Consciousness Live! with Bryce Huebner (S3 E3)

0:00 I think I just found out that I could do but we assume and have been looking for something I used to use Google Hangouts and then they sort of made it a pay thing and then I found this other stuff so I don't know I wouldn't really found something that lets I have lost audio from you Richard I've got no audio from you we do exactly nada that's wait there you are oh I'm back

1:03 you're back good it's good okay I'm sharing it on Twitter there we go oh that's an apostrophe not : and did I not put the link okay there it is okay it's

1:40 up there now so we're good to go and then you can share that if you want to and then we can get started I don't know if you saw do you see it yep okay all right cool your video is frozen I've got your audio so I'm not going to worry about it yeah I think it's a buffering thing and your videos working fine for me and then afterwards we'll just have to see how it comes out sounds good well we bid live sorry for technical

2:16 difficulties as usual unexpected but thank you for joining me a super special guest today Brice hübner Brice for those who don't know you can you say something about who you are and what you do yeah so I philosopher in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University I have spent most of the last I guess 12 years or so working on a bunch of issues of the intersection of philosophy and the cognitive sciences more recently

2:52 I've been getting really excited about some pretty low-level neuroscience and basically I'm trying to figure out how to remix a bunch of classical Buddhist philosophy with some contemporary results from both cognitive and computational neuroscience as well as cultural psychology I think that's the overview of where I am right now Wow very cool and so before we jump into all that

3:24 stuff because I know you use the word low-level right there but I don't think you mean like low low quality I guess you mean like basic neuroscience or bodily neuroscience or something like that yeah I mean I think a lot of what people have gotten what philosophers have gotten really excited about has unfolded in the domain of sort of neurons firing and that's kind of the end of the story and in some collaborative work that I'm doing with a behavioral neuroscientist named J silk

3:59 and we're trying to sort of think about how to integrate the end of that kind of picture stuff about hormonal regulation and things like regulating various kinds of thirsts and appetites and the role that that might have in larger scale cognition and trying to think about how adaptation to various kinds of social contexts often takes place through the recalibration of a lot of those hormonal

4:32 systems yeah that's very cool you know I mean III think this is very exciting stuff because I feel like hormones are neglected quite a bit in the study of the mind in general I mean we'll get the consciousness and a bit Badgers mean just talking about the mind in general there you know I remember as a when I was a grad school I had a class on hormones and behavior and and our professor was like well they're almost like neurotransmitters I was like well but yeah they are aren't they there's long-range neurotransmitters that's basically but I got so it's a story so I'm sorry go ahead

5:05 yeah it's gonna say from the very beginning of when hormones were discovered what they were thought to be is chemical messengers that allow distributed systems to coordinate their behavior so the liver for example to coordinate with respiration or to coordinate with the with heart rate or to coordinate with various kinds of neural processing or if you think about probably the most famous example down that road if you think about Pavlov

5:37 Pavlov's whole project was figuring out how the anticipatory regulation of insulin shifts learning we've sort of dropped out a lot of that story from the thing that we learn about what Pavlov was trying to tell us right but for him what was critical was trying to figure out how it was the insulin regulation was anticipating the ingestion of food and how that built up the kinds of stimulus response patterns let me see yeah that's that's very interesting I

6:10 mean because you I mean the story you learned in you I could basic cycle whatever is that's a stimulus response behavior that's sort of built-in and they're like little mechanisms not that exciting it's like there's some stimulus response in there but but actually the mechanism is pretty interesting that if it's insulin production which is somehow there's a system in there which is in determining when the insulin should be produced yeah and I mean and that's where the neuroscience has gotten way more interesting is recognizing that it's almost never a single sort of

6:44 system that's regulating a behavior like that it's often drawing on multiple systems including in that case things like leptin and ghrelin in some contexts things like oxytocin regulation insulin all those things are generating the kinds of signals the regulate particular kinds of demands and the organized particular classes of behavior so the story becomes a really interesting story about how all those met processes interact with what you might think of as more dry processes

7:17 which are the sort of signaling and electoral physiological stuff that we're all pretty much familiar with right the spiking patterns of neurons okay so it sounds like what you're saying is that we've almost as a field or at least the majority of people in the field have put too much emphasis on the spiking unless not enough attention to the neuromodulators the chemicals are actually carrying the signal yes so I think the way that I would put it is that any story that accurately captures the biology of cognition is gonna be an

7:54 incredibly complex story about the interaction of multiple kinds of systems which are operating over multiple kinds of timescales right and which are processing over different kinds of signaling apparatuses and I think that part of what happened early in the emergence of the cognitive sciences was there was a split between people who were happy with the kinds of idealization that are present in the McCulloch and Pitt's type model and the

8:29 people who were apprehensive about that so people like w Oshkosh B who are trying to build up systems like the homeostatic temps to capture the interaction between the wet and the dry systems so a lot of people don't know about that project but basically what Ashby did was he took for Royal Air Force control units wired them together and then organized them so that they had a trough of water in front of them a

9:03 magnet suspended in the middle of them and an electrical current running through each of the troughs when the system was stable each of the magnets would be in the center but what you could do was you could perturb the system and it would then search for different settings using the RF control units to organize a space where the system would be brought back into equilibrium and what he was trying to do is to show you could build up the kinds

9:41 of homeostatic regularities that would allow a system like that to return to equilibrium when it was perturbed the problem was that's for systems yeah and it's using a very minimal kind of interaction but that gets us closer to the kind of modeling we want we want something that's tracking both those kinds of electrophysiological gradients we want a system that's tracking the way the different kinds of wet processes are sustaining those and stabilizing them

10:14 and we need a story about how over multiple time scales systems come to be able to anticipate the kinds of challenges they're going to face and how they're able to bring themselves back in the states of equilibrium when they encounter those kinds of challenges right so I mean I think it's fair to say that this is in the broad tradition of the embodied camp right that the kind of view that I mean one it's a version of it at least if not the standard one yeah I mean I think you know folks like Evan Thompson have been sort of pushing on

10:48 things in this general vicinity for a long time he hasn't necessarily been focusing on the same aspects of the sort of anticipatory regulations that I'm interested in right and he's been more apprehensive about symbol processing and computation which I am NOT super apprehensive about I think that what we need is a computational story that allows us to bring those kinds of variables in and it allows us to integrate all of the great sorts of computational modeling going on with a

11:23 story about how those other variables are interact and I think if you get something like that you get a deeply biological embodied and situated understanding of what coefficient looks like but one that doesn't throw out the computational framework which I think is yielded a lot of serious benefits yeah I know that's what so that's what's really cool about this the way you're trying to put these two projects together you're not so you're not throwing the one out in favor of the other although I do think maybe it leaves you open to certain sorts of I

11:57 wouldn't say worries but at least challenges so one might wonder where the actual work is being done because you know suppose you could replace all those wet systems with some kind of dry system that mimic their behavior you're gonna say that's not good enough or there's no way of doing that or you know can we model those processes or mimic their inputs into the into the neural systems and then get the same sense of embodiment or what you know like for instance you know I'm gonna take a left filled example you take care of them Limpy chop the limb off you get a good phantom I mean not a good phantom but you get a robust phantom so it could

12:32 there be you know these kinds of phantoms as well without the inputs do you think I'm not super deeply committed to a story about how this stuff has to be implemented I think in biological organisms like us there are really intriguing facts about how these systems function and we're gonna have a harder time understanding that if we don't

13:07 focus on the wide variety of interacting systems across multiple time scales so just sort of think through a couple of simple examples the first one is is thirst regulation we've got a pretty good sense at this time about how thirst is the quenching of thirst is operating and it's operating using three

13:40 distinct kinds of systems one that tracks the immediate ingestion of a fluid so if you think about any time you've been super thirsty the first drop of a drink actually has the effect of quenching your thirst whoo but it's not going to stay quenched off of that first drop the second is a system that's tracking the distension of the gut because of the ingestion of fluid the third is one that's tracking the osmolarity of the blood so tracking the

14:17 salt versus water content roughly and that's being adjusted through the expansion and the contraction of blood vessels which is regulated by hormones like oxytocin and more directly by the suppressant those systems all work together such that when they all three deliver the same signal that's the signal to stop drinking people are kind of bad at this because we've got another system running on top of that which is

14:50 our anticipations and our judgments and whatever else but if you look at for example rats or other kinds of model systems they'll stop drinking when the osmolarity if their blood crosses the threshold which means they don't mean to a jet ingest anymore water and it's because those three systems are sending signals of different sorts at different time scales which can then be brought into alignment and when that alignment occurs and there's no difference between

15:23 the outputs of those systems they end up functioning to regulate the behavior of the animal so here's the question that you're asking is it possible to offer just a purely formal computational account of what's going on there and could you build some kind of robotic system that regulated its thirst in that way probably I doubt that it's something that a lot of people are going to waste

15:59 their time doing and I doubt that working out precisely how the hormonal regulation of the dilation of blood vessels I doubt that's going to be a part of the story that any viable robotics is going to build in but you miss what's going on in biological system if you don't understand how those kinds of processes are working yeah it's really yeah I agree with that but I wasn't really going for the robotic

