Consciousness Live! with Carolyn Dicey Jennings (S2 E11)

0:00 Carolyn dicey Jennings so for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do yeah thanks for having me this is so great I'm really looking forward to like I said learning more about kind of taking everything from your mind so yes I have a background in philosophy and psychology and neuroscience I work in a cognitive science department my work is mostly on the topic of attention so what I've been really interested in is how we are able to direct our minds through

0:32 attention and what that ability says about other aspects of the mind so things like perception action consciousness so even though I'm not a consciousness researcher per se I'm not like someone who's just doing consciousness because I work on attention and attention and consciousness there's been a big battle about how those two things are related because of that my work really says some things about consciousness as well yeah and so I don't think I was just finished reading your book the attending mind yes you have a is that printed yet is that

1:06 out that's not out no no I'm actually I've got the proofs right here because if there's any question about what I actually said I'm gonna my deadlines November 22nd so I have a little bit okay I'm on that and then the publication dates in March I'm really excited it's my first book well it's a great book like I just read it it's really good it's highly detailed it covers like a tremendous amount of stuff so I imagine it must have really taken a while to write or I think books always

1:41 take a while and always longer than you think always that I mean you think yeah so the what's one of the really I mean if tons of interesting stuff in there but one of the main interesting I think findings of the book is a kind of new idea of what the self is what the Sun so the idea that attention is directed by an agent or self a subject a substance of so so I was wondering if you could just say a little bit about how you get to how you fit all of that together could

2:14 have some specific questions but I would like to forget yeah yeah and it's good for me also to go through for myself and also if anybody is watching this who doesn't hasn't read the book which is everyone the papers are out on this I do have some work so probably my first hmm I have something all the way back from 2010 but my first thing really clearly about this was 2012 the subject of attention so the idea is that there are there's evidence for a self if you look at research on attention and that comes

2:50 from three domains basically so you have the domain of phenomenology domain of psychology and domain of neuroscience and that is basically laid out in that earliest Anthes article that you have from phenomenology it already seems as though there's a division between when your attention is directed by yourself or in accordance with your current goals and when it sort of grabbed so for example I like to use the example of sitting in a cafe so if you're sitting

3:23 in a cafe and you're reading a paper and there are some people nearby who are having a conversation that's really distracting subjectively there's a difference between allowing your attention to be grabbed by the conversation and then you can contrast that with effort fully continuing to direct your attention at the paper but phenomenologically there's a distinction there and I think historically we use a label of effort maybe it's not always experienced as effortful but I think

3:57 that that's a good way of thinking about it that phenomenological you feel almost like the effort of a muscle against weight that you feel that you have to expend some amount of effort to keep your attention on the current task and not let it be grabbed by external salient forces so that's a phenomenological evidence so I think that that phenomenological evidence is defeasible evidence of a self that directs attention it seems like there's something that's doing that work of pushing against what the world wants us to attend to and then from psychology what you have is this evidence that there is

4:33 a distinction between what's called endogenous and exogenous attention so that there's there are distinctions between and behavior between cases in which your attention is more grabs and when your attention is more eternally directed X so standing for from the outside endo standing from in from the inside right and so similarly I think that's a feasible evidence if there's something inside that's directing attention in one case that's different from you can see behavioral a behavioral difference between that and the case in which there isn't something inside this

5:07 directing okay and then the the neural evidence would be that between top-down and bottom-up attention and again defeasible maybe you know maybe we're laying a construct on top of this data that doesn't best explain it maybe there's another way of explaining it through different set of constructs but I think the most obvious explanation now is that there's something like a self or a subject of attention that's responsible in one case so maybe it's a top-down and bottom-up attention what you see is that there are different networks in the brain for when attention is top-down and when it's bottom-up now

5:43 what I did in the in the book is I kind of went beyond that basic the feasible evidence I tried to make a story that that can stand against many objections to the concept of the self mm-hmm I tried to provide a story of how this could work physiologically in a way that would answer some of those objections and that's fairly complicated and I'm guessing that that is what you have questions about is that specific with that specific view of the self not this you know in direct evidence of the self but what the specific view of the self is is that right yeah yeah so now but I

6:18 really like the the idea of the emergence over himself that's well I'm not sure what the right word is that's constituted or something related to these macro level brain was frequency prophecies I really like that accounts but there is look so can you tell us a little bit about you have you have neural activity at a local level that that activity can represent things like certain sensations

6:52 that activity can also represent things like goals right so you have activity in certain areas of the brain that seems like it corresponds with different kinds of things and in this frontal cortex you might see it as representing goals and so bottom-up and top-down attention you might see as one is allowing you know the areas corresponding the sensation to have more of an impact on the process of attending and then top down would be allowing the ones that are corresponds goals to have more of an impact but one of the things that's very interesting is how those two are balanced against one

7:25 another so back to the cafe example how are you able to push against the like sensation one with the goal how is that possible it's not clear that if you look at just the local level you're going to be able to explain that and so what I think is what I think is a good explanation of of this balancing of the top-down and bottom-up forces is the existence of a self and what the self is in this case is the set of activity so it's going to include these local level actually these ever-present goals as

7:59 well as the local level activity to include sensations all the stuff together but the way I think about it is that the set of local neural activities that that can be represented with waves and so I think of the self as the pattern created by kind of like an interference pattern the pattern created by all these different waves so and what I mean you want to distinguish between the narrative self and the self that's kind of outside of

8:33 the realm of experience so that when we think when we think about ourselves that's not the sort of that's not the self that you're thinking about here this is something that doesn't show up and the narrative self or does it or so that was one of the areas that I was a little bit unsure about what the relation between yeah so one of the things that that I think is unfortunate is that I think people have been I think people have written off the self because of a fear that the only way of having a self is to have a homunculus I think that's a very general fear in the

9:07 science community and I think that that's just wrong headed anything but that's a misapplication of a very specific fallacy to a more general phenomenon which I could talk about this um so I think there are fears like the homunculus fallacy in the background and that has led people be like well we have to explain this illusion of the self because there can't be any real self and so let's talk about like the narrative self or the concept of self or it you know the constructed self basically and I do think that there are ways in which our senses of ourselves can be wrong we

9:40 can be wrong of course about like details about a personality like whether we're good people everyone thinks that they're like a good person like oh I did that or I didn't do that sometimes it can be a little bit ambiguous whether something came from you or not right it's like the late Mary Wheatley's stuff so I think there is something which is our construction of what we are our concept of what we are I think that that's a real thing it's just that I don't think that that's all there is to do self I think that there is something that that construction aims to

10:15 understand just like I think there are real things in the world that are constructions of those above those things are trying to understand so for example if I'm looking at a tree right now in my backyard I think there is a real tree there and that I have a kind of concept or construct of that tree which is an imperfect match to their real tree I think our concept or concept of the self is imperfect match the real self that I don't think that that means that there is no self there uh-huh and so the disconnects that was because I saw MANET on article that you wrote about this and

