Consciousness Live! with Mark Solms (S4 E18)

0:00 talk during the chat and if they have something interesting i may ask but if not i know oh we're live now sorry [Laughter] okay we are live uh joining me today a very special guest uh mark soles mark for those who don't know you can you start by telling us a little bit a little bit about who you are and what you do yes i'm a neuropsychologist i trained in the early 1980s i was frustrated by the lack of psyche

0:34 in neuropsychology and so i i took the unusual step for a neuroscientist of training also in psychoanalysis so that's who i am i'm mark solms i'm a neuropsychologist and a psychoanalyst very good yeah you know that is a very unusual combination uh there and that's one of the things that i admire about your work is that you make a strong case for bringing the psyche um back into neuropsychology into psychiatry i guess as well or are you strictly focused on neuropsychology

1:08 oh no precisely because of the the the overlap in my interests i psychiatry is center stage right okay and there has been a strange absence of the subjective phenomena for uh for science a medical profession that aims at um trying to understand what we might think of as mental uh it seems to have disappeared so um i think it's good to bring these questions to the forefront um can you tell us a little bit about yeah i mean i

1:40 was speaking with you a little bit off before we started i mentioned that i had seen you debate allen hobson at the assc when was that 2001 or two or sometime in the early um it was my debate with him was 2006. um yes time warp okay yeah so i that was a very interesting um debate can you tell us a little bit i mean you talk about it in your book but i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what the premise of the debate was and how you think things went

2:13 well um so alan's work was the springboard for his work was his splendid research into the brain mechanisms of rem sleep and a sleep cycle control generally and the the most of his work was done on rats and the downside of rats is they can't speak um and so what he was studying was entirely the physiological side of the equation we were just talking about you know there's

2:44 the physiological side and then there's the psychological side and so i my research was building upon what he and others had taught us about the brain mechanisms of rem sleep which correlates with dreaming in other words we dream for the most part during rem sleep i by studying human beings was able to see well what happens on the psychological side when those same brain mechanisms are afflicted of course in my case with naturally occurring disease

3:19 not not experimental damage and the the great surprise was that patients with damage to the sprain structures that generate rem sleep have still experienced dreams and patients with damage elsewhere in the brain who lost dreaming still experienced rem sleep so it was the that was the springboard for my disagreement with him is that i i did not believe after those findings that the brain mechanisms for rem sleep were the same as the brain mechanisms for dreaming

3:52 and he accepted that interestingly when i first presented my findings to him to his team at harvard in the late 1990s he accepted my findings until he realized that i was saying well perhaps we owe floyd an apology because the the brain mechanisms that that generate dreaming as opposed to rem sleep turn out to be far from the motivationally neutral structures that he had identified in the brainstem that are responsible for rem sleep that the the brain mechanisms of dreaming have everything to do with motivation and

4:25 emotion and and other interesting things you know like autobiographical memory and so on so our debate was um over the question of whether or not freudian dream theory was still viable and i'm happy to say i won the debate uh with the uh the vote went two to one uh in my favor to my great surprise yeah it's interesting because you were one of the first persons i heard use the f word freud haha um in a positive way i kind of uh you know was taught to say what sort of embarrassment we have to

4:57 talk about him he had weird ideas but uh you know the field had moved on and we sort of own a debt for talking about unconscious processing but in the wrong way and so forth and so on but so you so you want to connect um i guess one part of which i don't understand about the sort of picture that you're uh painting and the apology to freud and this is for clarification on my own and is i so i thought to vindicate freud you would have to i mean so the way i interpreted the debate let me back up the state step was whether um like psychoanalysis could excuse me can

5:35 you learn something about the mind by looking at someone's dreams or thinking about the content and looking for latent content as opposed to the sort of obvious content um and i so it's not clear to me whether you think that part is vindicated as well or detachable from this idea because because it seems to me that what you're arguing for is no there's like the hypothalamus is activated he's seeking there's there's gold motivated uh areas that so it's not just random stuff seemingly um but that doesn't really get you all the way to well we can learn about like

6:07 your true stuff by analyzing dreams or do you think it does that's that's what i was curious about well let me begin my answer by set by making clear that i am by no means uh trying to defend freud uh the whole freud and nothing but before it um it's in this particular instance i genuinely think we offer it an apology because the the argument against freud uh coming from alan hobson and and and others working on the brain mechanisms of rem sleep was that these mechanisms

6:41 which generate rem sleep clearly cannot perform the functions that floyd inferred from psychological data to be the driving forces of the dream and those findings themselves the ones which which disproved freud those findings were erroneous so we go back to square one and then we look at what the brain mechanisms of dreaming actually are and they are you mentioned some of the structures there i would emphasize what what's called the seeking system by some

7:12 others call it the brain reward system um it is the mesocortical mesolimbic dopamine system which has everything to do with you know with with desire everything to do with positive uh a pleasure seeking uh vigorous activation uh you know of motivational uh search behaviors and engagement with the world now it's a very big surprise to see that this system uh is switched on literally you know full blast like lit up like a

7:48 chris obviously and uh you know that's that's what freud inferred uh if i i'm i'm skipping a step when i say that you know freud looked at this random uh nonsensical looking uh dream content that that we experience and he said if you interrogate it psychologically you find that behind the surface there are heartfelt desires that they're there there really are major motivational forces at work behind the dream and that is what it looks like if you look at

8:20 those brain structures you have to say well that's pretty much what freud inferred and and that speaks to your question about you know does it really i mean so uh you know what about all of this latent content and hidden meaning and so on the fact is that the dreams that we experience and remember in the morning do not look as if they're full of heartfelt desires and repressed motivations and wishes and so on right but the brain mechanisms in question do look like that so you know i i think that it's in that sense that we owe him

8:52 an apology not only that the argument against him was was itself erroneous but that the structures that that are responsible for dreaming look a lot like what you would have expected if you were freud and it's not only that those motivational structures are switched on full blast it's also that the inhibitory the sort of regulatory cognitive control systems uh centering primarily on the pre-frontal cortex that part of the brain is deactivated during dreaming sleep so you know it

9:25 looks pretty much like like what freud described but last word from me on this school is that i don't believe that proves freud was right i'm just saying it means that we were wrong in the arguments that we set up against him and what we see in the dreaming brain is compatible it's consistent it's it's it's plausible um you know in relation to the freudian account that's what i think we can see yeah okay so and i take the point about the brain structures um and so to extend i think maybe freud

9:58 does deserve that apology but excuse me following up on your last point there it seems to me that maybe that's where the apology should end though because one of the criticisms of freud i mean i don't know so look there's you you have a very applied therapeutic like clinical background and we'll talk about that in a little bit but i come from a way more theoretical perspective so you know some people have said to me look freud shouldn't be evaluated as a scientist but as a therapist and if his methods help people and who cares if they're right about the mind so i've heard that argument maybe you you could say something if you're

10:31 interested but but i'm sort of thinking about you know the how to learn about the structure of the mind and uh and then you could apply that to help people obviously but i'm asking it's a more theoretical question and so one one of the criticisms of him from that point of view of his approach was that yeah lots of stuff is compatible with his theories but um you know what what would falsify it and so on that score i don't uh or in your mind has anything changed because it seems to me that what you've said is yeah it doesn't you know it's consistent with it but that's what

11:04 everyone sort of would have thought and also i think that you know the hobsons of the world would say you know that's sort of what we we can live with this as well because you know we predicted from the dream conte there's a monster chasing you so the amigo is activated is that a really a big surprise in a certain sense um so so anyway i wonder what your thoughts are about this line of critique might be well um let me repeat what i said earlier you know i i really don't i don't want to be my identity to be the freud yeah i really don't and it's not only

