Consciousness Live! with Georg Northoff (S3 E7)

0:00 going live here all right we are live joining me today is an extra special guest I guess I should have asked you before we started exactly how you pronounce your first name is it George and northa for George okay lot of said George is easier for the audience okay so thank you very much for joining me today and for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do yes thank you very much hello and thank you for inviting I appreciate ya I'm by training I'm a

0:34 medical doctor and a philosopher so and I have degrees in medicine neuroscience and philosophy and I'm lots of practicing psychiatrist so I still see some patients and my main researchers here really around sort of this triangle between philosophy neuroscience and psychiatry and it's really about how to understand mind brain relationship and you also see that I will turn towards world brain relationships in order to understand mind brain relationships I'm

1:08 practicing and researching in whatever a little bit north of you in New York all right how are things up there with respect to the current situation the pandemic are they as bad as they are elsewhere it is not as dramatic but it's the same here I'm locked in I am basically not allowed to go out and I think we are not as crowded as you guys and I think they took some more pre-emptive measures here and now they're just instructed today I just

1:40 said that they instructed all the companies to produce the kind of material which is needed like some masks and protection gears and so on so I think Canada somewhat handles it well but of course we are affected by it strongly yeah yeah I really matter tell you how the leadership handles it in this case so that's that's nice to hear that's certainly true has it been so excellent down here when my say but I think as a Canadian I share that well I'm really excited to talk to you

2:15 because I I'm a big fan of interdisciplinary work and I really admire people that that do the hard work of the interdisciplinary Mis so it's one thing to be interested in neuroscience and philosophies another thing to have degrees in those things and to try to use I guess I would say you take a kind of neuro philosophical approach which identify with that tradition using neuroscience to help understand philosophical problems is that nobody is thinking about your work yeah I think it's a very good characterization but as they know in philosophy it's all about

2:47 terms you can understand the term you know philosophy in different ways so originally it was the term was introduced by Patricia Churchland 1986 and she really suggested basically okay let's look to neuroscience to resolve philosophical issues and that sort of has a very strong presupposition that maybe philosophical issues can be reduced to neuro scientific questions and that something that sort of what I would call a reductive neuro philosophy

3:20 but that's approach which I am NOT fully share because philosophical issues have a certain level of analysis conceptual ontological epidemiological issues which are not completely resolved by empirical interest so these are all different methodological ways of accessing reality you see that's already a strong statement and they cannot be reduced to each other so that's why I suggest sort of a non reductive form of neuro philosophy and I'm saying that because

3:54 the concept of neuro philosophy has somewhat come into dispute over the last couple of years where they say it couldn't really resolve the issues and but that concerns bringing mainly reductive neuro philosophy so for me it's important yes ontological questions issues are important separate from empirical issues but the empirical issues can guide and inform the ontological so we can have more empirically plausible assumption about existence and

4:27 reality ontology or empirically less plausible ontological assumption and neuro philosophy is for me to have empirically implore a plausible my Freudian unconscious yeah I think that's really a nice way a nice distinction there between the reductive versus non reductive neuro philosophy I hadn't really encountered it before so I think it's a nice way of handling some of the criticisms that

5:00 have come this could to their earlier approaches yeah exactly I'm pre-empting them that's a gives you also a different view and also it gives you the view maybe to link some of the history of philosophy like can't like Schopenhauer we actually brought in the brain to current neuro philosophy and neuroscience yeah yeah and speaking of cons I know that you mention him a few times in your in your work and part of this has to do with the idea that was one of the earliest philosophers to reject this kind of passive model of the

5:32 mind for the mind is like a video camera receiving input from the external world and he argues for a more active interpret interpretation where the mind is actively constructing experiences and in your book you argue that kind of either side of this issue it's too extreme and you have what you call the spectrum model which incorporates elements of both of them so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that before we go I mean just specifically starting with the brain yeah I mean you you already hit upon the historical context so Hume and Locke had very passive model of mind it's just to

6:09 receive our input and then of course the question is how is it possible that mental features like self-consciousness come about then Kant reverted to the opposite extreme and said okay the mind is spontaneous in an absolute way and in order to prove that he went into the logical dimensions and the categories and that of course is again absolute spontaneity and I think when you look at the empirical data of the brain neither extreme fits the data so if you have a purely passive model of brain it doesn't

6:45 fit the data because brain has a spontaneous activity which continuously shapes the input so meaning that the people who listen when you listen to me you perceive it in a very different way what I say then another person because the two of you have different kinds of spontaneous activity patterns so so your input is shaped by the spontaneous activity so meaning it's need no longer purely passive yeah right the other extreme mean is there is pure activity then the whole perception and

7:21 cognition would be determined by the spontaneous activity alone and your external stimulus input would have no impact at all that's basically next dream consequence of can't put into neuroscience but that's not true either yeah so it's really an intact yeah so that's why a purely active / spontaneous model of the brain in a purely passive model of brain in the sense of you neither fits the bill so we need an spectrum model and you have when you have for

7:55 instance psychotic disorders like schizophrenia there's a spontaneous activity it's a much stronger impact than in the healthy brain so indeed you have shifts that's why I speak of a spectrum is a continuum a spectrum of different constellations of active and passive components if you want to say so yeah I think that's a really interesting point too about especially like when you're thinking of other Tory hallucinations in schizophrenia so there there's evidence that you know I guess I'm jumping ahead a little bit because we should talk about the default mode Network which I think is what you mean

8:29 or partially what you mean by spontaneous activity so that was that was one of the questions I had when I was really in the book I mean spontaneous activity is in some sense to find a stimulus free activity or you know when you're when there's not a specific stimulus which you are engaging with and so anyway let me ask you what exactly do you mean by spontaneous yeah and you you may be surprised it's a very difficult question yeah it's a very fair question it sounds benign so let me just first

9:05 maybe draw a comparison so you you have the seaside yeah you go to the seaside it if not it's not long from Long Island unfortunately it's quite far here from whatever class the sea so you have spontaneous internal dynamics of your waves yeah all there's a very strong waves and so on and then there comes in the wind that sort of modulates the wave we see waves yeah so same in the case of the brain so you have a certain

9:37 spontaneous intrinsic dynamics the system is always active it's continuously changing this is very very important this is very hard for us to grasp because we usually think in very static terms we always look at one particular point in time and another and then we say okay these are all independent states what is important in the brain is this is very clear it's a degree of change from one time point to another that is relevant and if the brain doesn't change any more than you lose consciousness and you become

10:10 anesthetic or or comatose that's also what the data show change is important however changed as we all know can occur in a more structured way in a more organized way or just change completely blind completely random yeah yeah so and what I don't have a good comparison now but let's all go back to my coma see examples you can have a lot of a lot of small chaotic waves where there's absolutely no structure and the surfer

10:42 will not be able to properly surf on that however now you go to the other part of the of your country meaning to Hawaii you have a very structured big waves long lasting in some small ways so they very good structure ideal for surfing so now imagine these sea waves are your brain spontaneous activity and your external stimuli your input is basically like the surfer riding on these waves yeah yeah so and then however the brain is more complicated imagine now the

