Consciousness Live! with R. Scott Bakker (S1 E14)

0:00 aha now we are live so I'm here today with very special guest joining me it's a Scott Baker Scott for those who don't know you can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do I full-time fiction writer I write mostly fantasy fiction but some science fiction as well and part time philosopher I guess and lately a perpetrator yeah I kind of look at myself as being extra

0:42 institutional so I sort of look at my lack of affiliation with with any institution you know dealing with say you know issues in philosophy of mind or cognitive science I look at that as actually an opportunity to exploit so what I really strive to do my work is to try to rethink problems in ways that might be laughed at in institutional contexts where you know the the micro

1:21 norms of of simply progressing through you know a given educational system could be constraining you know consciously or otherwise and I also strive to be as interdisciplinary as I possibly can so I like to describe myself as a water bug about a mile wide mile wide and an inch deep leaping from silo to silo to silo pissing off as many specialists as I as

1:56 I possibly can but always always striving to pull together the most parsimonious coherent story I possibly can for cognitive phenomena largely well it's it's certainly great to have you and you know your writing is is is wonderful I think and so it's very rare that you find someone who's a philosopher and also a great writer so we need more people like the I think to liven up the discussion that's really true

2:28 and and also I mean what's interesting is that I when I was looking into your background is that you were in a ph.d program in philosophy yep and you basically completed I mean you did what we call a beedi which is all but dissertation so is this what you were studying as philosophy of mind cognitive science when you were there well I mean strangely enough it was it's not really a high degree nerve I mean I've always wanted to be a fiction writer I just didn't think it was a realistic job path so for some reason I thought being a philosopher was actually

3:04 a more viable but I had a very sort of eclectic university career you say you did a literature languages and literature undergrad I did MA and during criticism and then I went to Vanderbilt to do my philosophy PhD and I was writing a dissertation on fundamental ontology believe it or not but mixed in with salasi and Brando me and normative

3:39 Asst considerations and I was very very close to being completed to completing my draft anyways and I just I'd always planned to do a chapter on neuroscience and I had been reading neuroscience and you know in the months while I was playing my dissertation two together and as I started the chapter on neuroscience it was the whole project just collapsed

4:12 and it was genuine existential crisis for me because if I can't if I don't believe in it I can't write about it and I was you know in pondering what to say to my wife you know what I did you could start from scratch maybe I should go to a different program you know but I just lost all faith and my project and then by total serendipity a friend of mine at Vanderbilt next myth actually he had

4:52 given an old manuscript of mine to old roommate of his who happen to be a literary agent in New York and right in the middle of this crisis I got all these offers three book deals to be a fiction writer after all so it was it was an escape hatch it was saved my life and and obviously never gave up on the philosophy and never gave up on the insight which destroyed my my

5:25 dissertation and has brought me to your attention right I gather so yeah interesting so what so was it that you were I mean it sounds like what you're saying is you're working on fundamental ontology and then you start studying the neuroscience and you realize that the kind of question of asking what is fundamental has to address what the brain is doing and then you realize well that takes away the normativity and really any kind of interesting thing I could say about ontology is that sort of what happened yeah well I mean the big I mean the big insight was just basically realizing

6:00 just how unbelievably capricious human theoretical reflection was and understanding that a lot of these insights that I was pursuing we're actually far better explained as being cognitive versions of visual illusions and that's what I'd actually was building I was building a very complex cognitive version of a visual illusion and

6:36 that's the way I look at much of philosophy especially in intentional philosophy now as as as being an almost in the same business as researchers and optical illusions because if it means it's unbelievable the kinds of optical illusions that are capable of creating outright and I think we've been at it and it's cognitive guys for you know well probably millennia now so and so the key I mean so you're really interested in consciousness and in your

7:09 writing unconsciousness you kind of come to this what you're saying this this idea that most of what we call consciousness is an illusion generated by a kind of bottleneck and the brains inability to see itself in a sense and I mean you say you're in a more of a luminous than regulatory limit of hysts I wonder if I could just start by asking you what it is that so what when you're talking about consciousness what do you take yourself to be talking about um I mean the term the term is is impossible to nail down between turist theorists I

7:46 I realize but I mean just whenever we refer to our experience and I think it's simply the simplest way whatever whatever it is whatever it is that we're talking about when we report experiences and I think I mean I think that's enough I think that's as much as I need to make my case as to what consciousness likely is not which is which is largely what my

8:22 position is so I mean the blind brain theory is a theory of the appearance of consciousness so it takes a look at you know the evolutionary ecological preconditions of human metacognition and just simply asks right how would you know be like a human likely you know mistake itself when at last it finally turned to

8:56 interrogate its own soul and so it's it's say I'm so for instance Kweli a limit of ism I mean I agree with much of what then it has to say when it comes to when it comes to oil yeah I don't think I think I could probably hammer out a much more elegant argument but I'm an alumina missed about experience you know as something on college eyes as has a thing but I'm also an alumina business

9:34 when it comes to even you know cognitive scientific staples as central as representation so for instance I mean I would argue but representation is not a thing another thing out there in the world or whatever but it's actually much better understood as a powerful shorthand that we use to understand systems like ourselves so I mean that's one of the reasons why I was asking is because sometimes you talk about the

10:09 phenomenal how do these things present phenomenally sometimes you talk about self consciousness and so it sounds like what you're type saying now though is is sort of in the middle they're just just experience that's what it is really you're after when you target but so I'm wondering like where on the spectrum is self-consciousness is that experience for you or how do i parse these different terms that you use every self-consciousness i mean so i i would i would like to know how you know the term self-consciousness is used just some plain everyday discourse solving

10:41 everyday interpersonal problems right we refer to our experiences all all the time and the those those types of uses of those terms are the kinds of uses that you know your parents you know your your wife's parents you know and their parents and their parents have used themselves and you know in that context the types of deliverances whatever it is

11:16 that's informing the reports right it's actually quite powerful but a quite powerful way to to solve issues right so the problem comes when the philosopher says well what do you mean by self-consciousness right what is phenomenal experience right when the philosopher asks what these things are that's where we inevitably run into problems because those questions even though they're just eminently reasonable

11:49 questions to us don't actually come first in the order of explanation I mean we first have to ask what the ecology of this you know questioning experience consists in to really to really get a grip on our ability to answer questions like what is self-consciousness what is phenomenology and so on okay so so you wouldn't agree with the kind of starting place that many philosophers start from the identification of

12:22 consciousness as there being something that it's like for an agent so that the having a first-person point of view have there are these kind of innocuous things you know so when I see red there's something that it's like from maybe see red what it's like it's different than tasting chocolate or hearing the sound same is true when I reflect you know so so that often philosophers want to identify the thing they're trying to explain with this thing that Thomas Nagel introduced but it's kind of widespread everywhere you know so and even on a theory like yours I wonder if you're gonna end up saying well there's

12:56 nothing that it's like to be human or if you don't think that's a useful or helpful way of presenting the just what I think is that the systems involved and what its what it's like questions right which you know come up all the time in non theoretical contacts me all the time we say what it was like those systems are dedicated to answering those kinds of practical questions those kinds of practical problems right it's as soon as we take those systems which are

13:30 radically heuristic turning on incredibly specialized information right that that our ancestors evolved in order to solve your pressing you know reproductively high-impact problems that they faced in their cognitive Ecology's and so once we take those systems and we ask those systems to solve a theoretical problem such as what is redness for instance or what is pain

14:04 we almost instantly trip into crash space so we have which is just to say we have these systems and they work for us and all these practical contexts but we have no metacognitive awareness whatsoever of the scope of applicability of these systems right let alone two types and kinds of information that they turn on and require in order to derive you know advantageous solutions to whatever the practical problem happens to be we have no inkling of any of them

14:38 so we take these questions you know bump them up to the theoretical level and say what is redness I mean what we're doing is we're using very very specific set of tools adopted to to ultimately these limited set of problem ecology as ecological rationalists would say and asking you no questions just simply couldn't hope to give anything but the simple answers to and so since we're

15:11 blowing to the apparatus it just feels like the apparatus is Omni applicable it's like why the hell can I ask that question I mean it rolls off my lips easily enough and and my answer is that well there's nothing wrong with the question it's just you know with every question you have to you know ask yourself what it would take to answer that question and when you take a hard look at the biology and the ecology of these issues becomes very very clear I

15:48 think that we shouldn't expect much what is in the way of answers and we should we should expect to be spoofed and confounded and troubled in all the ways philosophy shouts as far as I'm concerned right I mean conundrums you know I mean even even the way you know philosophical schools will turn on you know systemic or quasi systemic sets of insights fits the kind of pattern of

16:23 heuristic breakdown that you might expect from from the misapplication of you know specific practical problem solving practical problem solvers to big theoretical questions yeah it does but I'm trying to ask about maybe one step back before we talk about theorizing and I want to get to that but just from the common-sense level pre theoretically yeah is there something that it's like to see read do you think I mean or no um

