Consciousness Live! with Matthias Michel (S2 E2)

0:00 okay we are live joining to me today is a very special guest all the way from I'm assuming Paris Mathias Michele so for those who don't know you in Matthews can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do yes I'm a PhD student at Southern University in Paris and so I'm doing my PhD in philosophy of science not philosophy of mind the detection of consciousness in the

0:35 neuroscience of consciousness so I'm working on the difference detection procedures that are used by consciousness scientists so it's mostly to detect consciousness or contents not states of consciousness yeah I mean I'll take that as a hostile comment I guess that's just not philosophy of mind ask you a little bit about the head and Abids but I like because your work is interesting because not only is it kind of historically based that you want to understand where the stuff comes from

1:07 but also is very contemporary as well so it's got a I think a good mix of looking back but also trying to see where we are and where where the field is going you and you still haven't defended your dissertation you say no I'm going to defend in September okay Wow congratulations to look to was it that quasi dr. cool well congratulations yeah your work is excellent how did you get interested in consciousness generally like were you

1:39 interested in before grad school yeah yeah I was interested in consciousness before high school during my third year so basically my first and almost only class in analytic philosophy when I was in in the lessons with the three first years here in France my first class was in philosophy of mind and so

2:13 we we studied consciousness a lot obviously and so at some point I thought that analytic philosophy was only philosophy of minds and because is the inference we don't have a lot of analytic philosophy so yeah studying consciousness was kind of obvious for someone doing analytic philosophy I guess and so how does it how does cuz you have a very philosophy of science orientation I would say which I think is is nice at your opening

2:46 comment suggested right but so if your exposure to it was in the philosophy of mind and how did you gravitate towards the more philosophy of science MA in philosophy of science in Paris and so I got interested in philosophy of science at that time thinking more and more about like classical topics in classical science and also I read least invariance book yeah that's a great by the same concept and I must say that it really

3:23 changed a lot of things about the way I've thought about consciousness science at that time and I kind of realized that I was more interested in the ways in which scientists try to study consciousness than in the classical debates in philosophy of mind yeah no need to take this kind of philosophy of science approach to consciousness science well that's very interesting yeah cuz her book is I think it's the first example that I know of in the

3:55 contemporary literature of someone trying to really take consciousness seriously as a scientific concept like what what are they doing what are they studying at what methodology old tools can we use so um that was gonna ask you about that so I'm glad that you said that so that's interesting so when you won one of the kind of lessons I think that we can take from some of your work is this there's a kind of myth in the science of consciousness that it began in the 90s and a lot of your work or not a lot of it but I think some portion of your work is

4:27 or like I don't know if that's well anyway would you think it's fair if someone said some portion of your work is aimed at trying to show that really there's a longer history and that in fact it's more than just a longer history we see a kind of similar pattern repeating through the history yeah exactly it's so kind of you know return [Music] and thinking that they're the first to study it I would love to do them to take several quotes all saying well since

5:05 since fifteen years now we've been studying consciousness and and it's not from like if you read team shells for example in the in the sixties and seventies I think there is an article by James Ellis in the 70s in which he says well now we've been studying consciousness since 15 years since basically the end of the beginning and yeah people have basically always been

5:42 studying consciousness obviously during behaviorism it wasn't so important for example if you take people in epileptologist uh deaiing serials for example they have always been studying consciousness because consciousness is part of the taxonomy of epileptic seizures so it's basically what distinguishes what they call thirty merit seizures and coma seizures and just today before we began I received

6:19 this so this is the mirror psychology this is one of the first textbook of cognitive psychology and I think which three chapters on consciousness sorry for the nineties like it's in maintenance [Laughter] yeah I mean it goes back even further right I mean so if you can't help but notice at the beginning of psychology

6:52 that it was defined at the science of mind and consciousness basically that's what they thought they were doing and you know how we're I think you can't exaggerate like certain early schools in psychics I call it psychological science like you know the introspection s and versus the functionalist or whatever like this presented in the textbooks basically but but whatever the case was when you read like Tichenor or any of those guys what they're interested in are like you know the units that build up the mind and it's talking about consciousness and there's a debate we

7:24 would say he's like structuralism versus atomism or something but it's all about consciousness yeah and we'll even a lot of people say that what really began the 90s was to search for the neural correlates of consciousness but for example if you if you look at the second half of the 19th century you have a lot of people talking about the physical conditions of consciousness 1887 there is a book by henry moseley called the

7:56 physical conditions of consciousness happen I don't know if it's translated in English but anyway you have a lot of people studying consciousness at that time and they're all studying I think there is even book by Thomas Leacock that is entitled the neural College conscious the the physical correlates of consciousness actually trying to know what's in the physical in the nervous

8:36 system is differentiating between conscious States and unconscious States and people have been doing that for very long time now right I mean I think whatever you like so I was a peripherally aware of this already because just by reading Huxley's famous article on the you know hypothesis that animals are automata or whatever it's actually called and he talked about the famous frog experiments and he even talked about the hypothesis that consciousness is located in the spinal cord and and it's like very similar to the to the

9:10 overflow debates and that so I I wasn't aware to of the extent so I was sort of aware that there was this issue back then in the 18th late late 1800s but after reading your work I became aware of just like how generally pervasive the issue was and that actually was like a main topic of discussion at the most important scientists at the time studied this I mean it's not I can afraid study right yeah and so you think it really closely mirrors the current overflow debates yeah ok can you say a little bit

9:43 about first of all what you think that how you construe that debate and whether you think that they really are having the same debate or a similar one yeah I think it's basically the same debate so a good way to start is to talk about the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness of course so in that's in contemporary terms right yeah the stuff and the conscious stuff that you can access and what there is some compounds that there is something

10:17 in slight to have those mental states but you cannot access it and so you cannot report being conscious of some things so during the second half of the 19th century this distinction became really important and so famously occurred for example in 1879 has a book in which distinguishes consciousness as feeding and consciousness as knowledge

10:50 and so you have a lot a lot of debates about how many items can you be conscious of at once for example and so if you look at the lessons of metaphysics by Hamilton there is this debate and for example shelburne a thought that you can see only 5 of 6 items and other thought that you can see more items than that and at some point the mass Leacock has

11:24 this quote which says well but they're missing the point the point is not how many objects you think you see it's how many objects you're conscious of at once you're conscious in the sense of consciousness as feeling and so it's basically the same debate as the debate we have today and in a sense this is a debate that is even older than that I often consider that cognac is the first of a flow of tourists so in I think it's in 1740

12:08 1740s he has the essay on the origins of human knowledge and in this he argues that the fact that it he argues that the two kinds of conscious contents basically conscious mental states you have some conscious mental states that us that are so subtle that you forget them immediately and there are some stronger conscious states that you remember and he makes this distinction

12:43 and a lot of people were influenced by that and so for example you have Louis Jourdan John Henry Lewis was one of the first proponent of the of the what I call the overflow here it's obviously not really the exact same thing it's kind of really similar but she writes that's Oblivion's the fact that you forget something is not a proof that you didn't feel it in the first right yeah exactly so the idea is that you

13:16 consciously experience it but then it just disappears really quickly so you can get it yes until you so can I just ask you really quickly so the sense when they say consciousness as feeling which I'm I'm happy with that as being a kind of stand-in for phenomenal consciousness that that's alright with me if that's what I've taken to be saying and then the consciousness as knowledge is the access consciousness part in Neil in the south 18th century 19th century sorry distinction and and it's clear from their writing that they're using feeling here to characterize visual sensations

13:49 so then I was feeling a red looks a little bit weird in normal English I guess I think it's really really really clear yeah and then when they talk about the consciousness as knowledge it's knowledge of what you're feeling or knowledge of something in the external environment or is that distinction I really think it's similar to not you see me so if you have consciousness as knowledge it's that you notice that you have some conscious mental states so it's basically really similar to the the

14:23 concept of a perception right you perceive some stuff but you'll see you also a perceive it's in the sense that you somehow perceive yourself perceiving it and so and so you think that the the right way to characterize this debate is that one can't really thought that you could have feeling without being aware in any sense that you had that feeling whereas the other side was saying that the way I read Huxley is certainly saying you know without the awareness of the feeling then there is no feeling

14:56 like in the separate final court case which is one of the big cases they talk about right the way I mean kinesin so a lot of this was because of the frogs what what they did oh no so now two big debate the debate about subliminal perception and obviously the distinction between consciousness as feelings and consciousness as plays a big part because a lot of people will say well it's not that you have subliminal perception it's just that you forget the some perceptions immediately you remember some other perceptions and

15:32 so you have on the one hand this debate and on the other hand they debated about the physiological conditions of consciousness yeah and so it in this in this late nineteenth century there is like basically three camps I think right it's well you what you are you the one was that there's consciousness in the spinal cord another that it's in the brain but maybe at what we would consider a first-order level like a some kind of representation of the environment and then maybe the third that it requires the knowledge or

16:04 awareness of having noticing or whatever so usually there's each one of those camps and in the same as we have today except one actually which is what I was going to ask about but you think we have analogs of each of those camps yeah exactly so maybe you can explain when so there are many many cases of they basically try to do everything with decapitated frogs the decapitated fraud case comes from I think the original one

