Consciousness Live! with Benjamin Kozuch (S3 E10)

0:00 all right we are live joining me today is a extra extra special guest Benji cosec Benji for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do well I am an assistant to the associate professor at University of Alabama and we can all assume that I had research concerns something concerning consciousness more specifically my program tries to bridge the gap between philosophical and moral

0:35 scientific theories of consciousness there's generally speaking we have a bunch of Tory generated philosophical theories of consciousness the time is nigh now where we can actually empirically test them and so I'm often looking for connections between the fields of neuroscience and philosophy putting philosophical theories of consciousness in the crucible of neuro scientific results yeah awesome so you used you said your program is is interested in this so there's a whole group of people on down there in Alabama

1:08 doing this my research program it's just me program I give it a name and everything it's good you know it's the the neuroscience philosophy program but it's just our me at one so yeah that's cool I mean and you you do a lot of interesting work of connecting neuroscience to philosophy and in particularly I mean so I think most of

1:41 your work at least that currently is aimed at critiquing other theories of consciousness and evaluating evidence for them but have you actually argued or defended are you like have a particular view of consciousness that you defend or is it mostly subjecting others to well most directly it is critiquing existing theories the idea would be though the one I want to talk about that often in my public would be that we have a couple main

2:15 contenders for philosophical theories of consciousness at this point and evidence against one of them de facto axis evidence for the other one in a Last Man Standing sort of way so you could say by the way that a lot of you know a good thirty forty percent of Milan research is directed at critiquing higher-order approaches to consciousness and insofar as it successfully does that and it's going to make more added epistemic standing of the major other major

2:48 contenders such as first order representation list theories but you wanna tension based attention theories as well yeah yes I critique those as well similar line of research so but those are a first order theory um yeah I suppose I suppose so do you think it's required that it be a first order theory yeah I think that's a good question I think it really depends on what you think attention is and how it works but if you go ahead there are there are times at which you know when we're

3:29 looking at the neuro scientific basis of things like higher order states hi were the thoughts what we usually need to do is we need to find a function to identify and so what sorts of cognitive functions that we know the human brain engages in and animal brains engage in that would be candidates for producing high order states one of them would be you know working memory another would be like action monitoring and another one also would be attention like it seems potentially that the way that the Henschel would work is it would form Iowa State's about over States in order

4:02 to determine what was to be attended to so I could be edified on this but I take it to be maybe an open question as to whether intentional theory is going to be first order or a second second order someone like Prince I explicitly identified their theory as being qualified as not a pie or a theory or not theory I think so yeah so it depends on um it depends on like if you think that the tension representatives that crucial claim to be that there's a

4:35 representation of your of yourself as being in a particular kind of state so I represent representation of the state and I think Jesse like him thinks that what attention does is basically select or amplify certain processes certain entities and working in a memory but that's not rear-ending yeah well i currently in working memory literature there's a debate about what role of QC plays in it one of the theory that was in favor for a while said that what happens is the information is actually transferred to the PFC where it's held

5:09 in working memory which sounds like a reason Tatian 'el sort of theory of working memory another and then in the case of the circuit theory it's going something that's just manipulated in sensory areas and amplified so this seems like a there could be an analogical sort of way to understand the attention the attention interpretation as well yeah second-order that's a good point I think that also this is something that needs more attention haha get it I think

5:43 people need to pay more attention this one of the one of the central claims whom that that I think needs to be analyzed and talked about more is whether attention itself as a way of becoming aware of something because if it isn't then it can't be a higher-order type of theory but if a attendant is something is a way of being aware of that thing then it is a candidate for being a higher-order theory so you know I actually will ask Jesse one time whether he thought attending that something was a way of being aware of it he seemed to think maybe yes but I know

6:16 other people that would say no to that that really you know perception thinking or the ways that were generally aware of things I should include attentional theory as being something that gains credence by showing that high over theories would be impossible for some reason almost independent reasons for discounting the attentional theories which I so you so would you say I mean before I get you that I want to talk to you about does the critique and the

6:48 stuff that you actually written but I was just curious about your positive views here you say first order representational abuse is that the kind of view that you're most likely to endorse or some something like a type account or something like block or Ned's encounter oh yeah yeah I'm much more partial to such a fear yeah especially if it turns out that high water theories don't work out but then there's there's problems with you know I mean this is a very long-term project here and so he can you take each each potential theory

7:23 you scrutinize it for quite a bit of time representational ism has a lot of scrutiny that still needs to be paid to it's something that you pointed out in the past is that it seems like representational ism doesn't have a great way to distinguish unconscious from conscious mental states since we have representations everywhere in the brain there's things – there's things – to question about representation them but that's not so much my current program I've written some stuff to try and help the representations about so I I have come up with an account of a

7:58 representational account of pain experiences which has always been dealt representation ilysm and so I try and it helped the theory that I put a little bit more credence into I try and help it along a little bit you're there but I I can't clean that I really don't watch as far as trying to support a causal theory so far yeah okay that's interesting generally though would you say you're a supporter of clef and I'm a lot to go over flow the basic idea that this overflows what we can access a report I'm definitely a definitely favorite yeah because like your gorillas in the mist but not unseen paper where you

8:31 argue against attentional theories the necessity thesis that an attention is necessary for ever there it seems that you do rely on I mean you argue for it but it seems like in the background is a kind of claim that the conscious experience is going to exceed what we can access a report about yeah we have to probably really define those terms carefully but I think it I think it lends us a pretty nice way to it and most really once you have stuff that falls outside of attention that is

9:07 phenomenologically manifest that sense sounds pretty close to it also just need an accessible in a blocking sense well once it's once said you once you allow that it's not accessed it sounds pretty close to being inaccessible that way you just said once you see that it's something that's not a subject of attention different way once you show that there are phenomenological experiences that are outside of what you are attending to it seems to lend itself to to supporting something like a thesis

9:43 like it's not the same thing yeah yeah because I mean I'm someone who thinks that you could have consciousness outside of attention but still probably require some kind of access in order to have experience and then there's no distinction between access to knacks and accessible right any organic city there's no nothing that's outside that's phenomenal Osby Memphis that's that's inaccessible but you were the whole you would allow that it might be phenomenal

10:16 archie mac manifested without being actually accessed would that be your position i'm very skeptical of that position that wouldn't be my position no i mean i've been for there's empirical things that we're gonna talk about I assume surely but generally I find the idea of in uh Naxos conscious experience to be very puzzling bordering on conceptually confused I just don't know what it would mean for there to be phenomenal consciousness which is

10:48 there's meaning that there's something that it's like for me to be in the state but yet there's no kind of access at all and I think even people like block and say that there's got to be some kind of access it just isn't cognitive access so having having those days without any kind of access at all I just don't even really know what that would mean to be honest and say you're saying that any moment some state is phenomenologically manifest it is being accessed in some sense yeah merely that it's accessible it's being accessed at exactly what we are gonna define accents here that's the

11:23 thesis in general which are supporting yes okay yeah I mean it's I just don't I mean it's a shortcoming on my part people have I've argued with a lot of people about this but I just don't really know what it would mean for there to be experience that was mining that it was like for me to have but yet which was not in any way accessed it just I'm not even sure what that amounts to like what does that mean can you help me understand what that means for one thing I mean that's that's one starting point

12:01 like well this is just a conceptual well yeah yeah as far as access goes yeah it doesn't it does not give me a headache well it's old magic can you say more about that though so why doesn't it give you attic it wasn't is that are you experiencing it if you have no access to it so I mean access could mean that it's something that gets grabbed by the cognitive system and put into play

12:35 in other kinds of operations and I see it as having as being needed to be grabbed in this sense for it to be so I have a next conscious experience as of redness I don't see that even to be accessed for there to be this little bit of phenomenology coming into existence so you're talking about cognitive access though but I'm talking about like that there's there's sometimes how does it more experience then how is it for you I I mean I I think I can say that the I

13:13 don't know what what the me is here I can put with phenomenology I think the thought is the thinker is one James play you've got so you got a little you know think about what the what the pan psychist says they have little packages of experience you know now I don't know I'm not a pan cyclist but I can understand the concepts they're a little package of experience in my brain that's not being accessed and it's phenomenologically manifest and if you want to see whatever is that little package of experience you want to throw the label of me on it okay I don't even know what a self is any way that you

13:45 want to invoke in saying that in what sense is it for me unless you want to say that it's something that's brought into the broader the broader care you know the person personalities I'm like that and then we're talking about something that is in access to some some stronger sentence so it gets it gets integrated into this notion of a self that I have and what I am and all that and then yeah I guess yeah but I find that pretty puzzling because the way that phenomenal consciousness is usually defined is in

14:17 terms of there being something that it's like for the subject so it's part of the definition that there's a subjects who's having the experience in fact I think it's kind of almost conceptually you know Galen Strawson says there's at one point that you know it is his what he called his you know what he calling his the craziest view he ever had or he has something that something like that where he says I every experience is the experience plus itself so I mean it seems like it seems like well anyway so I don't maybe we shouldn't get too hung up on this because it's sort of

14:50 orthogonal to the questions that I was originally thinking of asking you about but I just don't know what it would mean to be a packaging of experience that I was free floating because then yeah you may as well just think that it's out there objectively independent of any mind and that seems a bit strange a little bit of experience you've got basically as a mind in the subject by the very fact and that doesn't need to be like Benji cozy the philosopher it's an Alabama and so forth it doesn't

15:25 have to be integrated in yourself in that sense it's just yeah it's and I and this is where I I'm really like there's a there would be a conceptual incoherence in that I just take you to be that there is a subject I mean it's just tell me if you have an experience then there's there's a subject in some sense so that you're what you're saying it sounds like is that there doesn't need to be any structure to that or the relationship between the experience and the subject yes exactly yes yeah it's it's all come together and then Benji because it can come aware of the

15:58 experience of this little package of experience and then it gets integrated into into other sorts of things but at the very moment that it just comes into existence it doesn't need to have something more substantial than whatever is entailed just by having that experience by that is impressive right but anyway this is where we're getting pretty deep into it in the mire here yeah yeah well because I mean I think that's one of the benefits of higher

16:30 order theories which I want to ask you about but that's one of the benefits of them as they can give an account of what the structure or relationship is between the subject and the experience that accounts for this kind of thing that we're talking about where's I think that first sort of theories they don't have a way of saying anything meaningful about this relationship and so they become I don't even here when you have primitive mists which is you know not a very satisfying hello is this the incredulous stare I've heard

17:04 so much about Benji we're frozen here folks well my connection is excellent so I'm not sure if he can hear me or not let's find out one of the joys of life broadcasting is these sorts of things our access to each other has been

17:42 terminated Oh bummer all right so let's hopefully he's going to jump back in you alright well let's see while we're

18:16 waiting for Benji to come back looks like we have someone asking questions will form of thought does this fall under Sherry Lynn from Florida is asking oh he's back you're back yeah what happened did I pissed you off I just – I'm out of here [Laughter] [Laughter]

19:01 yeah part two well anyway so that was out trying to segue into talking about higher order theories here because I was saying that I think that this is one of their main benefits is that they have an account here which you know and one way of putting is what distinguishes a conscious state from an unconscious state yeah but but also I think it's important and this is where your work really picks up is that it's an empirical claim you know there's you can't really I don't really buy a priori analysis of consciousness in this sense so you know there are some higher order theories like Rockland tomorrow who says that you know it's it's off priority

19:34 that's transitivity principle is true or something like that I don't think I don't think that's right I think it's you know part of I think you could make the argument like David Rosen does is part of our focus like a logical notion that there's something weird about it but I don't know the more folk you talk to the less that I think actually pans out so I think the real the real place where the rubber hits the road is in the empirical stuff which is why I really appreciate the stuff that you do because you want to take seriously the claim that this theory makes and see what the empirical data actually show about it

