do the final one with free will. Well, I think that there's a few different ways this related. One is to go back to some of our earlier discussion about emergence. So, you know, if you pick out some popular science book, that argues against free will, there's only a couple forms of arguments Against free will and one of the most common ones is is is basically that you know your your atoms did it Whatever it is pick whatever it is your atoms did it you didn't do it your atoms did it You sort of we can talk about you as if you know you know, you, you, you exist, but that language is just

for convenience. Really, you know, everything is sort of completely reducible down to your atoms. And, and we don't, you know, associate, you know, if your atoms did it, you really aren't very strongly associated with your atoms, so then you didn't really do it, right? And I think for one, the theory of causal emergence sort of puts that particular argument, I think, to bed very firmly. Can you explain how it does that in simple terms, like Emma Golden Retriever? You know, there is this notion of cognitive closure

where you really can't explain certain things to the lawyers. Yeah, you really can't explain certain things to Golden Retrievers, but I'll give it a shot. So let's look at that argument. It's saying that, well, your atoms were the cause of your actions. So your atoms following the laws of physics were the cause of you reaching your hand out for a handshake.

Now the question is, well, was were they really the cause? Like did anyone check? And you might say, well, it should be obvious that they're the cause? Like did anyone check and you might say, well, it should be obvious that they're the cause, right? And what our research I shown is, no, because basically because no one thought to check. And while you can't do this with a person, right? Yeah, I can't prove this to you as a person,

because people are incredibly complex and physics is very complex. I can give examples that are similar to that in very simple models, mathematical models, right? Where you have some simple description of a system. And this might be like cellular automata, it might be circuits of logic gates, but imagine a very simple description of how a system works. Like x talks to y, y talks to z, z talks to a, right, and so on. And you just imagine it's very simple. What it turns out is that when you, when you look at higher scales of description,

so this would be like for our bodies, this would be like instead of giving the atomic state, what if I gave you the cellular state of your body, right? So all your cells, your biologists would talk about, you know, the sodium levels and they'd talk about, you know, which ion channels are open and so on, they would give a biological description or cellular description of your body, or you could give a description of your body up at an even higher level in terms of the musculature and the bones and like all these much larger structures like organs and so on and talk about their states, right?

And these would all be what this field calls macro scale descriptions. So macro meaning bigger, right? And so these higher level descriptions, the question is, well, do they have any causal influence over the future events, right? And well, again, you can't measure that out in the real world. You can create simple mathematical models where you can look at macro scales and compare them to sort of the atomic scale. And what you actually find is that pick almost any measure of causation you want, right? Because so there's a question of causation. People normally think of causation as this very philosophical right? Because so there's a question of causation, people normally think of causation as this very philosophical subject.

Actually, there's a whole science around causation now. There's a whole mathematics around causation now. A lot of it comes from Judea Pearl, who's a mathematician at MIT, and he won the Turing Award for this work. And so there's basically this really recent development of our good mathematical understanding of causal models. And so, you could take a system and you can look at the causal model of all the little micro

interactions, which would be like the atomic interactions. And then I can look at all like what would be the equivalent to cellular interactions or some other higher scale of description. And what you find is that there's causal influence that's irreducible down to the micro scale. Despite the system still being reducible, as in you could still say, you could still say, pick out every atom that makes up your organs or whatever, right? You could still pick all that out and you could still relate those. So it wouldn't be that the macro scale is not

reducible. It is reducible, but the causation involved is not. And what that means is that macro level entities can have real irreducible causal power in the world. And you are a macro level entity, right? We don't think of you. This is like the ship of these years, or what have you, right? Like you're not the same. You're not completely identical to your comics date. You're some sort of coarse grain that we talk about. And that thing can have really irreducible cause of power.

Simply from the fact that we know that in these simple models, you can sort of get this effect to occur. And then it's like probably very likely in these very complex real cases that it occurs. Does it make sense to ask the question, where does this causal power come from? Yeah, it makes a great deal of sense. It makes a great deal of sense. It makes a great deal of sense both temporally. So to ask where in time, so was it, was it something that just happened, was it something that happened a while ago, or it also makes sense to talk about in terms of

the scale of the system. And that's what this research has really talked about. So you could say, okay, what was the cause of this? Was it the atomic state of the system, or was it some macro scale state? And the answer is that in many cases, most of the causal influence can come from macro scale states. And we understand exactly how that happens. And it happens due to this relatively non-magical

thing called error correction. And it's basically just that, well, there's noise down at the bottom. And by noise, I don't mean like sonic noise. I mean like there's noise in terms of the probabilities of how things relate to one another down at the microscopic, and when you zoom out, that noise gets smaller and smaller. Well, the power of your causal influence is inversely proportional to your noise, right? So what's a great way of saying that. So it would be like, let's say that I had a light switch that controlled the light bulb. If that was a very noisy causal relationship, it would be like, I turn the switch,

and then sometimes the light turns on, but not all the time, right? Now think about the difference between that, and a light switch that you can rely on, right? You flip it, and the light bulb turns on and off, right? And one would be like a non-noisy deterministic system and the other would be like a very noisy system. One has more causal influence than the other

because in one case it's like, well, I flip it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. That's not very much causal influence. But in the other case, I flip it. It always turns the light on or off. Macroscails are non-noisy representations of their micro-scales. So what that means is that you can take a bunch of

relationships that are very noisy and transform them into non-noisy, reliable causal relationships up at the macro scale. And that's where you get this extra causal influence from, which is just something called error correction from information theory. And so I think it doesn't prove free will by any means, right? So it's a notion of free will has to be more complex than that.

