Consciousness Live! with Peter Carruthers (S4 E10)

0:03 all right we are live so joining me today uh extra extra special guest uh peter carruthers um peter i wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you okay um so i teach at the university of maryland i have done now for 20 years i guess um prior to that as you can probably tell by an accident i was in the uk um where i was mostly brought up and went to

0:34 the university of leeds and then the university of oxford um i guess i've been dancing around and writing about consciousness issues now for 30 years on and off changing my mind fairly regularly i mean some of the stuff i published back 30 years ago is now notorious and people cite it as as examples of clear falsehoods and indeed i'm quite happy that they should do so um but most recently the most recent change

1:08 of mind was when i converted from being a higher order theorist about consciousness to the global workspace theorist although there's been you know there's quite a lot of continuities between those two i still think the phenomenal phenomenal concept strategy is the right way to go to explain why we get puzzled about these things and and so on interesting yeah so i have noticed that you changed your mind uh recently about that i guess um i was curious about sort of what led you to revise your view i guess i know that you had some

1:40 arguments against global workspace theory that you eventually came to think weren't really doing the work that you thought that they were is that really what happened well well two things happened really um one was that i thought yeah the arguments that i'd run for my particular idioms idiosyncratic version of higher order theory um didn't really work i mean i'd always objected that the global workspace theory didn't really explain how anything would light up just by virtue of being in the workspace and

2:15 so on and then i i mean on reflection i thought hang on i'm a reductive theorist about phenomenal consciousness there's no such thing as lighting up there's no extra property that gets to be there right that's a really bad argument um and yet that had been what have motivated me to push for what i call dual content theory so so the version as you probably know the version of um higher order thought theory i had was a kind of dispositional version i thought that by virtue of contents being in the global workspace

2:48 and available to higher order thought if you then bought into a kind of consumer semantics it would be the case that those contents would at the same time acquire a non-conceptual higher order content right so so a perception of the content red would also have the content seeming red or experience of red right and it was that higher order content that i wanted to identify with phenomenal consciousness but i had no evidence that that was true it requires you to buy into a particular theory of

3:21 of content determination um i think i convinced zero people that it was true um and on reflection i thought it's unnecessary right i mean that that there's no why not just go with the first order theory and you can still appeal to higher order stuff in explaining why consciousness gets a grip on us and that's the phenomenal concept strategy and yeah so so is the idea uh just following up on what you just said right there is the idea that until

3:54 you identify because you're a reduction it's your physicalist right i think about about this stuff um uh not a co you endorse something called qualia irrealism but i think what you mean by that just is that um that that phenomenal consciousness is a cognitive phenomenon as opposed to some kind of non-concept non-cognitive phenomenon is that a before i get too distracted yeah is that the right way of characterizing that's what you mean by cognitive i mean so i think it's um all and only globally broadcast non-conceptual contents that contribute to phenomenal

4:28 consciousness that get to be phenomenally conscious but that's a kind of orthogonal issue about about cognitive phenomenology and whether thoughts are phenomenally conscious and whether concepts are phenomenally conscious and so on um no so i mean i'm the very thinnest kind of realist perhaps phenomenal consciousness that you can be that in that i think there are truths about it so i think when when mary steps out of her black and white room and thinks wow so this is what it's like to experience red i think she thinks something true and

5:02 but that's just because she's now thinking a thought that wasn't available to her in that black and white room because she couldn't think an indexical thought about an experience of red because she had had none right right so so there's truths there but they're just um truths about things that you can characterize fully in third person terms right so i guess i was using the word cognitive because in the sense of the global broadcasting or global work experiment people would would identify that as kind of a cognitive theory um but but so what i was trying to get out was that the distinction really is

5:35 between someone like your view and then someone like block um who is a also a quality a realist uh excuse me a qualia yeah he's he's a quality a realist because he denies that there's any kind of extra thing like the broadcasting or access availability to these cognitive systems that is important for consciousness well in one sense he's a realist in another sense not i mean so he i mean some people use qualia to refer to the dualist view right i mean the non-physical property and he's certainly not that

6:07 i mean i i called him a qualia quasi-realist i think at one point in the book by which i meant just that um although he's a physicalist he thinks that there are phenomenally conscious properties that don't reduce to representational properties or any combination of representation and causal role right okay so right okay so that now getting back to the question i was trying to formulate a second ago the the idea uh so you identify the phenomenal consciousness with the global

6:40 workspace theory and then you say well there still are these consumer systems um and those instead of identifying the maybe these non-conceptual contents will uh acquire a uh a second content like your original theory kind of populated but that theory that is not going to be identified with phenomenal consciousness but rather that's like our concept of the phenomenal consciousness well i i mean i no longer think that it probably does acquire a higher order non-conceptual content i backed off thinking that that's

7:17 going to be a a consequence of availability to hire order thought um partly because i'd become much more externalist about views about content and how contents get determined um so no i i i've now the view is just non-conceptual contents available in the global workspace get to be available to think these special thoughts that we can think and so they're they're the things that we refer to when we think using our first person concepts so this is what it's like to see red

7:50 or when i die all this will disappear meaning to refer to phenomenal experience in general okay yeah because that's interesting because that's one of the things that was a bit when i was reading the book um which by the way is a great book you might i mean you put a lot of books but uh your last two have been really really good the centered mind and um yeah i really really really enjoyed that one and then of course the uh human and animal minds which i guess is your most recent one um are both really whether you agree with them or not i think they're really tremendous pieces of work that everyone should read so that's

8:22 a plug for the books but anyway i don't have physical copies i have my pdf will be here oh well look if you want to see what it looks like it's probably the most beautiful color ever really is that yeah i could it's a um in an era where book covers are becoming progressively more kind of cheesy and abstract i think this one stands out is really cool so it's nice that they they did that but um but but so i was confused a little bit because i was wondering whether you had given up this dual content idea and so you clarified that for me so the idea is just that there are higher order

8:54 thoughts but now they're much more sort of like the traditional ones where you they have the conceptual context i am in this state yep okay um and then one of the things that we're about phenomenal consciousness i mean there's a lot of implications that follow from this kind of conversion of yours to global workspace and i think a lot of your recent work has been exploring this so like the idea that there's no conscious thoughts or beliefs for example is a consequence of this the implications for animal consciousness is an implication of this so i think it's really interesting that you're thinking through these these issues and of course i want to talk about them but before we

9:28 get to that stuff just talking about phenomenal consciousness in general i think that you have an interesting way of sort of saying what the target phenomenon is supposed to be because as far as i understand the way you talk about is phenomenal consciousness is that thing which puzzles us and gives rise to these hard part problem intuitions that's really the thing that we're trying to explain and understand so if you don't if a theory doesn't really give rise to those sorts of intuitions then it's not really addressing that kind of question so do you think it's first of all is that accurate and then is this related to what chalmers is called the meta problem

10:00 is that uh something that you think is related to this way of formulating or not yeah i think it's it's essentially the same as the meta problem um i mean basically i think as led block argued many years ago phenomenal consciousness is a first person notion right i mean it's that when we talk about used phrases like what it's like and so on that's really just an invitation to people to pay attention to their own experiences and to verify whether what's being said is true from their own first person perspective

10:33 too um and that's why i think that phenomenal concepts are the primary phenomenal concepts right they're the basis of it all but of course we have to talk about a lot of consciousness and i think the the the best way to operationalize it third person is to say something like well it's that set of properties that gives rise to the hard problem thought experiments whatever they are right and that doesn't beg any questions about you know which kind of theory of consciousness is true or anything of

11:04 that kind um but it does make the commitment that if if you come across a kind of property that some people want to claim is phenomenally conscious but doesn't give rise to those puzzles and that's what i think is true of concepts and conceptual content then it it's entailed that they're not phenomenally conscious they may be in the workspace and i think they are and they may be globally broadcast and i think they are but they don't give rise to those puzzles and so you don't qualify as phenomenally

11:37 conscious that's that's the split yeah i mean that's interesting and i want to talk about the the cognitive stuff in a little bit but but i do wonder about so people who think that well i guess so illusionists um you you say very carefully in the book you're not an illusionist although you sort of share the same spirits as them right yeah in a sense but they're not an illusionist um but uh and so illusionists are gonna deny that there's a hard problem typically is that the way that so is that the one of the

12:09 differences between you and the illusionists uh no because i deny that there's a heart problem too um that they're scenes in the sense of a real gap um so so i share with the illusionist the view that there just seems to be a problem right um it's just i think it's a bit weird to call it an illusion because i mean all other cases where people talk about illusions um are universal automatic set things up right and everyone just feels the illusion right so cognitive illusions of the thought that

12:42 fescue and cannaman would would deal with some visual illusions whereas i think the problem of consciousness is something that philosophers get you tangled in right and and it requires work to get people to feel the problem of consciousness you can't just say hey look pay attention to your experience what do you think right and you've gotta i mean you'll probably know this from teaching yourself that it sometimes requires a good deal of work to get students to even feel that there's a