16:32 system that did at this point I mean I guess I was gonna work up to it so you kind of headed me off there but I was more thinking like in a biological system like ours could you replace those inputs because I don't know so I don't know a lot about the distension of the stomach and all that stuff but you know I know the hypothalamus is playing a role with via the pituitary gland yeah yeah elating all of these hormones that are going on and so it's the hypothalamus which is involved in the sensation of thirst and also in determining the salt levels of the blood

17:05 so it's depending on these other signals that you're talking about but isn't it the thing which and so that's what I'm asking it's like couldn't you mimic those signals in a biological system like ours and still get the basically the same sensations or not is that are the hormonal aspects really important I mean yeah that's the way it actually functions my wondering like if that's a yeah I mean I'm not I'm not positive that I have an answer there I think part of what you're gonna lose out on is the

17:41 way in which a sensation like thirst is in many ways distributed throughout the structure of your body you can you can fill it in the way that your hands are getting tighter you can feel it in the way that your stomach is responding you can fill it in this in the way that your mouth is unfolding you could probably mimic all of those kinds of signal signals and generate of phantom feeling

18:15 of thirst but I'm not sure this is the the I see how this now hooks up to the embodied stuff in a lot of ways I'm not sure that what you're gonna get is that distributed sensation so much as an integrated judgement that you're having those kinds of sensations and those

18:48 might decouple in really interesting ways yeah I don't really know what the answer to that is and it strikes me as a really difficult question yeah I mean definitely that's kind of my whole issue with the embodied camp is I wonder about these things like I'm kind of an old-fashioned you know I like I like the head I think what's happening in the skull I like it to be extended very far and those sorts of things you know so I'm not saying I necessarily have commitments those but those are so my preferences if I had to be if I if I wanted things to be the way I wanted them I would like it to be mostly the in

19:20 the skull that's going on that's determining but and so when I think about phantom limb pain it's like it's like I think about the descriptions you know they describe their fingernails digging into their palms they describe pressure at the knuckles when they're making a fist and they can't unclutch it and and they describe feelings of tenseness in the months in the muscles so when I start thinking about stuff like that I start digging well what is the embodied bit doing because it seems like it's the whatever information representational states of the the system up there that's determining the

19:54 way it feels or the way things appear to you well so that seems just a bit quick to eat and let me say why it feels a little bit quick oh good it's true that in a mature system where you've got a lifetime or I mean however much time built up of learning to track those bodily variables there's no doubt in my mind that what you're constantly doing is building up a model both of those interoceptive and those Xterra separated

20:30 sensations and I also have no doubt that it's possible to run that model in the absence of stimulations from outside once it's built up but it needs the bodily stuff to be built up it so where you're going that's that's my strong suspicion and I think that that's part of the reason why you know working through the unbending of bent phantom limbs requires working through things

21:07 like visual inputs that give you feedback suggesting that you're actually moving the arm because you don't have the ordinary route to tracking the relevant kinds of Terror sexual sensations so what you need to do to adjust the model is use that visual feedback to update the model in ways that allow you to recalibrate so that suggesting there's something that's been built up over the course of a life there right I see yeah that's it that's it that's a good point that's a fair point

21:42 how I guess I don't see any way of trying to resolve these issues empirically is this a purely theoretical it should be think or is there a way we can get because of the embodied people versus like you know old-fashioned guys like myself I mean I don't know I understand the body as important just seems like the body can be simulated and that's what the brain is doing this at the time so it doesn't so I'm not sure what the force of being embodied is I mean it's certainly like in the neuroscience type that neuroscience

22:15 textbooks what they say is oh could you just be a brain in a jar well we have some evidence that you need input back from the body ok so hook the brain in the jar up to a simulated body you get that same feedback so is it just that there's feedback from somewhere or does is it important that it's embodied or if or what is the simulated body embodied enough I'm not sure how to take these things apart yet so I think those are wicked hard questions I don't think there's any reason to be

22:51 committed to those things having to be biologically based whatever the kinds of input structures are I think that whatever the input structures are they're gonna have to map the spatial and temporal distribution of the kind of activity that show up in a body to generate the right kinds of simulated

23:27 structures there's no reason that you couldn't build something like that that I can think of but it's a bit hard to think about effects where for example the way in which certain kinds of hormones are distributed on a particular day will affect the availability of neurotransmitters on the next day which will then affect the moment-to-moment

24:00 updating in various kinds of neural assemblages in order to get that kind of story you've got to figure out what those complex temporal dynamics are and they've got to be hooked up I think two things that are going to emulate circadian rhythms and all of that kind of stuff to generate anything that starts behaving like it's a person that seems like a lot of work to do it doesn't seem to me that it's impossible

24:35 right but I think that yeah I mean I think that if we want to understand those kinds of patterns the ways in which genetic and evolutionary and endocrine all indoor chronological and neurotransmitter based and signaling based systems are all coming together at any point to regulate assistants behavior I think if we want that kind of story probably focusing on the distributive biological

25:08 system as our best that yeah IIIi think I can agree with that point about actual humans insofar as we are actual humans yeah it's in in that extent like it's been an overlooked area where people have said well all you need to do is understand the neural firing so the pattern or what they encode or something like that and I think what the kind of pressure that you're putting is is well-placed and I hope more people pay attention to it my only question is like you know fundamentally what is it that

25:41 is doing the work of what where's the sensation because at one point it sounded like you were saying the sensation of thirst is partially in your hands because of the tightness there or whatever but you know whereas I would say what sounds like you know there's a representation of that happening up here or some information about that and so that's how you experience and that's sort of what it means to be representation obviously but so I'm wondering like how where is the sensation if there is it distributed through the body on your view I think this might be a place to start talking

26:19 about consciousness stuff more directly cool we're in the right place for that res yeah so let me come at this from a bit of an odd direction okay when I was coming through graduate school I got exposed to a lot of classical consciousness type stuff I did classes with Bill like in on that kind of stuff I did more neuro focused stuff with Jesse a prance so like I was exposed to

26:52 a lot of that stuff and they just couldn't get into it I tried but I couldn't figure out what was super cool interesting about what tipped the scales for me was starting to play around with meditative practices that made me more and more aware of the way the different kinds of sensations were feeling to me and there's a pretty long story here but the tool that sort

27:32 of was most useful for me is a tool called noting where essentially what you try and do is you try to attend to each experience as it arises and you can use different kinds of categorization schemes to do this and probably one of the easiest is using what in the classical South Asian traditions show up

28:07 as the six cent stores so they have like us the standard five senses taste smell touch sight and hearing but they tack onto that an additional sense which is basically thinking or something like that and they treat that as a different kind of sensory process so what you try and do is you try and pay attention when any of those kinds of mental events shows up and you just tag it with which

28:41 kind of event it is right no I've heard that sometimes people this can like help you through pain management and yes so as you get more and more precise about it more and more detailed about it you can start to unpack various kinds of sensations but even with that really basic one what you start to experience is the location of various kinds of tactile sensations and the kinds of sensations that they are you feel it is showing up in particular places on your body you feel tensions showing up in

29:15 particular muscles you start to feel various ways that breathing is shaping the the motion of your stomach and the motion of your chest all of that stuff starts to become the target of your awareness as you start paying attention to that this isn't to deny that there's some kind of model going on internally but what you start to see is that itches are actually patterns of tingling that are showing up on your skin the kinds of muscles muscle tension or just that their patterns of

29:51 muscles tensing that the various kinds of tactile experiences that you're having are located in different parts of your body I think that one of the things that starts to become super clear especially if you're focusing on tactile sensations and bodily sensations is that they're not just showing up in your head they're showing up as ways of reacting

30:24 and responding to things that are going on in the body so I think and this is where I want to say I think there's something very close in the perspective I want to take to a higher order type thought oh cool the bear sensations that are showing up initially are things that are happening all over throughout your body those are being registered in thought they're being categorized in thought and how you register and

30:58 categorize them determines how you orient towards them which determines their salience so if you go to the case you mentioned the case of pain when you start focusing on the way that pain is unfolding in a particular location in your body what you can start to do is you can start to pull apart the patterns of tension and the patterns of pressure the demands that are coming from your body to not put any sort of pressure on whatever that location is and the

31:34 unaffected responses to that which are unfolding in a different sort of medium and basically the way that people use these kinds of practices to manage the experience of pain is they pull apart those effective tendencies from the demands that the body is making and the way the various patterns of tension are unfolding they unpack the physical stuff in the body so the greatest detail possible and they try and just let the

32:07 effective sensation be the effective sensation it is without responding to it further and by doing that you're able to sort of generate both a more concrete awareness of how the sensation is unfolding but you're also getting a sense of which processes are going on where in some sense yeah so I guess I have a couple of things I want to ask you about about what you just said which is there's a lot there and by the way I'm really a novice when it comes to

