Consciousness Live! with Liad Mudrik, Lucia Melloni, and Michael Pitts (S4 E17)

0:00 um go ahead okay and the ad one thing i need to know is she's very good at multitasking [Laughter] all right we are live and that's good to know uh about the multitasking so um i'm very excited today because joining me uh not one not two but three very special guests in fact this is the first for me it's having this many people on at once so i'm excited um but uh so um so we have uh liad modric lucia maloney and michael pitts um so i wonder if you guys could just

0:32 say a little bit about who you are and what you do to get us started and um i guess we agree that lucia would go first right but yeah i could i can definitely go first so who i am i'm i'm a trained clinical psychologist a neuroscientist a curious person about consciousness the mind working in frankfurt at the max plan for empirical aesthetics and nyu and that's more or less it and i have the pleasure to work with these two guys you know like here who you know like it's just amazing to be you know with them so yeah and i'm and i'm excited to you know

1:04 have you interviewing us about this yeah thank you i'm excited too i'm biad madrick um coming from tel aviv university i've been fascinated with fascinated with the question of consciousness i know it's a cliche but in my case it's true i you know more or less since the first day i set foot at the university and started talking about the mind body problem and consciousness and brain and how it comes about and so on and so forth um i've because i've been interested in the question both from the philosophical

1:37 and the neuroscientific point of view of i i did two phds one in cognitive neuroscience and the other in philosophy and then continued um to a postdoc with christophe koch which was a great honor and pleasure and now working in my lab in tel aviv mostly on neural correlates of consciousness and testing theories of consciousness unconscious versus conscious processing how they how the two differ from one another and also consciousness role in in voluntary action so this entire free will uh question um which is a you know a small question

2:11 that people need to so so and as lucia said i also have the honor and the pleasure of working with both of them in the cogitate consortium i know you guys are all so friendly i love it can i tell you she's good at multitasking have you interviewed somebody has two i think i phds actually i think that claudia maria too and yeah i think dina ross is the same

2:42 right yeah i know i've always wanted to you should you should interview her too because she's great yeah i've emailed her but dad i would love to speak with her uh so that's awesome so um i want to i don't want to start asking you about it yet but yeah exactly oh yeah i could i can introduce myself um i'm michael perez i'm a professor at reed college and i only have one pa one phd and my background's in psychology and neuroscience and i study mostly perception and attention and how

3:14 those are related intimately with with consciousness so i've done some work on bistable perception and binocular rivalry and then also inattentional blindness masking all these ways we can um we can manipulate a perceptual awareness and and study the neural correlates of those those differences when we perceive something versus when we don't and as lucia and leah had mentioned um i'm just thrilled to be working with both of them two of the smartest people i've ever had a chance to work with and and it's just been a pleasure so far

3:48 yeah so there's not a lot of adversarialness in the collaboration so far yeah exactly that's awesome um well so that's interesting so we have a mix of uh people that have done philosophy psychology neuroscience all of you do some background a little bit in both so that's awesome that's exactly the sort of people we need since this is not a problem that really can be approached from any one field or at least that's my assessment of it so so before we get into the nitty-gritty here i wonder if uh i could ask you guys about sort of your personal views about consciousness

4:20 do you have them do you try to suspend them um so yeah i'm sort of curious like you know you said you had a postdoc with uh kristoff so does that mean you sort of are leaning towards iit or your favorite or i'm not i'm not looking for biases i'm just curious sort of what your uh what your feelings are as a as a person in the field so i i can i can start because you refer to christoph so i'm even before this project so now that we are a part of this project then we are forced to be neutral but even before that uh i was not affiliated with any theory in fact the reason

4:53 i got into christophe stab as a postdoc was because they published a paper that kind of went against iit in one of his predictions um so i'm at a stage i feel that i'm at a relatively kind of young stage in my understanding of the question so at this point i don't i i'm you know i'm going i'm being truly honest when i say i just don't know i'm still at the stage of trying to understand the question um to the best of my extent i don't have any theory of my own

5:28 and i i feel that the theories in the field are now also at the stage where we need to clarify them and understand exactly what they mean and we need to find the right tests for them in order to have substantial evidence that would allow us to weigh in in favor of one theory or another so as far as i'm concerned maybe it's just because i'm not mature enough and i need to study this more and understand it better but you know even before this project i felt like there is a lot of clarification and conceptual work and empirical work that needs to be done

6:01 before we can reach a decision so i'm at this point i'm i'm truly agnostic i i just don't know uh i'm ho i hope that our project my head might help us a little bit more to kind of understand and weigh in um but that's my own at least right i mean i'll talk we want to talk about that in a little bit but uh how much of a little bit or how big of a step you know so uh i saw i saw dave dogwood say something like well if we could do it in a hundred years our project aims to try to reduce it to like 50. i was like really by half

6:33 that's kind of a little step but who knows that would be wonderful i mean that's a great goal i'm not i'm not knocking it but so that's interesting um what about uh anybody else uh on the fence do you want to go next week sure sure yeah i would say uh in terms of the theories that are out there i'm i'm with lead i'm not committed to any any given theory i tend to uh dig in and read a lot about a certain theory and get really excited about it you know for several months and then and then figure out it doesn't explain everything and then move on to another

7:05 theory so um in terms of theories i think that would be the case i i guess my only sort of uh personal i would i wouldn't call it a bias but view about um consciousness is i think it's intimately linked with attention somehow i don't know exactly how but i'm really interested in this relationship between attention and consciousness and i if i had to put money on it i would say there's there's has to be some close relationship in any uh final theory but i don't think we're there yet and and as leah had mentioned i think the

7:37 the fun is we have these theories that that make predictions that we can formulate tests we can also do just data driven you know come up with the cleanest manipulation you can and and the only thing that's varying is you know your conscious perception or your conscious state um and then try to try to go in both directions to attack the problem so uh right yeah i think that that would summarize my view oh so i guess i'm the last one i i i come from a different uh trolley part you know which um so i started my phd really truly

8:10 convinced by you know francisco arella and world singer so we worked on synchrony for many years you know i you know i i wrote papers on that and you know and my and my aim at that point was theories need to explain certain phenomenon so i kind of like try to deconstruct like okay if a theory is a series it should explain this this isn't that and and that's why i kind of like convince me at some point that consciousness may have something to do with synchrony until i realized that it just didn't you know and at that point it was like it was also interesting to realize like

8:42 well there's some magic in all of these hypotheses you know when you put them at the limit you realize that actually it doesn't really quite explain you know and and so this was my first kind of like um discontent with my own you know like it was not even you know like stan or julia or what have you it was just my own limit it's like i'm just you know bullshitting in some sense i don't really know i don't really know you know they're philosophizing around here i'm just kidding i know i'm a

9:14 self-healing philosopher i'm not actually but don't be don't be philosophy it's so important and definitely not so yeah no i'm kidding but it's exactly because of that because you realize that philosophy pushes you to the limit and then you realize look i actually don't have the answer you know that is the important thing i agree with you about it you see you say you see and then and actually this is exactly the interaction that to me would say wow okay so actually don't have it they do that's the other do they do their people have it and i start looking around and you know at that point you know also jana and

9:46 a student you know in my lab at the time we started looking at how those theories including our own work had been you know created and we realized that look the data seem a little bit noisy you know the theories are not complete you know so so what are we really explaining you know and at that point it became actually quite this illusion i have to tell you you know it's my friend it felt you know so what are we doing and i actually stopped doing research and consciousness at that point you know there's just no um and then eventually one thing that made me come back through this project

10:19 is that i realized that even though people started acknowledging the problem on the methods the confidence and the theories paradoxically increased which to me felt like i mean the research just absolutely odd here like we all know that the data are somehow in some way noisy and yet at the same time we believe that we have more evidence for the theory we just didn't match um yeah there's a real disconnect between like the intro section and then the results section you see what i mean

10:52 you know it really it really at some point it just felt like you know a little bit psychotic in my own mind it's like i mean what's wrong here and and and it felt that projects such as this one are probably what is needed for the field to kind of like shaken up in terms of you know what you really need to specify your you know assumption first of all you we need to acknowledge what we explain what we don't and we also need to acknowledge that the data that we have are not particularly clean right so so in that sense i kind of like i agree with that we need that you know so part of actually coming to a theory hopefully

11:24 is to you know make your assumptions any assumption on that you know put them on the table and also clean up the methods right so i hope that these mechanisms will enable that you know will we it's interesting because maybe this is i don't know but like in the in the consciousness um field you have these labs that are not all of them but a lot of them are led by like a well-known person who's like investigating a certain approach or something like that your guys's research has sort of shown that they a lot of confirmatory evidence but not

11:57 as much disconfirmatory evidence yeah um but it if you sort of step back for a second when i was reading this contrast stuff and i saw your presentation at ssc which is great and all that stuff but i started thinking yeah it's weird because what you would predict sort of like beforehand might be that uh well you would have a lab that would do what do you guys have been talking about sort of be neutral and test different theories and check data but not be advocating for a theory so i started thinking gee it is kind of weird actually um like in other areas if you read a typical paper on attention yeah they may

12:29 advocate for a theory but they're also you know checking a bunch of other stuff as well you know there's three other things that this could be compatible with or we haven't ruled out and you don't really get that sense in in the in the work here so i wonder if uh is that because of the topic or is that just because the way the field came up or do you have any what do you guys think am i am i wrong about that maybe i don't know is what do you guys think about that so i think there is um i would maybe try to differentiate between two approaches to what what you're talking about so you're referring to the contrast database which is worked by taiwan um who basically took 412 experiments

13:03 that you know referred to four leading theories in the field and try to see how they study uh how how these theories were empirically studied and as you say what we find is that if you only look at papers that ended up supporting gnw you find mostly frontal activations while if you look at papers that ended up supporting recurrent processing for example you find mostly posterior activation so you can interpret this finding in one of two ways one is what you just said which is basically we have two camps and each one is kind of finding evidence in line with their own theory

13:36 but i would actually want to present you with another interpretation which is you have you have those labs who find you know look at their look at their theory and find supporting but also sometimes challenging evidence but you also have a field which i would claim i before i spoke about my own maturity let me refer to the maturity of the field so i think what happens is that many people j they find a specific finding they don't start up which this is another thing that i very nicely showed um very nicely showed sorry is that

14:10 um you have relatively few papers that set out uh in advance to test the theories so most of them they find they look for some contrast for you know c versus i'm seeing they find the potential ncc if that ncc is frontal then they say well this supports gmw if it's posterior they would say well this supports frequent processing and so on and so forth also for the other theories so basically what we show here is that the field is now um very focused on finding now in you know in the last decade finding nccs and then post hoc

14:43 interpreting those nccs in light of the theories well what we would like to have more and more are studies that in advance say this is the prediction of theory a this is the prediction of theory b let's test them and see what we find and what i showed was that only seven percent of the studies that he looked into um indeed contrasted the predictions of at least two theories seven percent you know it's a very low number so we need more of those and i think it's almost i mean it's it's sorry to cut you off but is it do you think it's i mean i just was