11:39 because it's not it's not um you know freud is not fashionable uh it is also because i think that freud was frankly wrong on many accounts i i really do i i also take your point about you know the things that that we find that are consistent with freud are kind of like you know well why would you have thought otherwise you know of course that dreams are motivated and of course there's strong emotions involved and you know etc etc so you know i would just say quickly to remind you that hobson was arguing precisely

12:13 the opposite i mean he was actively arguing that dreams are motivationally neutral he used those words right you know saying that the pontine brainstem structures involve the neurotransmitters involved acetylcholine these have nothing to do with motivation so you know it is true that you you can say in retrospect well why would we have thought otherwise well for a good few decades we did think otherwise and we were wrong about that but did hobson change his i mean he did change his mind his aim state space stuff did it incorporate that later

12:46 right i mean this is the early ops view yes so after i mean to his great credit he changed his mind and and he developed an entirely new theory not only the aim state space model um but but also subsequently he developed what he called a proto-consciousness theory of dreams and and and in the last years of his life because you know he died earlier this year yeah i didn't know he died this year oh yes yes uh so so in the in the last years of his life he was very active right yeah he

13:18 went on to like the free energy principle exactly so he and i ended up working on exactly the same theory exactly so you ended up in agreement that's a happy ending to the story but it it is interesting that uh yeah that his early work he would deny such a psychologically seemingly obvious fact um that you know this kind of thing that we're talking about but okay so yeah i don't want you to be the freud apologist but you do in the first half of your book argue we owe him an apology and so i think as long as specific apologies about this um and in that sense i agree

13:52 uh okay um so i am curious too because it came up a couple places in the book as a and as a precursor to some things that i want to ask you about in a little bit i wonder so you make a um a case that uh feelings as you like to use the term which i i think as philosophers we would equate with like phenomenal consciousness so i wonder if first of all you agree with that um and then uh feelings as you say can't be unconscious there are no unconscious feelings so i wonder if you could uh tell me first do you use the phenomenal consciousness word in this case um and then secondly

14:27 the argument against unconscious feelings well um let's put it the other way around if if if we're going to use the word uh feeling as synonymous with phenomenal consciousness then how can you argue that it's unconscious uh you know phenomenal consciousness is conscious by definition that's what we're talking about and i i however to come to the first part of your question you know i don't think that the whole of phenomenal consciousness consists in feeling in the sense of

15:00 affective feelings but i do think that the core ingredient of all phenomenal consciousness is affect so feeling in the emotional sense of the word feeling in the valence affective sense of the word i believe is the foundational ingredient of all phenomenal conscious states and i'm very happy to argue that my case as to why i believe that but for now let me just state it um i believe it's the core ingredient and and in that sense my answer is affirmative also to the first part of

15:33 your question i would equate them in the sense that you cannot have phenomenal conscious states without there being feelings involved and i think that's theoretically very important um but i acknowledge of course that there are aspects to phenomenal consciousness which are not affective uh and that's that's a whole complicated story as to why that should be the case right but but on your view those aspects which are not affective somehow depend on or can't occur without the effective part yes

16:06 in my view and uh as i said i'm very happy to unpack the evidence for that yeah yeah no i won't get to that i'm just trying to understand the view first i'm just trying to make sure i don't make a misstep so uh when i ask a question um which i always will though so uh but yeah that's interesting because um i i do i mean obviously if you're gonna like you said if you're gonna quite feeling with phenomenal consciousness then there's a sense of which it can't be unconscious but some people think there's a sense of which it can be like maybe it could be not access conscious

16:37 um so some people might think that you could have phenomenal consciousness without being aware of it like ned block uh without you know he argued you don't have to notice it or be aware of it um and but you use this word in your book which is why i'm bringing this starting in this place uh because you say we have to register i used to use that there's a couple places where you say we have to register the feeling and i was like registered the feeling right so isn't just having the feeling enough so what else it so is that just a way of speaking in english or does that word am i reading too much into it like a philosopher not or

17:09 uh does it signify something in your mind um important about the nature of consciousness yeah well um there's so many different ways in which i could come at this question because you're touching uh correctly on the heart of the matter by diving into this question of feeling so let me start by saying the reason why i use the word feeling is because i want to be clear i'm talking about the conscious thing that we feel um you know there is a broader word i used it a moment ago affect the affect is i fully acknowledge that they are

17:43 affective phenomena which are not felt so this is why i'm wanting to narrow my claim when i say that feelings have to be conscious i mean that aspect of this broad range of things that we call affective but the part that we feel that's that's necessarily conscious um and uh the the the broader the broader concept of epic um there are many uh terms and concepts that i could introduce there but i think that the antithesis or the the the the the other concept that i would want to introduce here first of

18:15 all is need you know feelings and this comes to your uh asking about registration feelings are how we we being the the the subject of the mind how we register our needs states is as feelings i think that is the fundamental function of feelings is for you to know that you are hungry to know that you are thirsty to know that you are sleepy you feel it feelings are how we register our needs they are just to use the examples that

18:50 i've just given well let's just use one of them hunger you are constantly uh your energy needs uh are constantly uh uh uh being that that they're active the the the brain processes um and and other bodily processes concerned uh for example you are constantly burning up um sugar supplies in from uh deposited in adipose tissues and in this way you are supplying your your brain and body with with its with its energy resources

19:24 but we don't speak of that as hunger um right we speak of it as hunger when we feel the need and for me that transition um it makes for it it's important to see the distinction the the feeling of hunger is a demand upon the mind to perform work you're now driven to do something which you're not when you're just burning up uh glucose so that difference needs to be understood and the understanding of that difference i believe that brings us to the heart of why we feel at all in other words what

19:58 consciousness is there for what does it add to these autonomic functions like like energy balance so yeah there's a lot in there i mean there's a lot in there i want to ask about because so so let me take a typical philosopher uh root and then i'll come back to a more empirically based i hate to keep pestering you with these philosopher ideas but i try to get the conceptual stuff first before we go to the empirical details which is the hard part in a lot of cases but in this case um so i mean so single-celled organisms they

20:33 do some of what we're talking about here right so they will seek um nourishing things well not maybe seek is the wrong word if you want to use that in this particular way but anyway so they go towards things which are good for them and they will tumble away from things which are bad from them um some people you know uh want to argue that there's consciousness there and that permeates permeates all life so i'm currently having a discussion with evan thompson about this we're going to hopefully publish some papers in the journal consciousness studies and he's arguing tentatively for an affirmative case there and it's based largely on kind of homeostasis and regulation

21:07 there's more to it anyway so but you don't want to go that far right so are you going to say single-celled organisms have this sort of affect the primitive version of it or does it require brains to get it or where on the phylogenetic scale like how far down do you want to push this well um let's begin with as you say philosophical uh questions but it's very hard to address them in this day and age without immediate with without sort of uh constantly having to dip into the empirical side of things

21:40 absolutely but the philosophical issue that you're touching on as you well know is the problem of other minds you know how do you ever know whether anything other than your own self is conscious because consciousness is a subjective state you can only ever observe your own and so i'm starting by saying that because i'm wanting to acknowledge just how big the the empirical problem the methodological and beyond that the epistemological problems are of how do you determine you know anything about whether a creature or an organism is is con or a machine

22:15 is conscious or not it's a very big problem and so my starting point is that is the one i've just mentioned that i know i'm conscious um of people would agree with that yes well there you go so you know each of us knows that we are conscious each of us says that we're conscious and they're all sorts of empirical data which which which enable us to pinpoint what the brain structures are you know that render us conscious and we can go into those so i'm i'm willing to say that any human being who has brain structures like me who be who

