Consciousness Live! with Joshua Tan (S2 E4)

0:00 all right we are live joining me today is a very special guest Joshua Cain so Josh for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do yeah so my name is Josh tan I'm an astronomer at my home institution is LaGuardia Community College just like you but they astronomy our program at CUNY is based out of the American Museum of Natural History so we have all of the research astronomers there and also there are some now down

0:34 at the Center for computational astrophysics in the Flatiron District which is a new Simons Foundation Institute so we kind of work on a lot of astronomy problems together research in that way I have been here for about two years working on things my main interest is actually neutron stars and I kind of got interested in I've always been very interested in science communication and questions involving science in general and one of the classes I actually teach

1:10 is astrobiology at LaGuardia which surprisingly touches on the subject of consciousness more than you might expect students have big questions and perhaps very legitimate questions about what the connection between consciousness and for example life might be and so so then we sort of got started I guess a few months back and Here I am doing it yeah that's right

1:41 so it was that I mean just a follow-up on that was that how you got interested in talking about consciousness but it seems like you are more interested in before or like Hazar in advance so I've always been involved in public science communication sort of thing and a lot of that involved trying to determine what things you could say with certainty with things you couldn't

2:13 say with certainty about scientific facts and so to that extent actually before I became an astronomer there was a brief period of time where I got very interested in the comparative religion and so spend some time kind of looking into how that all played out especially on in the realm of scientific understanding versus religious understanding things of that nature that was back when I was undergraduate I'm

2:46 not real interested in that and then sort of ended up going into the empirical side of things from there but then I've always been involved in outreach astronomers tend to do that a lot and so because of that you end up engaging a lot with some of these subjects so I've spent quite a bit of time engaging with cosmology I've spent quite a bit of time engaging with evolution as a subject and then quantum mechanics also is one of the things that ends up coming out it's a subject that

3:18 you know we study to varying degrees I mean I've taken a number of classes and use quantum mechanics to describe various things and in my research but I'm not that's not my main field of study but it's certainly something that I was interested in when I saw you talk and saw that you know there was going to be this engagement because one of the things I had actually looked into were theories about consciousness and quantum

3:53 mechanics being connected because Roger Penrose is something of you know he's one of the more interesting cosmologists out there so I know him for his work in general relativity and then he proposed along with Stuart Hameroff this idea related to consciousness in quantum mechanics being connected which was I would I guess I could say charitably not received the most favorably by people in the physics community and then there were some other sort of strange Crocker

4:27 she's the kind of brood up around that maybe about 10 to 15 years ago right online that's kind of all settled down at this point I would say but it's always something that I stayed in touch with I'd engaged with and then I guess before I even went to your talk there was a I kind of got an interest in the subject again because Scientific American has been publishing sort of blogs that are supposed expensively be about scientific ideas and I took

5:01 objection to a few of them that were about this subject as to whether they were actually scientific claims that would be offered and so I was so you wrote it I felt one that you wrote about Penn psychism right that was the response to a blog that was written by someone that as far as I know is not very well known and either the philosophy nor the empirical side of big

5:37 questions about human consciousness but got this blog post published had this sort of recasting he didn't explicitly say in his blog post that it was pants psychism but he referred to a paper that he wrote that definitely was content psychism as a yeah as a claim and he tried to recast it in terms of emergence which is an interesting idea that comes out of physics it was very popular let's say thirty years ago you'd be a little bit less popular now than it was as a

6:12 unifying characteristic in physics but that's I took an exception I guess to the way it was proposed in Scientific American I made the claim that it wasn't actually a proposal that we could test it was not it was not a testable proposal it's what I said but it would always be a way you could sort of find your way out of the weeds if

6:45 someone said oh this is not what's going on you could always oppose another aspect of it that would allow for your pen sight isn't it to be emerged as it were so that was kind of my criticism like Oh lemon ik was kind enough I don't think he agreed with me that he shouldn't engage with this sort of non empirical side of things because he thinks that I think his opinion is that this is an open question and you need to have a wide range of opinions offered but he is graciously enough to

7:19 essentially publish my response with basically no edits at all so do I mean cuz I I guess there's a lot of stuff I wanted to ask about I'm not sure where where to jump in at this point but do you take a falsifiability in general to be a criterion for like a scientific theory I mean and I have this have string theory in the in the background you know so I know that people that are in philosophy of science have kind of moved beyond this and I think with good

7:52 cause I think it works as a nice heuristic at least when I'm talking with students I find that it helps to kind of eliminate certain misconceptions about things that may or may not be amenable to investigation scientifically I guess that's the way I think of falsifiability so I don't think of it as the full criterion necessarily or something that could be relevant to a scientific idea I

8:28 think that there are sometimes proposals that are made which are not strictly falsifiable but that allow for a development that may provoke scientific discovery and investigation so I'm hesitant to say that this is like a hard-and-fast criterion I'm not carrying in that way on the other ground so I do think that it's extreme it's a it's a big red flag when I can't identify what's something when something

9:00 is falsifiable I think that that's a that's a good indication that's something because that some sort of question has been asked that may not be answerable in an empirical way so I mean notoriously in string theory we have a similar kind of issue arising yeah and in oncology in general I guess this would be something like eternal inflation so eternal inflation isn't something that looks like it's empirically testable is it but yet kind of this interesting question so I always

9:35 find this to be problematic in the sense that if you look in the history of I guess I use parallax often as the example parallax of the stars was one of the big objections to Galileo when he proposed that the earth went around the Sun and his interlocutor said oh well there are no observations of parallaxes of the stars but fixed stars the ones that are very far away and so this is a problem with your model and his response

10:13 wasn't exactly satisfying and you could argue that at that point they didn't have the technology to observe the parallax of the stars yet and so was the proposal that eath parallax of the stars galileo acknowledged that they should exist that you shouldn't have parallax he just said that the stars were quite far away although be missing judged exactly how far because he was much closer than they actually put her no I didn't know that yeah interestingly I mean he could meet a lot

10:46 of interesting mistakes in his dialogues before but the tides is the most famous he disinvited me wrong about his experiment he's not done but in any case but you see if you imagine like if you were having this discussion Galileo's time would we claim that parallax of the Stars is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because we don't have any technology that can go this if it does exist if TV stars are so far away sand this might just be completely unfalsifiable so I'm hesitant always to say that something is strictly unfalsifiable because we don't know what

11:19 sort of breakthroughs and technologies are going to develop and so yes right now it's really hard to imagine how you might falsify string theory or how you might qualify certain internal inflation models but that doesn't mean that they won't lend themselves to such treatments in the future as far as I'm concerned I'm hesitant to predict that that's the case so in this sort of battle between people who say string theory is not falsifiable so it's not science and those that say you know shut up it is I'm kind of somewhere in the middle I don't know it may very well be that the

11:53 proposals that they're putting forth are not falsifiable ultimately like they may end up being in the realm of pathological science you might say something like where people continually change their ways of putting forth things davidich kind of does this idea like you should have a model that you can't change very easily that's kind of the mark of a good model right that's an interesting way of putting it I guess I mean it's but string theory certainly fits that right there's no – because some people there's this flight get the

12:27 landscape and there's like you know but I mean the fundamental rules that generate the landscape you can't you can't find you can't without any sort of remarkable like it's one of the big complaints about it is that any observation that's me probably can be accommodated yeah big problem right there have a problem right so it depends on who but there's also people who claim no there are no go theorems and there are areas that you can say oh yeah so I and this is also way beyond my

13:01 wheelhouse I not a string theorist I don't delve into this very deeply but so I remain extremely agnostic as the question as to whether string theory is scientific or not I am happy to let the string theorists work on their problems as much as they want to and try to propose things that we might do to make observations I will say that penrose kind of interestingly even though I think that he's been wrong about certain things his is pretty remarkably good at proposing ways to falsify his ideas

13:35 something he tries to do as a matter of course I think people can learn and take a page from his book of doing things like that but but you make this a squirrely fast why I so what I'm not hearing you say and I wonder if you would add if you're not saying it could you don't agree with it or if you just haven't brought it up yet what I'm not hearing you say or what I wonder what you would say about is suppose that you know I take the Galileo point that's falsifiable in principle or something mhm so suppose that string theory were not falsifiable inference not even in

14:10 principle break wouldn't it still count as science given the level where I would say that there you start to have a problem where even in principle when something in principle is not falsifiable that's where I start to say yeah this this can't be a scientific plane like that uh-huh so you're not you're not interested in that kinds of arguments I guess like Sean Carroll has argued and in philosophy inside philosophy of physics Richard I would argue that we need some kind of some other criteria for to evaluate theories

14:43 as good or as being physically meaningful which don't rely on falsifiability precisely because of things like the landscape and string theory yeah I think maybe so I don't know that I necessarily follow what Sean means when he says that it's fitting because I think that it it's fine to say yeah all right we need other criteria in the meantime but at some level you have to be able to say you know this has some

15:21 consequences to what I can observe right and if you can't say that then at what point is this description viable right like what are the other things that you're actually looking for so yeah I don't know that I necessarily follow completely his idea is yeah alright there's lots and lots of possibilities and in some sense now like in particle physics you know any observation that gets made no matter how

15:55 tenuous there will quickly be thousands of Papers written about possible theories that can explain it but I don't think that that's I'm saying that that means that particle physics is not not falsifiable I think it still falsifiable I just think that there are lots of different ideas about how you put together theories right and that when you eventually what will happen is you eliminate the ones that you don't like you follow the path down the ones that that seem to be correct and they provoke new predictions and that's where it