20:07 what do you think that that's right though that this is mainly an empirical issue [Music] that I find substantial to ultimately be outside of value theory I I feel like most of the issues that I'm interested in philosophy are going to ones that could at least in principle be empirically decided if not that's the first time yeah that's sick you know hey

20:41 we're here to talk about me so there's my there's my general general take on philosophy so you but you said outside a value theory so you're gonna leave questions about value outside of that you don't think those are empirically attractive I think there's certain value questions that are interesting that can't be empirically determined interesting hey Richard you're gonna stop every time I say something wildly implausible off-the-cuff we're not going to get anywhere all right so so yeah so can you tell us about what is what do

21:23 you think is the I mean it's a big question but just to get us in the ballpark what is the empirical case against higher order theories what do you think the strongest you're anticipating I think that if you look at the subset of empirical data that concerns brain lesions it would be that certain predictions that I think higher theories should make as to what happens when high order areas high order state producing areas are damaged or not seen

21:56 when you look at brain lesion brain imaging data so if I want a theory is correct then there's some place in the brain where these high order states are going to be produced and they're going to be necessary for having conscious experiences according to the theory you figure out what places those are most people think that the PFC and you look at what sorts of deficits you have and like attention will be if you look at the deficits we don't see anything like what we would expect to see if I were theories true and if the high order states are being produced in the PFC I

22:29 mean I can admit the claim can be made much more broadly to its research on progress even if you look the places outside of the PFC that might produce these higher-order states you again don't see the right kinds of deficits so this is what you call phenomenological blindness – it expects they're like so you define something as an integral area if it's responsible for producing these higher-order states and if there was damage you would expect massive amounts of higher-order states to be absent and which would manifest itself anomaly that's the base to put it slightly differently if you damage one

23:07 of these areas and you see X percent production X percent reduction in the ability to produce higher states then you should see something like X percent of a person's phenomenology also take leave so if you damage someone's high water state producing area and they lose 25% of their ability to produce hyoma states then you should see is 25% of the person's phenomenology go go missing in some sense there's a lot of different

23:42 ways that this can happen I think you just read the paper which I carry out a somewhat careful analysis about the ways in which this can manifest is loss of high or low states but Stephen most broadly and there should be a commensurate loss and phenomenology to whatever the losses in the ability to produce our own state and so if you have brain areas that are damaged and say in such a way that you notice that the subjects have manifested at cognitive deficits that are appreciable then you would also expect them to be appreciate

24:15 appreciable deficits in their ability to have visual experiences so now you talk about phenomenological blindness there is the case where a person completely loses their ability to produce high water States and it seems like since Tyler States says the thing that brings phenomenology into existence is having an iron state see velocity complete ability to have higher order states that means I'm completely lost ability to have any kind of phenomenon include a visual phenomenology what is the lack of mitchell phenomenologist basically glass so you would you would basically end up phenomenologically

24:49 blind and be indistinguishable from what it's like to be a person who's completely alive now I don't know if we should ever expect that to happen even if I wore suits through its it's very rare that someone completely loses a cognitive function when any brain area is damaged even in cases of blindness where the visual cortex is damaged people will often have phosphines or it don't just be scotoma x' or hemi blindness where it happened visual field is gone or so forth but what we would call pure phenomenological blindness that'd be the case where you completely

25:21 lose the ability to produce higher states and then that would look like something just like what would be like to be completely blind yeah that's what the theory seems to predict so so you have to be a bit careful there though because it predicts they phenomenologically you would lose experience but you wouldn't behave as if you were blind you had like a super blind sight yeah so I didn't know you're getting into the issue so so far we've been restricting restricting ourselves to the issue of wouldn't be

25:52 phenomenologically what yeah now you're talking about behavioral differences right see the behavior we might be exactly the same that's we rethink it's possible you'd be exactly the same oh yeah yeah people who are blind uh they don't describe it as being exactly the same they describe it as being phenomenologically very different well we're talking about phenomenology so if you if you were say so if you were

26:26 to totally disable the areas that make higher-order states which we're assuming is in the prefrontal cortex although that's not part of the higher-order theory per se but is our you know I'd say good guess based on what we know about what the prefrontal cortex does doctor that's an assumption for the time being yeah exactly yeah but you know there are other you know they're people like axial you know clear mins who aren't gonna really localize it in the PFC and so there are other options that you could explore but I think I myself like the just gonna see the present

27:01 discussion was just going to PFCs as our example yeah so if you could disable that completely but leave everything else intact in some way then a person's behavior wouldn't be changed they would still be able to perform tasks discriminating things being button presses and verbal report but they wouldn't have any experience so oh actually because the parts of the brain which access it allowed them to introspect would also be missing yes so

27:35 it's it's a curious prediction the first thing to point out is that having considered the issue and looked at lesion data and how lesions typically affect the PFC it seems very unlikely that we'd end up one of these scenarios where there was a 100% loss of the ability to produce higher of the states yeah you know there's that said that case of people haggle over a lot these days from the 1930s the stockbroker who had his entire PFC removed and that might be a case like that but typically

28:08 they're going to have partial cognitive deficits yeah and so highly controversial as you know but it's not the entire PFC was removed right I tried to acknowledge that what more can I do that might be one case in which it could have happened but other than that you know a lot of times if it see if it's going to be a naturally occurring lesion

28:43 it's not going to be a complete loss any ability to produce higher order states so we need it we need to consider that as well and you could how would you adapt your argument in that case so the problem we're running into a moment it goes like the exact thing that the person would set used to say that their phenomenology had changed they couldn't use it right so but is there do we have the same problem as a partial loss of the ability to produce higher states yeah I mean so I think that there's an argument that you could

29:15 make that part of the brain which produces higher states overlaps or has some machinery in common with the part of the brain that does metacognition which is associated with things like introspection and knowing about your own mental state so if there's an impairment in one you would predict an impairment and the other to some degree but it would be perfectly overlapping not just partially because if it the overlapping ever broke the person might be able to realize that the visual experience have changed and so in a fantastic way some notable way yeah it's worth

29:52 mentioning to here that you know the high workers can't have it both ways and that they often appeal to studies in which they say that there are there are depths and consciousness as a result of PFC lesions right and so here we have they're taking the report of the subject and they're saying the subjects saying they have a deficit in consciousness here is evidence for for higher order theory because as a PFC Weejun correlating with a death sentence right so I mean you can't have to make up your mind one way or the other if you if you want to go the route that you're

30:25 floating you were floating in a moment ago then you kind of to throw all that evidence out does that seem fair yeah I'm not sure that seems fair okay so because the kinds of studies that we're talking about here which I guess we could talk about the details if we really want to choose but both those kinds of things what they're doing is estimating a metacognitive ability and then inferring a lack of consciousness from that a lot of different different forms I think the Ronis is how do I pronounce it

30:57 yeah that study takes that form there they might be inferring from that but there's a lot of ones where they just ask about visit villa as well straight up which is to the credit of these you know these fantastic studies with the PFC I mean the the it's there's so many scientists are taken seriously the idea of looking for phenomenological deficits it's such a credit to their field and it's such a boon to ours that they're doing that they're carrying out these ingenious experiments in many cases but that but that's a whole nother can of worms there too and for the lack of

31:31 phenomenology from lack of metacognitive sensitivity that seems a kind of leap yeah well it depends on this kind of empirical link so if you if you don't buy that there's some evidence that suggests that the rail of in areas which do the metacognition are also at least partially overlapping with areas that would be higher-order areas but but I think that you know people that one Lao and you know around us and those guys that that's where some of this evidence comes from that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex which is often flat you know touted as being an important area here although there are

32:04 other people who think that maybe the frontal Pole and you can miss another ya know medial areas are important so it's not just the DL PFC but that's a major area but we think that area does have some role to play in these kind of magnet kind of abilities and also has been implicated in this kind of higher-order awareness if it exists and it's important for consciousness so and so far there's a lack in one you can infer a lack and the other given that that area is crucial about the both uh yeah but isn't that kind of assuming what you're setting out to prove am I missing something so here we the idea is that you want to prove that the

32:39 deal PFC is important for consciousness and you there's a link with metacognitive with metacognition like why is it important because it has to do with metacognition so there's a one set of studies which talk about metacognition and focus and the deals PFC seems to show a prominent role there there's another set of studies talked about visibility and which we take to be in an index for conscious appearance and DL PFC seems to be important there so there seems to be some overlap and the machinery there

33:11 which then you start to look at the Magna condom stuff in that light then we start to say oh well whether it's deficit there maybe it's also the case that there's a deficit in experience we've seen it confirmed over here that that DL PFC damage creates a conscious deficits we've seen it also creates medicago deficits you tie it all together yeah okay any in any case well okay so that would be the argument for why it's it's what you were saying

33:43 before isn't fair that we can't that we have to get rid of that sort of evidence if we want to accept the other kind of evidence [Music] yeah I guess I guess you can allow that evidence to carry over I don't consider it could be super strong well I don't think any of this evidence is super strong I hope yeah we agree about that so I mean the title of your paper I mean by the way you have your papers always title something funny but this underwhelming force I agree with you that that part of the argument is not

34:18 especially strong at this point but I don't think that's really I mean I think that those sorts so I I think the other putting it the other way the kind of the point of all of this lesion PFC stuff is to counter the sorts of people one of whom is you who go around saying oh well we have really good evidence that lesions to the PFC don't affect conscious experience and then the responses but well here's some evidence that in fact it maybe it does they're not supposed to really support or prove higher-order theory as being

34:50 true but more supposed to mitigate this claim from from the poison camp that oh we already know like from the 30s even that this doesn't play a role so that I think it's more and in that realm I think it actually does succeed so but I don't think it goes so far as to establish the form under which things may get into print sometimes you have to be a little rough shod with with the argument under the strategy but the general if I wanted to to put it a little more carefully I would say it

35:23 doesn't help very much like to show these these very tiny deficits of consciousness if they even exist so if I can if I have more room it could have tied the dialectic all together what I'd say is that it doesn't really help to mitigate all the PFC stuff all the PFC stuff work we don't see deficits in consciousness so it's not an effective response to these other studies where we don't see deficits in consciousness when the DFC is damaged well but so what studies are you talking about where we

35:56 don't see deficits in consciousness I mean there's there's there's like the people with their deal PFC damage have been have been studied extensively in many many cases and it's never been they've never been shown to have the kinds of phenomenological deficits that for a PFC that higher order theory seems to have to predict but they're now looking for that and if they are looking for it they're looking for behavioral deficits yes I was about to follow up with something to address mentioning the

36:36 the line of argument here would be that there's if you study a whole lot of people with deal with do PFC damage and you never see any example of perceptual deficits or the person saying their phenomenology has changed in some way in the course of the course of all that this starts a cumulative accumulation that starts to make it look like strong evidence against it and the same thing can be said not just about the DL Pepsi but the PFC in general why does that count as strong evidence eventually I mean all we're talking about here is an

37:09 absence of evidence well because it at some point the odds of the deficits being revealed in one of two ways seems to become very high we have a lot of experiments the first way which it might happen is in the case of behavioral deficits they stop being able to and I'm going to address where that I mean this is for poor people or not I caught up in the dialect again so if someone that lacks consciousness for for some Colorado in the visual field you might expect them to not be able to report on

37:42 right so there's a pot that's one possibility there so why can't the subject report what color you put in front of them because they're not conscious of it okay so that's one way which which it might work and that's sort of intuitive but the higher-order theorist is gonna say oh no you might not have behavioral deficits you're the first because the first order states are still able to do all this stuff so the person will be able to still name what color does you put in front okay but what happens when you we end up in a scenario that starts to sound a bit like blind stuff you know black ciders you

38:16 ask them to name something they say they can't see it and yet they can still name what it is well I'd say there's a little puzzle that their ability to be able to do this and it comes out they express amazement at the fact that they can do so well at something they can't see it and so I would expect eventually you'd start to see people say well this is kind of odd on this trial I couldn't see it but I was able to is able to say what it was or even more generally you bring someone in to in for testing because they've just had a massive PFC damage