15:16 thinking when you're saying it's almost like there's a second phase that we're entering where the first phase was like take us seriously like we can study this we can do it we can get results but now we're like we got too many results we gotta okay we have to see like which ones we should take seriously yeah and i think it's also a transition from the search for the mcc to a stage where we have different theories they took these nccs and they put put out you know they suggested very interesting accounts but now the time has come to test these

15:48 accounts right and test them a priori and not only kind of post talk so i think i think this is the new stage where our field kind of enters it's like pessimistic i i i you know i'm always optimistic i'm happy to take the optimistic okay so let's hear from the pessimists no but i think that you have just just for the sake of you know like push us not to think about what we are what what we are in here right because you know say that you know there's a third interpretation of what you know like leah

16:19 said you know which is like okay either you think that people don't you know they you you start with your bias and therefore you find what you you know what you set out to find which i think that it always happened and we always keep happening no matter what we do i think this is what we humans do right um the second one which is this part that you know like a lot of the people interpret in postdoc that it also is not necessarily perceived from my point of view negative it just reflects the fact that we are you know you know we have 30 years of data you know that so we don't really know and you know we have some theories there

16:51 and we need to then say okay so does this finding fit with what right you know so i think this is what we have been doing in the past 20 years right right and now the third and so you could say like the third alternative is now to start like doing more than more adversarial you could say yes fantastic that could actually be a possibility if the theories were sufficiently spelled and i think that you know like one of the things that we will find out you know through this you know exercises that the theories and this is this i come back to what i was trying to tell you before in my journey is that we are not really clear on to what we explain and what is the limit of

17:24 our explanation right right and the fourth is which is probably my part of my pessimism is we need to acknowledge that our methods are not good enough you know and that with the experiments that we have been running have not been sensitive enough right so you know we have tons of confound so from my point of view i definitely i i somehow refuse to interpret something that i feel is noisy you know so i'm just i'm just gonna put it absolutely out there so you know so long and i think that my

17:56 research has shown in many ways you know that i mean you can interpret certain signatures of one way or another and then you realize they just tried to distill and you know what happens and you know some of them remain some of them don't the more we do those kind of things in an agnostic way i also think that we're gonna learn a lot i'm talking about you know distilling you know like the report the attention the memory you know like all of them that's around this thing that you know you know may actually have nothing to do with consciousness but of course

18:28 we don't have subjects in a vacuum right they are doing something they are you know pushing bottoms they are you know looking at one thing or another right so so long we don't do that i feel that you know we're going to also get corrupted so there's not much to interpret at the same time you know um you're thinking about it so but you're not so pessimistic that you're saying that 30 years of this 30 years of data is like incr like unsalvageable uh corruptedly by some i can't say it what i'm saying thinking but you know what i feel like it's no no no no salvage it i i think that you can you can salvage it in the following sense

19:03 you know you can say like okay so whatever journey you went you you had until here you know you were able to come up with this theory right so then and now i refuse to test the theories on the predictions that they made in based on the past data or on the things that they already know right because that you know from everything is like a postage so what i want now it's like okay so now let me take your theory and if you're serious it has any predictive power it should be able to predict new data and new observations and new things that you haven't seen exactly right yeah so that if we so so

19:36 now i think that we can actually say whatever like even if the data were wrong you know or good or what have you if the theory is sufficiently spelled out we should be able to go on with this next part and then learn something yeah and i don't think there are very very many theories if any at all actually which are spelled out in that amount of detail um even iit which is like the most math one you know mathematically precise in some sense although in another sense it's not because phi can be specified willy-nilly in all sorts of ways and how do you measure it and approximate it so there's

20:09 tons of stuff there but um even so even there it's not clear 100 percent like theoretically the limit you're right but like how we do it here isn't um and global workspace there is another one i think that people feel like they understand it but then when you actually try to understand it it's like exactly impossible okay exactly so this this these exercises are so healthy because of that it really you know like brings to awareness like oh you know we think that we understand each other but actually we don't right we're all relying on metaphors and and they uh

20:41 they snap if they have too much weight gets put up exactly exactly so yeah so i mean i mean this is uh some you know some people might be really pessimistic and i and i don't think any of us here are although i wonder how not pessimistic we are by the way before i move to this next question michael did you might you want to say something about it i mean i guess quickly to follow up on what what lucy was saying i i do think there's a value moving ahead with sort of the agnostic um let's try to control for as many things as we can let's try to do

21:12 you know the most careful manipulations and contrast and uh and worry about the pre pre-nccs we call it or the the prerequisites be before you're conscious of something what happens after what allows you to report i think we can learn a lot by doing that and i think it was around what was it lucia 2010-11 it's sort of like it was almost the zeitgeist the spirit of the time thing where a bunch of different labs were or thinking along the same lines and i remember distinctly reading lucia's paper with her student yan back in

21:46 2011 i think it was it was a pre-print or something and immediately emailing lucia and jan saying i was thinking the same thing we have some studies that go along exactly with what you're saying we need to get together we need to you know organize a symposium um and then there was i think a simultaneous paper that same year 2012 saying basically the same thing so a bunch of labs were thinking about this and i don't i mean back to your your point richard about um do we need to sort of look back in the first 20 years and say we don't trust any of that data

22:18 no i think they were very useful to kind of help us develop these paradigms to get these theories up and running to make predictions but then i think you can use that as a jumping off point i agree with lucia we don't want to take what the theories were predicting 10 15 years ago and allow them to adapt and allow them to be refined based on new information and if i mean i think realizing that maybe we're not using the the most controlled uh paradigms or not our studies aren't powered enough our

22:50 you know our neural measurements are rough in a lot of cases uh so realizing that can really inform the the direction we go forward so i i mean i think um in terms of the the search for the ncc yeah we might be at this transition point where we can now do more more theory testing and sort of a different type of of science instead of just kind of gathering information running every experiment we can but i think at the same time we can still kind of hang on i really i don't know if i'm alone out of this group but i i like the approach that

23:23 christoph uh coke and francis crick proposed back in the early 90s like let's simplify the problem consciousness is very difficult to study why don't we just start simple and try to come up like with the minimal um you know the the minimally sufficient set of neural events for any any one percept and and that can then inform all sorts of things it can be signatures we can look for in the clinic just to help diagnose consciousness um it can be sort of a guiding pose a guidepost for

23:56 uh animal model studies and and when you can get into the human brain in the rare situations to say where should we look uh well let's look at these neural signatures um when are they occurring about where in the brain and that kind of guide you guide you where to look um and then they can also you know link up with what we already know from all other areas of cognitive neuroscience so we have a bunch of developing areas in memory and language and attention and perception so if you if you find sort of a rough neural correlate somewhere then that

24:28 might inform how how a different networks are interacting to to lead to that subjective experience so yeah i mean sorry i said that was going to be quick but you got going there no i mean i'm just thinking about what you're saying it was it was good uh but i i mean because one of the like for example um i agree with everything most of most of everything that we're saying here in fact i'm agnostic myself largely speaking and i write a lot of papers defending the higher order approach to consciousness mostly because i feel like no one understands it

25:01 and that it should be developed to the like the way we were just saying it should be developed in enough detail that you could show that it was wrong and so i think that you know if there's a kind of prediction there that people haven't really noticed this mis representation prediction people think it's absurd so that's a perfectly great thing to test um the the the more conflicts with you know intuitive judgments the better that's that's didn't falsify it but i feel like people haven't really been thinking about so so for example let me let me step back so the so this this project that we're all involved in

25:34 in different ways um you guys are running this uh we're involved with the you know the iit and global workspace theory i'm involved with the first order high order uh stuff and and just that way of separating stuff to me already is a problem because there isn't like a theory called higher order theory which is pitted against first order theory it's it's rather that there's a whole bunch of theories which are first order and iit and global workspace theory are first order theories um so i really feel like if you're gonna do this right you should always have one you should be aware of that distinction

26:07 and always have one representative on either side and i know they tried but you know who and it didn't work out for you know why and we don't need to worry about all that stuff if we don't have to worry about it but it just does seem to me that it's an important part of the way to test the theories because for example this could come out where you guys find something but it could be like a correlate of an unconscious content or not because iit is a theory of content it's not a theory of consciousness or whatever and and there's no really way to test like

26:40 the real division in the landscape as i would see things uh between the approaches which say okay we need some sort of higher order monitoring representation or something in those that deny it so i wonder what you guys uh so so i would be a little bit pessimistic about the project for those reasons just like divides up the the the landscape in the wrong way so that what you guys aren't really testing according to me is not really like a theory of consciousness but like you know some predictions about where things associated with the theory are going to be found in the brain but it's not

27:12 per se consciousness because you haven't ruled out the other side anyway so i just wonder if maybe i am being too myopic in my thinking here or if you guys think that uh you could correct me because i would be like like to be less pessimistic i want to join the optimist on the top screen let me give the the you know this actually will go back to what what mike was saying right so if you perhaps you know that a better way to think about this isn't a framework right and you can you know like do pairwise comparisons or you know like you can you can compare three or four you know you can go with

27:46 it with any level of combinatorics right the way in which i think about this problem is um you combine you do accompany the topics of two you know and then you share the data and then you share the data you know and then the other guys that you know we're testing the you know iit and you know like all of the other labs that i hope will do this outside any of these mechanisms will share the data you know so then we can actually really compare across a large set of data because again from my point of view reliability i'm probably obsessed a lot with noise and

28:18 you know signals you know but but from my point of view like what really will be will be relevant is to understand this in the large numbers right so if we do this in many different comparisons with many different contrasts you know with many different stimuli hopefully somebody will do something not ambition you know but tactile or you know like an audition would be great you know then you could actually look okay what happens you know when i look at multiple data sets multiple forms of consciousness and so on and so forth right so so i i shared your your pessimism in the sense of you know how much can we do

28:50 with it with a pairwise comparison right and you know you can do a lot but not everything right well it's not about my worry i guess what i was being pessimistic about is whether it would narrow down theories of consciousness um say what sorry could you explain which way it would narrow down well just what the sort of project is aiming to do and you know reduce the number of viable theories in some sense or challenge them in some way so i think i'm sorry yeah go ahead i think that when i think

29:24 the three of us when we describe this project to others um we kind of emphasize you know it has a very big title right you know arbitrating between theories of consciousness and so on and so forth but we all uh i think share a level of modesty and to be honest i would be very surprised if within three years either iit or gnw would step down and you know would exclude itself from the discussion about consciousness i don't think that would be the end result and i actually i'm not sure it should be the end result with respect

29:57 to you know whatever we find it will require more work so my ambition in this is not to kill one of the theories uh or to exclude them or to narrow down my my ambition is um is twofold first uh to to force the theories and that i think picks up on what lucia said before to clarify exactly what their predictions are and also to kind of sometimes force them to make predictions about things they didn't relate to before this project so i think what