16:29 becomes falsifiable becomes more like related to your I think area when you talk about something like dark matter and dark energy so how do you adjudicate between the people who say look what this is actually doing is falsifying Newtonian Einstein's the Einstein's theory of relativity yeah versus the people say no it's not it's just something else out there called dark matter dark area so no we don't know which one it is it could be either one uh-huh and it's perfectly fine for it to

17:03 be either one right it could be that the theory is still fine and there are any particles or new things that we haven't detected or it could be that there is some problem with the theory on certain scales and that's kind of nice leaving the mystery open because we don't know what the solution is at some point someone will or if history is a guy at some point someone will discover something that will point and lead us into the direction of saying this is the

17:36 explanation that's correct versus this other one and there are strong hints that dark matter for example is probably something like a particle that seems it's I think it's the most popular explanation for a reason that's probably too technical to get into but that's the kind of the I actually like having that kind of argument available and that there is not a resolution yet is something that I think is a feature rather than a bug excited yeah because

18:11 what I was trying to bring out was that you there's another kind of argument there I like what you're saying about the the openness and you know scientific attitude being humble and not not knowing and I like that but why isn't there another kind of thing you could suggest which is that the general theory of relativity is so well confirmed in almost so many other areas yeah it would just be a great cost to have some modified Newtonian dynamics or whatever

18:43 junk it and so there's other considerations beyond whether you know they strictly falsifiable or not that suggests that this is actually the better theory and should be preferred over modifying it in some way why isn't that another one of these kinds of non-empirical considerations I'm a good son I'm a big fan of regimes so I really do think that explanations depend on the context that you're trying to make them

19:16 in and so the obvious comparison is then to the revolution that happened a hundred years ago with general relativity versus Newtonian gravity you could make exactly the same argument use their tiny problem supposition the extra precession of the perihelion of mercury is a command you should be worried about it's only in gravity is incredibly accurate as a predictor and people were right to say those sorts of things but it turns out that there are strong fields that change the fundamental way that gravity works and you recover a

19:53 Newtonian gravity from general relativity but it requires a map modification Newtonian gravity is that fundamentally not correct in those regimes and you can show why and any explanation that would modify gravity to account for dark matter or dark energy or any other other sort of mysteries that are out there in astrophysics we'll have to recover all of the wild success the general relativity has enjoyed at some level so I don't think it's enough to just say oh it's been

20:29 successful let's keep it as is because the regimes that we might be testing gravity in at this point are different than the regimes that it was originally proposed in relation to and the observations that Einstein had available to them we're not of galactic and galactic cluster scales yeah no yeah I take that point so just to don't get too distracted by this but to bring it back to something related to the

21:02 consciousness point which is what this was all about to begin with there's a kind of I think on your part willingness to be patient with respect to things like string theory and not with respect to something like pin psychism so I'm wondering what what is in your mind the thing that makes the one a serious thing we should wait around for and the other ones something that you can say Oh what we won't ever develop a way that we could test this yeah so I guess to me I guess if I was gonna identify the

21:36 problem with the proposals I have read so far with pants IQ isms as I see them as being eminently adaptable to any sort of scenario that you would come across so I guess the idea is that I can't come up with an explanation that would pull you away from that if I were to talk to someone that was a pan psychic proponent you know we'd say what would be the thing that would that you would be able to observe that would convince you that hands like isn't this wrong I don't know that I could get a response from them

22:10 that I would agree with and in that sense there are there are people that are kind of stick in the muds when it comes to things like alternative theories of gravity for example who act very similarly right and I think they were equally incorrect okay when I talk about some of these people that are like oh it's modified Newtonian dynamics till the day I die they have a real hard time accommodating some of the observations that seem to be problematic for that sort of treatment

22:44 and to that extent you know I also have a problem with them what I can do is I can see because perhaps I'm more familiar with the literature and like ways that these ideas have developed places where you can pick out the important things that they're saying or the general principles the ideas and then say you know you can you know sort of have this or at least whatever the ultimate solution to this mystery will we'll have something that can explain this really interesting aspect that

23:17 they're pointing out and then get rid of some of the other sort of as I said sticking them that sort of behavior and you know the stuff that I can easily say alright you know you're never going to accept that dark matter is a particle no matter you know even if I hold one in my hand and give it so that so yeah so that's the way I approach the subject I guess generally is that that's whenever I've been reading about people who promote or proponent of Penn psychism that's the sense I get and that may be

23:50 because I haven't read the right stuff or I might not be as immersed and being able to pick out the things that they actually are saying that might be something you could latch on to right but that so it could be my own ignorance but that's the comparison that I see is that it's just something that can't that that is not going to be able to ever be shown to be wrong anybody as far as I can tell right so so I mean yeah I would

24:25 you can make a comparison I like forty in psychoanalysis yes actually that I was thinking about that the other day that it's very similar the story here seems very similar to me to psychoanalysis right yeah yes so I wonder now this came up in some of our earlier discussion so I wonder if I can press you a little bit on this and I just for the record I don't know if anyone cares but I'm not trying to defend Penn psychism mm-hmm I'm not a pence I guess I'm pretty old-fashioned like identity theory materialist that's you know you know don't know if that's true or not but that's where I would

24:59 like things to work out so you know I'm not trying to I'm just trying to get clear on what the methodological issues are and you know what we're what counts as evidence and stuff like that so I I think that the people who because I talked to pants I kissed suck some of them care about science a lot of them actually and I think when you ask them like why are you upon psychics why why not just the brain or why not just you know functionalism or whatever your alternative view is they tend to say things like Oh consciousness as

25:32 experienced by me from the first person has a certain quality to it that I just can't understand how that thing could be physical and then they could get more complicated you know kirby zombies or whatever but the basic thing that gets them is like the thing that I have when I have consciousness is something which seems in its nature not to be compatible with the way that physics and the physical sciences describe reality but yet we know it's perfectly real so I wonder now you I guess you're gonna say

26:08 that that doesn't counter the kind of evidence or or that I don't understand that that opinion is an opinion and it's a it's a perfectly fine opinion but I could equally say that opinion about almost anything I could say that about gravity right my experience of gravity doesn't seem to comport with the explanations that people offer for it I don't think gr is correct therefore right and so to me it's kind of like all right I don't know what to do with that sort of argument because I don't you do though you would explain

26:40 to the person how given the forces as described in gr and brains as such as there's lead to experiences like there's even though this is what's really going on so you would you would you would be able to take a scientifically minded literate person and convince them that yeah the Sun is not rising we're actually rising you know just you experience it this way and they would come to understand that but can you do this I mean I don't think you're gonna be able to do the same thing yes that's always been the claim is that you can't do the same thing for someone who argues

27:14 in this way maybe because there's the mysteries that are still involved in consciousness or maybe too too close to our own experiences or too easy to access and comparison right the mysteries that are still evident in general relativity are pretty technical right and so it's much easier to kind of say well everyday experience is totally explained whereas maybe III would agree that everyday experience is not totally explained in the sense that we don't have a one-to-one explanation for you

27:49 know experience versus cause-effect kind of arguments but I also don't think that there's been a convincing story that this is impossible to do right and so at that point you know it is sort of a level of alright well we have to kind of shell the question at that point because for me you know then it becomes now we're trying to like debate between two different ideas for which you don't have

28:23 strong evidence but we're trying to pull on past understanding of how the history of ideas and things developed and so that's where I start to like pull out ideas that Carl Sagan comes up with and things like all right which is the simpler explanation is the simpler explanation that consciousness rise in the brain or is it that consciousness is inherent to all matter and then you have to have that discussion right like that argument is it simpler one way or the other and and it's not it's not Queen right it's not a simple way to

28:55 kind of do this but I think when I when I kind of evaluate it at that level it's it's easy to maintain this sort of I guess non materialist position whenever you have a mystery that you can hold on to as as I guess viscerally as consciousness it's right weights it it appears to me but so do you do do you I mean I think in your sympathetic would like Dennett and some of them your

29:29 characters out there so do you from your own just personal day-to-day experience do not find any traction at all when philosophers talk about phenomenal consciousness and yes and you just find that mysterious or I do I find it totally mysterious and even when I try to like give it the benefit of like alright I'm gonna try to understand exactly what's meant by this I just can't shake the fundamental idea that it

30:03 could easily be all in the brain like I just can't I can't wrap my head around how someone can be so convinced that it is impossible for that to occur that they would that they would sort of say all right we're gonna have to answer all this other stuff and I sometimes ask myself why that might be the case like why is it that for me is it just because of my training is it because of like other questions that I have investigating it clearly a zombie you know it but I mean but I mean I think

30:38 the zombie thing is interesting but I also think it's something of a like it's it's kind of just an object lesson more than anything else we don't really know that that's a legitimate way of describing what consciousness is and the people that study like neuroscience are kind of not really they don't really care or a lot of them it seems that I've investigated their work don't really care about what the answer to that question is in a sense but a lot of like actual work that's being done in doesn't take into account

31:13 the is completely agnostic to that question yeah completely agnostic to the question of idealism though right yes great but as is like all of science in a sense exactly yeah we don't we don't really care what the fundamental thing that's going on may or may not be as long as we have this sort of description networks or all right I mean I think this is really this the central turning point of the disagreement because you know the one to the extent