16:40 comes from Kruger in 1853 and so my my favourites of these cases is a case in which a frog is dropped in water and it is submerged sweet and even if the phone is decapitated it will swim to the surface but now imagine that you put an inverted jar in the path of the frog as it tries to swim to the surface even if it's decapitated it will just try to go

17:16 to the surface realize that it cannot go through the surface and just swim out of the jar to the surface brain there's no head there's nobody without a head and so I think it's right to be really amazed by that and so here you really see the debates about well but should we take the flexible behavior of the fog as an indication of

17:53 consciousness and so that was the own one of the arguments that people who thought that there is consciousness in the spinal cord like Lewis and many others Krueger also thought that first iron ship for example all these people were literally taking the fact that there is flexible behavior was an indication of consciousness while other people thought well this just shows that you can have unconscious flexible

18:28 behavior right it's kind of Buddhist modus ponens ponens modus tollens right yes exactly and the debate is whether really that kind of behavior by itself is sufficient to conclude that normal wouldn't normally what we think causes that namely the conscious experience is playing the same role there no okay yeah so now so you I mean just a jumps quickly to later I think the upshot of all this is you think that ultimately so we have this old debate which very

19:04 similar parallels and you might quibble with well is that really access to consciousness because the way it's defined as you know guiding behavior or not just knowledge alright so it may be maybe not but either way it's very similar like I think it's hard to deny that they're basically talking about the same thing and so it doesn't get resolved really and then people forget about it and now it's back again and we're still arguing about this and so I think the the lesson that you want to conclude from this is that there's just not really a good way to empirically

19:38 settle this issue which is why I keeps popping back up um I wouldn't be so pessimistic okay oh that's good okay cuz I'll tell you where that pessimist I mean I make extremely optimistic about consciousness science if it's done in the right way right so the issue is about under determination so the idea is that basically in consciousness science and that's what I think this debate really

20:12 shows I mean the fact that the debates keeps coming back it really shows that it's the issue is somehow under determined in the sense that every time you have a counter-argument to a specific theory of consciousness for example someone can come and just say well I deny that this entity is conscious oh well you don't think this entity is conscious but it's really conscious for example a good a good case

20:44 is the integrated information theory and the inactive logic gates yes sir Aronson comes and says well well inactive blood according to your theory inactive logic gates or conscious and so they just bite the bullet and so well that's because you you think that you presuppose that not having any interesting behavior or performing any interesting function could be taken as

21:17 an indication of consciousness but we don't think so we reject this premise and so we accept that inactive logic gates are conscious and so each time someone it's always possible to reject the the the indication that you used as indicating that you interpreted as indicating as indicating consciousness and so since you can always pretty much always do that it's very difficult to find counter examples and to test to

21:52 really test theories of consciousness that's why and that's a real problem I think but I think there's also some ways of trying to solve this problem and that's what I'm trying to do now okay so that's the optimistic that's the optimism part know the and these ways I assume are ways that are gonna be new since this has been going on for a couple hundred years or depending on who you talk to make Nicole beautiful four or five hundred years you want to come back to life and

22:27 those guys which I think can be as you construe it says similar to pay there but we live in it's a dick okay this is kind of an issue that's been around the block so hopefully these these new techniques are gonna be powerful but before we get into those and if you want to talk about it I don't know if you want to reveal what you're working or not but if so I would be interested but before doing that let me just ask about the the kind of the reason for being pessimistic so do you do you don't think let me do let me preface my asking by

23:02 pre asking a different question do you think there's been no progress at all in this endeavor in this particular case if it's in this particular case I think there's been enormous progress but there is a difference between making a lot of progress and people recognizing that a lot of progress has been made right okay it's always possible for some people to just deny that progress has been made that's really a lot of progress has been

23:37 made for college consciousness I think that fMRI was a kind of revolution well I think on consciousness in general we we know much more than we did even thirteen years ago I think some will take just the relation between attention and consciousness the fact that you know the experiments by Bob Kendrick showing that well maybe attention is not sufficient for

24:10 consciousness at least that's you probably didn't know before well I mean they illustrate your point though I mean like people object to that as really showing that Jesse Prince has has a whole interpretation of that involving orienting as opposed to attention and blah blah blah diffuse to attention and etc so there's always a way of reinterpreting or trying to reevaluate the evidence which which you might and I know you address this but you might think that's a general

24:43 feature of theorizing and so I mean it's is I wonder if you would so just generally from a philosophical of science philosophy of science point is is it fair to say that one thing that you that you may draw from your work is that Theory advancement really sometimes depends on non-empirical considerations like non theoretical considerations that's the point of the determination argument right okay good if if Theory choice based is under under determines

25:19 by the evidence then to make the choice to choose your theory you need something else than empirical evidence and Muslim most of the time depends on epistemic values so it doesn't so it's not a radio problem but in consciousness sentence [Music] the cases in which it depends on maybe knowledge Istomin values like authority soap like that but I mean why isn't that just a sort of case in in in general right so I know you have this paper with

25:53 hoc one where you've got talking about these sociological factors and especially with respect to the hard problem and or discard be the the the meta problem why why why are we talking about a hard problem or why is there how but anyway so I know that you guys talk about these sociological factors and you know in consciousness science there are definitely those factors at play but it's the same in quantum foundations of quantum theory it's the same in well you know Chomsky in linguistics I mean what so why is this

26:26 not just a general feature as opposed to like a persistent problem for consciousness science um the problem is consciousness science is that basically in situations in which a field is undetermined by the evidence there are fields entire fuels don't remain and underdetermined for such long times usually but here it's it's a special

27:03 case a way so just I don't want to interrupt you but just to interrupt you for clarification you don't think that it's a general feature and in hundred under determination is a general feature yeah well I think it's a general feature of science in but theories just don't remain undetermined for 300 years right it's not supposed to last that long I mean yeah I guess I I thought the under termination argue my supposed to be like

27:37 in principle all empirical theories are under the term like that's just like there's always an equivalent theory that you can formulate I mean certainly string theory is teaching us about in terms of dualities that you know there are certain equivalent theories with different oncology's and so when does that theory not become under determined when does it get determined well I think it becomes determines when becomes too costly to reject some hypotheses and

28:11 that's why I think that's the the main issue for consciousness seconds yes but the cost function there is not defined in terms of theoretical principle or data it's the terms and the fact in terms of something else right so the cut the cost what determines whether it's costly to do that is you're not something that's theoretical or data-driven but something that's sociological or epidemiological sometimes it's also theoretical for example if I if to save your hypothesis

28:48 you need to reject some principle that is also used in other fields of science let's imagine that to reject to save your hypothesis you need to reject I don't know some basic principle of perception science then it's really costly to reject to save your hypothesis sorry so it's not just sociological it's also scientific if you have some principle that you need to reject in

29:24 order to save your hypothesis they're cheap and costly principles to reject and with the progress of neuroscience I think that more and more principles will become more and more costly to reject and also from the most sociological perspective I think that some principles can be made somehow more costly to reject because they play a role for example in in law in the attribution of moral responsibility for example in

30:01 therapies and so on and so on and so because people care about these principles and they become more costly to reject right ok so I understand what you're saying but I still think that in a some sense the theories are under determined by the data yes because it's these extra data things that are determining the cost of rejecting or something like that so if you like the Queen Ian or do ham or whatever kind of picture is that the rejecting principles more towards the center of the structural support layers

30:36 the web that's what the cost of it that's where the cost goes yeah you know cents okay all right so I can I can yeah it's in the center of science in general yes that would be very bad but I mean so this you there are times when when that doesn't happen but still so you know I don't know the famous case of water and h2o I don't know if you you probably are but you know the work of hassock change you know he has that this wonderful book

31:09 which I love and at the which everyone read more is water h2o his other book is great too the adventure temperature here's a lot of stuff anyway so this in this book he really tells like you know so there's this story about they did this famous experiment they took water and I got the two things and there's oxygen here and hide in there and okay so it doesn't that sort of conclusively suggests or very strongly suggests that these two separate things or what compose water and the historical answers of course well there are a lot of people that argue to the contrary actually and people said no it's interaction of electricity with the water that creates

31:41 these machines and so there was no like the sighting moment when they said water is h2o is just like people you know it's kind of useful and that other stuff wasn't and they just flow just didn't was kind of but there's nothing that like truly falsified has a change human defense in this book if I remember correctly that they actually rejected rejected phlogiston theory a bit too early for rejecting it all right exactly cuz he argued that they had to like

32:17 reinvent those same notions but they had to wafer like electrons and stuff yeah yeah but in this case of course it was somehow under determined by the evidence but it didn't last for such a long time I think in consciousness science it's a bit worrying precisely because it's really a kind of lasting under determination so so you're right there may have been 70 years or something like that

32:49 when that people were like this may be wrong but then eventually they kind of just died down yeah it just came down and people adopted the water is h2o I think it will be the same consciousness and sakuni yeah eventually it's I mean so that's part of what I was asked to trying to get out here is that so the really the debate has progressed in some sense so I I think your earlier answer was about like has science of consciousness progress where as I was asking have we made any progress on this overflow argument do we think we have