30:30 happened to us was in some cases where we said so what would you predict in that scenario although you didn't say anything about that in the past now let's think about you know perception maintenance or duration and so on and so forth so that i think that's one ambition it's just that this project and others would help us understand the theories better and also understand again i'm going back and you know to this concept of maturity to understand which theory is mature enough to to to give us clear predictions that we can test and which theory still needs

31:04 more development so that is one goal and the other goal is to at least force the theories to revise some of their claims so at the end of the day i think it would be very plausible if iit would have to say well you know what here i was wrong it doesn't mean that the entire theory was wrong but at least in this and that point i need to think again and the same for g w you know they might still hold on to the idea of global network and global workspace and so on and so forth but they would say but you know what here there there is a result that i was not expecting

31:37 i have to explain why that happens and i can always explain it post talk and say you know in in retrospect this experiment was bad and but we all because the process is transparent we know that when we started you did think that the experiment is good enough to test your theory so i think the combination of open science and the entire process being public and the kind of um magnitude of the data this is sort of yeah just to write what you just said right there is like uh i guess that's what i'm wondering about

32:08 is does it test the theory or does it test like because it seems like to and i don't know by the way i don't know if i couldn't find it or if i'm inept at the internet but i couldn't find the pre-registration to pre-print that's terrible i'm happy to see the science paper and i found that in the science paper there is a link to the registration when you click on it you're supposed to get it but i'm happy to i wanted to look at it yeah my bad i'm sorry it's like i should have public and whoever wants it is more than welcome to get it okay i'll put a link to it here but um

32:43 because the two experiments that you have that design one involves the video game right that's a attention task or something like that but the other one involves just like looking at a screen or something and seeing some stuff and there's nothing really going on at all right um so so there you are uh uh there's the link awesome thank you um i like that uh i don't know why i didn't see that i had the science anyway so that's my fault um now you have it maybe i because i read it from the link on the uh website and it was a pdf

33:18 but maybe it wasn't like uh anyway so it's here now yeah exactly um but so anyway so so there what you're looking at is like so as far as i understand the goal of that part of that experiment um the iit crowd julio says you should see some sustained activity maybe in the back part of the brain the you know back here somewhere the hot zone uh and the global workspace theory says no you should see some burst of activity that fades away until something else

33:51 shows up um so is that does that test the theories of consciousness or does that test like some background assumption that they have about how the brain works i mean so to me it's not clear that i test the theory of consciousness uh for reasons i was saying before so i wonder if why you guys think or if you think that this does test some claim that they've made about that that fault that follows from the theory as a theory of consciousness as opposed to a theory of like brain function or something yeah i can try to jump in and uh explain a little bit more about

34:22 experiment one so okay the two the two main things we're manipulating are the task so one assumption i think i think both theories make is that it doesn't matter if you're in the lab looking at stimuli flashing on the screen and you have to make judgments about those stimulate every single trial if you're looking straight ahead there's nothing else on the screen and we show you a face you're going to consciously perceive the face and the task irrelevant conditions in our experiment so you're looking for a particular letter or a symbol and then

34:56 we show you a face you're going to see that face and that's something that the theories haven't really tested at least extensively yet especially global workspace theory what happens when you don't have to report uh even to yourself what you're perceiving so it's it's really saying okay we know we're going to find what what stan and colleagues have have been finding for you know last 20 plus years when we have targets when we have you know tell me do a discrimination on on the stimulator that are showing

35:30 up but we don't really know in this in this really basic case how that's going to translate trends translate over to the case of uh task irrelevant stimuli that you perceive but you don't have to do anything about and then the other key manipulation is the how long you subjectively experience a stimulus so if i present something for half a second you know versus five seconds i think we all would assume that your conscious experience would differ in terms of its duration how long do you have an experience

36:01 yes you know it's difficult to if you go for a really long stimulus maybe you see it then you start thinking about something else you're mind wandering and there's complications there but we had uh that in mind in this design so we have these three uh different stimulus durations and then that allows us to test um key things that really differ between the theories like you mentioned richard global workspace theory thinks there's this ignition and then sort of a fading out until something there's some update in the workspace something else like the seamless goes away now now what you're perceiving is

36:33 different um where iit has this identity relationship so as long as you're subjectively experiencing something the neural correlates according to it should um persist uh so i i think those are the the two it seems like a really simple experiment when you look at the method that's just we're showing faces and objects and you know letters and and symbols um and we're changing the task and the duration uh but what so what exactly are the subjects doing like what is the task that they have to do maybe can you can i can i get something before before you're going to the the

37:06 width of the experiment because i want you to kind of like think also richard from a different point of view right because you know i i i think that i take the you know at the core of your question i think it's actually something really important which is like okay are we trying to understand consciousness through these adversarial collaborations right and i think that's a really important question you know well taken and i can tell you you know and i can tell you that then and i said this is this is what this experiment is trying to do beautifully in this in the following sense right so if you think about an experience that experience is there you know or we usually obsess about that what brings

37:38 something into awareness like why am i aware now of you or lyad or you know mike but also one thing that and this person i was always you know fascinated by is the fact that they can look at you and you don't disappear how come that you know that guy look at you and you don't disappear and i can give you actually even an even more interesting fact which is that i close my eyes all the time because i blink and you don't disappear either you know so in my conscience you know like there's no input you know because i close my eyes you know and yet you're still there

38:10 so how does that magic happen right so now when you say when you think about that then you realize that any theory being global workspace higher order theory first order theory whatever theory needs to actually explain this phenomenon right so what this experiment actually tries to do is to say like okay so and that's why in fact for instance we had to ask the stan like stan what would you predict because you know like every time you understand you know like you know that's an experiment it's about you know like masking attention and link you know but never does an experiment that tells me

38:42 okay so how come that you know that you are you don't have here right like you know we do the flip side right um so now actually interestingly enough it happened that for that particular phenomenon they made contradictory predictions right and then became handy right but but you know so what and the reason why i'm going through this you know lengthy explanation is because just to give you a sense of it tries to understand consciousness in some sense that we have not understood before even though it seems trivial and mundane yet we haven't done

39:17 it you know i think the tribute on this is actually pretty cool exactly exactly so i wanted to i want you to appreciate that before you know might explain it like because they're saying oh 500 milliseconds and then we end up like and like the integrity and then people like forgets the why right you know and what matters is the why we're doing this right and i and i yes that's the philosopher yeah but actually if you think about it philosophically also when you think about the other so experiment two is one where we try to get this contrast of sin versus unseen

39:51 which is what the field has been doing for a lot of time right when you think about it philosophically or more deeply there's also some confusion there right because let's say that i present you with a face and because of our video game in some some trials you won't see the face and in other trials you will see the face and we say this is a conscious trial and an unconscious tribe but that's not really the case right because when you don't see the face you still see the entire display and you see the computer and you experience a very vivid conscious experience but that's from that experience the face is missing

40:24 yeah just a little content exactly but it's it's a you know it's not it's not really seen versus unseen in the way people you know typically think about it so in a way this this type of so what i think is nice about this project is that the two experiments really kind of complement each other so one experience one experiment gives you the scene versus unseen contrast that we are used to in a somewhat different way than people have been doing because now we have very strong stimuli presented for a long time on the screen and the other experiment

40:57 which we should say follows the work by uh for rookie and manly and leon the wells lab where they try to do similar things we we take these stimuli and we just show them and ask what happens when you are conscious and we also critical aspect of this is the manipulation of task so what information can we find in your brain when you are clearly conscious of a stimulus but you're not doing anything with it in terms of you know task and cognitive processing and so on and so forth you're always cognitively processing it but not in a task related manner right

41:31 um yeah no i i i you know so i don't know how to ask what i or even if what i'm going to ask is even coherence but i it's never stopped me before so i have a 100 well no i don't i'm not sure because the global workspace theory like what you're saying is um it's not clear to me that what you guys are saying right now is that you are testing a prediction of stands or of the global workspace theory of consciousness

42:03 um because and it's what would be the difference obviously would be that so for example bernie bars has a different version of global works first theory um and i think you could possibly have a different version that's closely related to like something that jesse prince's view that connects attention more centrally as the gateway into working memory which is basically a global workspace broadcasting sort of story but from the lower level like it broadcasts from the sensory cortex to that to working memory as opposed to the way that stan thinks of it the frontal cortex is the broadcaster

42:37 not the thing being broadcasted to so i mean there's all right so is that the global workspace theory of consciousness no or is it stan's view about how content is in the brain guided by his understanding of the theory is implementation of it but it's not doesn't seem to it seems like wrong i think to say that it's a prediction of global workspace theory um that that is being tested um thank you for making do you think that's fair yeah i think you're making an excellent point because you know people are talking about how the field is fractionated but

43:11 actually even when you look at a specific theory you find the fractionation there as well you mentioned higher order thought you have so many versions of higher order theories right i don't know if they're different or the same in verbal variants or like at this point yeah so in an ideal scenario we would have let you know let's oversimplify it you'll have two theories that are competing one against each other each other we have way more than that but even within each theory as you rightfully say we have many versions of the theory so how can we make progress so one way is to say well we are not testing any theory until

43:45 they converge within their stream so let all the higher order thought guys sit together come up with a theory that they agree upon and then we test them we can wait for that i'm not sure if that's what they would come now it seems to me as if what we need to do at this point is take the versions we have and it could be that you know we find that something is wrong with g w and then bernie bars or jesse prince come and say well i have a a better version of g w so then this is a refinement of the theory and that would lead us to an agreed upon consensus within the gnw

44:19 camp and we test that but the we we won't be able to make any progress if we won't test any theory yeah absolutely so that says all my everything i'm asking about is really aimed at the idea of the adversarial collaboration and testing theories in that way and this model of science which you guys are advocates of and i'm i'm not against either obviously i'm involved in this project so um i i just that's what i'm thinking about it's not like uh so so it's only within the confines of that being your goal i'm wondering is

44:52 that really what we're doing because it's sort of like i read these art you know i read there's quanta you know article economist or something um and what they're all saying is we're going to narrow down the fields of theories and here's one theory it's called global workspace theory and here's another theory it's called iit and they don't mention that it's iit 3.0 and that there's it could be the iitn at some point uh that there's these different versions that will so it just seems to me that's the i'm starting to worry that the message which is being sent out

45:24 is a simplified one where the reality is a lot more complicated and the science depends on us understanding the complications there um and i'm not against this project i'm not trying to to to really be down on it i'm just trying to you know be realistic about it about what it is what it's aiming to do or at least as i understand anyway i would like you guys to convince me that i'm being overly again again i'm pessimistic i i i like to you know always throw the ball at you know like you which you know is