32:40 these South Asian practices and I mean we were talking briefly before I I have tried meditation I have some familiarity with Buddhist philosophy been to a workshop obviously where I call you but also I went to one a Taiwan on a sort of in Taiwan on the connections between harder theories of consciousness and some Buddhist philosophies so I have a passing familiarity but that's up I'm really at novice and I don't know I know I should know more so I want to pick your brain about that but but the first thing I guess so you know if someone were saying you know looking at the

33:13 screen of a TV and they saw I don't want to say the t words I won't say it but you know they say Barack Obama a pleasanter sight on the image there and they said well there's Barack Obama and you say well no that no that's not Barack Obama and they said well yeah sure it is look you know pay attention to the screen you can see how his arm is booming up over here and his finger is there well I mean that's a really simplified analogy but you could tell that that person would be making a mistake because what they're looking at is an image of Barack and not him himself so that's not really his hand and that's not evidence that they're

33:46 pointing to so there's a representation of him so now that's my kind of reaction to what you were saying about the meditator practices is that you say oh I feel it unfolding in my skin or in parts of my body and I say well of course that's how it's represented to you that's the that's the way it feels but you could have those without the skin without the arm or whatever so I'm not sure that you I mean really so the stretching of the muscle or in the tension in the muscle I'm sure there is a muscle that is

34:18 stretch and it is sending a signal that is being interpreted but where is the feeling of it the feel it so is it what would you say to someone who said the feeling is in the mind which represented represents it as being in the muscle yeah supposed to it really being in the muscle yeah I mean I think that this is probably another point where I come much closer to the inactive and ecological sorts of frameworks it's not obvious to me that

34:59 there's ever a we representing in these sorts of cases there's the things that are unfolding in a body there's the judgments that are made about them and the affective responses that are unfolding in relation today and those things are typically for most of us most of the time bundled together because they unfold incredibly rapidly right but it's not clear to me that

35:38 there's anything that plays the role in your example of the TV that has Barack Obama on it I mean I think that what there is is what's going on in the body the way that that's being registered by a wide variety of systems the way that that's contributing the ongoing processing in the service of allowing the organism to cope with their current situation yeah no I know I'm familiar with all the

36:13 Cartesian traps that we don't want to fall into yeah suggesting that there's a homunculus or someone watching a screen but but it is so it I mean take you know the sentence there is a tingling on in the muscles located on the left side of blah-blah-blah arm midway down home a tabla yeah ok so there's a linguistic representation but why couldn't it be said doesn't have to be a screen or an

36:46 image right the point is just that we have ample evidence I would say that there's something in in the in the brain and the neck top as you guys like to call it which is carrying information about that and we know that our suspect but that's really good enough in a lot of cases because if I start stimulating right there you will feel tension in your muscles you will feel tingling in your left toe like if I tickle the neurons in the sensory motor cortex in just the right way you're gonna have those things and we know from various cases of you know in the parietal cortex

37:20 where you can elicit these sensations as of moving an arm but your arm did not move and you can have the arm move and the person denies that it moves so it seems like well it's up there that you that's where the screen is it's not a screen in the sense of an image on it but it's a screen in the sense of a representation of something going on somewhere else so why would so if we stepped away from the screen chocolate cuz I didn't mean to bring the image into it but I know right so I think that I'm trying to figure out how to put this

37:54 in a helpful way okay just tell me I'm wrong but he's like no so I I think you're right that you can hack the system to make it behave in a way that emulates the kinds of things that typically does you can do that through various kinds of electric cortical stimulation right it doesn't follow from that that that's what's typically going on or the dat's how the system is

38:27 typically processing information nope I didn't say that but not to cut you off but just a jump in real fast I was more putting pressure on your introspective evidence I thought that you were saying you know I meditate and I have these sort of I know turd that these experiences are located here and they just seem to be there and so that seems to me good evidence that they are and I went so if you were if you had you're in a dark room with your eyes closed and you know like a sleeping beauty type situation where one of you has these electrodes implanted in your head and

39:00 the other one doesn't and you had no way to tell and you were doing these meditative practices well it would seem the same to you so so I'm going to be super careful there I don't think you can draw evidence about what's going on from those kinds of practices I think that what they give you a sense of is how things show up to you right but you can you're absolutely right you could be totally wrong about that I think that

39:35 the more we look at the way that different kinds of behavioral drives are regulated by systems that are operating outside of the neck I think it gets really hard to hold on to a view where everything is going on in that space I think the more we learn

40:10 about the way that heart rate for example is regulating some of those neural processes I think the more we learn about how the interactions between the kidneys and the liver in regulating calcium and sodium needs and motivating generating the signal that motivates an

40:45 animal to start pursuing those things I think what we start to see is the bodies like ours have evolved such that systems spread all through the thing are doing the work that they can do to keep the animal within the bounds that allow it to pursue vitality yeah so I think that at the end of the day there's the issues

41:21 here are going to be super complex and I don't think that introspective evidence can get it I don't think that reflection on things like the way that various kinds of sentential organized computations operating can give us traction on it and I'm not sure exactly how to pursue a lot of these questions at the end of the day I mean they're hard there's no doubt about it there's

41:54 no other sense of the word but I didn't mean to bring no no exactly they're real hard yeah hard problem yeah so can we come at this from a slightly different direction totally I've tortured you with my favorite topic which is the Rumba you know about Roomba the vacuum device oh yeah I spent way too much time watching videos of Roomba and cats interact on YouTube yeah it's a problem for me anyway so Roomba is pretty cool so one of the things that's cool about

42:29 Roomba is that it has a little home base and when its power is low it goes and plugs itself in and recharges itself so you know is it yawn your view that Roomba has a sensation of hunger at that point or is I mean if not what so I'm kind of kidding I'm gonna bring this back to the consciousness issue because I'm gonna bring in what it's like talk here soon because I my suspicion is that there's nothing it's like to be a Roomba but I just wonder like what your reaction in general to the questions so my first reaction is to say that the

43:06 Roomba doesn't need much beyond obituaries returned with particular space to achieve what it achieves when you think about the way that biological systems need to navigate complex often unpredictable environments where sources of food often don't stay in the same place for a long time yes or we're

43:43 getting to those places requires enormous amounts of work you need in those systems I think more complex representations out there needs which can be used in the service of and I'm using this term wave more broadly than many people would be happy with to regulate to carry out cathodic regulation you need them to be able to

44:17 represent in their heads something about the location of that resource so to play around with the salt example that I mentioned or there are troops of elephants that engage in salt mining and they'll remember where the salt mine was your year they'll remember how they got to it they'll be able to adjust how they get to it if something happens at their original path was not there and in order

44:53 to do that they've both got to represent that the salt was valuable for them and that it's something that they need in order to compete preserved by tally right I mean just to the Fen room was a little bit they they do in some sense retain the information about where the charger is because anywhere in the house they located they can navigate their way back to it so they how do they do if you move it well that's a good question I don't honestly know my suspicion is that they could find it but I don't have any

45:26 I'd have to check on that yeah but that would matter for you that they could find it if it was moved I think it helps a lot right I mean it's going to depend what kind of strategies they have for doing that I think that gets you down the right kind of trajectory but for me what's going to be most salient is the capacity to adaptively respond to unexpected and unpredictable variations okay so some shellfish are out and

46:06 elephants are in olefins are definitely in yeah definitely but I mean I meant I couldn't think up something now slightly above a shellfish quickly so deep on yeah I mean social room bizarre out shellfish or an I'm it shellfish don't do very many take a clam when they're not doing any of these things that you're talking about but I I'm not sure like what your take on them either is but so and most points in their life right as juveniles they do move around right

46:39 right yeah a little bit so I think that to the extent that they're engaged in a search for what's going to best optimize their vitality I think you're getting in the right direction yeah I know I yeah I love the right direction but see what so I guess you've we've said enough for me to ask the next part of my question because I I don't want to press you too hard but so the roomba versus you know mildly sophisticated I don't know let's

47:18 say I guess a cockroach something that's that's fairly sophisticated but not too sophisticated so one on one we're going to want to say is conscious and the other I'm guessing you're not going to say is conscious you trying to think about exactly what I think here it's okay and I think I didn't figure all this out I don't know that I have a settle opinion on the issue I find the idea that living things

47:57 in general have a minimal and rudimentary sort of awareness to be pretty plausible I can't defend that I think that what we see is gradations in how many sorts of things an animal has to be aware of and how salient the trade-offs between them are and my rough

48:37 inclination this is super speculative and I have no way of defending it is that it's the trade-off between different classes of demands that generates something that we're typically happy calling experience okay yeah no I love this I love speculative stuff and this is that was a good one so yeah so the so I mean you didn't say it but no room but

49:10 consciousness right I think that's right okay so then isn't does it make sense for you to say that there's nothing that it's like to be a Roomba but there may be something that it's like to be a tree or you know speculate that was your speculative point I guess but you know to be a fox or something like that so at that level that kind of talk makes sense to you or does it not still yeah it totally makes sense to me okay because I thought you were like more of a hardcore skeptic about the usefulness of the I mean maybe maybe I think what you're I

