A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind - Erik Hoel

given your background given 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 um I believe it was just widely reported that you know a long-standing bet over whether or not Consciousness would be resolved was notoriously not resolved um who made the bet I believe it was Chalmers and Christoph [ __ ] if I'm not mistaken who's talking about being a a very famous neuroscientist in the field and David Chalmers being a very famous philosopher who was who was for which oh uh Chalmers was of course was the philosopher was against it and the scientist was for it um and and if you if if you think about sort of where we are um in the search 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 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 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 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 and and let's just bracket this problem aside and and to him right he you know he was a religious man right he would have said it as you know it's just it's just not science's business to go poking around in the soul just put it aside and lets you focus on this this universe that God is created for us and that 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 um 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 uh qualitative properties and that's Neuroscience uh to figure out how the brain works you need to understand how Consciousness Works um and 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 prizes Francis Crick who co-discovered DNA and uh Gerald Edelman um who 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 unanswered scientific question here which is how does the brain create Consciousness and they both sort of started up their own institutes and their own um sort of ways to approach this problem but you know had had it not had the weight of two Nobel prizes behind it um I don't I I think that there still wouldn't even be any serious uh scientific attempt to understand consciousness and Neuroscience um and and and I think without that Neuroscience struggles a great deal I mean that's that's another thing that's that a a 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 um 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 yeah you're sort of forced to talk around it 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 yeah the 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 well we we're allowed to talk about attention we can focus on attention you know and and uh and we can focus on memory right like we we can do things sort of without reference to the stream of Consciousness but of course you know when you remember something you're you're conscious of it and when you attend to something you're conscious of it these are all things it's just something that happened there's a phenomenological experience which is associated with it exactly and so people tried to sort of preserve the um non-subjectivity of Science and not not let subjectivity in by by sequestering away a lot of these mental properties and sort of them pretending that that Consciousness uh doesn't exist but it it has not I'll just be very honest I have a PhD in Neuroscience um it has not been very successful I mean I I don't think Neuroscience has has made really I'll say it any significant um advancement since I really entered the field in terms of not 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 Neuroscience to talk about the main function what do you mean when you say not allowed is there there's 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 there are all sorts of you know structures that that um you know prevent somebody from from getting crazy I mean I I think more fundamentally it's just been that uh you know due to legacies of things like behaviorism uh talking about Consciousness has been considered sort of too dangerous and it's been actively discouraged and you'll you can still go and find a neuroscientist and you'll you'll ask them you know what are your thoughts on Consciousness and they'll either say you know I don't have any or they'll say that's it's sort of woo you know and and then you know the conversation gets very strange very quickly because you say well what do you mean by that you're saying that we don't we're not conscious or or what are you saying and then they have to have some sort of convoluted definition where you get to keep attention in memory and all these other things but you're not allowed to talk about consciousness but there are it's not it's not a conspiracy to keep Consciousness um out of the field it's 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 right like like 1985 you could not just go and get a PhD like I did studying the Neuroscience of Consciousness that 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 uh 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 as as as crazy and so on and um and and so it's very difficult to to do work in it but I think if you look at Neuroscience as a whole and where it is um you know it has sort of all sorts of all sorts of problems that that crop up almost endlessly within it and you have these repeating narratives and these sort of neural 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 the 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 um but he would of course been um you know I I think it's more likely that it had you I I've been a philosopher named Philip Goff makes this point uh makes this thought experiment of like if you brought Galileo out to the Modern Age and you said okay we're trying to do this Neuroscience of Consciousness he would probably say well no stop you know you're not supposed to do that that's this weird perversion of science right like you this that's the domain of the soul of course you're not finding any satisfactory answers it feels like do you know what it feels like to me as you're talking about it obviously all of the problems of Consciousness are Myriad and very difficult to try and come up with and as you've said yourself your entire field that you have a PhD and then have worked in for almost all your life until you 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 [ __ ] 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 questions in science um and we're still waiting on our Einstein we're waiting on our Darwin um and and it's sort of sad because Neuroscience is entering this period particularly with AI where you know people are are able to predict