But it does open this door to say, well, wait a minute, now we know that it's mathematically possible for like macro scale descriptions and higher level descriptions to matter causally. That is a necessary fact for there to be free well. Because imagine if it were the opposite, right? If we could show, listen,

all the causal influences always down at the micro scale, that would imply that it really is, you know, why things happen is always just, your atoms were in some particular, you know, atomic state or so on. Interesting. I got sent through literally today out front, Robert Sapolsky's new book. Have you seen what that is? I don't know if I've seen the new one. Determined the science of life without free will. Yeah. We would disagree. I thought you would. I thought you would. Well, I think I'll just say it, right? I mean,

he's a primatologist, I'm an evolutionary psychologist, right? Neurobiologist. I think an evolutionary biologist, perhaps. Evolutionary biologist? Yeah. So, you know, I think that the probability, like, that when you're talking about free will, you're talking about like the mathematics of causation. Like that's what you're talking about. You're not, and the relevance from, you know, oh, is it genetic determinism? It's like, forget genetic determinism. Is it just determinism from like your current brain state right now?

Is this you, is this you slowly mocking your territory here? I think this is, this is me saying that when people say free will doesn't exist and they sort of start that at the outset, it's generally only by having really strong metaphysical and philosophical assumptions. And if you actually go and you question those assumptions in terms of their details, what you'll often find is that either they're extremely debatable, and this would be like logical fatalism and some of these other sort of less direct arguments for free will, or like literally disproveable. So you can literally disprove the argument.

So I like Sapolsky a great deal, but I think that there's a certain, I think one thing that I hope my book makes clear is that these questions are not just closed. That's given the very best, the very latest that we have on what would be the most relevant scientific disciplines, which is how you create macro scale models, how causeling modeling works, how prediction works in science using notions like computational irreducibility. We had this revolution in the 80s that people have not caught up with, with chaos theory and computational irreducibility. Those are very relevant and have not been directly applied. We've had this causal revolution. Those are, that's very relevant and has not been applied. So, I think, if I want

one, people to take away one thing involving free will, it's not so much that you definitely have free will such that, you know, if you look down at these really basic assumptions behind a lot of the, you know, we obviously don't have free will or so on, what you'll find is things that are extremely debatable, especially given what science says about how, the best way to talk about how the world functions now versus say 1950.

And a lot of people are using stuff from 1950 to talk about it, right? And they're like, the laws of physics are working on deterministic train tracks. And they just have these really, and causation is just correlation or something. It's not like counterfactual dependency or something. They basically have this old stock world model. And if you look at contemporary science, you find a lot of complexity there and a lot of room a lot more room than people are led to believe. If a theory of consciousness was found would that

inform us at all about free will do you think would it be likely to inform us about the nature of free will? Yeah I think it would absolutely. And one reason why I don't make the claim and I don't in the book that you absolutely do have free will, but more so that the standard arguments against it have been nullified in many ways by certain advancements and thought. You know, is because consciousness is always the wild card. You know, at the theory of consciousness ways by certain advancements and thought. Is because consciousness is always the wild card. A theory of consciousness is always sort of the wild card. We don't know exactly what the ontology of the universe looks like without a theory of consciousness.

You could always pull out some joker, some very strange thing. And that would completely change your conceptions. So with that said, then, yes, absolutely. It could have a huge relevancy, but I'm sort of cautious. I think you can still talk about free will and intuitions around free will and arguments against free will or arguments pro free will.

Without necessarily relying on consciousness, I think you can talk about causation and prediction. And what prediction really means, you know, and whether or not you really could predict, you know, someone's behavior or so on. And what I hope people take away is that, you know, science isn't finished yet. So we still have some big gaping and very personal holes of left in science that have not been filled. And a lot of the recent developments in science have made things seem much more complex rather than less.

And that includes over things like free will, that includes consciousness, that includes neuroscience. And I think that that's something that is very much the opposite of what a lot of pop side books are out there to tell you. They're to simplify, they're to make the world easy. And I think ultimately the world isn't easy. Eric Hull, ladies and gentlemen, Eric,

where should people go? I love your sub-stack. I think it's fantastic. The super-sensorium article that you did a little while ago is one of my favorites. You just put a new one out on the fact that we don't have a town square and the all social media is fundamentally just killing us.

Where should people go if they want to check that out and everything else that you do? If you type in the intrinsic perspective, Eric, into Google, Eric or the K, it'll find it, or just the intrinsic perspective, Google will find it as well. And my first nonfiction book, is actually my second book,

and my first nonfiction book is out July 25th. It's called The World Behind the World. You can also Google that and it will come up with my name. Eric, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. This was great. you