22:49 when those structures are stimulated or activated pharmacologically or deactivated for that matter you know what i expect will happen what i predict from my own case is what happens um and and there's the wonderful additional feature in human beings that we can say this is what's busy happening um so you have you know you have strong empirical grounds for accepting that all other human beings and are conscious at just as you are and and and that this particular human being is not because look you know all of the things that you would expect to

23:22 be uh offline are offline and all of the consequences that you would expect to flow from do you etc etc you can do that with a great many other creatures all mammals you know the structures um that that render us conscious seem to be doing exactly the same thing in all mammals and i'm speaking about consciousness in its most basic sense and you no doubt want to come back to that but then the same applies to all vertebrates you know we find those structures in all vertebrates once we go beyond vertebrates where we do not find the same structures as we have in our

23:56 own case it becomes rather more difficult in terms of a research program you know how do you go about determining if no longer with reference to the case where we do know consciousness exists that is our own case it just becomes more difficult so that's the that's the first thing to say richard i'm just i'm not saying they're not conscious i'm just saying i'm much less sure to the extent that we can understand the functional architecture not just the anatomy and physiology that we can recognize in all vertebrates once we understand what that anatomy and

24:30 physiology is doing then we can ask broader questions beyond uh vertebrates and for me the pivotal thing there and you've touched on this when you speak of single-celled organisms having something that looks like seeking and then you sort of backtrack from the word there's some kind of certainly proto-intentional behavior no question about it um and i would i would say quite happily they have needs and they're acting on the basis of those needs needs in the sense that i used the word earlier and let me define it more

25:04 precisely it means deviations from homeosta homeostatic exactly deviations from their viable physiologically viable ranges the more you deviate from what's physiologically viable the greater the need is and that's exactly how single-celled organisms you know what drives their behavior really as simple as that that's what drives their behavior absolutely right the gap between that and and feelings um which is what i was talking about earlier what is that what what is the why do we feel some of our needs

25:39 the crucial distinction there for me and again i'm happy to go into all the reasons why but for now let me just state what it is um it is that it enables choice an organism that feels how am i doing is this making things better or worse um it it can change its mind if you'll excuse me using the word uh you know it can change its mind on the basis of how things are going here and now that is what i mean by choice i mean this is good i'll carry on doing that this is

26:13 bad i won't carry on doing that there's not a predetermined algorithm that that that governs that behavior but rather felt consequences that is the essence of what we call voluntary behavior voluntary behavior for me is behavior driven by choice as opposed to wholly predetermined by a fixed algorithm so that functionality then becomes something that you can use as a measure for for making an educated guess as to whether or not a creature is conscious

26:46 for me that would be my rough and ready measure of it is the creature able to change tack on the in in a novel environment in an unpredictable environment where there cannot be a fixed algorithm for what i should do um the the the the adaptive advantage of feeling is that a creature equipped with feeling can feel its way through such an environment making choices which will enhance its chances of surviving way beyond one which has fixed algorithms yeah i mean i see the appeal of such a

27:19 view i wonder about it at various points though um so so well there's a lot so that was a lot that you said but so the first of all i wonder is this really just a problem of other minds um i mean you know i'm aware of the problem of other minds from the 50s in philosophy it was a big deal but it in that the problem there like how do we know there are any other minds at all besides our own since all our knowledge of any mind is based on first person blah blah blah um and you know you could figure that problem like solved

27:52 and still worry about this methodological question um which i think is a separate maybe i mean maybe they're related i i don't want to nitpick but it does seem to me the important part of the question is this methodological one that's where where my interests lie certainly so you know i think that from the common sense point of view it's beyond question that uh non-human animals are conscious and experience things like common sense has settled that issue all the same

28:23 evidence we use on you is what i use on my dog in the cow over there so but but scientifically i think uh the question's not settled so i think we might disagree a little bit there and i'm aware of your background on this and that my my position is just that it's not settled not that there's an obvious answer so i'm not trying to defend that animals are not conscious i believe they are but i don't really think that so one of the issues is that you said we look for what we would expect if consciousness were missing and i go hmm what would we expect if consciousness were missing and so

28:56 there's really the kernel of the the problem i think and that's why the single-celled organisms really matter because you can mount an argument from the other end as it were so you're mounting an argument from this end and going back but you could start from the other end and say look what that shows is or suggests is that there's unconscious needs that the single cell organism is unconscious it has these needs it's homeostasis we use the word needs i think that's correct um so why is it necessary to do the things you're talking about

29:30 to have these felt components why couldn't a bunch of those things put together give you behavior that looked like i don't know yeah let's say a mouse um but uh didn't have any feeling and we're sort of halfway there with like roomba so roomba seems to do the things you were just talking about with respect to choices i would say it has voluntary actions um you bring in your house it maps out the room learns where the furniture is doesn't bump into it or does learns from it and tries to avoid it seems like the sort of thing you're talking about but i

30:01 don't want to say roomba feels anything i mean i don't think roomba is conscious i know people who disagree with me so you know those people aside i would deny that roomba is conscious but certainly roomba seems to me to have the behavior of like your element for cockroach or your average you know small insect so i i so i'm just kidding i know that was a lot to come back at you with but i'm just wondering like so i'm not entirely convinced by this argument but i do feel the pull of it is so i do feel like there's two outlooks on the way intentionally in brains like one side sort of says well it arises with need and the other side says no

30:33 there's unconscious need so we have to say where it arises and then it becomes a lot trickier to say because just using these common sense attitudes uh we'll get to in a second when we start talking about the cortex and its involvement which you know i think we have an interesting discussion bob anyway so it's it's a whole problem and simply saying oh we know what we see it seems to me to be um almost cavalier and glib with respect to like the deep methodological issue that science is facing here and that is what gives me pause um is that it's uh

31:07 common sense agrees with it so much that we just right over this mythological problem and and without giving it it's due or at least it seems that way to me so yeah i wonder what your thoughts on that sort of set of things might be um well the it's a curious position i find myself in right now uh because uh i'm not normally called upon uh to defend uh the the position that you're that you're asking me to defend it's normally the other way around in other words you know i'm i'm all for extending

31:40 um our attribution of consciousness way beyond what we are normally willing to do in the cognitive neurosciences in other words i'm saying not only are all humans conscious all primates all mammals i mean all all of us those of us who have the equipment uh undamaged you know we we're all and i'm saying all vertebrates are conscious in other words you do not need a cortex to be conscious all you need is certain brain stem structures and and then i'm

32:14 saying beyond that you know that i'm i'm willing also to um to take seriously the possibility that consciousness exists in some non-vertebrates the obvious uh example is some separate parts um you know the evidence for for for an octopus being conscious is pretty good yeah so what about that okay yeah so so i i'm one uh i'm i'm sort of liberal in my attribution in my willingness to accept the consciousness

32:48 of of of creatures that that very very many of my colleagues are not willing to accept so so i'm i'm one who's arguing for you know a less anthropocentric view uh for for one that is more more generous more willing to recognize that consciousness is way more ubiquitous than than we generally and it's a way simpler uh property than than we would think if we took human consciousness as the gold standard as our kind of model example of what we mean by consciousness i think we must we

33:21 must we must be willing to recognize as conscious very simple feeling states the capacity to feel your need uh to me is as i've already said uh that is a that is a sufficient uh definition of consciousness now i'm not saying therefore remember to use your very extreme example or insects and actually in insects i think it's really quite an interesting question i'm not saying they're not conscious um you know so i'm not normally but but i i will say this that i am

