Consciousness Live! with Bernard Baars (S4 E4)

0:03 okay we are live uh joining me today an extra extra special guest uh bernard j bars uh bernie i wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who may not know you uh yes i well i'm bernie bars i got started in the consciousness game a long time ago and quite early on i realized that we were looking at a very interesting time a time of both

0:36 convergence and divergence and i had a chance to work with a research group at the time that included people some of the pioneers in neural net mathematics which now of course has exploded in in applications and in sophistication we had one anthropologist who was very very good we had a great linguist uh len tommy who helped to found the field of

1:11 cognitive linguistics and we had me running around uh trying to make trouble uh and asking people about consciousness which nobody wanted to talk about it it's quite amazing and because it was intimidating i think and because of course we were coming out of a period of taboo uh it's like sex in the victorian age uh you know the first person to talk about sex the queen victoria probably should have received a medal uh for

1:44 for doing that uh because the taboo was really quite pervasive i think at least in in in um in the company of ladies for example where it was not uh allowed uh but then the men would get together you know in the locker room it wasn't actually a locker room but a virtual locker room and and the same kind of taboo atmosphere prevailed on the topic of consciousness even in the fields that you might expect to be directly concerned with consciousness

2:16 like medicine for example where you see people losing consciousness and regaining consciousness if you're if you work hard do the right thing all the time and people tell you about their experience and of course they had this incredible a neurosurgery tradition from wilder penfield where penfield studied epileptic patients who needed to have exploratory surgery because we didn't have any

2:49 brain mapping at that time so your surgeon would not know anything before he or she went in and took off the top of the cranium and found out whatever damage was visible at that time and of course you could not see the the really very tiny tiny damage that might be very very important but you did what you could and so the penfield group at the montreal neurological institute

3:22 uh studied uh 1200 surgeries uh over a 30-year period and they really discovered the mind body or the mind brain connection i should say because they simply stimulated the body map on the left of the right hand side of the body or the left hand side of the body and people would tell them i feel a touch on my hand and of course the hand was not being touched right the hand region in the cortex was being touched and that was in

3:55 retrospect just a major discovery but i guess what you're saying is that even though they were doing that they weren't connecting it to the explicitly to the notion of consciousness well uh penfield knew uh penfield was actually uh i think a lay minister uh anglican minister and he was obviously extremely well versed in philosophy of the time and traditional philosophy and so on and

4:29 of course in medicine as well so so i think he had quite a profound uh knowledge and and a great deal of understanding of the ethical issues as well uh i i think penfield was was a very very important pioneer in this field uh but then there was a gap uh sort of nothing happened for about 30 years uh and then finally um the computer became and a tabletop instrument that everybody had and inevitably uh everybody was forced to think uh you

5:03 know what is this gigantic brain doing in our heads that we don't fully understand because it was so much of a black box of course there was so much we did not uh really grasp very well and the idea came up that um that you've got this hundred billion neurons they have a quarter of a quadrillion of synapses connecting uh to each other uh they there was a fair amount of

5:37 knowledge but we didn't have brain imaging uh we had cat scans which were basically x-rays and so on and then we had open brain surgeries uh which were great adventures in in the surprising and unexpected things that happened in the brains of patients who were medically justified to to be operated on so what years where were you hanging around with these uh with this group and annoying them about consciousness this is pretty much

6:09 1980 is a pretty good guess because at that time arpanet was beginning and arpanet was the testbed really for the internet and that meant that many people in computer science had realized that our initial conception of computers as being expensive and slow and hard to program and buggy that concept

6:44 biology had figured that out for about a hundred million years before the brains that we see or even longer and somehow biology had made that work and the way that biology evidently functioned was computation was much cheaper than anybody ever imagined a biocomputation was much cheaper so a b will have i think about a million neurons in its brain and this brain looks very

7:18 different of course it's an insect brain looks very different from the mammal brain but nevertheless it's capable of all of all kinds of intelligent processing and if bees can do it then humans have so much more neuronal mass sitting in their skulls that that this must be the thought was it must be perhaps a society of brains and the society metaphor uh which is not the greatest in the

7:51 world but it's it's a useful it's one of those useful uh uh crutches to discovery uh it's it's a useful thing to kick around and and do some loose thinking about and see if there's something very specific that you can uh hypothesize and for me the compelling hypothesis was the global workspace idea which is essentially sort of like a game of charades where everybody is sitting in the room and

8:25 nobody knows the answer but everybody knows a little piece of the answer so you can talk to each other and somebody can guess and and you find out yes or no and in the process the entire group learns and essentially everybody gets a chance to place a hypothesis on a shared workspace and that's the global workspace and so that implies that that there are many intelligent participants uh which there are in in the brain at

8:59 many many levels of resolution um down to very small circuits and all the way up to let's call it entire hemispheres uh just for the fun of it and and then then you some sort of hypothesis emerges and there's sort of a vote that takes place and one hypothesis is the most popular and eventually the group settles on that one so

9:31 in a way it's also a parliamentary metaphor because you kind of have have to have a debate and a vote which is one of the things that we do within ourselves and this connects directly to higher order thought because you've just defined it for me that higher order thought is a debate about some previous mental content so all that somehow came together at that particular time i was able to state the hypotheses after

10:04 working for a couple of years uh on trying to summarize uh the the large amount of psychological evidence we had at that time but not much brain evidence uh and uh and i was kind of forced into that hypothesis i couldn't see any alternative and that has not changed yeah interesting i want to i want to get to that but i i think on the sort of victorian era point that you were making earlier it is interesting because there was there was other work that was very closely related to consciousness going

10:36 on i mean people were doing split brain um uh finding out things about split brains uh blind sight was being discovered this is all well before the 90s um so there were so there even though in the 90s there was a sudden re kindling of interest in consciousness sort of um a community spotted up at least which i know you were instrumental in helping to get together but there still was isolated work on consciousness going on just i guess uh not right explicitly i mean i mean yeah michael gazzaniga was talking about the

11:10 interpreter theory of consciousness as a result of my brain and stuff like that that's right yes there was a lot of work it was it tended to be somewhat intimidating uh in much the same way that if you were going to talk to queen victoria uh about breeding horses which people did i think she was interested in horses then you somehow had to circumvent the actual mechanics of mares and stallions and so on

11:45 so you had to talk around it and that turns out to be quite harmful because if you cannot use the truthful word for the thing that you're interested in then uh you're very severely handicapped actually more handicapped than uh i i ever realized uh it's there is a there's a kind of uh hole uh in in your mental world and you share that hole so i've i

12:20 remember quite a few times talking to other people in psychology academic psychologists who often did very very good work with the direct bearing on consciousness and mentioning the word consciousness to them and they would not hear the word it's very very interesting uh i imagine just like saying the word sex to maybe not queen victoria but uh prince albert her her consort who together uh

12:53 helped to produce the babies uh and and how they managed to do that uh without the right vocabulary i have no idea but they certainly did uh and and it was the analogy is actually quite close because human groups produce taboos uh as far as i can tell maybe all groups produce taboos and certainly the one the groups that i know about uh develop their own taboos it's this very strange social phenomenon

13:27 because it is kind of a blind spot in the shared knowledge that you hope to have about the relevant world yeah and i wanted to ask you about that as well since um we're talking about the sort of origins of consciousness science and um and you were instrumental in getting this uh a group together that shared an identity in this way with the assc and and uh consciousness and cognition journal i i wonder what what is your feeling about the state of consciousness science currently do you think it's healthy at

14:00 this point is it thriving or do you think there's anything to be worried about well there's always something to worry about uh yeah and i i think being able to use the word sex and to use it frankly and to study it and to treat it as um as not a very dangerous thing you know as the implicit idea was during the victorian period at least

14:34 the story that we hear about the victorian period which is probably not the real thing anyway but yeah exactly but it's it's it's close to the truth and and basically if one used the word sex uh in the wrong social group and so on uh you would be never invited again right or you would be consigned to to breeding horses or whatever uh so so there would be severe social penalties

15:06 uh for violating the taboo and this appears to be true in all the anthropologically studied cultures that i know anything about and the taboos are are very often quite invisible to people so the people who observe the taboo with great care and considerable anxiety are the very same people who would deny the existence of the taboo and this is sort of a very freudian idea because the notion of censorship when freud was lived in vienna uh