49:43 mean to put words in your mouth I thought well you're really were skeptical about was the way that it allows this blanket intuition that there are these simple things like red and pain when really they're more complicated and so I thought that was what you were trying to resist rather rather than you're saying there is something that it's like to be us and that really is the puzzle of consciousness isn't it to explain what it's like to why there is something that it's like to be us because we could be like rumbas where there's nothing that it's like to be us but there isn't and it maybe you have a story about why is this complexity in the trade-offs but

50:15 still that's a story about why there's something it's like the BS right yeah soon I think I said in a number of points that I'm pretty sympathetic with something like an illusionist picture the bit of that that I find really promising which is a bit that Keith Frankish has been trying to clarify I think in recent stuff is that what we find is complex network

50:52 Erichs of behavioral and responsive dispositions I think there's a version of love that I really think is right and if it turns out that there's something about the way that effect functions or something about the way that hedonic value functions that generates something distinctive in biological systems that leads us into a space where we want to

51:29 talk about consciousness in a more rich way I think I'm okay with that and I think that they're what we go looking for is the way in which those kinds of systems evolved to produce the kinds of adaptive behavior that we find in humans right so but when you get down to the things like single-celled eukaryotes or shellfish or wherever we want to cut the line part of what we have there I think

52:06 that gives them a sense of awareness of being an entity in a world in a really thin down and rudimentary bare-bones sense is that they have to be able to adjust their own behavior to deal with variations in the structure of the world and they have to be able to track variations in their internal environment in ways that lead them to engage in behaviors and more right and once you have that up and running I think that

52:40 you're on the road towards something that looks like experience I don't know exactly what to call it yeah so okay I mean that's that's you're hedging your bets a little bit I guess which is fine because this this is tough stuff but I mean when you say you're on the road to something that looks like experience well how far down the road are we so so I look maybe I'm let me see if there's

53:15 something in the background that's lurking here because yeah I know you have more sympathies with with like the approach that Darren takes and then I think I do but one of the things that that you know I'm talking again get it there's lots of dance up yeah yeah one of the things that he says which I've always found really puzzling by the way I hope to talk to him someday on this and he's I talked to recently he said he's trying to busy for this year but maybe next year he'll do interview so we'll see anyway one of the things I found very puzzling about his view was

53:47 that he thinks there can be gradations or shades of experience so that he thinks it makes sense to say that there are things that are kind of sort of experiences and kind of experiences and I've always found that extremely puzzling to be honest so I'm wondering is that in the background of what you're saying is that there may be shittin gradations or shades that from us towards these more simpler things yeah I mean I think that what I would say there and I think this is close to Dan's reason for thinking it too is that in biological systems there are almost

54:24 never going to be sharp lines right but almost never is not never you know it's not obvious to me that there's any reason to prefer a lights on versus lights off notion of awareness to something that's closer to a dimmer switch right and I think that part of

55:01 what's gonna happen is you probably are gonna start to see in biological systems something that looks more like it looks almost like a qualitative shift when you start seeing systems that are capable of registering multiple demands that are being placed on them and evaluating which way they want to make the trade-off in the service of pursuing

55:36 vitality right the more degrees of freedom you get the more robust the kinds of things you can experience is going to be and that's gonna be a gradation but that's going to be a gradation that's fine with everybody right exact but I think the switch between if there is one between just having one class of needs that you need to satisfy and having multiple that you need to trade off is going to generate something looks close to a quality shift

56:10 yeah I mean I I agree with all that stuff and I guess I just can't hear it in any other way except for that there's awareness or there isn't but then there's gradations and how where you are yeah so that's the second bit where it's a matter of how many on this kind of picture how many systems are yelling at you how many of them you have to navigate right so but but still it seems to me that you haven't really weakened the idea that a system easy we're full stop where it isn't full stop

56:43 and then where the shiftiness comes in is in the contents of the awareness so so that's I mean I get the idea and I thought you know Dan says his life as evolution there's a sloppy thing and there's never sharp boundaries between us and you know the next species over or whatever and I agree 100% obviously agree with all that stuff yeah but it just still seems to me that I just can't wrap my head around what it would mean to be sort of aware of something unless it meant I was aware of it but only in a certainly nondescript way so that's

57:17 weird so you are just aware of it but you know vague way or whatever I can't make sense of vague awareness I just conceptually don't understand what it means and I'm not trying to get you to say it I just don't I just I know he says strike harder and I tried you know I tried to understand these things I just don't see that yeah I think I'm probably closer to you on this issue in a lot of ways I think that part of that is driven by the undefended inclination towards a kind of bio psychism yeah

57:54 because once you go that way I mean consciousness is kinda everywhere yeah I'm you know I talked to Monica Galliano on the show and she's defense planet consciousness and stuff like that I'm open to that stuff it just seems to me that at that point you really want to make some distinctions because totally the kinds of consciousness that plants have which I think they do have some kind of consciousness actually but I think it's more like what we call creature consciousness I think they do simple you can you can train them

58:29 babilônia have low Pavlovian stimulus response stuff she needs a really cool experiments about the roots growing in one way depending on whether and was blowing so it's just awesome stuff but still it seems like that's the sort of stuff which happens and ice unconsciously without our awareness of it happening and so it seems yeah if you if you sort of just make it a station between the experiential aspect of consciousness versus being aware unconsciously of the environment and I'm happy to extend plants that kind of thing but I don't really see why we want to extend experience to those sorts

59:05 of things at least the a but yeah I mean maybe this is tied up with the other half of the thing that I wanted to say there which is I think we're in general really bad at tracking what we're actually experiencing I think that we experience a whole lot more then we take ourselves to experience and it just drops out of our awareness so rapidly the it just never gets folded

59:42 into whatever kind of ongoing picture we're generating of the world but I think that you can try and figure out exactly how to put this you can work to pull apart the contours of how your experiences are unfolding what's unclear is whether doing that is generating new classes of experiences or revealing

1:00:18 stuff that's already there yeah exactly that's a question that I don't know exactly how to answer but the more you work at that kind of practice the more clear it becomes the things that you typically taken to go on without recognition are perfectly plausible objects of conscious awareness yeah and so it just makes it hard to know how much stuff actually is just going on

1:00:53 unconsciously I mean that's a hunch that a lot of people have the a lot of stuff is going on unconsciously I think learning can go on unconsciously I think that the stuff that mom has done on this stuff is absolutely beautiful the favorite conditioning stuff the fear extinction stuff yeah I think that works really nicely to show that you can learn using non experiencial roots yeah I think it's been said mostly who's done

1:01:29 that work but you know hug ones tag yeah but definitely so but you know what you don't take the kind of hmm stuff as evidence for this you know just more traditional stuff you know you know Jo Jo LeDoux tells this story about one of the split brain patients that he worked with where he what did I forget anyway so he tells a story about this guy no I think was a gem actually sorry anyway where he put a thumbtack in between his fingers and shook the guy's hand gave him a poke and of course he pulled his

1:02:01 hand back and said what the hell but the next day when he came back he went to shake his hand again and the guy said no I don't think I'll shake your hand it just feels weird so isn't that a case of learning unconsciously I'm not sure I follow why it would be well they don't have well at the time it happened they had a conscious experience of the pain right so they weren't unconscious at that point so they at the next time they saw the person have no recollection of that ever occurring yeah I already heard

1:02:40 in my head so he already subscribe to it sorry so they were conscious when they exposed it yeah yeah and it's also going to be really important to remember that in all those kinds of lesion or neural damage cases the examples are really hard to draw much of an inference from because in a Chun's case for example there were preserved bits of the NPL yeah right the that showed up and what's going on there I I

1:03:16 don't really know exactly how to approach that and how it fell from his perspective I think is a question we're never going to have a really good answer to probably because the right kind of questions never got asked but those are the questions that really matter is how things are showing up from the perspective of somebody that has experienced that kind of mental trauma right yeah right no that's a great point so your skeptic about unconscious processing in general or just unconscious learning no I'm skeptical

1:03:52 about neither I'm sceptical about the claim that some kind of process could go on unconsciously therefore it doesn't require any kind of ongoing awareness okay why he's skeptical of that claim if it can be done without consciousness then why would you think consciousness is required to have it done I don't think that that's ever the

1:04:28 right kind of question to ask I think that when you start asking those kinds of questions you fall into a assumption about things being necessary in cognition or things being sufficient to drive certain kinds of behaviors and I think in general what we're trying to figure out is how things actually go on sometimes I mean I think there's there's

1:05:05 loads of interesting work that's coming out right now on for example the role of taste in regulating eating behavior it turns out taste is not doing the full amount of work that you might think it is doing but it is doing some work and it's serving to amplify and modulate particular kinds of behavioral responses right I think that when we start to see

1:05:40 that what we see is yeah you could probably knock out the pace system and still get a system to adjust its eating behavior but that's going to tell you something about how a system where taste has been knocked out adjust its eating behavior I think in general what we see is that those kinds of experience actors are playing a role in anticipatory judgments playing a role in to go back to the salt