10:50 so there are some similar comments there were I don't know some of them are not that great but some of them were pretty good I thought and a lot of pushback that you got there seem to be like from Buddhist conceptions of the South that yeah very idea that there is itself is just kind of you know outdated or so passe or so yeah and but but the way you answer that I think is is really good and it's unknown with what you were just saying you're I mean so even if that self was ceasing to exist in some sense there still would be this other kind of direct balancing of the interest that that's

11:24 that's not something that can be that's not really counter evidence to your view at all that's what I think yeah so I it's when you start looking at the Buddhist views of self that's where I think some really there's there gonna be a really interesting contrast with my own view because you know Buddhists have been thinking about attention in the self for a long time and and honestly they there was a lot of argument back and forth that's very sophisticated so if I really wanted to to come up against

12:00 probably what would be my greatest opponent it would be to carefully respond to those kinds of arguments I did try to do a little bit of that with such an ardent canary who said that workshop at NYU Janardan has has published a book attention not self which is informed both by analytic philosophy and by the the Pali tradition right part of Buddhist philosophy and phenomenal anyhow PPR is having a symposium on his book and I wrote a

12:35 discussion note for it and the title of my discussion note is too much attention to little self question you can probably guess what my stances here but I think that what Janardan is done in trying to reconstruct the Buddhist account here of so replacing the self with attention is he's given a lot of power not only to attention but also to consciousness so consciousness ends up doing a lot of the things that I think of the self is doing and it's just not clear to mean that the arguments that are used against the self can't also be used against consciousness when it's playing that

13:08 wool and so that's basically what I say in my discussion now is that it seems as though there's a prior commitment to the absence of self in that tradition and it's not obvious to me that that that prior commitment is itself justified uh-huh interesting so can you give us an example of how the same argument can be used against the consciousness so the idea that well I don't know like which one did you have in mind oh that's a good question I haven't

13:42 looked at that note for a little while so I remember you know I don't have it I don't have it in my mind that way that the argument goes I just remember this discussion of of working memory doing some of the work that I would have self do and thinking that that there was a problem there I'm sorry I don't remember but I will look forward to reading I haven't seen that it's not gonna that's

14:14 gonna be outstanding okay okay I wonder if I could ask you about the brain dynamic stuff in particular so one of the things that's very kind of central to your idea is the idea of a scale-free kind of transformation and in fact I think I've seen you say pretty much that when you see these kind scale-free dynamic said that's that signifies a kind of emergence that the sum of the parts is more excuse me that the whole is more than the sum of the parts and I just wanted like is that a general commitment that you have because like

14:48 for instance you know one of your own examples it's the size of a squares kind of scale-free yeah we don't think that that's an emergent property was where yeah you're right I don't you know in the in the eon article I was still sort of working out some of my ideas so it's I can't remember what I said in response to all of the comments but it may be that I said something there that I wouldn't on more careful reflection okay but I don't I don't think that just because you have the 1 over F signature that you have emergence

15:21 don't think that that's necessarily true so it could be in the contract so in the case of of the square and in many mathematical cases it's just in the way we've set up mathematics and it has that relationship so right is something that's holding those two things together but it's not like something beyond us are making it the case right although I'm not a philosopher of math and out there good like so I don't think there's just because you have that signature

15:57 that you have an emergent object necessarily and just to sing a little bit about what the one over Epping is because I think most philosophers are not aware of this concept yeah I've been sort of introducing it in some of my talks on this and in the even in the cognitive science community I think it's a newer trend in that community to talk about that ok yeah so or scale-free so the example I use in the book if I remember correctly from that chapter I used different examples

16:31 is that of waves so if you're standing on a beach you might have noticed that sometimes the waves come closer to your feet and sometimes further from your feet sometimes you might get a surprise wave that you weren't expecting because it seemed like they were really falling you know further away from you normally so with waves what you find is that if you think of the distance between your feet if you're facing the ocean and the ocean line if you think of that as an amplitude and then you wonder well what is the relationship between a higher

17:07 amplitude that is when the wave is closer to my feet and a lower amplitude when it's further from my feet so it hasn't gotten all the way there what is relationship between that and the frequency of the waves it seemed as though the ones that are coming that are not coming to my feet are less frequent than the ones that are staying away from my feet it's a surprise when they happen right right well there is a there is an inverse relationship there so amplitude of the wave you've considered in this way is inversely related to the

17:40 frequency and that means that less frequent waves tend to be larger in amplitude and that there that is true with a constant so it's not just somewhat it's somewhat true but that there is a constant that is held in that relationship so you see this in many domains and many of my colleagues at cut in at sea is at UC Merced are studying this phenomenon and trying to figure out like when it shows up and when it

18:12 doesn't but you do see it in human behavior you do see it in the brain and what that means is that the waves that you can measure the surface of the skull through EEG what you see is that the slower waves have higher amplitudes and run faster waves and smaller amplitude so gamma waves have very small amplitudes and let's say like a delta wave would have a very large amplitude and so I talked a little bit about this in my book and this is more basically what I think is that that one over F can be a sign of the of the presence of this

18:50 thing but it's not necessarily because it is the presence of the thing it's more the way I think of it is that it's the way that the that relationship is the way that you have a power causal power from the emergent thing over its parts right because because this emergent thing is also related to a body and the body is also something that's that has limitations so basically if the these small gamma waves want to have an

19:24 impact on your behavior but there's also in their presence these larger amplitude delta waves they're going to have to wait until the trough of one of these large amplitude waves in order to bring about a change in the behavior of the body right as they can't you can't the body can't respond to all of these waves at the same time and so it's they're going to have a they're going to have a better chance impact if they're in a trough when there is that large amplitude wave around and it looks like the large amplitude waves are the things that are responsible for

19:56 feedback like the feedback that you get and top-down attention and so what they talk about here is like a phase amplitude coupling that you see these gamma waves shifting to the troughs of the slower amplitude slower frequency larger amplitude waves and so that's where that's where I think you can call this control or causal power or whatever that these top-down this top-down influence is doing something to this bottom-up stuff it's kind of forcing it into the trough right that makes sense

20:29 so that it can have some kind of influence over behavior it doesn't mean it's literally like moving it over but rather that the only parts of the brain activity they're going to be able to influence behavior are the ones in the trough right and so it doesn't mean that kind of gets up to one of the questions I was gonna ask about that which i think is really cool and it's by the way just parenthetically it's nice to see a philosopher is paying attention to this kind of face coupling stuff which i think is oh yeah some of the most exciting interesting work to come out of this yeah I would love to see more

