Consciousness Live! with Tony Chemero (S4 E9)

0:00 i'm hitting the go live button all right uh we are live uh joining me today an extra special guest um tony romero oh i should have asked actually if that's the right way to say your name so now that is the right way to say okay good i lucked into that one so thank you very much tony for joining me i wonder could you say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you sure um i am mostly a philosopher um but i'm also so i'm 51 in the philosophy department 49

0:32 of the psychology department at university of cincinnati um my research is on phenomenology embodied cognition dynamical systems and you know some basic questions in philosophy of science um but mostly you know mostly kind of in the in the dirt with the cognitive scientists um and most of the work that i do in philosophy is actually inspired by my interactions and participation with cognitive scientists

1:04 interesting so i know you've done some actual work yourself uh cognitive science i mean like experiments and stuff like that studies and so on yeah i i was um i was hired out of grad school into into a psychology department even though my phd was in philosophy um so i had to learn a lot right then and it is it's ironic that um in our kind of grad school research group which is organized by brian campbell smith um we used to talk about cognitive science would be so much better without all the damn psychologists

1:38 then look at my first job suddenly i'm a psychologist yeah exactly wow okay you must have made a great disappointment to brian i read one of his books actually in grad school with austin clark it was amazing it was a really great book uh really a big fan of his work um on objects as perception or something i think it was um but that's really interesting and i just can't help but notice also that behind you there's some paintings yeah um you paint no this is my wife's studio my wife uh my wife in her

2:12 you know late 40s went back to get her masters of fine art and she's a painter um this is the kind of best sound isolation in the house i see okay cool um yeah i've always wanted to paint myself my mom my son everyone i know is a great artist but i'm myself not i i don't have that gene either okay so we can commiserate on that i guess um uh very cool okay so you said you're 51 to philosopher or 51 in the philosophy program at least that's right that's right um yeah that's very interesting so i

2:47 guess one thing i wanted to ask you um is whether you're still radical so you know the the best thing anybody ever wrote about that book i think is that rick dale did a review of it and said you know the dirty secret is it's not really very radical you know i'm as radical as as the book is but the book is basically you know i use the word word anti-representational law anti-representationalism but basically what i'm arguing against is a kind of blanket assumption that if it's

3:19 cognitive it's it involves mental representations right um basically i'm opposed to defining the mind in terms of mental representations so that's the sense in which it's anti-representational and that's i guess the sense in which it's radical um and you know like radical is a good word this is from andy clark he defines the position radical embodied cognition and which i just yeah that's what i think um but uh you know radical kind of means both like extreme but also like at its root i like both of those terms um like you

3:52 know i want representations out of the baseline definition of psycho psychological processes just that doesn't mean there aren't lots of them um but it's just that you know lots of things we do don't require right yeah exactly that's one of the things i really enjoyed about the book actually was that uh it was very nuanced in a certain way because you were saying look it's not that there aren't representations it's just that we don't need them to explain what's going on and so maybe there are maybe there aren't but uh sort of not the job of cognitive science to sort of tell us what the representations are and how the computer computations run and all that sort of

4:24 stuff so you say that's a fair way of putting it yeah i guess i would say it's not the only job of cognitive science to do that some cognitive science will be doing that um another way to think about this is um this is a phrase from a recent book linguistic bodies by i'm not sure the order but elena kufari ezekiel depaolo and hannah dieger um highly recommended but they talk about being non-representational instead of anti-representation the idea is that it's not that it's not that we can't make representations and it's not that

4:58 you know when i think about uh you know what i'm gonna cook for dinner tonight um i'm not like representing something in the future but it's basically that at the kind of root of our uh our living cognitive embodied being is are not representations right so that yeah because there is this kind of view that you come across which is that what else could you could you could explain it like what else could could be could you postulate that would do the sort of work that we wanted to do and so you're making the case that we need to change the way that we think a