33:22 any any reasons to to think one way or the other end and what I got from at least reading what your article was that that you were kind of pessimistic that this was gonna keep popping up but one kind of reason I thought for optimism was that we don't talk about the spinal cord anymore there's not very many defenders of consciousness the spinal cord now there's a lot of debate about but it's all about you know it may be embodied and maybe that's the spinal cord stuff going back because worse than consciousness psychism is oh if you take AI t to be quasi from psychist

34:00 on the strong interpretation of a AG then is i think it's worse means even less intuitive then consciousness in consu well I mean to be fair a lot of those early eighteenth nineteenth century guys were pence I guess – no practitioner was a pen cycnus as far as I know and so Penn tech ism was due or some kind of dual aspect or something like that was was a very popular view so I'm not sure why isn't that a separate issue though really because if one of the questions is like about the the

34:33 physical conditions which we're taking us kind of talk about correlates then it's a kind of a different question to say whether it's pence I kissed or materialist or or Wow right I guess if you've been inside just you committed to the view that you can have phenomenal consciousness without any kind of cognitive functions without access consciousness and so it's related to the to the Google Flu it's kind of extreme it's prove your innocence it's the ultimate

35:05 overflow it is interesting I mean I want to too much about pants I Gizem but it is interesting to to note that some of these pant psychics like maybe Galen Strawson for example don't deny that you need some kind of awareness though like so that he thinks wherever there's a conscious experience there's also kind of a self having that experience someone that it's for some so in a sense it's it's maybe I know how every depending on how you cast that out I'm not really

35:37 even sure that you can make sense of the overflow of you I mean that that was something I was gonna ask you about is that there's a long history of people to having this debate and to me I mean when I've started working on this stuff to be honest I have to admit that when I was young I thought yeah there's something to the overlooked overflow debate and I was kind of convinced by the common sense examples of the jackhammer in the background suddenly becoming aware of it and then when I the more I thought about it the more I just became I just didn't really understand what it even means conceptually for there to be an

36:09 experience which is like my experience that is it's for me but which I just don't have any awareness of so I just do you think that part of the argument in this earlier debate involve like this kind of understanding of the conceptual nature of it or was it empirically based what was the coherency of the concept of over consciousness without access question at all in this earlier debate yeah I think it was questioned um it was not only in prequel I knew that it was questioned for example best shown by the

36:45 weights in 1869 so it's the first in the first volume of the journal nature by Charlton bastion and he's talking about so in the first volume of nature there is an article about that so he defends the view that is basically there are some principle principle objections to the idea of overflow I don't think his arguments are really

37:18 good actually but yeah there was a kind of philosophical debates debate about that and there is the physiological debate the debate we have the physiology of consciousness obviously if if there is consciousness in the spinal cord then is a kind of consciousness that is not accessed right it means that you can use the physiological debate to solve the debate belt no it's basically beautiful

37:53 debate I mean it's not even clear that that's really the the right way of thinking about the options because if this if there is consciousness in a spinal cord and if you fit severed then I know one of the views that was around was excuse me maybe that there are two consciousnesses now yeah and so maybe there's like no access of this one to the spinal cord consciousness but that's like me not having access to your consciousness which is no big deal but maybe the spinal cord consciousness has access to its spinal cord consciousness and so I I don't I don't even think that really they that even if they thought

38:28 there was final cord consciousness that all by itself is any evidence for their view yeah well if you had enough ad hoc hypothesis you know you can save that you it's very difficult to see how because in a sense we don't really have I create here is the the way I think about it now I think the burden of proof should be on people who think that consciousness

39:05 overflows access and I don't think they can bring any evidence that is going to be that is going to force anyone to accept this idea because every time I mean it would be my bet that every time they bring some evidence if you'll be possible to explain it without postulating overflowing contents or some stuff that you are conscious of that you can't access so so I like that first point you made I know I've talked

39:40 with Ned who's a you know overflow guy currently Ned block and he he disputes that pretty vigorously and he gets he is kind of angry in a philosophical way not real angry but you know what I mean he gets kind of flustered when people say that the burden of proof is on the overflow of people and actually he has complained that that seems unfair to him that burden other he thinks the burden of the proof should be the other way so just out of curiosity well how would you address that claim why do you think the burden of proof is on the overflow yeah so now two reasons why the first reason

40:15 is that that's not how people use the concept consciousness but in fact down three reasons yaha first reason is that that's not how people use the concept consciousness if you are in assessing the moral responsibility of someone and you ask well was the person conscious of what she was doing for example you're not asking whether she had an accessible sensations you're asking whether she could control her actions with all she

40:49 could and she had the kind of access to what she was doing so that's the first way of putting the issue so I would take the principle that if you use it in a way that doesn't go that is somehow incoherent with the way in which people typically use it the burden of proof is on you to show me that I should accept to use the world as you use it for example if you think that I don't know

41:22 supernovas as a few new tools you classify the Sun as furniture you have to bring me a good reason for for doing that I don't I don't have to bring you reasons for not considering volcanoes as furniture the first the first point is that it's a kind so it's what hazard Chang calls a semantic extension so it's a case in which we don't have any indication that we could

41:59 use to detect the entity we are postulating right now there is absolutely no way of detecting phenomenal of detecting overflowing phenomenal consciousness there is just no way to detect this stuff I'm pretty sure about that and so if you think that it exists you better have really good reasons for from making us make all those efforts to to try to discover all this stuff right

42:33 and the third reason is that I think phenomenal consciousness overflowing phenomenal consciousness is completely useless for therapeutic purposes so imagine that to cure phobias for example I can expose you to still I unconsciously okay and I see a flash you pictures of spiders that are masked and

43:10 you do a kind of unconscious explosion therapy in this way and at the end of the therapy if if you didn't see any of the spiders or at least you don't feel like you saw any other spiders and if indeed you are less afraid of the spiders after the therapy I won't say well but you we're conscious of the spiders all along no of course you are not conscious of the spiders because you because if you had been conscious of the spiders you will have freaked out right

43:44 and so it's inconsistent with the way in which we would use the term consciousness to get effective therapeutic treatments for example so these are basically the three reasons why I think the burden of proof should be on those who defend oh yeah that's good can I ask about them quickly so that the first reason was we don't use the term that way so I wonder how you would respond to you know Ned's claim which is

44:22 contestable but I'd like to hear how you can test it so in in cases like the Sperling experiments where people are presented with these arrays of letters and they're very brief and so you know and I do this in my class too I show these ice troll students these things because it's fun to see the reaction but so the letters pop up for a quick amount of time you barely see them and then allegedly although we don't have a lot of evidence for this but allegedly people report that they feel like they saw the letters even though they can't

44:55 say what they are so they fail at reporting them so isn't so Ned interprets that as a kind of common sense overflow claim and so you want to say that's not oh yeah it seems like you would have to you have to you need to assume that's the best explanation of this phenomenon is that those phenomena flew in order to take it as meaning that people accept your sense well why can't you just take it like that people are

45:29 saying gee I felt like I saw more than I can say which is I I mean it seems like a natural way a thing to say that you know I see more than I can tell you right now just of the things that you so mold and you can tell the sense in which you but that's kind of what blocks point I think is and you know I'm not an overflow theorist although I think I'm there are days when I'm sort of sympathetic to something like that to be

46:02 honest with but I think these questions hard but anyway there's a his claim is that what what you're accessing in that kind of case is the general features that there were a bunch of letters so you have access conscious yeah that you excuse me the access conscious part is telling you that you have access to more than you can say yeah so that's not a weird thing to say on his video that's kind of what the view is it's just the details that

46:34 are not accessed yeah but I just don't think you need more than that to account for people's feelings maybe that's full in the fullness of time I understand what you mean but all I was asking is why isn't this a case of just if someone says gee I felt like I saw more than I can tell you why isn't the natural reading of that that they saw more than I can report but before you theorize about anything why isn't

47:09 that a natural reading I guess I'm asking if you're going to interpret it with respect to consciousness you need some kind of pretty logical or something and I mean as I take the overflow it's a kind of scientific hypothesis right so here thinking that saying this is a way testifying of the fact that people think that consciousness overflows access and

47:44 use the term in this way I think everything it presupposes that you think that their statements should be understood in terms of view of your view so it's kind of it's I feel like it's begging the question okay okay so how would you so if someone says I see more letters than I can tell you what how do you interpret what they're saying well they were conscious a lot of letters of seen unit of letters and then then they work

48:17 they they could report only a few letters it doesn't imply any overflow made maybe an explanation of this phenomenon maybe a scientific explanation of this phenomenon would require us to postulate the existence of overflowing contents but the the normal interpretation of this phenomenon the kind of folk interpretation doesn't really require you to suppose that so do you think that there's an interesting question here

48:51 about what the folk really how they would respond because you know I have tried to get some experimental philosophers to do this actually and I haven't done it yet and I don't want to do experimental philosophy but it does seem to me that that I mean I have thought that if they did these kind of Sperling experiments and then try to get the quantitative data right but then also just ask for qualitative data like this you know what is it like for you when you see these things so I do this in formalin in the class and it seems to me like people are split and after you

49:23 talk you show them a bunch and you do it for a while and then you sort of ask like okay you know what was it like and whatever this or not consciously or not it people split some people say yeah I saw all of them it's just that I can't name them some people literally say stuff like that and other people say no no I just have this vague sense that there's a bunch of letters there and so I do sort of feel I wonder how I mean it doesn't seem obvious to me that the folk are settled on this question well I think that's even if you do that once again