38:51 and when you do this they they run a huge battery of tests involving not just perceptual tasks but all sorts of tasks that test perception indirectly so if someone has to name colors say what's going on in their visual field read a whole bunch of passages in order to say test their ability for theory of mind run all sorts of examples where they have to constantly use their perceptions and this is not that long after they were damaged it seems like they would notice something has happened in their

39:23 phenomenology no it's not it's not definitely the case that they would that you have said I mean effects flanger I think his name is he did a study like 200 patients all of the PFC damage it's possible that these people all had deficits in higher-order states and had massive phenomenological deficits and they never mentioned it it's possible red but I mean I think the needle starts to move more toward PFC Theory the

39:58 probability of PFC Theory going down the more you look at people who have PFC damage in there is am any revelations of these sorts of sorts of dick sorts of phenomenological deficits and again it took tactics in a little bit these people may it might show something like a 30% deficits in some sort of 30 percent deficit in an ability to do some sort of higher-order function you can use that kind of as an index of how much phenomenological the deficits they would have as well so

40:33 you have all these people that have what seem to be large cognitive deficits which seems to indicate that they'd have large for nomological deficits and yet none of them mentioned it something's gone on all the phenomenology none of them have difficulty with performing perceptual tasks none of them Express amazement that appliances they're kind of amazement that blind cider would express at their ability to do things that that seems to require them to consciously see it yet they can't and so ya know I I agree that that's something that would cause you to want to do different sorts of tests and

41:07 he wouldn't ask them more pointed questions because I just feel like they're when they do these studies they're not really I mean some of them are current ones when they do that they do find some evidence that there's at least some change and in their higher-order awareness or what we would call you know visibility ratings or confidence judgments but in these other studies they don't really address those things so that's it's not really I mean you know to come at it from a different way if you think about something like a Fantasia which is a lack of mental imagery people who have that don't know that they have it they're very surprised

41:42 when they find out you know that there's something missing from their experience which other people have so unless it's really explicitly brought out I just don't see you know especially with the kind of damage that we're talking about in the areas it would seem somewhat surprising if they did notice it it would seem like to the extent that the prefrontal areas which are involved in access are damaged well then you're gonna have trouble accessing stuff and so it doesn't really seem all that surprising that they don't notice which for looking at the body of evidence and

42:14 having a different all things considered judgment it just did to me it seems like there's been so many studies of prefrontal cortical damage and no evidence of the kind of deficits you would expect that it starts to look like it's improbable in the theory would be correct and you mentioned that you know when they do specifically study it they do see deficits and consciousness and this speaks this sense of speaking of not the kind that I would expect to tie it in with some of the thoughts I was

42:49 expressing earlier on about using the amount of cognitive deficits of is as an index of how big the phenomenological deficits would be if Tyrone's there is true the aromas and all study I think that was something like a thirty five percent reduction in meta cognitive ability and yet the the deficit in consciousness that they find what is it well they I hope I'm remembering the productive but the correct paradigm here if it isn't then it's gonna be something people leave underwhelmed I think it's a you've got a square in a triangle and

43:24 they have to say whether the square was on the left or on the right and it's so they good they get a little bit worse bad no evidence for any other cognitive and any other conscious deficits no evidence for lost conscious states anywhere else in the visual field no evidence even for lost conscious states at fixation at the areas that they're attending right so it's not that they don't see the square of the triangle they just they just can't say what where the swear on the triangle were right it's not like they have a little phenomenological hole where those things

43:56 they still see a color there and they still see a shape there possibly this they still see a texture that things like that they see how many sort of aspect of their phenomenal experience seems to be preserved in that part of their visual field except maybe the shape of it and so it's just thinking if you take that and compare that to the massive amount of conscious experience they're having with the colors and shapes etc displayed about their visual field it seems like such a minuscule change that we have and I would I would

44:31 submit that you would expect something much larger when you have something that basically is taken away thirty five percent of the cognitive ability that the person has that's related to high over the state production yeah I think I think that's an interesting point so related to this point I know you you don't really buy this redundant function argument that people like o'clock on and night to know the garden so is that is that fair to say because I mean a part of their claim is that well there's maybe a lot of redundant systems and so maybe some other areas taking over this function must lean on

45:04 even in the prefrontal cortex I mean more and more likely than not somewhere in there but we can't really say that the brain seems to be massively redundant systems in it and you dismiss that pretty quickly as far as I can tell in my humble opinion I feel like they don't go much further than you know which you just said right there they don't they they are yet to be able to to point to studies that show massive amounts of so they say if you look at

45:39 this claim what is usually used to back up to it is it's always the same study which is a study by rechecked at all yeah which shows that study subjects who have I think it's do PFC damage on you audibly when they carry out a tasks that puts tit and puts demands on the do PFC the other do PFC will show extract evasion so it seems we like to operate in a dynamic fashion the thing is that in this study they didn't measure whether it brought it up to a normal

46:11 level of function right so if it was function if the person was overall functioning you had a forty percent forty percent level of capacity and now it's probably up to sixty percent level we would still see a 40 percent reduction in the ability to produce higher water states and still rather large rather large deficits of consciousness right and then this is really there isn't very much else that they present and you just look at more plasticity in general it's the kind of thing that first of all if it's way more

46:46 effective in kids and secondly it's really rare that a person ever has a complete return to climate change right it's more that it brings it ameliorates and not only that many times in many cases there's what they refer to as compensatory masquerade where they just learn how to do something different and it's not that they have a difference that performs the same function it's rather that they have a different function that is co-opted before carrying out the same tax right which I don't know how naturally that when it's

47:20 up to to the idea that you know what we want is the former thing in the case of the high-level States being being made up of course so this is where I think this is really where though the most interesting part of the debate is going to be coming up if if if I'm correct and I and I think that there's at least prima faster reason to think that we these deficits should be a little bit bigger then the debate becomes like well how effective is normal plasticity because we do I needed to be the case that is going to be pretty effective

47:53 we're going to explain the lack of pretty substantial deficits and so maybe the next two interesting stage is to really investigate more class just you can see whether it is up to the task making up for the loss of function that happens when that one areas in the PFC are damaged they're not just your plasticity in general but PFC plasticity in particular in part because one of the claims is made in the literature is that the PFC is much more plastic than but is it plastic enough yeah I mean so this

48:32 brings up the other thing I wanted to ask you about which is the way that the way in which you postulate the relationship between conscious experience in the higher order states which I think feeds into your claim that we don't find the kind of deficits that you would expect yeah but so at one point it seems like you you're taking on me and you make you start a couple of people although I don't know about their pedigree with respect to higher the theory but that there should be like one higher order state for every conscious episode so if I'm seeing a red round square there's got to be a higher-order

49:05 state that represents the redness the roundness and the squareness so that's three states right there all together for one Maxim a chinois is that that is that the way you're thinking about this so that's a that is the way that I sustain the dialogue throughout the paper but and this gets into the neurology of Ohio States but it's it's kind of like I don't know exactly how to count higher-order states but it seems to me

49:39 like if a list recorder got something like a tweeter theory which which are not which are not ascendant at this point it seems like you kind of have to have some part of the higher-order state that corresponds to whatever content is going to be conscious and I mean this thing's especially true of them you like yours where the phenomenally conscious states are all coming from the PFC like you're going if you're if you're going to have both a conscious experience and ice cream coming with you know with

50:16 flecks in it put it in front of a blue expanse and so far there's someone over here so yeah you're gonna need a little bit of content for each of that each of those parts of it and so I always suppose a little bit funny talking about this like sort of like one to one ratio but I do think I want to convey is that you're going to that's higher thoughts in some sense unless you go with my name's pointer theories which I'm not sure I understand how to work it the higher thoughts going to need to get bigger and bigger than more

50:47 phenomenology and that's more people require more and more cognitive resources and that means the more cognitive resources that are lost the smaller than the higher order states going to have to get yeah but I break it up into one to one because it's kind of a convenient way to to run the dialogue in the in the article but we could talk about like your sort of theory would with lemon saw very well to this and that we could just talk about how when damage happens certain components of the higher-order state are going to be lost

51:20 right cuz efficiency is lost and effectiveness is lost on your question yeah we try to clarify like how I don't want to be like so wed to that did that did that way of understanding because it's it's very weird to talk about but I think it helps to convey what the idea is yeah good okay because I find that very implausible that there would be a one-to-one like that's doing too many thoughts too many higher-order states a it so you

51:55 know I I split my views around so I don't have any like one view that I'm like 100% committed to but I have credence is distributed in various places I even have some pretenses in first-order views you know if I were gonna be a first order of things I'd be like someone like block as opposed to someone like tie or anyway but so anyway so I have some some sympathy even with those sorts of views however the way that the wit so this is an issue first of all let me say I don't think this

52:28 issue gets enough attention so I'm glad that you brought it up so that we could talk about it because it you know everyone talks about a simple example like I'm seeing red or you know I am whatever having these simple states and it's obviously much more complicated than that so the only person that's ever really talked about this is Carruthers Peter Carruthers and he's trying to make an argument against the traditional hire or a few that there's too much cognitive States but so one of the issues here is whether you're a rich theorists or sparse theorists with respect to phenomenal consciousness so I know someone like David Rosenthal is much

53:02 more into the sparse side of the camp so he denies that the kind of contents of these higher-order State you're gonna be very rich or detailed they're gonna be often comparative and so the kinds of contents are gonna be generally for abnormal conscious experience gonna be generally very sparse I find that be kind of surprising but I mean I can wrap my head around it I don't we're solving the proper to it evading this it is an actually but it looks like a wave of a yeah what do you mean by isn't actually I do I mean I don't know once you finish your thought

53:33 we can come back to that well I mean so the other happened the thought was that if you think that the experience is very richly detailed which I tend to sometimes think in fact I'm involved with you know this Templeton thing with Ned block and David Chalmers and a bunch of other people or trying to test this stuff actually and I do have some some allegiance to the idea that experience is rich and you would expect it to being the prefrontal cortex so we're actually trying to think about how do you get tests ask that so they're I don't think that you're gonna get a bunch of different thoughts though

54:07 I think you're gonna get you know who knows how many it's hard to count thoughts but the content are gonna be rich it's way that's where the action is is in the contents of the thought yeah so you know and and they can sweep together many first-order states at the same time you know describing in a swath of these states I'm seeing having an interstate with this kind of content and so they're you know I think that's the kind of argument that you present doesn't get as much traction because you don't you're not gonna expect the same sorts of deficits that you expect and in fact it may just be that what happens in

54:40 the contact it's a bit sparser because you're not able to generate you don't have as much capacity to generate the contents as opposed to missing actual their thoughts so you're gonna have experiences with more sparse contents which I mean we have some reason to think you wouldn't notice if the sparse theorists are generally correct and your and your experience is already sparse in the first place and you don't really notice that I mean we're sort of under this impression that it's very richly detailed and if we're wrong about that then it would be surprising for us to

55:14 notice that so so I think that this puts it highlights the assumption that you're making that we would expect a certain kind of deficit which would be like you know closer to the phenomenological blindness side of the scale as opposed to it just a sparse were kind of dialing down of the contents a degrading of the content so how do you think your argument will work in that case yeah I don't know I mean I you would so this is the point about understanding in in

55:50 terms of content rather than the hyoma states but then you also brought in the idea that well it's just farce with them people are less likely to notice yeah on the first point I meant I'm entirely comfortable with putting it in terms of content and I feel like it works just as well and that'll explain why so you have a theory of thought let's say you have a theory of consciousness a higher-order

56:23 theory that says that the content of experience is entirely determined by the highroad state something like your theory or Rosenthal's theory you are having an experience of a red square on a blue expanse now it's the brain is damaged and all you can do is what you are working on we don't what you're working with before is one I work on so there's only one what was happening was the red square the blue expanse now it's