15:41 vienna was the capital as you know of the austro-hungarian empire and the censorship office would be part of the standard bureaucracy of the empire and if you wanted to publish a newspaper uh which would be a print newspaper of course at the time around 1900 you would first walk over to the censor's office and and make sure that your your your first uh full first proof of the printout

16:17 was approved by the sensor and then if uh if the sensor uh for bad the publication uh there might be a white space uh where you just couldn't couldn't print anything and you didn't have time to reset all the on the lead type so so sometimes i believe that censorship was really very clear and because everybody gossiped in that kind of world with each other everybody really knew about the

16:49 censorship and they drew their conclusions so if a certain prince of the court was not mentioned in this particular issue of the vienna uh people's paper uh i think that was roughly the the title of the paper um then everybody would start speculating hotly whether that particular prince was out of favor uh and why and what terribly offensive things he might have done

17:22 the same kind of thing that happens in washington d.c of course all the time and in other centers of human power and politics and society so taboos appear to be universal and i do not know what the current theory is from sociology and anthology and why we have taboos but there's no question that human groups create taboos in the case of science of course

17:57 that's a kind of a suicidal thing because if you were isaac newton and you were not allowed to talk about gravity you would be you would be lost you would have no way to to write f equals m a the famous formula where f is force and m is mass and a is acceleration and gravitational force is is one kind of f so so that's a crucial formula in the history of physics

18:32 and it essentially created classical physics if you make something a taboo and it does happen in the sciences the sciences are not free of this sociological phenomenon it does happen in science and when it does happen you're crippled basically you can't do what you claim to be doing so do you think that's currently there is a taboo about consciousness and in science currently or not do you think that's why i think we're still at the we're still

19:04 having residual uh taboos because essentially because in the old days you would be punished in terms of professional punishment because behaviorism which explicitly denied the existence of consciousness starting with john watson in 1912 that was a progressive era in the united states and it was kind of a revolutionary era and the behaviorists were revolutionaries

19:37 and overthrew the prior psychology of william james william james being my hero so i get to criticize william james but nobody else does that's not that's not quite true but william james was a fabulous uh psychologist he his brother henry was one of the great pioneers in the stream of consciousness movement in literature and of course the the family

20:10 of his dad henry senior his brother henry and william james himself and perhaps alice who who was unfortunately um she was very obviously intelligent and talented i don't think she got much of an opportunity to do flower at that time the way emily dickinson did for example emily dickinson lived just right down the street i think from the james's house in in cambridge mass

20:41 so uh so at that time women were a very very difficult position especially if they were talented and had ambitions to be recognized so it was that kind of a time but william and henry were essentially able to found a very influential philosophical and psychological movements centered on the issue of consciousness and then behaviorism came along in 1912 two years after william james died he

21:15 died in 1910 two years afterwards john watson proclaimed the behavioristic manifesto as it was called i think he was president of the american psychological association and politically it became impossible at that time or severely discouraged yeah to use the word consciousness and not just the word consciousness itself but all the english vocabulary words that refer to consciousness which is about

21:48 i believe it's more than half of the vocabulary words of english so this was an extreme puritanical taboo that handicapped people who wanted to seriously think about after all this is traditional issue in in human philosophy going back as far back as we know in recorded history of philosophy uh 25 centuries in the case of classical greece

22:21 right and even further back in uh in like for instance indian philosophy hindu exactly right yes and indian philosophy it may go back even uh earlier right so uh i mean so i guess like for a skinner i mean i mean i'm not a behaviorist obviously but uh skinner famously said that you know there may be these inner episodes but they don't play any role in the explanation of behavior so something like that a skinner um you have to understand that skinner was kind of a split personality

22:54 and this is not my claim it's skinner's own claim in his two-volume autobiography which he published in 1975 right which he simply describes uh how he went through a very traumatic period as an adolescent but his real ambition in life uh was to become a stream of consciousness novelist really and and he spent four years at hamilton college uh being deeply educated

23:27 in the stream of consciousness literature of that time and he was really quite good at it had great ambitions and then the family encountered very severe problems his older brother died his father lost his job as a co-company attorney skinner himself went into a deep depression because you know knowledge could no longer fulfill that ambition to become a stream of consciousness novelist and at the end of what skinner himself calls his dark

24:00 year which is significant he becomes a radical behaviorist which means someone who in a very nuanced way because he's very intelligent and knowledgeable who denied let's call it the psychological usefulness of the very word consciousness and this is this is quite dramatic and it's it it's sort of pathological

24:32 but it's within the normal range of pathology uh because uh adolescence is a very very difficult period for maybe most human beings and in modern times especially because we don't have a set of guidelines which traditional cultures offer for young people and if you follow the guidelines reasonably well then you end up being an accepted member of the tribe or whatever we lost that and and so skinner and others watson

25:09 john watson himself as well william james suffered from [Music] was had very painful episodes worrying about free will for example right uh so the 100 years prior to 1900 were very much obsessed with religion and religion the key idea of religion was the soul and the soul was one word for consciousness so we're talking about a kind of a culture

25:42 war here that went on for at least 100 years probably longer but kind of culminated right around 1900 so i'm someone who's uh watching along out there jay richardson is asking um how guilty we think people like jerry fodor were in maintaining this taboo footer was a philosopher i think that's an interesting question because i do wonder to what extent do you think philosophers were complicit uh in this kind of behaviorist taboo as eyes

26:12 taboo eysing of consciousness uh people i love to accuse the philosophers but on the other hand there's philosophers and philosophers right yeah so burton russell who was one of the founding members of of the labour party in britain which is the social democratic party britain russell was very much a revolutionary and he believed that what he would have called the soul of

26:49 religion was a harmful concept it kept people in submission to the tyranny whatever the tyranny of the day was it was either capitalism or the bourgeoisie or uh or or the monarchy there's still monarchs at that time of course and they still had considerable power they were emperors uh but in any case it was a transitional period uh that led to a a genuine revolutionary period in the united states we called it the

27:22 progressive era and it has its own pros and cons that we can talk about some very bad things were done and some very good things were done in europe western europe especially it was social democracy which essentially took over and in russia of course the russian revolution took over and created absolute mayhem for decades after that so so this was

27:57 plus world war one was going on with an extremely destructive effect uh on the younger generation in europe and even in america to a lesser extent it was a tremendous time of destruction and also a time of creativity birdman russell i think played an enormous role in all this and essentially endorsed uh john watson's book called psychology from a behaviorist point of view

28:30 and this made watson famous because britain at the time of course was the center the intellectual center of the english-speaking world and having your book being celebrated by burton there just wasn't anything better than that so uh now there there were others uh uh alfred north whitehead who was russell's co-author right on the famous principia mathematica uh the great book of novel logic propositional logic

29:05 uh alpha dorth whitehead was very much uh on the other side from russell and uh white had one of my favorite quotes in the world uh is white chad's saying that nature has no departments and i believe that is what we are seeing we are seeing that there is no psychology department separate from a philosophy department separate from a biology department they are all the same aspects of nature even philosophy i would argue although

29:40 philosophers will no doubt argue uh against that i won't argue with anything but uh i i think the point is is interesting because like you're saying with russell endorsing the behaviors paradigm which i wasn't aware of but then even there's quine who you know and worded an object and i don't think he really believed behaviorism but he was he was willing to say well here's an empiricist theory of how the mind could work and you have people like gilbert ryle and then also i don't know how familiar you are with the work of jerry foter but i think that

30:11 the question that was being asked about voters is apt because um even though foder is probably one of the most influential philosophers of the of the contemporary period especially crossing over into the psychology and uh cognitive psychology disciplines uh he explicitly avoided talking about consciousness and his whole you know representational theory of mind left consciousness now you didn't think that you could really address that i think that is exactly right and and that is this oddity of let's say uh your queen victoria and one of your publicly well-known

30:48 hobbies is dogs and horses and children of course and and and here you are every word you say is carefully checked by your courtiers and your pr people essentially and turns into public pronouncement and people really guide their lives by the model of the queen and and and yet you cannot pronounce that three-letter word uh and what is the effect that this has

31:22 on people well people obviously imitated her people started to wear women start to wear black dresses for example because the queen was in mourning for her dead husband at the prince consort and she was in mourning for 40 years or something something a very very long time and that became the fashion of the age not just in england but really around the world so so the queen was enormously important

31:55 as a model and in somewhat similar fashion uh the evasion of the very word consciousness and jerry photo i think is a is a late product of the taboo right so he he came during a transition period and i i personally do have never asked either noam chomsky or jerry fodor or people who knew them well why they evaded what seems to us to be so obvious uh it's it's a very

