Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Consciousness, Free Will, The Subconscious, Quantum Mechanics | George Musser

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

This presentation was recorded at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic University, CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND, spearheaded by Susan Schneider. Center for the Future Mind (Mindfest @ FAU): https://www.fau.edu/future-mind/ Links Mentioned: - Center for the Future Mind (Mindfest @ FAU): https://www.fau.edu/future-mind/ - Other Ai and Consciousness (Mindfest) TOE Podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlOPw7Hqkc6-MXEMBy0fnZcb - Mathematics of String Theory (Video): https://youtu.be/X4PdPnQuwjY - David Chalmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r9V1ryksnw - Scott Aaronson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h16qJLGOXvw - National Intelligence University: https://www.ni-u.edu - Scott's Paper: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html - George's Book (Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation): https://amzn.to/3QuRDfZ Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

Is there room for free will in a law-like universe? We humans and other agents that claim to have free will are governed by causal processes that you can therefore look at the antecedents of any decision that I make. Can I still be said to be acting freely? I tend to think of it as we have a partial view of reality, of the quantum reality in this case, and that gives us the impression of a collapse. the impression of a collapse. Today we have a treat with panelist George Musser who is a writer for Scientific American, also Quantum Magazine and New Scientist. He's also the author of A Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory. And he has a new book on consciousness called Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe. Links to everything said will be in the description, including this book, which I recommend you

check out. This panel is conducted by Professor of Philosophy Susan Schneider from the Florida Atlantic University. The introductions are given by yours truly. This talk was given at MindFest, put on by the Center for the Future Mind, which is spearheaded by Professor of Philosophy Susan Schneider. It's a conference that's annually held where they merge artificial intelligence and consciousness studies and help at Florida Atlantic University.

The links to all of these will be in the description. There's also a playlist here for MindFest. Again that's that conference Merge an AI and Consciousness. There are previous talks from people like Scott Aronson, David Chalmers, Stuart Hammeroff, Sarah Walker, Stephen Wolfram and Ben Gortzell. My name is Kurt Jai Mungle and today we have a special treat because usually Theories of Everything is a podcast. What's ordinarily done on this channel is I use my background in mathematical physics

and I analyze various theories of everything from that perspective and analytical one, but as well as a philosophical one discerning well what's consciousness' relationship to fundamental reality, what is reality, are the laws as they exist even the laws and should they be mathematical, but instead I was invited down to film these talks and bring them to you courtesy of the Center for the Future Mind. Enjoy this talk from Mindfest. So, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. For those of you who don't know me, I have a channel on YouTube called Theories of Everything where we investigate what is the fundamental law, much like Sarah Walker was talking about earlier or what are the fundamental laws.

Usually from a physics perspective, for the past few years, we've gotten more into what is consciousness and does that have any constitutive role to play. Today we're here for a book salon with George Musser to cover this book called Putting Ourselves in the Equation. This is a fantastic book, by the way. George Musser is an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor at Scientific American and Quantum Magazine, and recently New Scientist as well. He's the author of Spooky Action at a Distance.

The link is in the description. It's also on screen now if you're watching this at home. Here's some reviews of George's book. This one's from Carlo Rovelli. Putting ourselves back in the equation is a delightful account of one of the deepest and most fascinating explorations going on today at the frontier of our knowledge. I couldn't put this book down. It reveals the science of what makes reality tick and what makes us all conscious, all

explored with lively inviting prose that draws the reader in from cover to cover. Now that last quote is from Dr. Susan Schneider. Dr. Susan Schneider is the founding director for the Center for the Future Mind, Florida Atlantic University. Distinguished professor of philosophy of mind, Susan writes about the nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, AI, cognitive science, and astrobiology. Take it away, Susan. Oh, thank you. Is it on? Kurt, thank you so much for joining us again this year and our partnership with Theories of Everything has been just really wonderful and we appreciate the introduction. And George, I meant every word I said when

I, you know, I mean, you know how much I love your work because I've been reading you for years and now we've been talking. I mean, I call you a lot actually when I'm confused about things in quantum mechanics. There are times when it probably drives you crazy and you're so sweet. Oh, you never drive me completely crazy, so's fine but I've always been inspired by your work and Kurt let's give a shout out to your YouTube channel. For deep dives it's hard to go it's no place else really on YouTube certainly that has the kind of deep dives that you do. Hours, literally hours of discussions about foundational questions in science.