21:01 people writing about him talking about it because it's just currently it's sort of scientifically novel and mysterious and so understanding it better will take more people's thinking about it and talking about it yeah exactly I would also love to see that it's nice to see it generally talked about too because I'm not familiar with it from you know hippocampal stuff which has been talking about for for I mean anyway so let's not get too distracted by the details but one of the questions I had was about the cause of like which way the cause and effect is going here so it's you know certainly is true like you have these

21:33 theta waves around they're going to sort of predispose neurons to fire in certain frequencies yeah and so that your idea there is that okay so this is we can identify with feedback and this is the kind of control over the things there but where do you get the argument that this is you know goal sensitive or so we're I mean so what evidence is there linking this kind of macro brainwave

22:08 stuff I make sure it's feedback but where's it links to sort of interests and goals or I guess suddenly I don't know if this is what you're asking but maybe like the empirical evidence would be a response there so one of my sources on this is the Miller & Cohen yeah piece and so they in this case they believe this is an article looking at monkey brains and so going back to like this in dodges exigence top-down bottom-up stuff you know there are certain ways of

22:42 studying top-down bottom-up and not as exogenous center that are pretty common in the scientific literature and most people think of that distinction as having to do with whether or not your attention is task or goal sensitive right and so they'll have like maybe like a they call it a singleton a an object a visual object that kind of stands out because of its features versus one that you you have a specific goal to look for that one and then they

23:18 look at how early that has an impact on certain areas of your brain so when you see a kind of active the activity response in the brain on the basis of that and and then I think in both cases both objects are present or something like I can't remember the details I'm sorry but anyhow that's where they that's where they see this millencolin established this distinction between top down and bottom up as being bottom up being bottom up when the attention was bottom-up that is when it was grabbed by

23:50 the singleton it tended to be high gamma and it tended to be in parietal cortex and then Li P and then when it was top-down it tended to be low Gomora high beta depending on your definition and it tended to be in prefrontal cortex I think in this case it fef actually so frontal eye fields and yeah it's it's more the setup of these experiments is to try to capture something that's goal sensitive versus

24:23 not goal sensitive and so I think that's also how I argued for it in the chapter as I said you know why should we think that this neural distinction has anything to do with something like mental causation by a self well that's built into what they're trying to capture what they're trying to capture is endogenous eggs and the eggs are just eggs agilis distinction right yeah and I like that but I mean I guess guess yeah I'm not being articulate so let me try one more so when the exact when the exogenous event happens yeah

25:00 and your attention is captured towards it isn't that serving the goal of survival so it seems like there's still a goal there there still oh yeah erecting so how do you so if you want to wait so that's what I was trying to figure out is why do we identify that self-directedness with the macro stuff yeah doesn't like these kind of lower-level things to which seems sort of self-directed yeah so it's not effortful or purposeful or something no yeah so you're right so I think that it

25:35 one of the ways I think about the bottom of bottom of attention cases is that those are long term goals okay okay in some cases why are we so into red you know that probably that's like something from way in our evolutionary past okay we will respond to read very quickly yes like Milliken like the information the evolutionary history of there yeah selection of the mental items or whatever is gonna see that as a response to long term goals right but it for it

26:10 to be something that is from the self we would want to say that it's connected to our current goals no okay doesn't have anything to do with the self is just that it has to at least correspond with your current goals it can also correspond with her term goals but yeah not sensitive to your current goals and that's usually how its defined is as a negative that things that are not top-down or things that are not responsive to your goals although bottom-up is still somewhat responsive to your goals in certain

26:44 cases so the relative distinction okay and then so also something I wanted to ask about which is related to all this was so this is probably but I'm I sort of know what you're gonna say maybe but that's interesting to see that's what you're gonna say so I wonder how you situate your view with people like Michael Graziano I know you've mentioned them a couple of times here and there but so his view is there's no substantive self right yeah there's just the attention schema but but all the

27:17 rest of the details seem kind of like they're very similar and that the whole idea of what's going on is to control attention that what we need is some how to deal with attentional control so there are different mechanisms that do it but do you think you're after the same explanatory target or what do you think you would differ even there I think that we're after the same explanatory target I think it's an important feature of his view that that there is no substantive self as you're

27:50 saying and I think that that is connected to this idea that there's no unified self that comes out of like the split brain research I think that people like Denton and Graziano I think that they you know they've been moved by that and they think okay there's no there's no unifying thing here so there can only be a construct my finger you know Metzinger argue a long time ago that there's a self model there's no self but there's a self model and yeah I think that that's a very different my my

28:25 overall philosophical stance is just very different from that I think that that's interesting and in fact Metzinger was one of the people who sort of got me into philosophies being really sorry this area of philosophy being really excited about his his view and how that might help to explain the consciousness that was an early inspiration but I think it goes too far I think that this you know and he'll set two and heels like oh you know the whole world's a hallucination or what it has me one that we agree on yeah going too far that's

29:04 implied by the science I think it's sort of sometimes I think it's just to get you know to get attention from the public okay so you don't buy in the disc Epis ISM here I mean because I think yeah I think part of what what they're doing is saying that you can ik that what they agree with you that what we wanted is an explanation of how engine is controlled and yeah I think well we can do it by you know some kind of schema without having to resort to anything substantive so and I'm not saying that I agree with them I'm just

29:37 curious why you response to someone who takes that line that says look we don't need to posit this other thing you're talking about because we can explain how attention is controlled so they want to that's what I meant by after the same phenomena same target phenomena they want to explain the same thing that you want to do namely how is attention controlled and they maybe even want to explain the phenomenology but they do so in this kind of minimalistic way so so what's what are they leaving out that's important they not left out in your view besides being on the self I think the emergent level phenomena so I think that one this is another kind of

30:14 finer grained distinction something where you're gonna really see the difference between my view in other people's view if you dig into the details here and I'm not saying I've done all of that work but I've I've definitely thought about it so there is a view that I think a lot of philosophers have actually people like Wayne Lou Sebastian Watson Janardan canary maybe Chris mole that maybe it's maybe the these phenomena I'm talking about our kind of result of local interactions so it might appear as though there's kind

30:46 of like some kind of whole brain phenomena but that's just an appearance it's not really doing any work it's really just coming down to these local interactions and I'm sort of sticking my neck out on there being this perhaps physiological something about the brain that we've missed so we we've been really focused on like neural firing and I think that that's just not all there is to the brain they think that there are some interesting results coming out about about this things like vesicle fluid you know finding like slow wave phenomena and vesicle fluid I think basically like

31:21 nonlinear effects at the whole brain scale I think that that is a that's a scientific bet that I'm making is that you're not going to be able to explain everything about the brain through local neural firing and I think that they're trying to give any kind of attention assuming that that's all you get to do because that's the kind of traditional view of the brain that everything's like neuron to neuron but I what I'm claiming is that there is this other thing and and we know that there is at least one other thing which is like local field