13:15 problem so i think i mean that's the only reason i say i'm not an illusionist it's just that i think you know it's it's it's a much more cognitive kind of problem rather than something that's just given that's part of our experience or right so so then if to put it slightly differently on the way you're thinking about things if illusionism were really true then the heart the intuitions about hard problems would be automatic and you wouldn't need much prodding at all it'd be like mueller liar you just show them they're like oh yeah okay we get it yeah that's something yeah yeah that's interesting

13:49 um but does does on this view does this imply that they folk i guess don't have the concept of phenomenal consciousness because they get puzzled by it or well that's that i mean that's a good question um i guess it i guess it mostly means that i mean most people will at some point or another pay attention to their own experiences as such and they think uh you know a mary-like thought oh so this is what it's like to smell cinnamon or

14:20 right um and to the extent that they are they're then thinking about a phenomenally conscious state they're employing a phenomenal concept to think about that state but that isn't quite the same i guess as having a generalized concept of phenomenal consciousness right um yeah so so i think many ordinary folk will employ what are in effect phenomenal concepts and so um if you draw attention their attention to those concepts and that's part of what what

14:53 i think we do with students is you say well look focus on this really bright shade of red and ask yourself you know um couldn't how do you know that someone else has got what you've got now as you introspect when they're looking at this rather than what they get when they look at this bright green thing right um so in fact you're just inviting them to deploy phenomenal concepts that they might have deployed anyway to see a generalized problem yeah because i think another way of thinking about this is that you know phenomenal consciousness is like a technical term for something that's an

15:27 ordinary thing and that people are thinking about it all the time i mean i i know i'm not maybe typical because i grew up to be a philosopher but i remember you know first time i had kimchi i did have one of those thoughts i was like oh this is what it's like to taste kimchi well i didn't quite guess it um and you know i would wonder why can't i just tell the doctor where am i what my can't you just like feel my pains why is he always asking me like how does it feel like i don't know how to tell you so i was always having these sort of weird kind of thoughts about my own experience but maybe i was an outlier in that case but but i i do sort of feel like ordinary persons have a grasp on what we

16:01 mean by consciousness um in the sense of having a you know sort of like the eric switch goal line right you define it kind of innocently as it's perception in good cases it's emotional experience well uh but but now there's a real risk of tangling up issues about phenomenal consciousness with all kinds of other things that people use the word conscious to mean right um which i i think are just third person entirely innocent don't necessarily give rise to any problems about ascribing them to animals or whatever so there's conscious of i mean look you

16:36 should know this stuff this is rosenthal's distinctions that he drew many years ago right there's there's there's being conscious of something and there's being conscious as opposed to unconscious and you know we know every animal that exists has awake a sleep cycle there's no problem about them being conscious as opposed to unconscious in that sense um so so i do think although ordinary people use the term conscious a lot a lot of the time they're not talking about phenomenal consciousness per se they may be talking about states which

17:08 are phenomenally conscious right but not necessarily as such they're just talking about perception or awareness or right um yeah i guess yeah because right they don't make the distinction between the creature conscious transitive con all these technical terms that we have in the literature uh but but still in their own case so yeah well i guess i can see what you're saying so there and in fact a lot of professionals do this as well they confuse these concepts together actually i know part of your argument for against some of these other theories is that they

17:39 partially confuse some of these concepts um okay so yeah that's interesting um i i want so bad to have thought of my previous self as a part of the folk um and i'd be like maybe maybe maybe not okay uh so i want to also kind of so these are the preliminary issues that are really going to pull a lot of weight later on but one of the main ones is this idea about consciousness being all or nothing that phenomenal consciousness in particular so these other notions in admit of

18:12 gradations you could be half asleep partially um sort of aware of something but when it comes to phenomenal consciousness i share your intuition very strongly that it's you either there's something that is like or there isn't uh and that's that's a very important kind of claim because it's going to do a lot of work with the animal stuff later in the in the discussion yeah yeah yeah no i think i mean given that phenomenal consciousness is a version of state consciousness right any given mental state of yours will be phenomenally conscious or not

18:45 although it can vary along every other dimension i mean that you can have i mean one of the examples i use is imagine walking home in the dark and you just see some vague shape looming in in the shadows right you don't know what you're seeing um in terms of consciousness of and there's very little content to what you're conscious of it's just a fake shape but nevertheless it's definitely like something to see a vague shape and similarly with these things that experimenters will

19:19 flash up on the screen for 20 milliseconds and then either successfully mask or not right um if they don't successfully mask it well it's definitely like something to see a flash of something i know not what even if you can't say what it is and there's no other content there yeah so i think a lot of the uh confusion around this is exactly as you just brought out though that people are not distinguishing between the content like what the contents of the conscious experience are and whether it's phenomenally conscious at all and so they confuse the graded

19:51 content with like level of consciousness yeah i agree yeah so i mean part of this and you make a point of saying this in the book part of the issue here is that um from our own first person we don't really encounter cases that are kind of like something or partially um but if like how would i put this if consciousness were graded would you expect that we would have those kinds of experiences um or to put us differently maybe our

20:25 kind of consciousness is all or nothing but i'm not sure why we would extrapolate to every kind of experience being that way from our own case um well i mean look it here it matters whether you imply the first person concept or the third person concept um so if you ask so consenting whatever it is that guide gives rise to the hard problem of consciousness does that admit of degrees well for me what gives rise to the hard

20:59 problem of consciousness is globally broadcast non-conceptual content and of course what qualifies as global broadcast emits of degrees across species and to some extent within humans too right so so in humans the broadcast includes availability to language faculty to reporting right in other species it will not in humans it's available to all kinds of aspects of executive function that other animals might black and so on so

21:32 broadcasting at mitts of degrees and so as it were described third personally that which gives rise to our problem with mitts of degrees but when you use the basic kind of phenomenal concept and you think could there be something that's when you focus on a phenomenally conscious experience this is like something could there be something that sort of quasi-like something and i just don't know how to get my head around the topic i mean i can't make any sense of the

22:04 question yeah but i guess um and i to be honest like i'm playing devil's advocate in a sense because i agree with you i shared that intuition but i guess to on the other side though couldn't someone say well that's a failure of imagination or like an argument from incredulity or in the worst case like that we're just like try you know dennis would come over here and say try harder yeah no i mean i i i i think that that may be right and that's why i was pleased it wasn't the only argument i had to rely on in the book

22:36 i mean that that one gave rise to what i called the negative semantic argument where i say something like um there's there's nothing in our first person uses which fixes where in the set of changes as you move across animal species and different forms of global broadcasting um phenomenal consciousness would end right there's there's nothing in our first person use that um carries any implications about about what would be so so it's going to be a matter of stipulation

23:08 given that there's no real extra property right if i require a realist there'd be a fact of the matter even if i could never know but given that there isn't given that all there really is is experiences that are available to more and more complex systems as you move across species and then at some point you get to creatures that can get puzzled by the hard problem but there's no extra property that pops in to existence at any point there so it's just going to be stipulation if you say well here is where phenomenal consciousness starts right um but then i have a different sort of

23:41 argument the positive semantic argument that doesn't rely on this gradation stuff or lack of gradation stuff yeah okay so i want to get into that positive semantic argument but before we do that i i one of the questions that was really kept popping up in my mind as i was thinking through this stuff well first of all i think you think so the basic argument is there's a dilemma for you you're either a quality a realist or not if you're a quality a realist then uh whether animals or consciousness we can't know which ones and and if you aren't then there's just no fact of the matter about whether they are or not and

24:16 i i mean part of me was thinking i don't really understand what it means for there not to be a fact of the matter like i sort of know what it means for there to be no fact of the matter about whether they have a global broadcasting system like ours that that's clear i think there's gradations there but what it means to be no fact of the matter about phenomenal consciousness that's different than saying they aren't phenomenally conscious oh yeah um but so what exactly does no fact of the matter on your way of thinking about these what does that mean

24:48 that it's just not an interesting question or is it something more metaphysically um it means it's indeterminate um so well i have a trouble between understanding the difference between indeterminate and we don't know so all right okay so so um and i think this may be shifting into the positive semantic argument but um in one of the one way of thinking about um at least

25:24 some of the arguments i run is that what you have when you um attribute phenomenal consciousness to animals or ask the question about phenomenal consciousness in animals is a failed presupposition right so is there a fact about of the matter about whether i've stopped beating my wife yet right yeah supposing that i never did yeah right and never have right well there's no yes no answer right and that's the bind you get into when someone asks you a question that has a

25:57 false presupposition right right and so there is no fact of the matter about whether i've stopped beating my wife yet i mean there is a nearby fact of the matter namely i never have and i'm not now um but there's there's the that question doesn't admit a true false answer right um and i think that's the situation wherein with respect to projecting phenomenal concepts into animals um and okay so sorry this is into the

26:31 positive semantic argument i think in the end what just fixes the truth conditions for a first person phenomenal concept and it's not any public norms there aren't any um and not any you know commitments to natural kinds or anything there's just one's own judgmental dispositions it's the way one's disposed to use the concept of this sort of experience and then when you ask so does a monkey have this sort of experience um