45:55 fine so let's assume that this is not the right way to do things right you know but just for the moment i mean this is you know i'm not trying and i'm not a trained philosopher but i got a whistle and i put myself in the country what is that um so how do you how do you make progress i would just ask you a very pragmatic and simple question because um well you do what we're doing but you've bill it differently well first i would say you should have we should have started by saying recognizing that the real division in the landscape is between the higher order and the first order

46:27 and that every theory of consciousness that's ever been thought of or ever will be thought of is going to be one or the other of those two kinds of theories that's the real thing that so like for instance i was at this meeting and they they were saying gee is it a problem that we're testing all just variants of higher order theories it's like but no one said that when you went to the iit global workspace theory where they were testing only first order theories why because people don't see that distinction and when they think that they they have a sort of bias towards the first order stuff and that's fine i had it as well but there's this

47:00 i'm not saying that the other side is right it's just that to see the landscape in the right way i argue so you know i'm biased in that way that this is the right way to to divide the field and if you want to test these theories you should be looking at you know the the way this way of pitting them against each other and then if you want to tell other people that you're like narrowing the field down and testing theories of consciousness then you should be like well we're testing this guy's version of the theory of consciousness and that's what the details of the paperwork say but that's not what the uh right but but this is where you know

47:34 what i'm trying what i'm trying to get at richard is they followed you know like there with you like i mean i think that camilo uh senoralia actually puts things in an even like a nicer way because he actually he doesn't put like you know like first or first order what are they explaining right which i think if you ask me i would actually a partition the thing there not it might not work it's like my brother in the back he said what are they explaining you know they give me sorry you're right let me just say that i would love it

48:06 you know now hold on you're right let me just say i meant uh assuming you're trying to explain phenomenal consciousness then you should divide things up this way but your point is exactly right yeah so but what i'm trying to say with that is that i take your point what i'm just what i'm trying to argue is at the end all of these things have imperfections right right and and the and the reason why you actually try to make to do it because as you know any of these things is extremely difficult as you pointed out you know we tried to actually do three adversaries we failed grossly it just didn't work right because actually you know like

48:39 it's not easy any of these adversarial projects actually extremely challenging so you know at least my pragmatic point of view is if i have to fight with my brother i'd rather fight with one than we do you know you're saying so this is you know like i have a very large family so you know and then eventually we will converge so so my point is i hope that this will be done you know through this mechanism that we have now that is incredible that the temples and foundations providing us this opportunity right absolutely but then hopefully you know

49:13 you and i and the alan mike and you know and everyone in the field can just be in their own lab like we don't need this thing they come back coming back to your initial point like why people are not doing this i wonder myself because you know you know to have a brain and to make a prediction in a way any one of us can do it you know right so you know yeah i mean i think they they the answer it seems to me is that no one funds it if you try to do that until until these guys so that's why i'm not trying to badmouth them in any way i'm just

49:45 i'm just trying i i i'm sensitive to the idea that there's a there's a camp out there that thinks this message is sort of sending the wrong message and that we're already a fragile field anyway and we shouldn't be you know anyway so i'm not 100 convinced by that i'm not convinced by it either let me ask you a question i feel that you know my sense is that some people worry too much like i think that this happens you know relax you know drink a beer you know and just you know like i mean yes the world is perfect we have coffee so i really worry about coffee

50:18 you know well i mean just just to um i i agree uh but can i before just one uh one one rejoinder to that before moving on um because the the the someone uh in question if it were someone like me would worry uh maybe it oh too much that um given what i was saying about this kind of almost like bias that is naturally had by people to ignore us like a certain way of thinking about consciousness

50:50 um and to intuitively conceptualize it in a certain way uh that's the relaxing lets that distinction get overlooked and by and and then compounds get basically introduced into every experiment like for example i would say a lot of experiments have the uh behavioral compound they take behavior as evidence of consciousness when according to the other approach they're dissociable so that's a complete assumption that's

51:22 being made by almost everybody um without having sufficiently demonstrated that we can dismiss the other side and if we could that would be great i would love to see it dismissed and move on with my life and then i can start writing papers about it and saying can someone please show why this is wrong um which is you know what i take my work to be an advertisement for like please falsify this theory so i can like do something else so i don't write those i'm not trying to support the higher order theory i'm actually now if it doesn't get falsified then great but i would like to see people try to actually falsify a version

51:56 of that theory rather than um a cartoon version that's characterized in the wrong way which is often what tends to happen so the relaxing if you relax too much then this then you know the the person like me will worry we're not really making any progress um we're just sort of assuming something and uh ignoring but but we should do that other thing first or anyway so that's what i would say so i wonder though so let's take your approach at face value if this is the case then all the other theories that neglect

52:30 this point of view would have to at least for some of the predictions fail right so it could be that the results of experiments like ours and others would be that none of the theories get it right in the sense that all their predictions pan out yeah and in that case the conclusion would be well we must have been missing something so that maybe we would understand that there is a premise that everyone assumes then it's actually wrong so i think what the three of us are trying to say

53:02 is that a we share your um i don't know if i i refuse to kind of connect myself with the word pessimism so i wouldn't care your pessimism you're less optimistic view yes but you know and we it to begin with it's not as if we think that the three of us are going to end up with a belt and lines in it for the theories we kill right so that's not our goal you know our what we are trying to do is to uh try to understand exactly what the predictions are of the

53:34 theories and where they get it right and where they get it wrong and then each one could take that bunch of data and those conclusions and decide how they want to pursue to proceed with that and one possible you know outcome would be exactly what you're saying to say okay the field has been completely misguided none of the theories get it right what's going on here maybe we are overlooking an important possibility right so i in any case i wouldn't what what i would really want to avoid also because you know we are putting so much work into it

54:06 and what we wouldn't want to be at the end of the game is to say okay you know what you did everything and you didn't change the field well you know what we are not trying to change the entire field we're trying to uh how to to make progress we think that what the way things have been done so far got us to one stage and in order to make a step forward and it doesn't have to be a huge step but it has to be a step we need to do things differently and that's that's what this project is all about trying to do things differently and see where it gets us

54:40 so if we are all kind of modest also in our expectations of this then we can gain a lot up to it if we just end up checking this is you know did they you know revolutionize the field well let me know we just want to make progress and hopefully what we will be able to do is is make progress in the right direction and also maybe um kind of set the the try to suggest uh a new way of doing things because people have not done things throughout research collaboration and

55:11 in our field we didn't have such large scale studies and we didn't have and we hope that that would also kind of maybe change the standard a bit with respect to how many data we need how much data we need to find a reliable conclusion which is also an important question that we don't always ask right i couldn't agree more with everything that you're saying in fact i think to be honest with you i think the fact that they've uh that the projects have gotten everyone together to have these conversations and that we're still having them

55:42 has already changed the field i think it's already impacted the field positively in my opinion whatever the results of the experiments are um i've been in the meetings and i've seen the progress i've seen it happen where people understand the other side all of a sudden they're like exactly that's what you're saying really that you're like yeah that's what i was saying for 20 years dude it's like he's very good it's amazing to see that happen in real life yeah i think that's one of the most important parts of the the project is the very beginning when you design the experiment because that i mean that itself

56:13 whether we end up testing and challenging certain predictions having the key you know proponents or developers of these theories agree on an experimental design like before we even collect data that really hasn't been done very much at all and i think there's a huge advantage i mean that's going to speed up progress and i mean if you're right richard that a key distinction is higher order versus first order then i would say we need to get more people in the same room coming up with experiments that they both agree on

56:46 one and whatever version of higher order and one whatever version of first order i agree because i think we can really make progress there and and yeah we could still make some progress we have two different first orders two different higher orders i think it's still valuable but uh but yeah i thought that was one of the my favorite part of this project was getting you know stan and julio to agree to run experiments that they probably would never have designed in their own life exactly yeah and and it's it's nice to see that people are thinking sort of in new ways as you guys were saying um and we were talking about that just

57:18 recently at one of these meetings we were saying let's not try to just do things that's already been done let's this opportunity actually like do something we would never thought of you know so i think that just that spirit is so the the the time of the foundation deserves credit just for that i mean da wae did you brought these people together and got them to talk to each other when when they that no one else you know one one aspect i think also richard that gets overlooked but i'm particularly sensitive to is that we we the adversarial part is of course a very it's a critical part

57:49 right but the templeton went actually further right they push us all to do open science right right you know and i want us to actually think about this because you know this is where the where this is where the you know the individual parts and then the sum is actually something that we you know from my point of view like the real meat of this is going to be when every one of these different comps you know has their data boulder data and then you know you can test your predictions like then so what would you know the witcher theory say you know in an experiment such as this one right and then you are going to have

58:22 equal data fmri data image data and then you can go and test it right so from my point of view like having that like you don't need to think about every single hypothesis beforehand you can then just go and say that what happened if i collect all of this data that before i did not have right and i test any predictions of any theory you do and here's the they beauty because you don't have to partition it between higher order and you know like first order theories you can say that okay even you know like anything that has different modes of explanation

58:54 right so at least for to me like and this is what i wanted to say at the ssc you know it's like i i see this as the induction like inference and the you know deduction right so you can actually either starting from a bottom-up approach which to me would be like what if we put all of the data together what do we get right or a top-down approach like now we have all of this data what would the theory say on this particular set of data so you can you can have now this thing hand in hand so if we are really smart in this this is not going to be about the three pro the

59:26 the project of lead mike and himself or the project that you have is like the product that the field will have and this is where i hope people will understand that this is the real change right from my point of view like this is the impact and i hope that people will really harvest this data for many years to come right and the students you can train your students down from you yeah exactly go that's my go test this theory in these days like that you know lucia mike and i you know and the admin collected or you know whatever be you you know rachel you say so that

59:59 we didn't have before exactly and so we need you to go and then another pandemic so everyone can go and analyze it for two years and without but when you see like how smart the temperature foundation was because it's not adversarial and they're saying that you're going that's it you know but the real money is what comes after right no that is i agree with you completely so it's it's going to leave a lasting mark and already it use i mean it's already a kind of small field where you see the influence of everywhere i mean i i guess i was kind of a skeptic at the beginning about

1:00:32 the influence that they had but now i think of it as a good thing um i don't see why uh i don't know so i guess one reason why you might not see it as a good thing is because you might think that consciousness science isn't taken serious by people outside of the field but maybe this is where you relax um maxim should come in the the axiom of relaxation uh because do you well let me ask you guys do the three of you worry as do you as consciousness researchers about how people in the neurosciences outside like sfn

1:01:05 um can you present a paper unconsciousness at the sfn i don't really think at a satellite conference maybe but at the sfn main thing can you do that now is that something that happens yeah there have been there have been you know symposia there's no there's no dinner talk afterwards about uh why was that there well i can tell you you know when i started people told me and i actually tell my students that as well you know if you want to study if you're one of the crazy people who want to study consciousness you should know that it's a minefield and some people said you know it's not a