various things off of brain States right like you might think well you know how come Eric is saying that uh you know Neuroscience hasn't been any progress didn't I just see some something about how AIS can now read your mind off of neuroimaging or something like that right and the answer is is that all that stuff is statistical so it's it's sort of like like first it's it's the the AIS are you know very very good at extrapolating from minimal data so if you actually look at what it's predicting it's it's actually not the same at all and it's sort of like uh you know how it's able to auto complete the next paragraph of of text right but um you know 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 with various relational terms here but is related to your conscious the conscious things that you are experiencing right so you know if you're if you're listening to this podcast you're the the the the auditory cortex is is going through you know various sort of stages of processing there is some there is somewhere there uh law of nature that tells us okay what sounds are now being experienced right like that that is a question um it's not just you know can I throw machine learning at it and sort of like Get The Sounds back or tell that someone is is experiencing something it's very similar to to the laws of physics right despite all the complexity that you of of you know leaves falling from trees there are natural laws behind those and science knows most of those natural laws particularly at the skills that are relevant within the brain we don't have anything like that um and and you can one way to tell this is that you ask Neuroscience neuroscientists to explain things and I used to do this all I was a menace in graduate school because I do this all the time uh where I would ask you know some prominent neuroscientists you know who had who's an expert at some you know highly particular field to to explain that phenomenon right like auditory processing or something and then they would give their explanation and then I would ask them to please explain it again but don't refer to location right don't don't just tell me where in the brain this is happening tell me how it's happening right like like because what is the spatial information tell us that it's over there or over there this 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 the outside of some very early sensory processing that we know we we know how it works things like Edge detection uh Envision so like but that's very you know primary sensory courtesy uh sort of stuff right this is the shallows of the brain once you start moving beyond the shelves 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 you notice there's almost nothing to say 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 these it's 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 you know imagine that you you sort of swapped around all those locational tags well what would that change right you would say oh well you know the you know auditory processing occurs in the front right and then in another stuff occurs you know far in the back right like you could swap around all that stuff and and you wouldn't feel any different about about the system and that's a good um that's a good indication that your your explanations are not very meaningful um and you know the the fundamental truth is that we don't even know that 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 uh quite about but quite a bit about but um 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 of effectively neural 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 uh in a significant number of cases Neuroscience is is is a thousand times harder than figuring out how some feed forward neural network uh uh is not only is the brain much larger in terms of the parameter size you know we probably have something like 100 trillion synapses um we're also you know it's also occluded behind an opaque wall of bone um and it's incredibly delicate and it's all folded up um and and then and 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 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 why would you not expect that black box aspect to to exist in the brain I've never gotten like a like a good answer uh to some Eric I I 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 no no I just got a lovely email from a graduate student um from a former graduate student um that was just um that was an absolute tree to read about how great working with me was so I'm sure I'm sure no no I I I I think I think you're you're you're right in the sense of um in in the sense of you know you one has to distinguish between being a gadfly and actually offering something positive so the thing is is that it's very easy to sit on your high horse and critique 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 and so what I you know also focused on what point in my career was was that well one one way to understand the complexities of the brain is that probably that that Consciousness has something to do with it so pursuing a scientific theory of consciousness should help you uh you know answer these questions because in theory there is some sort of natural law that relates you know experiences and much of the much of the the fluff of Neuroscience is just that the field is um in in um philosophy of science terms it's just pre-paradigmatic so because it's prepared thematic it has all these problems but that doesn't mean you should stop stop working on the field what it means is that you should work very hard to try to develop a a new paradigm uh what's just for the people that don't know what's pre-paragdigmatic that would be that there's no overarching Paradigm to explain uh 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 taximonies 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 um you know this this overarching structure which I suppose also includes criticism them yes yes certainly but and 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 um and and [ __ ] um Thomas Cooper was one of the people who really wrote a lot about this uh these errors crop up and once the errors reach a certain point we're like no one can really deny them anymore uh finally people are sort of forced to search for some new paradigm and uh and and they get some sort of replacement and you've seen this happen in physics right where it's like you know the the the early almost um solar system-esque models of atoms right 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 