For sure. And so you've done it again. You've written a crystal clear articulation of some of the most difficult issues. And so what I'd like to start with is I'd like to ask you, I want to just dive right into the material, if you don't mind. Tell me about the two key problems you began your book with, so kind of set up shop for the audience. You say there are twin hard problems. Yeah, and this is really – I should also give a shout out to Dave Chalmers who inspired me and continues to inspire me. So the twin hard problems – and Sarah introduced a third today, those two sides seem in commensurate with each other. And also there's this hard problem of matter, which doesn't get as much attention, but Dave has it tucked into a chapter of his book in 1996 that we don't really even have a deep understanding of the physical material world and its intrinsic nature if indeed it has one.

So I just framed the beginning of the book as calling it the twin hard problems because I think often the hard problems are associated with the questions of consciousness. And that, of course, that's perhaps the bigger of the two. But there's also this question of understanding matter, and that's squarely in the wheelhouse of the physicist. And my interest in this book is to try to come at these intersectional questions from the perspective of physics. I don't claim to have a comprehensive look at consciousness, at AI, at any of these issues, but I'm carving out that little part of it that physics seems to interface with Excellent and that leads me to ask you I mean I find oh today's earlier Talk was so amazing by Stuart Hamer off and of course you and I have been very interested in Stuart's work and you know Hartman's going to be giving a presentation as well

on some of these issues today, or maybe it's tomorrow. Everything's become, okay, everything's a blur since I'm the conference organizer. And I just wanted to start with a very general question for the audience. Well, first of all, I wanna emphasize, by consciousness in this discussion, we have in mind that felt quality of experience.

So whenever you, you know, smell a cup of coffee or you see the rich use of a sunset, it always feels like something from the inside to be you. And I know consciousness, that expression can be used in lots of ways, but when we're talking about consciousness, that's what we're talking about here, and we're trying to figure out what could the physical basis of consciousness be?

And of course, if we could figure that out, we could figure out all the real exciting questions like whether AI is conscious, whether the mind could be extended in some way. I mean, all kinds of intriguing questions and even the age old question of whether consciousness can outrun the brain, right? So I want to start with your interest in quantum mechanics here in relations to the phenomena of consciousness and just ask you a very general question. In what ways might consciousness depend on quantum mechanics? Yeah, so this is obviously a huge question that was really central to

Stuart's comments and before I go there let me just back up and give you a sense of my own kind of intellectual approach to things. I'm the Schmorgersburg person here. I'm the person who goes to the buffet and orders everything in the buffet. And bring it back to my, and my plate is filled with a little bit of each of those dishes. And so I am with intellectual matters, including the interrelation of quantum mechanics including the understanding of consciousness. I don't have any strong scholarly commitments to a different area. I kind of go at a higher, maybe more superficial, but somewhat higher perspective on the different issues. So I'm fascinated by the apparent connections between quantum physics and our minds. Because there does seem to be, and I'll use the word seen here,

it seems in the sense of when we make a measurement of the world that we seem to affect the system that we're measuring in a particular way. We collapse the wave function or reduce it. Now the seem may be an illusion, of course. There may actually be no effect or the effect may be more about us than about the system. But nonetheless, and Stuart had a nice little yin-yang slide where the little consciousness snakes down and that's the kind of interface that fascinates me and there's different ways to understand why does our observation something seem to affect it.

Does it in fact affect it or is there some, or how would the illusion of that effect be constructed? So the most direct kind of explanation would be is we do indeed cause the collapse of the wave function. There's this haze of possibility upon measuring that system, that quantum system, we cause it to select one of those options. And sorry. I'm sorry, do you mean that consciousness does that or do you mean any kind of measurement not necessarily

by a conscious observer? Yeah, so I think it's crucial here that, and this is something that really goes back to von Neumann's first analysis, that really the consciousness seems to be important. Because if there's a purely mechanical registration, for instance, if there's a chain's a chain called the von Neumann chain of measurement. If you measure a photon and you do it using, or maybe an electron let's say, and you do it using a magnet, and there's particle detectors, and there's a computer, and there's a whole line of instrumentation that leads to your own awareness or own perception of the measured quantity, there's this long chain and each step of the chain is normally described using the wave mechanics in that particular picture of quantum mechanics. And there's never any collapse that occurs. The collapse only seems to happen in our own awareness. And again, I just emphasize the word seems here. There may actually be a collapse earlier in the chain, but that's not described by our current theories of quantum mechanics.