16:58 is that merely an appearance that's not real or I mean I'm trying to get it back because you're asking in general right it's something look there's something it's like to see read at a concert with you know red laser show and stuff like that there's something like seeing red when you're smelling roses you know that you're you're handing to your wife there's something like two read when you're on the floor and you

17:34 grasp a bleeding wound yeah but is there something like to see read abstracted from all those contexts and there was like no I mean why how how could you Minh beings have evolved the ability to you know basically answer a question like that you know given just how limited in practical our metacognitive resources

18:10 seem to be I mean to me this seems obviously have to be right from a biological standpoint I mean there's just so much brain it most complicated mechanism we know and we have to somehow be able to report part of that complexity to our fellows and you know you're on the ground you're bleeding or you feel you're down a Kurtz you feel liquid you know you peer out it and you say think it's blood I think I see red you know you're low I mean let's let's think on the less gruesome example

18:49 practical context no i yeah hopefully the bleeding is not too practical but so when you are in that context like that very situation and you say you know i feel the liquid i see the color are you ultimately gonna be a limit Avista bout those practical particulars because I take that someone like Dennett he says yeah you you merely think that you see the color it's it's not really something that's a part of your conscious experience and that's that's a kind of a limited ism I'm wondering if you

19:23 subscribe to or not that was what was it clear to me when I was reading your stuff is so ultimately I think that you you argue that there's a lot of an illusion going on here kind of trick but still the trick appears real and that's what a theory of consciousness is about is about the way the things appear so it ultimately it sounded to me like you're not really in a limit but really sort of a kind of consciousness is not what you think it is type of person and I'm wondering where I've gone if I if that's not an accurate description of your view I'm Anna Limited Asst about the appearance

19:59 of consciousness to to reflection I don't read in it that way by the way I mean then it you know for Zdenek I mean the problem it isn't that you don't have these experiences right it's just that there's no such thing as well yeah this is just there's no such thing as this natural kind right that can be isolated and analyzed right I mean in in specialized theoretical contexts right I mean I mean the way I understand it

20:34 maybe he is not a luminous about you know seeing blood on your leg or and is it red or is it not red but he isn't a limited about you know these pauses that intuition just seems to so obviously present reflection and that's the kind of a limited ISM that that I share that I share with them so so just interrupt

21:10 you for a second if I can so what you're saying is that the thing you're in a limit of it's about is a sir and theoretically construed as a notion of consciousness not consciousness itself exactly so I mean so there is consciousness and you know I think there will be something so I like I mean for for me my theory feels like I just sort of naturally fits with on the cognitive side you know Bayesian theories of cognitive function and on the

21:44 consciousness side with EMF type type theories right I mean but for me that says I don't need it and it's so highly speculative that I like to just sort of you know set to one side so I think there is consciousness human beings have it and it will be scientifically examined and it will you know turn out to be nothing like what we feel it's like it'll it'll like most scientific discoveries will

22:18 probably be alienating and radically decentering when it comes to human intuition so yeah so I mean that's the best apart I guess that's kind of hard for me too I mean obviously it's hard to wrap your head around but that's the part that I'm trying to trying to really grasp here is that suppose that we have the neuroscience sort of under our belt and so when you see read you know we understand what happens at the receptors at the eye and the areas of b1 b2 b4 etc and then you say okay so now the experience of read what you might have

22:55 thought is a simple uh Nana's analyzable ineffable sort of thing you've come to learn more about it but it how is it on your view going to be radically different from the way we sort of commonsensical ii think about it because well let me just ask you that and what way is it going to be different than though then how we free a theoretically thought about it I mean I mean that I think it yeah so I think over generalized right but but it will be radically different insofar as redness this notion that

23:29 there's this thing that can be isolated as opposed to just simply correlating the the the deliverances of you know two radically different cognitive systems right one which is ad hoc built to answer questions on the fly that have life-and-death consequences and pre technological environments right and the latter which is absolutely immersed in technology and technological

24:03 instrumentation and dedicated to sourcing things in larger natural systems right so you know if you have experienced red and if we can if we can say okay well we have this experience and and we can pin it to these natural systems and then we can track the way in which we use our reports you know these the practical contexts every day right then yeah sure if you know okay if if that's what you

24:39 want to call red I'm fine with that right but if you say say something like Tom Clark would or anyone who who thinks there's something super physical going on right then oh no I'm afraid you you're chasing ghosts right you're not what I mean by that tracing I mean cuz I mean you know not that it matters but my cards on the table I'm pretty much a physicalists mm-hmm an old-school tag like I've been sort of an identity

25:11 theorist any reason not to be one so I expect the experience of red to be identical with some axial processing in the brain and I don't think that's a limit of assigning out the nature of the thing which I knew about from the inside from from the outside so so that III don't really see what being eliminated except for at what you said earlier which I can agree with which is that there's a certain way of characterizing that which maybe philosophers have intended to do as being you know it's

25:45 doable and it's simple or something like that that's gonna have to fall probably but as far as the experience itself I'm not sure in what sense we're eliminating it yeah we'll see oh no no I'm not an identity theorist right so I mean so what I want to say is that your report of read/write and your the reports that you make but that's that actually belongs to and can only only be understood in the context of of a larger cognitive ethology and that you know to actually take that and say oh it belongs

26:23 to here in the brain or this is where it rises interpret in the brain to source it that way is to misconstrue the relationship between the two ecologies right because that's what we're talking about my view you know you have a shallow ecological relationship with your own physiology and thanks to science you have a deep ecological you know one to two your own physiology and that really it's not that you shouldn't expect that there's going to be

26:57 connections you know between those two ecologies they're going to be connected in countless different ways it's just to say that those connections aren't going to be one-to-one a they're likely going to be surprising and like everything else on biology they're going to be in some cases unbelievable or what too hard to swallow via common sense right but they're not going to be one-to-one there's not going to be any way in which we any agreeable anyway consensus

27:32 commanding way to actually take the deliverances of these two systems the shallow ecological system and the deep ecological system and and match match them up in a simplement a simple manner it's going to be very very complicated like everything else yeah and so so saying you know that every experience is in some way shape or form the product of a brain is one thing right but saying

28:07 that you know every single experience can actually be nailed down to these specific neural processes maybe maybe not right in some cases yes but in other cases obviously no just simply because it all depends on right the actual natural facts pertaining to you know this shallow informational ecology that you know we you know call our inner life for what how do you write and those those like I say that

28:45 sometimes they're gonna match up in some strange way and sometimes they're not going to match up in any way that we can that we can readily fathom were clear it doesn't make it more clear I still were limiting anything especially you know so if we want to talk about the the color red just talk about an intentional state like belief which you say is gonna be more than likely eliminated so and you say you don't even like Dennis version of this where you know it's it's not

29:20 tense has a low rate I I would R be done it has a little low resolution version of what's going on but I mean then it I mean then it and all I mean most people accused in it of applicants both ways right because superficially he does right but he's he's basically making the same point I am right I mean he's like he's saying there's nothing an illusion there's no illusion when you talk about your pain there's no illusion when you talk about you know red there's no illusion you know I mean you're talking

29:52 about real things that are happening to you in in a real world right the illusion the illusions arise when we come when we attempt to you know basically analyze theoretically analyzed basically take the metacognitive tools we we've received which are very very specific very very limited constrained and apply them to answer you know nature type questions what's the nature of red for instance just so I mean that's what gets eliminated is the you know the

30:31 kinds of posits the kinds of definitions that fall out of those misapplications of what are ultimately very parochial practice grounded tools right right no I see so so your was more about what happens when we introspect and then try to give a theory of what we find in our introspection welljust introspection it's when we actually tried to solve it come up with general answers right using using

31:04 specific tools when we actually try to ask nature of type questions right sometimes introspection is involved in that right but it's just reflection you know absent any sort of scientific scaffolding especially is is doomed to lead you down any number of paths by saying okay yeah that makes it clearer I think what you're saying before yeah so a lot a lot of what's come up already

31:41 is based on information so it seems like information place kind of a crucial role a lot of the stuff that you're talking about and you and you've talked about in some of your of the work that is the integration of information which is really important and even and sort of aligned yourself with people like to know me and and their their kind of views on this and the even needleman's dynamic or I mean it only I'd like to know Nia Nishal II anyways just because it was compatible with my position right oh I agree with them I think whatever consciousness you know when

32:15 consciousness is understood as a natural phenomena that's the big desire atom that we want from from that explanation right I mean that's what we want to really understand is how how is it all this stuff ends up being here you know part of this whatever right well this turns out to be and I mean that seems to be something that's crucial to any satisfying account of consciousness agree with some thought for you and and

32:50 then what you add of course I is this idea of the kind of open and closed nature you know so it's so on your view there's a risk there's a system which is going to be generating consciousness and responsible for it you call it the recursive system this thing is open to all the information which is coming through but close in another sense as well so it's integrating things off stage so to speak but what shows up is is very limited and that's something I think that's very very different from maybe the way that Tononi and those guys want to present their their view yeah um I mean as far