31:53 potentials but those are those are relatively small or at least what we've been able to find with local field potentials are relatively small so these they have found that even when two neurons are not touching when they're cut that one can do the other to fire because of the field that they're in so and that's a local field potential right so the question is whether those kinds of findings are going to extend beyond that very small region and I'm betting that they will and maybe I'll be wrong their physiological whole brain

32:27 phenomena that they are kind of discounting the possibility of interesting okay yeah because there's a lot of other stuff that you agree on too like they agree that you can a potential without consciousness and consciousness a lot of tension and so yeah that's I wonder how you might respond to a kind of a version of the homunculus objection that maybe could be asked to be you so if you think of the control that the emergent self has over these lower-level

33:02 phenomenon how do you how do you do the count for the control of the control is there the thing that's controlling the subject or how is this what why isn't there a need for a further step back as soon as you go down this kind of so how do you and again exactly I'm lucky no fallacy but it is kind of a regress question I'm under I guess in this case the in the homunculus fallacy there is like an idea that there is a thing and then you're making a whole new thing and then that

33:35 new thing is controlling the first thing in this case you have a thing and then you're just like the parts of the things are being controlled by the the whole of those parts that all those parts together are controlling their individual parts right and so you're not really saying that there's an outside thing coming in so I guess I don't really know what further set you could have beyond just the set of parts that would be like is there a set of sets that needs to control that set I don't see why that would be necessary I guess

34:08 another way of putting it is the monkeyest fallacy there's an assumption that you first of all it's about explaining perception and consciousness meant not about the self per se and so I think using it to argue against the existence of the self is is wrongheaded because of that because the point of it is that if you're trying to explain perception or consciousness by bringing about a new self to do that then you haven't explained anything I think that's correct but but that doesn't show that there is no self it just shows that you can't just induce a new self or just use this new thing to try to explain the

34:42 thing that you're used to explain that thing basically okay so another way of looking at it is when people talk about monkey less fallacy they're thinking of they're already being the self that is like the bodily agent and now you're adding a new self which is like the thing inside of the head and what I'm saying is I think that there's one self and I'm trying to explain what that self is it's not like I think that they're already that we already all agree that what the self is is the body I think we don't agree that that's what the self is I think it's obvious that that we we refer to the self in ways that wouldn't

35:18 make sense if it was just the body right like when we refer to mean carnation that doesn't make any sense achill it's about if the self is just the body then what would it mean for the self to survive death bodily death that wouldn't that would be nonsensical getting to use this concept in ways that still need to be cashed out and that's what I'm trying to do here is to explain that first self not to bring about a second self right so what so then the so is this a at a more general level just

35:53 as they're just agents level causation and then you're gonna say and that's where the causal story ends there's no so what the chart so I if I understand the account they and I want to get into them accredit determination so I think it's really cool but so if we if we think of the self as what it's doing is controlling these parts so it's it's determining what things are going to be attended to a you know and which things are not but there's no thing which is determining how that determination is

36:25 being made no so it doesn't know for me the way I've been thinking about it is that there is a smacker level thing the self and that the reason that the macro-level thing the self comes about is because it's it's in charge of controlling the body yeah and that the body is itself a macro level thing in a world where it needs to engage with things at that level and so basically you have this emergence of a self because of the limitations of a body in a macro level world so all those things are emerging at once the the

37:00 world as we interact with it is not at them at the micro particle level right and because of that and because the limitations of our body at a macro level then you're gonna have to have this coordination of micro also kind of in the brain between that size stuff if that makes sense it's kind of like all the stuff is emerging at once yeah I'm just wondering what's the what's the cause of the the way in which the things are biased so the way in which the self controls

37:34 in my story it's one of the things that I that I allow in this story is that there could be global supervenience so it could be that you have a deterministic picture at the macro level that can be accounted for reductively accounted for by the micro level if you include every single thing in the world but at the local level when you're just looking at like one being you could not do that because they're being shaped by things at this macro level I don't know

38:10 if that may be so its it's cuz I think my view is consistent with a deterministic picture at a global level and a reductionistic picture at a global level yeah I think what a lot of people care about when they care about the existence of itself is whether there is something separable from something like being controlled by your genes or you know is there something if there's something special about selves that goes beyond just like what's provided to us at Birth is there any kind of like

38:43 internal causal structure basic writing world uh-huh and I think you can have an account of that and still keep micro level determinism it's Michael level reductionism at a global level right yeah that's a good point do you see just as a kind of non sequitur but do you see that this is something that I mean you extend this to other animals besides nonhumans I assume is this something that non-biological organism can do on your view I had I honestly don't know but but I think

39:19 there is I think there are features of the brain that are really special here and one of those features so I think the biology matters that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it non biologically but that they're probably going to be very special features of the biology that allowed for this kind of relationship yeah some of those things are like that the kind of thing that the brain is doing you know is handling sensations and so you know things III know I haven't talked about consciousness but I think that that is that is related to a body

39:54 is going to be an important part of getting something like consciousness out of this right but but understanding of you like your simple robots like Roomba you know the robot vacuum cleaner I don't think so because I think you're going to have to have a system in which the physiological the basis the physical basis of it is going to have the ability both for for like these local firing communities that are somewhat separable from the global effects you're gonna

40:26 have to have those difference we're gonna have to be some kind of global thing at some kind of local thing and then an interaction between them right but I mean those simples those simple systems they have to somehow arbitrate between competing I don't know if we want to call them interest but at least so Roomba plugs itself in when it's low on battery and it has to make somehow internally determination to stop it's vacuuming pattern to go back and plug itself in yeah that looks like a competition between you know directives or something yeah but but it's not gonna result and I mean these kind of macro

41:01 micro level coordinated patterns but isn't that kind of control already something which maybe your theory doesn't allow asking really good questions and they're you know people have brought this up like Eric schwitzgebel has this great paper what it's called functionalism is true in the United States tourism is true oh it's materialism it's true okay and you know

41:36 it's it's many people have thought about social groups as being the kinds of things that maybe operate this way so and I think about a culture sort of people economic systems should you think of them as having this kind of relationship but night I'm just I'm not sure yet and so it I don't know all the mediums in which this could take place in I just don't think the Roomba has the requisite makeup to do it but what does and what are the limits of it I'm not I'm not

42:11 sure I am really interested in you know looking at for example Twitter communities I'm not going to do this anytime soon but I there are some graduate students in our group who have looked at looked at for example there's a really great graduate student who's looked at Twitter tweets after gun violence and is there any change in the way in the length of time that people talk about the event is there any change based on the severity of the the event

42:45 so do people talk longer about events when they're more serious when they're more people who died or something like that it just doesn't seem like that's true and to me that looks like just a bottom-up system the way people seem like they interact on Twitter is just there's basically like an hour most people's responses are right away and then it's over yeah thanks Facebook is where all the top-down stuff is come on yeah like are there any like top down effects similar