1:01:38 smart choice of career and so but uh i i think it's the most interesting question in the world and i'm so happy to be studying that and i've i you know things i think you know we're okay um we're we're doing our studies and you know people get funded and the the community just thrives so look at the number of people at assc that is just increasing look at the number of journals that are now you know when i started there was i think only maybe one class that was remotely related to

1:02:11 consciousness at my university now we have a special program for studying consciousness in the brain and you have many programs like that all over the world so uh again taking the role of the non-pessimistic person i think that we're and i actually think that if anything these projects will make the world see us as you know more seriously because now we have you know big data open science team science you know we're using like the big canons to study this question

1:02:43 so uh i'm not as worried i don't know what what do you think michael lucia yeah i agree i think it's changed i mean in in the time that i've spent uh you know and starting at grad school and and after i i also had the same similar advice that leah got don't say that you study consciousness you know when you go to your job talk and um and i i one of my key mentors is steve hilliard at ucsd and he you know will freely admit that he was interested in consciousness for his whole career but that it wasn't like it wasn't

1:03:16 accepted by the mainstream neuroscience so he studied the closest thing he could think of which is attention yeah and and perception um but i think it's changed you know even over the last 20 years so i think i mean personally i studied uh perception color vision and other types of perception in grad school and then attention as a postdoc but when i went to give a job talk i said i study consciousness and my whole talk was about and they hired me anyway so i don't know that's one example of i think things are changing it's a little bit faster i think in europe than in the us uh to come around to the idea

1:03:50 i don't know why um but but yeah i'm pretty optimistic like we had i think uh our project the projects that you're that you're doing and and the field as a whole i think is going to just continue to be considered a main part of you know the general um what's what's presented at sfm what's presented in in the main neuroscience journals um i think we're carving out a nice nice niche sort of uh active productive subtopic yeah that's yeah hopefully i'm hopefully we're right about that i don't know

1:04:22 i mean yeah hopefully no one's watching these videos 10 years from now being like no [Laughter] can i tell you you know like so then perhaps you know like you know i was trained in a in a very small country where we didn't have these considerations so you just do what you like you know so first of all you know like you know you don't really think about you know you don't worry in that sense you know like um but but at the same time you know like when so

1:04:54 i don't think that i never i ever in my entire career i have felt like i am in a fringe um place like i just personally like it just it has never happened to me that i felt like even a fringe field no um but second you know like and probably most importantly to me is from my point of view if we understand what consciousness is we will be able to make to make better medical decisions and the way in which i always put it is like look i don't like if if we don't crack memory yeah sure i will not

1:05:26 remember whatever you know if we don't crack attention perhaps you know like they crash into a car you know if i don't understand consciousness you know dude we're gonna have problems yeah you know so so i the way which i always you know when you know i had this discussion once in a week i think um with john dillon haynes you know because he said like you studied consciousness and he was like you know what is this and i said like and you said you stuck attention like how do you measure that i don't even know what that exists what it tells you is that you know conscious does exist just for the record you know just for the recognition what's before the record whatever i'm studying

1:05:59 exists whatever you are studying it's an essence that you created in your mind i don't even know whether that is real so sometimes i think that how did john take that he was he was receptive to that idea well not okay i love it because i mean we john we're super good friends but it's just abortion you see what i mean because i mean sometimes what i feel is happening to this field is that people don't understand the seriousness of the question right you see like we are not here you know like this is not i mean it might be a french thing but it's a really important thing and the fact that we don't understand it

1:06:32 you know like that doesn't make it you know like you know more weird is that you know like the more is the opposite it's like we need to understand it we are making decisions ethically you know like and et cetera like you know when when kids are born or not you know like are they conscious or not you know like cars whatever you know like this is this impacts us on a daily basis right right so the way in which i usually give job talks is to say look this is what i study you know like and i'm not gonna question whether it's important or not if you don't see it it's your problem

1:07:05 like seriously you know yeah so let's start with that now i do take the challenge which is like how do we do it scientifically right but then you know like as a scientist i said like well so because the problem is hard and we just feel defeated just just because will i accept that somebody doesn't hire me because they feel that it's too difficult of a problem i mean it's easy but you say sometimes i think that we need to because we are the field so the way in which i think about it we

1:07:37 need to be the preachers telling people like look this is what happened that isn't the reason why you have to take me seriously right and i i think you know i've i've said this before but i i was talking with claire uh the other just a few days ago actually um about this very thing because i was like well part of the thing which needs to be done is like us like you are saying going on talking but also the ssc i think needs to play in this role and they they have started to do them more i think but it's you know [Music] i i think they need to uh be the public face of consciousness science or

1:08:13 something like that public relations there needs to be like i i don't know i i feel like but when i was a graduate student i knew there was a place i could go it was the assc there were people there that cared about what i cared about philosophers scientists all sorts of people but they were interested in the same thing it wasn't like going to tucson where there were some people there i was like let's not hang out all right no offense um but i never felt that way at the assc and uh so i felt like it was always like a like-minded group um and in the field we sort of have that sense

1:08:45 of of ourselves but it's not i wonder if the uh public has that sense of it because a lot of the discussion there is pan psychism and zombies and i'm a philosopher and i love that i do i do but it's not science uh it's not it's not empirical science and it's not gonna do the thing that we're talking about here and so a lot of the public discussion of even around iit is about you know logic gates and are they conscious and and things like that and not about like how does it differ from global workspace because some people say they're the same

1:09:17 theory and other people think that they're like can't even be compared it's like what how how can we make sense of that's the important things first so yeah anyway so i just wonder do you guys uh agree that the assc should play this role or do you think that really it's more an individual effort i'm learning about institutionalization i mean i'll just say quickly i'll let you talk about assc but i think the the conferences and communities are really really important and i had a similar feeling as you

1:09:50 richard trying to figure out you know where is a good community of like-minded you know have this view that we need to study uh consciousness seriously from from a scientific perspective and i only started going to asc i think 2012 or 2013 and it just immediately was like yes this is exactly you know i've never been to the tucson meeting but i've heard heard things um good and bad but uh but i think having that community um first of all is for the the members themselves the you know to

1:10:23 share data but i think you're right it can play a key role in the pr and to say if you have questions about what this field is really doing what kind of things you're studying come to a conference and see what these talks are like and you'll immediately see you know this is this is serious neuroscience serious um psychological research being seriously interacting with with philosophy which i think is really important exactly and just before jumping in um some people are talking about the uh tucson conference in the chat over here but uh you know i'm not against

1:10:55 tucson i've been there lots of times i've presented there actually but what i'm against is that it's called the science of consciousness confidence that's what i'm against because it doesn't represent the field of the science of consciousness in my opinion um it it sort of i think of it as like uh like how the light gets in it's like that sort of public festival thing with some scientists and some non you know whatever it's a bunch of stuff but it's not like the assc and people go there and they think oh this is the science of consciousness and they see stuff which uh you know i'm not against

1:11:29 i'm a philosopher i take all ideas seriously and i you know i've talked to on this thing you know people from all over the spectrum because i'm generally curious and i don't really have settled views and i'm not here to grind access or anything or tear down the conference i so tucson i'm not against it but i do think that people get the wrong idea from the title of the conference and that uh that people think of it as the kind of representative you know the center for consciousness science at uh studies at arizona so i think the ssc should intercede more in the official sense and be like no actually we that's that's like one guy and another

1:12:00 person running it this is actual there's a committee there are people that are votes we have actual government it's it's like a different thing um so anyway that that's my spiel about that i think that's well known anyway in my opinion but sorry can you can i just probably ask you a little bit more richard what is the worry like i i'm kind of like missing the i feel like lost in translation so what is the problem probably you know as you see it uh the problem is that if someone goes to the according to me if someone goes to the tucson conferences and thinks this is the science of consciousness

1:12:34 then they're gonna they're gonna think um it's a circus with no progress and no serious scientific method and anything is allowed and there's it's just uh they're gonna get the wrong impression about what the science of consciousness is and if people think of that as the main representative of the science of consciousness then i think that it doesn't do a good job of presenting what i think of as the science of consciousness yeah so that's so i maybe it's what i'm thinking of is the

1:13:07 neural science of consciousness or the cognitive neural science of consciousness but that's what i think the ssc is interested in and when they say the association for the scientifics that the s there the second s is like the cognitive neuroscientific study or something like that as i interpret it and that's not what's going on at the tucson conference and it's not bad but you shouldn't call it the science of consciousness according to me but but let you know just for the you know play playing devil's advocate right so yeah what i always you know what i'm trying to think about is whoever goes to that conference or this

1:13:40 other conference or the sfn or to whatever conference where we present our work i think what i would what i would expect is that any consumer of information digest that information in a meaningful way like you know so what i do with my kid is i present him like a lot of views and then i let him choose right so when i feel that part of the exercise is people can take the plurality they can take whatever they feel it is and then you know the exact you know take part to what that what what they think is the right way like i i i i am a

1:14:13 little bit suspicious about this idea of bullying like we are the right ones you are the wrong ones at that part i mean i have to tell you well where is the right and the wrong um come on or we are the scientists and you are not you know or you are we weird the good ones and you're the bad ones like you know to me it's like people just do stuff you know and then i hope what did the pan psychists do well i don't know but you know like but but i just did this whatever what i mean you know with these but my parents but pan psychists aren't interested in the science of consciousness in the way that we are

1:14:46 all right because their theory can't be empirically tested it's not an empirical theory and that's not a mark against it it's just it's weird to think that that's part of the science of consciousness it just doesn't it's not it's not a good or bad thing it's just a thing so i don't think that um i'm doing the thing that you're saying i think actually i'm i i think your point but like what i would imagine is that somebody goes and you know you present them with that view and then that person comes and says well but this is not you know it cannot be testable so then it reaches that conclusion right so then why call it science

1:15:18 you know why i have it at a science conference then because for instance in tucson actually there is many many it's very plural as much as there is talks on that there's also things on uh on neuroscience right and you know so so so i think that in in a sense like you know i guess that's what they are trying to do they're like i don't know like i'm literally just trying to be you know naive here you know but i guess that what they are trying to present is the broad spectrum from here to here have you ever presented your work there but i also

1:15:52 think that we can make it a kind of take take a bigger picture look at this and i think that it seems to me that this discussion is driven by this fear that we won't be considered as a science that we won't be taken seriously and again it could be my naivety or my optimism i think we are kind of past that stage yeah so i think that kind of well but it's not about it there was a lot of right now a lot of legwork and you know foundational work that was made and we owe that so you know to kristoff and to nancy can we share

1:16:26 and to many of the cognitive psychologists that lay the ground and you know all i'm going back to myself work in france and and bernard bars and others that kind of persuaded the the community that this is science and that we can do things we can study this question empirically it's not only a philosophical question and you know just to kind of take give you a small observation from italian's work in the contrast database when you you can ask where what journal is the journal where