56:58 damaged and you get just the blue expanse right so it seems like the same sort of argument is still going to work here it's and I gave a burnt-up twigs ample here but now I've got a rich phenomenon disgust parse mystic in a moment you've got you've got a rich phenomenology or you look you're in a stadium and you're seeing people everywhere and myriad colors and shapes and motions and so forth it's not all one higher order thought it gets damaged now you don't see as many

57:32 people's the colour of many people's faces you know faces you don't see as much motion you don't see as much as much of the other aspects of the experience that you would have looked out on the stadium so it's like it all comes down to a cognitive efficiency or effectiveness if you will as long as we have a decline and cognitive effectiveness then we're going to see parts of the phenomenology drop out so that's true just address your first point about how it doesn't I don't think there's any difference if we get away

58:05 from my toy model of one to one sort of 101 sort of relationship now if you want to talk about the sparseness thing why me do what do you want to interject on that before I'll let you finish them then all the exact right so as far as the sparseness goes I think to to present the dichotomy as rich versus sparse is a little bit misleading because it's kind of like saying well look as CEO he's not he's dirt poor

58:38 because he's not as rich as Warren Buffett right like so the idea here is that even if you can get things down as skinny as as the sparse stairs we want to make it still actually a lot of content there like examine your visual experience just to note in the phobia there's like thousands of the points of colors right there that are being filled in and that's all going to be have to show up in the high over thought in some sense and then you've got other aspects like whether it's moving or something like that about what its texture is and

59:12 this is just all in one in one modality right so I think I think even if if it's relatively sparse and I don't think I don't think that's far steer so correct you're still going to have to have a lot of higher-order state acreage in order to fill out the conscious experience and I mean you know we can go through a lot of the experiments and say why I don't think they work but for the time being I'll just say that I don't think any of a lot of experiments or even very good for showing that the experiences is that

59:46 much less rich than we previously take it to be so so I guess it depends on what you think antecedently about things like subjective inflation if you think that's a life possibility that people systematically misjudge how rich their conscious experiences or their experience things I mean so not just misjudge it but that they experience things as having a lot of detail when the details not there so I think that these you know this is one of

1:00:20 the other things we're looking at a Templeton thing I mentioned before is whether you can duplicate this and I know it's tricky it doesn't work in every modality and it doesn't they don't always when they look for but there is some evidence that I would say suggests that people experience things as having a lot of detail which isn't there so that the thing that you are talking about you know all the colors and the millions of points you you may you may be having a higher-order state which says something to effect of there's a lot of detail here without actually representing all

1:00:54 the detail and yet he would experience it as being very detailed just not in you've been tricky with the language here and I don't give you an experience of his detailed you would have a belief that it was detailed you have a week that your experience was detailed but you wouldn't actually experience as details I'll actually think you would experience it as detailed but just not in detail hmm so the experience would be as of a very detailed scene but without the details it sounds like a mistaken belief to me as opposed to experience

1:01:28 but it's not it's not going to hop on that particular word well there's some reason to think it's not just a mistaken belief because like it for example in these studies that you know I'm talking about the the ones that come from Cochran's lab and related areas but they they try to train away these kind of cognitive biases by coaching them giving them feedback travelpod trial by giving them incentives to draw it you know to to judge in various ways and it doesn't go away which seems like it's perceptual effect so objective conflation if it's a

1:02:01 real thing is inflation at the experiential level not at the judgment level I'm really confused now so you the claim is that people there's experiences are not as rich as they are if I told you a story and I said there was a crowded City Street and then okay so but I didn't tell you about every person on the streets or what they were wearing or anything like that but I just give you

1:02:34 the sense that there's a lot of people there well in that case you're not actually experiencing it you're not actual experience crowd Street no but that's the sort of representational contents that were positing in the experience and in the higher order state which was subsuming the experience are related to it so you know that's one of the benefits of having intentional theories intentional content can be as vague or general as you like as opposed to pointer theories and those sorts of things so you know I'm just saying with experience in it as

1:03:07 I've got doubts whether experiencing something has something is phenomenal logical manifest if you know what I mean well I don't know you mean okay well if you if you if you experience if you experience a gorilla you can experience its color you can experience its shape and experience its motion and then there's a question about whether you experience it as a gorilla whether there's something that's like to see something as being something of a type right I think I take it that we all think there's something that's like to

1:03:41 see so see a color and see a shape and so forth that's phenomenal but there's a live debate about whether it is something that's like to see something as belonging to a certain category yeah I don't think well that's what I'm talking about so I'm thinking about things like the Sperling case you know spurning sort of thing you've got two letters on the screen people sometimes say I'm although there's interesting paper that just came out on this but you know people sometimes say I feel like I saw the letters and it may just be the case that they experienced something which we would describe as a bunch of

1:04:13 letters without actually representing the details I mean so do to do truck it off the idea that there are things that that we can kind of like have as a part of our I mean there's just as there's debates about it about whether whether we can when we can phenomenologically see something as changing right right like it might be that we can in some in

1:04:47 some sense see change without being phenomenologically manifest right since we can see something as being I see something that has a gorilla without that being phenomenon let's give manifest and I'm just saying that whatever is being spoken up here has seen something as being a bunch of letters might fall on the side of like it's not actually from which case that would be a pretty strange claim given that you know I've been in seeing these stimuli in it I'd swear what I'm seeing is a bunch of letters that's what I experience is a bunch of letters on the

1:05:20 screen the question is I could say the same thing about the gorillas I swear I just saw a gorilla and yet the claim could be true that is that all that I phenomenologically saw was its color and shape and so forth in the case of the letters all I phenomenologically saw was whatever letters I actually did the shape and color of whatever letters I actually were part of my experience and then that thing where I saw things as as being a bunch of letters that's actually not phenomenological yeah so let me try to put this in a different way then you

1:05:56 may you may see you may consciously experience some shapes but not specific shapes no I tend to think that if you actually if you if you actually experience a shape it has a it has an actual shape to well don't you know so what I'm suggesting though is that there is some reason so this is what subjective inflation is if it's a real thing then

1:06:30 it's the sort of thing I'm describing where you have an experience which is inflated in the sense of presenting itself to you in a way which suggests a bunch of detail which is not actually part of the experience yeah yes so right and then we get to the claim that it's not that you're experiencing you – you're experiencing as if you're disparate unit as well leaving the word as out since you I'll give you the claim that you're making before so you don't experience it I won't say that you experience it as

1:07:03 detailed but you experience your experience is that there's a very detailed scene in front of you but you actually don't experience the details yeah experience it what you experience a very detailed scene being present without experiencing any of the details that's the kind of again I'm gonna say that I'm not sure the baddest phenomenologically manifest like you're usually we're experienced in a loose sense there the same way that I

1:07:35 experienced the gorilla as being there even though my experiences shape and so forth so how do you so you're gonna deny it so this is what started us off down this road is that sounds like so you deny it subjective inflation is a real thing but I haven't heard you like present a reason for thinking that it's not a real thing well I mean it's not the way that I would usually deny and it's not even a way that I I want to be married to in any sense I'm just I was opening up a different question here

1:08:07 about when you start talking about experiencing something that has detail whether that actually counts as phenomenological experience what so I left out the word ad just for that reason so you you experienced about some detailed shapes being present but there's no D tells in the experience it's just detailed shapes there's you know when you use the word experience to reason in a different sense from phenomenological experience no no no that's that's what I'm saying there's no reason to think that well I mean you could deny it in

1:08:45 the case of the gorilla as well you could have died in the case of change but I'm not sure I'm following the rhetoric here so there's some evidence would suggest that what I'm saying actually occurs and you're saying it doesn't so how do you deal with the evidence then yeah okay so let's get back on track because so we're getting into into some fine green obscure issues and I feel like we're not to doing carefully I'm gonna give you what my

1:09:21 more direct answer is to the subjective inflation stuff yeah I I confess to not being intimate with each and every study but the ones that I've looked at they often appeared to me to not show that there are elements of a person's experience experience that are missing but rather they show that people are not necessarily correct as to what is in their experience so some of some of those studies I believe they show a

1:09:58 person to be more calm overly confident about what is occurring in the peripheral vision yeah right so they show that the person thinks they're right about what is happening there even though they're not and that is the evidence for subjective inflation someone stasis but what they don't show is that there's a lack of experience there so they no one's claiming there's a lack of experience they're claiming that their the experience is not as detailed as the subject experiences it phenomenologically they're wrong they

1:10:33 have a sense that there's more there than it's really there yeah so if you are if you have a figure that is a set of dots we have to and it might be that in the subject thinks that it's very fine-grain if there's a lot of detail to and what it turns out is that so according to subject the dots are very small but what this is what the

1:11:08 experiments show is that the dots are actually pretty big so there isn't as much detail as they thought at the same time you have to still fill out all of that area of phenomenology so one of the sub parts of this figure instead of having and alternating the row of say we would yellow dots you just have one big blue dot right but you still have to fill all that area in and so if you if you have a high or a state that is saying that there is stuff in this certain part of

1:11:43 the visual field you're gonna need to fill that whole thing out then the hilar thought is going to need to be as big as it is needed to fill out that very individual field it doesn't saying there's stuff there well that's filling it up yes so that's what it's filled out by simply the thought having the content there stuff there it's so a break your vision your phenomenology down into coordinates yeah so what's something we look at the fovea

1:12:16 let's see what people are mistaking about what's happening in their phobia the phobia you know ten degrees across or some or somewhere around there you're going you're going to need a high overstate if you're going to have a color experience in that part of the in that part of the visual field you're maybe even eating a higher-order state that says that there's something here and there's something here and there's something here into something here there's something there it's something here if so you are going to need to fill up if it's a very detailed picture

1:12:48 you're going to need six different areas that are filled out and a less detailed picture it's going to be one area but the area actually ends up being the same sizes of smaller ones and once you have this you're going to still need enough of a higher order thought to fill it out like so now if you take a higher level state and you just have one that has a smaller amount of content now you end up just filling out one of those six areas as opposed to the whole thing or you just gloss over the whole area so

1:13:24 I mean if the if the higher death actor says there are some colored circles then you're gonna experience there being colored circles without experiencing any of the particular colors and that may be all you need and you wouldn't notice anything weird about it that's just in you know that's until you tried to access it or say more about what color was there you wouldn't notice anything strange about it yeah it's it's it's seems possible that we have arisen or a

1:13:57 visual field that don't have a definite color yeah so those experiments are people showing that because all they show is that people are like mistaken about what color is there they're not a service taken about there being a color represented they're not like so just they're the way that these experiments would be most favorable turnout I'm not seeing it that unnecessarily doesn't support the view the way it is but if you could somehow show that the subject just doesn't have a color experience at all there that'd be very favorable to

1:14:31 subjective inflation it turns out that what is it like in most parts of our visual field most of the time because sparse theory is true it's kind of like what it's like for us us behind our head there's nothing it's like first to have something have our spirits take the hold on so we're missing a little bit of what the dialectic here is because I wasn't really trying to defend sparked the sparse view right now I was saying that you know someone like me who thinks there's this rich view and it's all in the prefrontal cortex and then you have some damage to the prefrontal cortex and

1:15:04 then you say well you don't notice it you don't have any phenomenological manifestation of it and people don't say anything about it at which point my I was postulating that there would be a kind of degrading of the contents into a sparse kind of content in those particular cases not in the normal case so it might be the case that when you have the damage to the prefrontal areas that give you the 35% reduction what happens is not that you lose to experience but just becomes more degraded more sparse in which case it

1:15:37 would be more like the subjective inflation stuff that we're talking about which normally is you know we're talking about it's over here in the periphery and people the the key claim there is that people say it's more visible than what's in their focal area they say that was the more visible thing and they're they're highly confident about what judgements that are making they're wrong or they're right there you know their performance is not in any way tracking their confidence levels or their visibility ratings they're just as good in the other areas and so there's some some reason to think that their