49:56 Yoga for issue is a scientific issue and so any any report from your students say could be interpreted either as indicating events all right I agree about that this includes or as not indicating that their concept of consciousness right I guess it's I was just trying to know I totally agree with that and that's a fair point but I was just trying to address your first burden of proof argument which was that

50:30 the burden is on the overflow people because the folk don't talk about overflow so we would need some reason to even like and consider or you know they would need to convince us to take that seriously they the overflow people would need this convince us because one reason being it's not part of the normal concept of consciousness and I was just trying to say well okay so here's some what they would say I think in response and then if your answer is yeah well okay so it depends on your background assumptions and interpretations which

51:03 one you actually go with then it doesn't seem to me like the folk burden of proof thing counts for very much ultimately because the [ __ ] Vennela proof is not all that in situations in which using the term is important to us and it's in the law the for more responsibility consciousness is in the basically in the law in this case it's clear that it's access consciousness so in the cases in

51:38 which we use the concept but that's because they're talking about behavior so that's obviously what you want to appeal to you is access consciousness an etic it's I mean you know no one's guilty of having an access thoughts that a criminal in nature or whatever so that's different I mean so the law I don't so I guess I would I missed so yeah I agree with you that in the law maybe is codified a certain conception of consciousness that has to do with more access than phenomenal in the way it's typically contrasted

52:13 although you know I with you that they are related so now if you accept that you accept that using the term consciousness as involving overflow is incoherent with that with respect to that aspect of the legal part of it yeah okay so I don't think I'm the same as the folk sir I don't think that's the same as saying that the folk don't use it okay let's let's say that the bunch of uses of the term

52:47 consciousness at least without incoherence if you use the term in a way that is incoherent with how it is used in domains in which it is important to use to tell then perhaps but I mean so but you're I agree I've that's a nice way of putting it but so there may be other non legal contexts where you can consider anesthesia or surgery so it might be important in that case if you're worried about suffering if there were an access phenomenal consciousness like so you know is that nothing if

53:22 you're if you're really an IIT person then I guess you have to worry about logic gates and would it be important if I if I can't notice my own pain I would be in pain but don't know that I'm in pain at any moment it would be a weird kind of pain right phenomenal callate so I'm not even sure people would accept to talk in this way about about pain let's

53:57 once again maybe we should do this yeah I think I wish someone would do it That's not me [Laughter] yeah so and then the second so I I think you know with those caveats I think that's a good point burden of proof claim then the second one let's say I forget the third one was a therapy which I think is going to be sort of similar to what we were just talking about because you know uh knacks s depression is probably just as bad as being depressed and knowing it so you

54:33 might want to treat that anyway but you get the sense for every right do people even talk that way the the argument is a bit a bit different ok it is a bit different in the third case because in the third case the best explanation of the fact that we succeed at doing this stuff is because people will not conscious those tuna alright so in the right because weíre talking about the specific unconscious spirit conditions in case I forgot about that

55:06 right so but there it's not clear to me that that really you couldn't give the kind of fleeting forgotten kind of response yeah maybe there was phenomenally experienced spider nests and it's just you know since you don't access it you don't have the the knowledge of it but if you show all this you know your heart rate increases all that sort of stuff so there certainly is something being processed there so it's it's and you might even think that if it wasn't like the spider enos that you were aware of and it wouldn't have the

55:39 effect so I don't know that that's that's not useful in some sense maybe you can cool that's monstrousness define it as the kind of consciousness people don't really care about well the it is the kind of consciousness that they care about it's just that they care about it more when they're aware of it but I'm just playing the devil's advocate obviously I don't agree with overflow and you know I think you know that I'm biased yeah

56:12 exactly but I'm trying to I'm speaking as someone who thinks that before I started doing philosophy I wasn't over through overflow theorist yeah I didn't know it because I think that I was a kind of common sense view and then when you when I read about it I was like okay yeah that makes sense to me and then after thinking about I was led away from it and and now I would sort of reject it I guess on certain days in certain moods but but it doesn't seem to me like like you have to really do a lot of work to get people to sort of go yeah okay that's that seems like sometimes that's

56:47 the case you know whereas the other stuff you do have to you have to get them so you know to convince them that there are unconscious pains that are really pains not consciously experienced that you have to do a lot of work to get people to accept I think whereas this other thing that there are conscious pains that you don't know about is less hard to make from a comic so that to me suggests that one is more entrenched in common sense than the other you know I always give the example of when I was a child my sister was walking on the beach and she stepped on a bee she didn't know

57:21 she stepped on a bee I saw her limping and said why are you walking like that and she said walking like what and she looked at her foot and then started screaming and so because she saw the bee and that's from a common sense point of view it sort of seems like that's when it started hurting right when she when she became aware that there was this damage but but of course she was limping before that so if there something when was sensitive to the fact that there was that down and that's of course the detection criterion that really is at the heart of all of the stuff we're talking about thank you

57:52 yeah and that's so so so how'd I mean given where all of this stuff is why so I what I what I think that you're trying to argue is that what makes this distinct is that in consciousness research it's always easier to reject one of these right so that you can say look well the limping doesn't go with consciousness because you weren't aware of it or you could say oh no no reporting doesn't go with consciousness because you even are consciousness without the reporting and so you're

58:25 never really gonna get a cost like the way you do in these other areas yeah so basically the claim is that in consciousness sense no what I call detection rules that you use some indication as that you interpret some event or some indication as indicating the presence or absence of consciousness no detection who is too big to fail in a sense we can always reject indications as indicating consciousness you can say well but this doesn't really indicate

59:00 consciousness or in fact we should interpret this as indicating consciousness stuff like that right always do that and this it's always cheap to do that right because we disagree on what should count as the right indication of consciousness I mean is it always cheap though because you know I know one of the cases you talk about is the N encephalic children that have these emotional responses and I think that's a really great case because a lot of people want to say look you

59:32 know here they are they're they're smiling at their mother's voice and that's you know so they're experiencing some kind of emotion or sensation or something and then the other side says well no that's you know in a triggered remote and evolutionary response to the mother so they don't get killed basically because babies are annoying or something like that I mean no offense of babies but so that it's it's not involving consciousness but but isn't that like people really find that hard to take seriously so isn't that a cost when you say oh no the baby smiling doesn't involve consciousness I mean it can be your costs if we don't have

1:00:10 really good evidence all good reasons to think that it can it can happen unconsciously aside aside from that right so it's Oh exactly so that's that's really the key here is that once you open up the possibility that there's empirically good reason to think that these things can happen unconsciously then you get this whole conundrum and of course that's why the there's a certain side of the dispute out there that wants to deny the very existence of

1:00:43 unconscious perception you know I think in Philips work is I don't know if he really is a true believer in this or not but he certainly is exploring the possibility that maybe there is no unconscious perception and and part of the motivation for that I think are some of these issues so is is that another underdetermined issue on your view hmm no I don't think so I think that we can so at least in humans I think we can develop very good detection costumes I think

1:01:16 we can show why some detection procedures are better than others so I disagree almost completely with Liz Irvine on these points okay good so it's mystic and I defend the optimistic view that we have good reasons for preferring some detection procedures can you tell us like a couple of these reasons yeah this is lately long it's basically my Rigby dissertation it's really sort of like

1:01:55 slogan or bullet form that could help you know help a pessimistic person who wants to be optimistic so first of all it's really important to understand that what we judge as indications of consciousness and consciousness ends on never individual reports so one report doesn't indicate one conscious event right and so often people say that well we can trust those reports and you know

1:02:33 the scientists are interpreting those reports as indicating consciousness but they're wrong no they are not really doing that what they are doing is interpreting a pattern of reports given a pattern of behaviors on a task as indicating consciousness on consciousness so that's a big difference so basically you interpret a pattern of reports as indicating consciousness all along the task unconsciousness on some sets of

1:03:07 still I drink during the task but you're not never considering one particular report so then you have you can if you do that you can use signal detection theory and try to in some tools board from signal detection theory and to avoid biases and so you can have earn biased detection positives people call it measures of consciousness but we shouldn't call the measure measures of

1:03:40 consciousness because to measure is to I mean I would like to restrict the term measurement for 2030 properties I'm not sure consciousness is quantitative so right now we can detect it say if it's there or not and so that's what people what sense is basically do is try to use bias free considers in order to detect consciousness so in many many cases the issue of biases just doesn't really

1:04:16 arise the issue well but we have we don't have really good reasons for thinking that subjects subjective reports are true but the truth of subjective subjective reports is not a real question because in a sense subjective reports on needle through not fools it's like basically there is a kind of metaphor that people use the interprets metaphorically subjective reports as

1:04:51 sentences that the subject would say I saw the stimulus and of course if you interpret it this way it can be true of course but the right way to interpret it is to interpret it as traces that are left by unconscious or conscious mental state and a trace in this sense is neither true nor false so subjective reports are like traces and you use them you gather them and then you can decide on the basis of this whether subjects or conscious or unconscious of stimuli