The theory of quantum mechanics says all the way up to our conscious registration there is a multiplicity of options, this, mysterious by the way, but an effect the mind has on the object. Others would be that there's an external, and this is kind of more of Roger Penrose's idea, there's an external physical process occurring, gravitational in his case, but there are other options that causes this collapse. Another option which I explore in a whole chapter is in fact there is no collapse. Collapse is kind of an artifact of our imperfect observation of the quantum world. And that's kind of analogous to the Copernican revolution in which we don't perceive the motion of the Earth around the Sun directly because we're stuck on the Earth. And we think we're the center of the universe, but in fact we're not. Likewise, there's a Copernican sense in which the observation of the wave function may depend on,

it seems to us that we caused a collapse, but in fact there may be other branches of the wave function and they may persist and the collapse is a product of our interior view. And that's what takes you down the whole path of the many-worlds interpretation. I prefer to think of it as – people often talk about the branching of the universe as the billion universes or whatever out there. I tend to think of it as we have a partial view of reality, of the quantum reality in this case, and that gives us the impression of a collapse. Okay, those details aside, the point being is there's many ways to read this apparent effect of the mind on quantum systems. Wow, I don't even know what to ask because there's so much richness there. There is is really. There really is. So now what would the name of your particular theory be just so audience members can Google it and kind of learn more about the approach

that you just alluded to? And then I want to also go to the Penrose approach and the related approach that we heard this morning, which is often tied to Penroses, but we'll go into in a minute. Let's first get the name out there. Yeah. So I'll answer that in two pieces. First, remember, I'm the Smorgasburg person here. I'm not committed to any of those views. They all, I think, can and should be entertained. By the way, in this, I'm really inspired by Dave Chalmers' work on this. In your work, in your papers, your book, you lay out a number of options and yet you have

your own preferences, but you lay them all out. And I think that's important in a subject that's under development to leave all options open. So I leave all options open. Okay. Yeah. You sounded most excited by the first one. So, but maybe not.

No, I honestly do think options are open. If actually anything excites me, it's more the kind of many worlds view or the idea that we have a partial glimpse of reality in some way or other. And there's other stuff out there that we don't have a direct kind of purchase on. But that course raises its own questions. All these things raise questions. Questions are being raised. It's a beautiful picture of reality, a view in which there are many possibilities,

all of which are equally real in a way, right? And you would have a multiverse, and I mean, that's amazing. And of course, it's a well-respected view, especially in astrophysics and in many parts of physics. And I also, though, want to turn to Stuart Hameroff's position this morning and I wanted to ask you, because this is something we were just talking about. In fact, I put a few media articles on this topic

that we've been involved in, in the back of the room there in case any audience members wanna read them. But one thing that came up with Stuart's intriguing position is that consciousness is instantiated by the brain and furthermore, we're getting some sort of a glimpse of that picture through the experimentation involving microtubules. I guess the thing that perplexed me about that position was I'm also a big fan of Roger Penrose and you know

his approach is very controversial though within the quantum gravity field as interesting as it is. Do you see these views as coming apart or do you see them as being essentially combined? Yeah I think this is a really important point I think Hartman may get into this in his talk as well. That what, Stu, where are you? Okay, this is my reading of your approach and we can discuss your disagreements with that offline, but I think the Penrose-Hammeroff view needs to be thought of as a series of independent proposals, each of which can be independently tested and can stand or fall. So one of those is one of those

pillars you could say is that there is an objective collapse of the wave function and actually second that that collapse of the wave function is due to gravitational effects essentially or due to a conflict with classical gravity and then built on top of that is a third, fourth, etc. pillar that the quantum effects occur in microtubules, that they're implicated in consciousness, and so forth. There's a series of proposals here that are, in fact, being independently tested approach. I think that theories that are maybe wrong in their totality or elements of them are wrong can nonetheless push science forward. So I think this view has had an incredibly productive effect on asking questions such as is there an objective collapse of the wave function and there are measurements made I

guess in Gran Sasso, CERN maybe have made measurements are wave functions collapsing and are they collapsing due to gravitational effects? Extremely important because it's one of the great top questions in science. And are microtubules, is the neuron doctor in wrong? Is the relevant level of description in the brain not that of neurons and maybe glia at that cellular level, but is it intracellular? There is a series of empirical questions that I think are important to address because it is taken as a given in neuroscience that you start with the neuron and, okay, maybe the neuron is complicated, but you can kind of reduce that to a function and then go up from that and build your neural network. Maybe actually Stuart and Roger suggest we need to look inside the neuron and maybe quantum effects are involved now. So there's a series of independent ideas here all of which are

productive, I think. This is my view of their theory. And I think Stuart got into it a little bit in his talk. His theory needs to be viewed as panpsychist ultimately and a very interesting version as panpsychist, ultimately. And a very interesting version of panpsychism, too, that there are experiences, just they're occurring around us. Every time in this view that a wave function collapses, they're just out there, not associated necessarily with a material object, but our brains kind of corral them. I think the metaphor used in the book is they're a garden. And the brain acts as a gardener, creating the conditions under which these experiences can arise and then stitches them together and creates a self, a narrative self, etc. So I think it's a fascinating idea. It could be wrong, but I think it's worth exploring. That's my view. It is fascinating on so many levels.