31:46 that I do agree with the Chalmers type arguments against materialism is to the extent that I find some kind of pull from this the first-person sense of acquaintance or whatever the fancy where you want to use with my own experience it's not that I find it impossible that it could be physical in fact I spend a lot of time arguing actually it's quite possible and so on but but I do think that at the first encounter there's a well you need you need a connecting

32:19 theory you need something that allows you to understand how it could be physical because when you just think about like oh my experience of red or the taste of chocolate or that I'm drinking coffee right now or the blue of this shirt there is a fun there is a something there which seems special it doesn't seem right off the bat like it could be magnetized or expressed mathematically just seems kind of to have a different thing going on it's

32:52 qualitative it's not motivated but but the other thing the difference between that and the other stuff which you can always say yeah what about that other stuff that that the difference is that that all that other stuff can be characterized in terms of some kind of function or in terms of the structure that it has so you can always like this is the thing people always just say about life oh well life used to be mysterious but that's not really true it was mysterious but people people knew that they were just certain and I know you talk a lot about this in your class so I want to broach them together but people talked about whether

33:26 these certain functions there's reproduction there's copying how could anything that's merely biological perform those functions and then once we had a theory of how those functions could be done biologically life was less mysterious from the point of view of science but the question at the beginning was already one that you could see how well if there was something that did that function then it would be doing life but it's not clear that there's anything like that that you can say for experiencing red or having um emotional

34:00 I I just can't get over the sort of astonishing hypothesis proposal that every thought is a 42 Simha right like I cannot I cannot like that to me is the sort of equivalent to what you're saying when you're talking about biological function right that that is what the sort of materialists would come back with they would just say all right well you know your experience of a qualitative understanding of whatever

34:33 phenomena you want to talk about is fundamentally a synapse it's a it's a reaction to a synapse that that experience maps on to that and it may be complicated and difficult to even come up with the full explanation and we can return to life too because I think that there actually are still mysteries with respect to what life is that aren't very well accounted for not even not even that they're not even well accounted for I think ultimately it's a problematic category it's actually a sort of a

35:05 category here just talk about life versus non life in a weird way and that may very well be the same thing that happens with consciousness that in comes the category air to think that this is something that is empirically there's an empirical phenomena that we can easily map the idea of consciousness onto and I mean there's lots of stories about you know things that develop that weighing science will be fought it wasn't a thing or we thought it was yeah so that that maybe that's another

35:41 huge possibility that I am willing to entertain and it feels a little bit like there's the the groups that I am sort of most in disagreement with are not willing to entertain that as a possibility that either it's going to be completely separated from empirical reality so that no one will ever be able to sort of tell me that this doesn't exist I guess those are the people that don't like zombies or something like that and then or that you know there's got to be some other explanation that's

36:17 beyond physical descriptions that there's going to be this other I don't know artifice that's going to be developed and then we're going to be able to interact with it over in this universe and you can have your physical universe experience with it sorry yeah I drop something sorry about that yeah so I mean because I mean that I want to move past this because I don't think that there's gonna be a lot of a ways to convince anyone who doesn't know I'm

36:51 your site about this debate here but I mean so one set of debates ease in the things that need to be explained the existence of consciousness and the other side I think what I hear you saying is that the other side is open to the idea that maybe consciousness isn't in the list of things that need to be explained like in terms of existing things in the world or having your baby very comfortable with just it being an open question and not really knowing what the answer is by kind of assuming like normal that the answer is going to kind

37:26 of develop in the same way answer sex typically developed with things that have observable consequences that sort of thing like it's not going to be a unique case it's going to be the same sort of thing that we've had in the past yeah if you're talking about life or gravity or I don't know deep time whatever you want to talk about questions and then we slowly start to develop explanation it's gonna right yeah I generally have that hope as well I just was wondering if like you agreed and it to any extent that there's

38:01 something seemingly interestingly special about consciousness but suddenly you're saying yeah yeah I think there's computing experience but I don't think it's unique and I think the same mystery applies to anything we don't understand so let's talk about life for a little bit if you don't mind because you were just mentioning that so you know I saw this very interesting presentation that you gave about basically said it was like the first four lectures of your oh yeah the universe class it was on you on YouTube but something or somewhere so I

38:35 sort of know the general positions that you take but I wonder if so you can do a little bit of a introduction about what you think life is yeah why we want to focus on looking for biological life like ours and things on it and then I want to ask you some questions if you don't mind about it so yeah so I actually disagree with the functional definition of life to an extent because I think it's easy to problematize it and the examples I typically give our stars other people use computer programs to do this right I

39:09 like the idea that Istanbul almost any kind of list of functions that we want living things to have you can find something that people will agree is not living in general but will create not everybody but in general people will agree is not living that you can make an argument that those functions actually occur within that particular system and a star is a great example so like a star has an ability to reproduce in a way and a star has something that's akin to

39:46 homeostasis although we don't call it homeostasis we call it equilibrium and right like there's these things that you can easily make the analogy from one side to the other and so it's not that I actually think that the function definition is particularly problematic it's just that our kind of assumption about life is anthropocentric we're we assume things that are alive that are similar to us that developed in the same environment and the same pathways that

40:18 we ourselves developed but there's no reason to assume necessarily that that is a universal condition that everything will develop in this fashion that we might decide to call living versus nonliving and I think fantastic examples of this are things like viruses and prions right which most biologists will argue is are not alive but is somewhat problematically so and there are

40:51 biologists which will make the alternative argument as well and so to some extent I think it's kind of a not not an interesting question our virus is a lot it's like that's just not it's no longer sort of the thing that is most interesting about viruses or really anything that you're trying to describe that may be the subject of biology whether or not it's alive and I think some of this is this historical baggage

41:25 that we're carrying with us because that was a big question let's say as late as the nineteenth century people were trying to figure out whether there was this like Elan beetle that like the animated things and made things living and how would you describe this and there is actually some interesting ways of thinking about how life operates in a systems fashion that's different than things that are not alive in a general sense that you can kind of have fun with that that may even somehow in kind of

42:00 weird ways be connected back to consciousness and a lot of that has to do with discussions of entropy people get excited about all these sorts of things free energy definitions of life which I think are intriguing and and worthy of consideration if not necessarily fully developed yet but I think the so then ultimately what ends up happening is we just sidestep the question and so we say all right rather than try to answer this question but what is the live what is not alive we try to be as expansive as possible for

42:33 our own experience and say okay essentially everything we know that's alive has nucleic acids and proteins right those are the two things that things that are alive have so that's kind of the definition that we end up adopting when we launch space probes that explore other planets like ultimately that's the sort of thing we're going to be sensitive to if and when or if you know we discover life on Mars for example it will be that sort of

43:06 life right we're looking for like Martian bacteria or maybe not even bacteria right maybe that they're you know any sort of like like little bits of nucleic acid would be a Nobel prize-worthy you know sort of discovery sort of argument that you can think about like maybe you don't even find life but just the detritus of it or something like that you don't know but there's a real risk there because we focus so much on you know Earth's biology that we'll miss something

43:40 that's we might describe as life but doesn't function the same way right something without DNA but that is virtually identical talk about you know okay other kinds of nucleic acids or things that are not carbon-based or things that you solvents that aren't water but it's it's still very limiting because you're still operating under the sort of basic assumption that life behaves in this sort of chemical soupy way that may not necessarily be the case there could be

44:16 amazingly intricate and interesting conscious things that are out there that don't have any of those characteristics and we may completely miss them because we're focused on our own sort of understanding of biology but on the other hand it's not very easy to understand how you would go about exploring those other areas yeah without a place to start you might as well start with what you know and so it's a perfectly reasonable endeavor and I support it for fully fully to do these

44:51 sorts of things but I I think it's important to be aware that there's a fundamental problem with that assumption which is that we're basing it entirely on our own cells right not necessarily on the vast possibility space that exists out in the universe and if there's one thing we know from our limited experiences that nature's clever there's a vastly different stuff out there and it's not too hard to imagine

45:24 it doing interesting you're so I'm yeah okay that's good to know because I guess I interpreted what you were saying and that talk of yours as well this is what life is so let's look for that but really what you're saying is this is just kind of a pragmatic thing this if there's ever a place where the streetlight metaphor was a good idea this is it like where is it or the drunk guy in the streetlight but actually there's no other place to look yeah we don't know where we dropped the keys or even if there are keys right that's

45:59 that's the way I approach it and it's it's kind of encouraging in a way that you know you know if you're gonna talk from a probabilistic standpoint that a lot of the stuff that we're interested in in terms of the anthropocentric version of life is available in other locations so that's kind of you know encouraging in a sense but it's not at all clear to me that this is the only pathway available there's a lot of other pitfalls too which I know you've been

46:31 you'd like to point out that like definition of the habitable zone for example is one that you say it's we're making a simplifying assumption there but we're risking again we're looking all sorts of interesting possible right so this is yeah it's again it's the same situation you have to start somewhere so you sort of start with an assumption that you have something like earth functioning with like a carbon cycle the way earth does with an atmosphere that's about the same as Earth's it's a lot of thing that is similar to earth that you're relying on

47:04 and all of the planets we've discovered you can't say it word one about their atmospheres or carbon cycles so you know we're basing everything on like the size it's a total yeah we're basing everything on from the location and then somewhat on a size but yeah it's it's plain of hand waving at that level because even then it's hard to really measure the sizes accurately enough to kind of make judgments about what might