5:32 little bit um especially with the dynamic system stuff which is just i think really important and something that's under explored maybe it's getting a little more attention in the last few years or whatever but uh i think it's underexplored in philosophy at least so do you still think dynamics as dynamic modeling is very important in this because yeah i do i mean you know and it's just so now in the psychology department at university of cincinnati where i am um uh is a kind of center for dynamical systems theory research in psychology we teach a grad a graduate and postdoc level course every summer on

6:04 non-linear methods in the behavioral sciences so i mean it's just again maybe this is just what philosophers of science are like but i'm kind of constantly leeching off the scientists around me right um but i guess one thing i would say is that i've kind of moved a bit away from being interested in dynamical systems models to dynamical systems as a data analyst analysis to basically some a new way of analyzing data um using using uh similar things to what modelers use

6:37 i can go as far to the weeds as you want with that but i don't need to go any further um yeah i want to get into that actually but because i want to step back just to get clear on what the radical part was because um you make a distinction in the book between a kind of epistemological methodological claim and a metaphysical claim and so i guess that sort of touches on what we were just saying is what you so your claim is a methodological claim um that we that we don't need representations methodologically at least for some some cases for some things yeah i mean i think

7:10 i think you know if if you want to explain how we interact with one another and social interactions how we don't fall over when we're sitting or standing how we avoid things that are speak for yourself tony [Laughter] well over all the time oh so um because of my age you know i'm in my 50s um whenever i go to the doctor they ask me if i fall if i've fallen recently i'm like yes a lot but i i do martial arts so i fall all the time right that's called tumbling

7:44 it's not because i'm dizzy or something right exactly yes i don't need life alert just yet so so one i mean one thing that i was curious about when i was thinking about this was if it's really a methodological claim that it sounds like everything that you're saying is compatible with the idea that what's really doing the work are representations and computations and so this is one of the questions i had about the dynamical stance um and how how serious we're supposed to take it

8:15 uh because the way i understand like dan dennett's take on this is that a stance is like it doesn't tell you anything about what the what's going on inside um and so that that's the way i was reading sort of what you were saying when you said dynamical stances like this is a way of looking at the system but it's sort of neutral about what really is the cogs and gears or whatever if there are any is yeah i mean i think that's right i mean i'm kind of at heart uh you know i fight every day against being like boss von frosten in my kind of

8:48 logical leanings um so you know the idea is i don't think that we're gonna get anywhere by arguing about metaphysics because anybody can have any intuition and it's equally good that's not quite true but you know you can base your metaphysical views on on intuitions and and i guess i prefer to think okay so let's actually look at data let's look at what scientists are doing when they're trying to explain this thing that we in common sense language refer to as thinking the mind experience perception and so on

9:19 um and so yeah i'm not making i i think that it's hard to make ontological claims about unobservables right and if you think that you know what something in your brain represents is in fact unobservable because you know the content doesn't reflect light or weigh anything um then i think that you know we should try to have as few of those in our in our scientific theories as possible do you think so this is a sort of of a piece or at least um compatible with john bickel's meta

9:53 science his new way of meta science take on this that what you look to is the scientists and the way they interpret their work or is that going is further than what you were just saying i think that goes further than what i'm saying you know john john has i think you know if someone should be called radical it's john yeah he prefers ruthless but the uh no i i don't think we should just take whatever scientists say at their word but i think you know how do we know about uh psychological phenomena well it seems like the best way we know about them right now

10:25 is through experimental science um so we should take the results of that seriously um and not just run on like you know faculty psychology from kant or something right yeah right we don't the boxology is uh we're a little bit past that sort of just the a priori boxology stuff um so we want to be in close contact with the scientists uh that's basically the point that you're making we want our work as much as possible to leech off them you know the way you're saying yeah i want to be at least i mean you know

10:57 there's room for lots of different kinds of philosophy of course um but i prefer to say okay let's let's think about these kind of basic philosophical questions taking into account what you know the successes of the scientific psychology yeah and i'm a big fan of that approach by the way obviously yeah i know that yeah yeah so i think we agree very wholeheartedly on that um but but so when i i don't know if you've read this recent book um by uh nick shay called representation and cognitive science have you seen this