1:16:10 experience is actually inflated beyond what's the detail which is actually encoded in that area by the relevance for shorter stays so but they don't know to say in fact they're more confident about it so if something like that were which normally doesn't occur in the focal fovea areas a normal experience something like that may be what's accounting for these PFC deficit things that we were talking about before that was why I brought all that stuff up was a way of suggesting that the way that you would expect the deficits the

1:16:43 manifest is not exactly the way like a higher theorists like me at least would expect them to manifest that was what the force was that was supposed to be so I'm not suggesting that we actually have that in a focal vision right now in our phobia areas I don't I don't think that's the case but I do think that maybe in the periphery of this case I think it's I think one of the sticking points here is that I'm not sure if I completely understand what a less detailed experience is supposed to be

1:17:16 like I get the sense that there is a there is a definite color represented throughout my visual field and at each point yeah I don't know that's exactly what it's like what is like is that you have the sense there's a deaf in the color even if there isn't one let's see this described it yeah there's some of my mistake my belief could be mistaken it's not a belief it's the experience yeah I don't I don't I just don't think it quite accounts for what it is that

1:17:49 I'm talking about what you're talking about is this is the phenomenological sense you have that there's a definite color represented eats or experience that each point in your visual field which is what is like that's that's the way you experience yeah it just sounds like a belief to me it don't sound like it I don't know where Mable or the sticking point of the dialectic I'm not I'm not coming around this idea of experiencing it as without

1:18:22 actually having a definite sort of with it with it being phenomenologically manifests and it's still deserving the name experiencing as well when no one's saying experiencing that I didn't realize that would be a trigger for you so I retracted that way of putting it not been putting it that way so if that's a problem then it's not that you experience it as it's just that what you experience is a definite color at each point in your visual field but there are certain areas that are not definitely

1:18:55 phenomenologically colored in so to speak but you experience a definite you have a sense that there's a definite color it needs part of your middle field when that's just not the case that's inflation of perception and there's you may find that hard to believe but I mean you know that's fine but there's some evidence would suggest that it's perceptual it's a perceptual phenomena which is that you can't train people out of it no matter how much you try to incentivize them or give them feedback they still have it doesn't affect their

1:19:29 sense that they're more confident about the judgments and the periphery that they they read those things as higher invisibility that's both of those things together what's really doing actually between them being is speaking about what's in the periphery and the idea there's actually no experience in that part of the visual field with more than a mistaken but Benjy hole that there is experience it's just it's inflated it's not as detailed as wasn't completely obscure to me the idea that that there's experience there but yeah there is not

1:20:03 actually I didn't decide the idea of inflation is obscured in this sense yeah I mean I don't know what to say that it's a it's a theoretical posit based on these kind of yeah I'm not getting the motivation on the basis of these experiments I'm not getting the motivation for this for the particular theoretical causal just on the basis of these experiments the motivation is that well the subjects say things like it's more visible and yet their performance is not affected they say things like

1:20:37 they're more confident about their what they whether the grading is left tilted or right till did it leads to it not being detailed well in this case it would be that there's less detail than the Sun so that's it so used to the conclusion that they're not that it's not detailed well if you can't say with it if you are at performance not any better or worse about saying whether the patches left tilted or right

1:21:12 tilted and yet you're saying that it's more visible and that you're more confident then there's something going on there and now it may just be a judgement that you're making which is mistaken but if you train them give them feedback trial by trial incentivize them with money and it still doesn't go away which you would expect that it would go away under those circumstances if it were merely a cognitive thing then the those two lines of evidence suggests that it's the experience itself which is inflated not the belief that's inflated

1:21:48 yeah I mean I understand the reason I'm not I'm not sure connecting the last five dots here I would favor that they were the experience actually being this strange non detailed sort of entity that I have trouble wrapping my mind around I was supposed to say people are overconfident about what is going on in their experience in that part of the visual field because you would expect that you could train it out of them if it were just merely a cognitive thing I mean if you have a weird if you have a

1:22:23 bias or a tendency to judge a certain thing I mean you can't tell someone not to see the muller-lyer illusion no matter how much training you give them how much money you give them they're gonna experience the two lines as being unequal you can't you can't change that because it's a perceptual effect so the reasoning here is that since this seems sort of resistant to the same those kinds of methods then we would expect that it's a perceptual effect not really a cognitive effect so you say it's more visible but it clearly isn't more

1:22:55 visible you say you're more confident that you got it right but you have no reason to be more confident that you got it right there's something about your experience which is suggesting to you that you should be more confident and that is more visible when in fact it isn't okay but so if so if you I mean this is yeah so if you have bought this line of reasoning in the response I was giving before would be more more plausible

1:23:29 because it does seem that the way that you expect the deficits the manifest is kind of already denying the sorts of things that the higher desirous thinks are true so that's part of the problem I think with the argument that you were giving is that you you have these assumptions what's really our first-order assumptions about the way conscious experience would manifest and the way we would have access to and so forth and so on and you build that into your argument which then not surprisingly makes it harder to theory look bad because you've already built in some assumptions which are anti high

1:24:02 order theory yeah possibly okay so I mean whatever we'll have to talk about that more and maybe you know maybe this is anyway maybe it's not a coherent idea I actually think that it is and I think that inflation is kind of an important idea but let's talk about the Pointer view for a second if you don't mind because you were saying a bit ago that you you're I guess well I'm not sure what you said you said that you don't understand the point of view or how it works or what it says in these

1:24:35 sorts of cases is that yeah if you could explain to me how it works maybe I wrap my mind around but the general idea is that there's some somehow the higher order status tagging a little overstate yes where's the vault in tagging yeah I mean that's a good question so some people think that the idea of tagging doesn't make it any sense but I mean the way at least that I think about it is in terms of just specifying an address where you would find the first-order state so you know

1:25:08 if I say you're gonna find Bengie at this address and I write down the address then in essence I pointed to where you live and computer science you know we can say well in this data sector or this clock you know you're gonna find these states what you're interested in and so that's really I think all that you need um there's an address and the higher-order state basically says at this address there's a vertical perception the state becomes conscious as a result of that I make it sound okay so but how is your

1:25:45 argument here so would you agree that the kind of things that we can talk about don't address that kind of view oh you're going to so here's one way to work where and so how do you tag these states well I have one speed that says visual cortex says visual states like is that all the level of detail we need for everything to become conscious yes it just says in this part in this region you'll find something political or you'll find

1:26:20 something internally generating or you'll find that the activity from this address is noise ignore it the activity from this address is is alright so we need we need more than one their address right yes we need all the addresses for the relevant areas of the cortex yeah so this the thing that's nice about this view is it it doesn't require a duplication of content the way that like if you like yours does which runs it well and you're going for

1:26:55 everything that's in your experience we're going to need to have to content representing PFC it's not a duplication of contents since ones conceptual and one's not so you know you're not duplicating the you know whatever first-order representations your rewrappers ending that way you're not duplicating them so I think that the claim that is duplication is already a bit wrong so if you have a if you have a conscious experience of like some some rich scene you're going to need them all

1:27:27 that content in the PFC yes okay that's all right in many cases what's going to happen that's going to be duplicated from what's what's happening in the visual cortex nothing hangs on us though it's gonna be a Reedus ssin of it but it's not it's a description of it in some sense but not duplication of it okay so the nice thing is that you don't need to have all the content in the PFC there are reasons it seems like at any moment we have them we can go down a rabbit

1:28:00 hole here but the reason is because maybe someone wouldn't think a rich experience would all be bothered if you represent a volunteer right so let's just throw that out there and we can come back and hash that out if you want but that seems to be one advantage that the pointer hat you might have right but if you're gonna have to tag things in the visual visual experience is pretty rich you're still gonna have to do a lot of tag yes you know so for each point in the visual field you're experiencing a color going to need one tact so it don't seem to evade the argument I'm

1:28:36 presenting all that well in that you want you to have a decreased decreased ability to tag things as you have the prefrontal cortex damaged and thereby end up with a decreased phenomenology yeah so I I know I think and people who like this receptor on reality monitoring you kind of go back and forth on this because in some of his faces what he says is look we're having a criterion that said and so if you have lower

1:29:09 activity you wouldn't expect like lower you know this is one lacy respondent that people like Miguel Sebastien when he talked about you know dreaming and the dl PFC being sort of under activated in the case of dreams and then people you know hawk one says well we wouldn't expect lower activity there to mean less higher-order states it just means that the there's a lowering of the criteria so that it's easier to cross the threshold from this is no ways to this is political and so then that's kind of what you would expect in those kinds of

1:29:41 cases is that you would get conscious experiences generated more freely in a sense because you can't you don't have the ability to set the criteria up super high so so in that sense I think that he's not gonna say that it's a tag for everything but that is a threshold that needs to be crossed in order to be sort of counting his vertical but in some of his other areas where he's written about this it does sort of seem like there would be a tag for every point it's actually not sure what what to make of spelled out in a

1:30:18 way that's much more that my argument is less less damaging to worry which is why I start with the idea that you just got one tag and then it says what's happening in the visual cortex it's labeling that and that's all you needed in order to get the conscious experience the rich conscious experience you know maybe maybe my argument wouldn't work very well against to be like that of course that news is going to have its own problems but because we were thinking about everything that become unconscious he is probably going to need

1:30:49 to be tagged right to define the preeminence of whatever the experience turns out to be yeah so but if it were just a criteria setting thing then they argument when really do you know do you need you need to run each experience through the gauntlet that's going to be a part of the rich visual experience though like if you have to do that I get to run each thing through then it seems like you're running with the same problem well I'm not way of thinking about things what you have is you have activity in the visual cortex Ford's for example and then you have a system which

1:31:24 is kind of monitoring it to determine whether it's accurately representing something in the environment or whether it's internally generated or whether it's just noise and so there's a threshold at which it would have to cross in order to count as you know it generated from the external environment and it's kind of almost a priori argument that you get for this right because neurons are always firing they're never silent so you need some way of determining whether the firing is representing something or if it's just kind of noise you know just a general background activity so that's the job of this monitoring

1:31:59 system which is postulated to be in prefrontal cortex which is in some way tuned in to what's going on down there so that the activity I mean once it yeah so but you still need some way to say where the activity is and that's address point I guess so that you would still need a way to tag it yeah like you're it's here and it's also a good representation yeah you have to let have

1:32:34 to be well you know it has to be that yeah there has to be something that labels it I think he's backed off a little bit but least when we wrote our the paper that came on the block and ology you know he was open to the idea that it would be labeled as you know critical or intense or something like that and he's backed off that is kind of just a there's a three slots that it can be and it can be in radical it can be internally generated it could be noise and I'm a little bit less clear about how that part of it works although I know it's

1:33:06 inspired by this adversarial sort of computer science the type stuff where there you know the general adversarial Network against I don't know if you read that it's their abundance tough enough anyway so that yeah Sagan yeah it's you know it's inspired by the idea that if you want to train artificial neural network do you identify whether something is a cat or a dog then you need the system which is generating the content but then also a

1:33:38 system that's trying to outwit it that they they're adversarial in a sense that one's trying to generate fakes and so that the system needs to be able to discriminate the fakes from the real ones and it does a better job at it so that this is part at least I'm probably butchering this idea but that's part of the idea that is inspired his later views on this but so yeah I guess even there you wouldn't the kind of deficits that you're gonna expect though given damage the prefrontal cortex don't look like the kinds that

1:34:12 you get or that you predict in the in the paper you wouldn't expect a loss of the relevant higher-order states you would expect an inability to determine whether something was internally generated or noise or not or or vertical that is the higher-order state in its theories now yeah right I might not have followed you but did you conclude by saying that that looks less susceptible to it yeah well the cut nakhon deficits that you predict that you say higher order

1:34:46 theories predict don't at least on the face of it appeared to me the ones that you were so I donated so far it sounds like a the exact same considerations with a client's or Boris you can make less confidence judgments and in the course of making less confidence judgments you end up with a shrunken phenomenology so when you know the Hybris theory it says say however thought there you every time you have a part of a phenomenology filled out it's because you have a higher-order state and it's pointed at