27:04 in effect you're asking the question supposing that my dispositions to judge the ones that i'm currently using were to be present in the mind of a monkey would they then issue in a positive judgment and i think the false presupposition there is that these dispositions to judge could be in the mind of a monkey without changing the mind of the monkey right without the mind of the monkey being radically different from the mind that it actually has and so that so so there's no way to project those dispositions across

27:39 deeply across species i mean maybe they're borderline cases but um certainly not to to cats and dogs saying right so so the idea is then so that's that's helpful because the idea is that there's a false presupposition when we think about animal consciousness right and and and so the the the presupposition is that um how to put it yeah okay the presupposition is that is that the dispositions to judge that underlie

28:12 your use of the concept could exist in the unchanged mind of the animal it could exist in the animal you're actually the target of your thought namely the way the dog actually is not a dog souped up with extra phenomenal concepts that would require you know higher order thinking and and capacities for reflective thought maybe language in order to have them okay yeah that's that's very interesting so i i want to put a pin in that because i want to ask

28:45 something and then ask see how you answered and come back to this because [Laughter] one of the questions i had was it was okay so suppose that we i don't know in the course of the universe's time uh either you know create a super intelligent artificial system or meet some very advanced alien race i think really it could be either way um and let's suppose that we have reason i think they're conscious although i do i am curious about your views about artificial consciousness and maybe we'll you can answer that if you if you care to

29:16 uh but suppose we we have reasons to think that they well let's just stipulate that they're phenomenally conscious um but and they have something like a global workspace but it's much more sophisticated than ours with a lot more because they're super intelligent just very advanced um then couldn't they run that argument against us and conclude that we're not phenomenally conscious because or there's no fact of the matter about whether we're a conscious because you know we it's a graded notion and our system is not as advanced as theirs and lacks all these further components or whatever and isn't that like a reductio of the

29:49 kind of argument so i address exactly that somewhere in the book yeah and then dan if i can remember what i said and i i think that one thing i say is that is that um if you imagine that their cognitive architecture is just an extension of ours right so maybe they've got um some faculty that enables them to um do advanced mathematics instantaneously or something or right

30:22 or they've got exact executive functioning capacities that enable them to resist that second marshmallow indefinitely or right and but at the core of it they've still got a global workspace and they've got capacities for reflective thinking and they've got higher order concepts right um then yeah when they raise the question of um phenomenal consciousness about us they'd be um wrong if they said oh our concepts wouldn't apply there right because the

30:53 relevant components the relevant bits that you need in order to employ a phenomenal concept are present in both them and us even though they've got got some extra stuff so it makes sense that you could take those very dispositions and as it were put them into the human mind and and get a determinant judgment but on the other hand if you if you imagine that their cognitive architecture is just completely different right i mean who knows i mean it's different from us as we are from the octopus as far as we can gather about octopi mines which have um

31:28 nine brains it seems right i mean so there's a sort of central one and then there's a separate brain that controls each arm and it's quite unclear what's going on yeah so suppose suppose they're an alien species of super octopi or something um then i think it's it might well be the case that whatever they mean by phenomenal consciousness wouldn't apply to us but equally in reverse i mean then i can't get my head around the the reverse thing you gave us a stipulation at the outset namely they are phenomenally conscious because for

32:02 me that means if the dispositions undermine underlying my use of the concept this were to be instantiated in that creature then they would be because now i can't they couldn't be instantiated in that creature without totally reorganizing that organism's mind right because yeah um so i think i try and do a sort of divide and conquer reply as i recall yeah interesting so so this this idea i mean so the reason why i was asking that is because in our

32:34 own case if i mean if we if we selectively impaired these faculties like the broadcasting broadcasted two faculties one by one uh but left all of the other ones intact so let's let's selectively impair just a language one like we'll just tms it or whatever you know um so knock out uh right here there you go now the language faculty doesn't receive the information uh then we selectively impair you know we just go around um and so now we selectively impair the

33:07 high order faculty so you can't have these thoughts then is the view that phenomenal consciousness disappears at a certain point if one of these is taken offline rather and there comes a point where there's no fact of the matter because there'll come a point where um you can't ask anymore right you can't say hey have you got an experience like this one or something because the person can't talk and they can't have higher order thoughts about their own

33:38 experiences and and yet the the so the projecting the dispositions to judge into the mind of that person likewise makes a false presupposition right so that person's mind would not be in the state that it's actually in the state that's the target of our thoughts um if it contained the dispositions to judge that i've now got right because that would imply that its language faculty wasn't impaired and its higher order thought faculty wasn't

34:12 impaired and so on so so so i say yeah there are there are cases of no facts that matter about humans too yeah that's interesting one of the things why i was puzzled by this is because you have changed your mind it seems in a more dramatic way than than maybe uh i thought of at first because the way i understood the dual content theory your original theory was that it's just availability that matters not actually being encoded or anything like that just it's got to be available

34:45 um but now it sounds like what you're saying is no it's more than just availability it's more than just being broadcasted it's actually got to be received something's going to be done with it oh does it have to be well well i i so so the the there's two different notions of availability here um i mean block draws this distinction somewhere right so there's for him something can be available um which isn't currently being received by systems by other systems right but it could be if attended to for example that's what

35:18 he thinks is um fragile working memory contents are there available but not received um no i i'd always intended that um the conscious contents were ones that were actually being processed by or at least perceived as input by um the consumer systems i mean whether they're actually doing anything with it is another matter right so you can like i mean much as tai back in 95 talked about um conscious contents being

35:54 those that are poised for use by executive systems it says it whether knocking on the door that that constitutes it is conscious not not what gets done downstream and it might be i mean so one way to think about dreaming is that it might be a bit like this right that there's there's globally broadcast contents available to executive systems and to language reporting systems but those are all suppressed and so nothing is actually done with them done with those contents right they they just

36:26 sort of go out there and then fade away and yet it would still be phenomenally conscious so they have to be so the idea is they have to be sort of on the on deck as it were it's not just like literally information is being sent the information has to be received and whether it's being employed right away or not it's got to be like in my my doc so to speak yeah that was that's the picture okay and i think it always was the picture i see so i think remembering back 20 years now but

37:00 i think yeah because i've always had a problem understanding what people people use the word availability in a lot of different ways and it's uh um i think someone like jesse uses it jesse prince uses it in a more liberal manner he just means like the information is being sent if there's if there's a stream going out then that's consciousness right whether it's ever picked up by anyone ever in the brain at all it doesn't really matter on his view whereas you you need the receiver and and then what doesn't matter is whether it gets utilized right away yeah yeah and is this the

37:32 um just as a tangential idea here is this the basis of your i'm thinking of a paper you had where you were talking about ned block's overflow argument and sort of reconcile it with with your views is this part of a part of your reconciliation the idea that it's there but not being used um it was now let me try to remember that i mean trouble is it almost as soon as i published that little short paper um i thought i'd made a mistake because i came across some other empirical work that that

38:04 suggests it was wrong and that the idea in that paper on on on ned block was an alternative explanation of richness where you could grant ned the richness of conscious experience while hanging on to the paucity of working memory by saying well maybe more information can get broadcast out than can be sustained and it made sort of intuitive sense right because because you think when you've got um if what happens with the tension

38:35 is that that sort of boosts and selects representations to get it into the global workspace right when you've got an incoming stimulus it's already sort of active right and you might think it requires less attention in order to get into the workspace then is required to hold it there when you've no longer got input right that's the picture right there maybe more can get broadcast but then you can only hang on to so much right that was the picture but there's really nice evidence um by oh

39:10 geez to as i recall um suggesting that that isn't so where they they do a limits of working memory task where instead of there being a gap between stimulus offset and um identifying whether something has changed you know the normal kind of kind of thing um it's immediate so you see a bunch of of colored squares and all disappear except one which is now

39:44 split in half one half of it retaining the original color and the other being a color drawn from elsewhere in the display and you just have to say which is the original color and when you crunch the math and so on you end up with the same four item limit that you get in retention cases and so that suggested to me that actually the bandwidth of broadcasting is the same as the bandwidth of of sustaining i see so the idea is that the the amount of information that's

40:16 being broadcasted like four items basically yeah right but but a lot of detail about those four items right so there's no well yeah so you've got i mean you you you you've got properties that are bound into those items um i mean the way i think of it is like an object file where you can bound in shape and color and texture and so forth and it's not quite that all that information comes for free but it looks like sort of um that you can you can i mean there are another set of experiments they did for example where um you know you can put out the usual

40:49 array of items and see how many people can can retain and then test them for whether they can retain color whether they can retain shape whether they can retain orientation and it turns out all of those extra properties are coming for free right i mean interesting okay so that so no you're no longer inclined to to defend the idea that that richness is uh a property of our experience uh well not in block sense of richness i mean i think there's a certain amount of richness but