47:38 be possible for even a surface of a planet right like if we discover an extrasolar planet do we know for certain that it's rocky versus right watery versus gaseous not really we have some an understanding right we have some parameterizations of our ignorance but at the end it's it's such a difficult thing to just attack the thing in the first place that we really don't have an explanation that's pretty straightforward in that fashion and it can also be misleading right like some of the more interesting places to look

48:11 for life in our own solar system are nowhere near the habitable zone right that's just the way it is it's very possible to imagine that the conditions are better or at least available in situations that are very different than Earth's particular situation so so then can I ask because one of the questions that I was wondering was given the package of commitments that you're defending but again all of which are mostly sympathetic to but just to probe

48:45 what your position is here on this so suppose you know that we did discover in the course of our investigation some exotic non nucleic acid based system that behaved in seemingly intelligent ways what behavioral criteria would convince you that the thing was conscious that seemed to be an important I mean I didn't question yeah we call the hard problem of it may seems like

49:25 you're committed you come they like you land on in that sense is again a [Music] streetlight analogy which is that technology for better or worse is what we have used as our determination for intelligence here in the biological world so it would be a technological question for my for my perspective is this unknown entity producing technology that I can interact with and that's

50:01 extremely problematic because we're in a very narrow range of technology is this is the thing I always point out this is this is actually my favorite resolution to the Fermi paradox where are all the aliens which is that they're all either much less advanced for all much more advanced than us and we're only sensitive to the very narrow range of technology that we are and everybody else is somewhere else in the parameter space and the analogy I sometimes use is

50:36 broadband versus narrowband radio communication if you were to broadcast a broadband radio signal in when Marconi was first developing the radio they would mistake it for static like no one would know that you actually produced the technology that was intelligent and so yeah it's it's a problematic thing to fall back on but that's the only thing I can think of

51:09 personally that I can hang my hat on and so you know hopefully with enough rolls of the dice you like hit it like winning the lottery oh yeah they have you know the same ability to produce there's all kinds of weird ideas like you know we come across the idea that it's now possible for human beings if we wanted to to build an optical laser that could outshine the Sun at specific wavelengths so maybe someone will do that and so then we go around looking for these optical releases just another you know it's very much a like lottery game at

51:42 that point but that's the best that I can do is if you're gonna try to identify what I think would be a mark of intelligence and I think that that's the only way I can get at what we're meeting by consciousness would be some sort of intelligence then it's gonna have to be a technological match otherwise I'm not sure how communication is just problematic without technology as far as I can tell I don't know how else look into that okay if you if you stabbed it

52:18 with a knife and it made a strange noise and scuttled into the corner that's not gonna be evidence that I felt pain if you stab it with a knife and it runs into the corner I think that's evidence for pain but I think we're I guess I guess the way I in problematizing it is that this is something that is so totally outside the like realm of our own biological perspective that it would be hard for us to time determine whether it was even

52:51 alive let alone whether it was conscious right right and so yeah you stab it with a knife and then the knife turns into a flower like how do you that's that it's like I don't I don't know what the reaction would be so if the reaction happens right where it's very similar like in science fiction right where like everything is similar to human being then yeah then the question becomes a lot more straightforward but I have a hard time imagining that it's going to be that simple I grab my other easier time imagining that we're gonna actually have a problem identifying it

53:25 in the first place and then like so then the question becomes well how can you cast your net as broadly as possible and the best I can come up with this technology and even that is problematic right yeah very interesting so I mean I can keep asking about this forever but I wonder if we could actually if you would mind if I sort of segue into talking about the quantum mechanics in consciousness sure yeah because that was one of the things that started this discussion but there's too many interesting things that talk about yeah but of course so once again I'm I guess

54:00 I would defend more this idea than I would pan psychism I mean even though there's some stuff in the pants I get stuff that I'm sort of sympathetic to is that my beeping or you be that's my name okay but so that was the the impetus for this for the talk that I gave and where I was basically just arguing that the idea that consciousness plays a role in collapsing the wavefunction a causal role is is a serious idea that's at

54:36 least on par with the other kinds of interpretation there's nothing that you find clunky and so you wanted to say you were against that that it's not a serious idea so I'm curious a little bit so I know you first of all just to by way of getting in the realm I know your criticism of like the Penrose and Hameroff stuff that that comes from tegmark right them and that Max's work mm-hmm involving decoherence so first of all I wonder if you could say a little bit someone with that because I think I don't really agree with the point that you're making here but it may be I'm not

55:09 an expert obviously so I'm yeah I want to know what exact point you're making and see if we so I think so I don't know if you've encountered tag marks this does not work at all let's try to hold on that second tip is to turn off notifications yeah that's why I mean it's just not listening to me yeah not disturb these would be a discussion if there weren't some technological you

55:45 were just saying technology a sign of intelligence I'm doubting now yeah so I have to tune it disturb on but most of it that actually is what it's intended okay it looks like it worked okay it's all um yeah so did you read max tegmark s– like rejoinder and then like subsequent like saying little important to say yeah so I think max makes a good point that's specific but you also is attempting and I think it just doesn't care to go into it and great detail to

56:19 make a more general point which is that quantum mechanics is fundamentally a very micro physical explanation and the the scales at which it's relevant are essentially ones of energy and size for the most part at least when you get to the things that cause people to get sort of intrigued they're going to be talking about small things and you have to be

56:50 talking about certain energy regimes at least if you're interested in doing system relevant things that are quite different than what happens in biological systems which is not to say that they're not quantum mechanical effects within biological systems but there are fundamental things which make biology a classical system as a as a general rule and the strongest argument is one of about decoherence which is to

57:27 say that the effects of quantum mechanics to the extent that particles behave like waves and incidentally every particle according to quantum mechanics and everything that has mass behaves like a wave or anything event I guess we should say behaves as a wave the extent to which you can look at the phenomenology associated with those waves is the extent to which you can avoid this problem of decoherence which is to say

58:04 that things end up behaving a lot more like particles complemented populating the complimentary way they no longer are entangled they're now separate things they go their separate world wet lines they don't have this kind of spooky connection that ways provoked in the quantum world and so this is the argument that actually I think tegmark and I don't know if you would agree with me because he's a somewhat argumentative person but he's very but I think that's

58:39 actually sort of the larger point he's making which is that this is the kind of problem you're running up against whenever you try to do something functional in this way with quiet and I would largely agree with that I think that that's the fundamental thing you have to get around if what you want to do is apply quantum mechanics at a larger scale at least in terms of the ideas that Penrose and Hameroff with which we're doing which were essentially that there's effects happening at the

59:11 neurological level that mark causing consciousness to emerge yeah I mean they're their views a little even more radical I mean on for Penrose and Hameroff their view is that whenever they're spontaneous collapsed so first of all Penrose has to modify the equations of quantum mechanics that get spontaneous collapse when involving gravity or something weird like that but as soon as there's collapse they think that there's consciousness and then what the microtubules do according to them and what in which I'm you know nice and defending them obviously but what the microtubules do is to organize those

59:45 little bits of consciousness into what we call our stream of consciousness but they're that view is a pants I guess view in that every time there is a collapse there's consciousness and there's collapse all the time it's just not always done in brains but my so and I don't really the specific stuff I mean about microtubules and stuff I don't know about that stuff and not really that doesn't seem important the more general point though I worry about though and that's the role of decoherence so as far as I understand it it is the only so far it's the research

1:00:20 I'm not a mathematician on my businesses but I spent a lot of time trying to figure this stuff out so as far as I understand decoherence it's a basically a mathematical tool for determining when classical approximations become good enough that's a way to think of it yeah it can work but it's also a physical phenomenon well then I think there's a question about whether it's a physical phenomena so if you take a Copenhagen or a different kind of talks a stick interpretation then it's not going to be

1:00:52 and it may just be not a real physical process I think it depends on the way that you're interpreting it but but suppose it is a real physical process well I mean I guess the way I would say that it certainly is is people who for example run quantum computers this is the big problem that they have is that their system undergoes decoherence essentially and so you start with an entangled state and suddenly that state is no longer entangled right as you have either unintentionally introduced some

1:01:27 sort of energy into your system or you know all sorts of things can cause things to go wrong but basically you've removed the quantum mechanical effect that you were looking for is another way of saying it it's not I mean so there's there are sort of strong models of how the coherence happens but I think ultimately it's just sort of the statement that there is a difference between how things operate under quantum

1:02:00 mechanics and how things operate classically and there can be situation so an obvious place to look at the decoherence would be in the two-slit experiment when put a detector on one of the slits illuminated that's decoherence that's one off and that's a physical phenomena actually happened so in that sense I would say 50 coherence occurs there might be a more grander sense in which it's like a kind of no-go sort of thing I don't know that I'm even willing to entertain that as a

1:02:34 strong point and I think that's that's a way egg Mart approached it who's like a parent is the no-go theorem but I knew there's a more general question that you can ask yourself which is that under what regimes to quantum the sequani mechanics apply and is it you know what yeah I mean so there's a lot that's interesting in what you're saying but I just want to jump in really quickly because I mean certainly in the first instance I understand what you're saying

1:03:07 because decoherence in the most general sense is loss of coherence of the wave packet and so obviously if you put a detector at the slits and you get the classical probabilities back that's decoherence because you've lost the coherent packed package of information and the wave packet but so there are two things that I'm I guess that are getting mixed up I not mixed up but I think that are running closely together and what we're talking about so one is the emergence of the classical world like