I think that was very helpful. I suppose many people, when they read your book and then when they think of these issues, move to questions of free will, right? I mean, so suppose that the relevant level of explanation for human behavior isn't the neural level or even the system level, I'm more of a systems person myself, right? But it really does, it resides at the level of the quantum. How does that change one's view of agency and free will? So is there a sense in which humans act freely? What would that sense be according to these views? I know that these issues are very vexing and people often confuse the very

idea of free will, right? Right. So I'm, you know, I hesitate to tread into the waters of free will surrounded by worlds eminent philosophers, but I'll give you my kind of student, undergraduate level view of all this, which is that is there room for free will in a law-like universe? So if there are, we humans and other agents that claim to have free will are governed by causal processes that you can therefore look at the antecedents of any decision that I make. Can I still be said to be acting freely? And this is the one place I would make a scholarly commitment and wouldn't be a compatibilist. I think there is and should be and must be, just experientially, my experiences that I have free will. That's my datum here is I have free will. And I, as an empiricist, I try to explain my data. How would I explain that based on the fact that I am governed feeling of free will with the law like evolution of the universe.

So, I fall into that compatibilist camp. And one way I think about it is free will kind of means that my an arrow, you two decisions in a way. To me that's, okay, simplifying, but that's kind of what free will would be for me. But you could have an arrow pointing into it, and that wouldn't affect the fact that I'm still the author of my own choices. I'm perfectly willing to accept if I wind back to the Big Bang or just even a second ago, the light cone, everything within my light cone affects what I do, but that doesn't render me unfree. And one might argue I just have the illusion of free will, but then I would say maybe the illusion and the actuality of free will kind of collapse down into the same thing. Now, I'm looking forward to the philosophers sitting me straight on this, but this is my kind of, you know, junior college level, because that's the last time I took a metaphysics class view on compatibilism.

That was really nice. And as usual, you know, you always say that, oh, you don't know anything about something and then you say it so well. And let me just play devil's advocate though. I think there are so many different ways that the quantum world could impact cognition or consciousness and it might be interesting to pull apart different situations.

And one situation that worries me when it comes to compatible is free will or even the more radical form of free will which is called libertarianism not related to the political. Small L. Yeah, small L. Is a situation in which the brain is sensitive to quantum phenomena and quantum phenomena, you know, it's inherently chancy. So I'm not talking about any kind of hidden variables. It's just chance.

And somehow it actually causally impacts a decision you make. And being that it is chance in a way that wouldn't really be even a compatible sense in which we're free, because we're prisoners of absolute randomness. So I'm just curious if indeed quantum mechanics does impact cognition, how you really achieve even the compatible sense of free will in that kind of a scenario. I'm not speaking to all scenarios, but... So this would be the subset of the question of how do I reconcile free will with an indeterministic

physics. And I guess I have two thoughts on that. Again, philosophers, please help me on this, that there would be some fraction of our cognition that could be attributed to these indeterministic processes and some that couldn't. And those that couldn't, in other words, those that would trace my decision choice deliberation further back before that indeterministic event, the free will would reside there and then the indeterministic event would be some kind of constraint on my choice, something equivalent to that, or the conditions of my birth or something that led to something outside my control. Another way, actually riffing really off some of Stuart's ideas, is that the indeterministic

ventures you're describing, the quantum collapse, is choosing from a menu of possibilities. It might be in position, it might be in momentum, it might be in some other variable, spin, whatever, and that might trace back to some cognitive decision that's being made. So the shaping of the possibilities would be within the you or within my control. And then the question is, what is my control? And I think this gets back to what you were saying earlier. I think you need to talk about free will at the same level, ontologically, that you're talking about your own emergence. So talking about the free will of the atoms

that make me up, that's a wrong level description to be working on. It's a category error. So I think what I would like to do now is see what kind of questions the audience might have for George. Thank you, George. Fascinating. Definitely.

I love questions. Let's give a round to George. If you have any questions, you raise your hand. In the meantime, I'm going to ask a question to George. So a mistake that many people make that that Scott Aronson points out, and I wish more people would pay attention to, is that, okay, so if you have free will, you're determined by the laws of physics, so how can you?