11:19 surfer has an impact on the shape of the waves at the next time point so basically the surfer can sort of modulate the shape of the wave that's what happens in the brain your spontaneous waves activity waves are continuously shaped also by the external environment yeah right plastic if you want to say sure so plasticity right so and what's in what so when we're looking at neural dynamics with EEG or FM or whatever tool were using how do we

11:54 define the conditions under which the activity spontaneous as opposed to the conditions that are stimulus driven because when the eyes are open I mean I know in the book you specifically say it's not just eyes closed it's not resting still that's not what you mean by spontaneous activity so you can be having that when your eyes are open but there's always going to be in stimuli impinging on near sensory apparatus even when your eyes are open so in what sense is that activities truly spontaneous or internally generally that's supposed to be modulated at all times yeah good I think again there's a spectrum of

12:30 spontaneity there's no absolute spontaneity there isn't a sarong in that and Kant was probably wrong in that because he reverted in the second part of his critique of pure reason the transcendental logic he reverted to the logical domain into the categories and then you have concepts which are all or nothing either something is present and it's logically or it's not present and it's not logical so that I caught a me of concepts apparently does not apply to the empirical level or ultimately I

13:03 would also say to the ontological net so there you already see an important difference between a purely logical philosophical approach and more your philosophical approach yeah and now I break it down to the empirical level because you're when you say we speak of tasks of worked activities so you see me suddenly I come into the picture and you see me yeah so your brain and use of some activity however that activity is a mixture between the ongoing spontaneous dynamics and the activity I as an external input for your

13:37 brain induces and that's hybrid and that we haven't really understood so we have major lines of research going currently on in my group to understand this hybrid nature which component of tasks evoke is a carryover from the spontaneous activity the preceding pre-stimulus in which a part of the activity we observe is related to the external stimulus and again you mentioned the example of schizophrenia we have paper submitted and work and research where we can

14:10 really show that the schizophrenic patients are not properly able to distinguish between internal activity and external stimulus so they're basically mold in the external stimulus with in their internal activity and then of course they perceive the external stimulus in terms of the internal activity and their own beliefs right yeah and then I have hallucinations or I have the feeling that the way you look at me that means you want to kill me and things like that now you know my beliefs

14:47 like that right so trying to connect this to sort of more traditional ways of thinking about these sorts of things and I wonder so would it be wrong to say that by spontaneous activity you mean something like top-down activity and by stimulus you haven't it's bottom-up or these these categories are they orthogonal to what you're saying or they do they map on in a reasonable way yeah it depends on of course how you understand top-down and bottom-up but if you want to say so you can say it I mean

15:20 it were probably more internally driven versus a sternly driven activity so you have externally oriented cognition perception when I perceive you but however I might you might not really listen to what I say you just continue your own internal sorts then your internally condition prevails over the external cognition so it's a balance internally oriented if you mean that by top-down bottom-up I would subscribe to that yeah so you know one way like in in traditional

15:54 psychology textbooks they present this stuff it's well you have the the sensory quarter seeds are receiving input you know from the algae and so forth and then you have the sort of higher areas which are interpreting that kind of activity maybe there's even schema that you're you know it's being compared to and those sorts of things and so I was wondering because you come at this from a really neuro scientific approach and so I was one of it as I was reading the book I was trying to connect some of these more psychological concepts to the work that you're doing but but I wasn't really sure if that was the right way of

16:26 interpreting your work or not or if you think that that maybe that's a mistake because towards the end you end up saying things like you're gonna get rid of the mind altogether in a certain sense as a substrate for these capacities or properties that we talked about you know so I'm wondering if maybe the avoidance of psychological terms was maybe on purposeful or or not in your work yeah so for the audience I'm I yest I get rid of the mind but it doesn't

16:59 mean that I get rid of mental features right I do not get rid of the sense of self I do not get rid of consciousness I do not get off what you ask room with free will what I get rid of let's say that these mental features have specific representations isolated as isolated entities or natural kinds as philosophers like to say in the bread so this is very important so that people don't get me wrong and in our tradition we have often associated mental features

17:31 in mind for the psychological terms I think you're right we say higher or lower networks ultimately I would argue that mental features associated with a certain balance with a certain structure organizations along the lines of higher or a lower network and it is no doubt that higher or Aloha networks have different differential dynamics they have different spatial features higher order networks are more connected to the rest of the brain they show strong power in the slow frequencies meaning they have a lot of strong slow waves they are

18:06 good for surfing whereas the sensory cortex shows less connectivity to all the other regions of the brain and they have a lot of fast waves which might trip them better to encode and process the first stimulus from the environment so no doubt there is something to this yeah yeah okay yeah that's interesting so I mean just to clarify the thing we're talking about with respect to the mental features so you think consciousness is a real feature of the

18:39 of the brain or I should I mean obviously the brains interaction with the world the relation that I have to the world which i think is where you end up but it's it is a real feature of human beings correct even if you want to save the mental substrate it's the wrong way to associate it yeah I think let's say John Searle had said okay he compares consciousness to digestion yeah if you want even a biological process is like an output of a biological system yes I agree in that sense consciousness is a real

19:14 feature however now assuming as a substrate underlying consciousness as distinct from non consciousness that's something I would not do yeah because there's a continuum I would rather say about logic recieves there's a continuum of course that's for me the spatial temporal dynamic and if that is in a certain state if it serves a certain organization then consciousness is brought forth same with digestion

19:48 your stomach exists independent of digestion if your stomach is properly organized with all its enzymes then digestion happens however as a medical doctor I know that the presence of the stomach does not guarantee digestion yeah and many stomach disorder people can tell you yeah so the stomach is not the substrate the the relevance is here the dynamics the interactions the configurations the structure

20:22 organization you see the kind of terms I'm using between the different enzymes and that make possible digestion now same for consciousness you have a certain space-time dynamics in your brain yeah you have a certain constellation of fast and slow waves across higher and lower order regions as you say sensory regions cognitive reasons and that configuration that structure of space-time dynamic then determines whether you can have

20:53 consciousness or not so I wonder if we could just stop for a second and de ambigú ate the term consciousness because I know you're careful in your book and your work to distinguish the kinds of the ways that we use the term consciousness and then you have an account for each specific kind I'm gonna ask you about phenomenal consciousness and in a second but I wonder if you could just set the stage a little bit by saying how how do you understand the term consciousness how do you disambiguate it okay one thing one cannot say that your questions are not hard and tough right to the point it's a

21:34 good yeah so I think consciousness I'd say I just give a again sort of a very quick historical Specter you see often at the beginning of when philosophical concept consciousness was the philosophical concept obviously for centuries and not even always in philosophy the old as the ancient Greeks Greece the Greeks that didn't discuss him much about consciousness it was my a map with decart and then Locke and empiricism and so on yeah however and when a concept starts in the