1:16:57 most of the studies that we that we looked at was published it's not consciousness in cognition and it's not journal of consciousness studies and it's not the neuroscience of consciousness it's actually another image so it's a completely neuroscientific general journal and most papers about consciousness and the narcolepsy correlates of consciousness actually you know were published there that this is what we found so i don't think that uh we need to be apologetic about what we're doing we are studying consciousness we're using a psychological empirical neuro neuro scientific tools

1:17:33 and if someone has a problem with the science let's talk about the science let's talk about the way we're doing i mean i'm not i'm not i wasn't trying to make i agree with all you guys with what you're saying um but i was talking about the role the assc should play no so i agree yeah so i think i think so i i mean but hold on just to cut you off i know i should stop doing that but i won't um assc is we're used to that that's fine uh though i set myself over that okay so uh by the way it's getting really late

1:18:06 so if you want to tell us it's too late uh i just remember during israel so yeah i'm enjoying it i can go on forever so you you have to stop me and not the other way around uh okay um i'm having fun too so i know this is gonna be a bad cup we're gonna be up all night but because what so so what i was saying was it's it's not driven by fear it's driven by perception of reality as i see it so the the the thing i was trying to say but not well i think because what you guys were saying um but anyway so what i

1:18:40 was trying to say was that i thought the ssc should be playing a certain role and instead i think that the center for consciousness studies is actually playing that role um and i would rather the ssc do it that's what i'm saying so i think that the average person who isn't a scientist or a philosopher thinks of that conference as the main conference um in fact when i was coming in for 10 year and i presented there they presented me as to as as uh giving a talk at the main conference in my field and i was like

1:19:13 what i don't know if i really agree with that because it's not actually the main conference the ssc is in my opinion yeah i don't know so this is something that needs to be tested right it's an empirical question how do you know which of the two conferences is perceived as most important by people outside and within the field i've given well i think just empirically more lay persons go to tucson than go to assc i just think that's already established um that the ssc is largely professionals or are laypersons who are themselves scientists from other fields perhaps

1:19:48 i don't know so what i can tell you i'm actually a member in the in the members committee of the issc so i get all the applications and i you know one of the people who work and we get applications from scholars from students and also from lay people you know many of them actually at least the ones that end up on my on my inbox so you know there could be more there could be less you have to also remember that this is indeed a scientific conference right so at the end of the day um you know i'm i'm um i think lucia and

1:20:21 michael the test i like i'm really for scientific dissemination dissemination of knowledge i think i do quite a lot of that so i welcome all lay people you know to to be interested in consciousness and think it's very important but i i i'm not sure that these you know counting how many people come to this or that conference would make a big difference i can i can tell you one thing so axel clearman's just gave a talk in frontiers in like their big events and you know more than 3 000 people came

1:20:54 to hear what he has to say about consciousness so i think that the public is interested i think that um they are getting many ideas about how to study consciousness and what people have have been doing and they are you know they should be the one to judge and i think acc but is that so so just to be the devil's advocates well i guess already someone here's the devil's advocate so i'll be the the other devil's advocate whatever uh the demons advocate whatever so so if you went to the sfn

1:21:29 and there was a talk on dualism you would be like that's normal that seems okay like if they were talking about pan psychism at the society for neuroscience and stuff like that but the society of neuroscience is about it's not about philosophy but if you go to asia right but uh but but my point is that the tucson conference is called the science of consciousness and you show up and you hear about pansexism and idealism is couldn't you hear about psychism or dualism

1:22:01 you could have a talk about that and people would you know would they the scientifically testable aspects of it i'm not sure so in the last ascc we had plenty of purely philosophical you know talks there was a session that was almost all of it was completely philosophical and people gave fears models of consciousness and so on and so forth so i think that the beautiful thing about our field is that it ties together people from so many disciplines you have philosophy and you have computer science and you have neuroscience you have psychology you have biology and you know

1:22:34 because it's a your physics because it's a complicated question right and you know ultimately you are the judge so you you go to a conference you hear talk about pan psychism you are not convinced that's fine but also to kind of ignore that and say that that doesn't exist i'm also not sure that that that would be that's not the point so those are the options the options are have it exist but don't call it science and um when you are going to a science conference uh you know present science though those are the options

1:23:06 those are the the things that i'm so i'm not saying no one should talk about pan psychism i actually love pansagism i've had challenges on this very channel idealist um do you know they're still our idealist yeah i talked to him bernardo castro's money's interesting smart guy i talked to a solipsist i'm not against i'm not saying there's no place for those people in consciousness studies i love those people i talk to them all the time i don't think that they're doing the science of consciousness and i don't present them as having things to say about the science of consciousness and i just think that it's a little bit

1:23:40 weird to say this is a conference it used to be called toward a science of consciousness yeah i was going to say now it is the science of god so it just seems weird it doesn't seem representative of what i think of as the science of consciousness not of consciousness studies which is a broader thing which is the company seeing all these other things uh but that's my you know that's my personal assessment i think there's room to disagree so i'm not saying you're wrong um and i'm right i'm just saying and i i'm just trying to really what i'm being defensive about is that it's not coming from a place of fear of judgment i just think that

1:24:12 it's not really an accurate representation of what i think of as the science of consciousness but a lot of people go there and say oh that's what you do and i'm like no that's not what we do actually uh go to these small sessions like these five sessions of there and you might see something like what we do but anyway so that's what i was saying in that i wish that the assc would step up more and be the public face of the science of conscious and be like no we represent this field and those guys are not illegitimate and they shouldn't be scorned but they're interested in a different

1:24:45 set of questions like uh a broader set of questions and so that obviously there's going to be you know theoretical presentations at a scientific meeting but uh i i assume it's presented in the spirit of hey we need to pay attention to these in order to test the things we care about whereas over there it's not i mean you know you have dupont shopper out there talking about something that's like what there's nothing testable at all in what he's talking about and i'm personally skeptical of his like moral and ethical system i just think it's like that's not the cis that's not the signs of consciousness and i resent them calling it that actually uh so you know maybe i'm taking it too

1:25:18 personally i should lighten up and have a beer it's been recommended several times so i have to do it eventually actually i'm kind of with you there richard i think it's um i don't know if maybe lucia and leo are giving a little too much credit to the average consumer you know the non-scientist consumer um to kind of trust that they will be able to tell the difference between you know scientific evidence and i don't know i think there is a there is a lingering pr issue and maybe and maybe assc uh could do something there to really

1:25:52 establish itself as like the main venue for for serious uh scientific research unconsciousness i mean i've but that being said i've never been to the the tucson conference and and i'm i'm yeah i'm with you that i i'm very open-minded um maybe there's some things that aren't scientifically testable now but we could still discuss them um but if it's you know something that's complete pseudoscience and and outside of the realm of ever being tested i don't i agree i don't think it deserves to be called yeah if it was called like the science and philosophy and spirituality of consciousness

1:26:27 i would say that's a perfect name for it that's what it is actually that's what's happening there right it's not built that way and so anyway so and i don't want it to disappear i've presented there um i've i've given poster presentations uh concurrent talks i gave a plenary talk uh so i've i've been there um i'm not against it i'm just i just uh yeah no just want to have people to know what we're doing i want the public to actually know what the science of consciousness is about i i'm with you in that sense so i you know the last time i've been to tucson was eight years ago the only time actually and i i mean assc

1:27:02 is my go-to venue right for i'm just saying i i don't feel comfortable you know i just don't want to be in the judgmental role here especially because i haven't been there in the last you know few years and uh yeah no i totally understand that that's and now i'm just quibbling about the name that's real that's the only thing that bothered me they changed it they just changed it the wrong they just like why didn't they just call it you know the science and spirituality of consciousness uh great i would have loved that conference but i think maybe i mean

1:27:34 maybe part of what's like underlying this and something we talked about earlier why some of us you know were advised to not say we studied consciousness why maybe it was it was more difficult to get jobs and funding and so on i mean is is related to this it's that uh it's consciousness is considered by many outside of the neuroscience of consciousness as as sort of like the spiritual thing that we can't touch with science that um you know i think that's that's part of what's really interesting about it is you've seen these huge revolutions in the history of science right the the uh the sun doesn't revolve around

1:28:08 the earth it's the other way around the you know we're related to all of their species like these huge and i think figuring out how consciousness is generated by the brain if we're able to do that whether it's 20 50 100 years from now um i think could be the next next huge step and it's gonna have these societal impacts right it's um it touches on life after death it touches on um sort of uh the meaning of of existence and it's it's gets pretty deep so i think some of that that cultural and social baggage just

1:28:40 comes into play uh when we're talking about these what what do we count as a you know a real study of consciousness or science of consciousness a different perspective which i did find enriching you know from those kind of conferences um in general you know which is like sometimes you get exposed to different perspectives like you know say buddhism and you know like so like my entry into into you know the neuroscience of consciousness was francisco or ella and what he was trying to do was exactly to reach

1:29:11 you know like these things that were like more like mystical right you know and some of those are completely non-scientific and some of those in his program he was trying to make them scientific but sometimes those dialogues like having i mean if anything i would actually say that what i mean in the ssc is that it's too late you know to align towards one set of philosophies and one set of thinking right and and i think that you know and personally i like the you know i like to challenge myself it's like okay if i'm right and this means that you know like i can talk to some other people and you

1:29:43 know see which ways they are wrong or sometimes they even get enriched by their tradition so so i do think um even for the public like you know let's assume that we drop the s you know because i i i take your point that you know it's it's also trying to narrow it down in such a way that is also not representative of what they are doing so in that sense like science and spirituality would be much better but as a conference in and of itself i think that is it's rich when we are exposed to these different perspectives right and actually would say that hopefully the ssc would have more of that

1:30:17 you know which remember it's a little bit too narrow in some sense right yeah so um and i couldn't agree more that the uh the value of philosophy is exactly what you said it challenges your preconceptions and like you know sometimes i get criticized like why are you talking to this person they think plants are conscious it's like i don't know it's really hard to dismiss someone it's a lot harder it's really easy to dismiss someone it's a lot harder to say why would someone who's intelligent say this thing which i think is very strange and i i enjoy trying to work myself into

1:30:50 the way they see it so that i want to under and that's kind of what the project i have now you guys are here for is i want to i want to see things from your point of view so to speak so that's why when i'm saying you know what about this what about that i'm really trying to get i'm trying to work my way into okay so when you think that this is how you would respond to it rather than like i'm trying to tear down what you're saying and i wish more people would adopt that i'm not saying you know i have a discover some new thing but i do wish that more discussions were the aim was trying to understand the other person as opposed to just waiting your turn to make your point and yelling yes absolutely absolutely but don't you

1:31:25 agree that you know that the part of the adversarial collaboration is exactly did so what i took is that as the most important part of this is sometimes the camps are completely like death yeah you see the sense of you know like i'm talking to you like apparently but i'm not talking to you you're not understanding what i'm saying exactly you know so it was at these two the person was amazing to understand the disagreements and how much they couldn't understand each other right even though they're writing papers disagreeing with each other and saying things like what exactly exactly and i said it was so beautiful and i remember like