1:06:14 case the taste of NaCl is used as a signal by a lot of herbivores for the presence of other kinds of minerals that don't have distinctive tastes so add a single shot you can get a animal that's been depleted on some of those minerals to learn to approach NaCl on the basis of their need for those other kinds of

1:06:51 minerals they're doing it because the taste delivers a particular kind of response that serves as a signal for the regulation of their ongoing behavior right yeah I think I so I as you were saying I was thinking I think a lot of I mean I generally starting I'm starting to think there are really two different approaches to the neuro science of animal behavior one of which one of which assumes that brains started off without experiences

1:07:33 but with calm but still driving complex behaviors so that they started it so the general idea would be that brains as default are not conscious not not I mean experienced really conscious not in these other senses of the term and then over time somehow what we call experience shows up and we have to tell a story about that whereas the other approach assumes I guess that well they always were even in their simpler some kind of experiential aspect there and these are just so I hear you saying that

1:08:07 that that latter thing whereas like Ivan LeDoux I think has the former perspective in mind that seems right to me yeah and I just don't know how to reconcile I mean you guys are both doing serious neuroscience it so how do we reconcile this basic thing about whether brains can do complicated things without experience or not yes I mean I I certainly have no answer to that kind of question it's it does seem to me that this is a place where there's a great

1:08:42 deal of room for philosophical reflection but the kind of philosophical reflection that seems useful to me is reflection on what kinds of roles consciousness can play and organizing and regulating behavior and once you get those kinds of stories up and running you can start to figure out what the underlying processes and mechanisms are that drive them I think that this is probably the driving force behind my

1:09:17 worry is about a lot of stuff that shows up in the philosophical discussions of consciousness is it's kind of assumed in a lot of cases that we know what it is to be conscious we know what it is to have particular kinds of experiences I think we're really bad at that we don't really have a good sense of it and I think that what we probably need to do is chip away at those questions about what is it doing why our tastes functioning in the way that they are why your smell is functioning in the way

1:09:50 that they are why are various kinds of bodily sensations functioning in the way that they are and I think that you know if you if you look at for example Colin Klein's book on pain I think it's a beautiful example of this ya know trying to figure out how pain serves as a demand on coping behavior I think once you have that story you can start to work back to what kind of implementation is present there and that gives you much

1:10:27 better handle on asking the questions about animal pain yeah I mean I guess my worry is that if you if you take the other seriously which I mean my my Clint my issue mic attempt I want to take as much thing seriously as possible because I don't my hello sometimes people think of me as a dogmatist for some reason but really I'm like super open-minded I just like evidence an argument but I mean I'm willing to take anything that's serious seriously but sometimes hard to know what serious anyway okay so take this idea that the

1:11:01 brain is fundamentally they showed up non-consciously you know and that includes I don't know how far back you'd want to go but let's let's pick on these for a second you know bees have brains and they're not that complicated but they do fantastic things and they understand more trigonometry tonight anyway so they do all kinds of funny dances and they are pretty sophisticated but you know could that be brain could it be do what it does without experience well it seems to me that I can make

1:11:35 sense of that idea I don't know because I'm not a bee but and I'm not saying that I think bees like consciousness or anything like that but I'm saying I can I can entertain the possibility that a bee is kind of an autonomous antsy not an automaton I guess I say but a sophisticated information processing without experiencing machine if that's the way that you think about bees then it throws into question what role consciousness has at all to do with behavior it just doesn't seem like it if that's your approach that you're going

1:12:07 to connect it to behavior until much later it's gonna be way high-level behaviors if so yeah I mean you could still do all the same neuroscience and wonder why bees behave the way they do and you can still say they're aware of the environment I don't even if bees don't have experience I think I'd be wrong to say they lack an awareness of the environment clearly they do they wouldn't be able to move around or respond to it they have an awareness they so but is it a conscious awareness is it experiencial I think that's where the stuff that you don't like about the consciousness stuff it's important

1:12:40 though because answering that question sort of matters right to how we treat bees and the way we think of them so maybe you can help me here because I think this is exactly the point I always get hung up on what we know about bees is that they can carry out complex discriminations on the basis of things that we would have what we call colors scents and smells our colors scents and tastes some of us wouldn't be

1:13:14 so happy no sir so what's up I said some of us wouldn't be so happy to call those things colors so if they were occurring in me right the things that are occurring in me I the bees are tracking things that show up to me as colors they're tracking things that show up can you sense yeah they're tracking things that show up to me as tastes they're evaluating trade-offs between those and they're calibrating those against things like the risk of predation and the things that they've

1:13:50 learned about likely rewards in particular kinds of conducts take all those kinds of discriminatory capacities put them in whatever kind of computational and functional terms you want what is the thing that's missing for you oh when you say that they're not not conscious well I didn't say they weren't I said I can I can entertain oh I know on your supposition that you're not conscious yeah yeah what would be the thing that's missing yeah I'm just

1:14:23 as vegan as you are Bryce part of that but I loved animals just as much as you do I don't want to deny their consciousness you know I know I work with people who do say things like that but I'm interested in the methodological issue which is kind of what we're talking about right now is it's a scientific question about what counts as evidence and so forth so my common sense view is that they probably are conscious but still if I can make sense of the idea that they're not and if they weren't then what they would be lacking is a point of view which they experienced which for them showed up as

1:14:58 opposed to just the way you know the Google self-driving car navigates the environment without such a point of view so there there's like there's an informational point-of-view but there's no experiential point of view so add more things that bees can do into this sort of story bees can distinguish between internal changes of external changes they can track vibrations outside and realize

1:15:34 that there's something going on outside of them not inside of them suggesting that they're doing at least a rudimentary computational sort of representing the difference between self and world they're representing those properties that are what we would call taste smells and colors as properties of the world and not properties of them right so whatwhat's I still don't get

1:16:12 what's missing I don't get what the collection is whether I mean if anything were missing it would be that there was anything that it was like for them to do those things which those things seemingly to me possibly can be done completely without there being any something that it's like from the bees point of view it could be going on in the dark without experience and the behavior would not give you an indication of that because they would still be representing all the same stuff

1:16:44 so that's why I think you know that's the puzzle of consciousness that's what we want to understand is okay so why given so let's just don't give the bees the benefit doubt say they're conscious why why isn't it done unconsciously why is there any kind of experience associated with those things that you just talked about instead of them happening without experience that's that's the famous hard problem of consciousness that's all it is is explaining why a conscious Y experience has to be associated with any

1:17:17 kind of information processing representation or behavior because it would take too much model power to drive the kind of online adjustments between multiple kinds of demands and the terms of preserving vitality well I mean I bet you have an answer but I'm just trying to see whether how you understand mean whether we agree on what the problem supposed to be and why people are I struggle with it and like I don't mean to come off as pigheaded around this no I know you're

1:17:53 not I really don't understand what that problem of consciousness is supposed to be I understand when we're asking questions about how different kinds of biological organisms cope with their environments and what kinds of sensitivities they need those kinds of questions make sense and I feel like I'm missing something when I get told by lots and lots of people there's a further question about

1:18:28 what it's like for them it's it's not that I want to say there's a further question about what it's like it's that I want a further explanation about why there's something it's like for them as opposed to there being nothing it's like for them so it's that request for explanation which is driving it we're not trying to nail down that there's some extra fact there if they're conscious we assume that fact is there why though given that it seems conceptually coherent that they could be doing all that stuff

1:18:59 without experience it sounds like what you're saying is you're gonna go towards the zombies are not conceived one that'll mean to bring up a Z word you know that this is not even something that's a coherent scenario that I'm describing that there could be something but that sophisticated a level of behavior doing all the stuff you're describing but for which there was no experience that's my strong bet yeah well but why do you think I mean I think to generate a thing like that you'd have to change all the ways that biological

1:19:34 systems cope with the world you'd have to change all the way that physical processes implement that yeah but you still I mean not not – I have no idea – much like you haven't said what about those things necessitates the experience so why couldn't yeah I don't think it's ever helpful done look for a necessities mr. main what dude that's what's up what explains it then what explains rich what explains why animals are organisms with

1:20:08 those capacities end up having experience so I think that what my inclination to do and every one of these cases is to say take a particular experience that I critter has and try and figure out what's happening in the critter that produces that experience yeah probably not a general answer yeah well some people might think it's question begging because you haven't given an explanation of why the

1:20:42 experience is there as opposed to doing that very same thing without experience yeah I mean and that's when I just don't know what experience is supposed to be well the difference between you and the roomba or the be in the Rumba is one of experience there's a lot of differences between me and rumba you're doing the Rumba when's round yes has a dedicated charging situation yeah exactly one chases the cat around the room yes he's chased by the cat written upon

1:21:17 where the cat yeah that's usually what happens exactly but but still though I mean the Rumba driving back to its charging station doesn't experience its location in space where the charging station is that it's low on power it represents all those things experience them so at some point experience shows up and we want to know what explains that and it sounds like what you're saying is I want to explain the behavior