Then some people will say, okay, well, there's a scapegoat, there's a loophole there, because you can have non-deterministic physics, but then someone will say, yeah, but then that's random. So Scott Aronson, and you can correct me if I'm incorrect, would come in and say, there's a difference between non-deterministic and being random. Scott would say that, and others would say that, there's wiggle room for free will even in something that's non-deterministic because random could be a subset, a non-inclusive subset of what's non-deterministic. So what would you say to that?

So are you arguing that there's no free will because of, or that there is free will because of this indeterminism or the randomness? I'm saying that the argument that look you're determined by the laws of physics thus you have no free will. Okay, that's one. Then some people find a way out by saying with quantum mechanics non-determinacy. But then the philosopher would chime up and say hey yeah but non-determinacy means random. You don't have control over what's random. Then the Scott Aronson would pop up and say, yeah, but non-determinism is not the same as randomness. Randomness means you have a known probability distribution, and that's entirely different than being non-deterministic. For more information on the in-equivalency between non-determinism and randomness, check out Scott Aronson's Physics 771 lecture number 18, which has been transcribed and is on his blog. Link in the description.

So in my earlier remarks, I kind of assumed that there was a probability distribution that is shaped by your prior behavior. So you have to have some... there has to be some kind of causal connection between your deliberations, decisions, the process that you go through, and the actual decision that emerges and that hopefully you can execute. So you can't break the causation entirely within your own kind of ability to act in the world. You're an agent in the world. You have to be able to act in the world. You have to be able to act on the basis of your deliberations.

And if you can do that, you would be free, at least in my naive, compatibilist reading. We have a question from Stuart Hammeroff. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, George, Susan. Actually, two comments. As far as non-deterministic versus random or probabilistic, excuse me, Penrose defines non-computability as somewhere in between.

And what that means, I think, is it appeals to some other value system, something outside the algorithmic system. So non-algorithmic is probably a better choice, but it's also not random. It's maybe deterministic in some other value system, like space-time geometry, maybe platonic values, that sort of thing that influence our choices if we're conscious and just let that happen. The other thing I want to say about free will is that if we perceive something rapidly, it takes several hundred milliseconds

for that activity that seems to correlate with consciousness to occur in the brain. But we often respond in less than a hundred milliseconds. And this has led most, I don't know about most, but many philosophers to say that consciousness is epiphenomenal and free will is absent, that we're acting non-consciously and have this false illusion that we're acting consciously. And Benjamin Libet had done a lot of work on this. And the move the finger thing is a red herring, forget that. Go back to his earlier work with the patients in surgery

awake with their brain exposed, where he showed backward time effects that in order to have a real time experience at the time of the evoked potential, 30 milliseconds, you needed 500 milliseconds of activity. And he concluded that it was referred backward in time to the presence that we would act in real time. And the question is, can you have free will

without backward time effects? Because Penrose has shown that there's retroactivity, and he's been talking about this recently, including his chapter in Shango's book about backward time effects. So the question is, can you have, at least for real time activities, you know, if something you ponder for days or something, that's not what I'm talking about, something that happens right away, can that happen without, can you have free will without backward time effects? I mean this is about my pay grade, I should say, but my feeling would be absolutely yes. And I can evade the particular argument having to do with Libit, which is already controversial, by going to other kinds of decisions that I make

that I'm deliberating on. I wanna buy a new car. Which car do I buy? Do I buy brand X or Y? And that's not subject to the same kind of time constraints that you're describing here. So. So I'm talking about for real time. For like hitting a tennis ball,

hitting a baseball or something like that. Well already I frankly, if I'm playing tennis properly, I should be hitting that without any conscious choice at all. It shouldn't be free. It's just a muscle kind of effect. I'm imagining where the ball should go. Well, but you decide whether to go baseline or cross court, something like that.

Exactly, exactly. I should be thinking strategically more. And it's only when I'm learning and they're sending me a million forehand shots that I'm having to think it through that consciously. Well, just be aware that most people would say it's impossible in that situation and therefore consciousness is epiphylamidal and that's not necessarily so at least. Yeah, so I think the kind of definition I gave earlier, again, capsule and simplified, consciousness is in the loop. We're talking about a conscious deliberation to do a particular action, a conscious deliberation

based on my desires, my knowledge, what I had for breakfast, any kind of random influence that could be quite impulsive on my end. Yeah, but you still have to process what you're responding to as much. Yes, and I think the process takes at least a third of a second. So within the window that Libet's talking about.