32:30 great it's a very great paradox and i think one of the reasons was that the word itself was just explosive uh it would get you nothing but trouble and george miller who's my idol at that time was very great psychologist right wrote about it uh very very beautifully about the the first history of psychology that actually dealt with both the consciousness side

33:04 and the anti-consciousness side of 20th century psychology uh and i think miller really had the definitive take on all that but even miller was not listened to very much uh in terms of his little history that he wrote which by the way i should mention the title of miller's history it's called psychology the science of mental life uh and those were fighting words fighting words yeah exactly science of behavior exactly right

33:39 so it's very in retrospect you know human beings as you know of course have talked about consciousness for as far as we can trace back uh the words for consciousness and the conscious senses for example vision hearing touch smell taste those are conscious senses they emerge in the cortex exactly or somewhat like we expect conscious the conscious senses to emerge in our own subjective stream of consciousness so

34:13 people knew about that they had no particular trouble with it they interpreted consciousness both as an otherworldly mystery but also as a very practical thing so if you were teaching your child to shoot a bow and arrow or to throw pebbles to bring down rats or mice or moles or something like that some animal that you could bring home to to the family to feed them for them for the evening

34:47 which was crucial obviously people would starve without that so so all those things uh accuracy conscious accuracy was crucial in all those very very fundamental hunter-gatherer habits that humans developed really really to a very high level much more like baseball pictures today for example extreme skill at those things so consciousness was simply part of that discussion you would tell your

35:19 child or their child child would tell you oops daddy uh you missed that one and everybody would laugh at you and you would be ashamed and and the family would complain that they didn't have dinner or they didn't have meat for dinner that night so so there were consequences of of being wrong wrong in regard to your conscious sensory and sensory motor actions and this is not even talking about being a good member of the tribe and and following

35:53 the customary expectations of the tribe and and not running out on on your lover and and so on so uh human beings inherently by virtue of the fact that we do have a a rather stable human nature that is stable across cultural divisions by virtue of that fact we are inevitably obsessed uh with consciousness yeah so i i would just mention also about fodor that by the

36:26 end of his life he was talking about consciousness at least privately to people i know uh um he argued a lot with david rosenbaum about this apparently endorsed like a kind of representationalism about consciousness but i do wonder if if so if to be a little bit fair to these to these guys and um their cohorts if maybe some of the reason why there was this taboo was because there was a perceived crisis in psychology at that time of it not being serious um and so the introspectionism uh you know the period of the time before

36:59 um it led to these intractable debates about you know what does a circle look like an oval or uh you know what is tilted does it look like an oval or a circle and people you know image image the imageless thoughts debates just right epicycles and epicycles and so there was a concerted effort to say well what we need to study is something observable and that's behavior and so they threw the baby out with the bath water but i think it came from a place of saying we got to make psychology respectable and they may be over corrected a bit but i i would you agree that was a large part of the motivation it's it's it's a really interesting point

37:33 uh it's certainly uh to some extent as an undergraduate at ucla uh i was educated by people who who were skeptical behaviorists or i should say here were self-doubting behaviorists and i never fully understood because after all what do you understand as a first-year student not very much but my teachers certainly my first professor who was

38:05 marvelous he was the greatest professor i've ever had perhaps alan parducci he was profoundly aware of both sides of that issue so as a scientist he had to work within the constraints of the of behaviorism and he had to observe behavior and present public stimuli and so on which she did very beautifully and he

38:38 came out with a very profound understanding of what was called adaptation level theory adaptation level is basically the way we for example the way of a car salesman will first tell you about the really really expensive car that you can't afford but it has all these goodies so first gets that into your consciousness and that primes you then to say well i can't afford that one but maybe

39:11 and then he'll give you the next one because he set the context right and it's still higher than you would have initially gone exactly exactly right so sales people use this all the time and uh and there's a a pretty clear clear psychological theory for it that i think came out of gestalt psychology initially but then became very useful under the experimental work of of people who had to work within the behavioristic paradigm so so yes uh one of the interesting

39:45 things about that time is so everybody knew about sex but nobody talked about it and what's more they shaped their research programs around sex but but still didn't talk about it and so you get this very interesting ambivalence this whole thing is very reminiscent of freud because freud's notion of censorship of course going back to vienna and and the and the kaiser in in vienna the author hungarian kaiser

40:17 in vienna what would happen of course is that people were constantly trying to interpret the hints and the the blank spaces that they heard from the palace and uh and this is essentially freud freud applied that kind of socio-political metaphor to the human mind and it turns out to be a very very interesting and revealing it's not the only way obviously to look at the human mind

40:50 but it's one of the important avenues towards getting a deeper understanding of the mind so so i think he uh i think freud in a sense did the obvious thing but what's up what seems obvious to us of course is not obvious to people at that time it took a great deal of courage to actually talk openly about the censorship including the censorship that human beings impose upon themselves right so now i mean now we're we're post

41:23 taboo in some sense although i i do wonder so even though there is a kind of concerted effort uh there's you know several organizations um uh devoted to this there's journals devoted to the study of consciousness the assc now has the neuroscience of consciousness journal but but it but still there's a a hope a quest and for people like me would like to see the science of consciousness joined the sort of legitimate fields of neuroscience like what happened with attention so you know the tension used to be sort of and then at a certain point it became

41:57 very serious now everyone does attention and consciousness hasn't reached that level yet and there's a some people think maybe a danger that it's fun it's backtracking a bit and you know conferences that used to be more scientifically oriented like the the science of consciousness in tucson are now open to all sorts of you know non-empirical uh or someone might argue not empirical orientations and stuff so that's what i was asking a bit earlier is i wonder if you think the science of consciousness is is a healthy endeavor at this point or if it's uh

42:29 if we're sort of the taboo has gone too far the other direction to the point where everything is up for grabs and therefore it's also in danger of not being taken serious outside of well i just published a big book called unconsciousness oh yeah you mean activity [Laughter] which contains a sort of a slimmed down version of everything i've done over the last several decades and and it develops things uh

43:04 almost uh to today uh it books take time to write obviously so there's always a lag in the system but it's about as good as i can do and after i finished it i started to read the proper translation of aristotle's book uh which is sometimes called de anima yeah or it's called the soul or in greek i think it's something like

43:38 periphery repsique is the greek word for mind and all conceptions of mind historically i think implied consciousness they were very clear in fact descartes thought that consciousness was the only thing there was in the mind there was nothing unconscious right and descartes was one smart dude right so uh so descartes view on this was of course deeply scholarly and and very thoughtful and the fact that he thought that only

44:11 consciousness existed in the mind uh is indicative i think of of a great deal of western thought not just at that time but prior to that in any case it turns out that the a modern scholarly translation of aristotle's book is on consciousness uh and uh and so accidentally i i bumped into uh for obvious reasons actually i i bumped into aristotle's title

44:45 uh which uh in in a sense started the naturalistic study of consciousness in the western lineage of ideas and of course then we have plato as well we could talk about plato there's so much to say about plato definitely i think plato uh communicated very directly with the indus valley culture of the time and we know in fact that they overlapped in time so uh plato's notion of consciousness

45:19 is the maya notion of indian philosophy uh which is essentially that consciousness is a hallucinatory or delusional thing means that which is not so uh so that very profound philosophical history kind of merged with the western tradition and we lost track of that but i believe that's true actually interesting so i i have a question coming in from

45:55 another person viewing here over here named luke he wanted to ask you about um the global workspace theory in particular and whether you thought that the functionalism involved in global workspace theory continues in some sense the taboo of uh about talking directly about consciousness um yeah only in the minds of certain philosophers i think uh uh and and that's because philosophy since 1900 uh philosophy in the english-speaking world

46:30 has been as as tightly self-disciplined in its own way as behaviorism was and there is a considerable question in in my mind i'm not a philosopher i know a little bit about philosophy but i depend upon you uh to tell me uh about the things i do not know uh so uh so i think they painted themselves into a corner and that's true of russell i think it's true of wittgenstein

47:02 i think it's true of ryle and the others i i do not know well enough at some point who is a student of ryle you know it's it's very interesting i think dennett has broken the mold in in very interesting ways and i've learned some very profound things from dennett's writing and i think he sort of spun those very interesting ideas off almost in passing to his major point but but his little epigrams