41:22 it's a lot less than intuitively we think it's there and i don't believe the the the sort of eight item limit that brock believes in or the 12 item image or whatever it is that is the limit of fragile working memory okay interesting yeah that's okay um and so a lot of this i've been talking about different theories of consciousness and that's because you think this is the only way to make progress on this issue so i made it with respect to animals and and so forth so we've got to start by looking at the human case figure out

41:56 what theory of consciousness best fits our case and then and only then really should we start extrapolating out to these these other kinds of cases yeah yeah that's the picture i mean i i don't think there's a there's an easy easy way of doing it i mean a non-theory-laden way of doing it i mean so a whole chapter of the book is um well partly what got me writing the book was reading michael ty's lovely book on on i don't know what is it um fractious bees and anxious crabs or something else the other way around

42:30 um and he basically tries to run a theory free argument consciousness newton's principle as he called yeah yeah the idea that similar effect should have similar causes yeah and so i spent a whole chapter saying why that won't work in part because um he just he seems to have forgotten about all the whole range of unconscious experiences that we know about again from the human case that can nevertheless cause

43:03 flexible forms of behavior the sort of behavior that you know if you saw it in a in a cat you'd intuitively think oh conscious because you'd intuitively think that about a human right it turns out not so that that's i mean that brings up an interesting kind of idea because one of the things that i thought that i detected was that you think consciousness is important for a kind of flexible guidance of behavior um one of the examples you use is the long range truck driver right our famous example

43:34 um you have to sort of snap two in order to deal with the accident or the kid that jumped out in front of you as your example like the child in the street or whatever the um case may be and so yeah so so it's it sounds like what you're saying now is though that consciousness may be not required for flexible control of behavior um so it's it's okay so so so there's there's two things here there's there's there's a bunch of cases

44:07 um where behavior is actually controlled by unconscious states where one would take it to be flexible i mean if you see someone driving down the road and avoiding obstacles you would intuitively think that person is conscious why did he swerve around the parked car because he was aware of it or was conscious of it all right but that may not be true because it's just part of routine driving and it's only the truly unexpected thing right the

44:39 kid that races out after the ball or something that makes you snap too and it's not actually clear that you need to snap two in order to avoid the child it's just that it attracts attention in a way that the park car doesn't because the park car is routine the child in the way sends a sort of alarm signal right and that has the function of attracting attention and so it makes it conscious but actually you're probably responding before it becomes conscious right um because you know the the you know it

45:14 takes half a second almost for input to reach the level of consciousness at least on a global workspace theory approach and you probably hit the brakes before then right um but yeah even even for cases where we know for sure that it's phenomenally conscious states that are playing a role in making it flexible so if you think of cases like um prospective reasoning right where you're thinking well i've got that job offer should i take it or not right and

45:46 and you're imagining what it'd be like to live in that city or try to picture yourself having conversations with those new colleagues you're reminding yourself of what your pleasant place is like present place is like and so on um so you're engaging in in a form of flexible reasoning that that involves conscious experiences seems to be an open question whether the conscious component of it is playing any causal role right right so it might just be the contents

46:18 the first order contents that actually guide the reasoning right so so it's you know imagining this thing evokes positive affect and so it seems good and imagining this thing evokes negative affect and so it seems bad and it's all happening on the first order level although the imagined experiences are in fact conscious ones and and um available for higher order thoughts and all that other stuff it's just all that stuff isn't doing the work yeah it's almost incidental to what's actually it's the content like what the the

46:51 contents the intentional conceptual contents that are doing the work yeah that's interesting because i i felt like um it's a little bit of a the idea of flexible behavior i mean a lot of people want to use that as a way to say look of course the cat is conscious look what it's doing it's stalking its prey and something jumps out and it flexibly avoids the you know it's adapting to its environment and there's no almost no you know mammals which are as you point out in the book i think at one point that have this kind of rigid behavior you know like a

47:24 certain spider or wasp or whatever which does the same thing over and over when you mess with it um mammals don't behave that way so so clearly whether whatever the issue about phenomenal consciousness is they aren't like descartes brute machines they their animals are not simply unconscious and that's why descartes thought no for sure i mean so tzu um i'm full card carrying continuity theorists about the minds of humans and animals um and for sure the cat

47:58 is aware of the mouse as the mouse comes out of its hole right so this is transitive creature consciousness right right and the cat has some executive function capacities i mean for example very patient i mean the cat can do what a little kid often can't do which is weight right and this is true of most predators that they they tend to be really good at suppressing the impulse to approach what it is they want until

48:31 conditions are exactly right yeah um whereas other animals and humans in many circumstances aren't so good at that right you you see what you want and it's just really strong impulse to go get it so yeah there's executive function abilities there's something like a global workspace that's certainly intentional abilities um so continuity of mind whether there's continuity of phenomenal consciousness there is is quite another matter because i think that's this really special first person

49:03 what i'm aware of right now kind of thing yeah and i mean i'm one of the just uh another plug for the book one of the great things about it there's a whole chapter sort of nailing down this this idea that the that animals do have mental states there's this huge continuity between us that's something that's largely unargued for i mean people don't usually spend the time in these sorts of books going through that so i thought that was really nice to go through all the evidence and there's some great stories i really like the story about the ape that threw the rocks at the at the zoo yeah that was an example of advanced planning yes

49:37 exactly very advanced playing that was about one very clever uh very clever ape hiding those things around and all that sort of stuff so there's this so it does bring up the question of what the point though of consciousness is because you know um these animals are very sophisticated in their behavioral responses now of course they're not doing you know algebra higher order masses so far and so on um but uh they're doing very sophisticated things that are very flexible guided by the environment and in ways that clearly make them i mean they're sensitive to it so now in our case there's phenomenal consciousness

50:10 as well as all that other stuff but you know as we were just talking about a second ago if you did some various messing around you you could sort of make it no fact of the matter about us as well so what on your view do you think there's any role the function for consciousness specifically or does it is it really just yeah okay because it's it's i mean what what does the work is um content in the global workspace and it just so happens that the content in the global workspace in humans

50:41 is available to systems that can formulate higher order thoughts available to systems that can engage in reflective thinking and so on and that means you can formulate phenomenal concepts and now you can get but but the concept is just a concept which is in a first person way picking out a globally broadcast non-conceptual content there's no extra property that drops into the world when phenomenal consciousness arose i mean there just was well so the picture is something like this you you know you can survey the

51:15 the range of creatures with you know we've got humans up here and we've got bees down here and i think there's mentality all the way through and what you get as you move across that that space is a you know really complicated multi-dimensional similarity space of minds right whereas some creatures will have more sophisticated concepts some will have more sophisticated executive functional abilities some will have higher order thoughts some will not and so on and that's really interesting and

51:48 worth studying and as a reductive theorist about phenomenal consciousness i think that okay so you've got these first person phenomenal unconscious properties when you get to humans but that just is the states that are picked out by our phenomenal concepts on those states are just globally broadcast states there's no extra property that came into the world at that point or at any point in this sequence other than perfectly ordinary third person third personally describable properties like higher order thought capacities or

52:22 um executive function capacities as for reflective thinking that sort of thing yeah that's interesting because you i mean i think typically global workspace type theorists like to say well there's you know a lot there's a lot of function associated with consciousness as uh that's what workspace is and it does all that you can't do all these things without this and being broadcasted and so i think that's the interesting part of your view is you want to sort of cleave off those two things and say um well the functionality isn't really due to the consciousness bit but rather just to the global

52:55 broadcasting the fact that it's you know connected to the behavior right right but differently that the functionality comes from the access consciousness bit and not from the phenomenal consciousness but and drawing that distinction between that conceptual distinction between the two i mean i think they both pick out the same property if you like but um yeah it's a little more conscious i was just going to ask it on that note do you think so i guess i have the answer but let me just check you so would you also say the cat isn't access conscious either

53:26 doesn't have access conscious states oh the the answer to that is to some degree yes to some degree no right and the cat has attentional abilities it attention in the cat plays a similar sort of role that it plays in humans in that it it selects and boosts and suppresses competing representations and the result of that is that representations are made available to other broadly executive systems and long-term memory systems but the systems differ right so

54:03 if if you want to identify global broadcasting just with attention then yes it's a definite yes if you say no i mean global broadcasting where you know your model is the human one initially then to some degree yes to some degree no because the system is broadcast are to some degree similar to some degree just similar but it's but i noticed that the answer is not indeterminate no no because because now we're dealing with the third person concept of phenomenal consciousness right the

54:37 the and and there yeah it's all perfectly straightforward what's going on i think right yeah it's a matter of degree and there's there's no deep question there it's kind of sort of they do and i mean sometimes they something like it but but i mean it so someone is asking just before i get too distracted someone is asking in the chat trevor caruso is asking um in your view does the cat need the representational content of the mouse to stock it i think the answer is yes right they they're listening i mean quite how the cat conceives of

55:11 the mouse is an interesting question right i mean it's often really hard to know um quite how other animals are carving up the world and their concepts may be incremental with ours but yeah there will so for sure there will be a representational mental state that has the mouse as its target um and so the reason i was asking about the access consciousness thing is because i i think it's interesting maybe there's a little bit of attention here i'm not sure but so you want to say access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness are