43:18 to this you know you can really see a kind of strengthening of signal in certain cases that's what you see with top-down attention right you know you get this like strengthening of the signal and and then it lasts longer it can have a larger effect it would be really interesting if someone found that at the social level and if the mechanism was plausibly something similar I mean that would be that would be super interesting obviously it's not possible I just don't I just don't I don't know

43:52 and I do want to get at consciousness before we have to go actually but so far we're only talking about the self but I think it's really cool the work that you're doing on the self with reinvigorating a lot of these questions come on with the neural philosophy but one of the what I guess this last thing I'll ask about the self but one of the things that I sort of think of the self as in traditional context philosophical ones at least is as supposing to be the same over time like it's the thing which personal identity over time that's not what you view their self as right no it's a constantly being

44:27 it's constantly being updated or yeah it's constantly being impacted by I think experience basically is small changes to the self right okay yeah that's and that's cut ment I think a lot of that is coming out of the phenomenology phenomenological tradition especially with existentialist kind of ideas that the self is just you know kind of project a forward-looking this yeah instead of then I think there's a lot of connection between I mean and you have all chapters of this on the book to

45:00 drawing out these connections so I think that's really cool but so this is not the sort of thing that's going to grow on personal identity in this strong sense of being the same over time no I mean that there isn't the continuity of some sort no so yeah I also I don't think that we need to to say that there's like a new self created every moment I think that that that trend in philosophy has been motivated by the new the self is limited to experience that it can't exist outside of experience so an experience for each experience are gonna have a new self and I just don't see any reason why

45:34 I should accept that okay that it's limited to what's in experience and that reminds me one final thing I said it fine already but one more thing is the whole idea of it being outside of experience yeah it was a bit puzzling to me because a part of the evidence for it is that we have phenomenology of the self yeah so I'm wondering in what sense is it outside of it I mean I know it's the thing in your view which sort of organizes they experience them right way but in what sense is it phenomenologically outside of experience i don't know how anything could be phenomenologically outside of experience

46:08 because but I guess that's sort of mr. O's view right he there's this I guess there's these ideas of things that are like horizons or limits or whatever the things that inform the edges of the experience or something but are those really inexperience or okay so so you don't endorse the claim that is phenomenologically outside of experience I don't know how I would know know so I think that basically I think that

46:40 phenomenology is evidence of this self I think that also when we interact with others we have evidence of others being selves but that none of those are perfect evidence I don't think that we have perfect access to to our own self right I mean yeah because part of me was feeling like there was a bit of a Content trended some of the stuff though that you're saying but that's not what you're saying it's not like a transcendental self that's that's putting together the experience but isn't itself part of experiencer I guess I'm probably more of a Content than that

47:19 I'm allowing yeah I just I'm not sure that you could say that it's that it's discoverable I I think that our experience points to it but I don't think that it's that it like necessitates it or something like that I think that it would be possible to experience being the self in it for it to be an illusion okay so I think that it's in with the addition of this other evidence from behavior and from neuroscience right we're like okay there

47:53 really is something separable here okay I don't know if that's what you were asking but it yeah it is so let's I want to talk about consciousness okay so and and you have a lot to say about the consciousness I think it's very very interesting but I want really want to talk about the idea of conscious entrainment which i think is a really super cool example of a possibility of consciousness without attention but but first I wanted to just kind of get your Oh synopsis of your argument that conscious perception requires attention

48:27 so can you tell us so what's the difference between consciousness and conscious perception and then can you give us a argument for why conscious perception requires attention okay so the difference between consciousness and conscious perception for me is that in the case of perception you have an experience that's informational to you in some way so I think that you can have experiences that are not informational in nature when you do have experiences that are

49:00 informational in nature I think what makes them distinctive why we call them informational is because we take them to have meaning for us and I argue is that providing mean for us is going to require something that differentiates what could become information so basically the data according to our goals and interests so it's in basically the job of attention is to prioritize

49:34 input according to our goals and interests and so by prioritizing that input according to our goals and interest it's differentiating the input according to our goals and interests and then basically mapping that input onto something that has meaning for us and so I think that we need to explain why it is that there's a distinct between sensation and perception and I think that the addition of attention is plausibly what allows for that distinction I also go about in a different way which is to say if you

50:07 look at it from within phenomenology again people have talked about like well what are the different what are the different we know that there's some sort of structure in perception that's that's special yeah that makes it distinct from from sensory input and what is that that special structure and people have talked about well it's organized into objects the problem with the unity is really to try to figure out how you get from sensation to objects or its face it's maybe because those sensations are organized in a spatial framework or there's like a unified field that we're

50:41 experiencing and I basically in the chapter argue against those ways of those as I say that those while those are in parts of perception that they're not the foundational structure and that we need some other thing to be the foundational structure and that it's much more plausible to see the foundational structure as provided by the subjects so what so what is this meaning supposed to be in in this case so what what is a you mean big because one thing is I have was the way you're

51:13 talking I would usually associate it with something like you know episodic memory or some something that places me in the context yeah and conceptualizes the relevant things but that's not that is what you're talking about or is that because those processes don't seem laughs airily that's like that's that's getting closer I think like your concept of yourself episodic memory I think depends on like the you know indexical knowledge and stuff like that and I think that's a little bit I'm thinking of something more low-level something like your evaluation so there are some cool

51:50 philosophers and we're working on the value systems in the brain thinking about those as somehow integrated and what I'm thinking about here is that basically what attention is doing in these cases is it's applying or value systems to this input so your value systems are like subcortical they apply through the orbital frontal cortex right so both so I guess can you say why this is what what the conscious part of it is

52:28 so so far I hear like perception yeah so that I don't hear a conscious perception yeah you're totally right so I conscious perception because for my argument I rely on evidence from phenomenology and from experience okay and so it seems plausible to think that there are unconscious forms of perception I know that there's a debate about this but to me that's plausible and I'm just not sure if if I can make the leap to all forms of perception given that my

53:03 evidence has come from experience I say aha and so I it's it's I'm really talking about perception but I'm limiting it to conscious perception because of that I see okay so it's at least a theoretical possibility that this could happen unconsciously what you're talking about this structure in terms of value yeah okay yeah so attention might be just required for perception in general but if I understand what you're just saying you're saying since you're drawing a lot on the conscious cases you don't want to over generalize the cases right but do

53:37 you think we have any reason to make that generalization are you just being overly cautious or is it you think there's no reason to make that step I'm honestly really confused about even how to think about the line between some kind of subconscious conscious yeah like basically the subcategory is pretty weird may think a lot of unconscious perception are really subconscious perception it's just hard to say what what's going on there uh-huh yeah so so that's why I wanted to start off by asking like what the difference

54:10 when consciousness and conscious perception yeah I was sort of always in the background here so can you say something about the consciousness part of it like how do you understand that term here in this context in this context so my view of consciousness is pretty weird what I'm mostly doing in the book is they're all pretty weird but yeah so I'm mostly arguing against the super popular way of thinking about consciousness which is like the global