1:31:59 this was you know like back in the day when i was working on synchrony you know like i remember having a discussion you know back back in chile and i said why don't we talk about the people that actually think that this is rate code and they was like because it's just you know it's not it's not right is it well i don't know i mean kind of like smart people thinking about that so i know that silly cannot be you know that you know that's true everywhere though because like you know i i've joked at the beginning that i i i think of myself less of a philosopher more of a failed neuroscientist um because i did think at one point i'm going into

1:32:33 switching from philosophy to neuroscience and i ended up not doing because i worked in animals and i just couldn't handle it and i did surgeries and rats and it was just like too much for me i started having nightmares and anyway i'm a vegetarian i'm a vegan so i just i could not do it but i'm not against the idea of the research obviously i support animal research and i can happily have that argument which i thought was great that we had that discussion at the ssc but anyway so uh i kind of gave up on that and then i and then i you know i did some eeg stuff i did erp stuff at sf state

1:33:05 but it was it's amazing to see like the two camps because um when the like intracranial people like when i was putting electrodes into the rats when they found out i had done eeg stuff they're like oh that's not serious what do you like no one takes that seriously you don't even know where to bring what it's doing hahaha like it's just like complete like laugh that's soft science like they were calling it like you know you know like the way physicists talk about psychology that's how they were talking about eeg stuff i was like what uh so then i was a student and that's how they're talking to a student and then meanwhile on the other side the eeg

1:33:37 people are talking about those guys well you know anyway so it's i agree with what you're saying but it's also the fields are just so so people don't understand like neuroscience is not a thing um there are all these little camps or the electro fizz people there are the eg people they're the cellular people they're the physiology people and they barely talk to each other um so any time you get people talking to each other i'm super for it across disciplines and so i agree with exactly what you're saying uh the only point out my rambling story was about was uh that it's not specific to

1:34:11 consciousness this is like it's worse than you think out there as far as like fractionalization yes definitely there is this paper by snow from the 50s or 60s talking about the two cultures of the intellectuals versus the scientists and how they don't collaborate and they don't find common language and what i find is that whenever you have crosstalk whether that is between disciplines uh or you know within between theories or between subfields in the same discipline it's always enriching and you know

1:34:44 as part of the free will thing that is led by uri mars it's the new philosophy of free will you have their philosophers and our scientists and every experiment that we do we actually run by the philosophers and they tell us what is the philosophical meaning of the experiment if this result comes up and that is such an amazing exercise and it gets us to refine the experiments so i think crosstalk it is good every lab should have a resident philosopher that i agree i couldn't agree more actually two of them because they will disagree in a way

1:35:20 so i think you know whenever you can break a boundary and have crosstalk that will benefit both sides so we should definitely do that i can tell you that for instance for us like david chalmers did that and he was like we had our table of printing was like that doesn't check that doesn't check that doesn't change oh my god okay it's good to see that too because i it's so much has changed when i was a student

1:35:52 i was a philosophy major and i'd go into the labs and they'd be like you're a philosopher what do you do all day and i was like i read your papers and try to like figure out what the heck you're talking about that's what i do all day they're like oh okay that might be useful i was like thanks so yeah i do i i but there's like these territorialness these boundaries so i agree it's uh it's quite quite difficult to science is hard and and people don't really realize this i went to my first interdisciplinary conference and it was on you know and electrophysics and i was like you guys are both neuroscientists

1:36:25 and they're like nope so uh do you have an idea why because i see that and and you know to me this is problematic i feel that you know we cannot advance if we don't take the other perspective series seriously like you know this is just more like philosophical but you know from my point of view i just i cannot like i just take you it might not agree with your position but i take it as to be an intellect an intelligent position i just need to find out why i disagree you know if so sometimes even i find out that actually don't disagree

1:36:59 so so why is that we do that all the time and then when can we just not you know i mean that's a whole nother discussion by the way so but uh i'd say has a lot to do with the way fun things and competition and and the university obviously is the way it exists but uh uh not so close i would wave a wand and just give everybody who wants money for research i just give it to them and say some people wasted i don't care like just give let people do it and smart people like you will take that money and the field will advance beyond the wild and you want to write

1:37:31 grants anymore i just don't yeah i think a lot of your guys's time was when i first found out how much time you guys spend writing brands i was like flabbergasted shocked like how much effort time care and like how the odds you have to like math it out okay like only these numbers are accepted and i'll submit 20 this year i should be good it's like a whole and it's like philosophers don't think that way and we're so lucky yeah wouldn't it be nice if you could just prove yourself as you know i'm a i'm a decent scientist i ask good questions can i have some funds and you don't have to spend a half or two thirds of your year

1:38:04 trying to get the funding yeah yeah i know but there's this uh that yeah even at the university like i go to a conference they treat me like i'm a criminal prove that you got on the plane you're stealing from us prove that you went to that you gave the conference i was like i did it's recorded it's on youtube like uh oh my goodness but anyway so yeah that's a whole different conversation one quick thing about the camps and and you know the different especially like within a certain science i wonder if part of what we need is just better general science education to teach students how the sciences are linked together

1:38:37 um i don't know if any of you read eo wilson's book consilience or i came across this book you know as an undergrad and it was just lucky kind of happened happen on it and just it really explained how all of the yeah all of the sciences are are related and they're they're looking at different levels of reality different you know from microscopic and uh all the way up yeah but then you'd have to like do philosophy of science and people right right maybe like i was a philosophy minor maybe that's where i got it but uh yeah i think that that could help to to try to reduce the

1:39:10 sort of uh people getting into camps and saying this is the you know the most hardcore science and everything else is yeah but it's the scientists themselves that that need it the most and you know that it's especially funny to me not not not in our area so much but like in physics especially they're like oh you philosophers we don't need you like don't you though maybe not to do your experiments but to understand where what it means that's i'm not saying scientists can't do philosophy in fact i think they a lot of them do it's just they a lot of them tend to not do it well so do a lot of philosophers obviously

1:39:44 so it's hard um but it's it's it's i think i mean you know you guys i just want to commend you first of all i know i've been grilling you for two hours almost now i just realized but but your commitment to these ideas i just i just want to say it's really commendable that not only are you saying like we we think open science is important but you're like now this is part of the record like here all of our worries all of our discussion this is people should be privy to this i think which is why you know what the project that i have is like on youtube i want if people care they can watch it um it's like c-span like no one will maybe but it's

1:40:17 there if you wanted to um so but there's not a lot of that people are afraid to put their reputations online they don't want to look stupid or whatever not you know whatever that they don't want to be shown to be wrong but i always thought scientists should love to be shown to be wrong that's that's how progress is made i would love to be that's why i'm saying at the beginning i'd love for the higher theory to be falsified that that would to me would just like make my day um but but people get really invested in in their theories and of course that's where the problem uh arises that's a huge problem it's really huge uh uh returns and this

1:40:51 is where you know like mike's point with education is really important and and and they keep telling me students like you know what it's true it's extremely you know like you know i always tell them like if you want to become a scientist roll up your arms because know you're gonna learn when you fail every time you actually you know like don't fail you get to publish the paper but you learn nothing so just just for the you know so so you know roll up your arms because it's going to be hard you know and you want to be shown wrong you know you because this is when you

1:41:23 learn you know like so we have been talking about the the and the adversarial part like people you know obsess about who wins is who loses that i think is the real money you don't know it's like i will if if this is wrong then i will learn something you see so why can't we not train people to also understand that this is an opportunity maybe i can share maybe i can share something from my experience so that paper i was talking about when we started this conversation uh that actually

1:41:55 ended up you know making me come to christoph slab as a postdoc was a paper in psych science where i i said i found that objects and sins could be integrated unconsciously and then i to this day i remember the moment where i got an email where i was asked to review a paper that tried to replicate my findings and failed and i remember the the feeling in my body when i got that email you know it was it wasn't a nice moment right and then so i can totally relate to why people

1:42:30 don't like to fail or to be proven wrong it's and i thought at that point i thought that's the end of my academic career because that was my big finding and that was what got me my post talk and you know and then i i took a deep breath and i said okay that's what happened first let's review the paper i reviewed reviewed it i thought they were they did everything right and then i said let i will try to replicate this finding and i tried and i failed as well so i you said i i said let's just own up my mistake and say that you know i was wrong and

1:43:04 now i publish it myself and i'm fine with it and i really think that that was one of the most important experiences i had as a scientist and it completely changed the way i work in the lab now we in my lab now everything is pre-registered we never publish anything without replicating it first in the lab because you know i don't want to be in that situation again so i am so grateful for that thing that happened to me um it wasn't fun it wasn't easy it wasn't you know something i enjoyed but i really think that it improved my

1:43:38 work tremendously so i couldn't agree more with the sentence you know let's fail it's important to fail it improves us it improves the science that we're doing um so let's not fear of that and it's me i understand that here i think the important thing is to understand that we are not the story once we understand that it's not about me it's not about gliads finding it's about the finding if it's true or not then everything becomes easier you know it's still not i wouldn't want to be in that situation again where someone you know

1:44:11 i get an email saying one of my findings is is wrong but if it does happen again i will certainly won't have that feeling in my body again because i now know it's not the end of the world it doesn't reflect on me it was almost everyone makes mistakes all the time and this is how we learn and this is how we improve it's all that's sort of what mike was saying earlier actually uh relates i think to this because the your fear like of your security like you gotta eat you gotta live right uh your person as well as a scientist so you need you have this is a job

1:44:43 your your success at your job is linked to your success and finding something of being the person who found that right your name gets associated with it whereas what mike was saying which i thought was so interesting and important was that actually we should reconceptualize it maybe and think the person we want is the person who asks questions and can think of a way to answer it and maybe doesn't always get it right but it's the thing that should get rewarded is are you a good question asker then like go go do it um and let the community sort out you know who's right and wrong that's what science does but uh instead what we tend to reward is like who's got the flashy result the theory

1:45:17 that the model or whatever that you know is the thing that we're all gonna you know oh working memory we all know battle a's name right so uh because the model he came up with but as opposed to because he asked good questions or you know so i think that's i don't know how we change that's a systemic thing obviously there's no one thing to do but uh i do think that that's part of the issue here is that we pin the success to uh being a good scientist to making this discovery or something like that which is just so it's not 1875. it's like hard to do that but but you see what part of my utopia

1:45:52 is that you know through these projects again in the the open science component we might actually you know they could get past that thing so think about like now in my in my imaginary world you know like at night everything of this utopia of you know crowdsource science where you know we just you and i whatever you know i just you imagine that you bet on an experiment and then you know the r collects ten subjects might threaten my two you one and then you know we will put the data there and then we battle hypothesis and we're all right or all wrong yeah that'd be awesome whatever you see what i mean wouldn't that be you know it's like