22:08 empirical science usually the course of that that it gets sliced up so that you have different features different aspects a typical example is the limbic system nowadays neuroscientists will not talk much about limbic system they talk about specific regions like hippocampus amygdala blah blah blah 50 years ago people just spoke about the limbic system in my hope the same will happen with consciousness that it will be sliced up in different aspects what has a different aspect I don't know but of course I have my own guesses one of

22:44 course it's definitely the phenomenal aspect of what it is like phenomenal features what is it like to be bad Thomas Nager however phenomenal features are again not phenomenal features there a variety of phenomenal features beautifully described in particular phenomenology this goes from query this goes from temporal continuity William James stream of consciousness in a time consciousness pretension written he Musa beautiful descriptions in really true description sense of self different

23:19 senses of self EPS 80 then the choirs himself intentionality even haven't even mentioned that you know I think what we need when we talk about phenomenal consciousness we need to splice up slice up the concept of phenomenal here and distinguish between different features in my unlocking the brain volume to that's about consciousness where I try to link these different phenomenological features of consciousness to different neuronal neuro dynamical mechanisms and

23:53 I think that's the direction to go yeah the traditional nowadays you have a distinction between level and content of consciousness the concept of level is also more and more sliced up for instance in bane and recent papers very nice papers initially consciousness 20 years ago was related to the content of consciousness and I think the third dimension would be needed that goes very much those two and phenomenology it's a form or the structure of consciousness

24:25 the organization yeah so there you see is that what sorry is that related to what philosophers called the unity of consciousness or is that a yeah probably it could be but you can have again different meanings of unity you can have a meaning of cognitive unity which is probably the unity can't until Bain and analytic philosophy means then there is a more phenomenological concept of unity the experience of unity which for me goes back to hotel and phenomenological densa havi current philosophers and then there's

25:01 the access where this phenomenal conscious or access unity I think I've also heard so you see the same concept can be used in different contexts slash phenomenological analytic empirical and it might attain slightly different meanings and that's a difficult thing because you need to link see sniffing meaning otherwise it's just a mapping and that always leaves a gap by default yeah yeah so so with respect to phenomenal consciousness I mean so you identify that or correlate it with or

25:35 whatever I don't know what the right word terminates that's some I want to ask you about by with that where you call neural expansion is that so can you say a little bit about what that's that concept is yeah okay no that's not a very good question I likes it very much so glib bouzouki a famous neuroscientist is as consciousness goes beyond systems that's literally true so he says perception goes beyond the stimulus but I extend that to conscious consciousness so what do you mean by

26:07 that so when you're conscious of something that event or person might already be physically absent but you're still conscious so somehow there's a fleeting moment you're conscious it's still in your consciousness but it already is a way it's no longer physically present so you have a phenomenal presence with combined of physical absence in schizophrenia this is taken to the extreme where there's hallucination of Samson's which is

26:39 physically completely absent has never been there but it's phenomenally pressed and that's why they're so convinced about it so for me consciousness is going beyond the actual time-space properties of the physical features of the physical stimulus so your brain does something to the input your input comes in your input is already that the tone of the melody is already superseded by the next storm however you still hear as a previous tone in relation to the

27:13 present tone and so forth so your brain samo seems to extend or expand that stimulus and that's what I would argue does the spontaneous activity in this space-time featureless so it's a virtual it's really that I really believe it's a virtual expansion and your consciousness in a sense it's a virtual thing compared to the physical reality it's a virtual thing in the sense that it goes beyond the physical thing that's yeah in your experience it doesn't mean

27:48 that ontologically I met a physician here so I try to guard myself on an experience and it's already physically absent but phenomenologically is still present yeah right and it's present for me that I would argue in a temporal spatial way because it's virtually expanded yeah it goes beyond the actual physical features of the stimulus yeah and so we're aware neroli are we going

28:22 to this kind of going beyond so it's not going to be in the like low-level visual area as I saw not you know b1 b2 or whatever but say by time we get up to V 5 are we having other experiences is that where you're gonna locate them or I mean I guess they're gonna be located with the relation to the world that's somehow gonna get into here's maybe I bring up the comparison with the server I'm not sure whether it works but no surface starts okay so he's somewhat surfing not really fast but it starts okay that's we 1 V 2 V 3 so he get

28:57 really into the groove of the ongoing wave yeah so now the stimulus gets more processed through the other regions it really gets into the groove of the slow wave stuff and all the other regions it gets faster and faster and better and better better groove and the surfer can conserve better that's during that course stimulus the consciousness develops now you asked me where at that Shane you will have consciousness I would say that completely depends upon

29:31 the context and so on you cannot say it's either an v5 or it's either and there depends upon the stimulus properties depends upon your state of support Aeneas activity dynamic at the entrance of the stimulus in the same way the groove of the surfer depends at which time point she or he joined the wave same thing here yeah so so would you say then that the kind of traditional search for the neural correlates of consciousness and your in your view it's kind of a proceeding in the incorrect way trying to find you

30:04 know traditionally you know going back to Chalmers of the work is to find the minimal neural activity that's necessary and sufficient for a certain consciousness experience I I think as a criterion it's right and it's good but of course we need to go beyond the neural correlate that's clear but I do not think that we find this neural correlate in specific regions I do think that we find it in specific spatial temporal dynamical constellations let's say relationship between Rieff in prefrontal cortex and that we five

30:40 prefrontal cortex characterized by a certain dynamics which strong slow waves but also some fast waves if the same we five prefrontal constellations only exhibits the slow waves but not the fast way if the stimulus will be processed but not become conscious so I'm relying in part on data yeah yeah so I hope that gives you an idea how I put this into more dynamic space-time context yeah so I mean that's interesting because I

31:14 thought the part of what you ended up saying was that like for instance think the global work space or the global neuronal work space theory I thought part of the view was that that stuff broadcast to prefrontal cortex and available to a lot of systems is going to be required for reporting but not for conscious experience on your view so but now I thought that you were just saying that there is some relation to those PFC some kind of dynamic interplay between them which is in some cases gonna be required for conscious experience so but

31:49 that's not the same as global broadcasting so I'm wondering yeah good good point so the in the case of the globe in your own work space theory as I understand it and the theory has a lot of excellent empirical data absolutely no doubt but I agree it's probably more related to access of conscious becoming aware that I'm conscious right and the problem is here I think they start with single regions and then they say how do these single regions get access to the global work space I would argue let's say you

32:25 start in v1 but that we one already shows in the resting state a lot of interaction with the prefrontal cortex and all other regions of the brain so you cannot say that spontaneous activity Oetzi onset of the stimulus is purely v1 right you already interrelated with the prefrontal into slow waves in the FASTA waves and so on and so on it's the same thing imagine a group of people you have 10 people yeah all standing in a circle and somehow some people have a history with each other

32:58 and some people do not so now 11 person come in that person how the person will be received by the overall group also depends upon your previous relations among the members of the 10 people so in a way there's already a global component prior even to the onset of the stimulus so you see in the global neuronal workspace series the global component is at the very end it's it said I order that's why it's now linked with higher order cognitive theories David Rosenthal