54:42 work space theory view right and and in that view consciousness is this global workspace and then attention brings things into the work space and so attention is necessary for consciousness right and I think that that's pretty common that the sea consciousness is like a thing that things have to be brought into and they know that there have been lots of people who argued against that's a Dan Dennett for examples like no no no thing in a specific place and time that you're bringing things into that's absurd that's like the Cartesian theater right I think that the global work space

55:15 theory is almost explicitly embracing the theater you know bars where bars like talks about it as a theatre with actors and on the stage that's wrong I don't think it makes sense think of consciousness as a thing I do think it makes sense the scene itself as a thing and so the way I see consciousness is that it's a relationship between the self and non-self or world so or actually probably more specifically that it's one aspect of that relationship so you have the self and the things that's engaging with are in a relationship and then from

55:48 the selfs perspective it has impacts on itself on it that are coming from the non self and from the non self perspective the world's perspective there are things that the subject is doing and so what I say in the book is that I think of consciousness as one aspect of that relationship the one from the perspective of the self and I think of action as the other aspect of that relationship right so when we when we describe someone's behavior as an action rather than a reflex I think what we're doing is we

56:22 are you're viewing indirectly the self so we have a relationship with that self and we're like that's that's the self there that's having an impact and I think for us when we have a conscious experience that's us having the we're experiencing the world the world influencing us yeah so it's the reverse of that relationship if that makes sense so it's a pretty weird view I don't know if anyone else has like a consciousness as a relationship viewer or aspect of

56:56 relationship view I haven't done all the work that I would need to dispel out exactly what that means but that's that's where I am right now okay thinking of it in that way and so yeah perception is one way of having that relationship okay okay so where did where do you fall on like the like to what it's like terminology so one way of picking out consciousness in terms of what it's like for the subject are you okay with that are you suspicious that terminology you're okay with it I'm okay with that because well minimally what I

57:29 think I think a lot of those problems marry the bat zombies yeah is the subject I think people think that it's really about consciousness and I think that that's because they've written out this subject really and so I think you know what does it like to be a bat well that's a very different subject is very hard for us you know usually what we do is we try to align the features of ourselves as much as we can with others right understand well arguably I mean I don't work on empathy but arguably that's something that we're doing and

58:01 it's very hard to do that with something like a bat so really trying to understand this other subject and yes like experience for that subject is a relationship between the subject in the world but I think what we're having a difficult time doing is aligning with that subject uh-huh and I think similarly in the zombie case we we're not sure if there's a subject there we're imagining it as like a mechanism we're like yeah okay maybe there's just like a machine that's making those sounds and doing those things we're imagining this like totally automated

58:32 mechanism at least that's what I do when I'm like okay it's plausible like I wonder if there is really a subject there we have this in direct access to other subjects so maybe it's not there and then maybe along with it not being there consciousness isn't there because those two things fall together it's not like consciousness as a thing that's in there that were really focused on I think when we're we're thinking about that and then Mary you know with the redness what why does she need to experience it because she has to integrate it into her own experience it just your that's a necessary part of her learning and I think that that's that's

59:06 part of her being a subject too so I think I think subjectivity is just at the heart of a lot of these issues I don't know why we haven't talked about that yeah I mean it's a good point I I guess I mean I agree subjectivity is the heart of the issue yeah I wonder if you need a substantive self to have subjectivity which I guess is yeah but I mean I'm kind of you know I would like to endorse the idea of a substance itself but I've been brainwashed by the kind of you know schemas for us that's why I like your

59:41 work that's a new way of thinking about these these issues but just to get back to the zombie stuff you so did you just say zombies wouldn't have us cells I think seems like the straight forwardly on your view they would though I mean okay so I think that they if they're physically identical than they do but I'm saying that the information that that it wouldn't be conceptually obvious to us that they do so that's something I think that we have that we should infer the existence of a self based on the neuro scientific behavioral

1:00:16 and experiential data but if we're just you know experiencing someone from the outside yeah we can be we can be not a hundred percent sure but their self even if we had that data right it's not it's not we have in direct access to them to them as a self so why would we be less than 100 percent certain I mean if we can show that they have interests and that the interest competes yeah and there's some top-down process then there would still be a question about is it a

1:00:48 self I really do think that if we were engaging with something like that yeah we would assume there's a self but Chalmers is pushing at you know certainty mmm-hmm are you certain is there any possibility that they're not and I think as long as our evidence is indirect of course there's a possibility with beings that have personalities you know you interact with an animal for any length of time and you notice that it's

1:01:20 different from other animals of its same species you're like huh there's something different about you know it's got like some kind of like personality that means that it's it has interests yeah I think it's very quick when you interact with the animals in that way to be like okay they're experiencing and they have souls but isn't that an extra I mean so I guess yeah isn't that an extra step so couldn't you have yourself without the experience that's kind of going back to your robot yeah yeah I mean I'm I'm not I'm kind of leaning towards biological yeah it might

1:01:56 be that going back also to your point about like the social systems and other views of emergence maybe you could have things that have the same structure of a self but it's not connected to my body or its job is not to like organize the body through receiving sensations or whatever right and in that case then yeah it's gonna have a very different character I don't even know if it would make sense to call the soul uh-huh because it would be so different it would have it still be emergent and it

1:02:29 would maybe have the control but not for the sake of kind of like running its own biological life right um so what's a good questions why do you think that that part is gonna lend the subjectivity are they you know the phenomenal character to the experience what where's the connection if there is one on your view sort of to folk psychology that relates like the felt aspect of experience to this relation this aspect of a relation to the world good question I mean I guess like this is this like it matters to you so you're a self you're

1:03:04 something that controls stuff and that they new control you're controlling because it matters to you and it just seems like that's gonna be because of a biological thing like you only got so much time limits yeah I don't know why that would be a necessary thing why does valuing mattering rely on biological limitation it does seem like there's something interesting there that I don't yeah because you say in the book like it you disapprovingly quote the I

1:03:37 forget who said it but they were they said something like if we had heads the size of a watermelon than we wearing an attention and you said well no we would because we still have interests or whatnot but it sounds like you're sort of saying well if we didn't have a body at all or if our bodies are very different than we might not need these things in the way that gives rise to consciousness yeah yeah I think that the constraints matter yeah I think that the constraints are really important part of this and I think that that's something that Wayne was did a really excellent job of helping to explain to the philosophical community why are like the bodily constrains so

1:04:11 important yeah well I noticed we really had time and I like I said I have to a little bit as scheduled tain I know you have this talk that you have to go to but I'd we haven't talked about the entrainment stuff which i think is really is I want to ask you about that because I I mean I I won't anyway so can you tell us what is consciousness raiment on your view and how is it evidence for kind of consciousness that's independent of attention yeah cool so so this is my argument that like I said there is consciousness without