We respond in less than 100 milliseconds, seemingly consciously. Okay. All right, who has another question? I can't help but kind of notice if I just kind of disengage from this. And if I was just somebody who was, you know, layman or whatever walking in,

in all seriousness, it sounds like we're just, we all just got stoned, and we're talking about stuff like that. No, but in a very serious way, because I feel like that way that we look at things and we interpret things is half the problem. So when people talk about free will, determinism, all these different things, it's like, what do you actually mean? How hard is it to just figure out, put it down on a piece of paper, document, whatever, what

do you actually mean? Because before we can try and prove all these things and do all of these things that we hope to get value out of, what are we actually doing? Can somebody tell me, you know, what is free will? What is freedom? What is determinism? What is non-determinism? Like, people have so many different interpretations and definitions. May I say something as a philosophy professor?

I love that. And I think it's so important that we do understand what we're talking about when we're talking about free will and consciousness and whatnot and you know one of the Key issues even an intro to philosophy is how to understand free will and you're absolutely right that Unless we have common ground on what we're talking about. We won't be able to settle the disputes But you're right. I mean, this particular conversation jumped in. It's like in action, right?

It's like the beginning of a movie where they're just in the action. So we didn't slay the groundwork that you would do if, okay, Tuesday, you know, we're going to talk about free will and that's in the syllabus and we're going to read Frankfurt and we're going to read whatever writings are written on this. I think the general free will discussion, I don't want to derail this Q&A too much. Why don't we, we will have a coffee break and we'll talk about definitions of free will. Do we have a coffee date for that? Yes.

So, yeah, I very much am on the same page as he. I'm still waiting for definitions of consciousness from last year's MindFest. Nobody got back to me. I was asking a couple of professors about their definition of consciousness and what constitutes an example of a conscious object and an example of a non-conscious object. I'm still waiting for the response. So I have two questions. One is about the multiple theories, which is nice, super exciting and so on.

What I would like to see is an associated curriculum of testability, because it's kind of like arts and science. Like as an arts person, I can draw whatever. It doesn't have to be grounded in reality. As a scientist, I have to work within the possibilities of my current way. What I would like to see each theory associated with are potential methods of testability of this theory because unless we have testability, it's a nice theory and they can be beautiful, but we cannot act on them.

It's not actionable insight. So I would like to see actionable insight in that. My second question is about the free will. I think it implies some extra physical thing like the distinction of brain and consciousness, so certain independence of consciousness from the brain. So that's my conjecture and question. Really great points. The three of us are going to sit down and talk about free will and anyone else of course is welcome to join that.

I firmly think that free will is physical. I don't think, unless you, we exhaust every possibility, we don't have to go into anything extra physical or dualist to understand free will. I think it will ultimately come from an understanding of our own minds, our own volition. And I think definitions are great, really. I was having this debate with a mathematician friend over the weekend. She was like, define, define, define, define. And that's how mathematicians operate.

They make definitions, prove theorems, more definitions, more theorems, etc. I think physicists, maybe philosophers work that way. Physicists are a little bit more loose and maybe sloppy, actually definitely sloppy about this. Sometimes we just jump in and try to explain areas. And I do think that those definitions are important, we shouldn't get too hung up on them. We shouldn't paralyze ourselves for the, because we can't define consciousness, which is a, you know, something extremely difficult to define. Free will. Free will is probably something we should define before we debate it, I agree. But consciousness, I think we probably can

go on our intuitions for the time being. Tests, yes. And I wouldn't make the same sharp distinction between art and science as you were suggesting. I think science is an imaginative act, especially theoretical science, that to create a theory is to go beyond, it's to imagine something that hadn't been there, an idea that hadn't been there, and then the idea should be subject to test and often it's not obvious how to test something but ultimately every scientist, or every is a strong word, 99.9 would say ultimately yes, it should be subjected to an empirical test.

And all these theories we've been considering, I've been mentioning are indeed testable in that sense. So Stuart, when he's talking about his and Roger's view, has a number of tests having to do with effective anesthetic on microtubules, having to do with these oscillations he's observing that's extremely high frequency. Those are the tests of that integrated information theory and if these other theories of consciousness likewise have their tests and you're right to hold their feet to the fire and you better show me how to test these theories or Then you know come back to me later when you do know how to test them

Okay, we have a question at the back Yeah, let me see if I can formulate this. This is in relations to what you mentioned of being a generalist. I'm coming from the point of view of competence and we've been doing some research and looking at things from a risk management standpoint, which looks at surgeons, basketball players, and Formula One drivers. And they actually commit when they get the competence, they commit it to the subconscious.