1:21:50 I want to explain why the animal behaves and what I want to say okay so it's this system that regulates that behavior and that and that's wonderful and I love all that stuff but it doesn't seem to me that given account of well I can't just repeat myself but it there's no other way to say it with the experience of nature or what it's like from their point of view why there is a point of view you know that's the most fundamental question why is there something that it's like to be a bird and not something that there's like to

1:22:23 be a Roomba and if the answer is just their behaviors are different and they have to manage more computations then I guess I lose my grip on what it is you thought you were trying to explain yeah I mean I think we need to be super careful there because when you say that what I'm suggesting is that what we want to explain his behavior that's partly right but I think that telling the story in that way reduces the claim that I'm

1:23:00 making to a version of the kind of computational process story where all of its going on in the head yeah no I didn't mean to do that but I see what you're saying and so so I think this is exactly where the distinction between the two approaches to the biology of cognition are probably feeding into differences in how you think about the relevant class of questions if you think

1:23:34 there has to be a story about when and where experience turns on given an evolutionary history of non conscious organisms then I think you face precisely the questions that you're raising if instead what you think is that rudimentary forms of self-awareness and awareness of the world show up as soon as life is on the scene

1:24:11 and then become complexified through the various kinds of chefs in the demands that an organism has to cope with yeah I think you've got a story and the problem becomes one of why biological systems and merged in a world where there were no biological systems yeah that's its own kind of hard question no definitely but I think it puts the

1:24:46 the so-called hard problem in a different place yeah I know but the question is which one should we buy you guys haven't given any reason really to go yours or my really saying that's my way by the way don't want to be pinned with that but it just seems like that's the question is which where do we what why should we plonk for one versus the other I mean and just just come at this a different way it seems like you're smuggling a lot in with life because why is it rumba alive I mean you know I it's got self regulating behavior it's I don't know so anyway it sounds like

1:25:19 you're building in already to life the idea that there's consciousness which doesn't answer the question so we could just say pose the same question again why why does it show up with life and not with these nonliving systems I mean yeah so I just seen yeah I mean and I think the answer there is something in the vicinity of what I said earlier and that I think that Kevin Thompson has defended pretty well that from the very beginning living systems have had to be

1:25:55 able to chart their way through an unpredictable and dangerous world where they've got to figure out which trajectories are gonna allow them to survive and flourish yeah but what systems are you kind of living in that story I'm from Eukarya bro you carry a virus what I think viruses are a hard case and I don't have a settled opinion there but I think single celled organisms of

1:26:29 various sorts bacteria show lots of interesting behavior that are suggestive of an awareness of the difference between what's going on in them and what's going on in the world right I mean interesting because that's exactly the case that someone from the other side uses as the reductio so they say look if you think that these things have fear responses or pain responses right because they go away from noxious stimuli bacteria does obviously they

1:27:03 seek out things that are nutrient to them so some people will say well we don't want to say that they're a feeling pain so we have to draw this thing from between behaviors and experience whereas you're saying no other behavior is indication of the experience so it just looks like we're at this fundamental yeah I mean I don't know that I want to see the experience pain I think I don't have a settled opinion there okay but I think that when you see things like bacteria some negative ionic value though at least yeah they're registering

1:27:39 toxins and avoiding them and they're registering foods and pursuing them but they're also in the process of that they're adjusting the structures of their bodies to succeed in navigating those kinds of situations so they're projecting flagella out in certain kinds of environments they're generating things that look roughly like legs to walk across dry environments and they're doing that in ways that are sensitive to what's going to allow them to pursue

1:28:12 vitality right but I mean you mentioned vitality a lot I just like this a non-sequitur but I just wonder do you think there could be any or other organizing principle maybe not vitality I think that's one that shows up in biological systems but in a non-biological system you could have you know maybe maybe something else might be the organizing proof yeah interesting okay I don't want to get too distracted because there's too many I mean we I've already been chewing your ear for a long time and I sensitive to

1:28:44 your condition which by the way thanks for joining me with your I know yeah you've been saying on Twitter how you have these bruised ribs and pneumonia I don't know what happened but geez you seem okay it's not related to the virus that's going around as far as I know not yeah I know as far as ha no one's getting tested but no exactly okay but I'm isolated and staying isolating okay okay well good we need people like you rise in the profession by the way I was going to say the Stan but I just

1:29:18 want to say your your presence in the profession is tremendously appreciated at least by me your your your demeanor your approach your professionalism your mentor ship their exemplary and I hope that they serve as examples to other people I really really mean that so I want to thank you thank you very much that's very kind yeah no you're mean just your presence on Twitter is one thing you're very kind they're generous with your time but just that's how you are really that's not an act that's you so we need more people like you and in the profession and I'm hoping that works such people now anyway so I guess I let's see I wonder if I

1:29:53 could switch topics a little bit here because there's a couple things I wanted to bring up with you before I let you go one of them is a Fantasia because I know you you talked a little bit about that in Twitter and so and a lot of and I have at that as well I don't it's not diagnosed but I I do have a version of I'm pretty sure and I say oh well that's why you're an illusionist you see because you have this mission and that just seems to me so bizarre because mental imagery is one thing but conscious experience and what's I'm looking at you right now that's not

1:30:25 that's a completely different thing so what is your take on that I mean is is mental imagery important and real or not I have a speculative hypothesis there too okay which I think actually sits pretty comfortably with a lot of the positions that you've been floating today I think that with mental imagery or auditory imagery or tactile imagery or spatial imagery or whatever else what you're

1:30:58 getting is the virtual projection of whatever is going on below the surface and the reason I think that we should think that is so the best of my knowledge people have struggled to find real noticeable effects of the presence or lack of visual imagery and psychophysical tasks for example so if you take the standard

1:31:34 mental rotation tasks using Shepard blocks they don't seem to have much of an effect there doesn't seem to be much of a fact driven by mental imagery so that suggests that it's pretty far downstream what's going on you just clarify because I thought some of that stuff was that you know it takes about as long to mentally rotate it as it would to physically rotate it which is part of the evidence that it's an actual image or something like that totally so what was really not hexton mmm and maybe I misunderstood what you

1:32:07 were saying so so I'm I'm reporting the second hand so I haven't actually looked closely at the relevant data I don't know if it's published yet if it is I haven't seen it but what I've heard from a bunch of different people is that that precisely that effect that the amount of rotation that's required dictates the amount of time dozen yield an effect on or mental injury in that case doesn't

1:32:40 yell no effect so whether you're capable of imaging or not you show the same patient time effects yeah I read that yeah yeah so in a sense what that seems to suggest is that the thing that's doing the relevant class of visual manipulation visual spatial manipulation is not what's going on when you generate mental imagery the mental imagery thing is downstream from that and I think that my my hunch is that you get pretty

1:33:18 interesting and robust differences that we haven't yet tracked in the kinds of mental awareness isn't mentally but people rely upon in their daily lives some people my bet is rely on tactical and spatial imagery some people rely on visual imagery some people rely on other kinds of you know maybe bare computational list like sorts of

1:33:51 representations like who knows how people work it out but part of what's going on there is an attempt to figure out how to use in a person usable code the operations that are being carried out on the web there right so the the analogy isn't quite right for a lot of reasons but if you think about the way that compilers and decompilers work essentially what you're doing is you're moving back and forth between person

1:34:25 usable code and machine code right and what we have access to in that kind of introspective way is just the person usable code well that's interesting I mean so I have heard some people suggesting that maybe the thing we're talking about here suggests that you do have the images but unconsciously so maybe because there's also this other interesting stuff about Sperling cases where a fantage excandesco a you know kind of strict my language

1:34:58 you know victor lama kind of stuff where there's you know you can get up to five seconds delay in certain cases they can still do it and so some people suggested well they generate the image but just not consciously and it sounds like what you're taking the this to suggest is that actually whatever it happens at the image level you're it's actually the machine code hold that that's doing the work yeah that's my guess yeah that's what I think we have a an answer on that kind of question yeah and part of the reason is their research on

1:35:33 a fantasy ax is so recent is that how you say it I've only read it so I didn't know if that's as a Fantasia yeah but okay yeah it's very recent um I mean the one thing I mean I didn't realize it was a thing until you know I got the grad school and we were talking about this Speckled Hen and they were like imagine the hand I was like okay how many speckles on I was like I don't know I just imagine the head with speckles I didn't specify and everyone else was like oh there's six on the left side are they talking about so it really the main lesson to me was that

1:36:11 more work needs be done but also there's an assumption which is questioned by this which is that people tend to think everyone's mind is the same in this respect right that all of our experiences are roughly the same and the people are really surprised when you tell them that you don't have meant I mean I've had people literally just not believe me there's no you're lying so you don't you don't know how to interpret your own experiences like I couldn't do this for a living so yeah I just feel like there's that's a real big assumption that needs to be questioned that maybe there's this uniform thing called the mind yeah and I mean I think in general that's probably part of the

1:36:46 kind of push that I keep sort of angling towards right you know experiences in every way are unfolding slightly differently on the basis of history on the basis of context on the basis of pre-existing assumptions on the basis of the angle that you're directed towards things like all that stuff is affecting the way that experience unfolds absolutely yeah that much I I agree with I wonder so do you how much like do you think this is attributed to sort of