1:05:27 during the task or joining a set of trials during the task so here you eliminate the issue of the velocity of subjective reports because subjective reports are not true down not false either you eliminate the issue of biases and I could honestly go on and on about basically all the skeptical arguments against detection cos you do some consciousness sense they really don't get off the ground I think mostly they

1:06:01 are based on a kind of series of misunderstanding of where what scientists are actually doing with those positives and I think they apply to first-person sciences in which people have to give long introspective reports but in the kind of depiction costumes that are used in consciousness science I don't think it works yeah wow that's interesting so is this is obviously related to hetero phenomenology in some sense to Dennis for you right because I that's what I've

1:06:34 always interpreted his claim that the subjective reports are just data points so you just exploit you just assign them what someone says this so we've got to kind of explain why they would say that and that's basically explaining well but I mean phenomenology you it seems to me is that what we have to explain all the reports right I don't think we will explain reports there is a big difference between the data and the phenomena close a few cents that's

1:07:08 boganan would world the data we use it to infer the presence of a certain phenomenon so I use the subjective report though the report as a data to infer something about the phenomenon I'm interested in which is consciousness and so I can perfectly accept the claim that there is nothing subjective in subjective reports but I can use those reports to study something that is

1:07:40 subjective which is consciousness right okay so yeah I think I don't know if you're aware of the work of a Gualtiero Pete Giannini do you know his work at all because I he has some something I think it's kind of similar to this the view that subjects are basically detection instruments you yes exactly is the fiction instruments yeah that's exactly the view that they defend okay wow that's really interesting yeah it's really nice to see that you develop too and taken seriously because I think it's it's an interesting it's an interesting

1:08:14 view I mean so I mean just again from the devil's advocate side of things I think someone might accuse you of just simply begging the question right from the start that if that's all that if that's the way you study science is just by subjective reports then you've ruled out just from the beginning the possibility of any sort of overflow or beliefs of studying it scientifically because someone might say look yeah you can't you can't do so I mean in in some sense maybe that's an actual argument is that you can't scientifically detect this stuff but there's another way of doing it the so called mesh argument

1:08:47 where you try to show that there's this I don't know giant swath of evidence and psychology that maps on to some stuff in neuroscience honestly the mission argument doesn't work basically they say well it's the best explanation of the data because we we don't explain data we explain phenomena but let's say it's okay to say that we explain the data this is the best explanation of the data

1:09:22 but they never say well what counts as the best explanation when is it the best explanation which is your criterion for considering that's overflow is the best explanation and it's really and clear what would count as evidence for other flows since we cannot detect it in the first place and so they say well we can use some brain patterns in the occipital cortex and say well this indicates overflow but how do we know which brain pattern

1:09:54 corresponds to overflowing phenomenal consciousness and which brain pattern does corresponds to unconsciousness nobody knows I just don't have any criterion for distribution distinguishing between overflowing in consciousness and unconsciousness once a quaternion if they have a quaternion I can accept that view I can test it but right now it's just impossible to test and so I don't see I don't see any

1:10:28 reason why we should accept that on the other and the other hand I think there are cases in which we have we might have reasons to think that subjective reports are not a good way to proceed for example I think that the perceptual awareness scale is not a really really good scale reasons and I think there are plenty of criticisms that can make against the view that we should use

1:11:04 subjective reports in consciousness science but really if you see the actual actual reasons not in principle reasons for doubting that we should use subjective reports aside from in principle arguments it should be but it should be possible that someone could have and another flowing experience well there's not much thing don't worry if cases in one cares there will be someone on soon that actually

1:11:37 will defend over flow so though it was not just bashing there it's kind of felt like we get up but but but I yes I I tend to take everything you say very seriously I'm hearing commotions downstairs of children waking up and so on and so on so I can't keep you forever and and I wonder if we could switch for the remaining time to talk about some more

1:12:10 contemporary stuff which is already pretty contemporary but some of your more nitty-gritty stuff so that you have a paper talking about prefrontal cortex some consciousness plays there with Jorge Morales and then you have the people with how come we already mentioned and then of course there's the paper with 58 authors or whatever which I happen to be one small how many 50 see six or seven yeah so it's so you've been doing a lot of not only historical work

1:12:44 but contemporary work so I wonder if you first of all can you say something about this nature human behavior paper yeah so basically turns out that consciousness science doesn't receive a lot of public funding especially in the US and so we wanted to make a kind of cool for more funding for consciousness sales as it's important obviously for a wide variety of fields yes so that was basically the the idea

1:13:21 and then one of the main problem of consciousness science is that we shouldn't shouldn't call it consciousness science which we should call it the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness so that's what why how I would call it to distinguish it from what I call consciousness studies we have consciousness studies and the company cognitive neuroscience of consciousness cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is cognitive neuroscience cognitive neuroscience is about

1:13:58 representations there are the Hyksos in the brain and computations consciousness studies they don't have these terms right maybe even IIT is not a cognitive neuroscientific view of consciousness it doesn't appeal to representations it does not go to the high cost of representations they are two structural patterns in the brain but they don't

1:14:31 care about patience mental health and patience they don't talk about complications it's not linked to any function in the brain so IIT is in consciousness studies and not cognitive neuroscience of consciousness even theories that are more structural in a sense like the local recurrence theory by Lana yeah it's ready about it's still representational theory of consciousness in the sense that the content of consciousness comes from the vehicle

1:15:05 the the right dynamics for the vehicle of consciousness the representation will be high cool right so you need the right pattern but it's still linked somehow to the representations and so it's still a cognitive neuroscientific theory of consciousness and that's that paper you recently shared by the way with this unfolding argument was talking about the structural the problem would be structural kind of theories was very I mean I think I nailed one of the major problems with these kind of yeah yeah

1:15:38 exactly but I think it's the paper is I think and tell you're right for IIT but not entirely right for for the local becomes view well you can't give it there's no mathematical formulation of it that you can unfold really basically that's the one of the problems you'll lose notation also it's nuts so according to IAT it's really weird it's the geometry of the pattern of activity the neck it's not even knew all activity okay because the

1:16:15 nodes in their model need to be on but neurons are not enough I don't even know what the nodes are in any way you have some nerves and you have a kind of geometrical isomorphism relation between qualia space and and the structure of these nodes and so that's what gives the phenomenal character huge but yes it has nothing to do with local

1:16:49 patients right and I mean I was this is kind of now on a separate topic I was at a conference once where Julia was presenting this stuff and one of the things that he said was you know his theory predicts that a brain with no activity at all with zero activity no activity would have conscious experiences as long as none of the connections were damaged whereas a brain that with no activity but there were some you severed a connection between neuron a and neuron B then it would not have the conscious experience and you

1:17:23 know no one has picked up on that I thought that was that's a kind of strikingly bizarre claim that you could have conscious experience with zero brain activity but just an intact brain I mean if you might want to test that and I think that's something we need to look at because as far as we know that's like not what we expect over here that's that's the problem I was talking about well if you bite enough bullets loads of bullets your theory of consciousness can go pretty far right right again I can have a theory of consciousness on which nobody but me is

1:17:58 conscious if I want to I can defend it [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] how do you do nutrients on yourself aha Salter's and plus subjects I am my own data but just to be somewhat I mean not to be fair to IIT cuz I agree with the

1:18:35 things you're saying although you know as a philosopher I I think I could more open some of these weird things that they say but empirically I agree you're saying however to be somewhat fair to them I wonder so would you agree in the best case scenario like if things went perfect if everything we're magic and rainbows and unicorns all the time then what you would want to do is like have a theory of consciousness tested against the day see if you could falsify it it doesn't get falsify see if you can confirm it see if it explains stuff and so so you get some confidence built up in the

1:19:08 Distillery of consciousness and then and only then you ask questions okay what about snails what about ants what about non mammals what about computers what about group systems like it seems like at least that part of IIT is on the right track or at least that's the way they present it that first they want the theory and then you tackle the other questions because you can't really do them without a theory of consciousness we can't answer the question about dogs before we know like theoretically what we're talking about so that aspect of it is right right or

1:19:41 at least I'd like that approach that they have well not necessarily maybe you can have detection cathedrals and don't rely on full theory of consciousness so you think that we could detect consciousness and snails without understanding what consciousness is not having a theory of consciousness it's possible and I don't think we'll have we can complete theory of consciousness at one point that it will start and that

1:20:14 will say well now we have we have explained consciousness I think it will gradually build up and at some points we'll be able to be a bit more sure about whether snails are conscious and this is it's ok we'll we'll probably be sure right absolutely sure so I say that again sorry oh somehow is getting a funny color right at that moment for some reason sorry well never be absolutely sure but we can have really

1:20:48 good reasons do you think that it's the case and we already do we already have good reasons for example to think that birds are conscious I think because we can find some neurological even if they don't have a cortex we can find some neurological equivalents but so things but that's kind of wouldn't you say that's I mean let me set her differently I would say that's exactly what I was trying to say a second ago was that it seems like what that kind of argument

1:21:21 relies on is first you have some good reason to think that it's stuff in the PFC maybe that's doing it then you find something that's similar to that and the birds and since you already have a theory that connects consciousness to the PFC you conclude maybe in verge to mature that is the kind of argument you were but my view is that you don't really need a theory you can just find empirically that consciousness college with BSU activity for example I don't defend any particular theory of consciousness but I defend the view that