1:03:42 why why isn't the world that we observe like the world described by a destroyer equation like and decoherence doesn't answer that question as far as I understand this so what what the math of decoherence does for you is it says that when the thing interacts with the environment it becomes entangled in the environment so you would have to measure the larger system namely the thing that you are interested in now and the environment as well so it's not that the

1:04:16 the wave nature has gone away it's just that you would need to do different measurements in order to detect it and it would have to involve the the environment or the measuring so the classical way put it have you know the measuring apparatus itself would have to be part of the quantum mechanical system at that point because it's entangled with it and more generally it's entangled with the environment so III don't think it's I'm not sure it's actually right to say that well you just get a classical world from it what you get is a coherent set of

1:04:48 histories or you can sign on a trajectory to to a certain particle but you so it's not clear that you do get classical you get things that kind of look classical to the point where you could ignore the quantum chemical Corrections I guess you would say but that doesn't mean that a collapse has occurred because as I understand the math gives you a diagonalization of the density matrix so in other words what you get is a superposition of that various outcomes namely that you it went through this slit and you detected it

1:05:20 here and it went through this slit and you detected it there so there still is a superposition just at the larger level yes I think I actually agree with what you're saying in the sense that the quantum mechanics does not just disappear that's absolutely the case however I think it might be a distinction without a difference or the difference without a distinction which one it is and the way I think of it is just sort of in the sort of mean to Broglie eighth sense when you become entangled with the environment your

1:05:54 wavelength just becomes impossible to measure because it's too tiny right so all of these quantum mechanical effects that you're looking for are occurring at scales that are just inaccessible to our measurement systems and to the extent that a thought is a measurement that's my expectation that you're going to be interacting with things that are for all intents and purposes acting classically that's the kind of way and it's not that quantum mechanics a disappeared it's

1:06:29 just that it is now in a regime under which you know you're not acting you're not able to access the interference pattern in the way you know you would like to get these kind of interesting entanglements that everyone is attracted to because it's a different way of reality interacting yes that's the way I think of it so I don't think I disagree with that point I just don't think that it is one that you can sort of say alright so that this keeps open the possibility that quantum

1:07:03 mechanics could be acting somehow yet I just don't think it does I think it's there but I don't think it gives you the stuff that that people are looking for it doesn't give you that sort of I guess subjectivity that everyone is hoping to write know and I think this is an interesting point that you're making and it brings out I think the difference in the kind of approach that I was trying to defend and the Hameroff Penrose kind of approach because as and especially that comparison with quantum computing I think supple because they're what they're trying to do is get the

1:07:36 superposition to do some work they want that the quantum mechanical States yeah and I know Kay and Penrose and Hameroff says stuff like that they were like oh there's got to be a bose-einstein condensates or something that's doing this yeah so that's and that's a different kind of theory that says there's something about super positions or being in a superposition or something like that that's important to the explosion of consciousness so certainly I wasn't trying to suggest that there's another so I guess what I would be interested in is what is this alternative it can you still call it

1:08:08 consciousness causes collapse if you're willing to accept that essentially anything that becomes entangled with the environment is you know a classical system right can you still but a classical system in a superposition his time very classical so if the if the if the system is in a superposition of being spin left and detecting spin left and also being spin right and detecting spin right then there still is the question of what why is it that we

1:08:43 observe only so the way that I understand the coherence is that you're gonna get like a preferred basis so you're gonna get some orthogonal States either be left or right but it doesn't tell you which of those you're gonna get there's nothing as a matter of decoherence that says is gonna be left or it's gonna be right you get probabilities and this and the absolute value of their square or whatever is the probability of finding it this way or that way so decoherence doesn't tell you that the world is classical it says if you looked you would find with this results or that

1:09:16 results but that's always what quantum mechanics told us and it's not an advanced to add decreased so then I guess my argument against a preference for quantum mechanics to be pulled in at this level is that probabilities occur in lots of places right in this fashion so like turbulence is a perfectly you know like use the plane and a bounce up and down or down and up like yeah like there are there are these there are

1:09:48 probabilistic systems that the only way we know how to model these things and you can even kind of argue that this fundament like it's as as accurate as you can get is say that you don't know whether it's going to be this state or that state but that's not um that's not a unique thing to quantum mechanics happens whenever we have systems that are modelled probabilistically and just happens that quantum mechanics is one such system and and it does lead to some weirdness in the sense that you know people are uncomfortable with the

1:10:24 determinism being the probability but that's just the way it is it's kind of like this is the way the world works that determinism is the probability or I guess you could say the wave functions really like it's where the wave function is the thing that is the thing you can actually get out but you're not you're you just don't have the the this or that that people have come to expect but that that to me is sort of a different that's

1:10:58 a removed question so at that level then it becomes this sort of other question which is that well is it all just probabilistic like is consciousness a probabilistic mechanism and then that kind of removes quantum mechanics completely in a way that is maybe a little bit more satisfying to me because I feel like sometimes people cool in fly mechanics because they love it rather than it being very explanatory but maybe that's not what you're getting at I'm not sure yeah no so I mean I think there's a lot I agree with what you're saying there

1:11:29 but so the so what I was trained so what I was trying to defend and what I'm I mean not that I'm saying it's correct but the thing that I would be more open to is a claim about the measurement problem basically so why do we observe just one outcome instead of what the match predicts which is a superposition so why is it left versus right we know the probabilities the math always matches we never find a variance from that so what do you do well you could either say that there's some objective

1:12:04 thing that collapses it to one or the other and you do your collapse theory and that's where I see this kind of theory fitting in so the theory says well what collapses it from the superposition state is that there's a conscious observer who comes to know information about the state right and then people say well that's crazy and consciousness what do you weirdo and then you say well what are what's your answer to the mesmo problem yeah well you know we change the equations or a there's many worlds or yes oh there's yeah I am that's that's the point that I

1:12:37 was thinking you're just as serious to say and the decoherence doesn't rule that out right the quite right and this is kind of on the unfamous point was you know measure applying mathematics to the Pointer versus to the particle you get the same result so applying it to the conscious state I mean so there's no the math doesn't tell us where in the chain from detector to us knowing the collapse happens but there's suggestive things and you know this is why I talked about the delayed choice quantum eraser and there's a tons of ways of interpreting

1:13:10 it but one way of interpreting it is that you know it's our choice of which measurements we make which determine whether it acts like a wave or a particle and we could always choose a different measurement and so there's something about our conscious agency there that seemingly is playing a role so why why is this a possible and then so if it's testable then it's a serious idea and I think it could be testable and so that was kind of the argument I was trying to make so yeah so I think so yeah I agree that at the level of which we do not

1:13:43 know what the bright interpretation of quantum mechanics is we don't have an answer to the question and that allows for a wide range of possibilities to be entertained my concern with consciousness causes collapse is that it is using consciousness as a crutch where you could use almost anything as a crutch so it could be instead of consciousness causes collapse maybe it's you know the some of the photons that landed on my deck well what was the you

1:14:18 know which did you have more left-handed or right-handed photons that landed at 6:00 a.m. this morning another testable hypothesis right at the level that I can say that consciousness causes collapse is testable I can come up with a huge universe of possibilities that could be the thing provoking this this way that way sorts of answers and that's why I don't think just because something is testable it's necessarily serious because I don't see why consciousness should be the thing that

1:14:51 does it compare to any other sort of thing that I might experience measure or you know decide might be correlated well one the analogy I draw to is I remember I was talking to someone after doing a public lecture who was convinced that gravity would be different depending on chirality and he said what you should do is do an equivalence measurement of chiral molecules to see if the equivalence principle applied in the

1:15:27 same way to right-handed and left-handed molecules perfectly testable proposition yeah but no one's gonna do do it and the reason no one's going to do it is because it's not really a serious proposition because even though no one has looked as to whether this is the case there's no particular motivation to go look for it and so that's the sense in which I think that consciousness causes collapse is problematic it's that like I can see that as being just as legitimate as a huge number of other possibilities that might also provoke the thing to do this

1:16:01 or that and those are equally you know in unless I have some like good motivation to explore one or the other I'm gonna choose to sort of ignore that whole universe of possibilities you know and that's not to say that someone else should go out and try to do these sorts of experiments but you know you have to kind of decide which things you're gonna invest in and I'm not someone who invests in quantum mechanic quantum

1:16:33 mechanical experiments but if I was sitting on a jury of uninterested scientists right I would want something more compelling than just oh you know it seems like at some level we've made a choice so maybe this is something you should check check because it seems like it's unlevel perhaps you know the Sun make it shine shown in a different way as well maybe that's something you should check right well so I wonder what you would say about this because I think I'm sympathetic to the general point you're making and I just don't know if I

1:17:05 agree that it applies in this case although I think yeah obviously if you try to go to a funding agency and say you want to test consciousness in quantum mechanics probably they're not gonna that may change who knows but so wonder what so one reason why you might think you should test it is because so far as we can tell every everything can be in a superposition at least according to the math of the theory that and

1:17:38 they're getting bigger and bigger stuff you know I mean I heard I read some of my diamonds recently and they you know if there's a famous buckyball molecule or whatever so in limit there should everything can be in a blue super position because materia just the way things work however we know directly from experience that consciousness is never in super position because we don't experience things that way so from our own first-person perspective we have some definitive I would say evidence that there's one

1:18:11 thing which doesn't go into a super position or resist it very strongly that's conscious experience everything else that we have ever met is something that can do that so this seemingly is an interesting special thing that we should look into yeah I guess my question is first of all to the extent that we don't consciously experience superposition why can't the explanation simply be that consciousness is classical you know well what do you mean is that yeah well then it would be