1:46:23 who cares what you say a t g and w you know what you're seeing is like you know if you have a cool experiment and you think that this is gonna answer to culture well let's do it together exactly that would that is a utopia i would i'd love to live there and it's you know because i think that we were talking about science education and perception of science and sort of this i mean we got into these broad topics and you know sorry for not going through all the details of the cool experiments and by the way i'm going to harass each of you individually to come back and talk to me one-on-one about your own work because i think this group project is cool but actually i was reading your individual papers and i was like talk about that too so anyway that'll

1:46:56 sorry to bother you but you will probably get that email from me um but uh i think that part of the this education thing that we're talking about is super important um because of people's perception of what scientists do and how they do the job that they do uh anyway so i lost my train of thought when i was thinking about something else but uh so um that probably means that we've been talking a long time if i can't remember what i was about to say so uh this might be a good time to to

1:47:31 segue although i felt like i was about to say something so it'll come back to me but uh at this point i usually like to ask after we've been talking for a long time whether there was anything which you really wanted to talk about or hoping or sort of expecting that would uh come up at some point but that hasn't so you can say no but i just wonder if maybe somehow no but i just don't know i i i i have a question okay so you know say imagine that you know we roll time you know 10 years what would it mean that we failed

1:48:04 do we as a discipline we did this project for instance what would it mean a failure for this project oh for the project uh not for the neural science of consciousness um what would it mean for it to have failed uh in my opinion it would have failed if people thought that an approach that shouldn't be dismissed uh was this that they cited this as an easy way to dismiss it in the first line of uh of an introductory paragraph uh we

1:48:39 don't have to take that theory seriously parentheses this project 2023 uh uh but but the danger there being that uh maybe the question it's not you know maybe it's more complicated than that and that it only challenges the theory but they have a response to it so it does seem that would be mine if you want to say what failure is to me that's it it sends the message out that there's a there's a bullet a silver experiment it was done and these guys lost and now we can just like uh

1:49:10 you know there will always be the die-hards who don't give up yuck but uh you know we can not really worry about it that to me would be failure now i'm not saying that i don't think that's gonna happen but if that did happen i would be like oh man that was a bad call so would you you know thinking again about education so do you think that we should train people to do philosophy of science oh yeah in fact at the community i teach at a community college you know and we we have a philosophy of science general ed class um and we're trying to get it into the scientific uh world general ed category thing and they're fighting us on it but i actually

1:49:43 think no it belongs in there they're like it's not science and we're like but you need to understand science right and they're like well it's not science we're like but uh so i i yes i think everyone should that's interested should have some general introduction to the philosophy of science some understanding of it and a lot of these issues by the way that reminds me of what i was trying to say earlier which was that i think that there is this kind of uh general i know uh this general perception amongst a certain kind of layperson that like the things that we call science are just too abstract too complicated that they can't understand them

1:50:16 that they're that you have to that it's all hidden behind a smoke screen or something like that but like the science of like i joked about the 1870s but of course the what the joke is that you could do it yourself you could go in your basement and what the scientist said i'll chop the frog up and hook up the electrodes and look at the lane go it all be dinged it was all accessible but now to do any of this stuff you need an fmri scanner or you know near infrared whatever you need all kinds of fancy stuff which the average person doesn't have access to so one way this might help is that that data was just out there and if you could

1:50:47 like as a person query it and be like what happens if you ran it this way then you might get some of that that uh pessimism because i've heard people like i go on these youtube channels on that are for the average person sometimes and they'll say things like why should i believe you science person like i didn't see that data i didn't do that experiment i have no idea what you're talking about why should i take you seriously no i don't think that kind of skepticism is justified but i sort of understand it in a way like yeah they have no idea what we're talking about why these methods are good or like why we trust them and what double disassociations are any of these things

1:51:19 that we like put a lot of like faith in actually uh they don't know why and i see that as legitimate skepticism because no one's ever told them why they should trust that stuff um so if you're an appearance like if you're an empirically minor person you should be skeptical of that and so that's because they don't understand the methodology or what we're doing and so yeah that's why i think that the philosophy of science stuff is important yeah yeah and even more so the island institute for instance does that and what is really cool is that now every you know college students or anyone actually can download those data but also you can think about people from

1:51:52 you know continents or countries that you know will it's not just about kids you know or whoever like you know in tea references we would not have an emiji never ever you know and if even if they want to you know buy one i would say like you know you sold poverty and don't buy anybody you see so i think that part of that is also they could like the society science you see it's like now you know you can just make it really democratic and i think you see that that's why i'm so like excited about these things that i feel like people don't understand like

1:52:24 i keep telling my students when i did my phd in chile you know like i did not have access to any journal luckily i had a friend who was doing his phd at columbia university who gave me you know his access code so they could actually download the paper i played actually what i wanted to read sometimes you have barriers that people don't even understand i know yeah the same as i'm at a community college it's the same i don't have access to uh these highfalutin journals i have to email aqua and be like hey can you give me this journal this article it's like it's like this is

1:52:56 my area of research i can't even access the things which i i'm trying to but you see that the part of this is like we need to through this hopefully you know we will just turn the wheel because it's enough like you know this is public money everyone is paying for this and immigration could i agree 100 but the other side of access is understanding so if you just give them access to it but they don't know what they're looking at then that's not that's only half the equation so i agree with you but that's where the education bit comes and they don't know like what it means and you know like i

1:53:29 talk to people like scientists like what is a p-value what does it mean you get six different answers like okay so which is why which is knowledge is so important i actually thought about something that i would like to add at the end okay um so usually here we just we kind of caught up in the conversation that we forgot to acknowledge the many people who work in this consortium so here the three of us are with you but this is a huge group um you know due to time we can't name everyone but uh we welcome everyone here who is listening or watching

1:54:02 to go on to the cogitato website and see all the postdocs who are doing an amazing work you know i really cannot spell out like the amount of work that is included in this project and the amount of complications during team science open science when you're a postdoc here showing us some of the postdocs we just met uh today so uh this is an outstanding group and the three of us just learned from them all the time from the postdocs from the pis of course you know the adversaries themselves julian stan who had the

1:54:36 courage to kind of put their theories on the line uh and the the advisors that we have and and christoph and francis and and david others and really a a beautiful group of talented and devoted people so we owe them so much and i really welcome each and every one of the people who are here if you want to know who if you want to know who is really doing the work go on to our website and see them you know they are i'll put a link to the cogitate website please yeah yeah so that people can check it out

1:55:08 it's nice it's nice it's a nice website actually it's it's it says it's done by wordpress on wordpress so i was like wow it looks pretty good actually not only that i said you know talking about the sociology of this and all of the problems you know in science like imagine what it take to be a postdoc in this project so so because one thing is like the hard work that they do like you know yes i i acknowledge that and this is great but i want you to understand that the courage i mean it's not it's not about the work because everyone is you know hard working but you know it takes somebody who has courage to you know embark in a crazy thing

1:55:40 saying like okay look i weighed work you know like three years you know my you know like it will work all the time and then they might end up with one you know paper with two papers max you know and you know and you know we hope there will be more we hope there will be whatever because it doesn't matter what i mean it's like yeah i don't know you're they write hundred whatever you know it's not the same when you are the single author the head of the lab or the single

1:56:13 postdoc who made you know like the fantastic discovery you know as opposed to one that is part of a team right so what i wanna what i wanna highlight here is the the difficulties of science in terms of you know like what are we rewarding we're rewarding the solo you know like smart genius person you know but in essence we all know that there is no nobel prize without a team these days exactly but you know no i agree completely like the project says adversarial collaboration but really like uh all science should actually be that that's really what it

1:56:48 should be it's sad that it's not and that this has to be an idea that's introduced uh but and in fact that seems like it seems so obvious that when someone says that you're like oh yeah what have we been doing this whole time it's obvious but you know then you know what i want to you know highlight when they're going to the job market because remember you were worrying about you know like yeah you study consciousness like okay these guys study consciousness i end up and they end up in our paper you know with with many authors right so they the level of disadvantage in some sense about the display right so it's in that we as a community need to understand that there's some

1:57:20 people putting their careers on the line so we need to back them up yeah totally and these are and these are people like the ones that are in the call you know like they want you know like you know listening you know so because at the end of the day like in tenure and in jobs application etc it's gonna be you know like these people from this community right yeah you see what i mean so i think that we we need to really you know embrace this and you know do something you know stop the the complaint let's take the action yeah i i agree um i i would just say that uh

1:57:52 you know this is a big problem because i i talk to graduate students and they're interested in consciousness and it's like they ask like where should they go and it's like you almost sort of have to ask them well what theory do you like and you shouldn't have to ask them that right if they want to study consciousness you should be able to say well there's these six labs you could go 20 whatever but instead you have to be like well if you like global workspace then you can check out these people who work on questions like that or if you like and not just it seems sort of like the wrong way to so i agree completely with what you're saying and i hope that the project succeeds and i you know i'm obviously i don't know

1:58:26 you know if we're allowed to have doubts about it once we're involved but i do um and so i'm glad that i'm able to talk with you about them you guys have actually you know it's having these kinds of conversation that's made me feel the way i feel that i'm okay and i think this is a good thing and i see the benefits so i want other people to hear this um because when they hear templeton people feel a certain way when they they don't understand the project you know so i think that these kinds of conversations being open about it with the limitations the complexities the challenges all the things that we've talked about i think is incredibly important

1:58:57 and that more people should have these kind of open discussions and be like yeah it's hard we're trying the best we can like what what do you want us to do over sort of like what you were saying earlier what would you do like this is what we got so i just want to thank you guys that the people on the project the courage they have your guys courage all of that stuff your openness to have these conversations so good-natured about it i just think it's a great example for the field so thank you and most of the people in your project you know oh yeah i agree yeah we're wonderful too we're not talking about us though but it takes all of these courageous people

1:59:32 that you see this is what i mean with the community yeah so the the all of these people who are somehow embarked one way or another right it's it's yeah i don't know i don't know for the younger generation it's just nice or what yeah there is like a lot of nice people around yeah you know and then we you know we test your theory you know like the you know you put three subjects i put you know the headphones for and you know like then we we make it happen yeah exactly you know i think it's a i think it's wonderful i'm really just i mean uh happy to be a small part of it

2:00:06 to be honest with you so uh cool in that sense it's cool but i see it is getting late after it's really late in some places where some people are so uh having said that i want to thank the three of you for coming on it's been i learned a lot from just thinking through these issues just the conceptual and mythological issues um i'm super interested in in taking it serious and trying to work through uh so this has been so helpful i learned tremendous smiles so thank you guys thank you and just hang out for a second yeah yeah thank you thanks so much richard

2:00:37 that's cool just hang out for a second and i'll say bye off air but uh i'll do that all right we're off okay we don't see any change but