successive uh 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 uh post paramedic and so that's where you know I hope that like the the criticisms I'm offering forth including some in this book do have a do have a Positive Purpose right which is to sort of reorientate people towards um you know where can we actually move in order to solve some of these uh 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 those tie in and how they're related sure so I if if we if we go back to Galileo the intrinsic is is what he removed right is what he cut out um and the extrinsic is in a way were sort of more well-versed in or were more familiar with so an engineering diagram would be extrinsic um the the the mathematics um you know a physical description of some complex natural phenomena and that would be an extrinsic description uh the the circuitry of your laptop that would be an extrinsic description a causal model is extrinsic intrinsic are the subjective qualities that accompany your or you know are basically are your conscious experience and your stream of Consciousness and Neuroscience fits in this very strange uh position where it's trying to reconcile the the intrinsic and the extrinsic um something that is very interesting to me and and um you know I devoted again some of the book some of the books about this is that if you look at the development of our civilization you can as in humanity as a whole you can view uh you could view it as the development of these two different perspectives on the world and and they don't they don't really go together right um one is is our development of the extrinsic right so and the separation of the two so if you look early on of course people are explaining things with Gods um you know or magic or these other sort of much more like Supernatural phenomenon and suddenly we get honed down to only really wanting to give very clear extrinsic explanations of phenomena and the 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 is on we also get better at describing the intrinsic world 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 um ability to express our own minds and sort of the the the various details and and and and all sort of the the the the the micro quanta of your own conscious experience um we get much much better at that you know if you go back and you read um you know ancient Egyptian poetry or ancient Egyptian texts what you'll find is that descriptions of Mind are incredibly sparse uh they you really don't get very many descriptions of emotions and the descriptions of emotions that you do get are extremely wooden um it's almost as if you know you have literature but then you sort of don't even know how to really talk about other Minds and it's just like with science the ability to describe mine sort of rockets forward during the um they're an era of ancient Greece and post the homeric era and you see europides and all these playwrights become you know extremely um extremely good at describing Minds uh in ways that we would recognize now um and then funnily enough I mean after the the fall of the Roman Empire um you know during research for this book I was sort of going through going through history and trying to find uh you know text through which you would uh would be good examples of how people talk about minds in different eras right and uh it was it's actually very hard to find any text at all uh that talks about minds post follow the Roman Empire like when you're in the Dark Ages um and so you really sort of you really sort of lose this ability almost outside of some you know uh religious text you really lose this ability to really talk seriously about minds um I almost almost as if we like reverted back to ancient Egypt and then we you know develop it again just like with science um you know um during the Enlightenment and so on and and that was a really sort of fascinating story that I didn't sort of expect uh expect Opera um it really kind of fell out of out of my research and looking at these these twin threads and you know the intrinsic perspective just like just like we we took the extrinsic perspective 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 um and and that's the if you go back and you read um you know um you know 18th century novelists right they they have such facility with describing internal States um and that would have been completely foreign to people 2000 years ago um and it's as if they sort of developed um you know of a Viewpoint um just in the same way that science was developed except that Viewpoint is pointed towards Consciousness it's pointed towards um accessing and describing our our qualitative experiences yeah that's very interesting that you could almost look at novels and the literature as probably more well it almost certainly is more of a direct window into the Mind than the science of the brain and the signs of Consciousness you learn an awful lot more functionally experientially about what it's like to be a human by reading [ __ ] Wuthering Heights or something then you do by looking at Neuroscience journals yeah absolutely I mean you know there's just no doubt that Tolstoy knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologist even like an evolutionary psychologist right like you can take you know some sort of evolutionary psychologist say you know explain human nature and then Tolstoy comes in with you know very sort of what we would consider perhaps very strange archaic you know Notions of you know true Christianity and and how human beings work and then he somehow you know is able to sort of explain explain people just so incredibly well and has such an eye for how humans actually function um and and can write across all sorts of different you know divides um and and I do think that that's what what's really interesting there is that where that failure is is in the missing sort of Neuroscience of Consciousness right if one reason for that one reason that feels like such an obvious Gap is because Neuroscience is sort of continuously stuck trying to explain the everything via the extrinsic perspective um 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 ghost that's been left out of the machine um whenever we sort of try to give an ex perfectly extrinsic explanation of the brain how is Descartes involved or important in this story well I think I think Descartes is you know deeply important whenever you talk about um whenever you talk about Consciousness but but specifically for this