55:45 conceptually distinct but in the human case they are the same thing right uh but in the animal case they aren't the same thing so i guess i'm i'm wondering yeah so it seems like why yeah anyway so what do you think about that is that is the tension on your vehicle i i i i don't think so because um what is the same thing in humans is that full rich notion of global workspace the one that

56:18 includes higher order thought and language and so forth right um so there can be an identity there and yet once you've moved to um a different kind of global workspace right um that's no longer identical to the thing that's identical to what we've got it's more or less similar to the thing that we've got and so it can be the case that there's no fact of the matter about whether there's an identity there i mean it's it's sort of i mean maybe this is an over i know it's an

56:52 oversimplification but it's sort of starting to sound like what you're really saying is that well in our case we pick something out that's that's globally broadcast and that's you know we call it phenom we're puzzled about that thing because of these concepts and so that's what phenomenal consciousness is but it's not really like a a deep or important or interesting property about us it's just so that we have these concepts and so if the animal minds were different and they had these concepts and what they had to account um but they don't and so you know i mean we

57:24 i'm not thinking about a souped-up cat mine or something like that but if the cat mine had evolved slightly differently so that there was a little module that could be like what's this thing over here then you would say well that counts because they have it so it really sounds like well this is just a theory of the thing well i guess you already said it's a theory the thing that we find puzzling in our case but not not in any other case right i mean so so the the ultimate target of explanation at least for the problem of consciousness as opposed to the problem of the distribution of consciousness across animal kingdom but the problem of

57:57 consciousness is is i guess what chalmers calls the measure problem it's what is it that gets us so tangled and puzzled and so forth about these distinctive states and there i think the answer is well nothing about the states that's terribly interesting it's just the fact that we can deploy these phenomenal concepts and and it's that that gets us into tangles and enables us to conceive of zombies and inverted spectra and all that stuff so by explaining how we get stuck in the

58:32 puzzles um we explain why the as it were the actual subject matter is just not interesting yeah i mean it's an interesting it's an interesting um it's a very interesting view it's hard it's hard to it's a deflationary view in a sense i mean really absolutely yeah um but i guess so what if we could enhance our phenomenal concepts uh would we then we would just stopped caring about this

59:04 like if because i i guess what the way first of all i want you to say a little bit about what you mean by phenomenal concepts because you have a whole story about them and and how you might think that solves or gets get answers the meta problem do you think it does answer the matter problem like yeah i think so i mean so so for me and this is actually something else that i've changed my mind on and become more like jesse and less like carruthers of of of um 2000 um i think that they're higher order indexical concepts that are formed on

59:38 the fly right so so in fact your repair referring to a globally broadcast experience but not under that description indeed not under any description i think so oh right so this is what it's like or when i die all this will disappear and you're tacitly in the background employing a higher order concept like experience in order to make the thought be about the experience rather than about the first order content of the experience

1:00:09 right so when i say all this will disappear i don't mean the world right i don't mean the trees that are currently in front of me and all that stuff right of course i mean my experience of the world um but i don't conceptualize it as such explicitly um so there's no surface contradiction then in thinking some of the weirder thoughts that one can think um that philosophers try to get us puzzled about that could be a a creature that has has all of the same contents as me

1:00:45 and so forth but he nevertheless lacks this and although this is in fact a representation of trees and and i just said that the creature has a representation of trees there's there's there's no entailment from one to the other right because because i'm not conceptualizing it as such um so i think given that so back up a little bit i mean you you sort of asked what these concepts are i the way they get applied to globally broadcast contents i use the word acquaintance but there's

1:01:20 nothing not physically deep there it's just whatever goes on when a content is globally broadcast and you make a first order judgment oh that's a nice shade of green or that's a big tree right you've got contents available to judgmental systems concept wielding systems and that enables a direct thought about the object of the experience well likewise when those very same contents are made available to concept wielding systems that also

1:01:53 have higher order thought capacities you can now deploy a concept about that experience but there's no magic there's no coming into contact with one's own experiential properties or something right it's just global broadcasting to conceptual systems that's involved um but that's what enables you to conceive of zombies and feel that there's an explanatory gap and all that stuff right so that's what generates all the puzzles but so i know you have this footnote about the um

1:02:26 acquaintance being anodyne but uh i guess it does that really count as acquaintance i mean basically what i i don't care i mean if if you think no the notion of acquaintances is richer thing um fine um i'll substitute you know availability to conceptual systems or being received by conceptual systems or something like that okay i see um yeah interesting and i see another question here from uh victor uh barcelos i don't know if i'm saying the right name but he's asking what you think about a non-neurotypical

1:02:59 persons do you think there's gradations of amongst humans um i i think that there's a that there are a bunch of borderline cases for whether there's a fact of the matter or not right so so the claim that um whether a a crow is phenomenally conscious is there's no fact of the matter there is not supposed to be a borderline thing right but for sure there will be borderline cases amongst humans i mean think of neural development right

1:03:33 so you've you've got a fetus that is growing and developing and getting a brain and now it's born and at those early stages it doesn't have any of the capacities for deploying phenomenal concepts right the the to try and think well if if the dispositions underlying my current concept this were instantiated in the mind of the fetus would it be well that is just there's no fact of the matter there any more than there is with the monkey because

1:04:05 the mind of the fetus would have to be very different from what it actually is in order to have these conceptual dispositions but as the child grows of course there'll be a whole range of borderline cases where you don't know whether there's a fact of the matter or there isn't partly because we don't know in detail what's required for possessing phenomenal concepts um i mean exactly how rich do your higher order thought capacities have to be do you have to be a language user i mean we

1:04:37 don't even know that i think whether um partly because for that reason um but i don't care and because there's no substantive question being asked here i i i say yeah you can you know as a philosopher you could get yourself you know spend a lot of time working out exactly what the requirements for having a phenomenal concept are and trying to nail down exactly when it makes sense to project one of your phenomenal concepts into the mind of a child

1:05:10 yeah why bother there's no extra fact that you're getting out there other than the facts about the child's conceptual capacities and that's really interesting but the further question and where as the child develops can i project my own phenomenal concepts into its mind and have that have it be as a fact of the matter about is applying um who cares i don't and amongst foreground humans yeah there'll be a similar kind of um set of borderline cases where we're unsure

1:05:44 whether it makes sense to project a concept into their mind or not and again i say um i have a paper recently that's that's coming out where i um the title is stop caring about consciousness yeah and that's what i think we should do i mean phenomenal consciousness is a waste of everyone's time i wrote a whole book about a topic that was everyone's time wasted 30 years peter what's going on pretty much um yeah that paper was coming out phil topics is that right uh

1:06:16 yeah okay um yeah that's interesting i mean part of the reason why people get all worked up about this issue is because of the moral issues right they're they they think that you know if if you're saying there's no fact of the matter about infants and humans and the cat over there then we'll just do whatever we want to them certainly i think that was descartes view right that they're just machines that doesn't matter but that's not your view in fact you've for many many years defended the idea that there are non phenomenally conscious states that matter like their intentions their desires and so forth and so no no i think and and even stronger actually than i argued in the

1:06:52 book i mean in the book what i said was um empathy doesn't require projecting one's sorry sympathy doesn't require projecting one's own experience into the mind of another right you can be sympathetic for someone just by caring about whether they get what they want or not for example right so one doesn't have to have fellow feeling um with the other creature in order to want to ameliorate its situation or help it get what it wants or

1:07:24 take its pain away or something but in the book i said well maybe maybe empathy requires fellow feeling and maybe that implicates phenomenal consciousness um but empathy is a bad idea anyway and i i i drew on paul bloom's book against empathy where he argues that it's it's it really is a bad thing and you're much better off just with something much more straightforward but i think that was a mistake that that there's a kind of ambiguity and fellow feeling

1:07:57 and so i think i can fellow feel a pain with a cat in that the first order contents involved in pain perception as something that i can feel and i can imagine that taking place in the cat and pains of feelings so you know i i think there can be a representation an imaginative representation of what it is that the cat is feeling but then in philosophy we use this term

1:08:32 feel in a technical sense too to mean the feel of experience right where you know colors have feels i mean so color perceptions have feels and things right and it makes perfectly good sense to say that there might be feelings that lack feel so perceptions of of and i think there are lots of them actually i mean so so there are perceptions of bodily posture for example that aren't phenomenally conscious but nevertheless play a role i mean you adjust your posture without

1:09:06 being aware that it become uncomfortable right um so i think even empathy actually can make perfectly good sense across the border of creatures that um either don't have phenomenal consciousness or where there's no fact of the matter whether they're phenomenally conscious because there is a fact to matter about whether they're feeling pain and then you can be in a state of fellow feeling with that pain where your feeling is de facto phenomenally conscious and there's no fact of the matter about whether they're feeling as