33:33 hakam Lao yeah higher order theories however I would say surely global activity all the way already it is for Chinese level and what you see when your incoming stimulus is just modulate that relationship of the global activity to reward if a paper in print where we show that the global activity has representations in different cortical regions including v1 in different ways so your global action that lets you I start with a global activity and then

34:05 say okay is the stimulus just module made to global to local relationship so it's yeah I would just want to I mean I before moving I just want to kind of distinguish the higher-order approaches from the global workspace approaches there there they both involve prefrontal cortex and higher cognitive functioning but they're sort of underneath very different so for the higher order staff drive from rosenthal you need a kind of inner awareness and awareness of the mental functioning where that's not requiring any way and global workspace

34:39 I'm a global workspace there he's a first sort of theory kind of not straightforward but I would go with it I would go but I would say I would not go even with the first order approach again because I think it's not wrong for access it's very good and it is fantastic empirical data I really very good stuff however I don't think that it explains the phenomenon nah-ha right yeah and that's why I think you need to global and you need to global very early on and you need to time space dynamics yeah and this is so

35:13 this is sort of a tangental but since it's come up I do wonder why with your emphasis on phenomenology and in the history of that why why you don't consider higher order theories more specifically in the recent book at least I'm not sure if you did in the 2014 book but so I wonder do you I mean one of the main reasons motivating that approaches that phenomenologically it seems that you know conscious experience comes with a kind of awareness of that conscious experience that were work we're aware in some sense of all of our phenomenally

35:46 conscious experiences so do you and that's a phenomenological datum some people think but I'm wondering what your why your take on that might be yeah that's a very very difficult question another one by the way oh no no no that's that I mean I that has a long again has a long history tradition in philosophy I don't need to tell you self-consciousness can't self-awareness different forms of a perception empirical transcendental I mean it's a mess yeah even phenomenology speaks of a pre reflective self-consciousness right

36:22 and to be honest this is so I cannot really give you a definitive answer to that however I come from a different angle I come from an angle where as a psychiatrist I see patients who have experience which are inexplicable you become depressed and they don't really know depressed I mean really depression when you need to see me as a psychiatrist which is right yeah but it's inexplicable in the early stages of

36:58 schizophrenia something changes and they can't find a word for it there is but there is an experience there's absolutely no experience in a phenomenological sense but I think they are not aware of the experience as experience and so on so if you want to say so it's an experience it's a pre phenomenal phenomenal experience there's not yet a full-blown intentionality there might be a pre intentionality there is not yet a full-blown qualia that comes when you have the symptoms of skips afraid so

37:32 maybe there's some kind of pre quería so what I'm doing here philosophically horse I'll extended the reflective component what you just said the awareness of the awareness to pre reflectively I'm saying maybe who's a brilliant idea but maybe you need to go even one step further down to pre phenomenal a basic form of experience you find this I mean as surprisingly as it is you finds it in can't the concept of experience all over it is not related

38:04 to consciousness another person where you find the concept of experience in a very basic raw way is whitehead yeah so this is what I'm targeting because I need to account for these patients experiences right now that's that's much of my approach particular mine neuro scientific approach to consciousness is guided by that because I need to get then your own and mechanism and then hopefully provide some therapy later so

38:37 that's basically I would extend that to a pre phenomena level I do this in the 2014 book in the unlocking where when I speak of a pre phenomenal level and so when you say pre phenomenal experience like it so it's it's there's from the patient's point of view there is something that it's like for them John about three phenomenal experience or the reasons there is an experience exactly so they're there they're not aware of that but they're coordinates the relationship to the world to their own body changes the relation of their thoughts sometimes which we usually take

39:13 for granted a sort of Palani tacit knowledge michael polanyi kasev knowledge that becomes suddenly disrupted yeah certain certainties which we usually take for granted become disrupted and that's what I said but they still explain that's why it's so painful I mean these these people suffer like hell yeah so you cannot say there's no consciousness otherwise they wouldn't suffer yeah right I mean so this is kind of a debate and in the philosophy of

39:48 psychiatry about whether you take someone who has a delusional belief like you know cotard's syndrome or something that's really pretty extreme and so some people would say well their experience has changed and so their beliefs are a rational response to the change in experience whereas other people would say the experientially nothing has changed so just have a disorder at the cognitive level so it sounds like what you're arguing for is that the first the first interpretation so we have data now and it's part already published that

40:22 we're looking for this deeper level line schizophrenia there's the assumption of a basic self disturbance yeah and we show that this basic self disturbance cannot explained by cognitive dysfunction of working memory attention so it's a deeper level which is hidden yeah that's what I like to call it the consciousness debate neural predispositions of consciousness yeah and it's a deeper level that's probably the dynamic level yeah when you are on the server let's say again you know I

40:55 don't self that's why my X numbers are not good there but nevertheless oh look at the surface again the surface stands on the surfboard yeah and usually hoo-ee you just see the surfer but you don't see how much the surfboard adapts is flexible to the wave form to the continuous shape right it's the kind of level I'm targeting and without that adaptation of the surfboard to the continuously changing wave form the surfer could not serve that's the level I'm targeting in psychiatric patients

41:30 yeah yeah that's really interesting I mean that's an interesting way of thinking about it so I think that's and I really like this idea that we should be guided by trying to help people and our theories of consciousness should have some contact with with lived experiences and if it if it doesn't help us understand these kinds of psychiatric disorders and then it's not really clear what interests the theory itself has so I really appreciate this this kind of emphasis on practical and pragmatic results and using this to help people so

42:06 I just wanted to mention that so what if I could switch gears just slightly and ask because I mean in your book you say you want to moving from the mind bein mind body problem to the world brain problem and I'm gonna ask you about that certainly but I noticed one thing that didn't occur is the so called hard problem of consciousness and I'm wondering is is why so do you think that that's just synonymous with the mind-body problem or the the question of why is there any experience associated with these things that we're talking

42:39 about that's the way I would interpret the hard problem it's certainly possible it seemingly conceptually at least to have all the stuff that we're talking about you know explains much so all and at all and so some people think we need to give an account of why by these processes are accompanied by any kind of experience so do you think that's the same problem is the mind-body problem or do you think that's not a problem at all or so I'm wondering what what your responses to that so I I do think that they're separate problems it's not the same as I mean it's it's very simply the

43:12 first one is about consciousness the second one is about the mind that's clear Khan the mind is much more than just consciousness it's often boiled down there is consciousness free where there is emotional feeling these are all phenomena of mind and I think the mind let's say my level or coined experience it's broader than the current concept of consciousness but it's still a mental feature yeah so mental features to

43:47 remember what I said earlier was this virtual time-space expansion going beyond the physical that I would say is mental so I have a very basic very broad concept of mental here by mind you see before giving you I don't give you noun such as a problem I mean not you see that what you what you will see I will analyze the terms see their context and then I say maybe the question it's not plausible and that's the case I want to make for both

44:21 problems and I try to keep it short so they're hot the hard problem is why there is consciousness rather than non consciousness yeah that's the way I understand I know there are different formulations around about it but let's let's keep it for that way yeah unless you want to bring another formulation so yes I think it's for me this is basically an ontological question so you can keep that same question also in a metaphysical context and metaphysician and that's the way I think Sharma's