1:21:56 gives you call a Swiss yes conscious tesco nice crispy reactivity so I will accept that I don't have a theory I can look at the world and say well it's probably conscious for this reason so I don't need a theory I just I guess I was using the word theory like so a theory of consciousness and the senses except you're gonna just a bunch of empirical regularities um already okay we're gonna theory in that sense yeah yeah yeah I see what you're saying so it's not like

1:22:30 you're defending global work space theory although I guess you have one paper on that right something about the insular or something and so you're not defending any particular theory you don't need to be a higher-order global workspace or whatever to say that the PFC is important for consciousness and then if there are things like that and other animals you have some good reason to think whatever is going on is going on over there too well but still do you need the theoretically claim that it's PFC and not you know medial

1:23:05 temporal or subcortical or something else so you still need that theoretical claim that is associated with PFC yeah and so and so I know you you have recently defended this view by the way so I wonder and I also know I think historically that you started off kind of doubting that the PFC was important it's an artifact or something of the fMRI yeah exactly so I wonder first of all you could tell us like why you changed your mind and then maybe it's the same thing as saying what you think the current evidence for it is yeah so um one seconds

1:23:39 yeah exactly water break so basically you have in consciousness just one moment my computer I don't have a battery all right yeah so basically the idea is that you have a lot of evidence in

1:24:14 consciousness sense in favor of the view that when we contrast conscious and unconscious trials across a wide variety of paradigms experimental paradigms and across all sensory modalities at I knew–i there is PFC activity in conscious trials and not in unconscious trials this occipital cortex activity in both unconscious styles and conscious types and so you have experiments with

1:24:50 visual masking for example blue and passing again in 2006 you have experiments in the auditory modality with said again and colleagues in 2009 you have all this stuff shows that the clear sea is important for consciousness to call it or consciousness and now you have different ways of interpreting this and a lot of people don't really believe that the PFC is a collective

1:25:23 consciousness and there are two main arguments the first main arguments is that lesions to the frontal cortex don't obliterate consciousness and so you have several papers making that point have a bit of a pullin in 2011 you have a people more recent paper by mill anybody in 2017 I guess and in philosophy there is a paper by Benji Kasich in 2014 all these people make dis arguments but this argument has been

1:26:01 kind of the permit way by an attack out I think and I think the evidence the search is not really convincing so let's put this argument to start with more interesting element on my view is what we call the argument from report and so that's a people that I wrote with qualified and that's what that's basically an idea that is present pretty much everywhere now I guess the idea

1:26:36 that the PFC activity during conscious trials is due to the fact that people have to report in conscious and not due to the fact that people are conscious right and so you find this everywhere in Suqian colleagues in 2015 or call in colleagues people who defend IIT but the most interesting researcher who is defending this claim I think is Michael Pitts and his work is great so I tend to

1:27:11 do you think he's the best proponent of that group I defended that you two years ago I think I wrote a paper that was called methodological artifacts in consciousness science and so the argument from report basically is the following if you want to detect consciousness you need people to report but then if some brain Orion lights up you don't know whether it's due to the report all due to consciousness and it's really difficult to know and so

1:27:46 it could be both so my counter-arguments is probably the simplest counter-arguments that I've ever found my us race so proud surprised that nobody talks about that because it's pretty obvious and the counter-argument is this people have to report on both conscious and unconscious trials exactly if PFC activity is really

1:28:22 due to the report which would find it on conscious and unconscious trials but we find it only on conscious trials and so the PFC activity is not linked to the report so that's basically the counter-argument that we give but of course it's not so easy I think it's just this one simple arguments forces people to make the debate a bit more complex so it's already good but as I said make copies for example they

1:28:55 recognize they will say well of course people have to report in both the conscious and unconscious condition and so what I'll say is that there's still a difference and the difference is this when you see the students consciously you maintain information about the stimulus in working memory and when we see it unconsciously there is nothing to maintain in working memory and so what explains the difference is not the report but the fact that you maintain information in working memory for the

1:29:29 report and so in the paper with Jorge we have counter arguments to this view the first counter argument is that it's just false that in the unconscious condition there is nothing to maintain the experiments showing that for example the experiment by Solomon King in 2016 or salty and colleagues in 2015 they show that you can decode for example salty they show that can they could unconscious contents from

1:30:04 the frontal cortex even when people say well I didn't sister so it's false that nothing is maintained in the grain in unconscious trials so that's that's when the recording of the stuff from the prefrontal cortex is not wet fMRI is it I asked yet they use ACOG or something that's more invasive both he and colleagues 2015 it's a firm right but I'm not sure studies with anyway okay that's the first arguments well still

1:30:42 they find that there are still difference in the PFC in the conscious and unconscious conditions even on conscious collect trials and unconscious collect trials so the information the first order of information is used exactly in the same way they press the same button they do exactly the same thing the only difference is they say unconscious or not conscious and here you see differences in prefrontal cortex so the second argument that we presented

1:31:17 was I think it was based on a study by la Fuente and homo so that's a really fascinating study and so in this study monkeys were presented with stimuli and they recorded so it was tactile stimuli and so they recorded in the PFC I don't remember exactly where in the POC and what they showed is that when people

1:31:52 when the moon detected monkeys are people detected monkey people detected the stimuli the tactile stimulus they [Music] they had differences in PFC activity but not when they didn't but here too you can have the report argument it's because the monkey is actually reporting but what they did was something really clever at the beginning of in the control condition at the beginning of

1:32:27 every trial the correct response button was eliminated and so before the story's was presented the monkey already knew the right decision and it already maintained in working memory what it would have to do he will have to do and so the decision was already already made and basically there was no difference in PSA activity between the control condition and the other experimental

1:33:03 condition so what it shows is that even when the monkey already took the decision the forest music presented the Clery activity that they recorded remained the same and so it shows that eh which is not due to the fact that they maintained a decision oh I saw the smooth ice holes and then say I saw the suit it's really due to the fact that the neurons fire when the stress is presented and so that's another aspect of things there is a study by Melton and

1:33:37 neither in 2012 in which they show that basically in the PFC you have two kinds they find two kinds of neurons the yes-and-no neurons and so yes for yes I've seen those moves and no I didn't see the smooth some neurons are specialized for these two categories and what they found interestingly is that those neurons fire during the report yes and no but yes neurons only yes neurons fire during the students presentation

1:34:13 okay so when the students presentation is presented the yes neurons fire and so it shows that in some sense there is it's not just categorization there's some more than just categorizing because otherwise when no stimulus is presented you would see the no no neurons activated during the presentation of nothing so that was basically the arguments that we had and so obviously people will say well but what do you do

1:34:48 with all those great no report paradigms in which we show that there is no click on toward cortex activity and we answer that it's just a type 2 ever the null hypothesis well in fact they students and also they don't have any statistical evidence that they should reject the null hypothesis it's just a statistical basic point the basic statistical mistake in a sense because they show that they have key values above 0.5 but

1:35:24 point 0 5 but it doesn't protect you against type 1 a loss and so basically we say it's for type 2 else even in in some and you'll we also brings a lot of a lot of evidence I think good evidence showing that when you have more sensitive measures even when you have no report activity in the PFC unconscious chaos on and so I I think basically we

1:35:59 don't have really good reasons for believing that CFC activities linked either to in consciousness sense is linked either to maintenance in working memory or to report or to the decision to report or to relevance there is study by malian colleagues in 2013 in which they can decode irrelevant tasks irrelevant none reported stimuli in the PFC yeah there's really a lot of evidence in favor of

1:36:34 control context and I don't think people I do think that people have kind of overestimated the the value of those new report paradigms experiments yeah they definitely have I mean as you know Hawk once pointed this out for a long time that they've been doing them for a while and you know the other thing that I think is also important is that if fMRI is fairly weak tool and so if all you're showing is that there's diminished

1:37:07 activity that's not exactly that surprising it's not the same as showing that there's none the type 2 error thing I think is really important you know it was funny in in the old days Steve Fleming and Huck one and I used to play music together and we had this groovy couple of William James trio which you know whatever it was it was fun for us at least very well else but originally we were gonna call it type 2 and we were wearing a people I think we're talking about diabetes important stuff you have a lot of papers doing that especially in

1:37:46 your imaging you have really good reasons for thinking that there are a lot of type 2 levels because usually scientists they protect themselves against type 1 errors with p-values obviously important but I think that new imaging is vastly underworld yeah basically no result it doesn't doesn't mean anything it really doesn't mean anything it means something a little bit but you reinforce the probability of the null hypothesis being false the amount

1:38:22 of like misunderstanding in general of what you can and can't get from fMRI is is pretty pretty bad I mean I know someone who has to teach neuroscience undergraduates that it's like the misunderstandings are deeply entrenched in the comments coming a conception of these things it's hard to get rid of them actually even I mean even with a femoral you have no report studies ring for example in be no canals I hoping you have a study by weaker in 2009 in which they show gives you actually doing passive viewing right and

1:38:57 we're is more sensitive measures like single-cell recording we have a study by I can say his name panel should lose [Laughter] twenty twelve in which they show that during beam okay now finally you have also gives you activity when the switch occurs right yeah that's another area where there's no report paradigms