33:25 as it's been a long time since I've read any to know um as far as I recall I mean he's identity theorist as well right I mean he wants to sort of nailed the nail down this interface right but he's not well just he's not an identity theorist in the sense that I was using the term which identity with the brain his identity is identity with integrating information this internet reaching yeah which is he thinks something separate over and above actually not reducible to simply brain yeah yeah um but you're so you'd be against any kind of identity

34:00 claim it sounds like what you're saying no matter no not any kind a I mean I just don't think that the it'll be the relationship between what it is we report and and what it is we discover you know in terms of neurophysiology is ever going to be a simple one just simply because of the apparatus is that that were stranded with when it comes to the latter so you see this notion of heuristic misapplication I mean that's I

34:33 mean that's what's central central to to my view in understanding just what it means to suffer from what I call metacognitive neglect so take something like either in quantum physics for instance the the distinction between theories that try to explain quantum weirdness as being intrinsic onto logical feature of the quantum realm right versus attempts to explain it as being basically an epistemic feature of

35:08 our limited ability to engage the microscopic right why should that be a problem I mean why can't we simply scratch our head and say you know solve that right he seems to be such a strange strange problem to just accept oh okay well visit artifact of of our limitations or is it actually the property of the world over of what we make of it um if you think about it that's a very very

35:44 curious predicament for a cognitive being to find itself in right and it really I think concrete eise's the degree to which were hobbled by neglect I mean we are so blind to our the constitutive in many respects circumstantial dimensions of our own cognitive processes that we often find ourselves stymied by questions involving you know whether or not a property's

36:17 independent of us or whether property is actually a part and parcel of the circuit we form with nature once you sort of you wrap your head on that blindness that we have that inability to distinguish then you can really I think see how neglect looms large over all every question you encounter in philosophy in mind insofar as so many questions in philosophy of mind actually

36:50 turn on on that very issue right to what degree are we forcing us on you know reality into what degree is it just simply reality jumping out at us and when you when you take that issue that problem of metacognitive you know no matter answer the question of meta metacognitive in the clock right there's suddenly I would argue all kinds of things suddenly start becoming very very clear I mean even the subject

37:23 object dichotomy right I mean if we're constitutively blind to the constitutive axis of cognition right then really we have no choice but to radically schematize our relationship right to our world and in subject-object dichotomy is a very very simplistic way to conceive of that in that relationship that we have with the world and and then all of

37:58 a sudden you know this whole the whole question of something being out there as opposed to something being in here you can see that as a heuristic tool right and then the whole question of the applicability of that tool arises and because it is radically heuristic you would expect it to have a limited domain of applicability so all of a sudden you can start looking at you know all the ways in which philosophy agonizes over this issue as most likely being a problem of application right where we

38:33 have this schema for dealing with our own metacognitive lect and yet solving metacognitive problems certain metacognitive problems regardless no no it's in your head it's not in the world right problem solved if it turns out in fact that you're correct something you see huge swathes of philosophy actually going through the the problems they they do as being an artifact of systematic misapplication of

39:10 what's a very you know specific heuristic scheme to fundamental questions of what is so I mean it that's what this is what makes it so difficult to express my view into to get people to wrap their heads around it is the fact that we're always I'm always everyone is always sort of trapped with these tools that allow us to do powerful thing in certain circumstances without any

39:45 sort of awareness of the limits of those tools and you know to such an extent that it feels perfectly intuitive to apply those tools in ways in which they just simply have no hope of solving problems right Vic and Stein for instance you know I mean our normative ISM in general you know I mean if intentional cognition is a practical it belongs to a set of systems that we

40:20 evolved to solve one another in lieu of any you know natural scientific information right a way to actually avoid having to cognize each other's brains or physiology to solve for brains and for physiology then why the hell should we think that those systems actually have any have any hope of solving you know themselves right why should we think normative cognition can

40:57 actually has theoretical application right that's not what it was the ball for hey so it's not what it evolved for it evolved to actually systematically neglect neglect nature's in solve nature's regardless right and if that's the case then asking those systems to solve for nature's is bound to lead to you know theoretical miasma and so when you look at you know normative ISM I mean you know it's supposed to be a big break from the philosophical tradition

41:30 and yet for some strange reason it suffers all the same problems of under determination that that philosophical traditions suffers as well so in when it comes to the question of experience and phenomenology I'm saying the same thing with with respect to metacognition and reflecting on these on these question on these issues right so they just don't have the applicability that we think that we think they do and so I mean you

42:05 mentioned sellers earlier I'm wondering so some people who work in this area would say look what we want to do is come up with a theory that best accounts for the data that we have the data that people think things that people say and what they can do in the labs and so forth and so on and and and so some people might think well look you know the experience have read the a belief that you have they're not the sort of thing that you are gonna find in introspection and you know maybe that's a bad way of or even on reflection or

42:39 whatever but they're like theoretical posits like electrons so that we posit these things as as a way to explain a lot of this other behavior and so to take a simple example you know when people see apples they say that they're red or whatever agree then you put them in a lab you can show the same picture subliminally people say they don't see something but then they're able to discriminate the color unconsciously and times them for various things and so we say well look there must be some kind of mental state by which they're representing the redness of the of the

43:13 Apple in both cases and so then we're off and running sort of populating the mental with these theoretical posits and of course they could be refined or eliminated or added to but why isn't that kind of approach or why do you think it that sort of approach isn't gonna work that's a way of avoiding the kind of problem that you're putting out well I mean I think you know so when we operationalize things like intentional or phenomenal posits yeah I think it's gonna work in all kinds of potential

43:48 contexts right I mean they just won't generalize the way we want them to and surprise surprise right I mean you look at you know meant the mental and you look at you know various types of psychological theories that actually turn on mental representations and you know you you find this difficulty of sort of actually taking it out of that specific research context it just doesn't seem to travel right the

44:23 way natural scientific posits seem seem to travel like wait what exactly do you have in mind when you say they don't travel like I mean I know what you mean by that but what specific thing doesn't travel okay I mean it's like to debate or beliefs for instance right I mean beliefs and psychological theories that that turn on beliefs as posits you know really seem to solve all kinds of

44:57 problems in all kinds of specific contexts right psychological contexts but as soon as you as soon as you start asking the question where do you find a belief in the brain where what is the you know the etiology of you know given belief since you start asking those kinds of questions then all of a sudden the mysteries crop up everywhere and you know the game of you know trying to

45:33 define are excellent and in ways in which you know fit our theories begins right and it just becomes very very quickly evident that there's no way of actually resolving these these debates just simply because we can't actually formulate or explanation in any way that compels consensus right so you have all these so you have you just cannot so beliefs talking beliefs does a lot of practical work everyday practical work

46:06 there's no doubt about that when you theorize it you can you can do a certain amount of theoretical work with beliefs you know without tripping over your own shoelaces you can actually use the term in clinical context it's a great effect right and change people's lives you know so it has all kinds of therapeutic benefits right but when as soon as we attempted to try to try to map it into you know the nature of you know the meat high-dimensional

46:41 right as I like to call the physical right all of a sudden you were worse timing we left we're left scratching your heads so I I wonder I mean I guess I would personally I picked up but I wonder why you having said that aren't more of like a Dannette Ian because I think that's exactly his argument isn't it that the things are so useful they're not they're not physically in the brain but they're the intentional stance is something that we can't ever get rid of exactly because of its usefulness and so we posit these

47:15 things to capture patterns in the behavior of these organisms around us but when we go in to the brain we take a different stance that's the design stance and we're not gonna find anything like beliefs in there we're just gonna find neurons and in there connections and and stuff like that but that doesn't suggest that beliefs on his view aren't just unreal it just means that they're there at a different level of explanation or something like that capturing patterns or behavior rather than something instantiating the brain yeah I mean so then he wants to basically have a big tent ontology and

47:52 actually allow on all these things all these terms to be to be equal people partners and the grand and Denver of scientifically understanding human soul unless it's qualia of course but I mean I mean for me you know you know the attentional stance for me is sort of a view it's kind of like a last gasp of traditional philosophizing right the intentional stance is itself a

48:24 theoretical dividend of applying intentional cognition to the question of intentionality right applying this hyper heuristic system to solve a very very general problem and even though the intentional stance physical stance design stance even though they actually you know capture the specificity of of you know certain low resolution low resolution understandings of the ways in which you

49:00 know intentional cognition is heuristic right they don't allow you go any further than that they that's basically where it stops right and I mean his latest book is a perfect example and he's trying to understand he's trying to explain comprehension and you know if you've been reading done it all through its potential stances everywhere and then when it comes to explaining things and then when it comes to comprehension it disappears right because ultimately that's what he's trying to explain the intentional stance right so his primary explanatory tool simply no avail when it