1:18:46 you know not like being a physical thing boring explanation but to the extent to which you know where our neurons are behaving classically it's very difficult for us to you know have a superposition of thoughts because you can't really have a superposition of synapses but yeah why yeah you can actually in principle have a superposition of sent down so there's why not I don't know what that's been demonstrated be interesting to see but yes I've been demonstrated but what has been

1:19:18 demonstrated is that it's only technological and energy limits on to what you can put in super positions yeah I mean I guess that's the case but it's also kind of specialized right like it's like yeah diamonds and bucky balls are real interesting systems they're also extremely well ordered so it's like a very well posed problem to put them into super positions trying to put a virus into a super position that's going to be a little bit more difficult you know

1:19:52 trying to put a bacterium into your legs at some level you start to become problematized because of the classical world right because all the but there is no classical world there's only the quantum-mechanical world and then yeah then that things are behaving like classical things you can't put them in superposition right like I can't put two billiard balls in superposition even though you could calculate that given you know an infinite monkey's worth of experience eventually you could get them

1:20:25 to be in the same location right but try as you might you're gonna push them together over and over and over again they're never going to occupy the same well you can't experience them being in superposition but as far as I understand in quantum mechanics it's a general theory about physical nature and that system would evolve into an entangled so the mixed state is that there's a small but finite probability that you could do this right it's so remote that for all practical purposes it doesn't occur and that's the extent to which you know I see biological systems not behaving

1:21:03 quantity and also then that so then that's not a compelling because if we're saying that and I don't even know that I understand precisely what we mean by not experience in superposition consciously but I'll even grant that like that we don't do that I don't see why the explanation can't just simply be because consciousness is based on things that behave classically that may not even be a satisfying explanation but at least it's like all right that kind of

1:21:36 fulfills my my desire to have regimes and I say okay so there's the regime of the biological world above about the level of atoms or you can even have systems of maybe dozens of atoms in certain situations that were very carefully chosen but anything above that things behave classically and and that's where biology happens so biology is classical that sort of thing and that for me would be a compelling sort of counter to someone who said well but I

1:22:10 it's you know consciousness is the one place I don't we don't see super so maybe that's telling us something about how quantum mechanics works and to me that's not a compelling argument because of that because biology and I think that consciousness is related to biology the biological world because biology biology happens in the classical regime I'm not surprised that consciousness behaves it was to the extent that we're claiming it does as a as a classical thing so I guess that would be my rejoinder would be I mean

1:22:45 that's that if that were the case yeah that would be really compelling if it really was the situation where like the only time we didn't see superposition at all was with let's say like you could never see synapses right then that would be compelling right like if you could make that claim then I'd be like yeah then that's something we should go investigate but I don't see that necessarily being the case right like I don't see that as being somehow special or if you didn't if you had some other model of consciousness whatever it was I mean it seems like what you're saying is I mean in one sense kind of strange I

1:23:24 mean in another sense obviously I agree that part of me is on board of other saying I think that consciousness the product of biology in a fairly like flat-footed sense but I mean so it sounds like what you're saying is that you think in that they're the two worlds theorem there's the world that's described by quantum mechanics it's the small world and then there's the classical world which is the meat size to buy good stuff yeah that's like a classic kind of Copenhagen esque view that we need to cut the concepts of the classical world and to come prior to the quantum mechanical stuff but that they

1:24:00 emerge out of the quantum mechanical world I guess it's the way I would think of it which is what decoherence is supposed to be all about right like the classical merge world emerging out of a quantum mechanical a fundamentally we're all quantum mechanical I think we're all in agreement about that like at the basis of everything quantum mechanics has to be correct and to the extent that like I can't push my hand through the table that's due to quantum mechanics and like there's all sorts of fun things that we can talk about but to the extent that I can model a roller coaster right even though that's

1:24:34 ultimately due to quantum mechanics it's sort of pointless to try to model that way because we have an emerging classical world that works very well and the classical if you were to if you were to ignore quantum mechanics and give yourself a classical world my proposal is that consciousness could come out of that it could come out of that and there's no particular reason to abandon that as a as a regime qualification that your old consciousness has to be

1:25:09 classical so I guess this is just where we're gonna end up fundamentally disagreeing because I mean so there's lots of things that I guess I'd say so one is that I think I would not be very surprised that quantum mechanics had something important to do about biology you know that the discovery of photosynthesis using oh there's missing that we call their quantum biology so certainly like I mean if that's the fundamental nature of reality then certainly it's not surprising that life would have evolved to take advantage of that I don't think that would be that big of a a mystery Oh or that big what

1:25:42 surprise but so I mean cuz so from my point of view it does not seem to me that the the you know standard model of particle physics quantum mechanic field theory quantum field theory was maybe some superstring undertones or something like that it does not seem to me that that theory tells you that before there were observers there was a definite path that a particle took it seems like what it predicts is that well it could have

1:26:17 gone any number of ways and until you observe you're not going to know which way it went or that it went anyway so I just don't see that the argument that the world is classical boils down to more than that there's gonna be a massive entangled state of a bunch of classical seeing outcomes but which one of those becomes the one you observe depends on the observation so there's nothing in what you were saying about the classical nature of the world which

1:26:50 suggests that that picture isn't correct and that so the superposition of us talking right now and the call being dropped or whatever else you want to add to it would be determined one way another by the involvement of our experience that's that that's the claim that I'm trying to suggest is not a silly claim but it's it's not going to be refuted by saying oh but there's a kind of classical system there because you still haven't answered the question why do we find the results that we find

1:27:24 instead of the superposition of the two states so I never observed the pointer being up-and-down I observe it one or the other but the math says it's in a combination state so yeah so I guess I don't I wouldn't say that this is a refutation either like I wouldn't say that I don't think that there is a possible refutation because at the basis like why we're able to have the discussion in the first place is because we don't know when interpretation of quantum mechanics is and so my

1:27:58 skepticism isn't so much on the basis of saying you're not allowed to have this opinion right or that it's I mean I guess I say it's not serious in the sense of funding agencies and I actually think it's interesting to think about why funding agencies wouldn't fund this and I don't think it's just because they're prejudiced against people who are interested in the subject I actually do think that it has to but although it obviously could be but I feel like you shouldn't discount that aspect like I do

1:28:33 there's another argument that can be made besides that which is that there are when you don't know what the answer is the answer can almost literally be anything and so to that extent it seems like this is a very small possibility in the grand scheme and the extent to which other interpretations of quantum mechanics are taken so-called seriously or entertained more for better or worse

1:29:06 and I actually don't have any irons in that fire whatsoever I knew we I actually don't even know what it is I don't know what the answer is I'm interested in the question I'm interested in the arguments that people have but I don't see a compelling way one way or another but to the extent that you could open up to a huge range of possibilities of interpretations you suddenly start to entertain even more and more wild ideas which is fine but you that's that's where I see that explanation happening I see it in the

1:29:41 realm of lots and lots of different things that you know you could come up with and why should be preference I don't I don't see it it ultimately I don't see a reason to preference consciousness over any other sort of thing that you could imagine might be correlated that could explain some of it at least it's less weird than many worlds I mean that's bizarre but maybe less learn it's Lenny weird then Bamiyan secret hidden my agreeable ha it's more testable than many worlds right now so that's kind of nice on the

1:30:16 other hand I don't think many worlds people are asking to test interpretation right they're not gonna be they're not going to be the competitors right like so and that's that's actually a sort of an interesting question like how do you go about testing interpretations of quantum mechanics and I think the answer has to lie at a level that's well below this question of conscious which way sorts of experiments where you actually have to understand how things like the quantum erasers work

1:30:51 and things like this if you have to really get down deep into some of these things or you know what what the insert what regimes there's still open questions about how the uncertainty principle apply it's like things like very fundamental things we don't know about the ways that we understand the quantum mechanics to work and so that's the extent to which I can see like investigation happening I I think it's premature to set up you know you know it could be revolutionary in a sense but again you have to kind of make these

1:31:24 decisions whether or not it's worth sending up a ghost-like experiment for chiral molecules you know like you have to kind of decide is that something that we're prepared to do at this point is there enough sort of motivation and I just don't see the motivation as being very strong for CCC to be something to be taken as an interpretation attack again and I will grant that it is testable it's fantastically testable so that's like a great way that's something that's going for it and in you should be

1:31:58 held on to but I don't know I myself do not think that just because something is testable it should be tested I think there needs to be a better motivation and that's yeah then I think that's very interesting I mean and I'm you know I I don't put a lot of credence into this I think this is the most interesting of the kind of strange ideas yeah so yeah when you when you work on consciousness like I do you need a lot of strange ideas yeah I like that part the philosopher part of me likes thinking

1:32:30 about them and the scientists part of me thinks I want data on these kind of questions but when you get down to it it's really hard to see what would counts as kind of data against these overarching metaphysical positions like materialism my dualism ideally it's like okay yeah I'm a materialist but what empirical evidence is there you can say some stuff about history of science and success but it's [Music] it gets tricky really quickly as I'm sure you're aware but I mean my only claim that I wanted to establish what

1:33:03 our tested is considered was that it's less severe than all of the other things I mean many-worlds interpretation boggles the mind the Bamiyan interpretation is I I would say empirically not equivalent to quantum mechanics but I think there's some trickiness in the math you have a lot of details but people will debate that and then but it's still weird to postulate that there's a hidden kind of variable that's being guided there's a pilot wave it's I don't know it just it