1:39:30 getting overblown where people are trying to link the pupil response to conscious experiencing one versus the other yeah it's these other kinds of methods looking at PFC activity I think or to be paid more attention to so no I think that your ear at work on this areas as usual really good and also important people should be thinking about these issues and at the level of discussion about consciousness in in the science needs to go up another level or so right we're at the point now where it's time

1:40:02 they're really getting get serious from a philosophy of science point of view about these questions I just think people should I mean when one thing that I don't think people abstract philosophers flow suppose that read the abstracts of scientific articles constitute read data against some call you I I really think that the most

1:40:35 important thing is to read try to understand the experimental part correctly and we will probably avoid a lot of mistakes and annoying scientists with philosophical issues that are not really yeah I mean I'm a methods issue it's it's you know you can get a PhD in philosophy and you have to have some kind of formal methods but there's no empirical methods for me yeah unless you do interdisciplinary work right there's no no lab work required for PhD in philosophy which is unfortunate if you

1:41:11 want to talk about these issues you know I think that stuff's important to something one thing two mistakes exactly I mean to be fair to philosophers it's it's not always the case that even scientists are good so it's not just philosophers who need stats it's it's everybody because you know where people suck at stats it's but in this case it's it's really important and it's it that I

1:41:46 mean I I think we agree on this that the the points that we're at right now is very pivotal with respect to you know the science of conscious have been around for a long time but the moment where we are now is kind of an interesting moment because the neuroscience the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is is fighting to establish itself as a serious endeavor and there are at the same time forces amassed against it trying to drag it into you know yeah exactly yeah in a sense that's true you know and there is

1:42:23 this kind of tug of war going on between these two camps and of course the what people don't really realize unless they do the work in this area is that the one serious aspect of it the neuroscience that's that we like depends on a lot of money and if that money's not coming in then that's gonna die because that's the way the system was currently set up it's not ideal and I don't like it personally my philosophy of grant funding should be just like give everyone money and let them do it and then shut up about it but you know that's not usually the way it work so that's why this is so important because there were

1:42:56 fighting as a group I think to be not just taken seriously but to to for the legacy of this to be taken seriously seriously I think it's a matter of of perception perception really matters yeah yeah because look when people who are at the NIH were really really serious scientists were worked on I don't know synaptic transmission really science e-topics they look at some consciousness

1:43:31 and stuff they learn about it in the journals and they say they say well neuro scientists now believe that students could be conscious in rocks could be conscious in stuff like that since new scientific consensus it's scientific they rightly believe that consciousness science should not receive funding I mean if I if I wear them and I had only this information I would not give funding to consciousness science I

1:44:07 mean that's not what pants I guess believe but I understand if in the media at least it's how it's portrayed yeah this wait wait no respectable person thinks a spoon is conscious they think electrons are conscious okay who would be crazy enough exactly it's clearly electrons obviously that's less way less crazy but obviously that were you're making an important point I'm joking in

1:44:45 case people don't know I'm kind of sick and the kids have been sick and haven't been sleeping so if I'm a little bit flippin that's because let's blame that but we're making us here is point here about perception amongst so-called serious scientists about the field and it's more than just like we want to be considered cool it's that those persons decide whether or not we get to keep doing what we're doing that's the that's the issue and that brings us back to the you mention the NIH that I mean it's this you know this moonshot proposed I don't know how much

1:45:19 actually you want we have or can or want to talk about that right now but I mean it's it's kind of an interesting development which has happened which is that there's this weaseling in two of those areas by by the by the kind of thing we're talking about yeah exactly I think it's a real problem when some not pseudo-scientific but claims that have been supported by the data kind of

1:45:56 start shaping the field yeah I think it's a real problem especially if is going to determine the amount of funding that others in the field are going to receive I think that's a real problem I mean philosophers we can talk about any kind of crazy stuff we want cuz they'll pay us either way but if you're a scientist they won't pay you less you can I think don't realize that nearly not right in science if you start

1:46:31 writing in your grant proposal that you're going to investigate consciousness in I don't know electrons oh no gee gates you have in the chances are pretty good that you won't get to know but that's not what they do what they're doing is like saying we want to tell the difference between someone in a coma and not and someone who's locked a locked-in syndrome or not so that's the way they spin it they get they get funding from from private foundations so yeah from

1:47:07 the puzzles so basically the integrated information theory receives funding from the tiny blue dot foundation which is directed by Elizabeth core which is the daughter of the Koch one of the Koch consoles I think it's Chavez car it's one of I don't know well yeah well what we gotta get George Soros over here

1:47:39 to find exactly we'll take out the car brother come on Soros give us money anyway I I think that's in the domain in which what consciousness are what consciousness scientists are doing is really important for a lot of ethical issues or consciousness in fetuses for consciousness in patients who cannot communicate and so on and so on I think the last thing you want to do is to to explore a lot of possibilities and

1:48:18 say that all those possibilities are equally serious right sometimes as James but it sometimes the best thing to do is to avoid mistakes and not find truth the stakes are high your your first goal is not to find truth your first goal is to avoid saying a lot of nonsense because if you say a lot of nonsense it might have potentially disastrous consequences right your first goal is to avoid making too many mistakes not to find V theory

1:48:53 that should be the first goal I think yeah very important right and that's a really important distinction when there are ethical issues and so on go for not making a lot of mistakes if there are a lot of if you don't bring care about making mistakes it's okay to explore lots of possibilities now I I know I I can't keep you forever we've already been talking for too long we haven't even got to talk about fish at all which I was wrong no you can talk about fit said that and some of these

1:49:28 same same issues because I mean really briefly I really like your take on the multiple realizability arguments and I think it's another example of where there may be some under determination but but really the part that I mean so I think that connects to what we've all been saying but the part that I really like there is the the idea that there just isn't any empirical evidence for multiple realization it's a lot of it has taken on faith by it by the proponents of it but it just seems like it's gotta be that way but when you ask for actual examples of it they're

1:50:02 really not that convincing actually I mean in the case of fish pain I think it's even worse than that I think it's really really difficult to find bring actual evidence of multiple realization of pain and so basically the the argument that ideas the argument of cultural and Shapiro in the last book where multiple realization book and that's a great book I liked it and so

1:50:36 basically they argue well people talk about multiple realisability if you are kind of and persist you would like some actual examples of multiple realize the real realization right before we can talk about multiple realizability if I told you that eyes multiple multiple realizable but I cannot bring a single example of a multi P realized I you wouldn't believe me when I say in the case of multiple realization

1:51:12 realizability of mental states it's the same thing and so people say that well alright you know you know that you have pain in humans you need to have a cortex not all people agree with that but let's say it's true yes right-thinking people agree with it in order to have pain in humans you need to have context and since fish don't have courtesies they don't have a cortex they are not

1:51:47 conscious and so they don't feel pain right that's the no cortex no cry yeah no context no crime which by the way they still do cry hey just don't maybe they don't fuel themselves yeah if they don't have a core things they have nociception so they can react to nuts noxious stimuli you know that damage their body in a variety of ways but they don't feel pain and so a lot of people react to these organs by saying well of

1:52:25 course they feel pain because just like feathers are necessary for birds to fly if you take a bat for example bats don't have feathers but they can still fly and you can buy energy say a context is necessary for pain in humans fish don't have a cortex but they can still feel pain and why do this do we know that they can still feel pain it's because they have pain like behaviors they behave in ways that indicates that they

1:52:59 feel pain but once you accept that the problem is that you have a kind of slippery slope at what point do you reject the view that something that feels that that exhibits penlight behaviors actually feel pain at one point do you say well a frog spinal cord cannot realize pain you have to put some to find some criterion between implausible and plausible multiple

1:53:33 realizations of pain right that I claim they cannot do well because to find a criterion for example your criterion could be well everything that has pain like behaviors she all Spain except if they don't have a brain for example well but how would how do we know yeah why return instead of instead instead of except if they don't have a context then you have to bring some evidence right

1:54:08 there again except if they don't have a cortex I have evidence humans when they don't have a context they don't feel pain that's evidence from my crew Torian why why do is take the criterion that corresponds to your three theoretical ideas of words conscious in West not and so they have to find a criterion the problem is that to find such criterion they need to test hypotheses of the kind for all entities that have X they can feel pain and without X they cannot feel

1:54:44 pain the problem is that if you want to test this hypothesis this criterion then you need to know whether or not entities in which you test the hit area feel pain or not don't learn anything from the test you have to presuppose that they feel pain in order to test the claim that's having a brain is necessary for pain and so it's a kind of they they are forced to enter into a kind of circular a vicious circle which they can never

1:55:17 provide a criterion for distinguishing plausible cases of multiple realization from impossible cases so that's the argument and you can push the solvent further into saying that in fact they cannot even provide us with good reasons for believing in multiple realization in the first place why because it's the same thing if they want to prove that pain is multiple realizable they have to show that some animal feels pain but how do they know without in basically the

1:55:56 argument is that to interpret the data you need to have decided whether pain is multiplied realized or not so you cannot bring any evidence in favor of the multiple realization of pain let's go I like that argument that is presupposed in order to find evidence you have to presuppose it you don't presuppose it then you won't find evidence for it I like the structure of that argument I wonder how come your own view about birds isn't putting some pressure on that so using birds are conscious you have every