1:04:44 attention I I spend a lot of time in that chapter just like my journal of the APA paper going through some other arguments for it yeah I'm finding them to be not very successful and then and if we had the fullness of time I would ask you about those I think those are it's all good stuff okay so basically what I think is that it's pretty well-established in the scientific community that hasn't become habituated to something you use us attention yeah and I think of skills as cases in which you are habituated to something and so

1:05:20 it's plausible to think of your experience during skills as going to be as being a form of experience that does not require attention because you're dealing with something that you are waited to and we know that that reduces a need for attention that's the basic that's the basic story so I think that a lot of the evidence for consciousness has been based on studies that use novel stimuli and novel tasks right rather than ones you're very familiar with and I think they do that on purpose but I think that that's one of the reasons that people haven't really explored as much the case in

1:05:53 which you are habituated plus I think that there's been this tendency to think that once you're habituated you lose consciousness so people describe autopilot as a case in which our unconscious and driving right and I don't I think that that's something that they think it's like required for their view or something so they just like throw it in there that you must be unconscious in that case and I just think that that's plausible I think it's plausible that you don't require attention and I think it's plausible that you're still just having experience so I go through like anecdotes and and evidence and stuff like that empirical evidence one thing

1:06:27 that might be worth adding is I'm working with a grad student right now Alex Dyer and we've been working on the view that that you should see skilled behavior as pluralistic that is sometimes uses attention sometimes it doesn't and so one of the things you find is that there are these khon kaen different there's anecdotal reports about skilled behavior where sometimes it seems like they're saying oh no no no I was focusing a lot and other times they say like no no I wasn't using attention at all I was just in the moment and I think that one explanation

1:07:02 of that is this is this pluralist approach however the pluralist approach allows that there are moments where you're not using attention and you're still consciously experiencing and so that's really what I'm thinking of I'm not saying that that what it means to be skilled is to never use attention again for your skill but I am saying that when you are skilled in something it's possible to have a kind of experience where you're not using attention so why is so in and I know the examples you gave you say typically this sort of thing arise like it's sports and playing an instrument you have an example of

1:07:35 your own case from doing art I guess and as a court of quote musician I've had similar sorts of experiences but so you're gonna say the same thing about driving because that's I think really that's the place where most people have the kind of experience that you're talking about right but it's the the kind of features that you focus on namely or the subject object distinction like you're totally engrossed in the thing that you're doing you describe it as a case where you have you perceive yourself at least or

1:08:08 something as only having one interest at the moment namely but that's not the way a lot of peen it's very rare that you're gonna have that sort of experience when you're driving yeah right I mean most of the time so yeah it's probably much more likely for our everyday men you know well-trained tasks super habitual tasks washing the dishes driving etc it's very likely that rather than staying with that task once

1:08:42 it's bitumen other tasks in our minds right you're kind of obsessed with tasks so we're dealing with like oh that argument you know that we had with a chair of our department or we're dealing with whatever we've got all kinds of stuff going on in our minds and I think that when we can do something automatically we tend to prefer to shift consciousness to something else right so but just really quickly in those cases like the distracted driver there you do have more of a case of the drivings

1:09:14 unconscious in a sense like you're not aware that aspect yeah right yeah if you're like reviewing so there are these different modalities right so it could be auditory mostly so it could be that I mean it's still going to probably dim your visual experience relative to the auditory so if you're kind of auditorily rehearsing an argument that you just had while driving that's probably going to dim your visual experience relative to your auditory experience it's going to be like less present to you right that doesn't mean that it's gone completely

1:09:46 like well I mean it certainly is the case like people say oh I I didn't even realize I stopped at the stoplight and then suddenly you're stopped there and yeah you like you say you were thinking about the Li yeah I'd said let's say the compliment your chair gave you right but that's in that sort of case you would say okay so did you were you consciously aware of the stoplight obviously you're wherever you stopped about where you're consciously aware of it I think it's a little less clear to me anyway that you

1:10:18 are although you might have been aware of the surroundings generally it's not clear that you are aware consciously that's that like obvious case it's one of these subconscious things where yeah in your experience you just to notice it or was it not in your experience it's it's not the fringes and that's why I think the other arguments haven't been successful is because they're like well let's focus on that stop sign or that type let's see if we could spear 'mentally tell if you're confident your subjects aren't sure the behavior it's

1:10:51 not obvious it's just it's not it's not an easy task so I think that seeking the experience wholesale is a little easier so you know that doesn't require it exactly and there are cases like certainly you know I remember once in a car when a deer jumped out and we had this swerve to avoid the car and in that case it didn't seem there was the kind of experience of driving that we may be talking about here that we were just like that was the only thing that was there you and the deer and that steering well so I think we at least sometimes have those kinds of experiences what I wonder about is why we describe it as a

1:11:25 case where there's no attention as opposed to where there's hypertension now I know you want to distinguish attunement yeah and attentiveness mm-hmm so can you super say what that distinction is and then how why I to men is not a kind of attention on your view yeah I think this is fairly fairly simple to explain so you you want to be able to the basic problem in attention research and in philosophy in particular is to distinguish attention from other forms of selection so we know that you can

1:11:58 have these like automated selection mechanisms you can like kind of like a door to a room a door selects certain size objects things that are a lot larger or won't fit through the door right but it's not attention and it's not attention right there are things like that filtering mechanism selective mechanisms in the brain that it's we don't call attention we call other things you have them in the eyes you have filtering in the eyes already and we just don't think of that as attention so why conceptually do we distinguish that and where is the line you know when

1:12:34 does a selection mechanism become attention basically right and for me I think that it's plausible to say that it becomes attention when it has to do with the whole organism that's one of the ways of thinking about it is that we call something attention when it corresponds with something to do with the whole organism not when it's just just a part of the organism like the eye yeah so when it's going to be used for behavior for example that took one way of doing it so I think it's really important to separate filtering from attention and that's something that I share with with other philosophers like

1:13:08 Wayne Wu is a and Sebastian Bach so like we we know we need to find a distinction there that doesn't mean it has to be a sharp line but somewhere a distinction yeah and to me that means that the mere fact of being attuned to something the mere fact of half happening to do one thing at a time that could result from a filter right so just the fact of being apparently focused is not going to be enough just show that you have the

1:13:42 presence of attention because we know that there are these different ways of selecting so that's I think that conceptually we need to distinguish attention from mere focus or mere result of a filter and I think that that is something that my opponents have not done I think that they just say well you're focused so you're attending and I I think that if they thought more carefully about it they wouldn't say that I think it's easy to mix them up because in everyday life so you almost always go together but this is a case in