11:30 uh i own it okay um cool i don't want to put you on the spot if you haven't read it but i was curious about maybe one of the ways that you might respond uh of someone like you from your point of view would respond to the argument that nick was making which uh i i i mean in a certain way shared a lot of i thought um of the stuff that you wanted to say uh because at the end of the day what nick says is look there's representations um but they are only explanatory right the the

12:01 uh they come in after the fact sort of the causal mechanisms of the system are there and then we postulate oh there's content and the the reason why we that's useful to do um is because it gives us explanations that weren't that patterns that we couldn't see become visible um and and then in cases like where you give where the cause and effect explanation follows directly in lockstep with the representational content story like i think the example that nick uses is the

12:34 pulling of a trigger and a gun so you pull the trigger then there's the mechanism it fires the the bullet or whatever so there's no sense in what you want to say the finger is a representation of the firing or anything like that because you don't get any added benefit to it there's no there doesn't there's not a pattern that you can see that wasn't visible from before so would you be against that way of thinking about uh representations i mean maybe that's too quick and if you haven't read the book we can just pass over i haven't read the book um i'm sorry to say i apologize nick who i've never met that i haven't written okay but you did get a couple dollars from me uh it's uh it's uh open access oh is it

13:09 okay yeah that's someone with you have a physical copy so i made a big mistake so uh yeah i agree with that look i mean in addition to ivan frost and i'm also like really influenced by by nancy cartwright and um so i think that the universe has very few kind of islands of intelligibility right we should use whatever tools we can to get at them and to make sense of the regularities that we can find and you know that another rick dale again i mentioned earlier

13:41 in his review but points out that the exact argument that i make about why we should believe that there are affordances could be used because they're explanatory useful um right we should be we could other people could make the case that that's why they're our representation because they help us explain things i mean again this is a sense in which you know the it's not very radical like you know if cognitive scientists get explanatory and mileage from talking about content right believe in content um and that's really yeah that's a good

14:15 point because scientists will cannibalize anything that's useful right so if it's useful for them they'll they'll put it to work in their theories yeah i mean that's um you know in our lab and where do this kind of dynamical data analysis like oh these were used to like measure the tides and these are used to measure earthquakes but they turn out to be also available to measure human social interaction and human performance in various tasks um but you know this is like not this thing that you would initially say oh yeah this is psychology too this is about fluid dynamics or about or about you

14:48 know uh earthquakes uh the distribution of earthquakes in time and space yeah i read something interesting too taking like the linear algebra from quantum mechanics and using it to model like decisions that people make and it turns out to be surprisingly useful actually but it's kind of the asymmetry that you get in the physical systems mirror kind of indecisiveness in people in a certain way which is so it's an unexpected kind of application yeah yeah i mean i have long been skeptical of the value of you know quantum cognition but i mean i

15:22 think that there has been some good stuff a what makes you skeptical of it well um i guess that you know the quantum realm is so bizarre right and um you know the i guess what i here's what i what i what makes you skeptical is that suppose we understand the mind as well as we understand quantum mechanics it doesn't get us very far no well it would get us a little bit further in that we'd have a nice mathematical formalism which predicted everything nicely which we

15:56 don't have we don't have um the uh yeah i mean i had a conversation with carl fristen um the you know free energy principal guy about and i was complaining to him that like hey you're taking like bits of information theory and thermodynamics and you know other stuff and just jamming them together as if that gives you something sensible right and this feels like well if the math works though so that's all that matters it doesn't matter that this is a theory of information and this is a theory of energy what matters is the math sticks together and gives me

16:28 something coherent and i think that's that's the way scientists um approach mathematics when they when they you need a tool for something and you like so you find one and right or you make one that's right right so but what i mean because connecting to what i was saying earlier you might worry or wonder if this doesn't open up to the realism bits about the representations doing the work in the long run because if you think about like newton he writes down a nice equation but doesn't know what's doing the work it's not until much later that we come