1:33:37 just seems extravagant whereas in in this case it it seems to me that the you either gonna have to recognize the role that the observer plays in quantum mechanics and the only two ways to do that are the some kind of Copenhagen interpretation where it just boils down to what what kind of questions we can ask and how nature will ask them and to them or that consciousness is a real physical process that plays a role in bringing about the physical results I really don't see I see the other ones as being really kind

1:34:10 of exterior ethically extravagant whereas these ones are simpler so there shouldn't be perfect there is a simplicity to assuming that everything's happening behind like a curtain of consciousness because you can like kind of then you can have your whole discussion about what those models actually are they have interact I guess and so like yeah that I can understand and that was indeed kind of the impetus for the Copenhagen meetings anyway right

1:34:42 yeah that was the problem that they were frustrated with because they were like we can't have this right but then like I think that's actually where the discussion should happen right why is it that people say we can't have that and it's I don't think it's solely a prejudice against the idea I think that there is some fundamentally like sound arguments for what the heuristic development of conscious ultimately is going to look like yes we don't have it yes it's still a mystery

1:35:16 yes it could be completely wrong but I don't think that people are being needlessly dismissive to provoke this kind of resistance to using consciousness as the the thing that determines or the thing that decides I mean the one thing though just really quickly though I mean the one thing that I think we you and I both agree on is that there is something that needs to be said about quantum mechanics here in

1:35:52 quantum mechanics yeah well how it's gonna resolve it may resolve in the same way that like the mystery of what life is resolves in that there is no real resolution it's just kind of something that like people realize maybe it's like a matter of perspective we just haven't really come to terms with the way quantum mechanics works and right I actually asked a question I sent you an email and one of the questions I asked was part of the part of the reason I think that people find quantum mechanics could be spooky impossible to

1:36:25 understand etcetera etcetera is because what we really don't understand and what we really have problems with is wave mechanics yeah that wave mechanics is difficult but like almost all yeah with very few exceptions almost all of the phenomena associated with quantum mechanics that people find spooky or on incredible is something that you can find in any wave right like it comes

1:36:58 from signal processing and it comes from things like aurier transforms which people deal with and they don't really realize that yeah the uncertainty principle is there yeah right is it just yeah yeah and like actually the the interesting thing about quantum mechanics is the extent to which it is classical the extent to which you get discrete things rather than continuous things but that's not usually the you know the mystery we don't actually understand why at all which is equally interesting to me in a way but that that doesn't get as

1:37:33 much play as sort of these other questions and that really center around fundamental disconnect between the way we experience the world as particle-like things versus the way a wave like thing would experience the world and so that was sort of one of my tongue-in-cheek questions which i think might be worthy of thinking about it's like if we were waves instead of particles you know would this whole question be turned on its head and we were like you know you know it's super strange that you know there are situations where you can stop

1:38:09 getting interference patterns and you know like and I guess you imagine switching the whole perspective you get like this sort of questions it I wonder whether the unknown aspects and the like mysterious aspects of quantum mechanics just are coming from sort of a more fundamental place it's you know and the excitement that is generated by who advanced physics fine mechanics yeah yeah yeah I mean I I think that's an interesting point I tell you a lot of it

1:38:43 had to do with the non commute looking nature ability or algebra but there's a lot of I mean so the big difference with the classical stuff is that that's all interpreted as epistemic limitations mm-hm whereas the challenge of quantum mechanics it doesn't seem like there's a good way of having it merely be our knowledge of the system which is uncertain as opposed to the states of the system itself and being fundamentally characterized this way so that's why I would kind of resist that characterization that the weirdness is

1:39:15 in the way phenomenon because we know how to deal with that and we say well it's just due to our lack of ability to calculate it or lack of ability to have all the information but the real I mean the real resistance is is to the notion of superposition that there can be states which are not classical and a lot of the by butch I mean having definite values at a before before being measured so I think that's what I would a lot of the resistance to quantum

1:39:51 mechanics comes from the idea that before you measure there's no definitive state know classically definitive yeah I think that way but a lot of that comes from situations that you know we cannot be in the same race as someone else because we're particles but waves can like waves have no problem being in the same place as another way if you know what I'm saying and so it's like this weird sort of thing where I think that the I agree that it's not coming out of this lack of knowledge situation but it

1:40:27 is a is a say almost a phenomenological discomfort yeah no I see what you're saying but but even there we have a way of understanding when the two waves are the same place their energy sums total or they cancel out or to that degree or another but it's hard to understand what that means when we're talking about being up or down or left or right or located here located there and so it's really the idea that these so-called classical properties are wave-like in their nature not just that they're a

1:41:02 wave like things that things that we didn't think of as waves really are exhibit way right so I guess that's sort of the thing that it still you know when I teach students quantum mechanics the thing I usually spend the most time on is getting to understand how waves work yeah because right like it is weird that you can have an interference pattern and

1:41:33 then there's no energy at point a but there's two waves at Point a right like that is that is strange to me and should be strange to anybody that isn't a wave would not find that to be strange at all they would be perfectly they would find the the fact that you would say that there's somehow a problem with that to be strange that's kind of the way I I wonder about some of these sorts of things and I think some of this also gets into the way that it has been popularized I guess because that sort of

1:42:10 the thing that everyone gets excited about and so I worry a little bit the same same way that I worry about detection and measurement because I was taught it wrong in the sense that it absolutely is not the situation where you know if you run an experiment and somehow like write down the results in a notebook and then tear the paper out of the notebook and throw it away that you recover the interference pattern or

1:42:42 something like that right like it doesn't have to do with the act of measurement that we described in the laboratory right or like that I would have my students do it has to do with something fundamental about detection and what we mean by this and that's very delicate right because we don't often come in contact with that as being an information flow question right we're often thinking that you know – if you're thinking classically we think of two

1:43:13 things colliding and then going off in two different directions but you know unless you've really kind of spent a long time you don't think about how that is a detection of some sort and that that's a measurement of some sort and it didn't involve me writing down in tears or like recording it or really any consciousness at all right it just was the collision that occurred in two things go off and so yeah I don't know that we've I mean that's probably a whole other matter but I think that some

1:43:47 of the confusion also lies in what the words that we use imply about how quantum mechanics and physics in general work right so you think detection is a better word than measurement I sort of think that I don't know that I have a good answer for this but I do know that this has caused problems where like people think of measurement as it's easy to see the word measurement as involving consciousness like that's just it makes sense how do you measure something

1:44:21 you've got to be there to do it you have to you someone has to communicate it to you or you have to communicate it to someone else that's the fundamental even if you talk about standards of measure right like it's all about oh can we agree on what this and that and but that's not really what we're talking about when we talk about quantum mechanics experiments that are so-called measuring what might be I mean I think that's what one way of seeing the debate that we've been having but I think that that might be what a measurement is it makes people uncomfortable but I mean so

1:44:55 it's it this gets back to what you were saying what the real uncomfortability the white people resist it so that I don't know I just think people are wedded to classical notions I mean people bend over backwards to try to recover the classical world instead of just accepting that the world is fundamentally quantum mechanical that's a whole impetus for bombing and mechanics I mean like there's gotta be some definitive thing with a definite property it's just hidden okay but why I'm less there be what why why isn't it perfectly fine to say before measurement there's no detection

1:45:31 there's no definitive state there's no localized property I mean I just don't see what the is the real driving force to all of this is the kind of idea that there's got to be the world's classical it's gotta be that way yeah that just seems wrong to me I don't I don't know why we don't trust the physics the world's not classical experience is classical yeah we experience things classically but that's not how the fundamental nature of the world is at least if you think of in terms of the way the physics is unfolding it just seems to me wrong to say that the world is classical it's not its experience

1:46:05 which is classical but I think I think that's where we're just kind of we're gonna disagree because right but so why would diagnose your side as being the type of people who want say look the world just got it I can't give up this idea that at its nature there's a classical world with things having defendant properties even when no one's around and whereas my side is saying look but the science is telling us let go of that the world is not classical don't cling to that so I don't I don't know which one is right but I

1:46:40 don't know why the insistence on the classical nature of the world is so important well I guess the I don't know that it's classical so much as it's the terminus stick yeah that's that's okay that's what ethical means it means that there is a determinant state that has determinate properties which evolve in a determinate way in two states with determinate properties that you're not sometimes like when I when I talk about classical I mean something much more specific though I mean that something is following classical mechanics it's

1:47:15 following like a set of like explanations that were developed out of Newtonian and Hamiltonian descriptions right reality that's the same thing are deterministic in one way but they also can yield sort of intriguingly non deterministic situations which is why you know people get excited about emergence like that's the sort of but that just goes back to the point that we were I think talking about a second ago

1:47:47 which is that even on the picture that I would defend although I'm not endorsing there's going to be set of orthogonal basis which are classical looking so you're gonna get that you know that takes for the game's cat example you're gonna get as the preferred basis the cat's alive or the cat's dead that looks very classical but you still end up with a superposition of those that the cat is in a state of the sum of those two

1:48:20 vectors and that's not a classical state that's not something that's determinate in the way they that you want it to be it's only when it measured that you get a determinant state of the cat being either alive or dead it's not classical in a in a mean sense right like yeah cats don't beginning this way but you can get energy to be made that way and it's still you know classical electrodynamics still applies perfectly fine with