49:37 comes to actually explaining the difference between comprehension and compliments the way he comes to do and said from bacteria or from bacteria to Bach and by mice in my position is just to do away with things like the intentional stance and we're not talking about intentional stances I mean we're talking about systems that humans evolved to track each other and to track themselves and to solve a variety of practical practical problems and those are you know they're natural right I

50:11 mean we're gonna be able to pick them apart reverse-engineer them right and and fit them into the big synthetic picture of biology at some points you don't need intentional stances is that just simply introduces yet another you know homunculus into our our explanatory apparatus um but doesn't your own I mean so if the if you take your own view that face value and you so you have the system that's informational II blind and in a

50:45 really deep sense then explaining how the system is tricked to the system itself isn't going to allow it to change its output that's sort of the idea of its encapsulation so that you can come in and know all this stuff about you know the the way the tricks are performed it's not going to change the way the consciousness system generates the illusion that it generates right so in that sense you can't you can't eliminate I mean it's always going to

51:18 just fall back into the way it normally characterizes things that stuff out there stuff in here believes qualia right right oh I mean if you ask these questions I mean it's the same with optical illusions right I mean it's as you understand that it's an optical illusion the illusion doesn't go away right I mean all you can say is that oh okay well that's just my eyes screwing with me right and move on you know the problem the problem we have is that in terms of just simply bandwidth by the cognitive bandwidth doesn't come anywhere close to

51:51 the bandwidth that we enjoy with the visual cognition well so visual cognition you know we encounter an anomaly and it's like whoa that's normally right right in in reflection we encounter anomalies all the time and and this is interesting because you know I mean philosophy is generally held in ill repute and you know folk right and in this sense the folk we think might actually have the best of it right

52:25 because really I mean when you ask and I do this I ask people what you know what they think of philosophy and they just think it's basically people you know asking questions that have no answers right and really have no sort of practical use whatsoever anyways and it's interesting to me because I mean I just translate so seamlessly into what I'm telling you which is which is that we have these these very very specific systems right they consume very very specific information that we evolved to

53:00 solve the ancestral cognitive ecologies and that when as soon as we ventured to ask these questions right we're going to run afoul these things so Amy my paper on alien philosophy was basically an attempt to kind of recontextualize these debates you know visa vie alien species the the convergence and just to show how you you know you really can I think make a plausible argument that you know aliens with a convergent cognitive biology

53:34 would actually suffer a lot of the same kinds of problems we seem to suffer when it comes to answering the questions of their own soul right and but and I I mean I'll just I agree for the sake of our discussion here but my question was about you know how we cognate i how we how we address to other people around us is there ever gonna be any better way of talking about you then saying you believe x or are you ever gonna write a

54:07 better fiction novel by getting rid of beliefs or mental states or I mean the tiger wants to eat you is a good way to characterize what's going on with the tiger when he's attacking you that's not ever gonna change no matter how much you learn about the brain the point I was making yeah and this feeds right into the semantic apocalypse stuff right the the social consequences of basically being these these creatures suffering the suffering metacognitive myopia the way we do it you know I mean whenever

54:42 same way you know we see you know triangles and squares bickering in the hider simul illusion right you know incredibly low amount of information right yet cueing these incredibly complicated cognitive responses right right and we do you mean you can look at it and try to say that you know that triangle isn't arguing with her father swear right I mean but but still in the first instance

55:18 that's what you see yeah we are are basically doomed to run afoul these these these types of illusions I mean they're just simply part of our cognitive inheritance right and I'm but that doesn't mean science you know can't just simply put a sign up and say you know where if you go there right and point us in other directions and that's not to say that that there isn't all kinds of ways in which you

55:53 know we suffer you know genuine problems that could be hacked more effectively actually knowing you know what the actual interrelationships between our shallow metacognitive ecology and our deep ecology are so it's a yeah but I guess that's the way I was reading Jenna was that that the the intentional stance is not a not the right level of not the level of explanation but the level of

56:29 practical applicability so that according to him look it's just if you don't look at another person and see them as wanting something believing something then you're just missing out on something which is in hortence and knowing that you know in the brain none of that is really happening is interesting but it doesn't change how extraordinarily useful taking this approach to other persons is and so that at that in that level not the level trying to understand what's happening the nature of things but just in getting around the world it doesn't seem like

57:00 we're gonna ever be able to do much better than that given the way we're built and that's things that be a consequence of your view as well it's a first offense in my view except I just don't need the intentional stance I don't need intentional systems theory to to talk about it right I mean that's a distraction and talked about other people you do though no no I don't take the intentional stance toward anyone neither do you no one does right I mean that's that's basically yeah one more way of of oversimplifying

57:38 what's actually going on right and ultimately covering over the what I think will ultimately be the the real explanation which is just simply it you know so you know we have this ability to cognize sources and our environments you know and and science has given us the tools we need to extend that ability right to actually you know source model things in in our environment and to develop almost unimaginably powerful

58:14 complex ways of engaging in transforming our environment these low resolution systems right like intentional cognition are they're stuck at the level of correlations right they can't source things right all they can do is give us some sort of predictive wedge that we can use to to you know manipulate those systems you know and communicate these systems we do all kinds of things but

58:50 but we actually can't I can't look at you and understand what your brain is doing right but I can look at you and say okay he's got a question there's something I'm not answering right and I can make all kinds of powerful and perhaps correct in for instance regarding your state of mind or what it is whatever it is your brains up to and how it actually pertains to you know whatever access I have various as limited as it is to our interaction

59:27 now and you're stuck and we're stuck with those tools and that's what I think you know that's what I think the is the big danger for the future is the fact that we are stuck with these incredibly low resolution tools in the same way the hider similan so easily hacks intentional cognition tricks it into into seeing you know wiggling squares

1:00:03 and triangles as a soap opera we are trapped right within within the circuit of you know our social cognitive and metacognitive capacities and the the fact that they are so easily queued out of school so we easily miss applied right means that as our knowledge of our deep information environment becomes more and more complete our ability to spoof and cheat are these systems

1:00:38 becomes greater and greater which means if their reliability right their functionality right becomes less and less reliable so there's a powerful I think social predictive component to the theory I'm offering as well right theory doesn't simply say why it's hard for you to understand questions of redness right it also explains why that difficulty

1:01:14 that you have explaining that question renders you more susceptible to say Facebook algorithms for example right I mean one of the things this is one of the things I've always been a nomad philosophically I mean I've gone through so many different positions and this never my life of I actually stuck with one position as long as I have and it causes me anxiety sometimes but the thing the the reason I have a hard time getting out of you know heuristic

1:01:49 neglect Theory blood brain theory is the fact that I mean you would expect a general theory of cognition to actually be able to say something significant about all the varieties of cognition that we encounter in the course in the course of human life and it really you know so it's eliminated in so far as you can look at posits like belief pause it's like redness which i think is a

1:02:22 posit you can say all those things have nothing to do with what's going on in the high dimensional world right and at the same time you can explain why we seem to be living through this present age of growing confusion right why the plunging cost to reality is proving to be such a horrible horrible social

1:02:56 dysfunction you know why it is AI for instances is something we should be terrified even in the form of the chatbot let alone super intelligence gives a game of oh super intelligence I don't think we have a hope of making it to the bat point right because it's the a eyes that have been designing great to actually play off of our social cognitive cues that are yeah you just need to Facebook posting stuff about

1:03:31 Russia and we're done in they're set to flood our cognitive ethology was right I mean that's so I wondered toothaches they started to go if you don't mind asking a little bit about some territory explored by the book neural path which was sort of a try I guess part of the point of what you were doing there was seeing how we could rabble or get out of what it would look like to sort of step outside of a lot of some of the box that is were boxed into by our cognitive systems so the whole idea of a neural path with just someone

1:04:05 you know who's had brains been tinkered with so that some of these systems are disabled no empathy you know super up the rationality etc and that's a pretty depressing view that you get as a result and I wonder if that is your general view about you know the way things will go or is there a chance that we could augment some of these systems to make it better to allow more information in and as opposed to less well I'm wondering exactly what your view about you know transhumanism and these kinds of views are yeah I mean so this the argument I'm

1:04:40 making is kind of is I guess what you would call a wisdom of nature argument and transhumanist circles where basically what we're doing is we're undoing systems that are interconnected with one another and in such a way that simply by tinkering with them were compromising the our cognitive ecology as a whole and the big I think that the real counter-argument to that is one given by Allen cannon and better than

1:05:17 human where you know he just says well that misunderstands the role that connectedness connectedness actually plays in ecology so there's high degree of modularity and that you know every ecology that you see you know is a survivor of multiple collapses right either in whole or part right which is why ecology to sleep up again and so he would argue that enhancing ourselves is something we almost have to do in order