um you know he actually has this really interesting interaction where this problem of how does how does the intrinsic relate to the extrinsic I mean perhaps it's most its first historical formal discussion occurs in some letters that Descartes sends uh with Princess Elizabeth of bohemia um who was um a really really interesting woman um she was a mathematician she was a philosopher she eventually uh became an abbess of a of of a um I think I forget exactly in which country she was an abyss but but she 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 you know that that age was very different and how people spoke to one another was very different but you sort of you sort of get the sense that these are like two nerds you know communicating over emails um you know but but they're like stuck you know in the Renaissance um and and and uh and after Descartes died uh princess Elizabeth never married um and and and and and died Widow and um to turn down an offer of marriage I was given to her um and and and she was reportedly just utterly heartbroken but the point is that in these letters princess Elizabeth um 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 ideal idea of dualism um it's almost a caricature at this point where you know he's like the soul interacts with the body through the pineal gland his opinions were a bit more complicated than that but you know that's effectively how it's how it's portrayed and um you know princess Elizabeth has this point where she says well consider that you know sort of physics in the world is extrinsic and the soul is intrinsic how can one impact the other if they're if they really are if you really are a dualist and you really think they're two different types of substances how can one sort of causally control the other that seems that seems nonsensical that's the Pillow Talk That I Want by the way that foreplay for me I just dismantle my life's work and and use the word ridiculous yeah um and and and you do sort of get the get the sense of that where she's she's both complimenting him but also you know clearly clearly sort of like a bulldog has has got a hold of this point and and won't won't let go until Descartes you know really gives her uh the answer she's she's looking for and he he really doesn't do a good job of it right he he 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 uh they never really resolve it Descartes sort of ducks the question and they uh you know their their correspondence continues on on other matters uh for a very long time uh until his death uh but that to me is so interesting historically because it's a point where 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 and Elizabeth never you know questions that she shares the same intuitions um and in the modern day you can go to philosophy of mine and you can find all sorts of arguments that argue exactly for that right so so they argue exactly like example would be like the zombie argument that uh again the philosopher David Chalmers is very famous for sort of articulating and defending very well um uh is an example something where it primes your intuition to believe that the interns in the extrins are really fundamentally different but Elizabeth also notes this paradoxical 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 that how does that give us a cohesive ontology it doesn't seem to do that and so that's really the ultimate Paradox of 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 uh if it were true that Consciousness was irreducible and the Soul was you know moving around uh you know the neurons in the pineal gland or whatever right because presumably we would just find the you know the force coefficient or whatever of what the soul is doing and give it some mathematical description and then you know actually wait it's just this force and we'd be you know dismissive of it and find it you know very boring and non-supernatural and so on um and so that to me they're sort of the first like almost like Odd Couple who who who fully recognize and their correspondence this this paradoxical aspect of Consciousness and one of the things that makes it just so darn hard yeah is this it related in any way to the bicameral mind and like that perspective that was something that I first learned about whilst watching Westworld um which I guess might be the same for a lot of people uh 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 you know I think it was to to paraphrase Umberto Echo you know a book is made of other books um Julian James wrote this this classic um back in I mean 1976 called the the origin of Consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral 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 um and it's it's really fascinating because he proposes frankly a wild hypothesis which is that um you know the 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 um in the same way that we do they talk about God's Commandments and so on and so his speculation was that it's essentially the the two hemispheres of the brain we're 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 that's a that's an incredibly strong claim to make off of textual evidence right because that's really all uh Julian James uh had and and because of that Julian James is always considered one of the first Consciousness researchers because his ultimate interest was in consciousness uh but also he's he's always sort of considered like it was a bit of a lark right um a a beautiful book A book that most people who get into Consciousness research have read and are interested in uh but sort of a sort of a crazy one and even very early on some initial reviews of it you know philosophers who are now uh you know still working and still very 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 um and in a way a lot of a lot of my book a lot of what the World Behind the world is about is is exploring this alternative View and maybe a slightly more tame and sensible one um to the evidence that Julian James brought forth about how in Italy and no one was talking about minds and they were talking about Gods instead and the way that I frame it is is that you know philosophers have these 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 are you sort of just it's just tip of the iceberg stuff right and so in the in sort of the narrative that I that I paint is that um you know a lot of the the stuff from Jillian James is explained by thinking about it as uh 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 