1:35:21 it or a higher-order state that has it as part of its content or this or that everything according to the age of allow type Theory every time you have a party phenomenology filled out it's because you've got some confidence judgment filled out about that that perceptual state that would represent that you know it's going to manifest and so to the degree that you lose the ability to create these confidence judgements you would lose a corresponding ability to have phenomenal experience right or you would just lose the ability to set this

1:35:56 thresholds at a certain level so that you would expect you know some kind of erroneous judgments about whether it was internally generated or or externally generated which it doesn't it doesn't seem like you would expect holes in the phenomenology so to speak so much as misjudgments about where the thing was [Music] so the person what's going on here that the criterion gets dropped so now things

1:36:32 that it used to be that it needed to have a threshold nose hex before would be into and I think I think that's my messages notifications okay that's like stopping me from afar no wrong so now I now it can be a crappy representation and it gets labeled as being vertical yeah and so now you just end up with maybe you end up with more phenomenal

1:37:07 experience maybe yeah exactly in dreams you might have much more phenomenal experience in dreams more vivid wild like things that was a very personal but dreams for I think for most people their last minute well like me for example a lot I get one dream in black and white so I I don't believe that no one dreams of black and white okay but so in a dream things what you would normally judge as being internally

1:37:44 generated or mistaken as being out there you know experience as critical things which activity which may just be noise is jet is misinterpreted as being right so here's a very small conscious experience I have experience just to my father right and that's that's all phenomenal experience I have done in the case of a dream it appears to me like my visual field is just it's possibly just as wide as my regular experience doesn't appear to be any wider the thing that's

1:38:16 different is the content itself is wild right like so it's not all of a sudden I start seeing two objects in one partner visual field whereas I don't do that in the most in regular visual experience which I consider to be a bonafide increase in content and then the reason that I want to say that if anything that seems like it has it's it's less than a conscious experiences because the vivacity has lost the same way that in a memory you know things seem more faint right so on one hand the content is probably about the same amount on the

1:38:51 other hand it seems like it's so the idea that so it's like the range of content might go all over the place but the amount of content at any one given moment it seems to me Saints takes probably about the same right I mean I can yet let's accept that and then say but it's the range of the content which is so the lowering of the threshold explains why things the content is all over the place and there's no connection between the innocence because there's just all this randomly generated activity which is now crossing the

1:39:24 threshold which normally wouldn't right so i misstated we have a distinction here now between differences in content and increases in content I don't see that what's going on in the in the dream is just differences in content but not an increase any overall content so you see I'm saying I mean this is it there's not too much substantial hanging on this form we got sidetracked by the idea about whether there's more content in a dream experience than waking experience yeah

1:40:03 no I wasn't that was a mistake I fear the way you're putting it now I agree it's nothing too much hangs on it I think as far as we wrap rather than discussing just before that yeah um so everybody here but to get back to you know two points back to digressions back so when you get the distinction between increases in differences in content now the threshold is lowered so it's admitting a lot more things it's not just differences it's more things are admitting it at this point so now

1:40:37 it's almost like to just give a toy example for Google from a visual experience it's just overall to like wow that's huge in our case it goes from like whatever it is usually to like it it being even bigger than substance and the bigger here is is somewhat it's it's somewhat metaphorical not completely it might be that it actually becomes bigger in the sense that the visual field becomes bigger the perceived but it can also become bigger in the sense that now in any given part the visual field that may be simultaneously Springs to colors mm-hmm right usually you just

1:41:12 experienced one color in any part of the visual field now the credence is I meant something that's I think that's an interesting you discuss right there but [Music] now would become much more commonplace that instead of just seeing blue in one part of the visual field you might see blue and red and that very same part of the visual field at the same time because the crews the the threshold has been lowered so now you have these competing representations for what's being shown in the same form the visual field and they both are allowed it's because of the lower question

1:41:47 so are you so is what you're saying here is that this is an objection to this view is that you would expect that kind of stuff but we don't find it oh no right now I'm at the stage of exploring what higher order theory this version of high water 3 would say in the case of damage where there was a lower threshold predict right so you remember there's one part of my paper I just say I just asked the question what should what should the higher theorists state happens in cases no brain damage and so this is just an exploration but one that

1:42:20 is much more geared to this particular theory point I'm not only just specifically the point of theory about the credence confidence yeah and now we can try and turn it into an objection and I'm ready to do that okay go ahead we don't see that people start to have like multi various colors represented in the same partner particular they don't see that they start to see more overlapping things or the visual and

1:42:52 expansion of the visual field and so I'm not saying this is a strong objection but now we've caught this prediction that maybe the content of the visual experience actually becomes greater because of the damage but it's it's very interesting like if this is the right way this were the right way to interpret it right we get out we get a reverse of what I was talking about in the yeah exactly another one with your submit with humility this could turn into another way your objective a higher on the theory more specifically this version

1:43:27 yeah so I mean I don't know it definitely is the case that there's maybe some reason to think that get a reduction in conscious experience I don't know if you get the weird kind of things that you're talking about but that you would get more liberal judgments or about things with being visible or more confidence about what's there and and yeah I don't know so that's not I don't know so I don't know exactly what is that worth pointer theory or you're talking

1:44:00 about later theory okay yeah and so the idea here is that you're you're saying let me get one up on me again well I wasn't really having a clear thought I was just saying this is an interesting area that is the beam explored more like a generally the point that all this was kind of geared towards was trying to bring out the ways in which I think that you make assumptions about I mean you're the only one who's ever talked about this stuff so it's good that you're at least saying something about it

1:44:33 but the way that you expect the deficits to be manifest yeah given prefrontal damage is not obviously the way higher-order theorists that would expect them to be manifest and I think that's an important point yeah great look forward to you know a bit more you know a worker worked out version what we've been gesturing at yeah listen that's that's gonna be a great next stage yeah version of the

1:45:11 alternative yeah right and that's one of the I mean even though I don't agree with everything that you say I think that's one of the important things about the kind of work that you're doing is if for it brings attention to these issues and it shows that people need to say something about it it what's the one has I mean there's kind of a lot of glib glossing over of these very technical issues and a lot of higher-order yeah what a good good philosophical papers can often contribute something section by section you know and so my hope is

1:45:44 that in the article that you just read that the section of which I give an analysis of what the high order theorist might say in the case of prefrontal cortical damage you know I'm hoping that that helps to to flesh out that issue even for people who are committed hi world series yeah well okay you know here's a way to think about it is this does it seem like the proper way to think about what are the other options now we have this one question right exactly no it does I think that's one of the important contributions that the paper makes and also just a careful

1:46:18 working through of the various outcomes is also an interesting and important so I think you know while I sort of have questions about of your main the thrust of the argument I don't I'm not trying to disparage that you did the work I think it's important and that it's kind of for the kind of you need to be done [Laughter] yeah you know I love you and your work

1:46:53 with me so I'm noticing we're getting on in time here and I can't keep you forever and I'm hearing stirring some because I always try to do this during nap time I'm hearing the kids stirring downstairs so I wonder if there's anything which we haven't talked about what you were hoping we were going to talk about anything that hasn't come up with you wanted to come up and the answer can be no but I've always liked something I'm curious just what you think about you know predictable response but so your your uh your theory

1:47:28 your version of higher order theory and many versions of theories that are going to tie the production of power over States to the PFC has to potentially do commit to the PFC containing all of the content that we consciously experience right and so let's let's just start at the case that's most friendly to the opponent of higher order theory where our experience is really rich like it's as rich as we ever thought it was you

1:48:01 know like it's to every every point in the visual field that we think has a color motion shaped X representative it's it's there and in all the detail you want so now we have and what our virtue is an upper back fear so we think that all the content is consciousness energy right there's a question as to whether it's plausible to think that the PFC would have this much content in it so obviously we can we can pin down phenomenology that's the the first move

1:48:35 that's gonna be made here with sparseness but you've already said that you're sympathetic to richness maybe not the vast richness that I just said but you guys still got a kind of a rich picture like how do you feel about about the prospects for the PFC actually representing all that well I think it's an empirical issue so that you know I predict that we should be able to decode that content from the PFC alone and if we don't if we can't do that then you know so I would be abandoning that view

1:49:11 and that's in fact what we're looking at right now but so it depends on how you decoded it so if you're using fMRI which i think is fairly crude you know even with multi batter multivariate pattern analysis I still think it's fairly crude and people put too much faith in the fMRI I would personally say and what you want to single cell recordings and there there's some evidence that we do we are able to decode contents of what we think of as perceptual experiences I mean they've done this in in rats and monkeys and stuff and even up stimuli which are

1:49:45 not being attended you can still decode with the content so that it's not it's not a matter of them paying attention to it or something like that so my prediction what I would expect so my ultimate answer is that conscious experience is as rich as it is that's I believe it's pretty rich and I could be wrong about that but I do have feelings that is ridged and I think that our priori would be very surprising if they were all in the prefrontal cortex but there are a lot of things which are surprising a priori which turn out to be the case so my money is on this is an

1:50:19 empirical issue and what we want to be able to do and show is that that content is there and we have tools for kind of doing that and to the best of our ability at this stage in time it may not be perfect but that so so I'm not gonna really pin a lot on how implausible it is or anything I want to see the empirical work being done and if we can't decode it then I say yeah I guess I was wrong about that we can my like credence in this tremendously yeah

1:50:52 so your prediction would be that so then this is a this is a technological prediction because it because if it wasn't then this wouldn't be able to something to be completely empirically tractable so I've got you know one little point in my visual field off to the right midline eventually we'll be able to decode what color is being represented in that particular part of it

1:51:25 yes I do so and even better we'd be able to stand here that way and produce experience as a bad exact state of color just by stimulating the prefrontal cortex we'd be able to reproduce it by stimuli the approval on vortex yeah yeah yeah so that's evidence that that happens by the way so you know Tony Rowe has done TMS on the prefrontal cortex and you get phosphenes and he argues that oh and maybe you know feedback through the visual through the nerves to the visual cortex that's producing the phosphines which is a

1:51:58 possibility obviously but it also is a possibility that stimulating the prefrontal cortex in the right way generates the experience so I think those two things are really the future of this kind of work I did a row target areas that they knew don't with vision in the PFC it's fun what do you mean Dwight dealt with vision that there yeah I mean it could be that there's and now this is the way the PFC works but if the PFC had certain areas that were dedicated to processing visual information to targeting that and then and then hitting it with the TMS

1:52:34 and seeing the phosphates yeah I forget where in fact they stayed targeted I'd have to protect the details so I guess I mean you know it's not but the discussions are often limited to division with good reason because we just know so much more about vision and reality but the question was going to ask is whether you get auditory phosphenes when you do this whether you get tactile phosphenes when you do this yeah wait I don't know that's that's exactly the right kind of present and it's been a curious to me I guess the water wouldn't I guess you could just be though there's more access to vision by

1:53:09 the PFC than other modalities I mean I think there's something to this idea what talk one talks a lot about but it's that the PFC is it's hard to to play it's hard to stimulate in the right way because of the way the neurons their function and the visual cortex a lot easier to stimulate and get the kinds of his analogy between a trumpet in the piano so it's easy to bash the keys on a piano and get the notes from it it's hard to do that with the trumpet because you got to blow it in the right way and you have the elixir and you know so it's more than just hitting the bikini and more like the trumpet in this respect

1:53:42 and in the visual cortex is more like the piano so in some sense it's not that surprising that when we TMS we get frostings and visual cortex and it's harder to do that in the prefrontal cortex because it's you know it can also be the case that if at the FC the same neurons that I said Norma that represent some feature on one occasion it might be the case that a different set of neurons that represent the very same feature on the other occasion yeah exactly there's kind of like this this very