1:09:38 phenomenally conscious but it's not the phenomenally conscious bit that makes it bad it's the feeling that they haven't represented pain the the having of the feeling which is bad so so i wonder if you're aware of the the work of uh jeff lee you know um jeff lee he's a he's a he's a philosopher at you um uc berkeley was a student at nyu a while back um but uh yeah because he's he's written some stuff about kind of deflationary pluralism about

1:10:11 consciousness that there may be states of the zombie that matter just as much to the zombie as you know our states matter even though they're not conscious um and so i was wondering if there's you felt that there was some kind of similarity but if you haven't read our uh in canada i mean what you say sounds true to me yes i mean that zombies would matter so so you do agree with that all right so um so then on your view we have reasons to treat animals in particular ways to minimize their suffering um but not because they're conscious or phenomenally conscious

1:10:44 but simply because they have these representational states that play these big characteristic roles and so forth yep and and in particular they they have valence states i mean states that um they take to be good or bad in the same sort of way that we take states to be good or bad do you think that's an important part if they didn't have valence states would it then become morally neutral how we treat them uh yes i think yeah i think i think that yes yeah it's it's it's the it's the um goodness and

1:11:18 badness components of experiences that make them morally significant there's this thought experiment that david chalmers has talked about involving vulcans um these hypothetical creatures that he postulates that are phenomenally conscious but only visually and auditorily they have experience but they don't have any conveyance states they don't feel they don't care like um and but he still thinks it would be immoral to kill such a creature or treat it oh right well that's another matter i mean so so um it would be there's no need to feel sympathy for

1:11:51 such a creature because it doesn't suffer it doesn't find anything bad but but whether that creature has moral standing is a completely other matter right and i could be a cantian say about what confers moral standing right and say well yes this is a rational being and so of course is a center of value and and i should respect that center of value and so on um and i can i could be a cantian but still think that sympathy is demanded for certain kinds of creatures so i wouldn't feel sympathetic for that

1:12:26 being but i'd feel sympathetic for the cat and so there might be a reason not to do nasty things to the cat even though the cat isn't a rational creature in the same way that the the martian is and so what how does all these ideas translate over to the the non-biological cases like should we worry about roombas i mean i think about roombas a lot those robotic vacuum cleaners that drive around and um i always feel bad like when the roomba battery dies before it gets back to its charging station and when they

1:12:58 get stuck in the corner i see these youtube videos where the roomba's like bumping into the corner and i'm like someone help the roomba um and so you know i i think yeah it was is that anthropomorphization a little bit sure but are there cases where you could ramp it up a bit um and have a a non-biological system that demanded that we treat it in certain ways or do you think that is a yes absolutely um so so i think that i mean project ahead and imagine that um artificial intelligence has got to

1:13:32 the point where you know you can create an android a a creature that i mean whether it looks like a human is neither here nor there but let's suppose it's got a cognitive organization that mirrors ours right it's got perceptual intake it's got processing of those intakes a bit like ours you know perhaps using slightly different algorithms and so on issuing unconceptualized thought-like representations of the world and it's got goals and has to choose between its goals and so on um and then i think we're just in the same position as

1:14:06 as um was it the martians that chalmers was talking about or was it the vulcan yeah i mean it's just that it's it's not made of biological material that's all but the same it's a rational being and whether and i have no problem either with you know if if that being that machine is provided with sensory systems that are intrinsically balanced for it right i mean

1:14:37 that it gives rise to direct motivation to get away from the stimulus or whatever that that would be the equivalent of pain and so there'd be reasons not to cause the computer pain um but whether it's phenomenally conscious again i don't care and but but in the in the limit though it seems like you you could get a non-biological system on your view that was phenomenally conscious if it just had

1:15:09 a global workspace sort of very like ours like in in in one case like if we uploaded your brain to a computer for example would you sorry so it it i mean this is one of those places where you can get into a really technical discussion if it mattered um it it might turn on whether dispositions are identical to their categorical bases or not right because remember for me the phenomenal consciousness thing is about whether my disposition to use this

1:15:41 concept can be projected into that other creature's mind right so if this disposition if the dispositions underlying my current use were instantiated in that mind blah blah blah and if you think that dispositions are identical with their categorical bases well that's something neurological in the human case and won't be in the computer case and so actually there'd be no fact of the matter there right you you come there's no fact about taking this to disposition and putting it there whereas if it's contingent what the

1:16:15 categorical base of the disposition is then yeah maybe it's fine and again i say i don't care i mean that there are substantive questions that you could address but they're questions about dispositions and and we shouldn't be addressing them because we think there's some important question about whether the computer would be phenomenally conscious or not because it's not important and it's not well it doesn't matter for anything for me yeah i mean so hypothetically if there were

1:16:46 the chance to upload one's brain then would you be doing would you this argument convince you it doesn't matter i mean you would say someone says well if you upload you lose your phenomena you won't be you'll be a zombie and you say i don't care that's not what's important to me um i mean i well hang on that's that's not since there's no extra property there if i would be a zombie the only way i could be a zombie would be to lose my capacity for higher order thoughts and reflective thinking

1:17:19 and maybe language and yeah that would matter to me right well there's no fact of the matter then is what i meant to say right okay um yeah so so so if we shift to a case where there's no fact of the matter um yeah i'd say go for it i mean there's there's going to be nothing missing that matters for anything cool [Laughter] so i wanted to ask you about some of the objections to global workspace theory i mean you spent a lot of time defending the the theory in the book and i think that's one of the nice there's a lot of nice things about the book but that's

1:17:50 one of the nice things that you really go through a lot of the current stuff here um and i know you talk about this but i want to get you to talk about the the role of attention in the theory because as i understand the way you present it attention is necessary as a gateway into the global work space um and you know there's been some work against the front by the usual characters the ones you label as you know the kind of anti-global workspace crowd um i'm thinking of you know suchia and and related characters uh like kristoff um but uh now and and company but uh so there's some work

1:18:24 that suggests that attention is not necessary for consciousness which i think would be bad for the global workspace theory if that were true but you spent some time saying you're not really convinced by that so i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about why well so so i'm not sure which examples you have in mind but certainly early on it was thought that um just perception did not require attention because when you when you do um change blindness experiments right the kinds of things where you have pictures flipping backwards and forwards

1:18:57 and people just don't notice that there's been some major change in the focal object right the the airplane has lost its wing or something so there's there's there's change blindness but people immediately notice if you change the background right if you change the background from say a forest landscape to an urban landscape background and that suggested well no all right so we when you've got people attending to something hard and they'd miss a change in the focal

1:19:32 object but they couldn't miss the change in the background that suggests that background perception or just perception doesn't require attention but then there's really nice work by um michael michael michael i know him as michael i'm blanking on his last name anyway yeah michael cohen thank you um showing that if you just load up attention enough you can get people blind to background changes to to changes in the gist of a scene as well um really dramatic changes too

1:20:06 right there yeah yeah i know where it switches completely yeah and indeed he's there's a really lovely paper he's got out um just recently because occasionally i surf around people's websites to see what they've been doing he's got this paper wearing virtual reality goggles where you can use eye trackers to know exactly where people's eyes are being directed and it's programmed so that they take all the color out of everything else right so whenever you know i'm looking at a green green

1:20:39 forest and i move my eyes from here to here and all the green is gone except for the bit where my eyes move to and then i move it to here and all the rest of the green has gone and people don't notice it's really i've seen a video of what it looks like from inside the vr camera for that because i saw i hadn't give a talk just recently yeah it's really quite amazing there's like a little circle of green and the rest is just black and white and people are you know they're really surprised some some people notice obviously but um some people don't so one wonders what's going on so that's that's especially striking because we know that there is color

1:21:11 perception in the periphery and and its resolution isn't bad so this is really an attentional effect it's because attention tends to move with circades and so in naturalistic conditions you're not paying any attention to stuff that is outside of your current circade so what's your take from that though so your take is that so your take-home message is outside of attention well excuse me when there when there is no attention there is no experience of the thing that's basically

1:21:44 the message um well no no no um conscious experience i mean we know there's all kinds of priming stuff that you could still do and and the sensory motor system may still be able to respond to what's not being attended to yeah i'm sorry i was i tend to use experience as a code word for consciousness all right yeah okay i i i i don't yeah right i know you gotta you gotta it's gotta be careful about these sorts of things um but i guess yeah so i wasn't really thinking about those sorts of cases but i was thinking about the kind of cases where they try to experimentally

1:22:15 differentiate showing that you could have attention without consciousness and consciousness without attention um and there are some cases where uh where where where people have alleged that you can i mean some work by um uh by as i just mentioned christoph calkin uh now where they they try to distinguish between you know the being conscious of the stimuli versus paying attention to it and showing that you get orthogonal they come apart in orthogonal ways and have different effects on the perceptual cases yeah i i'm i'm

1:22:50 forgetting the details of that work and so anything i say now i think would probably be um not helpful to anyone okay but but generally you'd be sort of suspicious of work that tries to separate attention from consciousness yeah um and what about so you know i've heard i've think about bees um and their bee dances i've heard the bee dance described as a kind of global workspace and i talked to bernie bars and he thinks the bees doing their dance as a kind of global workspace um that excuse me not the bees doing