you know very very uh you know top of the line top of the line stuff for it and you know but once you once you move on and once you keep going uh 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 developments 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 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 you know a Scandinavian peasant you know in the 1100s was I think that that's a very difficult experience to to express and I don't think that they had very many good cognitive tools to express it I think that we're we're sort of have been gifted and people don't realize that right it's one of the things that makes modern humans seem so much more intelligent um 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 than like the very best Poets of Babylon right um and and and is that we've inherited a gift we've inherited all sorts of cognitive tools and all sorts of of of of of language in terms of words and Concepts that allow us to talk talk about our own interstates and that's something that was developed it was developed um a lot by writers I think um and that's an argument that I make that you know if that 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 and so you finally end up with you know people like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce who are able to you know discuss the incredible minutia of Consciousness and and transform it into you know beautiful stream of Consciousness stream of Consciousness literature and that was one they they that was their project right it wasn't just um something that they this is like their style of writing that they you know 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 and so I think we owe a lot of our our um language around Consciousness um it and we have a debt uh to writers and then also to you know psychologists people like Freud although I think in some ways the debt to him is negative um that we have the set and we're able to that therefore sort of express ourselves um in ways that that people just 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 um it really is something I'll be waiting for my whole life um I and I don't know if it will come in my life um I I think first of all it would be a 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 what exactly are we and we don't know there's no good scientific answer to that question there's 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 right and then there would be all sorts of you know incredible technological uh advancement to come out of that I mean the the ability what you could do with the theory of consciousness I mean first of all you can make some of the best art that's ever been made in the history of humanity you can make some of the best art um you could do you could do some truly incredible things and second of all I mean it may turn out as as I I've talked about on other podcasts and and and written about uh that you know I am very worried about Ai and and where that's going uh but it might be that certain types of AI are impossible without Consciousness I think it's very I think I think it's very debatable if contemporary systems are conscious I think most people would say no and I think I think most of the scientific fields of Consciousness research would also say no uh 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 you know something that that could revolutionize AI for instance um so the actual the funny thing is about this is that there's basically no funding um and and uh but 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 to Neuroscience via the uh 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 I'll say that like that they have gotten better don't take that as it's totally impossible but it's so much easier to you know get rats to run a maze and you know you want to look at the amygdala you know you know you the the chance of you getting a grant to do that is you know like uh 10 times higher right so um 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 you know um quantum physics with general relativity or something these are very very big questions and it it's totally imaginable that the answers to them are um you know would require building like a super collider the size of a solar system or something right for Consciousness it's like listen if we all do this every day ever all of us we wake up our brain you know are the slow waves recede right you wake up from your your dream right and and and and and maybe your Consciousness continues from the dream right and then the the Consciousness is a dream gets to be your your Consciousness for the 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 uh and and yet still remains a a a really major scientific mystery so I think it's I think 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 that's one of the reasons I'm so critical about Neuroscience in in the book is because I want to Galvanize people to to 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 it's related one is to go back to some of our earlier discussion about emergence so you know if you if you if you pick out some popular science book that argues against free will there's only a couple forms of arguments um against Free Will and one of the most common ones is is is basically that you know your your atoms did it uh whatever it is pick whatever it is your Adams did it you didn't do it your atoms did it um you sort of we can talk about you as if you know you use you exist but that language is just uh for convenience really uh you know everything is sort of completely reducible down to your atoms um and and we don't you know associate um 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 um and I think for one the theory of causal emergence um sort of puts puts that particular argument I think to bed very firmly can you can you explain how it does that in simple terms like I'm a golden retriever um you know there there is there is this notion of cognitive closure where uh you know if you you really can't explain certain things yeah you really can't explain certain things of Golden Retrievers uh but but uh 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 your handout for handshake now the question is well was were they really the cause like did anyone check and you and you might say well it should be obvious that they're the Cause right and what our research has shown is no because basically because no one thought to check and while you can't do this with a simple with a person right yeah I can't 