47:36 that he unsearched of various points are sometimes even more interesting than the major thrusts of of his books interesting okay and the particular quote that i remember from dennis by the way is is a quote that says uh consciousness is that to which i have access and then he uh italicizes the word i and that brings in this very traditional idea that goes back

48:08 to 6000 ears to proto-indo-european language languages because the indo-european languages every single one as far as i know make a major distinction between i as subject and me as object of a verb that's a philosophically very profound idea i don't know where those people got the idea probably from even earlier human languages i suppose or maybe it's just part of the the praxis

48:42 you know the the everyday practice of of yelling at your kid when they miss the rabbit with their pebble uh and and saying you failed and that gives you you know uh the uh and then the kid has to say to himself or herself i failed but not me failed because that doesn't have quite the same meaning so it's possible that early language users human beings who developed language from very early

49:17 on a couple hundred thousand years onward according to recent archaeological guesses human beings may have worked out the praxis of language before they figured out that i was different from me i i really don't know pure speculation but it is certain that they made that distinction yeah and so that that quote that you were talking about then it brings up a um an idea that i wanted to ask you about so it's talking specifically about

49:50 the global workspace i mean you didn't really finish your thought about you said in the mind of certain philosophers maybe i'm sorry global yeah global workspace in science we don't have complete theories uh and in fact uh i've been emailing a friend who's a really very good particle physicist um and he's very frustrated because he can't come up with the final particle right so so you've got this beautiful system

50:22 and you've got strength here you've got this and all these very very smart people talking to each other in advanced mathematics and so on right and they can't figure out how to finish the system and that means that physics even very advanced physics and physics is our model in a sense of what science could become uh it is the the most celebrated it's the most mathematically profound and all those kinds of things and of course it's it's it's uh immensely practical and powerful

50:57 and presents us with nuclear weapons among other things and fmri machines and sorry and fmr machines absolutely uh physics has played a huge role in in the brain imaging and the medical imaging uh revolution which has been so important continues to be very important right in any case so so my friend the particle physicist is very frustrated and now this is interesting to me because right around 1900 as you know of course

51:31 there was a great deal of confidence in the physics community before 1900 right that they had the answer they had all the answers it was only a matter of doing a little bit more work yeah and there were two small revolutions that happened a little bit more work and and then einstein came along and blew it all up yeah and then what's worse uh einstein introduced the the einsteinian universe the the time space continuum

52:04 uh and and the very profound notion of this universe that in a sense it bends in on itself and then einstein himself was shocked to realize uh that there were quantum phenomenon uh phenomena at a very very basic level that he could not deny right and they were probabilistic rather than deterministic and uh einstein loved the idea of determinism and could never really come to terms with that

52:38 wrote a very famous paper as you know showing that that uh quantum mechanics uh led to an inconceivable paradox and then the inconceivable paradox turned out to be true so so the whole history of science is not just physics it's also mathematics by the way because mathematics has gone through similar revolutions that were totally unexpected and happened right after people thought they finally had their stuff

53:10 together and and then somebody comes along goodwill comes along and and shows that that you can't have a uh the monster be demonstrably uh complete mathematics at all right uh and this violates everybody's intuitions so uh so this is very interesting phenomenon in the history of human ideas uh and the this very odd uh and frustrating both very beautiful

53:44 and very successful science and mathematics and then followed by some kind of revolutionary development that nobody expected that suddenly throws a spanner into the works whether and i don't know which is more fundamental you know is it the successes of science and mathematics that are more fundamental or is it these near successes that turn that trigger uh a paradigmatic change of some kind

54:17 right yeah interesting so you so is your idea i mean because the question was about global workspace theory yes let me backtrack actually global workspace theory is a scaffolding just as freud described his own thinking as a scaffolding which means it's a step and it gives you if you're lucky and you work hard it gives you a basis for trying to build a wall

54:51 and the wall can be the outer wall of a house and first you need to build the scaffolding and test it to make sure it's stable and so on uh global workspace theory uh in in my use of it and i think the others who have developed it very very beautifully by the way uh would tend to agree with this certainly the scientific types the empirical people would particularly stanislaus the han in paris and and a number of others because

55:26 scientists i think don't think in terms of complete theories that are the final answer i certainly don't uh accept your physicist says theory it is is a scaffolding um and it's it turns out to be very handy scaffolding and there are interesting historical reasons for that also because it turns out that metaphors for something like a global workspace are extremely ancient in the history of human ideas

55:59 and long precede probably the the invention of writing systems of of written scripts and so on uh and and there are plausible reasons for that but they're speculative uh in any case i i think the notion of of a conscious mind or brain that both unifies and broadcasts if you will whatever it is that comes to

56:31 consciousness i think that idea appears in william james for example even though he really resisted the idea of unconscious intelligent processing so but just by virtue of the fact that he was so brilliant and just kept on babbling to himself uh he he just wandered into these very interesting ideas yeah so i i don't think i don't think it's it's a particular person's invention i think it's the possession of thinking people uh

57:04 probably for much longer than we can know and and so yes it's a scaffolding and that means we can look to the next stage and for me the next stage of course was a sudden wave of evidence about the brain and particularly the cortex that started to really clarify very beautifully the first version of the theory was published in 1982 actually believe it or not and and because it was compelled by the

57:38 evidence we had which was so paradoxical and this seemed to be an answer to to the paradox that we all encountered really and then then the brain evidence started to come in more and more and more and of course the psychological evidence kept on coming in as well and via computer science information sciences we started to have a much deeper set of concepts which essentially express themselves in the world wide web

58:12 and in things like deep learning and so on uh tools that are now being used but the mathematical basis was worked out started to be worked out around 1980 so all at the same time these ideas were coming in and things were becoming plausible that nobody ever took seriously before so you know it's one of these things where it's an intersection of thinking people with the time in which they live and the ideas that

58:46 are sort of floating around at that time right yeah i think part of the question that was coming in was about whether global work spaces uh that's a theory of consciousness is perpetuating a kind of taboo um about speaking about consciousness and i think the the core idea there was the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness and whether you take yourself to be giving a theory a phenomenal consciousness or a theory of something else or how i feel about i've never see i i don't divide the world up uh in in i don't divide the world

59:20 i'm sort of a a white hedian i suppose in that respect because i really think that nature does not have departments and in my experience in the last several decades points to the same conclusion i think that's our common experience actually over the last several decades because brain science used to be totally separate from psychology which used to be totally separate from philosophy well that's absurd that's absurd because you go back to aristotle to go back to

59:52 plato and go back to socrates on the western side of the eurasian continent and and you get a certain extraordinary tradition very profound tradition and hippocrates of course was alive at that time with his medical school at on the greek island of kos and and made very important discoveries about the brain uh and about the epsilopsis which are still

1:00:24 being studied today very important source of information about consciousness and socrates may have been a mild epileptic because he had these absence seizures and it's very unclear and i don't know if the science even makes a distinction right now the medical he does talk about his demon which may have been like an inner voice guiding him in some cases exactly right and his as damon uh was the source of intuitive wisdom perhaps or wisdom

1:00:57 the reasons for which he could not explain at the time when he had those insights maybe something like that yeah but at the beginning of the symposium plato shows socrates getting lost on the way to the drinking party as you know and there's two guys that are following socrates and they see him getting lost and one asks the other should we should we you know grab him by the shoulder and make sure he gets to

1:01:30 the party or not and the other one says no no don't worry about it he'll show up because he goes into these states is of absence and uh and there are uh low-level epileptic seizures that are called absence seizures on the other hand uh people do get deeply engrossed and deeply preoccupied with questions and i'm i'm very unclear at this point i have to talk to somebody who understands this better what the difference is between normal

1:02:04 absorption that we all experience and this very low-level epileptic phenomenon right but so i mean this this wonderful book of yours is called unconsciousness and so it sounds like what you're saying is that you don't want to make distinctions with like certainly no distinction between access and phenomena and experiential or phenomenological aspects of consciousness empirically what you have is a continent and you don't know how to

1:02:41 slice up the continent you know god doesn't put labels museum labels on the different parts of the continent and say this is louisiana it belongs to the french right and that south america belongs to the portuguese or the spanish or whatever those labels emerge sometimes because human beings decide on divisions and fight over the boundaries and all that kind of stuff it's not nature that creates that so i'm sort of a naturalist