44:52 originally envisioned it for him ontology / the natural world but it's just one subset of the broader logical world and metaphysics however because he's in that sense he's a very traditional philosopher I see where he's coming from I would say for me this is at best an ontological problem but not a metaphysical on purely philosophical problem yeah so then so I sharply distinguished between ontology metaphysics that say when something what

45:25 applies to the natural world does not necessarily apply need to apply also to the logical world yeah because you have logical words that are distinct from the natural world so that is one way to go for that right so then I say okay what kind of ontology do I need in order to account for consciousness in the occurrence of consciousness in the natural world then I say yes I do not think that a property-based ontology works meaning I

46:00 do not think that there are special mental entities in the world properties here or substances so substances Piccard mental properties much prevalent still in current philosophy of mind I don't think that any such substance property based ontology works so that already means because I think you can assumes it is logically conceivable but I don't think it's empirically plausible given the data of the brain because what the brain does is continuously relate

46:35 different time and space scales and there's no fixed property you cannot distinguish so I would argue and that's what I do in the in the book you mentioned it's really that we need a relation based on ecology so the basic units of existence in reality are relation and that then when I say maybe we need to conceive we can do this later the brain is a relational organ to body and world so basically I say in order to answer the heart problem I say yes

47:11 consciousness is there because there's a word brain relationship if that word brain relationship ceases or like in coma you lose consciousness that's the empirical support of an ontological assumption where consciousness is based on a relation based rather than property based ontology now the mind-body problem so here I start with a conceptual level so the possibility of raising the

47:45 question of the mind-body problem is that you presuppose the conceivability of mind the mind must be possible even if you deny is a mind like Churchland in a limited division you still must presuppose to conceive ability of mind a possible mind is distinguished from an actual not so now that's a conceptual step that's a conceptual freeze in position of the mind part and then of course if you presuppose a conceivability of mine then the next question comes how is the mind related

48:18 to the body so now I consider the feasibility of that presupposition of the conceivability of mind and I say as an oncologist as an philosopher of the natural world not a meta physician not a logical if the logical world to mind might be logical conceivable Chalmers in the natural world I said there's no evidence neither anthropologically know empirically for the possibility or conceivability of

48:52 mind and if I say it's completely implausible to assume the mind then maybe the question resulting from the conceivability assumption also needs to be discarded dissolved so the mind the question for the mind-body relationship might be a logically conceivable question yes when you assume the conceivability of man but very key is not plausible yeah because basically I do not I question the question itself because I

49:24 say it's not empirically ontologically plausible but then of course I need to look how do I can account for mental features because before I did a distinction between mental features and Matt so I mean cuz I mean this is why sometimes I think you get accused of being an identity theorist I know you don't you know you deny that but it sounds like what sublime an old-fashioned guy I sort of likely I get any theory I defend it here and there and not it's not I don't know if it's

49:58 true or not but I I kind of like it so for someone like me it sounds like what you're saying is look my mind what I mean is some kind of substance or a certain property and I don't think those things work so I'm gonna say those don't exist I'm gonna be in a limit of X about that conception of the other mental but then why isn't it the case that what you're doing is offering a different view of what the mind is as opposed to saying I want to get rid of it because one could say that well the mental is you know because I it's very hard for me to understand what it means to separate

50:30 consciousness from the mind or from from some so I know what it would mean to say there's no substance that has that characteristic but it seems like mentality intentionality consciousness these things are all clustered together so I'm wondering what would be wrong with interpreting your view in as a redefinition of what the mind is as opposed to an elimination of it okay yeah I mean okay if you say I've got that all depends upon what you mean by might yeah right this is clear if you say okay mind is mental features then of

51:04 course my CSIS is then your mind body problem is basically a problem between body and mental features fine right I would have no problems with that however I however there's an important twist to this when you say I'm an identity theorist I would say no because your identity the assumption of the identity theory is one of the many possibility of resulting from the mind-body problem and that's why I say the consequences of an

51:40 implausible problem are s implausible it's a problem itself so basically for me it's an escape to get away from these conceptual alternatives of identities supervenience pan-turkism and so on and so on right yeah if you want to categorize me yes I'm a relational list world brain relation relation based on ecology and I'm a spatial temporal list because I think that mental features have a spatial temporal basis in the world and how it's related to the brain so if you want to get that but neither of that and I didn't argue all that in

52:16 that book because of course otherwise it would be completely crazy long yeah but ultimately the the basic thing is that all this the possibility of these different answers identity series supervenient or presuppose a mind-body problem which for me rests on an implausible assumption so now you can say not of this is a pocket gambler trick as we would say in Germany however fine you can say that but at least what I want to

52:49 open the conception landscape right yeah so I opened the conceptual easier to say not of you all wrong but I opened the conceptual landscape for including relation ISM for spatial temporal ISM and now we have to see what subsequent generation and people see whether it's empirically plausible what I'm doing yeah and ontologically and logically conceivable what I'm doing and if that support is given great if not you're not of then you need to modify right well I

53:22 just basically want to open the landscape so it looks as an alternative to raising this question and to broaden your scope of possible answers that's basically what I'm trying to do so say and comparing the scope of possible answer to the relationship between Earth and universe Kepler Galilei and so on could confirm great I'm waiting for those guys and I appreciate that way of putting the problem because it does seem I mean one of the thoughts that I had when I was reading through this was that it does seem like there is a mind-body

53:55 type problem which results from your views so if you if you take your view on board then there still is this question which is I mean it's not exactly the world brain problem although I'm not one percent clear whether this is right but anyway there's this question of how these mental features have their causal powers in in the body how they relate to the body itself how these relational features between the world and the and the body halves there there are effects and that's a version it's something like

54:28 an analog of a mind-body problem when you have put you a mental feature body problem or something like that yeah but yeah so there's two shifts in there so first of course the shift from mind to mental features which okay we covered already and the second shift is here that I say and that is crucial this is in Chapter ten what I'm doing if you just say body mental features so okay let me start another way main thing Thomas Nager points it out in wonderful papers 1990

55:00 conceivability so what you need is a necessary relationship between the ontological features and consciousness yeah main problem is that current accounts also for the whole mind-body debate that there is no necessary relationship between the body or the brain and the mental features they are all contingent that's the main for me the main conceptual epistemological problem whether that necessity is a priori or a posterior right Kripke it's a second question yeah so

55:36 and my argument is that if you limit your view to body your brain also in all the embodiment embeddedness theories you will not find the necessary connection of that feature ontological feature to consciousness that's why I say you need to bring in the world you need to bring in how the brain is part of the world through the body alignment temporal spatial alignment and that provides you because the necessary relationship and

56:11 that is a two-step proof first you can show that the brain is necessarily related to the world because it's part of the whole it's a mirror logical through support if you want to say so so conceptually that's a necessity yeah yeah otherwise you want to assume the brain is not part of the world okay then beyond metaphysics yeah yeah we're not going that yellow then if you can show that that necessary relationship in turn makes possible the necessary relationship of brain to consciousness