1:54:17 spontaneous plasticity that can occur exactly yes see one neuron may be involved in multiple I mean so maybe I'm you stimulate it one way and you get the visual phosphate you stimulate another way and you get the auditory phosphine so anyway what the right way to do it is so so I'm saying that because of this it might be a hard to actually empirically get as far as that you're saying as far being able to to empirically confirm to that to the degree that you're talking about but putting that aside it seems to

1:54:52 me that there's theoretical reasons to think that the PFC would not be in the business of representing this much content then scare that scared up on rich sorry it's going to be it's getting to be we've been talking for a long time still putting together the thoughts and the cough is very well so the PFC it seems like the we in general to give C's in charge of doing is not taking the mass amounts of sensory simulator we

1:55:24 have and just taking it all in it's more like selecting the subset the function of it is to select a subset for more intensive kinds of process and so like it the job of the PFC is not to redo placate I'm sorry for that worry about on right now all the content that's in the lower sort of sensory areas to the point where we'd have this rich visual experience not only in which visual experience but rich sensory experiences and all the other modalities it's rather its job is to just pick out a small subset and so it's not that we want to add the whole visual field

1:55:59 representative in the PFC but rather just the stuff that's important so that we can focus on it and give that sort of give that priority in the process so it's and if you look at the so part of the job however theorist is not just to say where it happens there's a step in there where you say like why or why where where does it happen well the way that we do it is we say what sorts of functions might involve the high representation why would we create desire when we're constitution so you latch on the function such as working memory or attention or action monitoring

1:56:33 and you say that kind of stuff like grease are our representations so where does it happen that PFC but backing up to that step about the function seems like most of the functions you would cite in favor of producing higher were representations are going to be associated with things that have jobs that are more associated with winnowing content like with picking out a subset a very small subset of the possible sensory content there's the PFC would not be in the business of reproducing as

1:57:09 much content as we find in our visual experience that's a possibility anatomically I'm not sure because you know these medial areas at dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex they get a ton of input from sensory areas there's a lot of input there now at the frontal pole and further forward you don't get that kind of input which looks like that's a possibility for getting like the highest level of abstract representations that are possible but at least in these other areas there's a tremendous amount of connectivity between what we think of a sensory areas also you know what we

1:57:44 think of as memory areas what we think of as self representing areas feeding into these prefrontal areas may be the function of that is selection as you say may be the function of that is re representation I don't think we really know at this point so I take your point I do think that it would be somewhat I mean I think one of the fundamental things here is whether you think so one of the fundamental issues which I've come up a get across across again and again when I think about this and talk to people about it is what you think

1:58:16 about the origin of brains so many people that I know think that brains originated non-consciously they first showed up they weren't conscious and then you have to explain how consciousness arises from from a brain which is already controlling behavior adaptively flexibly in response to the environment but not experiencing anything whereas other people seem tend to assume at some level that well once you have the brain and flexible adaptive behavior you have conscious experience you have phenomenology phenomenal consciousness and it's not clear to me

1:58:50 how to resolve that kind of issue if it goes one way then you can make sense of why there's all this extra machinery up there which is we representing everything if it goes the other way then it's a complete control of mystery but it's not it's not really clear to me what the right answer to that question is certainly the higher-order view predicts the former that brains started out non-consciously and I probably your typical you know honeybee is not conscious in the sense of having experience unless you can show

1:59:24 that it has the analog of higher States would be very surprising you know I don't know I think iguanas have have some probably rudimentary higher order states and I tend to think most animals do that are mammals at least it's not clear about the other ones but anyway so I think that's an open question we just don't know I think that's really one of the most conceptually difficult questions they answer you have a favorite candidate function for that which would be identified with the hyoma states that are important for having conscious experience or necessary I just suggested it here's one possibility

1:59:57 working memory right like that's just an example if you have confidence judgments metacognitive abilities have any involving confidence do you have a function that you would a favorite function that you want identified the production of the right kind of higher-order States with no not really I think that's probably the closest would be theory of mind probably so that that the right higher starts sort of generated out of our

2:00:30 ability to talk about other people's mental states and based on their behavior it's sort of the same for us we notice ourselves actually in certain ways and then we sort of go oh I must think something I must be seeing something and then that's going to be so that the function of the higher-order States originates from our wanting to talk about Minds generally other people's and ourselves which then becomes automated and second nature in a certain respect and then but I don't think that's you know I don't think

2:01:03 working memory is especially important for the relevant science with the functions that the brain is hypothesized to carry out do you identify with any of the functions that possibly with theory of mind oh I wouldn't identify it but I would you were saying what function is it growing out of our associative you know like present-day conscious experiences which cognitive system is

2:01:38 the one that is supplying the high level states so it might have grown out of out of theory or mind but then it took on a different function now it becomes something like for introspection in general right so metacognition is the closest one but I would say yeah and so it's a very broad category metacognition could happen it undoubtedly metacognition happens in a bunch of different ways I just want to say that it's any kind of metacognition would produce is the right kind of higher state or justice certain subset or it's just something you're having a special

2:02:11 subset definitely yeah kind of metacognition whereby you are aware of yourself as being in a kind of mental state so that's not the typical kind of metacognition their awareness of oneself is you know experiencing something and having mental state in general yeah so it's it's still kind of you know I just love to graft it on to something I'm familiar with something that people you know there's people talking what's mad

2:02:43 at Congress at all we have this specific subset of confidence judgments is there another one that we could latch it off because my suspicion is that we'll find that it would be unmotivated to hypothesize that whatever the system is is actually more to be in the business of producing as many states as we would need higher on the states to fill out our phenomenology like so you don't want to attach it to working memory and that's fair enough and it seems like a really bad candidate because working

2:03:17 memory seems to be pretty it seems to be pretty limited yeah means that if it was supplying our conscious experience then we're down something that seems far off from from rich yeah it'd be very sparse yet but what is the the fine-grained function that would create enough higher-order states to fill out a phenomenology this richly like so if it was like it was analysis so our own minds I wonder why do we need to to be tracking this little area in the right

2:03:52 part of our visual field what colors right there yeah I don't think there's any need maybe simply be accident even while I'm in a lot of the cognitive systems be representing it well because there were doing something else which maybe it was important like metacognition in general or theory mind in general and they just kind of whatever reason develop of Jena Dumas and I don't think there's any any special function which having conscious experiences allows us to do I don't think there's anything really all that

2:04:24 interesting about conscious experience experience no I'm talking about whatever function it is that that produces the higher-level States that are necessary for conscious experience and one wouldn't what function is that and does that function plausibly involve producing lots of high moral states yeah I mean I guess I haven't really put much thought into it I have to think about it more and really have a good answer and so I mean the the very tentative argument that I put forth here is that if we run down a complete list

2:04:59 of functions that we know are carried out in the PLC we're not going to find any that produce these states and sufficient quantities to fill out our which we're not good so we're not gonna find anything that that described in those terms seems like it has the job of representing all this detail yeah yeah and nonetheless we may still find that there's all that detail there so I mean like I said I think it's an empirical issue you know why it does it or what I'm talking about is a theoretical

2:05:33 reason for doubting that yeah I'm suspicious of all theoretical reasons for doubting anything I'm suspicious of all theoretical reasons for doubting suspicious no kospi yes I have a black hole philosophy sucks you may have heard of it right exactly partially to expression of what I mean I guess a good theoretical reasons can give us credence

2:06:13 for what we want to believe it at the present time which might direct and what what area we focus research resources but I can go really bad to I mean so there's good theoretical reasons for thinking that you should find the organ that controls behavior in the heart it just turns out it's wrong so having theoretical reasons for something is often just disguising a bias right are you seeing that do you run a reason yeah they aren't always pointed toward to

2:06:47 conclusions yes yes I that's why I think this is that we want deep we want data you know maybe it happened I don't have already reason for taking my theoretical considerations seriously in this case but I mean it may be may be one thing thing about it's like dammit I know that contents in the PFC so we're gonna spend a whole bunch more money trying to find that content you know like because I've got really strong theoretical reasons for thinking we're gonna find and if you've got the only weak theoretical reasons for thinking they're going to find it you might want

2:07:18 to use those resources for something else right example I figured out what it is a soupçon of normal activity that generates conscious experiences locally such as like a currency well that's who we're going up against in this experimental thing we're talking about but I think we have lots of good theoretical reasons for looking at the PFC they just don't come from these sorts of theoretical considerations so you know when things are some subliminal you don't get PFC activation when they're conscious experience you do that

2:07:51 occurs in every modality in fact even in in motion cases when there's a threatening face there you get amygdala activation but not PFC if it's subliminal so we have we have tons of evidence actually that that some kind of global activated in the PFC is important for conscious experience you could quibble with that and so forth and so on good evidence that it's in its local I think there is evidence for that that comes from lesion studies micro or investigating my friend Richard I thought I find this in PFC correlations just a little I suspected but that's why

2:08:36 we need to investigate more if those things were theoretically strong in a way that I am NOT agree with so far yeah I would grant I grant that we have good reason to okay let's find that content in the PFC let's throw our ancient all our eggs in this basket cooking gently in the basket yes exactly but there's lots of reason I mean many people have thought that there's this robust correlation between activity in the PFC

2:09:10 when things were consciously experienced and not when they're not and uh you know I go so far as to say at one point it was almost verging on being the received view and there's that doesn't mean it's correct but it certainly means that's worth taking seriously and then we looking into further and that doesn't depend on there being any function or any Theory associated with the thing in question it just is that we find these kind of correlations and so that's the guess we should look into it further well yeah you see you've suggested empirical

2:09:42 results what I think to be strong theoretical reasons the other one did the same hopper I mean you make your decisions on the basis of that yeah I mean so we're right now in this thing I'll keep alluding to we're looking at fMRI and behavioral data and change blindness and slow change blindness is one of the I think better it's one of the more interesting things that we're looking at here but you know so if something is so if the color in the background is slowly changing is you're doing a task in the in the center of the screen you would expect at least someone like me who has preference you know some

2:10:17 leaning towards rich content you would expect that the color experience would be represented in PFC so you should be able to code that even less telling its course brain is that from our eyes you'd be able to see some kind of connection between the color on the screen and the conscious experience of the person so that's the sort of thing if we if we do that and it doesn't it doesn't pan out if you can't decode that then I would say well then the only plausible alternative is the sparse view which I sort of have less credence in I don't think it's obviously false or anything

2:10:51 like that but I definitely do I would find it surprising if our experience in we were sparse I would be more open towards looking at for sort of theories if that if it came back that way absolutely I mean I don't know if I had abandoned harder theory I mean I'm not really as you probably already know I'm not like a true believer of higher theory I think it's something interesting that's worth exploring but I I don't know if it's true I don't I'm not committed to it yeah exactly perhaps it's when there's so much higher theory perhaps it's good to to

2:11:25 look at its foundations absolutely I don't know if there's so much enthusiasm for it I think it's often just dismissed out of hand and not taken very seriously and strong Mans to death and not in your work no no not yours man no but no but not and I wasn't astok when I say that but I but I do think Dad lies we've been discussing here even in work like yours which is careful and thoughtful there still is a lot of first-order anti

2:11:58 higher-order bias which creeps in to the arguments because you just can't help but thinking you know think thinking about consciousness in those terms and that was my real throwaway remark about theoretical considerations I do think that a lot of a lot of theory is but is condensed into intuitions and I into you know if you think something is intuitively this way that really just means that you'd have some background theory which is thinking things those terms and you know I'm just a susceptible I'm not trying to disparage your work in any way remember I'm I'm

2:12:31 the best host in the world I look around but I do think that this is a something that want to pay attention to that's I was always someone who sort of found higher order theories intuitively plausible like when I first heard about them I was like yeah duh right yeah what else could it be but so I have a bias in that sense but I still can put myself in the position of the first word of theories I think but a lot of people don't have that response they just think look this is the stupidest thing ever