1:37:19 theory lateness of introspection do you buy into this idea at all that sort of that you're that just like observation can be kind of influenced by theory so can introspection so maybe you're a theory of that I mean you know if you're someone like David Chalmers and you think there are these qualitative symbols maybe you're gonna find them and if you're someone like you the things are more complicated maybe you're gonna find that and maybe that's not necessarily reflective of what's going on but reflective concepts are using to sort it out yeah I mean so that this is in the stuff that I started writing up about the meditation stuff that I

1:37:52 mentioned earlier what I think is super cool is as you shift the kind of concepts that you're using to identify stuff but you find source to shift right and I mean my inclination is to think that there's a whole lot of expectation and anticipation and conceptualization that's feeding into all of those kinds of practices and the only way you're ever getting to anything that really tracks what's there is if you can do it

1:38:27 without conceptualizing and good luck with that yeah I mean we're all really rapid default conceptualize errs on that yeah yeah there might be a way around it but I think it takes lots of weird practices to hack the operating system to get us into I guess what I was hoping we get to which is the I don't know how to pronounce this word so don't I know you told me once and I forgot already but it's yoga no Katara yes okay and so the yoga Chara stuff which which honestly I have a even more passing

1:39:01 familiarity because that stuff that I am more familiar with is not this school to be honest yeah so I think this is related to that right because you part of the claim is that you can get to a kind of non conceptual pure awareness or something like that is that part of the handle well it's a fleet where there is an enormous amount of dispute among the people that we've clustered together it was belonging to that school so go down this road can you say a little bit for like novices like me about what the school is and who are the club yeah

1:39:33 totally so I think that I'm trying to figure out what exactly is going to be most useful so if you look at the way that Buddhist philosophical traditions are merged what you see around the fourth century of the Common Era is a recognition that when you engage in long bouts of

1:40:07 okay to practices stuff starts to get wonky as a technician yes stuff gets weird when you stare at your mind for a while so what happens is there's a bunch of sort of thinking about how to rework and retool the Buddhist philosophical tradition which it ends up generating the school that's called Mahayana the Mahayana school centers its assumptions

1:40:43 around individual and collective liberation rather than just the pursuit of individual sort of Nirvana what you aim for is the cultivation of bodhichitta that's a sort of boundless compassion for all living beings right I love that in order to do that you need to really hack the operating system because we're all embedded in a world where our own interests can de dominate

1:41:18 our ongoing behavior so what they're trying to do is to figure out how to hack the operating system there and to make it possible to internalize in a deeply engaged and embodied way that kind of boundless compassion for all living beings for the yoga charts I hope this is the right way into this they think that there are a couple of ships that need to be made in the standard

1:41:55 models of Buddhist psychology that are operated the first so I mentioned earlier the six kinds of sense doors yeah what they're gonna do is they're gonna add two more right lens for Dharma and once-ler nope so the the first one is going to be Krishna Manas which is defiled awareness and basic thought is that we've got a deeply embedded and habituated tendency to

1:42:29 distinguish ourselves from the world that we encounter and that that's actually yielding distortions in the way that we engage in things because once we've done that distinguishing we end up anchoring our drives to the self that we've produced okay so that's the first one the second is the ally eviction Jana and that's the storehouse awareness storehouse awareness is basically their model of unconscious processing excuse

1:43:05 me yeah no worries the way that they're thinking about unconsciousness Bryce do you need to take a break and get some water and her nope I'm good okay the way they're thinking about unconscious processes they think that they're not just facts about your current history but facts about the history of you as an organism that's embedded and situated in a particular kind of world and they think that all of the kinds of factors

1:43:41 as I read them let organize and structure your conceptual space end up being part of the unconscious storehouse so they think then these two additional processes of distinguishing yourself from the world and of anchoring to all these kinds of stored expectations and sort of assumptions and stored aspects of the world collectively those impact the way that ongoing processing

1:44:15 functions in each of the six classical systems so the input systems and the unfolding of thought are all shaped by those kinds of processes right and the basic thought is then then as we encounter the world what we encounter is not things as they actually are but things that have been shaped by the seeds that are present in the unconscious storehouse which are ran

1:44:51 through diluted self-awareness such that when they impact the right kinds of stimuli and conditions they generate a mental event which is organized and categorized in ways that make sense in light of those two sorts of things so that's a long answer but it gets us to how it links up to the thing that I said right before right which is basically all of our engagement with the world is shaped by the things that are in the

1:45:24 unconscious storehouse and by that tendency to bifurcate ourselves from the world and until you eliminate or as they often put it burn all the seeds in the unconscious storehouse you're going to be acting in ways that are anchored to those facts about history and to those facts about expectations and you're going to be categorizing and conceptualizing your patterns of thought in accordance with those stored expectations yeah that's super

1:45:59 interesting it connects up with the theory laid in this play in a way right because that seems like it's it's but so I mean I I'm confused about where the mental event so these things that are those things are not mental events yet before they're filtered through there's sorts the kind of direct input that then is turned into a mental events by being processed in this way or filtered in that way or is it mental already but in a pure sense and then distorted by it being passed were there yeah I mean this storehouse is called storehouse

1:46:33 consciousness or storehouse awareness so it is something that's functioning as a cause of experience but I think maybe a way to think about it I haven't thought about this alone I'm not sure if it's fair to the classical authors and everywhere that I'm thinking about this stuff I'm running it through all sorts of my own stuff so it's always how Brice encounters the yogacara texts right Nero Yoga Chara yeah exactly so if

1:47:10 you think about the way that a seeing event triggers an internal cascade what's happening is in a sense stored expectations and stored assumptions are interacting with the sensory data and those are lumped together and categorized by an aspect of thought which then generates the next unfolding of behavior there's always going to be a

1:47:45 lot I mean all these stories are processed stories for them and you're always gonna have cascades of events so I see something the it interacts with the stored expectations that triggers a pattern of thought which shifts my attention which now generates a new set of inputs which then interacts in that way which triggers a feeling which then leads me to engage in approach behavior which then shifts the way that I'm seeing things and it's gonna be that constant flow of information through the system that generates something like the

1:48:21 experience of being an embodied situated self living in a world so so the input to those to the unconscious storehouse is itself a mental event already so I want to be careful there everything you say or do leaves a trace in the storehouse which will then serve as the seed for an experience which you could call the fruit when that seed is exposed

1:48:58 through the kinds of causes and conditions that activate it and generate an experience on its basis so I mean so the input to those systems is an experience or not often but they can be you can engage in repetitive patterns of action

1:49:35 that you're not recognizing or consciously paying attention to that are nonetheless structuring and shaping both the world that you're embedded in and the way that your ink and I engage with that in the future right that's the kind of thing they're thinking about right for for these folks I mean they think that all of these unfoldings are bundles of psychophysical kinds of events that's not necessarily the story that I want to

1:50:11 tell I tell it in terms of the way that this is the neuro part the way that different kinds of bodily systems are adapting the past experience in ways that open up certain kinds of possibilities so differences in early oxytocin levels can shape the way that parental feedback or caregiver feedback is categorized which can then have a

1:50:47 downstream effect later in life and how willing you are to seek help right from another person when you're feeling bad what's happening there is the seeds that make it possible for you to engage in those kinds of behaviors later in life are laid down early in life by shifting the dynamics of the underlying system through those interactions with the caregiver is that experience is a conscious sometimes probably the levels of the

1:51:31 hormones in that case for the things that are serving as the trace right I mean but then you get a say a version it sounds like even in that system a kind of hard like problem of if if both these things can occur then what explains why one results in an experience and the other doesn't I don't have answers to those kinds of questions I think I think that in general what a person is aware of at any point in time are the outputs

1:52:13 of numerous interacting processes which are contributing to the way that they encounter the world yeah I think that that's something that just about everybody should be happy with but I don't think I have a good answer to why some of these end up being conscious and some of them know yeah but do you recognize that you should have an answer to that or is that something you think you don't think you need an answer to it no okay I want to ask just one final question which may hopefully won't take

1:52:48 too long but I want it so when you when you're burning the seeds if you succeed in that I don't know if I'm using a term correctly but um I get the sense that they think that you're getting more to the fundamental nature of things yeah but why I think that why I think that these these meditative introspective happenings of the weirdness the wonkiness why shouldn't the wonkiness itself kind of clue us into them maybe this is that's the illusion there's with us okay yeah I mean I think that the first one of the

1:53:26 first steps along the trajectory is getting to the point where you realize the the things that we impute to ourselves into the world are in some sense illusions all of them right but even it doesn't the wonky stuff is an illusion too so even the what so when you get to the pure stuff why can't why not think it there the folks who are operating within a Buddhist soteriological framework have

1:54:03 an answer for that question okay and their answer is that the pursuit of the path that was laid down by the Buddha gives you an awareness and then knowledge and an understanding of how things really are appeal to Authority from my perspective I'm not at all inclined to think that