1:14:16 which I think we've are kind of these mechanisms that we've trained are doing the the focusing for us in a way that is more like filtering right okay but phenomenologically would you say it seems like attending or even there would you say it doesn't seem like attending or are we're just getting confused but the phenomenology of focus with attention I'm not sure that people really have like a clear phenomenology of attention I think that there's the effortful stuff that I talked about so

1:14:48 the top down part of attention I think that people would say okay I know what it's like to effortful you attendant and I know what it's like to to kind of zone out you know to have everything kind of go go blurry or whatever is I'm not really focused at all I'm just sort of I don't know I think William James has an example like that so those two things maybe and maybe the second one is a kind of like a lack of focus or intensity so maybe that is a kind of phenomenology of attention wait

1:15:26 so what was your question again was that in these cases of the constants entrainment it seems I mean I would describe it as a case of seeming like I'm paying attention but only to that one thing or in a so super vivid way or something so I'm just curious whether he thought that so I see the distinction between a two man attention and I like it but if it extends it extends on your view to the level of phenomenology as well I do you think there's no phenomenological sense of attending in those kinds of conscious entrainment cases you know I don't have that same

1:16:00 intuition that you do but I haven't done the work of sort of going through the accounts to see if if that's like a plausible over it's difficult because like I said I think that it's it's best described as a pluralist account the anomaly I have and that I've been developing with Alex Dyer where you periodically go back and forth between an attention and an on attending state even when you're attending so even when you're in like a full attentive State there still is periodicity between it like attention mind wandering say yes

1:16:32 knowing in any moment what you're doing is difficult and and phenomenological reflection is difficult so just one account isn't enough just my own experience won't be enough but I'd have to do is kind of go through a systematic see if there's like a trend right and and I don't know if if that's fair I do think that sometimes your attention can be grabbed and that's very that feels that feels like something so I think your example the dear you know it's like wow I think there's a of that I think is right that that can feel like your attention is being moved to that thing all of them yeah but when you're really

1:17:05 in this like full flow state the kind that I was thinking of at the drawing so that's what I'm remembering right now is my drawing experience to me I I wouldn't have described that as feeling like attention but I wouldn't know what to say felt like in terms of attention I thought was that she was not the first concept that would have come to my mind I felt very connected to the thing I was drop the person I was drawing and I felt like the the distance between us even a spatial distance that kind of collapse but there just it was structurally really different I know that I have the tools even to describe

1:17:38 that kind of experience in part because they don't think we talk about it as much we talk a lot about the other the perceptual form of experience as I was yeah which then not a lot of about these other any dreams meditation stuff like that I think is there are other cases that may have a similar structure right don't really know exactly what to do with them so isn't it on your view that these are gonna lack lack meaning for the for the person right but is that do you think I mean so you think that's the right way to characterize these sorts of states

1:18:12 that they are experienced as lacking meaning because it seems that seems kind of counterintuitive to me really counterintuitive so I probably have to do something like sneaky there I guess I don't think that there felt as though you're gathering information okay right what I think what I think is going on is that you're using a lot of this structure so you've already got you basically you've done that thing so many times you've drawn or whatever so many times so you have these structures in

1:18:46 place so you don't have to gather more information to have the relationship with the object anymore but there is there are still like news there are still new sensations maybe you haven't had before and so yeah I can't remember want to say in the book about this I'm sure I have some response but I think but there there is something a little weird there about the fact that it's still sensory right and and yet I think

1:19:23 it's not informational and it does have meaning in a way but it's not new meaning but yeah it's yeah okay so I reread that for the book also I just want care so what is your view about the self in that kind of case so is the self app gone no I don't think so okay I think there's no attention so wondering what how what is it doing in that case I think what I think in this case is that the subject is in a much more direct relationship with the world so instead

1:19:57 of using attention to prioritize the in the input basically and to shift to the things that are the most important for the subject based on its current set of goals and interests instead it's allowed for this case to happen where there's one goal or interest that's dominating and so then it has basically a straight direct really a more direct relationship with the world uh-huh so it's not being mediated through attention there's no prioritizing work being done so but I thought the self just was the control of

1:20:31 attention so if there's no control of it it's like the pattern of interests and the pattern has control over those component interests uh-huh but the pattern exists beyond that control okay so the pattern exists at this point it's just not exerting any control yeah so so on okay so I'm having a little puzzle here because I thought you said that like before there was attention there

1:21:03 was no self so before you have the exercise attention the self doesn't exist yeah so I think but it seems like you would predict on your view that before attention all experience was like conscious entrainment no that's another distinction between myself and like someone like Heidegger okay you know like thinking okay well when I meditate I find this state where there's a loss of self that means that that's the more basic and fundamental state that the

1:21:39 state in which there is a self that must be illusory that's self and I just I disagree with that so that's the same thing Heidegger does basically it's like you when you become skilled with this object you discover proximity with the world that was lost when you get the distance from the object or whatever and so it must be that that proximity one that's the fundamental one and I don't and I kind of reverse that I'm like no I think it's subject first and then you can lose the sense of self because the self isn't doing the work of applying attention to that incoming input so you lose a sense

1:22:12 of self that doesn't mean itself is gone it's still there but I don't I think that it comes about with the first act of attention as I as I said but I think that it it once it comes about it exists beyond those acts so it definitely is that on your view that even so conscious experience doesn't exist prior to the attention use of attention yeah that's my view uh-huh okay yeah that's very interesting [Music] yeah well I'm thinking of thousand things that I could ask you but I'm

1:22:45 noticing the time here and sensing imminence four-year-olds running around rampant so just as a way to kind of wrap all this stuff up I wonder if there's anything I know tons of stuff that we haven't talked about but is there anything that you were hoping would come up that hasn't come up yet that we could that you wanted to talk about and the answer can be no but I just always want to check no I didn't have anything specific in mind I guess I was just excited like I said about learning from you I know that you've had lots of interviews of people on consciousness and or you've published a ton on consciousness and it's been mostly me gabbing on about here I'm here to talk

1:23:20 to you yeah exactly thank you for for doing that but I was you know if I was hoping for any other thing it would be more of a dialogue so I could hear like what your views are all the same issues which I heard a little bit about but yeah I would love to hear more about what you think about these issues well we'll have to talk more about that sometime generally I try to highlight your ideas here and I know I know and again thank you and I and I do just joking I think the book is really excellent and I think it's a real

1:23:53 contribution it's really interesting I don't really see a lot of that kind of innovative neural philosophy in the way that I used to be in the 90s I think it you know there's a lot of people didn't philosophy up neuroscience but I think of really taking the neuroscience and applying it to philosophical issues that try to find new ideas that stem from the neuroscience I think that's a that's something that's that's really exciting about your work so I think that's really cool and I do hope that people read it and maybe if you ever want to come back and have more of a less of a you know interview more of a dialogue they not be

1:24:28 happy to have yeah all right well thank you again so much I really appreciate talking with you and I'll say bye to you off there okay sounds good and we are often