1:03:13 i'm sort of an aristotelian really because i'm trying to understand the nature of this phenomenon and i think we can say that the experiential aspect of sensory perception for example which i need to ask you about by the way because i do not understand what your colleagues in philosophy have been saying about sensory consciousness so i need your help with this but in any case sensory consciousness is

1:03:47 very closely wedded to visual imagery for example but imagery is endogenous it comes from the brain itself and it was shown quite a long time ago actually by very good experimental psychologists that you can confuse images with visual stimuli visual events that rise to consciousness and that very similarly you can confuse inner syllables uh syllables that you only

1:04:18 tell yourself uh so you can hear them in your inner ear if you will that's not the right word but you're in your auditory cortex essentially it's generated by the brain itself it can be done voluntarily you can if if i ask you to rhyme uh the word rhyme that's a hard one uh to to in your inner speech uh rhyme the word speech with another word yeah and i'll bet you

1:04:52 can do it i haven't even thought through this one by the way so this is yeah reach teach yes teach of course uh and and now uh introspectively because introspection is really important sometimes very very accurate you know sometimes not accurate at all but but it can be very accurate so introspectively would you tell us about your subjectivity and whether you think that you rhymed the word speech with teach

1:05:25 even before you pronounced it so the idea is you say you give them a word you ask them the rhyme and inner speech and then you ask was it rhyming before you sort of said it in inner speech yeah that's one way to approach it and and what would be no tell me about the the privacy of your conscious mind as you remember it uh after i asked that question yeah i felt i i would say that it sort of happened that immediately

1:05:59 yes that that makes a great deal of sense and as you know uh psychologists in the 50s and 60s and 70s spent an inordinate amount of time studying exactly that it was talked about in terms of the confusability of syllables but they were mentally pronounced syllables but you were not supposed to say that but it wasn't in fact inner speech and we now know because we can observe

1:06:33 broca's area and wernicke's area during inner speech and we can tell the difference between conscious and unconscious uh speech and so on so so we know so much more about it it's much more that the whole question is much better constrained by multiple lines of uh quite good evidence yeah and and as you know of course uh we did not use the i didn't certainly did not use the word inner speech or use the word consciousness at that time

1:07:07 right it was not the right way to talk yeah so so so yes uh look uh global workspace theory is is a crutch uh for thinking uh about reality uh and i'm i'm very persistent and very old-fashioned in believing that there's such a thing as truth and there's such a thing as the ability that human beings have some of the time at least to learn uh what is true and to do it so well

1:07:44 that we can even convince each other that some proposition is is empirically true in the world and the world includes other people's minds and my own mind for that matter so uh so i see you know this is white hadian i see a single nature to the best of our knowledge of course and our knowledge is is almost limited but uh we have these tremendously uh wonderful surprises the einstein surprise right

1:08:17 where he said the miraculous thing about the universe is that it's understandable right and i think what that meant for him is that he saw two separate lines of evidence converging very very exactly in in a sort of miraculous fashion a fashion that was not really up to him as a scientist or up to the other scientists it was something that emerged from outside of uh one's own wishful thinking right and and i think that's a repeated

1:08:52 uh experience that empirical scientists have mathematicians have their own version of it and maybe fosters have their own version of it i would guess that philosophers do have their own version of this as well that suddenly two lines of thought that you thought that you imagined were quite separate that they actually come together and converge and i think that's the that's the repeated experience that is is is conv is persuasive that there really is a nature out there

1:09:27 there is a human nature there is an extra human nature as well and these these fields of semantics these fields of knowledge are surprisingly coherent when you study them very carefully so i mean i want to ask about what you were interested about the sensory stuff but i i take it maybe from from the philosophers at least so i take it maybe some of it has to do with this debate which has been going on recently

1:09:59 in neuroscience about whether um conscious experience is global or local um there and specifically whether it involves the prefrontal cortex yes exactly and uh i'm interested in that because i got provoked by an interesting article that you know about uh and um and i feel it requires a response from uh from the point of view that i've ended up in that i've sort of stumbled into over

1:10:32 time because it wasn't just my doing it was my doing in combination with one piece of evidence after another almost every week almost every day right now we're seeing really important brain studies uh with a very direct bearing on the on the traditional questions of consciousness as well as the modern questions about consciousness so this is a kind of a golden age and we have no idea of course but that will actually end up with a coherent

1:11:05 viewpoint but so far things are very encouraging and so one of the questions appears to be whether prefrontal cortex is necessary or whether it is a an after effect of sensory consciousness in particular the visual consciousness because that has been studied in very great detail and the counter claim which i do not believe is that prefrontal cortex is not that's called a precondition

1:11:39 for visual consciousness um so what do you what do you make about these like early um like patient a the famous patient a who allegedly had uh most if not all of the prefrontal cortex um surgically taken taken out and uh nonetheless seemingly was conscious or so what do you make of this general claim which i you know i had christophe on uh last of the week before last or whatever and he made a big deal out of out of these kinds of empirical findings that you damage prefrontal cortex you don't

1:12:11 seemingly lose consciousness but you damage visual areas and you get certain kinds of agnosias right you you yeah you get akinatopsia you get a chromatopsia but uh it doesn't seem like you get those sort of things when you damage the prefrontal cortex so i'm just curious what you make of this kind of argument well i have a very platonic point of view on this and it basically claims that we do have distinctive experiences that emerge in the frontal lobes and for example the feeling of effort

1:12:48 is is one of them uh the tip of the tongue experience uh activates regions of the anterior cingulate which belongs more or less to the frontal lobes people it depends on who you talk to some people say it is some people say it is it's part of the frontal lobes well i think what you get prefrontally and in the association areas in general which is the areas outside of the direct sensory projection areas and motor output areas the association cortex

1:13:27 seems to kristoff is using the word hot spots right as as you know mostly about sensory consciousness well hot spots appear all the time in prefrontal cortex when you have a tip of the tongue experience for example and the tip of the tongue is very easy to elicit all you have to do is is give people and then you know ask people an unusual word you know what do you what do you call the flying dinosaurs uh and if people come up with that one then you can ask them

1:13:59 well what else do you call the flying dinosaurs because one of those they'll get stuck on yeah having a five-year-old i can report to you there are no flying dinosaurs there are flying reptiles prehistoric reptiles but they were not dinosaurs oh i stand corrected on that i know too much about dinosaurs because of a five-year-old yeah that's that's basically well that's great that's that's a that's very important no but i take your point though it's easy i will change i will change that question it's very very good uh so uh people have a hard time

1:14:33 repeating or retrieving rather uh fairly rare words but they know the words it's just they're not instantly available to them and so they get stuck for a little while and they know the word right they they know that they know it they have the concept they have fragmentary images and and sometimes i have fragmentary segments you know syllables that come to mind and people are very good at actually telling you

1:15:05 the meter uh of the stress pattern of the missing word uh and so on uh so they can tell you features of the phonology right uh and and there are many many and they instantly recognize a mismatch of course so if you tell them the wrong word they say no no no that's that's not it well if they can tell you what what is the wrong word then they probably also know what is the what is the true world word uh and they can also

1:15:37 give you slow fast reaction times to the true word to the genuine word so there's all kinds of evidence that converges on the idea that the knowledge is there right in your in your brain and mind and and so it's but it's not immediately retrievable uh this turns out to be a meditation technique uh by the way uh in the indian tradition so so getting into a tip of the tongue state uh is actually helpful if you're

1:16:10 interested in in what is called silent consciousness sometimes i think styling consciousness is a useful descriptive term but but bernie is what you're saying here that um so when it comes to let's say uh non-sensory consciousness the prefrontal cortex is essential but when it comes to ordinary con conscious sensory experience it isn't or so i'm wondering what you think about that relation so broadcast somewhere else you know it is such an interesting question and

1:16:42 it is a very subtle question uh because during the tip of the tongue we do have fleeting sensory events as well and over a long period of time there's a very old psychological claim that children for example have very vivid visual images and auditory images maybe music inner music in a song in their dance all those possibilities and that over time you get a kind of

1:17:18 habituation phenomenon so that as you get older and from a judge editing point of view as you learn to do formal operations which is abstraction and piaget thought that you entered that stage of intellectual development around age 11 12 13 if you are in a french speaking school in switzerland at least and so these these are culturally somewhat biased but people

1:17:51 but these but they are very very important abstraction is the primary ingredient in iq tests as i understand it so so so you're as you become more capable of abstraction the very early evidence seemed to show that you lose the vividness of the images and the inner songs and whatever else you have that brought you to that point