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 getting the atomic State what if I gave you the cellular state of your body right so all 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 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 description 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 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 this is there's basically then 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 contractions 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 can still say you could still say pick out um you know every atom that makes up um you know you you your organs or whatever right uh you could still pick all that out and you could still relate those so it wouldn't be that the the the macro scale is not reducible it is reducible but the causation involved is not and what that means is that macros 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 the ship of Theseus or or what have you right like you're not uh the same you're not completely identical to your Atomic State you're some sort of coarse grain that we 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 uh that happened a while ago or uh 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 of this was it the atomics state of the system or was it some macro scale State and uh 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 um a thing called error correction and it's um it's it's basically just that well there's noise down at the bottom and my noise I don't mean like 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 um what's a great what's a good way of saying that so it would be like um let's say that I had a light switch that control 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 turn you flip it and the light bulb turns on and off right um 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 why 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 the light on or off macro scales 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 um and so I I think it doesn't prove Free Will by any means right so it's a 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 will 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 uh literally today out front Robert sapolski'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 um I thought you would I thought you would well I think I I I'll I'll just say it right I mean you know he's a primatologist evolutionary psychologist right um neurobiologists I think evolutionary biologist perhaps evolutionary biologist yeah so you you know I think that the probability like that when you're talking about Free Will you're talking about like the the mathematics of causation like that that's what you're talking about you're not and the relevance from you know oh is a 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 marking 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 at the outset it's generally only by having really strong metaphysical um 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 um and this would be like logical fatalism and some of these other sort of more less less direct Arguments for free will or like literally disprovable so so you can you can literally disprove uh uh the argument so um I I I like sapolsky I like uh a great deal uh but but I think that you know there there's a certain um I think one thing that I hope my my book makes clear is that you know these questions are not uh just just closed and and that's given the very best the very latest that we have on what would be the most relevant scientific disciplines which is like how you create macro skill models how causaling modeling Works how prediction Works in science using um you know Notions like computational irreducibility like we had this we had this revolution in the 80s that people have not caught up with with chaos theory and computationally reducibility those are very relevant and have not been directly applied um we have we've had this causal Revolution those are that's very relevant and has not been applied so so I think you know if I want one people just 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 uh 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 and they're like you know the laws of physics are working on deterministic train tracks and you know they had they just have these really and you know causation is just uh correlation or something it's not like counter factual dependency or something they have they they basically have this sort of Old Stock you know World model and if you look at you know contemporary science you find a lot of complexity there and a lot of room a lot more room uh than people are 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 I I think it would absolutely would and 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 in thought um you know is because Consciousness is always the wild card you know a theory of Consciousness is always sort of a 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 some Joker right some very strange thing um and and that would completely change your conceptions so so with that said then you know yes absolutely it could have a huge relevancy but I'm I'm I'm sort of cautious I think you can still talk about uh Free Will and intuitions around Free Will and arguments against free will or arguments Pro free will without necessarily relying on on on Consciousness I think you can talk about cause causation and prediction and what prediction really means you know and and 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 uh left in science that 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 there to simplify they're there to make the world easy and I think ultimately The World Isn't Easy Eric hole ladies and gentlemen Eric where should people go I love your uh uh sub stack I think it's fantastic the super sensorium article that you did a little while ago was one of my favorites you just put a new one out on the fact that we don't have a town square and that all social media is fundamentally just killing us uh why should people go if they want to check that out and everything else that you do if you type in um the intrinsic perspective Eric into Google uh Erica the K it'll find it or just the intrinsic perspective Google will find it as well um and my my my first non-fiction book this is actually my second book from my first non-fiction book is out July 25th uh 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 if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe