Consciousness Live! with Jorge Morales (S1 E5)

0:01 okay we are live joining me today is Jorge Morales very nice to have you here today and for Jorge for those that don't know you can you give us a brief account of who you are and what you do now of course thanks for having me I'm philosopher mainly I got my PhD in philosophy at Columbia University just recently and I'm also a cognitive scientist I have done experimental work on stuff like attention meta cognition

0:38 consciousness and now I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University in the department of psychological and brain sciences Wow yeah that's really cool you're one of these people that really walks the walk and talks the talk so to speak because like people like me know I'm interested in the neuroscience I have some background in it but you actually have gone to the point of designing studies carrying studies out doing some very interesting work so you're really firmly planted in both

1:11 traditions I think that's very interesting thanks yeah it's it's been a challenge but also a great opportunity to know people were getting on both sides of the same discussion on the same problems and there are some challenges as you know of doing interdisciplinary research and making both people with different trainings to each other and also sometimes some translations between problems and terminology and approaches is required but at the same time when you're lucky it's it's it's great yeah I

1:47 think that's pretty good so I mean I guess my plan today was to kind of start with some of the philosophical stuff and and work our way towards some of the more empirical work that you've done and and so I wanted to begin by talking about something which I think is in the background of a lot of your work and that's the idea of mental strength the notion well let me hear what your take on it so what is mental strength and why do you think it's important yeah could simply it's the intensity of four phenomenal states our conscious

2:21 experiences be them pains or perceptions mental imagery emotions they all vary along various dimensions and they have all sorts of representational phenomenal properties but one thing that they have in common is that they have a degree of intensity they can be paints can be more or less painful visual experiences can be more or less striking and the same for other types of experiences and I think that these property of having a degree of felt intensity sometimes ever looked like people talk about it people

2:56 know about it but I think sometimes in the history of philosophy the emphasis as we put on representational content on in the case of propositional attitudes of course the more language like stuff kicks in but it's in perceptual experiences and phenomenal experiences in general it seems like how much of them you have or how intensely you experience them it's a very important property that I think it's important to to talk about yeah and I know you

3:32 pointed this out that this is an idea that goes back at least to Hume of course just before if you're really serious about history which I'm not although interest in history of philosophy but I mean human con so this idea that there the force or vivacity as humid put it of the of our impressions is an important part of his philosophy and then you're right I think that people aren't talking about this as much anymore do you I mean I guess I wanted there's a lot of stuff I want to ask but I wonder do you have any hunches or why is it do you think that people are not focused on

4:04 this when they're trying to theorize about consciousness yeah that's a good point I mean historically given that Hume is the obvious reference for talking about the force of our experiences I think one problem is that he thought the force was a very good property a good criterion for distinguishing types of experiences or mental states generally so very strong experiences will be perceptions and weaker experiences will be things like mental imagery or beliefs and I think that's a

4:38 mistake and I think that the fact that the view that mental states have force or strength is associated with these other very important aspect of the human philosophy makes people steer away from the notion of intensity as a maybe not very useful property but I think it is and I think that another reason that these might not be as emphasizes in other cases is that maybe the more naturalistic approach to the mind like

5:13 the the the the birth of psychology the birth of neuroscience my talking about intensity of mental representations in general may be easier these days we have fMRI and we tend to associate like more brain activity with more of that mental state that it seems like maybe it's like an easy way of discharging that particular aspect of our experiences into the neurosciences as opposed to giving it a more philosophical or phenomenal approach which I think it's

5:46 also all see useful yeah I think that's a good point because for for hume he was you know the thought was just less forceful but then in the perception but it was the same state actually or that one was a copy or something like that so that's what you're you say he's not useful and we don't want to distinguish thoughts from perceptions in terms of this kind of property but you do want to say that this the notion of mental strength is something that's domain not specific that its domain general and that thoughts habit as well as as as

6:20 pains so so what then on your view does distinguish these different kinds of states if it's not something related to the spring yeah I think it'll vary like every every state will have like a distinguishing individuating property I don't I don't know if going into each of them will be useful but I could say something for in the case of perception and mental imagery which are typically thought of being very similar and having very similar properties I think the fact that there is like a existential commitment

6:54 about the object being like in front of the subject in the case of perception that's something that it's like even mental imagery so I will be willing to concede that there are cases of mental imagery that are way more intense more strong more vivid a perceptual representation of let's say the same intentional object and that will not be a good reason for thinking that I don't know like the case of mental imagery is being confused with being a perception or something like that

7:27 on the contrary like even when you are often with your experiencing mental image that is very vivid if you don't take it to be a perception you don't take it to be something out there and I think that's that's just because it's perception is a type of mental state perhaps because I don't know our brains have a way of tagging the causal origin of that representation that has some force in terms or some some some tag that says like this is out there these

7:59 exists as opposed to these other things that you're generating from the inside but that has nothing to do with intensity I believe yeah okay that's interesting so okay well I don't wanna get too distracted so I'm wondering you you're talking about intensity here but but it's not just in the intensity of the experience that's the strength of the experience on your way of thinking of it is it I mean is there other aspect so I mean because I'm curious I know you talked about like a paper cut and versus a pin prick or something like that and

8:34 even if they're you might judge that they're the same strength one could be I mean excuse me the same intensity one could be more in the center of one's consciousness so to speak so is it's not just intensity is it it right is it more or isn't it also being front and center in the stream of consciousness something like that that's mental that's right that's right I think there are two ways of understanding mental strength and both complement each other to give the full picture that I want to present

9:06 one so in terms of individual states if you think about like a single pain isolating for everything else you can think of mental Australia and us yeah some sort of intensity that goes up and down on explains like how much that state is experienced by the subject but we don't have individual mental state we usually have a wealth of them at the same time they're very dynamic they interact with each other and I think when you have that picture of of the whole mind with different mental states

9:40 interacting each of them with different mental states what results is let's say you have two mental states and one of them is very intense and the other one is not so in terms you can you can see that's very that's a state right that's where intensity more or less drives which one it's more center to your whole mental life at a given point but in some cases maybe the intensity the sensory intensity of the state is not very strong it's just you know it's a paper

10:13 cut but maybe you pay more attention to it maybe you start focusing on it maybe it makes you I know it sure there's some emotions that makes you remember certain important event of your life where and that makes other states dampen in their intense in the a in the central role they play in your mental life at a given moment and I think that that is a an important way of understanding mental like a more thorough way of understanding mental strength in a way that the sensory intensity of state plays an incredibly important role in

10:47 determining the overall mental strength but you know the more overarching or more comprehensive way of understanding it it's more like how much of your conscious dream it takes at a given moment and this is important because that allows us to separate from sensor intensity but also from salience or attention for example so it could be once you put all these things in place you can have orthogonal dimensions that

11:20 once they are combined allows you to say like Oh at this given moment these meant will stay like these paper card is more central to these subject in this particular moment than these other mental states regardless of may be centrally this other thing tetris part was being more intense in this particular instance of these subjects psychology is little usually nyle showing tears paper card plays a more central role so if tell me if I'm misunderstanding

11:54 this but is this related to the your distinction between intrinsic and relational mental strength so no that's exactly what I think oh it is okay yeah yeah yeah sometimes I use these labels of increasing in mental strength being you know over all things consider without taking much attention on what the rest for mental states are you can say like the intensity of a particular mental state is these and it's driven by these intrinsic properties of the state like no the sensory states the

12:29 representational contents of the state it's a tensor I may be the attention that it's used but the relational strength I think it's very important to understanding like the dynamics of the mind and how different mental states interact with each other so so then if the intrinsic strength of the experience is well intrinsic to the state then when the relational aspect of it is that the same property because it sounds like

13:02 it's it's a different kind of property namely the you know the overall kind of holistic relationship between the different strengths of at the experience at a time and and that's I'm not wondering if you think that's the same thing as or maybe a derivative product of the intrinsic thing or what exactly how many things we're talking about here yeah I think in terms of properties increasing properties that's what mental strength is that's what I see like mental strength is intensity of a mental state however if you want to understand what mental friends or what's the mental

13:37 intensity for mental state what's the role that it plays in in the mind and how much it's gonna affect how the subject experience both that state and all the things you need to take into account other things other mental states so let me put an example maybe this helps Oh the skyline of Manhattan if you have the skyline of Manhattan the Empire State looks very tall in part because the other buildings are not very tall or not as tall as the Empire State if you keep the height of the Empire State

14:13 fixed and you build twice as tall buildings around it the height of them per state is not going to change but how sell it it is or how important it is or how much it stands out in the skyline of Manhattan is going to be very different so in a way its properties didn't change it has exactly the same height however how central it is how are conic it is might depend it's really it's a relational thing that depends on what's around it and I think that the mind can be understood in similar ways you can

14:45 have the exact same amount of pain but if you're also saying like or here like extremely loud noise maybe that pain gets dumped and all things considered in your overall psychology because the noise is so loud that you can't even that tan that pain maybe the pain is it becomes like just a little chunk of your mental life even though its intensity didn't change when the loud noise began so I know this helped no it does but so I guess what I'm what I'm curious about

15:18 is well I saw what the way I was understanding it was that mental strength was supposed to be a domain general phenomenal property that meant that mental states have conscious ones mom and I ask you about that in a second actually but that conscious mental states have and so the relations that these mental states have to each other I mean I I'm ok with that I can and I understand your point but it seems like it's a different thing it's

15:52 not a domain-general kind of property that mental states have so it doesn't seem like it's mental strength properly called or am I missing I mean so where am I going wrong in this kind of way of thinking about you are that the domain generality once you take into account like the relational way of understanding mental strand loses a little bit of its punch perhaps or it's not so clear that it's the main general in the way I wanted it to be yeah or let me let me try to put it a different way so the

16:27 paint so I thought that mental strength was like the intensity of the pain how much it's occupying your your conscious experience but that can change so how much it occupies your conscious experience can change without the intensity of the pain changing as we were just talking about and then so which one of those is mental strength is what I guess I'm asking because you wanted to find them kind of both ways but they seem like they come apart and they're not the same thing no I think I think mental strength it per se it's the intensity of an individual mental state

17:02 the thing is that when we talk about like how strong a state is in the conscious experience of the subject mental strength is crucial to understanding that but it cannot be determined without taking into account other mental states so it's intrinsic it's an intrinsic property it's a phenomenal intrinsic property of mental states and the reason I think it's a min general is because that property exists

17:34 in the same way regardless of whether you're a pain or your mental image or your emotion I think that that phenomenal property of being more or less intensely experienced it's it's not different across modalities for example so that's that's what did the main generality plays an important role when I talk about the the brother view like the zoom out view where you say like oh but what about like all these mental states interacting with each other it's not like the intensity or the

18:10 the intrinsic intensity of mental states are different but just like it's very important to understand how that same intensity can be experienced over all differently by a subject in dependent relationally it's a little bit of a contrast to thing where something might look very big if it's compared to a small thing but it's actually all things considered like a very big thing it's just at the current moment it's not as intense so I think that our way of

18:43 understanding all things consider how an experience it's felt by a subject you have to take into account both thanks you have to take into account how it is intrinsically but also what kind of states surround them that's why I hate to say I tell you like what is the real mental strength is it one or the other well intrinsically you can have mental strength you can have mental state of a single state if you we were creatures or maybe other creatures other animals aliens have one single state at a time you can still take every mental state that one mental state mental strength and in that case that will determine you

19:19 know in that case we wouldn't be able to distinguish between the intensity of one mental state and its overall experience given other states because it currently has one state but in creatures like us I think that this interplay between like what really how strong the experience really is versus how really it is experience overall it's something that you cannot do without like you have to go back and forth I think in order to understand how intensely and experience it yeah okay so I can I want to ask so you mentioned the domain generality and

19:53 the reason why you think its domain general and I was kind of curious about that because what I mean so let me what why it wouldn't it the case that the mental strength of a pain is a distinctly kind of pain –is– kind of strength and the mental strength of a desire is that this is a distinct distinctly kind of desiring so one sings gripping the other seems blinding those don't seem like the same kinds of properties right off intuitively off the bat so what argument is there for that

20:26 being the same property across the domains yeah that's a good point so I think that the difference that we experience it owns two other phenomenal properties so of course usually when you see a very bright light it not just feels like intensely visual or something like that it feels like intentionally white or intensely green or something like that like like other phenomenal qualities are associated with intensity of that and the same happens with

21:00 paintings were its intensity is always entangled we're I don't know how often they feel for example and I think that in that sense it's hard introspectively to disentangle those different sources of properties however I think that one good reason for thinking that it's the same property across the maze is that well first of all they interact with each other as I said before like this is this is a good case where when you have a very strong pang other experiences

21:34 seem to feel less intense like you you don't feel maybe you get distracted or maybe they don't occupy as much of your visual or the story of your conscious field if you know visual experiences don't occupy as much and I think that the reason of that is like it's a it's a sure resource and it's a it's a shirt property of which having more on one aspect of your mental life like the pain experience that you're having sort of affects how much you can have in other experiences of that so I think in that

22:09 respect and this is why I talk sometimes about like blinding experiences like in the case of pain we have this low cushion like this thing was blinding like I was so much in pain that I stopped like being aware of the rest of my surroundings but I think that that's true in other cases too and and I also think and we can talk more about these later that this is worth organelle to attention but I think in other cases like like visual representations arise from perception and visual representations that arise

22:43 from mental imagery you can also see that where subjects are start imagining very vividly certain you know whatever they saw it experiences these phenomena called decoupling like like they start feeling like perceptually they're not processing much anymore because of the intensity of their visual images and this is correlated with the intensity of visual imagination and not with how many objects you are imagining or whether it was easier hard to imagine them it

23:16 tracks reports of vividness so I think that this is good evidence to think that it is the same type of property that is competing across the mains yeah okay good thank you yeah that's good now also relatedly I know that this is a phenomenal property for you that's so it's got to be conscious I guess but is there an analog to this that can occur unconsciously or do you do deny that or yeah I know I don't deny it I don't think I mean I think we have like I me

23:50 because I think phenomenal properties are instant shading in the brain and you know they arise from brain activity you know brain activity per se detached from you know the rest of all the interactions in the brain it's not conscious per se I don't think like a single neuron can be conscious for example so in that sense of course there is like a non conscious version of it that's like the nice of the boring answer in terms of like neural wet work but I think that even in the unconscious mind you can certainly you can talk

24:23 about like priority structures or things that guide like processes like if you have to process certain take seriously maybe certain things are given priority and other things are relegated to secondary process or something like that now that said I think that it's important to talk about mental strain in phenomenal terms because I don't want I don't want it signal-to-noise ratios for example in signal processing of a perceptual in the perceptual domain for example I don't

24:55 want that to be correlated to or maybe its core later maybe it's an indication of what the phenomenal experience is gonna be but I want those two things to be independent because I think that while you can give an explanation in terms of in computational terms or in rural terms I think that of some of the phenomena that I'm interested in I think that talking of it at the phenomenal level at a level that can be introspected for example where you can say like oh this experience is more intense I think that that's important for several purposes and we should

25:29 reserve these notion of phenomenal strength at the conscious level well there are other things that are similar or may be correlated happen at the unconscious level I think that it's not it's not particularly useful once you go into the to the unconscious level for example so so to take like the case of blindsight or something like that you know the there's this especially in this recent case of that person walking down the hallway and they're avoiding the chairs and dancing around the garbage

26:04 can you know it's sort of for all intents and purposes seemingly having representations of those things being front and center and guiding their behavior and so forth and so on so you would say that's unhelpful to talk about some kind of unconscious mental strength there in the case of those representations yeah I think yeah I think so because in the sense yeah that's a good example so the the the guy who walks down the hallway reports not seeing anything nothing where his surroundings and yet he he works very slowly and he looks not very confident

26:38 but he basically walks too and avoids the object in that case I feel like I mean if we want to describe his mind what it looks like at the moment he's mine like what he has access to I mean like like his his conscious mind that the the mental life that he could report on it's that life it's you know furnished with maybe fear of tripping on certainty like wondering why these scientists really can't or he thinks he can't and I think

27:14 that that's what I want to explain and for explaining that I can say like yeah his fear of tripping was very strong uh now is that true at the unconscious level I don't know maybe maybe the fear whatever on punches processing of I don't know fear response flee or fight mechanisms that were being activated or whatever maybe maybe they were not very relevant in the overall processing of mental information because maybe I don't know the visual information and the coordination of movement was like

27:46 actually taking off most resources of these points that patient so in that case I think that there can be like an important association between what is really central at one given point in time for the conscious mind and what's really central to the mental unconscious life of a subject so at least in that sense just because of because they can dissociate in you know if you if you think about this in terms of peaks and valleys the peaks and valleys might not overlap for the conscious and the

28:18 unconscious moment and in that sense I guess that I think it's more useful to just keep the terminology to talk about the conscious case yeah okay so I want to make sure that we get to talk about attention and what you think that mental strength is not but that is related to but you also talked a lot about two of my favorite things which are paid Aysen boliya and dental fear and I wanted to ask a question about both of them actually I think it might come up a little bit later when we talk about introspection again but so paying a

28:53 somolia you want to describe that as a case of pained by lacking the strength of pain is that the way you want to describe that or how are you characterizing the case of pain a somolia not quite but so – Ebola is this case where subjects usually after stroke it can detect pain they can they can discriminate painful stimuli from non painful stimuli and they can say like this is more painful this is less painful in a sense that you know this is hotter than these stimulus

29:28 or this electric shock was stronger than this electric shock so there's no problem with their sensitivity but they don't they don't dislike it right they don't they don't find it annoying they don't run away from it in some weird cases they even laugh when right experimenters like hurt their because they like what are you doing what are you doing so it's a weird case but I don't think that in those cases they don't have you know those experiences of that peculiar type of pain maybe maybe a pain that doesn't bother them they still

30:04 have some kind of mental strength it's maybe a mental strength that you know the overall experience maybe I mean who knows what they experience it's like but let's say it's it's probably closer to an experience of perception than to our normal experience of pain but I wouldn't say that they don't have mental strength in that case I would say that the mental you know the contribution of the awfulness of pain to the overall mental strength of the experience it's not it's you know they don't have that they lack

30:38 their mental strength is it's more leaner in that sense it's like just given by the sensory stimulation as opposed to the sensory stimulation plaus the valence of the experience yeah that's a good case we're thinking about like how multiple dimensions of an experience can contribute to the overall intrinsic intensity yeah and what reason do you have for or would you get for calling it a case of pain at all so some people might say they're not Payne because exactly for the reasons

31:12 you gave they're not distracted by it they smile they don't seem bothered by it at all so um I'm just wondering if what you what you might say to someone who is challenge you on that as a case of pain at all yeah that's I think that's still it's awfully very interesting because in a way we have a very strong intuition I think in general that pain sought to feel bad in a way even things that we enjoy like I don't know small pains and technically they are bad and you know they're bad but at

31:46 the same time you want to feel them a little bit so I sort of know the feeling there you go tattoos are a common example people always bring up or you know all sorts of preaching and I don't know so a case where it doesn't hurt oh like it there's it's it's really weird to include it there but at the same time it's I think that these subjects and maybe despite what I said before I don't think these subjects like think of these experiences our perception in a normal cases us in a case of like they don't laugh at visual

32:23 representations for example oh how funny I'm seeing something that it doesn't feel bad like that's not striking it doesn't feel weird to them and these cases I think are I think in I mean you have to trust like these they're introspections and the scientists reports but I think one one thing that they have in common is that even for the subjects these experiences are in a way painful but in a weird way like they still feel like the I think they are somewhat aware of the weirdness of their experiences and they know that it's not

32:57 just perception which you will expect like if you have pain – the awfulness well then that's you're just perceiving something or sensing something and I don't think that's how their your experience and this is not just a case of patients who have like a rare syndrome but also with paying patients that are given morphine for example it's a common report that they are like you know their eyes like this is hair and they're like well yeah sure it just doesn't feel awful anymore like I don't

33:30 care but it certainly hurts and and and these are patients that you know you can you can think that their whole brain is working in a more normal way or in a way that is closer to their non morphine infused experiences and so I don't know that's what I will say like it's it's it's a it's a difficult kind of case of pain but it's it's not I mean if it's not paying what else it's I think that the options are not very attractive yeah yeah I mean I tend to agree with you but

34:05 just to pursue this line of an objection just cuz I want to hear what you want to say so you know I think they compare some of perceptions pretty pretty good so you know if you do something like the cutaneous rabbit you know you take a thing you just touch someone and then they feel something moving or whatever so why wouldn't paintings willing to be more just something like that they're fit they're feeling that someone's touching them and they can judge the intensity of you know the sensory component of it and then they also notice that they're being damaged

34:37 they're not so they see tissue damage from the pinprick as it were or the burning or whatever the stimuli the noxious stimuli is in this case and so why couldn't we just explain they're kind of strange behavior in terms of those two factors namely that they are merely sensing some kind of contact and also noticing the damage and not I mean so they in that case it'll be like a top-down cognitive effect yeah I know that I'm being damaged and I'm experiencing these sensory non painful experience so this

35:13 must be a pain like yeah it should be feeling kind of some sort of inference right that's not an interesting hypothesis I don't know what say about it you know important I feel like it will be an empirical hypothesis it's like can we show that it's an inference that they were making or or not and I don't know if any research about that in particular but I think it will be an empirical question it's more like yeah then we can we disentangle the inference part from the sensing part or not and with that I

35:46 mean so it's an interesting hypothesis yeah if that were I mean I agree with you that there's not enough done on this kind of stuff these patients are hard to come by and far as I know they're not a lot of done it but anyway so if something like that were what was going on there that wouldn't affect your view very much except for maybe this claim that there are different elements together which make the intrinsic aspect up or something like that which isn't really a big part of the view is it uh yes and no no I think I think yes in the sense that you're right like this is a

36:20 nice case exists in the literature and the way I'm interpreting seems to help me explain how mental strength you know has different sources we're so in that respect if these turns out to be like a bad example like I'm okay with that like there are other examples I can rely on for showing that in a way mental strength is composed or you know the end experience of how intense and experience is its base of different thought I mentioned so that's okay but then you

36:56 say that this having many dimensions as part of what produces mental strength is not a big part of the view I believe is that what you were referring to yeah yeah I'm not sure about that I think I think it's a little bit more important than I okay yeah that maybe you made it sound because I think that's one thing that allows us to explain what the term is mental strength for a particular case but not only that it also allows us to explain why many other things can be orthogonal to mental strength or why you

37:31 know like if you lose one precisely in the case of in the case of penis emolia if you don't have one source of intensity that doesn't mean that the experience is not intense in some sense or you know thanks to the other source and I think that this becomes more obvious in the case of perception and mental imagery where perceptual sorry representational content the representational content what you are representing in those experiences it's actually both very important but not essential in a way so

38:05 one case I like to show that you know the intensity of the perceptual experience or a mental image experience is not 100% tied although influences are modulated by what your representing is the case of imagining a theme candle so you can imagine a deme candle very vividly or you can imagine a spotlight not very vividly and I think in that case it's clear that the representational content like you're

38:38 imagining something not very intense versus something very intense and that one thing that's content and it does play a role but at the same time the vivid the overall vividness or the overall intensity of the mental image it's not gonna depend solely on those aspects so you can imagine so you're if you really meditate and you're really imagining a team candle maybe that becomes like a super strong experience after all I mean the mental strength of the experience is very strong even though you know it's just a dim candle that doesn't have much maybe I don't

39:11 know maybe if you go looking your visual cortex in one sense it might be like very active because we are imagining very vividly but in another sand maybe you can decode the contents you will see that it's actually not a very vivid representation it's actually a very vivid representative Adam thing so I think that the multidimensionality of mental strength is important to account for these cases interesting yeah then that brings me to the next thing I was going to ask you about so that's a good way to segue which is so what mental strength is not so and you think you

39:45 argue it's not attention it's not say psychological salience it's not representational contents so since you've just brought up the representational contents back part maybe we'll work backwards towards the attention part so is it is I mean what I'm hearing you saying is that mental strength can't be somehow reduced to just the representation of the candle for instance because it may be a dim you may be representing a dim candle but it could be a strong experience but does that mean that it can't be a

40:17 representational content at all so couldn't it the content be something like I am vividly experiencing dim candle and then that's part of the representational content of the experience that in that case so is would you object to that or is this something that you'd be ok with um I think I will object to that in the sense that I find hard to describe phenomenal content or you know the phenomenal character of experience like sure in this discussion about representational ism about whether

40:52 you know a phenomenal character is identical to reducible to based on representational content I think there's a very strong case to say like this cannot be like 100% independent maybe they there's a there's a strong dependency on what you're representing for explaining what the phenomenal character of your experiences but I think that once you start adding things into the representational content that include things like the subject or

41:26 perspectives for example is like the representational content of this candle as seeing with these other lighting and with me filling in blue and after hours like I don't know include more and more things into whether it representing but I think that I lose what people do that I feel that we lose a group of what we were talking about when we started talking about representational contents because I think that to a large extent the reason why phenomenal correct and

42:02 sorry for character and representational content are related to each other the worlds of what relation you prefer it's because you're talking about experience of an object for example in the case of measured visual perception and sure you can put some constraints into how that is with that it represented but I think that the more the more you put the subject in or particular conditions of that the less I understand why these two are related to each other so I think that in general I think I don't think

42:36 it's a very good move in general so I don't think it's a very good move for mental strength so if I'm hearing you right that sounds like what you're saying is that representation ISM a representational ISM or whatever I never know what people call it nowadays many whatever the representation is they start off by saying what what the content of these representations is tied to things in the external world so you're representing that red round ball so that's what the content is tracking or key to anyway and then your argument here is that once you start adding

43:11 things in like vividness or I'm seeing it from this point of view then you lose contact with the original motivation for representational ISM is that the argument fix it yeah yeah I think so and of course it's I think it's a little bit of a slippery slope right because in the first case you're you know if you're a little bit of detail to what the contents are sure you gain inside and it's like oh that's the content of this visual perception as opposed to just red ball it's like red ball of the size with

43:43 this kind of shading is like okay that's helpful but that'll that move sometimes it's abused I think is it like oh let's just throw in every way of describing these in a way that might or might not be actually represented and then in that case I think that's when it's not as useful or probably just wrong so and I think that when in the case just to go back to mental strength I think that including not just what the experience is about but also how intensely it is experienced

44:17 like I don't see how that has to do with the contents of the experience like I feel like that you know that's one of the best candidates against like a full-blown strong view of representational ism because like look I can tell you everything that it's being represented and still I don't think that we should including those in that description of the representational content how I am experiencing it or how intensely I'm experiencing it compared to for example another experience with its own set of representational contents like you know that relational character

44:54 that I was talking about before of mental strength I really don't think that should go into the representational content yeah so it sounds like this is more just like a general skepticism about the success of representational ism as opposed to an argument against mental strength being captured in representational terms does that sound fair or I mean coming is specific about mental strength that's really doing the work here it's something about phenomenal character in general sort of outstripping what's out there maybe you're right that

45:29 I'm skeptic in general but I don't think that the argument requires that kind of skepticism because you could say look the reason you see these the ocean is blue it's because you're representing it as blue and that's a it's a representational content of experience that provides us with the phenomenal character there is no qualia over and evolved what you're representing I like I could be let's say I can be okay with that and say like yeah it's a it's what you're representing the color and you're representing the size and the distance of the ocean in front of you well I think that it's really hard to capture

46:02 and I think in these things it there is something specific or special about mental strength and it's that you can you can keep those things constant I believe and say look this is what I'm representing and yeah I'm experiencing it being very you know I'm experiencing it as this is an intense experience that I'm having you know but that doesn't mean that I'm for example that I'm representing the ocean is being brighter like really brighter like no I'm representing with its brightness and its hue let's say I'm representing everything vertically and

46:35 yet you can imagine a case where this fiber presenting the ocean is properties politically and phenomenally in terms of you know the phenomenal character of its color and its brightness etc can be held constant and yet you might be having a more intense experience for example because you have less noise around it like there is this is basically the only experience that you're having and in that sense it's gonna be more central it's gonna be more intense whereas if for example you are

47:08 distractive and you're having a bunch of experiences at the same time and you're thinking a bunch of things you can still represent the ocean exactly as having the same properties and the phenomenal character of you know the domain-specific phenomenal character hue and brightness might be the same but overall the experience of seeing the ocean might be more dominant because of the other experience of your habit I think that in the mental strength does provide like a specific argument against maybe not against representational ism in general but against representational ism as the only way of explaining

47:45 everything that has to do with phenomenal character like I think that at least intensity might not be well captured by representational ism even though maybe all the things are well country okay I wonder if I could ask you so when I think about representational ism usually I tend to think about you know painting for instance trying to capture things in terms of drawing something can't we do what you were just talking about in terms of artistic representations of that sort so painting and the blue ocean when there's you know

48:19 a bunch of other stuff going on around it versus painting the blue ocean just on the background of a white canvas well with every other aspect of it exactly the same the intensity of the same shade the same hue the same intensity isn't that other one gonna be more of a vivid representation of the ocean just because there's nothing else on the canvas I don't know I'm talking about vividness for objects in the real world works that well well more stand out more

48:55 striking I mean salient or more like maybe more central to the canvas is that like the ocean is gonna be more central because there's nothing else right that's in the ocean where the beach and beachgoers know seagulls flying around the ocean it's gonna be there with the same properties with less central right so doesn't that capture I mean I mean to me that's a guest I think could be a representational kind of account that captures what you're after if there's these difference between the two canvases why wouldn't there be a

49:27 difference in the kind of the kind of experiences where the that's just I mean I don't see what else would have to be added to it to make one stand out more given that there's nothing else there yeah I mean that may be maybe another way of putting your objection is saying like look sure it's you know the ocean seems to lose its centrality when do other things but those things that you're adding are also representational and they're phenomenal characters are you know based on reducible to whatever

50:03 they are representing so in the end actually it's representational contents maybe not of that particular experience per se but representational contents two cores or something like that that is doing the trick now I don't know I don't know what to say to that I feel like I don't know if the centrality can be captured by the representation like it's not an author it's not an extra representational content that it's capturing or displaying the centrality of a particular state right it's just

50:37 like the fact that you have a bunch of them or you have a bunch of things on the canvas that makes it more or less central but it's centrality is not something that you're drawing or the Oh painting right it's it's like a I don't want to say emergent property because it has a lot of baggage going to okay so it's something like it's it might be yeah so they're sensational in

51:11 that sense that is your preferred view is this like a mental paint kind of view the mental strength is a kind of you know something added I mean you know not maybe you don't want to go all the way with Ned's Ned's view here but I you know his view is that as far as far as I understand it is that these phenomenal properties can represents his example is the case of a map you know where different colors represent Heights or something like that but there's nothing intrinsically representational about the phenomenal properties themselves they just you know intrinsically are the

51:45 things they are is that the direction that you're inclined to go in for for mental spring yeah I'm sympathetic to that view I think I think that in that sense mental like I don't I don't know if I need to buy like the whole mental paint baggage for every phenomenal property but I think that if some property is mental paint its mental strength like at least mental strength it's a very good candidate for mental paint even if all the things maybe turn out not to be but yeah okay interesting yeah um there's a lot of things that

52:17 keep popping my head I want to try to focus here a little bit because I don't want to keep you forever although it's a danger that I have whenever I'm doing these things okay so but I wonder if we could kind of I was gonna talk about attention and salience and all that but I wonder if we could just kind of segue unless there's something you want to specifically say about those things I wanted a segue to talk about introspection which I know is a lot you know it's come up a couple times already and you have a view about it in terms of signal detection theory which I find very very interesting so so first of all you know introspection I think you

52:53 characterize it in this kind of a diminished way as possible is simply having attentively being attentively focused on conscious experiences yeah right so that that's already I mean it's fairly non-controversial there already are people who are going to reject that characterization of it you know like people like Gretzky hardcore hardcore for sort of theory people who think that you know it's just displaced perception or something like that so do you have anything that you want to say to those guys with or is that just something you want to try to bypass and say well this

53:27 is what I'm interested in this kind of attentively focused on experience so the transparency theorists in general right like this idea that introspection of conscious experience is really like if I really try to introspect on the screen right now almost like squeak really what I'm saying is just seeing I'm just keep seeing and I just get yeah and then you kind of intern out you infer that you're in a mental state what yeah is that kind because of what you're actually focused on in the external but it's just it's just perception and then yeah right I

54:00 think this goes back to the ocean example maybe I mean the idea that like I think that in that case like like when I introspect and seeing looking at the ocean it's one of the main experiences in my my conscious stream at the moment that's gonna make it stronger according to the theory and I think what introspection when you introspect that experience sure just in the ocean but I think you can also distinguish what you're perceiving from maybe the way

54:34 you're perceiving it or in this case like the fact that it's oh I'm pursuing it and this is like really tears like wow I'm seeing I don't know I'm seeing that that see for the first time for example Oh which I know it's not an ocean so and you're like wait and you're like really focus and it's really quiet

55:06 that there's nothing going on except you're looking at it I think that you can introspectively I think it'll be wrong to say like oh you're just seeing the ocean it's like no I'm seeing the ocean and the role it's playing these experiences playing in my mind at the moment and that it's not something that I perceive in the regular vanilla sense of just look you know upwards I believe so again I think this is another case where introspection and mental strain play nicely together and and yeah I think

55:39 that you're right like maybe with the exception of people who think that experiences are transparent saying that attending your experiences that's what introspection is it's maybe not super controversial or at least it's not you know and that level of description without going into the details people who say like yeah attention seems to be involved and you know the fact that you think about conscious experiences somehow has to play a role perhaps yeah I want to keep it as minimal as possible

56:12 because because of that okay so I mean so what are the questions that I had was a lot of the stuff that you seem to describe as introspection I wonder whether it it counts as introspection so for instance just right now you were talking about the Dead Sea I've never seen it in real life so I can't have reference to that particular experience but you know being from California we have some nice oceans out there too so I've had plenty of ocean kinds of experiences and I wonder so why aren't those kinds of cases simply cases of really intense conscious experiences

56:46 like when you say wow look at the ocean that doesn't really seem like you're attending to the conscious experience that seems like you're attending to the ocean in in a similar cases so I wonder how you want to distinguish intense conscious experiences which indicate reports or result in reports or judgments about the nature of the thing versus introspection properly so-called where you're somehow focused on the Xperia luyties as opposed to the thing out there well what's what's the

57:20 distinguishing mark on your view you can't do that right sorry yeah no I think I think you're right I think you're right maybe the way they spread the example before was misleading I think that introspection is not just like like introspection requires not focusing on the experience as an experience you know like you need to think of a past mental state that you're trying to attend to whether these involves like Eastern shading some phenomenal concepts or just concepts in general or whether you need

57:58 a theory of mine like I I can be a little bit neutral about exactly how it's done but I think that yeah for introspection being something you know philosophically interesting it's just it's not just like a regular awareness of I don't know being a wake or something like that but making a judgment about an experience as such so so too I mean because this is where I was gonna ask you about the dental fear stuff so you know it dental fear is I mean famous amongst people putting out

58:33 the graduates and talk to David like we do but for those of you who don't know you know it's a case where people go to the dentist's often their nerves are anesthetized they're afraid they feel some vibration they report being a pain they say ouch but you want to describe that as a case where they're not really in pain but they've made a mistake in the introspective judgment is that correct that's right I think I think David's example of mental theater it's nice way of distinguishing between

59:10 undergoing an experience and making a judgment about it because one thing I mean one of the problems that of you like the one I have according to which introspection is a detection you know it's the application of a detection mechanism to conscious experiences one of its consequences is that one can be wrong about it like if its mechanism and it involves detection and there's some signal and there is some noise you know the first thing that you get with that some of its mistakes and itself

59:45 particularly country intuitive maybe thinking about being wrong about one's experiences because it's you know in the case of pain especially it's like look if I'm in pain I'm in pain there's no mistake like that's what being in pain is basically for some people will say that Ryan's like I cannot be wrong about pain like I might be wrong about my body being damaged but I cannot be wrong about experiencing something awful but I think that there's a there's a which that we can put between our growing in experience and making a judgement about

1:00:19 it and I think that when one report experiences especially experiences like pain that are like more inwardly based as opposed to I don't know visual experiences that are more outwardly based because um you know in the end you're reporting on the world oftentimes in the case of pain it's it's really you're talking about all you're feeling usually independent of your body and you know because of how the world works those two things tend to go together but they don't have to and the thing is in

1:00:54 the case of dental fear where the patient like maybe maybe even jealousy phase like ouch and the dentist is like dude I haven't even touched you I was close to it's really I think it's really counterintuitive in that particular case to say that the subject wasn't pain I really experienced pain because of the setup of the dentist whatever like his brain made him feel pain it's it's more I think I think in that case that's

1:01:31 that's one Kaazing which we can see like isn't it more plausible that the report sincere as it was was actually mistaken like the guy was not lying it was not confused in terms of what the person felt was his current experience but that literally there was no conscious experience of pain and I think that that's a good case for for driving a wedge in between judgements and

1:02:03 experiences yeah I guess I would so there's a couple things I want to ask sa ask you about about this I so on the one hand you want to say that this is an introspective mistake that's part of what I'm trying to get out here that this isn't just a normal report to this an introspective report so I'm somewhat puzzled by why introspection is involved in this kind of case why isn't it just that they have a thought and they blurt it out but it doesn't seem like there's any attention to a conscious experience

1:02:36 going on here because on your view that there isn't one the hair or at least not of this tiny so that that's my first question is why I think that that's intersective as opposed to just normal conscious experience if any and then the second question is why not think that it's pain so well first maybe I'll ask you the first one and then get to the second one just good yeah so I think I think you're right like not every single time that someone says I'm in pain they're introspecting wrong or did was

1:03:10 painful or did was bright it's not you know introspection is a little bit more taxing than that we discussed before in the case of I like the case of gentle fear because it's a case of someone who's really scared of the dentist who's anticipating pain and I think that what they're doing is monitoring their experience like that there's trigger consciousness right it's like this is it it's calming it's about to get really bad it's about to get really bad like I know the drill is like the vibrations are getting stronger or the

1:03:42 noise is getting louder and they're monitoring their experience and I think they're thinking about their experiences cuz they're like anticipating and they want to I don't know they they're waiting to detect the experience of pain so I think in that case in particular they are actually thinking of experiences our ass experiences like here's here here comes the pain so in that case I think it's introspective yeah and that's one yeah that's a good point I wonder why I think you're not interesting about their tooth

1:04:14 I mean so why aren't they monitoring the tooth and what's going on inside their mouth as opposed to the experience of what's going on I mean I don't know so this this may just be a difference in how we go to the dentist but I I mean I'm just a bit I guess I'd be a little bit reluctant to say that what I'm doing in the dentist's chair which I had like everyone hate going to but I guess I'd be a little bit reluctant to say it and what I'm focusing on is my experience as opposed to the dentist's hands what the drill bit looks like the sound that the

1:04:47 drill is making the I don't know so why how are we supposed to adjudicate here between your way of describing things versus my way and I'm not saying that you're wrong or anything I'm just curious like what theoretical kind of leverage can we get on this distinction I think the question is really relevant I'm not sure there's a way of adjudicating this case in particular because I know people might do it differently and maybe maybe some patients who yell in pain without being touched where I don't know that we're

1:05:23 ready to get Yelp anyway and they pull the trigger too early and they were really not nothing about their experiences they were just like I know they wanted to Yelp in pain because that's what they do in the dentist or that would I don't know maybe that was a delay tactic for so that's it for this particular case I don't know maybe not everyone does I think it's possible to

1:05:55 think that some people might be actually thinking about their experiences and I'm thinking is it painful yet is it painful yet is it painful yet it's coming it's coming and think of it as pain and not as oh the tooth out of the dentist which might they also be thinking about it might be like display cases attention where multiple things are being trapped at the same time but I think there are other cases where can be more positive that people are thinking about their experience and rather than talking about being in pain

1:06:28 versus not I think a useful way of thinking about these cases is confidence so here's an example that I like to tell people so you go to the ER you're in lots of pain and the nurse comes and asks you and you're like visibly in pain a lot of pain and the nervous ask you are you in pain and you're like yeah give me something and the nurse asked you are you sure you're in pain and you're really you're probably gonna be angry are you sure like give me

1:07:03 something and then you know they do they give you something and yeah that's not drug-seeking behavior give me something but yes sure and I'm also like abstracting away from the fact of how the US health system works where instead of one minute they're laughing papers at four hours before you see a doctor let's assume they give you some drug really quickly and and now when later the nurse comes back and asked you like are you in

1:07:38 pain and you see like yeah I'm still in pain and then they ask you like are you sure I want to the intuition I'm trying to probably like this is a completely different question for you for you is like oh I don't know is it like like you consider the question is valid for example in the second the second time as opposed to the first time the first time you like there's no doubt that this is an experience of pain the second time where you know the pain is about to disappear or something you're like no I

1:08:14 thought it was in pain and I should like really think about these because maybe I don't want to do too much oxycontin and if I can avoid a second think of that will be I'll be good for me and I really want to know if I'm still in pain and I thought I was because I'm uncomfortable but I know is that just being uncomfortable versus pain and and you can introspect about it and you can be unsure about whether you know you should be describing that as if that is an experience of pain or not and maybe you are and maybe you're right maybe

1:08:47 you're always right if you like I think you can be wrong sometimes but even if you are always right I think that the fact that sometimes you can be less sure that was something about the mechanisms behind introspection yeah that's that's good I mean I guess with the reason I was trying to get at this was because I well I tend to think introspection is really hard and that it takes a lot of efforts and practice to really do it and the way that we're talking about here

1:09:20 makes yeah we said it's a bit taxing but this doesn't seem like it's hard like it doesn't you know how to have a lot of practice to do this sort of thing you're doing they're talking about doing and so I just wonder I mean to me I'm just really not sure whether we would call that introspecting as opposed to merely reporting so if someone says you know art do you see it and you say yes that doesn't seem to require an introspection in any real serious sense or maybe I'm just being too hard nosed about what I want to call introspection so maybe what

1:09:53 you're talking about should count on it perfectly good as introspection but it also seems like there's this other thing too which is a oh we have a stroke we have a visitor but how's it going go and he'll momma okay I'll be done soon okay please we were not in a BBC yeah that is me you're correct the joys of live broadcasting come on but I'll be I'll be done soon

1:10:27 okay and then I'll come downstairs okay thanks for making an appearance so so anyway to get back to what I was saying it seems like there's kind of it seems that it's with pain there are at least three different things that we want to call painting so the qualities associated with the tissue damage so that the when people say the pain is in my knee you know what they mean is that there's some damage there that sort of seems to be the thing that you're sensing as though as I would put it but there's also the

1:11:00 pain which is the mental representation of whatever that thing in the knee is and then also there's the conscious experience of that that thing right there so a lot of these so myself my worry is that a lot of the things we're talking about are really at the lower level that you're talking about things going on in the body so that what you're focused on is not the mental states themselves but proper quality properties of the appendix or the knee or the the joint or whatever it is so but you want

1:11:34 to say no that that's a year of what your focus on is the experience itself of the pain not of what the pain is representing yeah I think I think you're very I think you're on the right track or racing to worry because not every report of a conscious experience is a case of introspection and I agree with that I think that you know for making some report like you really don't have to attend to your experience you know in a very demanding way or at in any way maybe like you're just you know thinking

1:12:07 about the world and to report about that well I think that and then why I use the cases like a follow-up question and by a nurse in terms of like how your pain has changed in general if you think about like patients who are receiving you know like lengthy treatment I think those are good cases of people who they're just not saying like oh my name is okay they are saying like look compared to how the experience of the pain was last week these week is better and sometimes it

1:12:42 could be I mean the case of the knees depending on the kind of lash leash and you know visual gardens my hair up or something like that right think about headaches and people with um migraines right sure it feels around here you know like you can localize it but it's it's a type of thing that it's way less localized and I don't know an injury or a back pain it's it's in the hand but it's really not and you know that there's no injury for example so

1:13:14 you know it's not physical damage at least not nothing that affects like tissues as opposed to just nerves and I think that people who experience like frequent migraines for example or they tend to introspect I think they tend to focus on qualities of the experience and they tend to compare them and then take to focus on and the intensity whether they it's going off if it's staying the same its diminished sharing and I think in I think in those cases like when

1:13:48 you're making comparisons between previous States or people who are used to because of their unfortunate situation of experiencing these often I think that's a case where I'm not saying it every single time it happens but I think it's I think we will be positive that that in many cases people do make these comparisons and they focus on the felt experience as it goes to the world yeah no that's a long effort from migraine so I but they said for me they do seem localized like I think right

1:14:21 here ya know they can be like you know in a particular part of the head but it's you know that there's no tissue damage right and I think that helps kind of detaching the body and the experience and focusing more and experience yeah maybe so do you so you would say then that introspection is something that well I don't want to use the term ordinary people but non philosophically trained persons that they do all that

1:14:55 they do on a regular basis whereas I would have said that it's that my suspicion is that is something that you have to be trained to do it's very hard to do and that normal people probably hardly ever do it but but that so you would say they typical people do often introspect I think I think human I think yeah human adult's interests bag often and I don't think that we do every time all the time and maybe there can be long periods where you don't but I think it's very

1:15:27 common even in some tasks where you're comparing chips of paint for example which seems very visual and non introspective at all I think there are cases in which you can say that that's a visual task clearly and that not much introspection is happening and I think that there are other cases where a superficially similar task is taking place and yeah you have to you have to focus your attention more on how things look like to you as opposed to how they are and I think as soon as you start

1:16:01 going into the realm of appearances or thinking more about experiences so yeah so so now what rolled the signal detection theory play here because I know that you have this account an introspective single detection theory so how does and now it lines up very nicely what the discussion about mental strength so can you just give us a brief overview of what the role of signal detection theory is and your thinking here right I think you you're right to point out that my thinking about mental strength is not completely independent

1:16:37 of me thinking of this particular type of mechanism that could account for introspection yeah and the idea is the following so we have a very whole we understand very well at least at agree how perception works in terms of for example what makes someone detect the presence of a target means the presence of a target and you know a very successful theory for that its signal detection theory which

1:17:10 roughly speaking postulates that there is some sort of internal response to the presentation of perceptual stimuli and that internal response depending on how strong it is subjects can use it to classify that internal response as being as corresponding to just noise that just happened to arise from the regular workings of the visual system for example or classify it as indicating the presence of a target

1:17:45 right of a visual stimulus and without going too much into the details I think that till with what I just said like those those things like there's an internal response to the presence of something outside and you know the brain has a task of saying look is that thing that I'm sensing part of these kind of things like stimulus out there or is this kind of internal response just part of my regular firings that I should

1:18:18 ignore and say that there's nothing out there like that that's Journal framework I think that takes place not just for perception but you know if the brain recruits you know the brain tries to be cheap and if it already has one mechanism that works well for something if you think about in evolutionary terms it's not unlikely that that type of mechanism got recruited by other types of mechanisms and I think that introspection be given how we described before and you know as directing attention to certain type of

1:18:51 object in this case a perceptual conscious experience and the fact that you know that the directing of attention with the purpose of classifying or detecting even the presence of in this case a conscious experience that looks a lot like perception and that looks a lot like this mechanism so I think that we can explain that and as you pointed out before the idea is that introspection it's the splitting of you know or classification of internal strength that

1:19:25 is the the mental strength of an experience gives rise to an introspective response it's like look there's a mental experience and this amount of strong and should I take that to be you know something I should say like oh that was a pain or oh that was a conscious experience of this kind should I use that amount of intensity of our you know how how it felt phenomenally to say oh yeah that's definitely a pain versus it's definitely

1:19:58 nerve pain or maybe put some confidence intervals and say like wait a minute I detected this kind of mental strength going on that seemed to pertain to a pain but I don't know it seems like it could have been something else and maybe that's what you hesitate about being in pain or maybe you know sometimes these things in the brain misfire and you can have like like in the case of mental fear because you're monitoring all your mental states at the same time you could be misclassifying an experience as painful when really the signal that you

1:20:33 picked up the introspective see now that pertain to fear perhaps are supposed to pay so sorry maybe that was too long but that's that's good so I mean I'm wondering I guess part of me is wondering what attention has to do with any of this is it on your view that attention is helping to set the criterion or be I mean what part of what role is attention playing since we characterized introspection at the beginning as attentive focused unconscious experience but now with the signal detection Theory what there is is there's a criterion there's a single

1:21:06 there's a noise so whether there is the attentive part or how is that playing a role in that's great I think I think there are two roles that we should distinguish one is attention first it's limiting the reference class right of what you're doing like the fact that you instantiate maybe a phenomenal concept of pain like it's this thing I'm gonna direct attention to that to things that look like that so that's like some sort of intellectual attention that it's being directed towards experiences as

1:21:39 opposed to the world or to any other stimulus so that's like the first role of attention just saying like focus on days but of course when you do and this is something that might explain why introspection seems infallible to many people when you do that a phenomenon we know happens all the time is that in perception for example it's it's that attention increases the signal of whatever you're attending to or reduces the noise making the signal more conspicuous or sometimes both actually

1:22:12 so sometimes you can reduce the noise increase the signal and make whatever attention is being directed that easier to detect like classified more accurately for example well faster or you know it has a bunch of benefits so in the case of introspection I think that first attention says like you know pay attention to only these things phenomenal experiences and then by doing that of course you're increasing the signal and maybe the intensity of the experience itself which makes it more

1:22:47 likely to be classified correctly as experience that it is because you're paying attention to it and unlike perception where you can be asked perhaps about things that you were not introspect that you were not attending I think in the case of introspection it doesn't make sense to ask you about something you were not introspecting it's like oh how was my experience before I thought about my experience before I was experiencing and sure you can do that but then you're relying on memory and like definitely introspecting alters the experience and in that sense

1:23:23 at least one important way which it it is altered is by making it more intense and you know if introspection follows some kind of signal detection theory mechanism or computational implementation then that means that you know you're less likely to be wrong about your introspections when you introspect because you're making your experiences more salient yeah so that to what extent do you see this is kind of maybe not exactly relevant but I think it's partially relevant to what extent

1:23:57 do you see that this kind of signal detection account of the mind in league with or at odds with traditional or what is becoming quickly traditional kind of Bayesian theories so because I'm and I'm thinking about your paper that low attention inhibits priors so so it seems that there's a kind of conflict there between at least traditional beige and theories of and which might be used to kind of give a theory of introspection and this a kind of count that you're talking about here

1:24:29 yeah do you see them as related or in conflict or what what exactly do you see the relationship I mean I think in this case signal detection theory is a tool that it's very helpful because it's in a way it's simple and it's easy to understand the parameters that you're using when modeling perception after it the fact that there are more complicated ways that might be in some cases may be better models in some cases there are just more complicated models that maybe

1:25:02 not achieve that much more than simple signal detection theoretical model that's something that I will be at least for these introspection debate I will be more agnostic about whether going Bayesian helps or not I think that you know talking about introspection is hard do philosophy about it is hard doing some kind of philosophy where you're proposing a psychological model of how it's done without being you know being very easy to test it it's also very hard

1:25:36 so I think that in this case like going Bayesian will not necessarily add much to DS although that doesn't mean that maybe the kind of mechanism it's you know as complex as some views of Bayesian you know some some theories of how the mind is Bayesian might might help but yeah I'd look for introspection I will be agnostic about what's the right computational description I think that single diction theory is useful and

1:26:09 gives us a lot of punch and gas for starting to think about these things in a more mechanics wäôre computational way but that's all that's all that I see yeah so so you don't see because I guess what I saw the connection was that well in the task in the paper where you're talking about low attention it's not clear that there's really a lot of introspection going on there maybe on your view there is because of what we were just talking about but you're just asking sub just to judge an orientation of a patch or something like that

1:26:41 they don't seem to have to do a lot of introspection but it seems like there could be so given that you want to apply signal detection theory to introspection it seems like you could generate a case like that where you're asking so if if the view is that well you can only use one criterion for both attended and unattended which i think is the whole point of the paper right that Bayesian models predict that the prior should come in when there's uncertainty but the experiments that you guys performed seem to suggest that that's not what's happening that you kind of select a

1:27:13 place to put the criterion and then that's it you have to sort of judge both about the same one it isn't the same thing going to happen and couldn't the same thing happen in introspection on your view oh I see yeah yeah attention that's it sorry of introspection that's that could be particularly troubling because the reason we got the effect that you're describing in which you know is yes for just to tell you something about a stimulus when its attendant versus when it's not attended it seems

1:27:45 like having prior information about what that stimulus might be doesn't help much because your your criterion for the attendant case in the unattended case seems to be tied to each other and therefore you cannot be optimal in either and that affects things to happen only or mostly when you're switching back and forth and you have to keep both things in mind let's say well you have to keep a representation of the unattended cases and of the attended cases like if you're just attending or Journal mix and matching that much it doesn't seem to be that effective or it

1:28:20 might not be as strong in the case of introspection I I see two things happening why don't witch that affect my replicate and terrible because then we will be like maybe wrong more often or something like that right although there will be good for my general view that interest functions follow yes so in that case it's very easy right like I'm introspecting right now and I'm trying to think about like I don't know how the pressure of the headphones feel and trying to really focus on that aspect of my experience but I'm ignoring a lot of

1:28:52 things I'm not paying attention to other experiences and maybe when I switch back to that or if I try to judge them like not very attentively I will just get things wrong like and that might be a real explanation of why you know if if introspection is what's happening in things like change blindness paradigms for example where you know you somewhere to introspect with the visual scene seems to you but you make a general judgement or you know it stretch equally with the same amount of confidence things that you were really attending to versus things that you were not that's

1:29:25 and that's what the mistake arises and maybe that's what happens in the introspection which is what you were suggesting but I can also see another thing if the introspection really just requires attention and really requires you to focus on the experience and it's only when you're attending that you're really introspecting and anything that is not intended it started your experience again but you're not introspecting it it seems like your criterion is set and optimized let's say for attendant experiences so in that case you would not experience this

1:29:59 conflict between switching back and forth attended and on attendant experiences which will give you a more reliable criterion because you know you're only using the attentive version of the of the task because either there's no introspection on it and the experiences or at least it's not very frequent and we don't use it that much so in that case and that that's also maybe compatible with an experience that we have which is we tend to be right or you know I believe that we have we tend

1:30:31 to be right about our introspection and we've covered two reasons for that one is because we're attending to it very intensely so no no wonder you know the attention is amplified they is amplified all the destructors are minimized and the other thing i mean what you just brought up which is and your criterion is really really two for that kind of experiences in these contacts which is you know is this a pain or not well that criterion is to for detecting experiences or attended in the case of pain and you don't get too

1:31:04 many false alarms you're not too liberal you're not too conservative that could be one explanation of felt success of introspection I think yeah so and in the case from what I remember you describing a possible experiment which I don't know if they would ever let you do but you know shocking one leg and shocking the other leg working on it currently but so in that case the experiment is explicitly asking the subjects to kind

1:31:38 of go back and forth between the two experiences so you're shocking one leg burning the other leg and you're asking them to judge when the burning is at the same intensity as the shocking so in those kinds of cases at least we would get this kind of or would we on your view would you expect that we'd get this kind of effect because of the criterion effect being set only in one for both experiences because it's not exactly like your I mean you have to sort of attend to the other one as you're focusing on this one to perform the

1:32:10 experiment I mean to do what you know totally sucked if I do I don't know but I'm thinking for the remark okay I think you're right I mean there are two reasons why these tests might be hard right like first of all as you said like you have to switch your attention back and forth between the shock and the heat and that makes like comparisons even if you switch back and forth quickly it's it's a slide diachronic comparison like it's really hard to make it simultaneously although maybe you can split your attention on these two

1:32:44 [Music] experiences but yeah I can see a problem there the other problem is that you're classifying a different type of experience and I think that's really complicated because we're not used to doing it I think like it's really hard like if I ask you like I don't know when it's more intense the light coming through your window or I don't know the sound of my voice in your headphones it's really hard to make those comparisons I don't think because they are of the wrong category it's just like we don't use them you tend not to

1:33:17 you know split them in that way and that would make these classification difficult so that will definitely inject some noise and that's what I know maybe training with the subjects will be important if you wanted to test introspection of these kind of thing but yeah I don't know what say oh there's an it's a good point okay cool what we're running out of time here so I want to I mean this we don't have enough time to talk about everything that you have that's interesting and we haven't really got your published work yeah yeah but I want to tell me how something that you have

1:33:53 coming out with ha Kuan which is I mean you've had a couple things with him but this is the work on the neural correlates of consciousness and cool you know what what it is that how first of all what methodology we need to adopt in the world what you what your assessment of where we are and that is so this is coming on some handbook of conscious and I forget which one I should have this written doubts mother I don't that's right it's the Oxford Handbook or philosophy of consciousness all right Krieger Krieger loose editing right so what is your I mean kind of a broad

1:34:25 question but what where what is your take on where we're at now trying to figure out what the neural correlates of consciousness are yeah that's a fantastically hard question I think one I don't know there are many lessons that that could be drawn from the last few decades of this kind of research but a couple of things that we highlight in me in that paper and are first we should be

1:35:01 really careful about talking about correlates of consciousness because they tend to be associated with things like necessity and and of course it will be great if you could find what's necessary and what's efficient were undergoing our conscious experience and I think one problem that researchers have found at least some researchers have starting to notice this this problem is so the brain is a very complicated machine with respect to this

1:35:37 question at least which is it's it's easier to knock out certain thanks that perform a simple function or that are highly localized in the brain because he's like you know you're knock it out just stop having the function you bring it back in you start having add there you go that's the causal you know there's a causal connection between that particular area of the brain or connections between the areas of the brain wellwe've question is I mean given what you know what we know and how you know convoluted both studying it and probably it is in the brain one thing that we've

1:36:12 noticed is that there are redundant seen mechanisms right like the brain is it's not just plastic after a lesion it might you know like rewire itself to keep performing a similar function so for instance in both patient studies and fMRI studies or any kind of neuroimaging studies we have to be very careful about no findings right so because not finding something or noticing that knocking out a particular region of the brain doesn't seem to abolish consciousness for example we

1:36:45 have to be very careful as theoreticians of what that means of course it means that we should pay attention to that preaching because it seems like it's important given that I don't know we were doing a comparison between conscious and unconscious trials and I don't know a particular region of dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex was in particularly active and that's that's not nothing but you know absence of evidence should not be confused with evidence of absence of a role because of

1:37:19 a number one this is the thing about necessity and sufficiency it's not clear whether you know maybe there are more than one neural correlates of consciousness and if you kill one maybe the other one kicks in and that doesn't mean the third one a trivial region for consciousness it was the one carrying out the function until it didn't and then something else carried out but it would be easy to think we thought it was necessary and it's not so or it seems that it's not because you know you kill it and the

1:37:54 subject is still conscious so I think that less efficiency or not very useful notions for studying consciousness and the other thing related to some of the things I just said is understanding that we're dealing with extremely unsophisticated tools and it might not seem like that because you know they're an fMRI magnet is 3 million dollars and it's like the technology is hard and doing the analysis is incredibly hard and it's amazing that it works but at the same time you know the resolution is

1:38:28 not great their sensitivity is not great and we we need to we need to factor that in in her theories about the neural correlates of consciousness in a way that sometimes it's overlooked right because that's until that you have and then if you find something it's not there and and it's easy to forget that you're working with extremely insensitive tools and this is if I my abandoned is it's it's this shows up in higher theories of consciousness in you

1:39:02 know that postulated preference of cortex my perform important function in sustaining consciousness and the thing is as I said sometimes fMRI for example is not sensitive enough people say oh nothing light up in PFC therefore probably not relevant for consciousness but don't you see more sensitive measures like direct measuring of neural activity usually performed in monkeys or sometimes you know when you place a series of electrodes on the surface of

1:39:34 the brain with human beings and when you use those incredibly more sensitive measures you notice that conscious continent is decodable from perform toll areas for example yeah even unconscious content which i think is interesting that's very interesting even things where tasks irrelevant are decodable from the brain and importantly even in those cases the differences are subtle like you can recover that but it's not like you know it's not it's not a Christmas tree lighting up in PFC that tells you all bio maze here's where

1:40:08 consciousness contents leave it's more like even with extremely sensitive measures you can eventually decode it but it's subtle so if it's subtle even in those cases we should be very careful about how we do fMRI definitely yeah which is a popular maybe the most popular to make sure these days yeah no I think those are both incredibly important points not just because I'm sympathetic to higher order theories but I think for any kind of person interested in consciousness the things you're talking about are very important

1:40:40 and philosophers in particular I think tend to go for simple models and the the idea that you know there's one place where it's kind of we're gonna find that place in the brains important for consciousness incredibly seductive but the science is pretty clear that the brains full of redundant systems find a finding that this area is knocked out but they're still consciousness doesn't by itself suggests that that area doesn't play a crucial role in consciousness before it was knocked out I think that was your first point right

1:41:14 given that then I mean given that this is that so first that this point is important to redundancy issue the poverty of fMRI it's an inability to really get at some of these questions then you know why shouldn't one be pessimistic about the search for the neural correlates of consciousness at this time look do you think pessimism is warranted at this given what we're able to do no I think we should be optimistic I think I think the field has moved forward a lot important because of experimental design

1:41:48 if you see some of the first experiments I don't know the late 80s or early 90s trying to assess the neural correlates of consciousness you know things like having a controlled unconscious condition was not even a worry or subjects were asked to report when they saw something they didn't see anything and then those conditions would compare truly creating a report compound another thing that it's actually really hard to

1:42:22 control for but now people are more and more aware of these and this is something else I also work on with hack one which is matching for performance like when you compare conditions between conscious and unconscious cases one clear difference is that when you're unconscious of things you're not very good at it but you don't see anything so you you're either a chance or closer to chance you know maybe maybe you you can recover some signal and you can show that the subject perceives something but but not as well as in the conscious case and you don't want that to be the

1:42:55 difference you want to be you know signal and performance in the task to be similar between conditions which is really hard to obtain experimentally by the way and that's why cases like blindside are so appealing because there you have a case where subjects are maybe not equally good in the conscious case but sometimes had patients perform at ceiling almost so so that's a case you want and so that's just like in the behavioral side of things on the neural side of things it's not just computational modeling has becoming more

1:43:30 complex and more sophisticated which is not bad but also we become I think more aware of things like look univariate analysis that case would you just compare like overall activity of one condition which is the overall activity in some brain review of the other condition and subtract one from each other that's great that's how you know fMRI started but it's not gonna give you several differences it's not gonna tell you anything about pattern activity differences which is something we're doing now multi very pattern analyses where you can classify you can

1:44:02 use machine learning to distinguish between more subtle or you know differences and with univariate analyses and I think that for those reasons we can be optimistic that progress is being made but we have to be aware that you know it's being made slowly and we have to be careful of course yeah yeah the challenges are steep but I I'm glad that you're that you're optimistic so I'm there's a I mean I could talk forever with you have a lot of interesting things we have a scratch the surface but

1:44:34 I have to kind of wrap things up here so I wonder if there's you know any final comments you want to make anything you want to say before we sign off well if I may I will I would really like to just mention because of how this conversation Wed which I'm really grateful for and you capture really nicely many of the things I I care about I think it's really important that there's collaboration between philosophers and scientists and the dis collaborations go as deep as possible because things like

1:45:08 introspection things like consciousness things like neural correlates of consciousness or attention or basically anything that has to do with the mind it's at least this is my personal take on the issue I don't think that we are as philosophers where we as scientists or dealing with different problems or with different issues I think that the problem is one it's how does the mind work and and the fact that sometimes you can make a philosophical reflection of either the concepts that we use for describing ed or postulate like really

1:45:43 abstract models of how the mind at work or if you're getting your hands dirty and testing you know human brains or monkey brains or something like that that should not distract us from the fact that if this is worth doing it has to be about the same problem right we are asking about how the mind works and the fact that we focus on different methodologies are different levels of explanation should not prevent it from talking to each other reading each other trying to become conversant in

1:46:15 each others these are playing each other discipline so I think I think that having these kind of conversations that like like they wonder we just have and you're someone who has done these also very well it depends which is you know making the boundaries less less marked is really important for these kind of research yeah I couldn't agree more that's a it's a really important point I excellent place to also draw this wonderful conversation to an end so I want to thank you again for spending this time with me I mean I really enjoyed it and I hope to see you around soon

1:46:49 yeah me too I'm really grateful and things it was for for having me okay cool so just stay on for a second I'll talk to you for just a second afterwards but thanks again all right