1:18:24 so you throw away your crutches in a certain sense uh but artists of course and musicians uh retain that capacity for very important reasons but they probably have much more refined musical imagery or visual imagery because they keep on developing it and that's why it stays fresh of course so so children in this view have very vivid inner feelings emotional feelings for example which we now

1:18:57 believe uh are emerge in the insular cortex uh also part uh very close to well it's it's really anatomically part of the frontal lobes so so you have inner feelings for example which are very sensory in their in their original nature i should say before you become habituated to them and then in the process of becoming an adult and in the process of learning to regulate your emotional impulses

1:19:30 for example which is part of healthy adulthood you also lose the freshness and the impulsivity and the compulsivity of of of qualitatively distinct inner conscious contents so there is a a story one can tell it's developmental it's a life developmental story uh about the transition uh from what is sometimes called

1:20:05 qualitative consciousness sensory consciousness in my vocabulary and the kind of abstractions that mathematicians and philosophers and other people of that kind use for their everyday mentation right so but i mean part of what reason why i'm asking this because i want to kind of get clear on what role you think the prefrontal cortex specifically is playing in in the context of conscious experience and global broadcasting so

1:20:38 i thought that it was the case that uh at least in the uh the global dynamics updated version of um of global workspace theory that i guess you published in 2013 so it's been a few years now but um i thought the idea was that you could have this any to many broadcasting so there could be broadcasting to anywhere in the cortex and so that you which should be so that you should be someone who would be okay with finding out that the prefrontal cortex didn't play a role in century consciousness because maybe broadcast some to some other cortical area

1:21:10 yes i don't think there's any question about it let me give you an example david spiegel in 1985 he's professor of medicine at stanford and a very nice fellow and and somebody who's used hypnosis for many years as a therapeutic modality in psychiatry and he ran a wonderful experiment in 1985 in which he used the event-related potential

1:21:44 which was the only way you had at that time right which is sort of the averaged eeg after a certain event that happens at a time that you arbitrarily call time zero so within a third of a second after time zero which is the onset of a flashing light for example uh that you use you can actually observe this voltage change which travels from the back of the head to the front of the head

1:22:16 well into prefrontal cortex and now david as a very skilled hypnotist with very high with subjects who are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion uh basically tells them uh you'll see a flashing light which is real right and then you'll imagine a box uh turned upside down over the flashing light and that means that you won't be able to see the flashing light that well right and the question was will you record in prefrontal cortex

1:22:50 this event related voltage and will you see it decrease in amplitude as they start imagining this box over the flashing light and the answer is yes and it's quite a significant effect now that could be interpreted as a post-conscious phenomenon this is not very likely and i just found a nice article that looks at what's called the frontal eye

1:23:21 fields which is a very important part of the prefrontal cortex and the frontal eye field turns out to to feed back to visual cortex and to be profoundly involved in conscious vision and i can explain the reasons for that but i don't particularly need to i can simply give you the citation for that and you can look it up it turns out that the fef the uh frontal eye fields get involved in conscious perception before

1:23:55 uh before it becomes conscious very early on in the process uh the our current understanding is that visual events become conscious in an area that's called it which is the lower temporal cortex infrared temporal and also mtl which is the hippocampus the medial temporal lobe those are both enormous areas by the way they're not little and what you get according to really

1:24:29 remarkable studies by the french team of the han zhang and many co-authors what you get is this explosion this broadcast in area itmts and then of course there's many other parts of the brain that are very intimately connected because cortex is hugely interconnected it is extremely difficult to parcelate cortex on a functional basis you can do it on an anatomical

1:25:02 basis right you know once you pickle the brain but but functionally within actually uh working cortex it's very much like trying to divide the traffic pattern in new york city for example uh you can do it but it's somewhat arbitrary and during rush hour especially it it it becomes increasingly arbitrary because essentially it's maybe even better to think about the phone system in new york city because there you don't

1:25:35 have traffic jams uh the the the time it takes to to go uh from uptown to downtown and vice versa at that time turns out to be very very short because of the reentrant nature nature of critical connectivity cortical connectivity uh uh tends to baffle engineers who are very afraid that they're going to blow up a system by getting positive feedback which is

1:26:08 entirely possible uh and it's one of the great puzzles about cortex why it doesn't blow itself up because you have all these excitatory neurons in one place feeding activity to other excitatory neurons which feed back their own excitatory activity to the first neuron and you can do this from just about point a any arbitrary point a to any arbitrary point b right in this cortex which includes the thalamus is called the

1:26:42 corticothalamic system uh and and so uh jerry edelman who i worked with for quite a long time and was very profound thinker on these things i got a chance to chat with him about that and and he and his his closest confidant would discuss this and and the general rule of thumb was that cortex seems to operate far from equilibrium right where equilibrium is a

1:27:16 thermodynamics term and cortex because it is also a physical a physical object in a sense uh it also has to obey some of the fundamental thermodynamic constraints uh that you can't work their way around so anyway so so the the idea is that the uh cortex uh always runs very close to instability right which is chaos uh and and that's a very profound question uh i'm a big fan

1:27:50 of the work of walter freeman and robert kozma on that which is very very interesting and important so there are some very interesting hypotheses around for that and of course we're always on the threshold of ignorance which means that if we're open-minded we're always asking questions and trying to find better answers right and i think that's the status of that hypothesis so i am curious because i would have thought that you and like stan dehan

1:28:22 um slightly disagreed here but it sounds like you're saying you guys agree so i'm a little bit curious about that because the sort of global broadcast um as far as i understood the the global neuronal workspace version of it where that was is that there's these long range neurons that project to the prefrontal cortex and it's when those are activated that the information propagates into the workspace which is somehow located roughly with in the in the prefrontal areas but it sounds like what you're saying is that the conscious in this occurs in the i.t area or the empty areas which is

1:28:56 where the broadcast originates from but not where it's being broadcast to well i think we're really going back to aristotle on this because we have visual consciousness we have auditory uh consciousness we have conceptual consciousness or the consciousness of ideas as plato might have said right i think those are all valid conscious contents i think they emerge anatomically in some way different parts of the brain sometimes very predictable the insular cortex for example

1:29:28 really of the anterior part of the insular cortex really does have to do with heart feelings right gut feelings uh that we have especially as children feelings like love and hate and fear and and and disgust and despair and so on as percept like feelings that we tend to locate in the in in the heart and stomach area whether or not they actually exist there

1:30:02 and and i and of course we know that in cortex it's the insular cortex that's involved with that that's the crucial aspect of and and there may also in fact there is also heart activation and so on uh but it's not necessary so you could you could cut that off essentially and still have the feelings in very much the same way that you have phantom limb feelings even after the limb is no longer there so so i think there are a number of anatomical locations

1:30:34 that function as global workspaces under certain conditions and a very beautiful hypothesis has been proposed by gustavo deco in a recent paper which argues that we know the city map of cortex reasonably well by now and it's called the connectome of cortex which is essentially the street map it's the structural

1:31:09 connectivity of cortex and then of course we have signaling traveling over the structural connectome so we have traffic we have to worry about traffic maps and and fifth avenue uh you know might have no traffic on a weekend let's say i don't know it's conceivable let's say you haven't been in manhattan lately although yeah well uh yeah i i take your point on that uh or it has too much traffic and it's all stuck and that's also possible uh and okay so so so we're really

1:31:42 worried about the signaling and uh global workspace hypothesis can be viewed as a media hypothesis so we're talking about uh not just a theater the theater metaphor is one of the traditional metaphors of course for this uh but we're really talking about a brain web and the structure of the brain web is the connectome let's posit that as an assumption right and then we have to work out the signal flow and

1:32:17 now the signal flow appears to emerge from certain pieces of cortex and in the case of the insular cortex for example the anterior half of the insular cortex is said to lead to conscious experiences of inner emotions while the posterior half of the insular cortex does not so we have what looks like a very uh a very uh inviting comparison case between conscious and

1:32:50 unconscious and that's the crucial thing of course from the scientific point of view because we want to be able to treat consciousness as a variable or observe consciousness as a variable so in this case we have body maps the insulin has body maps which are linked to to a vast number of other body maps including external body maps which were discovered by penfield in the 1920s and 30s

1:33:22 the external body maps are separate from the from the enteric body map which may be one word that could be used the gut body map because there's smooth musculature on the inside of the body and striped musculature in this in the skeletal muscles so so the the innervation and the muscles and and the muscle cells and so on are somewhat different from each other but if you feel nauseous that conscious feeling is