33:55 against pan psychism uh i i i do not believe that everything is just a little bit conscious um you know so so i i do i do say there's a dividing line and i think we're saying the same thing uh when i say i think that it behooves us to to to think about well what is that dividing line yeah and on what grounds are we drawing that line and what methodological tools must we deploy in order to and what criteria you know in terms of

34:27 experimental design must we use to determine whether a particular creature or machine is conscious or not i um i think that it's a very difficult question and i i i i tend to think that uh compared to my colleagues that that that consciousness is is far more widespread in in living things than we previously believed that most of my colleagues still believe and i would even go so far as to say to my great surprise because a few years

35:00 i wouldn't have thought so but i would even go so far as to say that i do think an artificial consciousness is possible i don't think consciousness is necessarily tied only to biological organisms i see okay i got the feeling from your book the way you emphasize the brain structures that that might be the case but okay interesting um so i guess i'm i'm a hold out for hopefully it's biological um probably one of the last three or four holdouts let it be biological but but i so just to back up a second i i was aware that

35:35 um you're much more liberal in your in your outlook and that you're arguing that we should accept you know consciousness is more widespread what i was asking for was a response to a kind of argument against that view starting from the single-celled organism case and saying so because what i thought you were saying was in effect you can't have these kinds of behaviors without affect without consciousness without feeling um you're not gonna get

36:07 true seeking behavior um without feeling motivated to search or feeling depleted and therefore hungry or i thought that was part of your view so before i go on is is that or or could you get that without like in a purely non-conscious entity is it even conceptually possible from your point of view to have a completely non-conscious entity which behaved like your average rat yeah so um the

36:40 i start with the human case for the reason i said earlier which has to do with the problem of other minds that takes me to the anatomy and physiology i want to understand what is it that makes us conscious and we have the best chance of being able to do that with us because you know we we are ourselves conscious and because we can speak and then i go backwards using the using that same anatomy i go backwards and i say okay well you know let's let's find where else this anatomy exists and then

37:13 just to be clear on the point that you were questioning me about earlier i'm not sure i i was uh conveying to you what it was that i was intending i was saying that on the basis of having identified those structures in the human case then it becomes possible to make testable predictions you're saying if this structure does in this creature what it does in us then my prediction is if i stimulate it or replace it or whatever then this will be the behavioral consequence as long as those those predictions are confirmed we're doing ordinary science they are

37:46 falsifiable predictions and as long as they're not falsified we have to say well the the hypothesis that this creature is conscious that hypothesis is not falsified so that's the way in which i do it now the the aim of doing all of that ultimately is to get to rock bottom to understand well what exactly is the mechanism whereby consciousness is generated that for me is a profoundly interesting question if you're going to claim that you have identified that mechanism then it should be possible to engineer

38:20 it otherwise you haven't you haven't identified the causal mechanism that generates consciousness so so just starting from so that's that from the anatomy and physiology to the function and to the question of can non-biological creatures be conscious that's the basis upon which uh might that's the route that my thinking travels um now to your question of need when you do the exercise that i've just summarized what you find is that the crucial consciousness generating structures in

38:54 humans and all mammals and all vertebrates are structures which have to do with the regulation of the need economy of the organism that's that's why i come to need it's not from some apriori sort of you know seems to me that biological creatures are defined by need and only biological creatures are conscious and so therefore one plus one equals two you know it's a there really are many empirical steps that lead us to that conclusion and it has everything to do with the regulation of knee and then you look at well you know there are lots of need regulating structures in the brain

39:27 which when you lesion them do not lead to a loss of consciousness um you know so it's clearly not synonymous with me there's a subset of need regulating structures which are crucial to consciousness and then you want to find what is it that that set of structures do and that's how you come to the you know to the conclusions that i've come to so when you say is it possible to have an an organism which has needs and which is not conscious i say yes but not because i'm prejudiced it's because of the kinds of evidence that i'm that i'm talking about do i think that you can

40:01 have a a creature or system you know which which is conscious but does not have needs i would say well there's no evidence um there is no evidence that there is such a thing all the evidence points to the fact that consciousness feelings uh being the the sort of in my view the elemental form of consciousness that they have to do with it's a subset of need need regulating structures it's a particular way of dealing with need need which allows you to have choice

40:35 over over how you're going to deal with it so when when it comes to engineering and artificial consciousness and my starting point is well then we have to have a system which has needs and that's not impossible not difficult even to engineer a system uh the fundamental design principle of which is it's it's uh it must keep on existing everything it does must enable the system to carry on existing as a system just there you have the beginnings of what we call lead biologically right yeah okay so i mean i yeah i understand

41:10 your so i guess what i what my question i'm not doing a good job of asking yet which that's all right that's why this is a conversation on an interview because i i'm terrible at actually asking the questions but i um what i'm what i'm trying to get at i think is uh it does seem to me there's two so i like the way you start from the human point of view and then say okay let's start from there and go the other way however i think that there's a real mire from that step to

41:41 the argument about running structures so this will take us to the argument over like is the cortex involved for example so you you want to argue that um well you have consciousness without the cortex and that you know there's large large i i guess i thought i didn't really realize this was the accepted view until i read your book and i was like okay maybe everyone i know does think that i sort of thought the accepted view was the other one that was all subcortical and these guys were fighting against it but maybe yeah reading your book convinced me maybe that's a misperception but um so

42:17 what is the evidence in your view i know you talk about the book but i want you to get to say here um what is the evidence for consciousness without the cortex because it seems to me that once you present that evidence then we're going to have a real the real question i was trying to ask before it's going to become relevant so let's let's go ahead and start there okay well i must start by saying that i acknowledge of course that consciousness with uh that is abnormal in the absence of cortex in other words i'm certainly not claiming and many people want to

42:50 attribute to me this view so i want to i want to disavow it straight away i i'm not saying that the cortex plays no part in consciousness that's absurd uh the cortex plays a huge part in the consciousness that we are familiar with in fact it plays the dominant part in the consciousness that we human beings are familiar with but but only by influencing the lower stuff right because you do say in your book like the cortex is largely unconscious i thought that was a so i could see sort of why people might infer from from statements like that that you thought it wasn't so if it's relevant

43:22 it's causally relevant but there's no like conscious contents which are supported by the cortex on you or is there no there are so so so i'm i'm mindful now richard i'm no longer answering your question that you're awesome i'm not answering this follow-up question so yes it's certainly true that um the vast bulk of what the cortex does is unconscious at any one point in time the vast bulk of what the cortex is doing is unconscious and in fact um that is the basis for uh

43:56 the way that chalmers formulates the hard problem uh and not only chalmers i mean it goes all the way back to frank jackson since you're a philosopher uh yeah let's go back to him you know jackson's knowledge argument uh states that mary the visual neuroscientist without ever having had a certain type of visual experience um she could not know with from with all of her mechanistic understanding you know of how vision works how visual information processing goes on in the brain that that's all of this it doesn't

44:31 require consciousness um to explain the mechanism and the functionality it doesn't require consciousness therefore consciousness you know that that's why we got this hard problem you can't use the normal kind of mechanistic arguments to account for it etc the the fact that this is true of mary is is because those processes processes like visual perception the kinds of things that the cortex does and not only raw visual perception um even the highest forms of visual perception like face recognition like reading with comprehension a uniquely

45:05 human capacity all and this what i'm saying is based on oodles of experimental evidence that all of those functions can occur unconsciously you can read with comprehension uh unconsciously in other words you don't know that you've experienced anything but your subsequent behavior is influenced by what you've read that can be demonstrated easily in an experimental setup so that's these are cortical functions power excellent these are cortical cognitive