56:44 then you have the link the necessity relationship yeah and you overcame the contingency however that necessity isn't as I would argue with Kripke and nadle is in a posteriori necessity it's not a prior and that's a tricky thing that's what we are missing in the current debate because they all look for an a priori necessity and then of all these theories identity theory blah blah blah and they all turn out to be contingent yeah so for me I subscribe subscribe this under the contingency problem yeah and that

57:18 chapters chapter ten in the the spontaneous brain that you can't imagine how much labor that chapter cost me it made me psychotic it's because it's so difficult but I I'm somewhat convinced that I think that's a way to go yeah these necessities conception then you can see whether there is empirical plausibility for that yeah so but so there's a couple things I want to ask you about what you're saying right there but one of them has to do with the relational ISM and I like structural

57:51 realism by the way so I was really happy to see without you brought that in and I like the moderate form of structuralism that you argue for in the book I'm a fan of that approach in general in physics I like context structuralism so anyway so I'm very happy to see that connection but it does make me wonder about some of the things that you were saying about like locked-in syndrome for example so you talk about the case where you have the person they're locked in and seemingly in a coma you tell them you know imagine playing tennis they see in a supplementary motor area some activity

58:24 walked through your house you see activity and especially relevant locations in the brain and and I thought you were saying that this is evidence that they're conscious what's going on but the relation with the world is missing at that point so I'm wondering how we reconcile those two aspects of what you're saying yeah very good question and I would say locked-in syndrome they are right they have no motor relationship to the world that's true it's blocked like in a mere traffic lateral sclerosis they lose all

58:57 the muscle function they cannot move anymore true however their sensory processing is probably in their sensory alignment of the world it's probably still there that's and we are trying now studies where it shows us when we compare locked-in syndrome versus anesthesia and so on and so on so the basic sensory input processing with which we started our conversation today is still prevalent and that's your alignment to the world so when these peep

59:28 listen to music they cannot dance to the risen physically but probably mentally as I still do where's if in coma you cannot listen to the rhythm of the mute you you don't listen to the rhythm of the music anymore and there's no mental dancing anymore I see yeah so so it's it's it's any kind of connection to the world that's gonna play this role so I guess I was thinking too much about movement and

1:00:01 affordances and those sorts of things which are part of the story I think in your view but not not the whole sorry it's not I mean these are extreme cases where you have a decoupling between sensory motor which we usually use exactly for the kind of things what you're doing affordances relationship ecological niche Gibson and others but here you still have the sensory alignment you don't have motor yes but there's still a connection where's one of the most impressive people when I we did a lot of research

1:00:35 brain imaging on these patients who lose consciousness comatose vegetative state anesthesia and also now in sleep and when I saw these comatose patients because their motor functions are still there they still show reflexive movement but I was always asking myself why don't these people behave why does a motor activity does not transform into action or behave so what is action and behavior what are they about they are about of relating to yourself in a virtual way to the world

1:01:09 yeah when you're standing in the when you're doing an action you immediately have a sort of a virtual 3d coordinate system of the world and yourself as part of that you're part of the music you align to the rhythm of the music and it's the same way and that's what I mean by relationship to the world you align yourself to the world and then you can go with the world likes Asafa aligns moves properly to aligns the surfboard to the wave and then she or he can self-same with consciousness in a way

1:01:44 consciousness is like surfing on the time-space dynamics of the word mediated by your brain oh cool that's a nice metaphor I mean I was always more into skating than surfing so I'd prefer a skating metaphor but this makes me wonder like what we're gonna say what would you say about well I mean in a kind of ordinary case like dreaming experience but then also like sensory deprivation where people and sensory deprivation experience like really radical hallucinations under some cases

1:02:17 if it's done too long there there's no you can't rely on the sensory connection that way or are you gonna say that they're still sensing like pitch darkness right yeah so what are we gonna say about these kinds of cases yeah so I do think in schizophrenia as another example of that obviously yeah you still have a virtual connection to the world built up so your so your sensory cortex is not only active when you get external input your sensory cortex is continuously active even in the absence of external input so now in dreams you

1:02:51 your visual cortex does not receive much external input anymore however all the four other sensory regions are still channels are still open even in dreams so you're not as disconnected from the world as it is often taken to be because you still wake up when there's noise you wake up your dreams are interrupted or your integral you incorporate that into your dream yeah yeah so that's it it's not as sensory disconnected however you're right I need to account for this I would argue that your visual cortex

1:03:23 it's just spontaneously active and creates a virtual sensory input like your auditory cortex in auditory hallucination it's a virtual auditory input where the spontaneous activity is not properly suppressed and the spontaneous activity in auditory cortex in schizophrenia becomes as high as doing an external input in the healthy state right your activity your spontaneous activity is as high as doing normally an external input of

1:03:57 course and you think there's a voice and that indeed can be shot and has been shown yeah but doesn't that put pressure on the relational ISM because if you can have the conscious experience without the relations but just a virtual relation or a zip relation then then couldn't you do that in a normal case too I would argue that let's say if that person never from birth on me was sensory deprived she or he it's like some Airy argument now yeah right yeah

1:04:30 what not develop auditory hallucination but I know the ground is very slippery I know that they thought so and the other the conceptual escape I do are you really pretty really present me with heart problems yeah I like that so the conceptual escape would be what you're saying at different levels of empirical relation but that is grounded ultimately on an ontological relation and the case when I said that you were

1:05:04 deprived from the early on you were never related to the world then you probably really relaxed that ontological relationship so I think that conceptually I would make a careful distinction between empirical which can have different degrees of relation and the ontological right you not infer from from a low level of empirical relation to the absence of ontological relation can't already accused not know yeah knock of the physiological inference right and I would do the same you cannot

1:05:39 infer from the empirical to the ontological and I think it's often done in the current debate it's sort of yeah so that's where I keep these levels somewhat distinct it's very important for me as a non reductive neuro for loss right that's the nominal doctor fire right I don't know how distracted I want to get by this cuz I can't keep you forever but this is really interesting to me so like if you take like these or kittens who had their eyes so shut when when they're born and then they

1:06:12 unsewn they take it these kittens I don't know what it's like to be one of these cats but they have deficits their visual deficits they don't develop normal vision but they do seemingly have some visual responses so maybe they have a kind of disorganized kind of visual experience without object or something like that but there's a case where where you might say they've never had this kind of world relation but yet there's still a kind of visual experience which is possible is it would that be a kind of challenge to review or would you say

1:06:46 that there's a way of accounting for that first thing I would need to know the empirical details I mean what let's say on the other hand let's see I saw I would cite cases like kaspar hauser now or remember very tragic examples 89 1989 when Romania was opening and they had this office yeah they were completely deprived they were always in the orphanage home yeah and they were basically like vegetables and they never really had a proper relation to the

1:07:19 outside world and they could never really develop proper consciousness because the temporal spatial structuring organization from the environment of your brain spontaneous activity was not there right so they have a very rudimentary form of consciousness if at all but this is not complex not organized not structured nothing that's why we these would be for me cases of a mini little relationship and you're yeah and maybe there's of course you have a