1:05:54 to keep up with the transformations of our cognitive ecologies right and that if something goes wrong we can fix it and that's that's the great thing about enhancement but but the problem is that you know you and I product of a you know hundreds of millions of years of evolving right to be able to have this interaction right now and you know as our Ecology's change right so try not to

1:06:29 be too long-winded here but I mean I just take let me just take the internet you know the way in which people who had radical views just even a few years ago if they wanted to talk about the radical views they had to talk to their neighbor to their brother to their friends and uh are they're not gonna have the same radical views right so that radical view will be tamp down right so you have some notion whites are the best on the planet right and you talk to your neighbors and

1:07:06 you're like pretty self congratulatory dude you know most of us imagine it indoors right and problem solved right now that doesn't happen right example it just Google our Muslims dangerous and count how many pages you have to go through before you actually anything remotely close to you know a well-reasoned skeptical response to those types to that question or those

1:07:38 types of questions in general sorry I lost my train of thought what was the original question again well is there any hope for us to apply ourselves in such a way that we can better ourselves as opposed to worse than ourselves so so Alan Buchanan would suggest something and I'm putting words in his mouth here but he would say something like well you know okay that's a problem but that's a problem that can be fixed right because we can make ourselves more discriminatory when it comes to these

1:08:12 types of issues by enhancing ourselves right so we could have like some sort of onboard [ __ ] detector or what have you you know but it but the question then it becomes okay you have a [ __ ] detector and I don't right um okay all of a sudden it's like well [ __ ] detector really it just makes you sound like you're more full of [ __ ] than you've ever really well no no I got a [ __ ] detector and I

1:08:44 detected it was [ __ ] right oh you get the gist yeah home is is as soon as we start augmenting ourselves especially if we do it in a piecemeal way that's you know basically determined by you know commercial contexts right the more the invariant background of the cognitive ecology that we rely on in order to have this you know incredibly rarefied exchange breaks breaks down so it's just one of those situations where the more

1:09:19 we enhance ourselves to attempt to get ahead of the problem right the more fundamentally we fuel the problem and this is even more of the case I mean right now we're just suffering from the problems that have come up with arisen because of tinkering with their external cognitive environments but I mean as soon as we actually start writing our neurophysiology right automatically every you know you have a different here physiology that changes every cognitive ecology that you pass through through the rest of your life

1:09:51 right and if everybody's doing it and everybody's an arms race of some kind yeah you can see very very quickly I call it the big splat sometimes right how just the any kind of stable human cognitive ecology is is bound to collapse and our attempts to shore it up with more technology are just simply bound to exacerbate the problem and I don't see any way out of it I mean like I I think and I don't see how the

1:10:25 answers the only solutions I can see are all just incredibly authoritarian you know neo-luddite craziness I mean I just can't bring myself to endure any of the possible solutions right like if I'm right then what's going on with Trump and all this is continuous with you know the Anthropocene in general right it's simply part of the global ecological degradation of our planet as a whole and you know the only way to undo ecological degradation in our

1:11:00 environments is to manage that right but now we're talking about managing souls and you know there's just no way to talk about managing human souls right without actually you know throwing the whole enlightenment for instance out the window right embracing some kind of crazy form of of authoritarianism you know I mean I don't know sometimes one of this isn't the solution to Fermi's paradox this is the great filter yeah

1:11:39 once you start tinkering it goes down I guess I'm more of an optimist here I wonder so you know some of the ideas that have been pointed to seem to me pretty good for reducing biases you know one idea was that if you could have an implant that detected that was connected to the Internet and could give you kind of vibrations depending on the crime rates of the neighborhood that you're in so you know a polite quicker pulse mean you're in a higher crime rate area thus lower pulse meaning you're in a lower crime rate area and pretty soon you come to pretty just kind of sort of directly sense the crime the statistics of the

1:12:14 crime of the area you're in and this could you know lower people you go into a predominantly black neighborhood some people might be a little tense or afraid but if they're getting this perception that the crime in our area is low then they may act very differently than they would if in without that kind of information you know and that's kind of simple a simple example but you think even those kind of tinkering these are gonna have the drastic effects that you're talking about I mean well first off they would be universal right and second off they they can actually give

1:12:46 you the exact opposite response that you want right I mean it could be that you know where you live black neighborhoods are high crime neighborhoods right and and so you're like hey every time I'm in a black neighborhood I keep getting this high crime alert right you know I mean you know the the connection between you know the evening news notably if it bleeds it leads yeah and the kind of phobias that that seem to underwrite you know so many

1:13:23 policy outlooks in American life I mean you need to do some heavy-duty research to be able to say anything definitive about it but it it seems to be a I don't know it certainly seems to be a simple solution to think that humans evolved in contexts and communities of 150 to 250 people right encountering violence and

1:14:01 just say violence in those communities constitute a direct threat to oneself right therefore heightened sensitivity to those types of acts right have definite survival value hence we are hardwired right to process information regarding physical threat right against the backdrop of 150 people right when when you're when it's a backdrop 150 million people right it means that

1:14:35 you're going to be acting on basically a loser or illusory threat responses all the time basically and I mean you can you'll then leverage that is you know being a condition for the you know present hysteria regarding the Scarab and for instance a Stephen Colbert is not me but those kinds you know heuristic misfires which characterize so much of modern life by Deidre Barrett calls it calls them

1:15:09 supernormal stimuli sherry Turkle calls them Darwinian buttons being pushed you know how do you know any given augmentation right such as providing information as to what kinds of threats you have in your neighborhood isn't simply going to have some sort of knock-on effect of systematically distorting what you our behavioral

1:15:47 response should be and there's just no way to determine that in advance right so every single solution that you offer in this respect right is going to have a cloud of anesthetic consequences associated with it and and you know it just seems to me that the more you pile this on without you know the Millenial filter of natural selection right the more unreliable our ancestral capacities or doomed are doomed to become it I just

1:16:22 don't see how we can fix them with them making making the problem worse right and the problem of natural selection is that is deadly I mean if this is the great filter right you know natural selection shop you guys oh I want a disaster I guess one final thing which was sort of more theoretically oriented about enhancement so does your theory of consciousness and the appearance of

1:16:55 consciousness predict that if we could take the recursive system and in and broaden its access to information so where it was open to all the information going on then would consciousness disappear what it all would would it go away well once that if if had a perfect access to what was going on well no I mean um it depends on what consciousness you know ultimately is right I mean I mean on your view of it am i but like I say I think because you see pmf's being used in so many

1:17:34 ingenious ways in so many different contexts across nature and simply because the brain is you know we know electro biomechanical organism I mean I think I think whatever like once again whatever this is EMF has has something to do with that and we're you know we'll we ask you know what it is via our meta cognitive capacities you know we are engaging consciousness right but what we call experience all

1:18:10 these other things right I mean are tethered to it but are actually have far more to do with solving problems betwixt ourselves and whatnot okay so it's okay would be so I would say that we would have radically attenuated metacognitive relationships to our ourselves and there's no real limit I can see as to

1:18:47 how attenuated those might possibly be and that what we presently enjoy is so granular right so low resolution right so geared to ancestral practical problem-solving that our descendants you know in the future should they actually survive whatever it is we're going through now would say you know yeah they weren't really nauseous I mean but my view they would be post intentional

1:19:21 right I mean they wouldn't understand things the way we could and the way the only way we can which which is the via these the schema right he's incredibly procrustean short hands that we use so yeah so I mean yes and no to the question I mean the its it there's it's what comes after us I don't think we can imagine and once we understand ourselves all the way to the

1:19:57 bottom I think that whatever humanity is now it'll be unrecognizable to us and I think we'd be horrified by what what comes after us I think we'd be this really this really horrified by it because I don't think it would be immoral or recognizably moral or emotional and I'm sure it'd be recognizably rational although I know Eric would eric scatino but argue against that but yeah i think and this is one of the the depressing points the

1:20:35 most depressing things for me of this view is is that you know even if the technological optimists are right Humanity is this fact right i mean rude no matter what i mean we we cut our own throats right or we bootstrap ourselves out of existence and or anything recognizable as such I just once again I just don't see any way any way past right I thought I would want to endorse interesting so it sounds like you would I mean

1:21:07 maybe from the point of view of where you are now you're saying that we were sort of repulsed by what we've become if we actually accomplish that feat but so you wouldn't it's I mean you and that's kind of the picture you get from the from the book as well and they're all paths that you know by the time he's bootstrap himself out of all of these recognizably human thinks he's a monster and that's not a desirable thing from our point of view but it is it's not so it's not something that's better for us in the long run you don't think that where we are now is better for us

1:21:39 well where we are now I mean we're like if you look at humanity as a kind of you social super organism right I mean I mean where we are now is where we were ancestrally right plus you know these ever more fundamental cognitive ecological changes you know but we still all have the same operating system basically and once you know we start individualizing our operate our

1:22:14 operating systems then you know I mean I don't know I you know it's the singularity is to me the singularity is primarily all about basically the point at which human self understanding collapses as as a as a possibility right for for practical problem-solving let alone theoretical problem solving and you know things like you know Facebook