45:38 higher uh perceptual and and and and learned cognitive functions symbolic cognitive functions reading you know so so it's on that basis that i say the bulk of what the cortex does does not require consciousness which then leads to the question well okay well then why does some of it require consciousness and what is it that may what is it that differentiates cortical functions which are conscious from cortical functions which are unconscious and that's what leads me to the brain stem and that's the the story that you began with the

46:12 question you began with uh you know and i'll come back to that question but the so the vast bulk of what the cortex does is unconscious but some of it is conscious and when those cortical processes unique cortical processes the cortical the cortex does things that other structures don't do they're not intrinsically conscious but when those cortical specific functions are rendered conscious then your consciousness has a content that it wouldn't have if it wasn't cortical functions which are being rendered

46:45 for example the ability to hold a stabilized image in mind and to do mental work with it this is this is something that only cortex can do it can do all of that unconsciously too but when it does it consciously you have a kind of consciousness your consciousness has a content which it would not be able to have without cortex so that's what i mean when i say cortex most certainly does contribute not only something but a hell of a lot to consciousness but consciousness is not synonymous with those kinds of mental gymnastics consciousness for me is a is a very

47:19 basic state you know it is it is arousal waking up in the morning and feeling something is conscious and uh that for me is a is a is a necessary and sufficient uh a definition of consciousness is just that it feels like something it doesn't have to entail all of these cognitive and symbolic operations and these self-reflective operations of the kind you know that enable us to report on our mental states and so on it's just the beginnings themselves

47:52 i mean i i find this argument somewhat unsatisfying i guess because can you i mean so i'm not it's not clear to me why uh you can't just make the same exact which i thought was in fact now then think about it the same exact arguments um against the you know the meso corticolimbic system being involved because there's most of what it does is unconscious and you know we have unconscious threat detection and the amygdala is activated when the snake is not seen and um so forth and so on so uh isn't that roughly

48:26 an equivalent set of evidence and brings up the same kind of question so using that it's using this distinction between conscious and unconscious contents as a way to say well there's nothing intrinsically conscious there so we should look further down no yeah so sorry richard that's why i said please note i'm not answering your first question i'm now answering your follow-up questions so that was not my answer to your first question so now let's come to your first question um on what grounds do i say that the cortex is not necessary for consciousness okay the the the the um

49:00 the starting point is that you can remove the entire cortex and the animal still behaves as if it were conscious in other words it still it still wakes up in the morning it still goes to sleep at night it still shows all the full range of basic emotional behaviors in other words it fights it plays that it gets scared and runs away it copulates uh it raises its young to maturity all of these things um you know so this is this is not just a autonomic arousal of a sleep waking

49:35 cycle uh this is this is uh intentional volitional goal-directed behavior across a wide range of different affective states and the same thing applies to human beings obviously we never thank god i mean i'm sorry we do it with any creatures but we never remove the cortex of a human being to see what will happen it's been done in a myriad other animals and i don't only mean rodents i mean in dogs in the early research it was done in dogs and cats you know all the evidence

50:07 remember what i mean by evidence when i was saying earlier about testable predictions falsifiable predictions all of your predictions as to you know what you would expect from the creature if it were conscious are confirmed even though it has no cortex in human beings born without cortex you see the same thing hydrancefully is the condition we're talking about um and these kids don't only wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night but they are behaviorally emotionally responsive beings and they have preferences

50:39 that they show all kinds of pleasures and all kinds of unpleasures in situationally specific and situation the appropriate ways that by itself is not sufficient evidence but it's weighty evidence and it's certainly not what would have been predicted from the cortical theory of consciousness in other words that that that consciousness is intrinsic to cortex and it is generated by cortex and from cortex but actually yeah i still can i try to interrupt you but can i just um that last point that you made i want to talk about hydroencephaly

51:13 and uh the decorticated animals i think it's horrible how we treat animals and animal research i think that maybe attitudes are changing and you know i always show the hub this is now i'm getting distracted but i always show the human weasel uh cat experiments to my undergraduate students and they're like what are you doing to these cats i'm like if we don't support this stuff let's think about better ways to do the science here but anyway um like computer models might help but uh so one of the questions that that this is i think where the line really gets blurry because you say we want empirical

51:47 predictions and the cortical theory of consciousness would not have predicted the things which we're talking about and to me that doesn't seem uh right i think in fact the cortical theory would in fact predict exactly what we find um because basically what the idea is that there are two systems here one for controlling behavior and one for doing consciousness and so you can remove one and still have the other and so that's why i was asking earlier about whether on your view was even conceptually possible to have animals with these kind of behaviors but no

52:19 consciousness because i don't think you can simply say look they behave in these ways uh therefore they we have good reason to think they're conscious now i know you say it's not sufficient so that's what you mean there but but i'm not even think i don't even think that that uh so i wonder let me put it more mildly i wonder whether this is rising up to the levels of good science to count that kind of thing as evidence because we don't in humans know um that you have consciousness without the cortex

52:53 and so i saying that this that so i wonder how much weight you want to put on this piece of evidence that the cortical theory doesn't predict this because there i would want to defend the cortical theory now i agree that it's not clear you look i've seen the the video of them you know a girl smiling with her um mother enters the room you talk in your book about the brother being put in the arms and you know the way they respond and then one wonders but couldn't that be explained by evolution and that this is more beneficial for you know us to have these emotional reactions to them doesn't indicate that these are good and if you found an ana like a roomba doing

53:27 exactly that people would tend to go i'm not sure is it just imitating so i do wonder how much anthropomorphizing we're doing here and this is exactly where i want to be cautious now i i don't think that we you know so i'm not clear anyway so let me stop and just get your reactions before you yeah no well so i agree with you uh that that line of evidence by itself uh is not is is not decisive uh it is very striking and why do i say it's very striking i'm going to come to what other evidence okay so that's where i'm

53:58 heading in this answer but i want to just tell you why it's striking is because it is the abc of behavioral neuroscience the the the sort of like foundational method of behavioral neuroscience is the lesion method if you're going to attribute a function to a structure then when you lesion that structure the function must be lost so it's it's that's why it's so striking is that the removal of cortex in its entirety and let me just retreat from its entirety for a moment and and and point out or remind you that in human

54:32 beings where you remove the whole when i say remove obviously for the treatment of medical conditions we do this the removal of the whole of the prefrontal cortex um you know which is supposed to be because not all cortex is equal when it comes to consciousness you know my colleagues my cortical uh consciousness colleagues they say well prefrontal cortex is where it's at that's sort of where they're sort of reflecting upon or there's all this phenomenal processing and then there's the kind of access to it it's prefrontal the global work space

55:06 theorists and so on they also i report in my book a patient with absolutely no prefrontal cortex and he speaks and he says he tells you what he's what's going on in his head likewise with the insulin that's the other structure which is supposed to be so crucial that de marzio reports a case with absolutely no insulin and he speaks and reports on his on his on his conscious states and so on and interestingly both of these patients my patient and the marzia's patient um they are they are affective beings they feel

55:42 and they feel very intensely they feel more intensely than you and me they are unable to contain to inhibit to regulate their that their effects and i think that that's an important observation in terms of you know what consciousness but let's leave that aside the lesion evidence one more bit of lesion level sorry is that on the other hand you can damage two cubic millimeters i know you guys don't think in millimeters that's sort of like the size of a match head that much brain stem and consciousness is obliterated in any

56:15 human being two cubic millimeters of the parabrachial complex when damaged obliterates consciousness entirely and in all other creatures that have a brain stem it has the same so that's the lesion evidence and i say again that's the abc evidence it's striking because that's the that you usually consider the sort of first most simple criterion is lesion the structure uh does the function persist or is it lost lesion like there is some debate about these how much of the prefrontal cortex was exactly lesions