1:33:55 probably emerging from the front half of the insular cortex so and and that's very interesting and the evidence is to me very compelling so this tells me something about that expands my conception of whatever may be the brain basis of this informational concept of global workspace this media metaphor of a global workspace and the interesting thing about this of

1:34:29 course is that the re-entry the the bi-directional feedback in the corticothalamic system is so fast and so explosive that you kind of start scratching your head and because you want to ask you know what comes first the visual system or the prefrontal system and if you look at david spiegel's 1985 hypnosis experiment what you're

1:35:03 essentially telling people is you know your subject in the experiment i would like you to look at this flashing light and then i would like you to imagine this this box covering the flashing lights so you can only see the box but not the flashing light right and and that is a prefrontal task because it's voluntary it involves a deliberate imagination it involves cooperation with the suggestion of the experimenter

1:35:37 all these kinds of things that are very very likely to be prefrontal but then prefrontal cortex can mobilize the visual cortex to illicit images for example and they're good images there's bad images it's individual differences but you find the good imagers and and then you study those to make it easy uh anyway so so where do you want to slice up the traffic flow in manhattan uh well it's it's inherently a difficult

1:36:11 question and the claim in the particular article i just found yesterday is that the frontal eye fields actually get activated before area itmtl gets activated and if that's true and frontal eye fields are profoundly involved in conscious vision they're necessary for conscious vision for reasons that we know reasonably well so in that case a prefrontal cortex is a necessary condition

1:36:43 but you have to remember a prefrontal cortex is a big place yeah and it's not a single coherent uh you know industrial section of your city it's a whole bunch of neighborhoods and they have somewhat different connectivity they have somewhat different functions uh and and they might play nicely together or they might not play nicely together they might compete with each other they might reinforce each other and so on so so i i think empirically with these kinds

1:37:17 of questions you kind of have to be patient and and look for the best evidence and maybe make a guess and then look for more evidence it's very much dependent on feedback from nature so i mean an interesting question is whether you think given this way you're talking whether the whole enterprise of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness is kind of making an assumption that they ought not to make which is that they're going to find some minimally some minimal area of cortex or other area of the brain which is

1:37:49 necessary and sufficient for generating a certain kind of experience because it sounds like what you're saying is and i know you've used this metaphor of like a hurricane before it's like there's this flurry of activity which is kind of stable over time but not localized in any one particular area and that may be more of the type of thing that we're looking for yes i actually uh borrowed that from walter freeman who who has done really profound work on that question and who applied nonlinear mathematics with uh robert kozma his mathematician uh to uh the understanding of the

1:38:24 cortical eeg very important work and it was walter who came up with the idea of a cyclone uh to to represent this because he started to think that standard mathematics uh linear mathematics with calculus and so on was not going to do the trick because i assume because this this system is so intertwined it feeds back on itself in so many different ways uh it re-enters in in jerry edelman's vocabulary

1:38:59 um and it is it's so close to chaos if if you think about it in terms of a trajectory and and walter's work and robert's work shows that there's alternation between organization and chaos about once every 100 milliseconds which is again an extraordinarily beautiful result and i hope it's true and of course in science you you know you always try to be cautious uh exactly right and and then you wait for

1:39:34 the next big surprise that you didn't expect uh and you try to wrap your mind around it because you're not in charge of this process you know nature's in charge of this process to at least as much as as individuals are and and this is so this is the nature of the reality we encounter as empiricists and i'm not limiting empiricists to scientists right i think you know if you're a janitor if you're a good janitor you're an

1:40:06 empiricist and you better be an empiricist right so empiricism is fundamental to the human condition um and and you don't have to be philosopher you don't have to have a phd you don't have to have anything but you do have to be able to survive so so empiricism is is basically what we end up doing and because we fail whenever we try to take a great leap into the unknown most of the time we simply fail and after a while we get the point and then we become a little bit more

1:40:39 modest and and start testing more more more tractable hypotheses so it just occurs to me it seems like i should have got this sooner but i'm wondering now is the in the the title of global workspace dynamics the dynamics there is like dynamical system non-linear system is the sort of is that what you're trying to invoke with that that term there yeah you know that word also has many levels as you know at one level it means you're talking about things

1:41:10 in motion and and the word dynamics does not commit you too much other than that but of course the cortex in terms of adaptability i think the conscious cortex is the leading edge of waking life adaptation to the world and the world includes other people and it includes ourselves so so this is a very common sense view

1:41:42 of consciousness you know the first thing with your kids uh that you need to do is to get them to pay attention yeah yeah good luck don't spill spill your your oatmeal uh kid uh pay more careful attention and don't fall down uh well it's surprising to me just speaking from experience i had to tell them that you should walk with your eyes open looking forward these are things that they don't they don't want to do you're like it's a good idea you know there are profound philosophical lessons in that

1:42:15 exactly you know because it is actually true i believe that people with a strong theoretical bent sometimes forget that uh and and it's kind of amazing i'm sure i've forgotten it myself uh so so the theoretical types drift off in into in into word salad uh and then they have to be reminded that you know if you're five-year-old or three-year-old you better just look straight you know where you're going to stab the same part yeah

1:42:49 the science neuroscientist tony rowe i don't know if you know him or not but he once told me that when he was a graduate student he was very interested in consciousness he wanted to think about a theories uh and he was asking his advisor about it his advisor said uh you're too young for theory [Laughter] you need to put that on on the back burner and and just get some data first so i mean i think that's a good i think by the way i i think that's another taboo and taboos sometimes have a rationale and often are harmful yeah

1:43:24 you mean taboo against theorizing yes yes i encountered the taboo against the arising i did my homework by running extremely boring experiments for three years and then i decided i didn't have the the dog and hard work ethic of real experimentalists i love what they do i constantly use what they end up with but i'm not that i'm something else

1:43:59 and fortunately i got rescued by the by the cardinal science group at that time which was open to theory yeah and i i think that's something we i mean we're running running short on time here actually so i can't uh follow everything but i do i am curious about what you're thinking and someone asked this in the chat too so i know it kind of tells what i wanted to ask and something that we were talking about before we started when we were informally chatting before we started um on going online which is uh what the

1:44:32 distinction between higher order and first order theories so as far as you understand that distinction how do you view global workspace theory because i view it as a first order theory or at least as in the way that's done to han and those guys present it but i feel like sometimes in the way you present it has elements of higher order theory like the observing ego for example being one of those so i'm wondering what you think about that distinction i think it's extremely difficult to dissociate empirically dissociate uh first order theory is from higher order theories

1:45:04 uh and here is an experiment famous experiment from the gestalt psychology people which is simply repeating a meaningful word to yourself let's say about 10 times and what happens of course and i'm going to jump to the conclusion here what happens is that we lose a sense of meaningfulness of the repeated word and it's very important for you to do to repeat your own word because you get different phenomena

1:45:37 when you play it back on on your mac for example the the voluntary motor control aspect appears to be important to keep the word fairly coherent but the meaning seems to bleach out and that is the subjective report but it's extraordinarily reliable uh subjective report and you can do various control experiments for this kind of thing um and and these are important phenomena because they are redundancy effects and

1:46:12 redundancy effects knock out consciousness i think i'll i'll make that as a general claim if you if you present a visual stimulus to the eye and the eye has a jitter on it it has a tremor on it which is a functional tremor it's not pathological in any way it's functional tremor because it it ensures that with every little movement of the

1:46:45 eye which is those movements are not under voluntary control the edges the light edges and the color edges and so on fall on a slightly different population of foveal receptor cells that means that they're constantly feeding new information into your eyes even if it's something as subtle as just a shift uh in the boundary between light and shadow for example right and that's a necessary condition because you can defeat that

1:47:19 uh by mounting a a projector a tiny tiny tiny projector on a contact lens for example and put in a stable stabilized retinal image and what happens is that your stimulus fades it disappears from consciousness right and this is one of a large set of redundancy phenomena that seem to implicate consciousness and essentially the bottom line is that if a stimulus is not informative it's it drops out of

1:47:53 consciousness that sensory adaptation you're talking about there uh you can i think the language of adaptation in the language of informativeness is essentially the same the two ways of talking about the same thing and and i'm sure there are ways we can refine that thought but that's the initial take i would have on that so how does that relate to testing the difference between higher order and first order theories i mean because higher order theories are as as just so you know as we were talking about before are just the kind of theories that's