But in the first moment they bring it back to conscious, they commit errors that could be fatal. So there's a lot of high competence people that operate from this subconscious at a nanosecond reaction to be able to control. And so there's a space in between and I don't know if that's something that you can speak to or you know anything about. So the process of, do you mean the process of learning a field before you gain competence? Well what has been studied is that risk goes high up when somebody doubts and then brings

something from the subconscious to the conscious and now they know it's steps and they start following the steps. But when they were in the subconscious and they did it automatically, it was just pure competence and pure talent and pure skill and whatever you want to call it. But once it moves from one hemisphere to another, it's kind of like, you know, the learning, you're trying to do it again, doubt comes in and you can make mistakes and things like that. Yeah, I mean, this is arguably one of the reasons that we, we humanity or primates,

whatever, evolve consciousness in order to aid learning. So when we're learning something, we're highly conscious of it and we tend to overthink it. And that's, you wouldn't want the surgeon to be in that condition when they're, even the student or the resident to be in that condition when they're operating on you. You want them to be extremely practiced so they actually don't have to think, at least at the kind of scalpel mechanistic level, to do that. So there's at some point at which things pass back out of our consciousness or we at least elevate to a different

perspective on what we're doing. Yeah, I have two questions, but I'll keep them short. The first one is related to consciousness collapsing the wave function. I don't really understand the argument beyond something's unknown that collapses the wave function. We don't know what consciousness is, therefore they must be the same thing. And the reason I'm picking on that a little bit, I want you to explain to me why it's particularly consciousness because people do this all the time with aliens, we don't know what it is, therefore aliens. Right, so I think there's a lot of things where

the unknown becomes a placeholder instead of just saying it's unknown and we need to develop new ideas. So I'd like your comment on that, George. And then the second one is related to this concept of free will, I really liked what you said about how most of your free will is not what happens in this instant, but like what you plan ahead for. And so it seems to me that the horizon of free will is more open in the future.

I can't change where I am right now. I can't be in Arizona, but I could plan ahead to be there, right? So that makes it seem to me that free will is not explainable with quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics doesn't have that long time horizon? And I don't know if you have any thoughts on that also. That's interesting. I mean, this is, again, my feeling, uninformed perhaps, or somewhat like a little bit informed, but not as informed as the philosophers, that free will doesn't have anything to do with

quantum mechanics. It's only have a kind of cognitive or emotional perhaps explanation that will be something to do with the makeup of our psyche and our attribution of agency to ourselves. So I don't think that the timeframe of quantum mechanics is relevant or even that of classical physics for that matter. That's again my unformed view. Those who are experts should definitely join our little discussion group later on that. So I think that the consciousness causes collapse hypothesis is more than the minimization of mystery issue.

And maybe the alien example is instructive. So the pilot saw flying saucers skip across the sky. Must be aliens. Okay, we recognize that inference as fallacious. But there still was the observable there. Namely, they saw something bounce across the sky. They saw high atmospheric lightning, for example. They saw some phenomenon, observed phenomenon, and that is properly the subject of science. So I think the pilot comes back and files a report, or the Navy saw that funny tic-tac thing,

they should come back and say, oh, they saw something. Probably the interpretation is hasty, shall we say at the very least. It's not an alien spacecraft, extraterrestrial spacecraft. But they nonetheless saw a weird tic-tac or they nonetheless saw a flying saucer or something of a saucer like in the sky. Let's explain that. So I think we have to be careful when these claims are presented to us to take out from the claim that which is valuable for the progress of science and bracket that which is not.

And maybe we'll come around to the extraterrestrial hypothesis after exhausting every single other one. Right? So with the collapse of the wave function, this is all I'm suggesting here and are for me to be the one that suggested it. Von Neumann suggested it, Wigner suggested it, that it seems on the face of it, according again to kind of a von Neumann formulation of quantum mechanics, that there is a role for the observer.

That there's one rule that you apply, and this is in the Schrodinger picture, but something similar for the Heisenberg picture, that there's one rule that you apply, and this is in the Schrodinger picture, but something similar for the Heisenberg picture, that there's one rule that you apply for the evolution of objects, the Schrodinger equation, and then you measure something and take a sample from the distribution, and that's what we see according to the Born Rule. Now one reading of that is that consciousness does have or something associated with consciousness is probably the better way of putting it. Something about either integrated information, if you ascribe to that theory or whatever theory of consciousness is saying consciousness is associated with some physical observable information integration.

That integration of information makes that system more susceptible to causing a collapse. I'm sure you could tell some kind of causal story with that. But it's a testable hypothesis. And it's been dismissed, perhaps rightly, for decades in physics. But I really was, David, where David has, there he is can can defend it better than I he and Kelvin suggested, okay, maybe it's wrong, but at least now it's become testable because you can say here are systems with various degrees of integration of information. Let's see whether they change the time scale of collapse. So you brought that back into empirical science.