56:48 how much survived well uh i don't know i don't know about your patient like patient a the famous one that people talk about from the history i know there's a debate about that but and i don't know the details of your patient i don't remember you putting any um photographic evidence of the lesions in this no i did the scan the scans or the scans are uh published in modular one oh okay and the insular one yeah i know that one i remember yeah i didn't i didn't put dimarzio scans in my book but in his paper publishing that case he does he does nobody disputes

57:21 that demarzio's case has no insult no no i wasn't saying that no and i was talking about whether the whole prefrontal cortex or whether some functionality was preserved i'm telling you i want to get to this other point and i'll never do so let me just yeah okay go ahead let me explain evidence there's also the following evidence that when you uh in addition to the lesion evidence when you image patients who or research subjects who are in intense emotional states so these are people who can report to you you know

57:54 what i'm feeling i'm feeling sad i'm feeling scared i'm feeling angry and so on you image them using pet image and positron emission tomography and where do you see the activation the activation is in the brainstem and other subcortical structures so this is another sort of standard method that we use you want to see where is the brain activity that correlates with this behavioral state and what we find is it's in the subcortical and in particular if it's in brain stem structures interestingly um cortical structures are deactivated in those

58:28 cases so you know well i mean so it's but i there's a lot that i i take your point i agree it's all very complicated but like for example in your patient was he the the ev the fact that he was able to like direct the attention [Music] sort of be aware of his own states do metacognition suggests that areas which are important for the kinds of functions that the prefrontalists like are intact or some that those functions are being performed

59:00 and there's cases where if you fully get rid of all the prefrontal cortex you get a kinetic mutisms you know the bob knight has that famous case so i do think it's not quite as clear collect the lesion evidence i'm not saying that it's obvious one way or the other i'm due i do think that in this particular case the abcs of cognitive neuroscience aren't we can't really proceed as normal because it's not clear i don't know i think the jury's still out about whether this lesion evidence with respect to the prefrontal cortex in particular is really convincing now i know you want to say can get together with all those other lines of evidence

59:33 i have the cumulative case but even there so you know you have um it seems like a lot of and i know you say this in the book so i think maybe you're explicitly thinking that a lot of like when we wake up and start doing things every it's all conscious um but what a lot of people take is like well there's you know we have these unconscious activations of these same systems um some of them rise to the level of consciousness but a large part of our behaviors are sort of driven by these unconscious processes and so i i just that the sort of thing that

1:00:05 you're saying when you legion this area does the functionality disappear depends on an assumption on your part that the functionality is this behavioral stuff not consciousness so maybe the consciousness has been lesioned out and the behavior is the same and it doesn't seem that the evidence really decides between that and then you add in well there's unconscious threat detection unconscious amygdala activation when you see the unhappy face unconscious you know hypothalamus activation when you see the nude photo etc so all of this stuff

1:00:41 i mean every time you say well this seems evidence of consciousness there's something equally on the other side which says well it can be done unconscious it seems like so it just it doesn't seem to me that the case is as strong as you are suggesting that this is just the abcs of cognitive neuroscience and then we know oh brainstem well um i'm afraid richard the this is how science works you know you don't ever have absolute certainty about it that's true so you know i'm just saying the weight of the evidence uh it falls in in favor of the view that consciousness

1:01:16 is not an intrinsic cortical function and let me just finally finish that summary of the so there's the lesion evidence what you've spoken about removal of cortex they look as if they're conscious without it they look affectively conscious i agree with you we don't know but they look effect lesion the brain stem tiny tiny little area everything goes you know so that's the lesion evidence the imaging evidence is that when you then with speaking actively participating research subjects they are in intense affective states you

1:01:50 image where is the activation in the brain that's generating this state in other words that correlates with this state that's the way that we normally go about using imaging you know functional imaging evidence it is subcortical brain stem in particular cortex is deactivated so you know if you're going to say that these feelings are generated by the cortex then how come when you lesion the cortex that feelings still seem to be there and when you do imaging studies of feelings it's the cortex is not participating in the process then there's deep brain

1:02:23 stimulation evidence if you stimulate those brain stem structures in awake conscious speaking subjects what they report is intense affective states intense you know i mean you can generate intense fear intense depression in rage for feelings by stimulating those structures when you take that together with the other two lines of evidence and it starts to add up so it looks like you can generate the feeling there when you image somebody in the state it seems the activation is there when you lesion that area the function

1:02:57 disappears and then lastly pharmacological probes in other words the the drugs uh that we give uh to to to alter emotional states uh the standard common and garden psychopharmacological agents like antidepressants anti-anxiety drugs antipsychotic drugs and so on they act on serotonin they act on norepinephrine they act on dopamine all of which are sourced in those very same structures the brain stem structures so it's when

1:03:30 you add pharmacological evidence with deep brain stimulation evidence functional imaging evidence lesion evidence the weight of the evidence then starts to point to the brain stem but it is always only going to be you know a weighing up of probabilities um i agree with you it's not we don't ever have absolute answers in science and uh it's it's on the basis by the way i'm mindful of the time and how busy and popular you are so i don't know if i'm overkeeping you at this point no i'm happy to talk about any uh anything you like okay yeah because what

1:04:04 i was thinking was um it's interesting that people on the other side of the fence like i'm thinking in particular like the lisa feldman barrett's and the joe ledoux who joe i know and work with um and we don't agree on everything but you know i i think this mythological issue is the really important meat of the thing that uh that we do agree on in this area anyway um and it's interesting because they want to say a lot of the same things and and i hear a lot of the same like for instance joe and i have written joe's you know press this line as well that that the pharmacological evidence

1:04:38 is very important but infers the opposite conclusion from it so uh i wonder what you think about that line of argument which is that you know there hasn't been any real new from from psychopharmacology for like depression or anxiety disorders um and they all treat these subcortical mechanisms as you just pointed out serotonin dopamine etc norepinephrine and people on the other hand report their behaviors definitely change if you're anxious you take the pill and you'll go to the work or the party but people report that they don't feel

1:05:11 better um and that's why they go to therapy as well and talk you know or whatever cbt or recycling whatever it is they do but they but it's not really targeting the subjective state you might think if you looked at the evidence objectively it's targeting the behavior but the subjective state seems to follow the cognition um it's it's how they interpret what's going on that really you know they're at the party but they're not having a great time they don't feel like themselves but they're doing things that they're differently so so some people would are conclude from that

1:05:44 that it's a mistake to identify the feeling part with the subcortical thing precisely because the psychopharmacological psychopharmacological evidence suggests the contrary so whereas you just used it to suggest so i do think it's interesting when people are appealing to the same body of evidence and then inferring the opposite from it it makes me wonder whether we're really in a position to be you know addressing these questions listen listen i i have to respond to that okay first of all i

1:06:16 am the last person to want to claim that depression uh can be equated with a serotonin deficiency you know or that anxiety you know is is is due to an excess of norepinephrine or something i i i that that is exactly the kind of molecular reductionism that we started our conversation today you know you were saying am i interested also in psychiatry and i said yes very much so and and and we both seem to be saying you know as long as the same thing which is that the problem with

1:06:50 with with biological psychiatry today is it's mindless you know you go directly from these molecular mechanisms to whole complex clinical conditions like depression with no no sort of psychology in between in other words no understanding of the complexity of the functions involved so it's no surprise to me to hear that somebody who has over a lifetime developed a whole way of being in the world you know and you then fiddle with one molecule that that they say to you well look you know actually i'm not a different person

1:07:23 you know you know i agree but i'll tell you something else i've taken all those drugs and i i i've taken every psychopharmacological agent that that we give to our patients to see what it feels like and uh speaking of the problem of other minds i'll tell you from my own personal subjective experience it affects your feeling states big time and that's not this you cut out there mark oh he cut out right at the crucial