1:23:23 their dance but that the hive becomes the kind of global workspace when the bee comes back and the bees block there's all these receiver systems and so forth and so on um so i mean what do you think about those sorts of cases do you do you think that that's really a case of a kind of global workspace there or well it's an interesting thought i mean so so um seeley did this lovely book called the what is it the mind of the hive or something right where he pushed that idea that um there's a kind of distributed decision-making that takes place across

1:23:57 the hive in lots of different respects when they're for example deciding whether to accept a certain new place as a new nest site and you've got these various bees coming back giving dances saying over here and over here and there's a kind of collective decision making process that spreads across the surface of the of the bee colony um i don't know i mean it is an interesting question i i think one thing one can say is um at a course grain

1:24:32 level yes this is a global workspace i mean i mean compare it to to some of the debates about extended mines and and stuff right so remember otto with his notebook right um at a cost grain level you can say yeah the notebook is otto's memory i mean because it plays a similar sort of functional role to what a memory system does in normal person and so on um but on a fine grain level it's completely different i mean for example he can't consult his memory in the dark

1:25:04 right whereas there's no problem at all about remembering things in the dark for normal person and so on so it it really just depends at the level of functional organization that you want to pitch to your inquiry i think and there's no fact the matter about which is the right level except unless it means the level that is most productive for science right and there i think it's just an open question how productive it is to think of the the the mind as sorry the hive as being a mind um or whether it's just a

1:25:39 sort of helpful analogy that you know you can see it that way sometimes and i don't know yeah so again because that's what i was kind of interested to find out about your view about whether you thought there could be kind of these group minds um i'll defend this idea and bryce hubner is one of these guys who's uh in his previous work defended this idea that it could be group level minds and so forth and so on um and so it sounds like what you're saying is that at least in the b case you'd be sort of non-committal depending on like what what we were talking about and actually

1:26:10 across for the question generally because it's one i haven't worked on or thought about deeply i mean so what i've just said about it depends on what's the most fruitful one for science is i think would be my answer but if you say so what is the most fruitful level of description for science [Laughter] exactly okay um and so i wanted to ask talk about concepts i i know where i can't keep you around here forever but if you have a little bit more time i want to ask about the the idea that um there are no conscious thoughts

1:26:42 uh because i wonder if you have you changed your mind on that because i thought earlier you were saying that you did think that thought like conceptual representations are broadcasted um but uh in your previous work you've argued that only non-conceptual contents are broadcast or at least that's why i interpreted it well so so here it's important to distinguish um the two notions of conscious um access conscious versus phenomenally conscious and that there's two orthogonal sort of debates one could have here

1:27:14 so if you ask um our thoughts access conscious right well it sort of depends upon what you mean by thought um so if you mean something that has conceptual propositional content then yes because you know as you hear the sentences i'm now uttering i think that a semantic content is getting built into the sound stream as you perceive it and you hear that sequence of sound as meaning

1:27:47 and then you go back and say what i've just said right as meaning that so there's a proposition that's getting bound into the perceptual content um but if you mean um i thought something like a judgment or a decision or um a a standing state belief that you'd formed on another occasion then no what you get into working memory is something that might be caused by such a state right so you know if you ask yourself

1:28:20 what you believe about such and such and a sentence comes to mind into working memory then it's not the belief itself which has been globally broadcast it's a downstream effect of it it's it's what you do when you take that um stored information and transform it into a motor plan um which is then used to generate a rehearsal of what you would expect it to sound like

1:28:53 if that motor plan were executed and then that result of that is in turn interpreted by the language system and you end up with the content and if you're lucky you end up with the content which matches the content you started with not always but i'm lucky you do but what you certainly haven't got is that very state here right i mean it's it's it's as distant from that state as um as is your interpretation of what i say from my state right i mean i think from involving the same things

1:29:27 so yeah i think i think um attitudes don't figure in working memory and so are never access conscious right it's it's sensory type or sensory involving um states that figure in working memory but concepts can figure in working memory and propositions can figure in working memory that can be what we might call a i mean casing calls passing thoughts right when when you're not doing anything and you think i wonder what i'll be

1:29:59 doing tomorrow right and so there's a content there which is before your mind in working memory and is conscious um but isn't necessarily a judgment or a decision or anything of that sort um so so that's the sense in which thoughts aren't conscious now there's a quite different sense in which um even for those concepts which are globally broadcast or which do get bound into working memory representations which is the way

1:30:31 i think it goes those concepts um make a constitutive difference to the phenomenal properties of the state right and that i think reduces to do they give rise to hard problem thought experiments or do they just influence properties of the of the state which give rise to hard problem thought experiments and and i think the latter i think that they don't make a constitutive difference they make a causal difference so

1:31:03 the standard example hearing the very same sentence with or without understanding surely there's a phenomenal difference there um i think well yeah how you're going to pass the sound stream into chunks and so forth will differ in the two cases and so the experiences will differ and so it'll be the phenomenal properties will differ um but it's not the meaning which is itself phenomenal on my view yeah i mean there's a lot that a very interesting stuff there so just taking the first thing that you we're

1:31:35 talking about the access conscious claim um so because i'm trying to make sense of of the of a kind of something that you wrote about in the article on this which i know is sort of also from the book but anyway um you gave this example of looking at the trunk and you want a chunk of your card [Laughter] but you know so you're you're looking at a bunch of luggage or whatever in the in the trunk of the car and you're trying to think about how to arrange it so all these things fit so you want to say okay so maybe i'll move this that way and and as

1:32:08 far as i understood the argument your claim was you don't have a bunch of thoughts about how these things should do rather you sort of picture the way they might fit together and then you have a thought that says oh this is the way they'll they'll fit together or something like that so that what's actually conscious is the experience some imaginative acts about how they might be arranged and then a misrepresentation of that stuff as being a thought i mean i i i think that's not quite the

1:32:41 way i'd want to put i mean so so now now we're in the domain of um basically imaginative reasoning right so so i think that's what's going on here that that as you look at the size of the trunk and its dimensions and you look at the luggage that you got stacked up next to you and you're thinking all right so which do i put where um what you can do is take in working memory a representation of this bit of luggage for example

1:33:15 um you imagine it twisted onto its side so you do the kind of thing that you know koslin spent ages doing experiments off you do a mental rotation of the image and you place it there and then you take this and do a mental rotation of the image and you place it there and you see it's not going to fit right now so so you spend some time playing with transformations of visual representations until you reach a fit and when you reach a fit you may or may not articulate anything to yourself

1:33:47 you may just go ahead and do it right and you've satisfied the constraints or you may say in in a speech you may think ah that's the way to do it put that one on the left right and and that may express a decision um but it's actually sort of superfluous i mean you don't need to do anything like that to do it and i think that's exactly the kind of reasoning that we have evidence that birds can do right that's this kind of perspection of where you're mentally rehearsing actions forming

1:34:19 imagistic representations of the of the consequences and seeing whether they fit task demands or not right i mean responding effectively and affect the outcome you get that really nice example in the book actually of this kind of uh i forgot what kind of birds they were but uh they're trying to solve this task about using the stick to get something that they haven't uh they're they were calendaring crows i think who seem to be especially smart yeah they're yeah and they sit there staring at the setup for like 50 seconds or something like that and then solve the problem really quite amazing

1:34:52 so so on on on this way of thinking then when when they're doing that what they're doing is broadcasting some representations of the shapes or excuse me of the yeah the lengths and the shapes and the distances and so forth and but and in the human so like i mean i guess i want to talk about the birds too much because i want but in the human case i thought the point was that you know that you may have a thought like oh this is the way to do it but at the first order level so to speak there are no thoughts like if you move the thing this way then

1:35:25 it will fit congruently with that oh right right i mean so if you if you i mean let's focus on decision right so um one would normally express the decision as something like put this one on the back and that one on the right okay and now as as you're imagining the transformations when you imagine this one at the back and that one on the right um there's a response to that which as it

1:35:59 were recognizes that it satisfies um task demands produces positive affect it feels good it feels right okay um and that's enough to set you moving doing the thing right um but the that whatever sets you doing the thing doesn't itself fear in working memory it's a response to the representations that you've just transformed and arranged thus and so in working memory right

1:36:31 and what in you know commonsensically what we think of as the decision is when you say ah that one on the left right and you verbalize it to yourself now that's caused by the decision it isn't the decision right right i mean i think we mistake sometimes mistake our inner verbalizations for judgments and decisions and formings of intention and so on when they may be caused by those things or they may cause them downstream of themselves

1:37:04 um but they're playing this intermediate role they're they're not actually the things that do the work i see so so when you're saying that the the thought or the thing isn't conscious um yeah i guess i'm a little bit confused in what sense is it not conscious then i mean you it is actually so it's it's it's it's not access conscious in the sense it doesn't itself figure in working memory in a weak sense it might be higher order