1:22:51 social media all this stuff might I mean it's just also rudimentary right I mean it's wax photographs you know by time we get to the blu-ray version of it we're just going to be so overmatched I mean I just yeah I want to I got a little girl for chrissakes right and a wife that's it's constantly upgrading me to be more positive so I want to be and I just don't see any way we can we can actually escape what we're doing to ourselves in

1:23:29 our cognitive ecology I mean especially with AI I mean especially especially with AI you know and you have to get back to that 20% that we were discussing just shortage before we started with live I just don't think you know even if you could get that 20% to agree you know I just think the vast bulk of humanity but find you know just even the premise of what I'm saying to you preposterous right and would just simply misplaced the blame for whatever types

1:24:03 of short circuits are arising right and that would just simply compound those short circuits you know I mean there's a really problematic political dimension to to all this all this as well so yeah yeah you're Sonny guy yeah I guess yeah I'm a bit more optimist about the technology stuff but I certainly see the potential for the sort of thing that

1:24:36 you're talking about crash space at all it's a short story I submitted to Midwest studies and philosophy I think it's on my academia yeah that's the one that's the episode I mean the issue that Erica Swift get more edited yeah yeah yeah no I mean that so in that story it's basically a debate right between people who have been enhanced and people who haven't been enhanced right humanist

1:25:10 you know versus transhumanists and in the whole point of that debate is to show how in which the free will debate is it same with neuropath I guess they do the same as something similar you know how the free will debate is actually being concretize by technology you know how the question of you know autonomy responsibility and authenticity just become progressively more and more difficult to to clarify an answer I mean

1:25:46 anyone can Jerry render a response right I mean anyone can play a tennis game of redefinition and come up with a friendly story right we can still use the word responsibility right we can still use the word freedom we can still use these words but all those attempts mistake our ability to theorize solutions right with the actual flesh-and-blood short-circuiting right of these ways of understanding our our social environments so students for instance

1:26:22 used to be able to the teachers used to be able to call their students lazy or stupid right but not anymore rapidly I think even accelerating time frame you know more and more impediments to student performance right are actually being medicalized so we're actually understanding the the causal history of why you know little Joey stares at the window all the time instead of looking at what's on the smartboard

1:26:56 right and as soon as you understand that then all of a sudden you can't say that's bad don't do that right all of a sudden why because we have this system right which you know in moral cognitive system which when confronted with genuine causal explanations for behavior leads us to exempt individuals from from behavior right so it's almost like this you know creeping exculpation is what

1:27:30 then it calls the problem and he's just finally now starting to I think actually take it seriously I think he might even be writing a book about this right now but but in the classroom it's transforming the dynamics of the classroom character judgments are becoming more and more out of place right perhaps even professionally disastrous to me in the classroom right in that there's no limited I mean there isn't a single thing a student does right that is you know deleterious to their academic performance that can't

1:28:04 possibly be medicalized and explained in causal terms and as soon as it's explained in those terms then it's you basically it's the exemption cube and you're all of a sudden you can no longer make a character judgment you can no longer use that powerful tool you know our ancestors gave us to actually make a determination in the classroom right so where does it end right students have no responsibility at any point right I don't know it certainly doesn't seem to be a

1:28:36 sustainable trend I mean at some point right you're going to have to say you know you're responsible right but how are we supposed to use our moral intuitions to reason through that there's no satisfying way to do it which means the masses are never going to get it you know wankers like you and I we commanded response and that gerrymanders response around right but but the voting public is incredibly invested in their

1:29:09 child's education isn't gonna put up with are are we agree right so it just seems like boom that cognitive ecology we're in the we're actually watching before our eyes right the semantic apocalypse creeping you know along the the obsolescence of our you know ancestral socio cognitive capacities in action another great example is sentencing the use of neuroscience in sentencing right so rates of

1:29:46 neuroscientific defenses going up more and if you can make a good neuro scientific argument that your client you know was you know basically disabled and this sort of that respect right you'll get a softer sentence but when it comes to time for parole and they do the risk assessment right what do they do they look at narrow physiology once again right and they use the exact same data

1:30:20 that give you a lighter sentence in the courtroom they use that to to keep you in write to increase the punishment so all of a sudden data in this context which actually serves to who the hell is going to punish someone for having a disability right and then the same data in this context is like well geez we could make sure this punishment continues for as long as possible right yeah how do you solve it well all kinds of solutions out there right you

1:30:55 get rid of everything within the criminal justice system doesn't make sense to the populace anymore right it's just wankers you're talking about it and vacant agree on the moral dimensions of they can agree on what's going on in terms of the physiology other than that all they have is the likes of you and I yeah I don't know if you caught this debate between Dan and great Caruso which was in um a on recently did you do you know great yeah it's a it's a I mean

1:31:32 Greg's idea is that you know punishments a bad idea and if he's a determinist and he thinks well look you saw a prison system but because of quarantine basically so there's a quarantine model or you know someone has an infectious disease we we keep them out of the public it's no fault of their own we don't blame them that you have leprosy or whatever you know Ebola but we still keep you quarantined because you're a public public health threat so his idea is to kind of take that approach towards the the criminal justice system yeah some people commit

1:32:05 crimes that doesn't mean they're morally responsible for their crimes but they're still like infectious carriers of a disease you have to quarantine them so this the criminal justice system still makes sense but it but you have to really sort of interpret what punishment is and what more responsibility and that sort of stuff is so I don't know if that's what you call Wang curry or not solely gerrymandering a set of rationalizations right in order to basically try to get our intuitions back in line with what we now know right so you know our intuitions which are products of

1:32:40 these shallow Ecology's right the shallow we'll call cognitive ecologies plotted with all this deep ecological information that we just simply did not have to worry about we were pre-scientific the intuitions are just absolutely adrift and so how do you make sense of it but you call a philosopher and the philosopher gives you an interpretation it's called a different philosopher you get a different interpretation you call a different philosophy different interpretation right each of those philosophers is convinced that ya know

1:33:13 this is the best way of doing it right but but really in point of fact the lesson is in that process itself right that very process is actually a exemplifying right what happens when deep environmental information really just really starts to flood our shallow cognitive Ecology's you know all of a sudden our typical you know ancestrally tuned responses to things like causal

1:33:49 explanations of bad behavior right begin having all kinds of crazy side effects right like no kid in your class is responsible right like short sentence no parole you know I mean the fact that philosophers can actually you know try to take those systems rework them in this way or that way or this way or that way to try to basically you know appease these sets of intuitions well it's kind of neither here nor there right I mean

1:34:24 because really what we're witnessing is basically the breakdown of the ability of those systems to actually function you know is the way it was by our standpoint you know enlightenment post enlightenment standpoint absolutely brutal ways of resolving these issues that our ancestors have that's another problem you know you see and that's the thing it's it's funny it's what I try to do in neuro 5-2 is it's you know all these

1:34:59 philosophical arguments that were just abstractions 50 60 years ago right are just staring us right in the eye right yeah they're concretize concretize yeah like AI driverless cars right how do you determine responsibility you know I mean the legal system has to work for any any type of you know organized state to exist has to have a functioning legal system and people have to buy into that

1:35:33 legal system and in order to maintain any type of legitimacy right for whatever the ruling hegemony happens to be you know I don't know I this is what worries me about Trump this is why you know I don't think Trump is a blip I think Trump is you know the first canary to die in our coal mine that's a warning it's a warning no I mean it's kind of funny how in fantasy circles the all right

1:36:07 actually hijacked the Hugo's the Hugo Awards basically using web resources you know so that the only writers who were nominated were hard-ass right-wing authors write that had ideology that was suitable you know for that was recently that was three years ago now Wow and so when that happened and then you know all of a sudden the girl Raven

1:36:41 battling you'll write online for for a long time I'll never forget you know realizing just how many followers these these lunatics had people who wanted to resend the right to vote from women right heard all minorities up into the concentration camps I mean just the most despicable mad crazy views you could possibly imagine and they had you know here I thought a million views on my my website

1:37:14 you know a few years back I was like whoa million views Wow you know and next you know I'm in a blog war with this this dude who is crawled out from underneath some kind of medieval rock and he's cut a hundred and eleven million years Wow on his on his blog and I mean that's when I started to realize that holy cow you know as the cost of reality plunges right the more responsive it becomes to you you know

1:37:48 basically baseline human desire we see what we want because that's what sells and that process how do you arrest that process right how do you stop it right yeah no that's deeply depressing I mean that that's why I was want to be an optimist about the singularity and transhumanism is because I think that the the project of the Enlightenment postulated a creature which never existed you know this rational creature yeah that just plainly is not who we are but it's who we could become under the