1:08:02 moment i don't know if you still can hear him oh man can you guys anyone in the chat can you guys tell oh are you still there you throat did i freeze too i thought you froze that's the interesting thing about other minds so you felt that you were still there and i felt that i was still young the audience will decide who was still

1:08:36 there maybe so so what i was saying is that you know is that the the the whole psychiatric uh picture uh is not synonymous with the feeling statement right but the feeling state really you can manipulate quite dramatically feelings just by themselves with these drugs but one more thing about joe and i also know joe and i know your paper with him and and i i really like joe and i don't like arguing against him but i do need to make the point joe's claim joe's claim is that

1:09:09 feelings literally come into being when they are labeled in prefrontal cortex and and this is where i t i think that simple line of evidence like my case without prefrontal cortex you know he has intense feelings that he's his feelings bubble all over the place functional neuroimaging of patients with intense feelings the prefrontal cortex is deactivating i find it very hard to accept the view that the feeling literally comes about in prefrontal cortex right yeah i mean so we don't know what prefrontal cortex how it codes

1:09:44 and deactivated doesn't mean turn off it just means relatively less activated than before so there's lots of caveats there but i definitely understand the line of argument that you're making and the position that you have um but uh but you know on joe's side on that side there are there are cases where people with amygdalians have felt fear they have reported you know the famous case of the uh woman without fear she was quoted but she did have fear she felt fear of association and um with no amygdala so so now maybe disease which you're talking about the

1:10:19 case sm you're referring to right exactly yeah she's just one case and that that disease you know it affects the amygdala to greater or lesser degrees and and other structures too in some cases so so i want to tell you that in south africa we have the biggest population of herbal committed disease patients anywhere in the world i have personally studied 40 4-0 such cases and i can agree with you that they certainly are capable of feeling fear and that that one case sm is atypical in that respect and i also

1:10:55 want to add i do not believe that fear is generated in the amygdala and it's no surprise to me that many of these subcortical limbic as they called circuits are activated without the feeling state co-occurring but remember to me the feelings have to do with brain stem all of these circuits that all of them converge upon the periaqueductal gray in the midbrain and that is where the feeling is that's where it's at i thought it was the whole because you mentioned the mesolimbic i thought it was the whole circuitry but it's really the periodical double grade

1:11:27 that's the important thing very aqueduct because because remember all going back to what we were saying about needs and and emotions are just one subclass of affects or all of the different ethics you know that when you feel them they are you are feeling a need state but all of those lead states are in the flux all the time and so there's a what goes on in the midbrain in the periaqueductal gray and immediately surrounding tissues because it's a beyond murker whose work i think is brilliant in this area speaks of a selection triangle um so it's it's it's

1:12:02 the periaqueductal gray and the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region these three structures working in in concert um that this is where the selection the the prioritizing of these different error signals unconscious in themselves i agree with joe that they're not an intrinsically conscious things but but where where joe and i will disagree he thinks it's all when it's broadcast upwards into prefrontal cortex i'm saying no it's when i have to be re-represented actually not just broadcast but uh yes represented and labeled he goes further

1:12:37 than saying just that it's a global workspace but that it also requires specific verbal labeling and so on i uh yeah so and by the way just to clarify his position i think his position is that like in so he said things like rats can't feel fear and and people have misinterpreted that for i mean obvious reasons um but what he really means is that you know fear is a specific human emotion because since the rats don't have that label whatever they feel can't be called fear it could be called something else and maybe that you know that's a semantic i know that you know he's

1:13:09 gotten a big argument with yak and yeah i know you're you know greatly influenced by yakun's keeping i don't know why scientists can't be nicer on both sides but whatever um because i think they're both doing great work but but i do think that there is a legitimate debate here which is like you know because should you call like this the reward system or the pleasure system um it does matter uh and it does bias things which way you talk about it so i know that you're on the side of we should you extend these terms and and and your penske was the one or the first

1:13:42 brave you know people to buck the tradition and say no i'm going to use words like fear and apply it to these subcortical systems but but i do for these reasons when we're talking i do worry that that it rides over that method i don't think the mythological question has really been addressed yet for these reasons we've been talking about so i don't think the case you're presenting is nothing i think it's very serious you know i'm i take animal consciousness extremely serious i'm a vegan i care about these things because of those sorts of reasons but i but i just think to that when

1:14:14 we're talking about the level of like science um i'm not sure that this kind of evidence we haven't nailed down that these things require consciousness to be done because it doesn't seem to me that the behaviors we're talking about require consciousness i don't i don't see the argument for that now you know of course that's a very abstract theoretical thing in the in the you know you describe in your book how this really matters and people being treated in various ways i i don't think the ethical considerations hinge on consciousness so i'm you know i would take a different approach i think they

1:14:46 they ethical we ought to treat them morally regardless of consciousness but that's a separate uh argument but anyway so i i just i'm worried that when you say okay so there are these behaviors and in me they're conscious so therefore in them they're conscious um it rides over this this uh this idea that well why why can't those behaviors be done unconsciously and we have some reason to we see what suggests like maybe it is done unconsciously

1:15:20 so uh shouldn't we be a bit more circumspect until we really nail down this case in the human case that's and my whole position is like we should leave the animals out it for ethical reasons for scientific reasons they're not great for studying consciousness because if they are conscious we're moral monsters and and even if they are we can't really learn much about consciousness by studying them because of all these issues that remain hanging over our heads so we should focus on humans well well you're saying a number of different things uh now simultaneously

1:15:53 first one about you know when we speak of fear in a rat and fear in you and me are we speaking about the same thing i think that is an interesting question it's different from two other questions that you've just posed so yeah you know i think that the my own position on that is that there is a core natural kind whatever we're going to call it um pancep uses capital letters to make clear that he's not talking about just the feeling state he's talking about a a a sort of a endo phenotype a thing that that you know that we that

1:16:27 that transcends that is that is that overlaps with what we human beings mean when we speak of fear you know we have uh all sorts of symbolic capacity uh with uh not least of which has to do with language uh you know and so of course there are a much wider range of things that we human beings call fear that doesn't mean that there isn't still a core natural kind now that leads to another question that you've raised you know when you're saying well for that sort of reason you know we we shouldn't really be studying

1:17:02 consciousness in these other creatures because you know we can't be sure that they have this thing that we call consciousness when we experience this thing that we call fear in ourselves um you know and and remember on that score that my view is that we should that feeling is the foundational form of consciousness and so you know when you say we shouldn't be studying consciousness it depends what you mean by it if you mean human consciousness this type of reflective secondary consciousness access consciousness and so on that you and i normally have in

1:17:34 mind i mean feeling feeling uh for the reasons that i've argued throughout most of our discussion today feeling i disagree with you i think that there's you know that when it comes to the that core natural kind whatever we call it you know this thing which is at the core of what we human beings experience as fear which is different from rage which is different from lust and so on these are natural kinds and and i think that there's or that all the evidence that we've been speaking about points to the fact to my the conclusion that i hang my hat on you know which is

1:18:08 that these are subcortical functions uh generated in the periaqueductal grain that's where the actual feeling is generated the raw feeling let's quite apart from all of this cognitive elaboration and symbolization of it and understanding of it and so on um then uh you know the ethical question that you the the other thing that you've just been discussing for me the ethics pivots on the feeling you know the consequential issue is are you causing pain are you causing distress are you causing a feeling state and so you know that's