1:37:40 conscious and that you know that you've made that decision right um but then it depends on on whether you think um a state can be conscious because you know that it's there although you've had to interpret it being there right because on my view the way you respond to your own in the speech is no different from responding to the inner speech the outer speech of someone else right it's received as input by the language faculty and you have to

1:38:12 interpret its content and so on um so if you're happy to say that you can be conscious of other people's thoughts or sorry that your awareness of someone else's thought renders it conscious um you could say that about your own case too yeah i guess i wonder why uh you'd have to have that kind of symmetry there because um because you can always say by definition by fear it's only your own states that beliefs about which true beliefs about which render them conscious yeah well i think you could do a little bit more

1:38:45 than that i think that i mean um like uh like someone like david rosenthal what they're gonna say is the difference is that you have to represent the thought has to represent that you're in the state and you can't do that with other people's states yeah try enough yep yep okay um okay so yeah this is very interesting because now so switching over to the phenomenological claim that you were making if i may um i guess because i do defend the idea of cognitive phenomenology i think that there is such a thing uh so i guess i i do feel that there are these kinds of

1:39:23 zombie problems marry problems with um with with concepts and uh yeah so can you i wonder if i can get you to say a little bit about why i mean suppose no one ever had a conscious thought um and then they suddenly came to have one it seems to me a bit strange to say well there's no change in their phenomenal is it like there's it could be a zombie before they could be a zombie afterwards um but but the conscious thought here means um let's stick with verbalized thought a sentence occurring in working memory

1:39:56 okay and that's a phenomenally conscious experience right and the question is just whether the conceptual content of that thought makes a constitutive contribution to the phenomenal properties right so the way benedictine and i tried to run this was um if you think of of um with respect to any experience that has a conceptual content so i think we did this with duck rabbits or

1:40:30 something like that right where you can make it go backwards and forwards um and try to get um a a zombie thought experiment going not for the experiential components of the experience right the shapes and so forth but rather for the concept that you deploy right right so that you have to think something like there could be a creature just like me in all respects um except that and a creature that represents it now as representing a duck but who

1:41:02 nevertheless lacks this kind of experience right the the the whatever you have when you represent it as a duck and we couldn't get our heads around that one i mean i can do it for color i can do it with shape i can do it for you know any non-conceptual content which can be a modal by the way and you can do it for numerosity i think and you can do it for valence um but i i i can't do it for concept contents yeah um but i guess i ca i think i can so i

1:41:36 wonder if part of the issue here is sort of one's antecedent's views um that because i sort of already think there's a phenomenally that they do that concepts do contribute constitutively to phenomenology i'm disposed to think that there's you can get this difference you don't so that's why and so therefore you don't so i wonder if there's kind of a you know a problem with these sorts of arguments here given that what they reveal more is like something about us rather than something about the thing we're talking about well so i mean maybe um

1:42:10 i mean what i would say is that that that some of the arguments that have been put up for cognitive phenomena cognitive phenomenology are not very good yeah i agree right and so i'd want a uh a reason for thinking that they're there that i can i can get on board with because because the people who who are meaning blind and so on i think um sorry i i forget you ran that example but you're supposed to imagine someone whose behaviorally and

1:42:42 cognitively just like me except that he never experiences the meaning of what's said to him right it seems to him meaningless right and and what's forgotten there is that is that part of um understanding is access consciousness right that if he's really just like me then um as soon as something said to him he knows what to say in reply or um knows what would follow from what's just been said and

1:43:16 so on and so forth and then to hang on to the idea but nevertheless it seems meaningless to him i can't get my head around it right because he he he knows what it's about he knows what's being said he knows what follows he knows what i should say and and yeah right so what what what's what's missing he's missing yeah i mean but you could run the same thing sort of about like uh zombies too right i mean but you don't think that you have that sort of issue because even though you know in our so i guess the analogy would be that in our case

1:43:49 phenomenal consciousness on your view is access consciousness so when you're told to conceive of the zombie you're conceived as someone that has all that same stuff even the same concepts right this this our experience this e or whatever um but you think you can make sense of that but not of the other things so i'm puzzled why you think you can make sense of the i mean i i i i guess because i think um we do have these first person content concepts for referring to non-conceptual broadcast states to

1:44:23 experiences um but not for referring to concepts i mean i don't know how well perhaps you'll show me how you can do it but i don't know how to have a thought myself and then say that concept and individuated just create concept rather than the word that i've used or the thing which instantiates that concept or something right right so i don't think there's there's

1:44:54 there's phenomenal concepts for concepts yeah yeah i mean i guess yeah i guess i do think that we pick it out it sort of has that experience um but it's what it feels like when when we have the concepts um so for sure i can pick out the experience into which the concept is bound well that's different right that's a that's it right i'm talking about the conceptual experience but yeah i it's this is the cognitive phenomenology

1:45:29 thing is so confusing because there's so much disagreement about it i mean um but but what gives me a little bit of hope is that there's a lot of disagreement about the other stuff too like i meet people they say oh this is what it's like business that's all meaningless bs and what are you guys talking about so i do wonder like how much stock we should put into these sort of um these kind of arguments because you find them even for cases where we don't think i mean you and i for instance agree about the what is like thing about the experience of read but maybe not about the concept

1:46:02 of cat but then i meet someone else they don't even agree about the con about the red thing so how are we are we all just sort of spinning our own well i mean i i i think there are um you know there are kind of subtle issues here so so other other thought experiments that have been used together the cognitive phenomenology case which a bit more plausible and again i forget who who produced this one um but the the the woman who does

1:46:35 advanced math but has no sensory experience at all yeah i don't know that one um so at a certain point so she thinks about proofs and stuff purely a modally right so she doesn't have any speech or any of that kind and she's gotten it she's she's a brain in the vat as it might be right but nevertheless still thinking and now it's an empirical matter whether that's possible um it's certainly conceivable i'll grant that

1:47:06 and and we're supposed to imagine that that she suddenly sees the way a proof should go and surely that's a phenomenal experience there's something it's like to now see the way the proof should go right and i share that intuition but i think that you can get it through some of the other a-modal non-conceptual components which are phenomenal or do contribute to phenomenal consciousness like um basically valence so so

1:47:41 there's ease of ease of processing right um when you see how a proof can go you you can there's a kind of temporal dimension it's now easy to run through the various steps there's a feels good to it it's it's it's being processed fluently as you go through probably feels satisfying um so there is a component of of experience that would be left behind in someone who has no sensory experience that would contribute to phenomenal consciousness um but it wouldn't be the concept per se or it needn't be

1:48:14 right you can say why this would feel like something without having to bring in concepts yeah so but you can modify the kind of thought experiment slightly by making sure that person she didn't have any valence states yeah well then it's not so clear that i can get on board with the intuition yeah um still stay because it still seems like there would be a kind of aha like feeling or experience that one had a kind of rational sense of oh this is the way it goes and i get that you

1:48:47 what you're saying that would be accompanied by uh this feels nice or easy easier to go this way or something like that but it seems like so you you absent that you just don't share the intuition i guess this is why i have problems with these sorts of yeah no i agree it's it's it it's very much a sort of niche debate yeah exactly yeah and it is puzzling i mean a part of my view is that the reason why a lot of the i do think the attitudes are i have this phenomenology and that you know sort of the the phenomenology goes to the attitude like there's something

1:49:19 that it's like to believe versus desire versus uh you know to want et cetera and um part of the reason why i think why people no don't notice this is because every belief sort of feels the same it feels like you know like like uh like it's true or like this is the way things are or something like that but the so i'd also think the concepts um but yeah it's not clear to me what way we can make any sort of progress on this debate in in an objective way i guess that's one of the things that in these in like in these

1:49:51 other cases i can sort of see a path forward in this case i can't it's hard to see and and interestingly scientists are interested right i mean so they're interested in consciousness but the question of of of conceptual consciousness or or cognitive phenomenology i don't see anyone getting in on board with that one and probably not perhaps for just the reason that you're saying that nothing really much turns on it and it's it's it's for philosophers to worry about and stay out

1:50:25 there yeah it's about a way to keep ourselves in in business um some somebody is saying in the chat over here play uh platin's arm saying just sort of anecdotally that a lot of mathematically gifted persons tend to say that they intuitively feel the answer um but of course that can be explained by the thing that you were saying the second god maybe there's other these other kind of contents that are playing the role yeah yeah interesting well um as always your work is very thought-provoking and very careful i really admire the way that you follow the argument you're

1:50:58 willing to change your mind you're open for your evidence so all of the qualities that i admire in philosophers less dogma and more more argument um and and more empirical stuff too so i highly recommend your views and your books and your work but i i i do have to let you go because i can't keep you forever but i do wonder at the end here whether there's anything which you were expecting maybe would come up which hasn't um and the answer can be no but i do always like to check uh i i i think the answer is no i mean a lot of stuff came up that i

1:51:30 thought wouldn't come up um [Laughter] sorry about that um okay well i want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me i i really enjoyed it and um yeah just hang out for one second i'll say bye off the air but once again thanks very much okay all right so we're off we're clear