1:54:38 typically functioning minds I think they would agree with the way that I'm just going to put this typically functioning minds are never gonna get to an awareness and the knowledge of how things really are I am not inclined most days to think that a typical minds get there either but I think we can do better and I think we can do better by realizing the constructed nature of the

1:55:15 vast majority of our categories and her experiences yeah I think so I mean I like but so that's my real question though it's why I think you're doing better as opposed to getting worse at what's what's going on yes so I think the answer to that comes downstream when we see if it's true that getting rid of rarefied categories opens up less dogmatic less hostile less on antagonistic patterns of behavior

1:55:56 whether it opens up better ways of navigating deeply entrenched in our group hostilities whether it helps us to get rid of really problematic kinds of drives that tend to show up because we assume that things are gonna be roughly like they were yesterday right no and and I understand that that somehow it's in a sense of myself is different from you which is gonna make me be mean to

1:56:28 you or aggressive towards you and if I understood that somehow we were the same that I would be more open towards treating you like I treat myself or something like that I get that but out of that and I agree those are valuable goals and if something moves us in that direction then I think that's a valuable thing so I understand what you're saying but a more abstracted theoretical from the mind we want to understand this nature point of view it doesn't seem like that carries much weight because if we want to know what the mind really is and you guys are saying it's really all these little bits that are complicated

1:57:01 and you're making a mistake thinking they're simple and other people are saying no there's really the simple things in there it doesn't it's not clear to me who's got the high ground introspectively at that point okay I mean I don't think there's a whole lot to say introspectively about who's right there I think who's right ends up being a function of what the structure of individual and social worlds end up looking like I mean it's like a weight is imrat that's that's pragmatism it's a

1:57:36 it's a deeply pragmatic kind of perspective and I think that runs through just about the entirety of the British tradition in some way or another right for the for the yoga turns a lot of it's tied up with engaging in practical activity aimed at making the world a better place for living things yeah the decreasing suffering yeah yeah I mean I know only a famous story about the Buddha in the air oh right don't worry about me I'm gonna get the arrow out that's an important body yeah

1:58:11 so I agree so that's interesting that there's there's so much pragmatic stuff built in that they're willing to bank a theory of the mind on it I think that's interesting that's an interesting approach might you know myself I don't know I'm kind of I wish it were the case that we could rationally understand that you and I are not that different and therefore I stand obligated so I would like to hack the system by increasing rationality in this in that way you think it would to get the same goal or do you think it has to

1:58:43 be experience –all well so I think that's that's actually a really point interesting point about stuff we've been talking about all along I think so you can play with a fun little thought experiment that can sort of get you to see things conceptually from a Buddhist perspective so here's the thought experiment you recognized already if you accept the not-self doctrine that

1:59:22 anytime you act in a way that benefits a future instance of yourself you're acting out of generosity and you're acting out of care right so in order to engage in practical activity of any sort you have to be organizing your behavior by those kinds of compassion and by those kinds of concern for somebody that's not you the problem is you've got no good reason to focus on that guy rather than focusing on all the other people who are

1:59:55 experiencing whatever kinds of suffering right and you can work to expand that out and show that we're already engaged in you know compassionate and whatever action with our family with our friends with our colleagues whoever else it happens to be and you can start playing around those boundaries that's unlikely to motivate behavior like just being told that and just understanding it I think that what the focus on meditative practices is supposed to do is to get you to the

2:00:31 point where you work through that whether you're doing so by conceptually directing yourself or by disclosing something that's already there it doesn't really matter but what you're doing is you're forcing the system to internalize that kind of understanding and in doing so you share the behavioral profile of the person who's engaging in actions I think we see that all over the place and it's not just in the context of compassion or empathy or those kinds

2:01:06 of things think about for example the amount of work it takes to internalize the recognition that mountains are processes not entities yeah right that's somebody who's a geologist can see a rock face and contract patterns of temporal variation that reveal the ways in which the process is unfolded most of us can't write and once you've internalized that the structure of the mountain like they're still about in there but it shows up slightly different

2:01:40 to you because you've internalized that sort of assumption and you've done so through practical engagement but the kinds of tasks that require you to engage with the mountain as a process and not as an entity I think that's the the basic underlying Buddhist thought yeah this situation in action do you think I mean this is sort of a far afield but do you think that if you know we were able to augment ourselves you know transhumanists style you know and I know there's you know the morality pills if there's oxytocin and

2:02:13 all that stuff but they have side effects you know there's they highlight in group stuff like that so those aren't great but what if we could hack the rationality system they give you to really feel the force of like cons arguments that's you know the the whole ground for being an agent assumes that I choose my thing so I gotta let you choose to do you think I mean it just seems to me that it's just a default it's yeah we're biological systems were built this way but we could build a better one that was more effective that bypassed all that stuff you're talking

2:02:47 about and focused on the thing I'm talking about yeah I mean right my bet is we messed that up to the extent that we try to pursue it yeah well our because we don't most of us don't have a good sense of what it would take to actually get the system in the right state but I think more importantly what something like that would have to do is affect not just rational judgment but

2:03:23 patterns of feeling and hedonic response patterns of attention and awareness patterns of practical motivation patterns of the things that you perceive and select out of a scene all those things have to get transformed to shift your behavioral profile and the reason is because in most situations we never just see things we see things and that shifts our attention and that shifts the

2:03:58 motivations we have and that shifts the way that we're feeling at a particular point and those things are constantly in dynamic action with one another and what the practices that emerged across these traditions are supposed to do I think is to help you to bring those systems into a new state of equilibrium right where they open up new classes of possibilities yeah and I think that that's that way of thinking about it is is really compelling to me so I like that you know I guess I lied earlier I

2:04:32 have one last question which is that you said you might you know think in your book that you're writing very mysterious but exciting book yet to be come out on these themes that you might think I don't know if you're joking but you said you were thinking maybe calling it why I am a Buddhist in Contra distinction to a certain famous why I'm not a Buddhist and if I understood the why I'm not a Buddhist argument it was that it's a religion and he's not religious that's amazing oversimplifying but that's a that's a sense of that's sort of it so what is what was your what was your point and say so I think when I said is why I am a neuro yoga Charen

2:05:06 okay I thought you said I why I am a Buddhist okay I might have missed one I might have read yeah yeah so I think that the evans book why I am NOT a Buddhist is a nice set of challenges to the easy acceptance of you know Buddhist dogma and treating it as something you can just drop into the current understanding science right you know so if you think of something like Robert writes why Buddhism is true what he's

2:05:43 doing is trying to take the things that he sees as core key ideas from Buddhism and show that they're actually reflected in his brand of preferred evolutionary psychology right and Evans going in for criticism of that and suggesting that really understand and engage with Buddhist philosophy and but it's practiced you need to take the weird aspects the things that show up to us is

2:06:17 weird way more seriously right they're deeply committed to stories about multiple past lives run multiple future lives and they're deeply committed to particular stories about karma and stories about rebirth that you can't just selectively drop out and say that Buddhism is the right story and the other thing that he pushes back on is the willingness to say that cognitive science has demonstrated that there is no self

2:06:52 because at most it's shown that the self is implemented by multiple interacting processes or that it's an ongoing unfolding of different kinds of mental events so he thinks that those kinds of things have been distorted when I say I've thought seriously about calling my book why I am a neuro yogacara I think that what I'm trying to do is to suggest that picking up on themes from the classical yoga chareth framework and

2:07:28 re mixing them with neuro stuff yields a new kind of way of engaging with the relationship between ethics and science and a new way of engaging with questions about the biology of cognition and it starts to open up possibilities that wouldn't have been available either from the perspective of the relevant bits of cognitive science or from the relevant bits of the Buddhist tradition and in

2:08:03 order for that to work you have to recognize that what you're doing is a new kind of thing like the classical yoga Tara Philosopher's I think that meditative practice is pretty important I'm convinced that they're right that there's something about the sense of self which can be worked out of your ongoing experience but that can also just disappear in cases of

2:08:36 depersonalization and derealization and understanding how that functions gives us better traction on what's actually going on in the production itself and the way that it functions in everyday life and I think that the your returns are right that in a lot of ways our everyday engagement with the world is much closer to a kind of illusory representation we often like to admit and recognizing that helps to feed into a better

2:09:09 understanding of the relationship between ethical and political values and our understanding yeah Wow that's I mean that's awesome there's thousand things I want to ask after you say that but I have to I mean I'm seeing the time here and understanding that you have a life so I gotta let you go maybe when this book comes out someday you can come back on and we'll talk about it after I've got a chance yeah let's do that it would be fun yeah that'd be awesome so the usually what I end the show is I ask if there if there's anything which hasn't come up what you wanted to have

2:09:42 come up and the answer can be no I think my answer is no okay okay great thank you Bryce so much I enjoyed this town site I learned a lot I learned a lot in general from you reading your work and interacting on Twitter but this has been tremendous for me I really appreciate it and super fun yeah super fun so just hang on a second I'll say bye off the off the air if you don't mind cool Cheers figure out how to stop this recording