And to me, that's a that's a valid research program. We have a question from Garrett. I will keep it brief because we can talk later. But thank you for your talk. And I guess maybe my question is a little bit more about maybe the selection process of the buffet, right? So you're saying in some ways that approach to that and maybe it's more of a bird's eye question.

Maybe a little bit. Maybe what your impressions are in the current state of like, right. There are many different theories of consciousness, right. And I think we tend to, right. If we find the one that we like, we maybe stick with that bed bug, right. We want to itch that itch and go for it. Terrible, terrible metaphor. I know, but it feels like that.

But it kind of come, I've had my times with certain things, right. So, um, I guess what I'm asking is, in some ways, right, you're saying, and part of the book is, you know, what is it about how we're now looking at consciousness or relooking at the mind, we're trying to explain, say, something in physics or quantum mechanics, why is that even happening? And I'm wondering, based off of the different theories that you approached to me, and I know you talked about IET and different ones, and also Stuart Hamer's or core R. I'm wondering, you know, do you think actually that does have implications for what we think consciousness is, right? Because all these theories have a very different way of defining

consciousness. In some ways, putting ourselves back in the equation in terms of what we're thinking about the mind definitely comes with a lot of kind of theoretical baggage in a way, right? How do you define consciousness, right? So in my IT, there are certain things that are kind of indubitable and except, right? I can't come up with reasons why, but it's a very specific understanding of consciousness. So I'm wondering, is it all theories of consciousness, right, that put us back into the equation, so to speak, or is it just certain ones? How would you sort of characterize, I guess, that buffet plate, right? Because I can see, right, maybe global workspace going, well, no, I don't know if we need to go back into

putting ourselves in the equation, so to speak. But I could see something like IT, right right kind of being amenable to that sort of thing. So I'm kind of curious about that process. Yeah So I guess there's kind of two questions here What are we mean by the title and how is that relevant to my choice and then maybe more broadly? How do I make choices in this and that's you know, it Inethel bowl in a way or it has to do with My my interests at a given time. But let me just answer a slightly oblique question if I may, because that's what you always do with questions.

Namely that I think the study of consciousness is in still a formative phase. And there aren't really great tests for, there's questions of whether it's testable or the different theories are testable at all. So I think it's a let the flowers bloom kind of scenario. We should look at these various theories. I chose in my book, it focused really on two, integrated information theory and then Carl Fristons and Andy Clarks and others views on predictive coding, predictive processing, because they struck me as the ones that are physics-y.

And that was my own interest. I left out global workspace, although I'm actually writing about it now for Scientific American. I think it's a fascinating approach, higher order theories as well. So I do, of course, include Oracle RR as well because it's physics-oriented. So that was my criterion for this book was whether there was a physics-y component to it. In other words, is it quantitative?

Does it involve the kinds of systems of physics traditional studies and therefore its tools are applicable to? I'll pick your brain later. Okay, we only have time for one quick question and that's all. So I appreciate all your comments. I'm not a physicist, but I was trained as a psychologist. So the way I interpolate what you're saying is I think in terms of perception. Specifically, my question has to do with perception

below the level of individual conscious awareness, intuition, if you will. Or when I was in graduate school we worked with t-stichistoscopes, you know, all of that. So how does that fit into your framework and your understanding of consciousness? So how does these events that are occurring too fast for us to consciously register fit

into a theory of consciousness? I mean, they have to be compatible with that theory. I don't really address that in my own thinking or the book. You know, the more general question, and this goes back to the title of the book that I'm asking is how can the external observable objective view that science traditionally seeks to develop be reconciled with an internal subjective and kind of interiority of our experience. And that goes beyond questions of, I mean, obviously it's sharpest in the understanding consciousness and the hard problem of mind, but it goes beyond that.

And that's actually the kind of broader point I wanted to make, namely, how does a concept of observer need to be brought into, certainly quantum mechanics, but also cosmology and other domains, our understanding of time, what is time, what is space. And there, I do think the kind of considerations you're talking about with perception would come in, because there I'm not really talking about consciousness as such. I'm talking about all the habits of mind, all the filters that our perception create and the illusions and the misperceptions or the misapprehension maybe is a better word, misinterpretations of the world that we make. So yes, I do think that those insights from cognitive psychology are crucial to the broader

program of reconciling the interior and the exterior. Okay. Give a huge round of applause to both Susan Snyder. She's one of the people who spearheaded this whole organization. To George Mustard for writing this book. This book is called Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation. The link is on screen.

If you're in person, you can get George to sign it if you ask nicely enough also very nicely thank Palm Health Foundation Patrick as well and thank you Kurt for such a great setup and making this possible thank you thank you firstly thank you for watching thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like. That's just part of the terms of service. Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with

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