1:48:25 positive there's some kind of higher order awareness involved in conscious experience whereby what that means is a representation of a mental activity uh and as a sufficient or a necessary condition for having a conscious experience and first sort of theories deny that so so take any meaningful word uh take the word you came up with a speech rhymes with cheech and take either one of those they're both have layers and layers of lexical semantics attached to them they have feeling tones

1:48:58 attached to them all kinds of additional layers of meaning and and i would argue that semantics for example of the word teach is a higher order thought and that it is conscious because it meets all the basic operational criteria for consciousness which ultimately come down to accuracy and reportability so so you can reduce those down to your starting operational definition in a straightforward way and

1:49:32 and it turns out that the percepts that we encounter the conscious percepts that we encounter in the visual world most of them that i see in your office for example are quite meaningful they're meaningful results to me and even if they were not meaningful my cortex would tend to turn them into meaningful gestalts as you know so that's our bias to look for meaning in the world meaning semantic i'm using meaning as semantics right now

1:50:06 but meaning also has a more profound dictionary interpretation in terms of life meaning and so on uh so so layers and layers and layers the the events we experience in the world are sandwiches they're not just not just the cheese and not just the bologna or the bread they're whole sandwiches and they're multi-layered uh and and all the layers as far as i

1:50:39 can tell and this is a testable question all the layers essentially emerge in consciousness at the same moment now again i i realized that this could be false and so therefore uh it it would have to be tested and these days we may be getting to the point where we can actually test that hypothesis it's very difficult because of the very fine temporal resolution that you would need those kinds of things and it goes back to the immense

1:51:16 re-entrant capability of the cortex the fact that you've got this resonant explosion and you can argue whether whether there's something just before the explosion that is sort of conscious and it could be in certain cases probably certainly true but we're still dealing with kind of the first order understanding of what the conscious brain does

1:51:50 and so for a first approximation i'd be happy to say that our perception of the word teach is a sandwich it's it's a multi-layered thing interesting um are you familiar with the work of jeff krishmar do you know uh i know jeff yes someone is asking uh grant castaloo is asking uh he says that uh jeff claims to have a road map to a conscious machine that he got from gerald edelman or edelman and uh he's wondering what your thoughts about this i know we've talked about ai consciousness before you and back in

1:52:24 back there you were skeptical of it so i wonder if you're still uh i've gotten more of that over time which is probably a function of aging and i can no longer wrap my mind around these ideas no uh i i think in in decent science indecent empiricism whether you're a janitor or whether you're a surgeon you really have to make a distinction between what's true and what's not true and and i think that the ai hypothesis is

1:53:01 unproven at best and the idea of being able to prove it would seem to imply that you have to understand the evolution of consciousness which for mammals alone the neocortex which is the organ of consciousness for mammals and humans and so on the neocortex emerged about 200 million years ago so so so i'm going to set a high standard here and and ask uh believers in conscious ai

1:53:36 to prove to me that the biological consciousness that emerged over the last 200 million years is properly uh mimicked in an artificial intelligence system and and we're not talking about playing with dolls you know because children playing with dolls they really do believe that they are you know they're conscious they're friends they have feelings and all that kind of stuff that's a projection right and that's a very natural

1:54:08 projection for human beings we do it very naturally with machines with computers uh and we're wrong that's all it's it's a bias that we have it's very charming bias that human beings have to interpret the stars and the clouds in in human forms it just happens not to be true so i i am curious about this because uh i mean the notion of a global workspace is a functional notion in fact you got the idea from alan

1:54:39 newell who's you know computer scientist and standalone now let me let me let me just beg to differ on that okay ellen newell was a very important computer scientist absolutely right he was also working for almost a 40-year period i think on cognitive architectures and the fundamental empirical observations that they started to work with in the 1950s was the protocols of chess players as

1:55:14 they were thinking through their chest problems and of course what they found they were working with a very good gestalt psychologist at the time what they found is that chess players think step by step ahead of time but they also think in moments of insight right and uh which are profoundly important and we tend to neglect them nowadays of course which we should not do they're conscious moments very important conscious moments so so alan uh was both a psychologist he may have talked with herbert simon

1:55:50 about economics he was a great computer scientist he he applied the idea of of of crowdsourcing or swarm computing or whatever we call it these days including the global workspace concept and of course the global workspace phrase came from his research group at cmu very very important but he was not he he was not a reductionist computer scientist he didn't think

1:56:28 everything came down to bits and and bytes right okay but but my point though was that the idea of a global workspace is a functional idea and i know stun stan you don't think so it's not okay so how is it not a functional idea uh the word functional in the philosophical interpretation i think is profoundly misleading uh it it is it is used as a kind of reductionistic notion uh it's it's reduction by

1:57:01 abstraction if if that makes any sense it does so anything that uh so so if you look at a beehive and you look at the landing platform where the returning bees come back from the field and they carry some poland and so on and the other guys are or gals are standing around the guys actually uh in the case of me are standing around and sampling poland and looking at the bees dance and so on that's a global work space right so functionally uh the

1:57:36 the landing platform of a beehive is just as much of a global workspace as our conversation here which is being broadcast to people who are feeding back their questions to you is also a kind of global workspace those are all global workspaces but we it is profoundly misleading to treat them as a single entity a computational global workspaces are very powerful they've they've entered the toolkit of standard

1:58:10 computer science and of course they're used routinely for crowdsourcing uh for difficult mathematical problems for example i'm talking about the biology uh and and that's what i'm trying to understand i use whatever hook by hooker by cook whatever metaphors or whatever math models all these scaffoldings that are readily available so if i could i would abolish the word global workspace theory and turn it into something else but it's

1:58:44 it's all going to have the same ripple effects and misconceptions uh so i take this perhaps as a chance to correct any misconceptions on that i'm interested in the biology in the brain and the mind yeah interesting subjectivity it's all uh grist for the mill because it all goes together in nature as far as we know i mean i think this is another place where you and like standard really disagree because he recently had that paper in science where he uh authored with hakwan lao and sid

1:59:16 kudair where they were basically arguing that the global workspace could be implemented in a in a machine and that machine would be conscious because he thinks this is a completely computational functional notion so it sounds like you disagree with that pretty profoundly actually uh oh uh totally yes i i think it's it's um it's a kind of abstract reductionism and and uh it's just as bad as every other kind of reductionism and since we are talking about a very

1:59:49 profound biological adaptation with an enormous history and a life developmental course and a momentary course in our conversation right here for example moment to moment with adaptation very much dependent on the conscious cortex so so this is not some abstraction in in mathematics or in introductory computer science this is this is as profound as any other biological adaptation perhaps

2:00:22 more so than most right so i'm starting to get the idea more more clearly now about the idea how this is scaffolding um this is a useful way to think about things but it's it's not we shouldn't mistake the scaffolding for the structure that we're trying to build right and and once we uh build a better version of this we can maybe we can throw away the scaffolding kick they'll kick the ladder away take the ladder away why not if if you don't need it anymore so so there's no there's no attachment to the words global workspace theory

2:00:58 yeah certainly not on my part right interesting well that clarifies a lot um i i really do have to let you go uh here so i want let me just remind people about your own very cool podcast on consciousness which i listen to regularly waiting for a new episode to come on the one with heather berlin was very interesting and so um i hope you're continuing to do that project yes exactly uh we hope to be going on and grinding out interesting ideas and uh it might be possible for us to

2:01:32 kick ideas and questions back and forth you and me uh so we can respond to each other's challenges on these things that would be very cool i'm all for that i always enjoy talking with you i learn a lot every time i talk with you it's been way too long since i've had the opportunity yes very glad about that but uh just in closing i wonder if there's anything which you were hoping or or expecting to come up which hasn't come up the answer can be no but i just like to check at the end to see if there's uh well uh i suppose a useful cautionary note

2:02:08 is that the old saying that the map is not the territory the map of global workspace theory is not consciousness itself and if you get that confused you're going to end up in some other place very good well we need people like you serious people theorizing and by taking the empirical work seriously so i really appreciate your contributions obviously you've made seminal confusion but you continue to do that and really paying attention to the biology

2:02:42 is something that i think is incredibly important and something that needs to be and it's it's it's just so much fun also i should tell you that uh so it's very good to talk with you richard thank you see you again yeah nice to see you so just hang out for a second i'll say bye off the air but uh with that okay um all right so