1:38:22 right kinds of circumstances which is one of the reason why I'm interested in transhumanism in general is to try to to make the kind of creature who the Enlightenment thought humans already were whether that's really successful can succeed or not I agree there's you know there's all the issues you brought up and all that but that that's the reason why I think it's important because all of the things which we're talking about are the product of our natural evolutionary history and those are the things that way I want to get rid of those are things which if I had

1:38:55 the chance to I would just jettison immediately yeah and then I think we'd be better off of course you know could we all do it at lunch or something you know how do we do that but that's the hope of it whether whether it succeeds it's a different question I just don't understand I mean short and once again it's you know like I agree with you is possible to do but I mean you would need some incredibly draconian like I say you'd have to legislate the human soul and I mean and that's and that's inimical to the Enlightenment right I mean well I

1:39:28 mean we already do that to some extent right we mandate that people go to school K through 12 and oh yeah so that's already pretty draconian in a sense and what we're doing is you know instilling in them a bunch of stuff which they might not have normally come across you know including math and language skills I guess I just don't see doing this sort of thing is really bad drastic of a difference as it's you know installing some hardware instead of installing some software well well the software though if you look at the software I think it's an incredibly important point right I mean we do I

1:40:06 just like human souls and all sorts all sorts of different ways right but if you look at the education system I mean in some ways you know what makes so much of the education system politically pernicious right is the fact that it's so religiously avoids any type of you know politically relevant content right I mean civics classes I mean most people come into school not they don't know how market economy works they don't know how government works and not only that they

1:40:42 don't know the first thing about themselves right they don't know the types of oversimplifications that they're prone to make right there the kinds of parochialism that they'll run afoul of right I mean they come out of school knowing nothing about how flawed they are as as a problem solver and every time the jurisdiction tries to do that tries to inject it has political consequences and and I mean once it once we start talking about you know rewiring

1:41:20 right as opposed to just simply retraining humans I mean how would we rewire humans in a way isn't obviously political right simply from the get-go right and that's the problem I mean that's I just don't see how you could do that outside some crazy authoritarian regime you know like maybe the Chinese would be able to do it at some point I don't know I don't think I don't think the West is ever gonna posture the wherewithal to do it I mean but you know who knows I'm you know just some major

1:41:56 crisis or something like that you know maybe that will give us the impetus or I don't know I don't know I just seems one of those mountains that just seems too too high to climb right yeah no I know that's that's a that's a daunting way of putting it I mean on the one hand you could just sort of force everyone to do it and become like China in a sense but with more rational and enhanced agents and then you know disband the government or something that sounds crazy no one ever do that they would do it the opposite it's not all a bunch of stuff

1:42:29 that make you more easily controllable more easily yeah exactly is that's I mean that's the best way to retain harmony I mean if you look at it I guess we could probably be easily rewired to fall run afoul hero-worship you know so we just embargoes in enough times we will worship them I mean that might be a very simple fix right exactly just one person you know but that isn't

1:43:04 enhancement you know when people especially transhumanists I mean usually it's you know there's usually a libertarian strain lurking in the background right and it's all about maximizing choices right and that's something that would have to I just have to die I mean what does choice even mean once he get to that point right I say you have an a I say you ciri becomes smart enough to become a life

1:43:41 coach right which just around the corner yeah and you can already subscribe to apps that give you 24/7 access to a therapist right to make you weigh yourself right I think it's a huge industry and if anyone wanted to make a million dollars they should invest in it now right so I think it's gonna be absolutely massive but again that was an idea solve problems exactly the idea that was explored in this this book I don't know if you heard of it's called

1:44:14 all the birds in the sky we forget who the woman is but anyway there's a version of that idea and I mean it's kind of a fantasy sci-fi novel she mixes magic in with a on stuff but there's a point at which one of the is sort of becomes like an iPhone it's a Bick Watase and it's always like giving unobtrusive relationship advice and steering you in the right direction to just meet the person who would be the best person to meet you so it's this kind of sort of a version of what you're saying hey guys because I mean it's it's yeah these are these are tough questions

1:45:01 but one of the things I think that's important is people like you are exploring these ideas in their in their in their fiction which you know is you can write a thousand full of philosophy essays and some people can think very abstractly and kind of can think your way into it but for the rest of us you know you need to have a story that puts you in the in this place and that's I think some of some of your work does that it explores these ideas and the depressive brutality of them from uh from a point of view that that people can't help but take it seriously and and the more I mean no matter how depressing

1:45:34 all this is the more we think about it the more were cognizant of and talking about it I think the better the better off we are that's what I hope I don't know if I necessarily believe that though I mean I really sometimes think of if I'm right about this semantic apocalypse stuff right if because I mean my goal is really really simple it's just simply to get everybody in in the intellectual world to think about cognitive ecology right and to basically throw humanism out the window and start understanding you know their

1:46:07 cognitive predicament as one of always being embedded in these superordinate systems right and those systems sometimes they allow us to make you know antic ontological determinations and sometimes they don't when it comes to ourselves right they don't at all right and because we're blind to that it means that you know these huge commercial interests can rewire our Ecology's without any sort of accountability

1:46:41 whatsoever jeez I can't believe I'm drawing a blank on his name but if you do anything after after this interview Google system 0 and check out two blog post the hell I can't believe I'm forgetting his name you kick me nuts in the system zero check it out it's it's basically outlines what the combination of big data and AI means right within

1:47:19 the framework of type 1 and type 2 cognition so you know system zero is basically type zero cognition right we're basically all of our automatic systems have been so thoroughly in meshed right with our commercial environments and we are so well known by all the algorithms that that were now embedded within that in a sense even though we all think that we're absolutely free what have you we are

1:47:53 just kinds we've become a commercial sock sock puppets in a way and yeah it's just that I mean that trend you know where you know the crash of human social cognition becomes a commercial opportunity right then that crash space ends up being translated into a cheat space you know just seems to be inexorable I just don't know how you would stop it without somehow getting rid of capitalism itself and I

1:48:28 don't see that happening so who knows that you know in that kind of administered commercial slavery who knows maybe they are people libera have to be found there that would enable humans to hang on for for a while you know even if you know they're constantly you know bombarded by false narratives and false realities have you I'm not sure what the politics would look like but maybe that's the potential way it's

1:49:04 certainly not a desirable one right I mean right yeah hey you know the thing is is that in the thing of it I think it's just the most important point I guess I would want to make is is to understand just how seamless you know this part of our conversation regarding semantic apocalypse right is with the blind brain part of the conversation yeah right so this is this notion of being other cognition being utterly blind to its constitutive in

1:49:38 circumstantial dimensions right short these you know metacognitive shortcuts that we use right we call the reasoning argumentation and stuff to troubleshoot these these problems we have with our take on on the world right I mean that story is continuous with the story of the classroom for instance right I mean it's all part and parcel of picture of cognition that actually under

1:50:13 Stan's what it is we experience or think we experience right in terms of what we can be reasonably sure that is missing from that experience right what it is we're neglecting every time or solving something and I think you know because it is such a parsimonious view right I mean it you know allows you to drastically simplify your ontology but

1:50:48 yet really does have this incredibly comprehensive reach right I mean that's the reason why I think I've actually solved I think I've solved the problem of intentionality but that there is even though I'm still struggling with formulations of it but there is I think a general theory of cognition lurking under the surface here and I encourage everyone to log on to three-pound brain and debate it with me because lord knows I need I need help yeah the tagline on

1:51:23 this is convince me I'm wrong yes please convince me I'm wrong I think it is a soul-sucking the intellectual buzz right of killing multiple birds with single stones but but ya know it's it's soul sucking it really is because you know every time I attempt to think of what a post intentional philosophy would look like it just it just ends up looking like a horror show

1:51:55 [Laughter] inhuman and and and the thing is is that we should I don't think we should be surprised I mean I think any species that you know shares you know our our developmental pattern is bound to run into this wall with you know the metacognitive shortcuts that their ancestors involved right to deal with problems at the constitutive and circumstantial level that they

1:52:27 absolutely neglect otherwise you know hey think of the flying a wall right that's such a Curie saying you know I was thinking about this with Trump and Putin having that two hours alone together right you know what would it be like to be a fly in the wall and here's why do you say that right I mean because if you were there in the room we'd be tackled and imprisoned right I mean you'd want to be a fly on the wall because you don't want to actually impact any of the systems that you're observing right and so the idea

1:53:00 is you'd actually be able to somehow cognize the fact of what's going on there in that situation you see these systems independently of your own system right and so that fly in the wall is a great analogy for basically what we're all after in a way you know scientists and laboratory you know we're all trying to figure out how these systems operate independent of whatever impact we may have on our own on our own ecology and so the ideal is to be a fly on the wall

1:53:39 system and what that basically means is that you know what we're trying to do is basically align our you know our biology in our circumstances in such a way that our biology and our circumstances don't impinge on our ability to cognise right those those circumstances right to negate possibility of observer effects the thing is is were blind to our