1:18:43 the ethics has to do with that why i'm so concerned about the ethical consequences for example of how we treat uh hydrogen and cephalic children and you know let's let's just be clear about this richard because these philosophical questions have really serious practical consequences yeah i mean there are kids for for decades who have been left to languish literally i mean i use the word very advisedly as vegetables it's a vegetative state is that they were considered to be vegetative in other

1:19:15 words they were unresponsive there was no there was no feeling state there and that's you know and for that reason they were there was no consideration given to how it feels to be abandoned uh to have awake surgery done uh without an anesthetic and so on those sorts of things yeah these are these are really weighty ethical issues um if you the question as to whether or not feelings um can exist without cortex has those sorts of practical consequences right now just to be clear i would say

1:19:48 it would be wrong to do that whether they're conscious or not so my view is that the ethical implications don't hang on consciousness and it's still that's wrong what they're doing and whether the hydroencephalic children are conscious or not well as i say again for me feelings are intrinsically conscious things yeah but that's the interesting thing again because like you know i think a lot of people will agree with that um like for example i know joe does he but he thinks feelings are cognitive and

1:20:21 you agree with him but you think feelings are these you know subcortical things so but on the other hand and i'm mindful of of keeping you forever but there's this kind of common sense argument folk psychological argument i want to just before we end i want to get your and you know as a tip of the hat to freud since we started off sort of talking about foreign bring it full circle uh it seems i wonder anyway i wonder what you would think about the idea that unconscious feelings are sort of part of folk psychology um in the sense that we recognize from our

1:20:54 common sense day-to-day interactions unconscious emotions you know it's not uncommon for uh to see someone acting a certain way and say why are you afraid i'm not afraid well look how you're acting so i guess i am afraid i didn't realize that um or you know the common psychoanalysis sort of for many years i felt like i i wasn't aware that the real reason i was doing x was because of something that happened in my past and then you become aware of it you're like oh that's what's been guiding my behavior but but so the argument would be

1:21:25 if i'm having something which can you know is guiding my behavior and looks like anger but i'm not consciously in that state shouldn't we still call it anger like common sense says i think yeah we do have unconscious anger unconscious hunger even um unconscious libido all these things seem to me just part of not i'm not talking about science or what you know scans or anything i'm just talking about the way we ordinarily like freud's ideas have become part of our folk psychology and so i'm wondering if part of your argument goes against that and or or not

1:21:59 or if you think i've got the folk psychology wrong no no i mean i think when you say that's the folk psychological view i think you're right that is the third psychological view um and and i think that um that view needs to be accommodated within you know the the the conceptual uh dissection that i'm uh performing which is why i said early on in our conversation that i do not speak of affect i speak specifically of feeling because i'm speaking about that subset of affect

1:22:33 phenomena that are that we feel that are conscious i said that because i i acknowledge that there are good many uh uh other affective phenomena that are not conscious and you gave their sort of rough and ready everyday examples of it and i think that those are perfectly good enough examples of for the purposes of of what we are talking about but just to be clear would you would you call those like anger you would say that it's correct to say that like he's angry about x even though he denies it and so forth because yes

1:23:07 i'm a psychoanalyst i see it all the time yes so so i i completely agree with you however i mean there's so much that we can say just about this point so let me just try and pack a few things in in the last minutes we have the first thing the first and most important thing for me well actually the first thing i've said already which is that i acknowledge that they are unconscious emotional phenomena and the the the most important thing that flows from that which is also something i touched on right at the beginning is that it makes a difference whether you feel it or not you know there is a there is a thing called

1:23:39 feeling which has a function which does which is which is absent when the feeling isn't there and that function is precisely the thing i mentioned earlier the capacity for choice the capacity to change your mind to say you know because this feels like that i'm not going to do that instead i'm going to do this and this is exactly what we try to achieve with our patients we try to bring these things into their conscious awareness so that they have some additional control over some voluntary control over it some choice in the matter otherwise these things act

1:24:12 through you um you know and that that is a very good everyday example you know of why it matters whether you feel something or not which is precisely the argument that i'm making that there is a there is a natural kind of thing called a feeling which we must differentiate from all these other things and feelings aren't necessarily conscious and asking why is that the case what did they what does it add gets us to the heart of what consciousness is all about for me consciousness is all about choice uh it's all uh and i the basis of of voluntary behavior

1:24:45 but i do want to add one other point going in a slightly different direction which is that when we speak so remember i have acknowledged and i agree there are such things as unconscious affects in the broad sense that i don't speak of unconscious feelings to me that's an oxymoron but they're unconscious affects i agree and there are many different varieties of them by the way but but there's this mistake that happens a great deal in the cognitive science literature when we say that the the experimental participant was unconscious of x y or z you know what we normally what we frequently mean

1:25:20 is that we don't know where the feeling comes from you know that we're not so for example in a kistoscopic experiment you flash face a and face b face a is called rapist face b is called philanthropist the the subject doesn't know they've seen anything so they're unconscious okay then you show them the same faces super lemony and you say which one do you prefer they say i prefer be and and that's taken as evidence of unconscious emotion but actually what goes on there is they have a feeling i like this guy i don't like that guy the

1:25:55 feeling is conscious but the cognitive context as to where does this feeling come from is unconscious and i needed to add that because although i agree that they are really are unconscious affected states i think that frequently in the experimental literature when we speak of unconscious emotions what we mean is a feeling state which is conscious the origin of which the cause of which is is not available to the to the subject yeah i mean that's an interesting argument there's a million things i want to ask you about that but uh i do have a

1:26:28 small dog looking at me like she wants to go outside so i have to take her out speaking about my view the small dog is feeling something right now yeah here this is uh in my view the small dog is feeling something too this is right who could deny it look at that wonderful i agree that the small dog is feeling something the question is on the base i mean i didn't even get to ask you about this recent um uh kind of people were talking about this recent paper that came out about birds and some discovery that they may have some not exactly like a cortex but some structural analogous wiring

1:27:02 um which may be you know because i think a large part of the anti-cortex argument goes like what about birds because i can't ever look yeah birds like even chickens are much more intelligent than people give them credit for and you know you know obviously crows are like out of this way anyway so birds are really phenomenal and it's a big mystery their brains look so different but i wonder just i know i should be ending right now but um have you read this paper or some birds have a pallium which is which is a which is the the homologue of of mammalian cortex but just remember that in my view what we're talking about when

1:27:36 we're talking about feelings uh are brain stem structures which we share with birds right no i know that but i'm just saying as as usually birds are used against the cortical people um because like they don't have a prefrontal cortex for example but then now there's some evidence that maybe they have structures that are wired in the same way but not like they're individual cortex of the bird but it looks like the wiring mirrors what's going on in the prefrontal cortex of mammals yes so that seems to suggest that maybe you can't use the birds against the prefrontal cortex people

1:28:08 yes i accept that okay we'll never get the dog um but mark let me just say in closing that it's been tremendous fun talking with you your book is excellent you're the hidden spring uh journey to the source of consciousness i highly recommend it engagingly written wonderful anecdotes good uh and also serious questions addressed but also your work in general as we talked about the beginning i you know saw your debate i was 2006 i thought it was further back but anyway i just appreciate your approach you're trying to bring the subject i really admire even though we don't agree on everything i really

1:28:41 admire people like you that are passionate about consciousness serious about science and saying let's not neglect our humanity when we try to understand ourselves and so i and that i really appreciate you coming on talking with me and i applaud your work and general approach so thank you thank you richard i i enjoyed talking with you and the the questions challenging as they were you know that's what made it a very interesting and enjoyable and worthwhile conversation thank you i appreciate that i agree and i'll send you the link to all that stuff

1:29:15 later but in the meantime um just hang out for a second i'll say bye off the air but uh thank you again for joining with me thank you all right