1:48:53 situations like that and so I don't think that we've worked through all of our psychological difference difficulties with coming to terms with that the the crossover that's occurred and that's kind of the way it seems to me I can understand the III where I definitely agree with you is that we ultimately are at a quantum mechanical world and I also like I think I agree you've been down to the level of saying that these sorts of super positions

1:49:28 exist even in a classical you know sense but where I think I don't where I think we may part ways is I don't see that as being having any implications whatsoever for reality is its experienced by a human being for example I don't see any

1:50:03 chance for that to be necessarily meaningful and I'm very open to being shown that that's incorrect right like for example in situations with photosynthesis like there's some profoundly quantum mechanical stuff that's going on or you know there could be radioactivity is profoundly quantum mechanically I can point to things that are phenomenologically quantum mechanical that you really need quantum mechanics to explain that can have extremely macroscopic consequences but but that's the sort of yeah I sort of

1:50:45 feel like there's this tension about the weirdness of quantum mechanics and I and I'm not certain that that that that advertised feature of it is is perhaps provoking more push in directions that may be unreasonable then then I'm comfortable with I guess that's the way I'd say right yeah well I could be talking with you for hours and hours

1:51:17 but I can't keep you forever so I wonder if there is anything that's cut that hasn't come up yet I hard to imagine but anything that you would like to break up before we go no I think this is pretty good I think I have a good understanding of where you're coming from you I guess the yeah I still sort of fundamentally don't understand the hard problem of consciousness but I'm also feeling like you know there's I actually think the first question I asked you is still one

1:51:49 I don't I would really like to understand that which is why is it that there's such this disconnect between people who like except that the hard problem of consciousness is something that needs to be dealt with and people to think it's not a thing almost right like like why why how how do you cross that divide I just don't it's a one I struggle with every day that's partly why I have people over here talking

1:52:21 about this stuff because yeah I mean I talked to pants I kiss and functionalists illusionists yeah all pretty convinced yeah of their own approach it's interesting to ask that question I'm not really sure what the answer is myself I think some of the stuff we talked about the beginning is the bottle is as close as you're gonna be able to get to an answer that people you know people put a lot of emphasis on their first personal experience yeah and you know it's a philosophy major growing up you know you you you take your

1:52:54 undergraduate class on Descartes and Descartes says this could be a dream and I don't no if I have a body and you know well I don't even know if I have a body at that point it just seems to me if you can do that they've left what way you're left with it just conscious experience that's what you're imagining you're imagining that all I am is consciousness yeah and that's something every undergraduate is forced to do if they take intro to philosophy it doesn't seem that hard to do and at that point Descartes kind of convinces us live the thing you know what certainty is that

1:53:28 you're this conscious being you have experience yeah so when the dentists of the world come along and say hey you could be a zombie you don't know you're not a zombie it just is I mean I see the chemical topical point they're making but I can't take that seriously I I just can't entertain that possibility that I don't have conscious experience and the reason I can't is because I have it and so that's not negotiable like I know I have conscious experience and I know there are questions about what its nature is and all that stuff but I can't I can't understand how someone could be

1:54:00 convinced that yeah there's no pain that there's what we call conscious pain isn't a thing when I have them all the time I have migraines I have the inky joints I eat food I taste it it's like that's what consciousness is it's those things we all know it we all have it the question is how do you explain and understand it not is it there so when when the illusionists of the world set up the problem has convinced me that consciousness is real I just don't understand what the challenge really is because yeah yeah it's like that's this is just like basic level stuff like you let strike kick I mean I was once out of

1:54:34 talk with a famous philosopher said what should i do pinch myself and publish the results and the journal philosophy the answer is question is no you should pin someone else we're gonna have them publish the results but if you don't take that as a serious source of evidence then you're gonna you know have these sorts of this guy so the dentist of the world when what Dennis says when you tell him this is what you've said basically he says yeah that's a data point that I need to explain that there are people who have these weird ideas that they have conscious experience and that they might not be zombies so I'll put that as a data point over here and

1:55:07 there's a bunch of data points and then what I want is a theory that explains why people sometimes people say that about people say not that and that's hetero phenomenology basically we're a huge start from the outside and just take them explain the reports of the other people so he doesn't even recognize as there being something that is a source of data or need of explanation that there is something called consciousness and that just seems to me to like lose the game at the beginning like as a as a materialist as a physicalist person what I want is for consciousness to be physical I want it to be a brain process

1:55:40 and I want it to be consciousness I wanted to be this thing that seems mysterious I want that to be physical not some other imaginary thing so so that's sort of a rhetorical mistake I think that a lot of physicalists make is they say look consciousness is not real when that just I mean I did that's I don't know if I taste the silliest claim ever made that's what Galen Strawson famously said about it I don't think I'd say that but it's certainly a very bizarre play I mean go and tell someone about epiphenomenalism consciousness exists but it doesn't cause anything

1:56:13 they no ordinary people find that to be incredibly bizarre because we think of consciousness has so a part of our lives and the cause of our behaviors yeah so it's all and that's the only thing I think that's gonna motivate people now of course I'm not gonna say that I trust my first-person specialness so much that I'm gonna say and psychism or dualism or something like that but I but I can see why people would be if you really are convinced that there's something that we're actually confronted with not

1:56:50 giving an explanation of that or explaining ways ignoring a huge half of the data like the most important part of it yeah yeah so yeah to me like that I would never start with Descartes and his buddy groundwork like I would start with Carl Sagan right and like the first thing that he does is to ask you to question what you've seen and what you know and what you think that you have known about your own personal experience if you're going to evaluate sort of like claims the girl pregnant doesn't ask you

1:57:24 to have to question whether you have areum's no he doesn't but he does ask so I so for me I'm not as convinced and I actually don't know that I've I'm clear that then it is necessarily convinced either that the answer is absolutely that consciousness is an illusion it actually does think this but I think that it is a reasonable hypothesis that's hard to disprove that has some intriguing characteristics in the sense

1:57:56 that it is in an ahkam Schrager sense kind of simple and you can argue against those sorts of predilections that i have but like that to me is the sense where it's intriguing not that i think it's correct but that it is something that you know needs to be dealt with fundamentally because I can understand it yeah whereas I definitely think people that are first-person subjectivist in that sense I don't even

1:58:30 understand it not in like the sense that they can't articulate it but in the sense that they think you think that it's okay – hinder them yeah and that sort of fantastic to me in the sense that you know I'm very skeptical of my own experience like I think of my own experience as being easily manipulated by external variables that I have no control over and so that's kind of why I I don't take much stock in what I myself feel like of course I go around

1:59:06 thinking that like I cause things to move and I you know but I don't consider that to be evidence that that's actually what's happening I just think of it as this is the way I operate and my variant though it's not I mean so I get what you're saying like the sense of agency it were often buffeted about by the environment can fabulet reasons for what we do it's whatever it is right like whatever it is there is that experience is not open for that sort of questioning we're

1:59:40 that's right I don't I do not say that that doesn't exist in the sense that like it's not something that is experienced by me but I don't necessarily think that it's problematic to explain that is it being illusion or to explain it as being something that is you know perhaps asking the wrong question right yeah so yeah that's that's where I I mean I understand illusionism as an abstract idea and

2:00:13 actually when I think what I think is that when you actually talk to people who are illusionist they end up mysteriously not being illusionist what they what they really are telling you is that we we don't understand the nature of consciousness and that it's real nature is not what it's common sensical II thought so that they that they're trying to debunk a bad theory which is yeah that's the impression I get it's it's a it's almost like the it strikes me a little bit and maybe this is

2:00:47 instructive in a weird way but the story of special relativity in the 1950s and 60s you know the story Herbert Dingle huh heard Engel was an astronomer who was convinced special relativity was wrong and so he started coming up with all of these preposterous paradoxes that special relativity seemed to indicate about how things and and these paradoxes have now become standard thought experiments that we teach to students because they're so Illustrated but he

2:01:21 was convinced that it was completely wrong so I think in that sense you might be that illusionism is wrong but I think it might extremely instructive in that way so Herbert Dingle for example proposed the twin paradox which most people don't really and I thought yeah they say that I find the true paradox was proposed by Herbert Dingle because it actually is a paradox if you're not careful because no one twin both twins should if they observe the other twins see the other twin who is moving to time dilated and that's a paradox

2:01:55 because when they come back together how can they possibly both have seen time dilation one twin has to be older than the other and Herbert Dingell said there's no way for you to know which twin is older than the other and of course there actually is a way and it has you know to do with some really interesting ways of how you answered the particular question it has to do with switching reference frames and it's a beautiful thought experiment but that's the sort of way I think of it it's like you knew you need those kind of like real contrary in people and maybe they were completely wrong perpendicular was

2:02:30 wrong like special is right but it was extremely it was great that he did that in the sense because now we have this like excellent pedagogical list of things we can go through to exam how thing look a PR exactly this is sort of a similar sort of thing right that's interesting else Kiros and had the same issue so I I think of illusionism is kind of like that it's actually informing us in a sense about how we might need to problematize the questions that were asking about consciousness yeah that's

2:03:03 very interesting I didn't know that about Dingell I've always I guess thought that that was attributed to Einstein the twin parrot I know Einstein did not mention the paradox came decades after it's not on these yeah wow that's so funny I know that okay will very give us about a great discussion Josh I really enjoyed talking about a and I I think more people talk about these issues the better even great even if we end up not agreeing like you were saying it's have these discussions so I want to say thank you for that and just stay on

2:03:38 for a second I'll say bye after I stop recording okay sounds good