1:54:15 Constitution and we're largely blind to our circumstances right didn't even know what evolution was you know 145 years ago or what have you right so our ancestors had to do that they had to figure out ways to be flies in the wall without any clue as to what it was they were trying to do right they were trying to find ways to put them selves in these situations were like to cognize their environments without impacting them in ways that rendered them dependent upon their own activity

1:54:50 they had to do that because since they're blind to their own constitutive and circumstantial dimensions they had no way of cognizing it's very impact right we have all kinds of ways of knowing when you push something it'll move and and what-have-you and and I mean that's absolutely crucial to understanding how we're going to survive in any environment right but those systems themselves as they operate independently of our interactions with them it becomes impossible as soon as we

1:55:24 interact with them simply because we are blind right to ourselves source blindness we can source our environments but we can't source ourselves so when we impact our environment suddenly we can't source what's going on in our environment right and so we have to develop these elaborate scaffolds ways in which to you know basically you know abstract ourselves from our environments or you know protocols for just non impinging on our environments whatsoever

1:55:56 right all these ways to become flies on the wall and be a fly on the wall is to be safely blind to one's own constitution and one's environment right to be constituted in endowed such that your constitution or endowment is be relevant to what it is you're trying to cognize if there's a problem and you can't cognize these systems

1:56:29 independently of yourselves right then there's a problem you got to go back and you get a look at this what you're blind to basically and solve it somehow right and I mean for me this is a reason the best way to look at reason and rationality is basically these really Lodhi ways of trying to nudge each other back into that fly in the wall position right without realizing that that's what we're we're trying to do since we neglect that blindness right it doesn't seem like

1:57:03 when we reflected that there's any blindness at all it seems we suffer why Ciotti very well what you see is all there is effects of all kinds of varieties in so to me that understanding cognition you have to understand the experience of cognition you have to understand what it is that experience systematically occludes or overrides and once you do that then suddenly the first

1:57:38 personal which seems to be radically incommensurable with with the third person makes a whole hell of a lot of sense right what's the first person the first person is basically a kind of neglect structure right it's it's basically the shallow ecological view that we have just simply by virtue of being human beings right with that are largely blind to themselves in their environments attempting to make sense of

1:58:11 some weak corner of our environments and I mean that I would argue is the upshot that's what cognitive science wants I mean not just simply to understand how things work because we can understand that right but how to understand how things work in context of our self understanding of how things work and that's where all the problems align right correct incorrect the hell's that you know right wrong you know feelings

1:58:49 you know I mean all these low B phenomena that we have right how do we plug it in to the the high dimensional world that Sciences is a well you have to actually look at those low dimensional phenomenon as dimensional reductions of what's going on high dimensionally right and when when you understand that then suddenly things like belief and phenomena

1:59:23 phenomenology you can say you know that they're not real in any high dimensional sense right through shallow information artifacts right it'll allow us to solve you know all kinds of ancestral problems and that we've bootstrapped in all kinds of ways to solve all kinds of different problems right but I actually don't really have any high dimensional correlate right

1:59:56 there's no belief anywhere in the brain there's no belief anywhere in nature there's no belief anywhere right even though there is all the time when you're actually working within these heuristic systems to solve problems you know they become incredibly useful it's just like thinking that money has value right money doesn't have value right money does what it does by virtue of its position within a super complicated system of interactions right no one knows that you go to a grocery store and you can 2-person money and they give you

2:00:28 milk I mean incredibly simplistic you know and Andrew Campion and his inherence heuristics right this is what he's researching the ways in which we essentialize and impute spontaneity to our environment right as ways to bootstrap different types of solutions to our environments when are you if you give that view a chance you look at that

2:01:02 view the longer you look at it and especially explorers the continuities between them between the you know the utmost private the phenomenological to social semantics apocalypse right that you'll agree that I'm onto something even if I'm not characterizing it right because I'm not convinced on characterizing it right right I mean but I think there's something there's gotta be something to this this way of looking at things

2:01:35 you know fly-on-the-wall semantic apocalypse eristic neglect for some reason there's just a lot of explanatory power that lies between those three poles I guess a couple hours here I think what you were saying is now really

2:02:09 put into a nice context of things that we've been talking about and I agree that I think that these ideas are worth exploring and they're very interesting so I'm glad that you're you're out there trying to get these ideas out because like I said before I'm thinking about them is beneficial at least I think so it may be if somewhat depressing but of course you know there's there's no guarantee that life should not be depressing I don't think Darwin brought brought

2:02:43 much joy to many lives on the other hand you know there there is a certain joy in coming to understand some of these things but also maybe it's if we spread these ideas around if someone think of a good answer I mean one of the things I'd like to be able to do is think of think of types of experiments that you can use to to just simply test a lot of those specific predictions that the theory makes right I mean I mean some stuff seems to me it just just kind of has to be true I mean

2:03:17 it just can't be the sense it can't be the case that we develop the metacognitive capacity to apprehend ourselves right it can't be the case that the you know subject object you know intentionality you know that that heuristic right is Omni applicable I mean it just it's just too too bloody symbol and it's fraught with so many problems they to me it just screams heuristic misapplication you know when

2:03:55 you when we start talking about ourselves and thinking that we can take a fly-on-the-wall position visa vie ourselves huh I mean what how could you make sense of that right how could you basically you know orient yourself you know in such a way that you're you know Constitution and circumstances right don't actually impact right whatever it is you're trying to cognize because it's your Constitution thank you're trying to

2:04:28 trying to cognate cardamom right we've no way of taking a fly-on-the-wall stance easy to yourselves I think it just simply falls out of the view right the hold whole baskets of theories of of introspection and approaches to metacognition I think fall by the wayside once once you pose yourself as a kind of ecology nested within an ecology right yeah oh no I mean one of the perils of being a fantasy author

2:05:08 engaging in these topics is how you have to you have to do a little more work to convince people that it's not just fantasy right I get that a lot of sounds like you you got another book to write yeah well I mean you talk it's clear that you've done your homework on the neuroscience part of it and I think that even though you know we could have disagreements here and there the theory is not just fantasy there's something empirically based that's that sound here yeah it's just a weird consistent

2:05:43 conceptual twist right I think it's the one that demonstrating defined for for years and years right keeps talking about inversions of thought right but without being able to characterize what that inversion should look like in specific terms right here the inversion is quite simple right I mean it's neglect structures once you start thinking in terms of neglect structures right and the ways in which neglecting things makes leads us to make all kinds of mistakes right you don't see detail

2:06:17 you think it's simple right you don't see a source you think it's spontaneous you know you don't see alternatives you think it's the only game in town you don't have any way of flagging insufficient information right metacognition wasn't evolved for philosophical purposes right so you assume sufficiency right because these are the systems you evolved to use why should you assume they're insufficient to a task right just simply because culture has nudged you in a direction to

2:06:51 apply it in a way it hasn't been applied before I mean all these things I think have to be taken accounted for you know when when viewing any any topic you've lost your mind yeah absolutely I agree so we have been going on for quite some time now and I don't want to keep you forever and no no no actually lots of versa I can talk with you all day you have a lot of interesting things to say but I wonder if there's anything I mean we've

2:07:25 covered almost a lot almost everything by one if there's anything which hasn't come up yet what you want to flag bring up well I mean presently working at a nonfiction book I probably should mention that provisionally entitled the end of meaning and and so it's you know an attempt to basically lay out the whole picture right from the neural phenomenology part to to the semantic apocalypse very

2:07:58 interesting and and to do so to do so in this accessible ways I this I can possibly manage so I think accessibility is is it really is one of the one of the big challenges that I think the view face is so and then the other thing I'd say is three problem right brain is my my blog because I have been rebuilding my burn I haven't actually been posting there is you mean that literally

2:08:32 yeah no it's it's it's nice working with your hands after you know extended periods and you know cerebral mists three-pound brain is a good community I'm inordinately proud of of the blog and in some ways it's just simply a philosophical scrapbook but get some interesting people weighing in with opinions and great blog I'll put a link to it under this discussion by the way

2:09:07 but I highly recommend it as well it's a great blog and I am constantly on the lookout for links you know links about the ways in which your cognitive ecologies are being compromised and and also evidence for and against the you know basic basic view of metacognition that I put forward so it really is just endless amounts to talk about though

2:09:39 that's that's part of the problem I think with the human to DM complicated for us or humans to solve right yes well it means though yeah we won't be out of work anytime soon or at least I'm a hobby anytime soon good times for years to come well I want to thank you again for for joining me stylus has been excellent discussion I learned a lot by

2:10:13 interacting with your work and by talking with you so I just want to say really appreciated it and if you ever get that book together I'd love to look at a copy of it yeah yeah sure sure and thank you thank you for giving me a platform for squeaking uh some craziness I've been conscious of my chair cracking and popping in the background I don't know if you can hear it or not I haven't heard it at all no I have to wait for posterity to let us know yeah eventually about damn chair it is a chair – it is a chair okay right okay wanna know thanks

2:10:57 again okay