1:56:30 reason for that so is that not evidence for a kind of multiple realizability of realization or pain so so it depends on how you define multiple realization and that's where it gets tricky right multiple realization typically is not understood as realizing the same so first most of the time is realizing a function it's realizing a phenomenal character right which is already wheeled by the way that's in any way let's say

1:57:08 that phenomenal characters can be mentally you realized whatever that means it's not about the stuff that composes the realizer it's about the way in which it's organized I think so for example if my if my pen was instead of being made of wood its wood but I won't know anything else it wouldn't count as multiple

1:57:41 realization why because it's just not the same stuff but it's it's it just writes in the same way so to have multiple realization you need to realize the same kind in different ways not not just with different stuff here inverse basically the idea is that they realize this probably I'm not sure I would I would say it's 70% chances that they are conscious but they probably

1:58:19 realize pain in a way that is in fact actually pretty similar to the way in which we realize pain even it's without the context so it's not it's not just the idea that is there is not something really intrinsically special with the context right in the way in which the new what it does yeah so I mean if you push that far enough then it seems like you could say that you know you could have consciousness and an artificial system

1:58:51 and yet not multiple realization so if you if you have like a robot that's conscious by doing it in a way that is done in an arc or whatever then it doesn't matter if it's silicon or biological on your view I would say that for example if it's in silicon chips but if it still performs the same computations it's not really mutable realization because it's just some different stuff really realizing the

1:59:25 same function but in the same way it's still realizing the same function in the same way so what so does that that does you know Ned's example the China brain is that the same way if you have a hundred billion people all doing the functions of neurons ah yeah I don't know maybe that would be in the same way yeah they would if they realize the exact same computations yeah I mean that's an interesting view I don't know

1:59:57 if that's like the standard way of thinking about multiple realization I think this is how both women should do it's a way of thinking about it is it stronger I think yeah I think you need a lot of evidence actually really thinking that something is really relatively realized because other see otherwise everything is going to be realizable that's right yes you just have to show that you can do it with one little difference somewhere and it's beautifully realizable yeah exactly one

2:00:31 electron and this carbon atom is different and is that multiple realization something that really differentiates but in in fish the problem is that we don't find yet we haven't found yet the kind of analogues to the cortex in humans and so that's why the case of fish is different from bones right yeah exactly

2:01:07 right well though it depends on the kind of fish right I mean some some some fish I think like maybe child and stuff or something like that have something like a primitive cortex so it really just depends on the species for example but most people talking about chilliest a fish yeah the context and in cartilaginous fish like rays and sharks they don't a sentence didn't even friend-friend nociceptors right that's an interesting point they'll still have

2:01:42 pain behavior though I'm not down some repose swing that's sometimes the shock can be cut into house and continue eating hungry I'm really hungry no but that's pretty as pretty so they don't have the pain baby so I thought they did have some avoidance behavior and even some I guess it's mostly it's not really yeah right we just need to

2:02:17 have more data to decide but basically my argument is not against consciousness in fish I personally don't think that fish are conscious I'm but for my my real view is that we don't look right and if you claim that you know that fish are conscious and that they musically you realize pain you go beyond the available data and it's not intellectually honest

2:02:49 yeah no I'm not part I agree see I'm on the other side of it but at the same place so I personally think fish are conscious but I also think we don't know it and it hasn't been established so and for the same reasons that we've been discussing in and you know this is something that it's just so hard for the average person like I pressed this case all the time in class you know animals conscious yes or no yes obviously they cry when you kick them yeah but can you build something that cries when you kick him it doesn't feel pain yes obviously you can but then why I feel really Oh what are we not getting there just as a

2:03:23 real disconnect ultimately it comes down to people have this kind of impression that it's alive and therefore it's it feels something when it acts that way but things that aren't alive then of course you say what about Roomba is Roomba alive I think yeah why not it doesn't reproduce but neither these other anyway so you can get the whole can of worms opens up but in the popular mind they're just this link between acts that way so we must and it what reason what we have or not we think this way and it's normal to think that way but

2:03:59 it's like I don't think people will realize the importance and it's true also for even for scientists working in consciousness science they don't realize how huge blindsides is you know how huge all the studies on the fact that people can retain considerable memory without conscious memories all this stuff that shows big dissociations between

2:04:31 conscious and unconscious processing and show that you can have a lot of unconscious processing and complex behaviors with unconscious processing people all those made that I think and so they underestimate what you can do with unconscious processes that's exactly right yeah that's why they believe that Oh surely if you have this behavior you should have consciousness but do you accept that for for the folks I know

2:05:03 no sure sure he knows yeah exactly I mean this is a point that we tried to when I wrote the paper with Joe LeDoux we tried to make this point so if the options are not either the consciousness or they're just mechanisms that can't respond flexibly to the environment there's this in-between position which is that they are cognitively sophisticated at an unconscious level and that explains what they're doing but not there's no need that populate the extra edition of consciousness it is

2:05:37 interesting that you see this kind of difference between people working animals and people working in humans so in the animals that the claim is how do you demonstrate the animal is conscious whereas in humans the claim is how do you demonstrate that they're unconscious processing there you know it's similar debates by the opposite I mean it depends on which animals we're talking about right right in mammals in general no it will be pretty much like humans I guess I hope well it depends because you

2:06:13 know you might think there's a difference between verbal reports on the one hand and nonverbal reports yeah so while monkeys can reports they can't verbally report yet anyway but and and there are some interesting studies that show that you get different results depending on whether someone verbally reports or finger presses or indicates whether a movement yeah exactly exactly so I think there are issues here and I'm optimistic about overcoming them but I do think that there are real methodological issues specifically related to can we use nonverbal reports

2:06:50 as being reliable indicators or traces of consciousness or whatever and I think that we can get to the point where the answer is yes I know other of you I know like Joe is more skeptical of that Joe LeDoux he's he's much more skeptical that you could ever get to the point where we would have any good reason to trust nonverbal reports over verbal reports so that's a more of an old-school kind of you know I guess Joe's famous quote I guess it's famous now since I don't know but it's quote now is you know when it comes to

2:07:22 behavior he's a behaviorist when it comes to consciousness he's a consciousness guy but if pushing buttons is just basically a kind of behavior you don't need to postulate conscious experience to explain why the animals pushing this button versus that button for the same reasons we've all been discussing this entire time so it does look like you know there's any time he almost pushes it and you take that as indicating it was consciously where you have the same issue why why take that as evidence as opposed to how many being done unconsciously the thing is that

2:07:56 once again you use the meter for the verbal report but it's not it's almost never available report in consciousness sense people press buttons for both the first order and second order tests it's pressing buttons all the way down yeah but there's a difference because you know that the person is pressing the button because they understand that pressing it means that they saw where as

2:08:30 we can't rule out that the monkey is pressing the button because it associates reward with button pressing but you can develop also some ways of testing consciousness in monkeys too when for example is quite ironic because the first cases of plain sight but what I mean yeah and so it's precisely by using the same methods we used in monkeys in humans

2:09:03 that we discovered that humans too [Music] before that's but but if before the humans cases no one would have been very confident in saying the monkeys didn't have conscious experience but we're performing the task anyway that would seem means pretty counterintuitive I would think right they had to test that in humans where they could actually say no I'm not seeing it I don't see it it's not there for me and then we go okay so monkeys too but that's where the verbal report comes in right so there and I think there are

2:09:36 some articles with by Humphrey all the articles on bright side in which says that it's it's I made misquote here approximately he says it's the monkey didn't believe that she could see right but it's the as if part that's important and that's where the humans the that to sort of get to a place where you would feel comfortable making that claim you'd have to do human work first well you could verify with a verbal report as opposed to just a behavioral response

2:10:08 yeah so that's where I was so ultimately that's what I think the the verbal report Trump's or at least that's part of the case for why verbal report would trump these other nonverbal ways of indicating includes your confidence measures and all that other stuff so it depends on the cases yeah depends on the cases yeah do self evidence that you can use direct responses first although that you can use that to detect consciousness

2:10:42 right most of the time that's what we do right we see people do stuff and we infer that they are conscious of things in their environment we don't ask them all the time right so that is I think one of the I mean so I think that's one of the big problems here so to descend in the theoretical talk for a second so for someone like me who's interested in debates between first-order theories higher order theories in general and support you know one of them but not ultimately but anyway so as someone interested in that debate and what would count as evidence for or against a

2:11:18 first-order theory or a higher-order theory these kinds of questions are going to matter more right so if you take one so well actually yeah yeah sorry I'm kind of lost my train of thought [Laughter] what were you just saying a second ago um huh yeah you lost it – I got I got a text from my wife downstairs saying

2:11:50 you've been up for a long time we're gonna eat lunch now all right they derailed me a little bit but obviously sorry about that yeah let's just we've been going for a long time now and I'm good is there anything that hasn't come up that you would like to have come up before we call it a day um um I think that's fine that's fine I want to thank you for your time I really do think that your work is excellent I can't really believe that you've done all this

2:12:22 amazing work before you even have defended your PhD so we expect great things from you obviously and I really appreciate you taking the time and discussing my stuff it's it's you very much yeah okay say on first I can I'll say by a lie