1:07:54 minimal minimal consciousness may be evolutionary there but that's what I would say so I would cite those cases in support of my relation relationship interesting yeah I mean it it throws a whole new light on like think about Plato's cave right you guys are not going to have sort of normal experiences so you could infer they had all these strange philosophically because they had no alignment to the ward sitting there ask you about well a couple things but I want to ask you

1:08:38 about there's there's a part of your book where you talk about a different date array a different stay safe with respect to you're talking about so part of the problem is this kind of you're dealing with a kind of circularity objection to your view that you say that the brain requires a relation to the world it's kind of antic it's it's part of its structure but you got presupposes the existence the brain already so you you introduce in the course of that this man maybe it's the next section after I

1:09:11 might be excitedly miss remembering the sequence there but you know better than I do but so what so missus had to do with your wait yeah okay okay they called okay you would pick up the bread yeah okay there is no do you need to go okay yeah I don't want to I don't want

1:09:48 to impinge too much of keep you know if you have other things going on so you need know what is what because a lot I mean this goes all the way back to the beginning of the book and this is not towards the end but you're making an argument that the way the brain encodes information is in terms of differences and so then you'd introduce these two different kinds of differences the day I think it's day rain right and they say

1:10:24 sure say it's the difference per se Yeah right so can you say a little bit about what that distinction is and and how it's working here yeah so that's and that really goes to the heart of a relation based on ecology that's why it's so broad yes so when you say differences you would assume yes okay let's say we have two time points T 1 and T 2 and then you encode the difference between T 1 and T 2 yeah and then you would argue yes however your different space coding is not ontologically because you presuppose

1:10:58 that first sub read must encode T 1 and then T 2 and then Alan can coat the difference if you stay that difference are really basic and fundamental that circular because you need to assume T 1 and T 2 in order to be able to assume difference yeah coding so and that goes really so in that ultimately if you say now extend it to the ontological level if you have to first assume T 1 and T 2

1:11:32 and then different space you end up with a property-based ontology yeah right cause you first assume the properties of T 1 the properties of T 2 and then the difference somebody who is caught in that and it would be nice to trace it down it's like nuts because he goes quite way far in his concept of time and very well but ontologically he goes back to the Moana right and nobody knows what is there more data because it's such a hybrid constellation you see how the current concept can be traced to history

1:12:06 so this is laughter in a way that sense is much more interesting that cut so now how to get rid of these more nuts so the difference is based on T 1 T 2 these are the best difference.if political differences yeah this is what you observe how you calculate differences however if you want to have said unto logically you cannot assume T 1 T 2 on so logically you must assume that T 1 and T 2 are a consequence of the basic differences and that's of course completely crazy to think because that's

1:12:40 not the way we said however what would argue here now you have differences and T 1 and T 2 my Abstract choose from that differences so the difference is ontological t1 and t2 are epistemological are obstructions this is the way how we based on our brain can and must approach the reality we are not able to directly grass differences as such we can only try to measure them indirectly and that's what we are currently doing in our brain stuff I

1:13:14 have all kinds of measures which really measure the differences the differences between slow and fast frequencies scale-free activity for the experts yeah the difference is between two different time points autocorrelation window for the experts so I really use different based measures and then the time points are of course operationally prior true but ontologically they follow yeah and that's the difference theory is exactly where difference is primary and

1:13:49 fundamental t1 and t2 are abstractions are inferences from those difference this is basically like our brains Anna we get inside into the time through t1 and t2 but ultimately what we see what that is is a difference the same way the brain scanner the the colorful brain which we get out of the FM I doesn't mean that the brain itself is colorful meaning that's the time we measure at t1 and t2 doesn't it doesn't mean that time

1:14:24 is nothing but a sequence of t1 and t2 same thing right so so the idea is that once an epistemic in one's are not logical exam once this methodological want is a methodological epistemological bounces onto logic and I think that's very important my feeling is that that is often confused in philosophy of no-mind see states also neuroscience yeah and I think a person who also gets all these level together and confuses again of course my beloved yeah yeah but I

1:14:58 think one can learn a lot for him right so I mean I know you spend a lot of time talking my time towards the end of the book and that part that was some of the hardest reading for me I think but so if what if what I mean I don't want to ask me like what is time on this view but it's almost like I do want to ask you what ultimately if it's not a sequence or a series a succession of events then what are we how are we understanding this temporal ontological

1:15:32 a temporal aspect that's a real Pandora's box here okay yeah I completely agree the notion of time is underdeveloped in that book but I don't need to tell you that would require another book and this is yes it's on my list it's on my list the notion of time let me start again with another empirical example that gives you an idea how I conceives the notion of time so when you mental time travel yeah so there's solid empirical evidence now and

1:16:09 also in psychiatric patients that you'd there's no clear separation between past present and future your past always extends into the future and also the past into the past typical exam do you listen to music you here's a tone at this point in time and you here relative to indifference to the tone in the past and you already start anticipating the next – right and a good composer is the one who sometimes let

1:16:42 you anticipate the right sing and Tom cent Shiori violates anticipation Beethoven master yeah so and that makes a fan of listening for music at least for me yeah so now what does your brain does so your brain the composer he doesn't compose a melody he just composed some tones however is a good composer he knows your brain he knows what your brain does with the tone she or he composes so the comfort

1:17:15 bozer puts the tones in such a way together that you perceive a melody yeah Prokofiev another master in that with the dissonance is deep down it's unbelievable yeah oh and so meaning your brain puts things together across our distinction of past future and present so again past future and present are probably abstractions epistemological concept for us to better operationalize conceive reality however it doesn't mean that reality itself conforms to them so then

1:17:50 you can say maybe not of you seem to be a present just present chasm that goes you have a dynamic view of time for sure that goes at politeness just did you parents for loss of her so it's a dynamic view of time time consists in change of time change of time and time exists only as long as they change yeah so it's a very only book saw some people

1:18:27 Jada Lewis if you look for some philosophical predecessors lighten it's obviously some of that you can also see in Heidegger but Heidegger for him hide time is always existential which I would not share because I aim to describe the time of the world independent of us and ourselves because that I need to do in order to understand then how the brain as part of the world participates in the time of the world yeah the brain doesn't construct its own

1:19:01 time it's just participates in the ongoing time construction of the world so now I'm realizing oncologist yeah not as a man yes I mean you have to do a lot of work I mean obviously that's why a whole second book but so making that compatible with physics as we understand it currently I mean not just relativity physics which a lot of people take to be the premise in an argument against positivism I'm not necessarily someone who agrees with that but I think that this it's a challenge there but also if you look at

1:19:33 you know our deeper physics Xtreme theory and stuff like that there are some people who think that at the fundamental level notions of space and time itself may not be relevant at the deepest micro physical levels and so this this yeah so I mean there's a lot that would have to be said about how you gonna make it compatible with those kinds of yeah I mean very briefly there in the physics community the the trend is also going Lee Smolin for dynamic time and actually Lee Smolin and I work together on some of these