2:13:04 you don't need to think about experience in order to have it or and I those are the sorts of things which I think we need to guard against whenever we have these knee-jerk reactions which is why we want the careful empirical work the problem is getting the money and that's hard that's why you know at this point we're asking Templeton for the money and the good Templeton I here I don't know if it is that's what they say it's the good Templeton so but they're willing to pony up some money right so that's that's what's good about this is that if we're just not priori and there were no

2:13:38 chance of empirically testing these things I wouldn't be in this debate I wouldn't care I'm just I would just walk away so it's only because there's the possibility of actually empirically testing this stuff but I think it's even interesting and this goes back to even my earliest writings on hired atheria I've only ever said look the theories not obviously false and it's worked out in that detail that we could try to look at some some experimental work and see how it fares yeah so uh you know are you interestingly your bt might be difficult I think so you realize that if you could never

2:14:14 absolutely empirically decide it you might not be interested in the issue I absolutely would not be interested yeah and then this is in principle or so if we have an issue that we in principle could not Berkeley just empirically decide I that's where I might not be interested it could be that we could not in principle imperfectly decide something but at least in some sense you can see how a footman was better we would do we would we would be able to

2:14:46 decide it I can be interested in those issues even if it if it is outside the realm of being able to empirically decide it in fact yeah so this is like you know how I feel offspring Dirac string theory can't be tested now but there's at least some principal ways that you could test it so it's yeah we're thinking about and with respect to the higher-order theory maybe we can't definitively decide but given the technological state were in right now we can still look at what the state of the evidence is and all things considered judgments of that nature and you know

2:15:20 maybe fMRI is too crude of a instrument to really give the finit of evidence but you know with ACOG and sequel cell recordings I think there's a way now even where we're at now we could get a lot better evidence for or against it so I don't need it to be but it but if it were just you know if it were like pants ike ism or something like that where they're just nothing you know it's like a metaphysical or even materialism so you know in some sense i don't really care about that debate as much because there's just no empirical work that could ever decide it when you bottom out

2:15:55 on your shoot it becomes a yeah exactly and you know that i wrote a paper on zombies I don't know how I got sucked into that dummy but I have one paper on zombies my D prioritizing paper and in that paper I basically said this empirically should actually it it may be the case that in principle it's off priori knowable that materialism is false or that physicalism is true but from our point of view it's going to be an empirical matter that decide that that turns this issue one way or the other so that's why you

2:16:29 know in much the same way with water and h2o it's maybe in principle knowable that water is h2o in principle a priori that you could know that I believe that I'm convinced by that or at least have some credence in it but even so it was a it was an empirical discovery on our point on our behalf that got us to think that that was true even if after that we could see in retrospect yeah you can deduce it or something like that it's the empirical work that matters and in particular in this case it's what kind of concept of consciousness is the right one I think that's what the empirical work really is going to move

2:17:04 us forward in this debate so yeah honestly I don't think that any interest there are any interesting philosophical issues that are better detached from peripheral considerations even ethical I mean I'm I'm more of a naturalist I guess than you are even about ethics I'd make that claim yes I think even ethics is subject to empirical even mathematics oh all of it if it's if it's interesting

2:17:38 it's empirical if it's otherwise it's not interesting okay well naturalism as a thesis about what is interesting yes okay we've already established sort of a naturalist in me only in the case of values so by this is sort total non sequitur but you think of the same is true for math okay because I think even there is an empirical issue okay anyway

2:18:15 so we don't need to talk about that but yeah I really do think that if it's not testable and in principle it's not it's not worth talking about to make it seem as if we even talk about something substantial for the last few minutes I'm gonna bring it back to I want to bring it back to the theoretical consent patience thing with yes because I mean understood it it seems to me that like if we couldn't find the content of the TFC that see we can even find this forest content to the PFC we couldn't find the correlations that we wanted the

2:18:50 PFC is complicated enough and our instruments might are being crude enough that maybe the the high water series could still claim well we can't find it because you know it's just our instruments are crude you know and it's it's tough starting the PFC and plasticity and mixed selectivity you with the neurons and so forth all that at that point you know someone might want to say but what are the fuel considerations for thinking that they that the PFC okay the functions in carries I would even bother to represent

2:19:22 as much content as you're talking right so I mean you've already sort of stipulated and will be able to perfectly decide it I'm saying well maybe though it may be the pro maybe someone when they looks like it's not panning out they're gonna say well actually we can't empirically decide right they never they never committed it out of the first place yes you might you might still again you know you might still have to fall back on some of these fever considerations well let me say that what I meant was that I don't think we'll be able to decide it but we'll give enough evidence to convince me to bail or not oh you can always modify a theory to

2:19:58 withstand any onslaught from the empirical work by saying instruments blah blah blah blah of course I think it's something about Academy modify any any prediction so that it can withstand any results right is something I can put a link to in there it's 95 ok I'm gonna go to this thing at this hatter talked

2:20:35 unconsciousness and falsifiability things next Monday anyway so I think this is an important issue if but what is it on consciousness and falsifiability okay I forget who the author of the paper is falsification of consciousness Johannes kleiner from Munich and Erich pol from Tufts thatthat to the author the paper anyway so I think it's an

2:21:07 important issue and I don't you know we don't in the way science works as you never get full falsification as far as I understand it even with water and h2o right there's all these made people just got basically bored pursuing the other alternatives but even that quote unquote definitive experiment which where you take the water and you separate the hydrogen the oxygen you know people were saying oh well something happens in the tubes and yeah so I don't know so there's always a way that you can weasel weasel out of it and explain away the details but after a while just gets not

2:21:41 interesting anymore the other ideas are just more powerful and applica land many other places and so you know I think it's sociological considerations that move science forward rather than any like you have to give up that theory or else but you know and so maybe there'll be diehards and but certainly I don't think if a certain set of experience came out a certain way then we would be justified in saying let's leave that alone at least until the technology gets better that would be my attitude yeah there's going to come a point where

2:22:16 we've drilled down pretty far but there's we're never going to get so far that someone can't modify their theory in order to accommodate it there's different thresholds that we might consider to be rationally appropriate well this is giving me a little bit more confidence in my article considerations the longer the conversation goes on because I mean even in that case so we want to use lesion data in order to evaluate high over theory it should be part of the data so yeah but then you know and then some of the stuff we talked about earlier on where you have a

2:22:48 perfect lesion that knocks out the ability to to create a pile of estates at all and that would be the only thing that the person could even realize their deficits so it turns out that if that scenario is correct it might be you that you can't use me to die right so you can't use it to fit to falsify it or confirm you can't use it to confirm or disconfirm right and you can't completely disconfirmed content studies in order to disconfirm high over theory today cuz it could always be the case that the PFC is

2:23:21 just too complex right so you gotta get to always turn out to be a combination of empirical results and theoretical considerations right yeah okay I can't rule out the scenario you're talking about with with the lesions but if we but if we if we got that then we just can't use lesion elements at all and we're gonna have to use theoretical considerations probably somewhere in there yeah I mean I've never been a fan of using lesion evidence so I'm not against that that conclusion I don't

2:23:56 think anybody in the higher order camp has ever argued lesion evidence supports higher order theory I think instead what you find arguing thing we talked about which is that people say lesion evidence falsify higher theory and we say no it doesn't and not I think withstand scrutiny but but it's not the case I mean so people say you will never find any effects on conscious experience when you lesion say yeah there are some effects at least in possibly interprete below effects but that isn't established at the higher theory is true or even

2:24:30 supported it just mitigates an argument against it publications there's times where me they say they act to support I mean we're getting into it into get to it is a fine grain issues here about like what counts as support and what counts is just merely a merely undermining their argument against yeah well that's why

2:25:04 let me just go on read it and that's my view is that it undermines an argument against yeah more importantly than the lesion stuff for me would be the decoding and ultimately can you stimulate and produce I mean that to me if you can if you can stimulate the prefrontal cortex and then you taste chocolate and I'm saying that that's about as good as we can get if you're not getting pretty sure it's not a casting effect the show is not a cascading and that's one of the troubles here is how we show

2:25:37 that sort of stuff well you know their experimental sort of clever and there and you don't need perfect evidence I don't think we're ever going to get definitive it like certainty with respect to any of this stuff I think that's not the way science works at all rather you get to the plane where you're like okay this explains a lot and if it's but with a bunch of other stuff that we find and so you know it's good working hypothesis and then eventually that's a good enough but I don't think that there's ever a time where you go this definitively shows one would that never happens that's just not science that's not what that's what they

2:26:09 do with their businesses yeah exactly yeah and even there you know depends on your choice of axioms and all kinds of you know background stuff so III mean I have trouble with that stuff as well so you know I'm a million about math so I think it's and it's not a very popular view nowadays but I think it's good ideas inductive generalizations based on experience what do you want what do you want it's pretty good it's a theory which describes the stuff that we see

2:26:43 that's what arithmetic ins and those sorts of things are but anyway so I just don't think that it you know if you're if what you're looking for is like will we ever definitively show that this is the case or not the answer is obviously not but the question is will we ever get to the point where the balance of evidence tips in one direction or another where you have to add Hockley modify things June 1 2010 I think yeah we are already almost at that point where first order views seem to me they definitely a lot of patchwork to account

2:27:17 for the sorts of things that we say but I have there are some theoretical problems with first sort of views already so there's some considerations there about that we talked about the beginning what you said you didn't want to talk about but I think that there are these questions about a walk what what's the difference between a conscious stay in an unconscious state if it's not the facts that there's kind of higher representation of it then what is it you can no one's ever given a good answer to that you know so I think those kinds of things do suggest that it's worth taking serious the higher order approach I

2:27:53 don't see well you let you wash donned out remember like sign up for this yeah yeah the inaccessible consciousness step to me it's like bordering on a contradiction it's not exactly a contradiction but I think it's like pretty close to one actually it's like almost conceptually incoherent yeah so I think you know you you have problem with

2:28:29 inflation and you're not sure what that would amount to I have wrong with the inaccessible consciousness I just don't even know what that means or how to make sense of it and that's probably shortcoming on my part I don't know but I just think it's that's bizarre if anything is so that's suggests some kind of access to me is important now is a cognitive access I don't know like you talk to people like Ned he says well no there's access but it's not cognitive and I said well what else is there there's I don't know some deflation area something and another or some some other thing it's like well no one's ever come

2:29:01 up with another thing which explains the kind of access that we have which is not cognitive that doesn't mean they won't and if I'm looking all the time for people who are writing on this stuff and maybe someone will say something that's possible about how there could be a kind of access which is not cognitive but I just yeah I find that to be completely mysterious so I think there's you know like any good interesting issue there's things would pull you in one direction and things was pull you in the other direction and we're stuck here saying well what would count as good evidence

2:29:33 for against it which is why I want to do as many of these experiments we can and give as much data as we can and see what overall I mean this is basically Ned's mess argument which I fully endorse I just don't endorse the conclusion of it he thinks there's a better mess towards the first order view I think there's an equally good mesh towards the higher order view and so what we need is more considerations to throw into the mix yeah exactly so and yeah so I need to need serious work on in many cases small issues yeah exactly

2:30:15 yeah I know then we put it on the other absolutely and I'd say you know I I wish there were more hours in the day and I wish my life was going to be long in the winter it is because I would love to be working more to at the same time he working more to try and flush out the first order theory yeah but that's for sure that's not my watch [Laughter] well I'm sorry I said you'll upload to the singularity and then have all the

2:30:50 time you need my audience wait this just in I really gotta get get out of here because I'm noticing it's already well it's been going on here for like almost two hours of 40 minutes so that's it's a long time yeah but I want to I want to thank you again for this interesting conversation as usual I learned a lot from thinking through things from your

2:31:23 point of view and I think this kind of work is important and interesting so I'm glad that it's being done and I'll you know is there anything you want to end with you can have the final word if you want [Music] [Music] [Laughter] there's that incredulous there I've been waiting for [Laughter] okay I'll say I'll say bye to you off

2:31:58 the air but thanks again good now thank you thank you very much Richard this is fantastic cool all right let's see