1:20:05 things okay I know he likes is what I'm doing on the brain stuff it can links it to his physics stuff of dynamic time so interest or doubt you mentioned the different levels this is deeper level there's no time and space I would probably argue the micro level is just a very small time and space scale mmm yeah and that's what I'm doing in the MIT book I say that's a nested miss it's like the Russian dolls the world is the biggest Russian doll and then there are all kinds of different Russian dolls and

1:20:38 the smallest the smaller smaller smallest may be just an abstraction and we perceive it as if there is no time in space right but it's they might be a very nano nano nano milli blah blah blah time scale which we cannot cannot cross that's interesting yeah I see we're already really running out of time now but I wanted to ask it just this is top switching gears completely but I wanted to ask you about your views about artificial consciousness and whether you're skeptic or so if we built a

1:21:13 machine which had these same sorts of dynamical relations to the world would it also be conscious on your view or is this something that's not only brains can do no I'm not a brain fetishist absolutely not it may look like that I speak of word brain relations but I could also be a word agent relation however that agent must have spontaneous time-space dynamics yeah a spontaneous or resting state activity that agent must have an internal space-time

1:21:47 hierarchy to about topography which current agents don't have more that and so that the two dimension it must have spontaneous activity second it must have space-time dynamics third set space dynamic must be relevant must be in a certain very elaborate hierarchies of time space dynamics meaning there must be many many many Russian doors within the brain itself yeah like the different regions likes a different way of slow fast waves yeah and the first condition even more important that time

1:22:23 and space hierarchy must be shaped shapeable and plastic by the environmental context yeah I just had this morning in a Skype was a colleague from Denmark and he told me that many of his psychotic patients now have coronavirus hallucinations if delusions about the corona venom and the just thing it's just three four weeks ago and they immediately react so these guys I had me very aligned to the world and contact sensitive however they mortise into their own internal beliefs and then

1:22:56 history so you see how much the spontaneous activity is shaped by your respective environmental come maybe not in the millisecond maybe not in a second but over stretches of 10 20 seconds and of course in much longer minutes hours blah blah blah longer timescales yes right oh and this would be same the same would hold true in a simulated world as long as you had all of these relevant features you would say you could be conscious in a simulation you could have an experience if the the

1:23:30 world is a context so that agent must relate to the context and the context must be spatially temporally more richer and more extended than the agent itself if it's just one to one I don't think there will happen much because this is asymmetry is that the brain is a smaller doll with a more limited space and time scale than the world let's say seismic earth waves earthquake they have timescales which we cannot conceive here right and it is that metric relationship which i think

1:24:02 makes it possible for us to experience our self as part of a wider world and that is consciousness for me about consciousness for me is about you experience yourself as part of a wider world with SS earth perspective yeah you have a point of view Thomas naked what is it like to be a bit he doesn't speak of first-person perspective distinguish from cell he speaks of a point of view which locate in a virtual way in the world and that's what I'm trying to explain that's why I come about this world brained

1:24:34 relationship stick that's the ultimate yeah and my side so this kid that just was an erotic patient I see that distort they have distorted consciousness of themselves as part of the world i describes this in an earlier book neuro philosophy and the healthy mind yeah so it's really and that leads my view of consciousness strongly so this could happen I mean because this could happen in a simulated world it could have been like in a Cartesian demon world where the Cartesian demon is simulating all of the external steps right it seems like

1:25:10 it also happened in idealism world a world rival ISM was true we're all there was was minds figured I didn't get it oh I'm just so it seems like you know the term relational ism that you're talking about could hold in a computer-simulated world as long as it's done the right way they could be true in a world where idealism was true like absolutely of

1:25:42 them so there's nothing really physical is necessarily about the physical world that's important it's about just the general the context and the agents relations are through space-time dynamics so it won't so I would very clearly say the criterion in spatial temporal dynamic environment yeah in a world whether that world is the real graspable physical world or a virtual 3d reality world fine no problem for me the main christian-based time dynamics spatial temporal nested missed spacial temporal directness what I did

1:26:15 and kind of think special temple hierarchy I would add now spatial temporal relationships what I expect these kind of things and you need a certain frequency ranges so let's say if you have only slow waves only one big slow wave frequency you will probably also not be able to surf yeah you need also to slow at the faster wave you need a certain frequency range and that probably the extend of your possible consciousness the range it's interesting so I see we're really I'm

1:26:50 really running you out of overtime here and you you're really busy so I'm gonna let you go but I do want to ask you as a final question if there's anything which hasn't come up which you wished had come up and the answer can be now but I just wonder if there's anything we haven't talked about that you were hoping which come back no I think we covered a lot of ground covered the ground from the brain to the world brain relation and the ontological you covered the mind-body problem the heart problem you located me you try to locate me in the current literature which is very good I appreciate that because it looks a little bit out there but you see I also always try to bring the references to

1:27:25 others to see the it looks very far out what I'm doing but it's deeply embedded in that trying to trying to find an answer and the next step which is the last chapters of the MIT book is this Copernican revolution but that's a different topic but yeah I think what what I just want to see how much I think that also became clear so out this interview how much conceptual methodological ontological and empirical issues go hand in hand or byte they

1:28:00 cannot be reduced to each other yeah I think that's one of the main where I'm always getting surprised oops what's going on here yeah and that gives you a broader landscape of novel alternatives of viewing the same thing yeah right it opens the door and that's what I'm trying to do and now I try to gather a lot of empirical evidence supporting some of these views yeah well and I was gonna get to the Copernican stuff but I just said you were running really out of time so we'll have to save that for later someday but I don't want to say

1:28:32 thank you for joining me I really appreciate your time and willingness to have these conversations and I think the the conceptual landscape that you're trying to open up is one that needs more attention so it's very I think it's very nice to see people like you working on this stuff trying to bring in careful considerations from the neuroscience but also connecting it to the history of philosophy the current philosophy so I wish more people had that kind of ear for all three of those topics and not to mention like helping people as well so I think I think it's really cool what you're doing I really appreciate it and even though I might

1:29:04 not agree 100% I think thinking about it from your point of view it's really challenging and fruitful but I appreciate very much and one thing just advice would be nice if you wrote a textbook minding the brain where some of these things are sort of indicated they go not as crazy but there might be a good entrance minding the brain watching which would be nice also for an interdisciplinary audience written and it's a textbook lucky given in class learning the brain a guide to neuroscience and philosophy and I sketched some phenomenology analytic

1:29:36 philosophy or that in what fashion with neuroscience so it really goes beyond see analytic philosophy ground but I think it could be a very good textbook used in undergraduate graduate classes has been translated into Chinese and maybe translated into Italian Wow yeah I teach a class called science humanism and technology and I think a book like that might be perfect but I check it out for sure I haven't seen one yeah it's a non reductive approach to all of this yeah the brain and philosophy yeah yeah I'll have to check

1:30:11 it out I'll put a link up on the on the website too but so thank you very much for for joining me I'm gonna go ahead and end this now and then just hang on for a second I'll say bye to you off the air okay