17:02 to understand the mechanism or you know that's the curvature space timer you know whatever you want to say about it we don't have a full theory of gravity but we have that piece of it at least but now we sort of understand why the equation that newton came up with works because we have this physical interpretation of it uh something that's doing something so couldn't the same thing sort of be going on with respect to cognitive science like we have these models that maybe work but it's not telling us about what the actual mechanisms are and then so in the fullness of time we may find out or not that those are representations yeah i mean i think that's right and you know betting about the next

17:35 big thing in in cognitive science is not a good idea probably so i would um you know i would not be surprised if if if people will end up saying oh yeah tony he had some weird ideas we now know that right i don't again yeah um and i don't i don't care about more than that really i mean i guess i guess you know i i want to kind of participate and like help some people see the cognitive sciences in a particular way

18:08 um and you know this is also true of that book i aim like directly at cognitive science grad students like that's who i thought of when i was writing that book the whole time so you know the idea is to kind of get people before they have solidified um you know think something slightly different from the way they might have before yeah sadly it didn't reach me before then but i think i think it would have been helpful because there is a kind of standard assumption uh which isn't question too much i mean you have to average neuroscientists i mean just as an antidote i remember i

18:41 went to connecticut i did one year of grad school of connecticut and uh in philosophy and i was also working in the neuroscience program as well and i was in this laboratory working with mice and it i couldn't handle it uh for personal reasons because i like the animal so much anyway um i remember i was talking to the the friend the pi uh this guy named james kroback who was a postdoc with european doesn't matter anyway so anyway and i was talking about something about you know so we're talking about spatial navigation and memory and i was like so the rat has to you know represent where the goal is and he was like there's no representations

19:12 in the brain i was like what the [ __ ] are you talking about it really took me aback a little bit but then i realized i was in connecticut and then i found out about the whole ecological psychology movement which i really was totally ignorant of um so i was so i wanted to ask you a little bit about that because you know the gibson the whole ecological psychology movement is just kind of a mystery to me and you do a really good job i think of trying to clarify it in your book but so i wonder can you just say a little bit about what the motivation for that is uh for the ecological approach yeah um so you know gibson james gibson

19:47 uh started writing you know started studying psychology um in the 20s teens and 20s when psychology and philosophy weren't very separate from one another and his mentor was eb holt who was a william james student oh i didn't know um so he's trying to basically make a science out of william james's radical empiricism so you know radical empiricism the idea is basically that everything that we experience is real and only things that we

20:21 experience are real and it's basically a denial of the distinction between like mind and world and that's what gibson's theory of affordances is as well right um when he introduces him he said affordances are neither mental nor physical he says psychical either psychical or physical or maybe they're both so that's the idea um the idea and you know when he's writing this he everyone he had to say you were a behaviorist um because it was the 1950s in psychology um so you know he was

20:55 influenced by behaviorism and um by this william james view to kind of come up with a non-mentalist view of psychology um where you say you know actually the the way we've thought of perception he focuses on perception as like starting with visual perception starting with like two flat mental images and then we have to kind of build up the world inside our brains maybe that's not the right way to do it um and you know the main claim is that if you think about the kind of poverty of the stimulus arguments that are used to get cognitive science off

21:28 the ground in the 50s gibson argues that the stimulus is not impoverished because animals move around and do so on purpose right the fact that you move on purpose means that the input to your vision say is not static images it's a flow and flows have so much more information than images do what i mean so you know when you're when you're in a scene there's no question about whether it's something is a

22:00 tiny thing really close or a huge thing really distant that that kind of possible ambiguity goes away as soon as you move your eyes right in the image that ambiguity is there so a gibson starts out as like okay so there's way more information than we realized let's start with the information to do our theory of perception right i mean sometimes i've heard this point put by saying that yeah the idea is that well why would the brain build a model of the world because the world's already there it's already got everything that you would you would need so you don't need a model

22:32 of it an extra representation or something like that yeah yeah that's the way rodney brooks puts it um the uh i mean i guess yeah the question though then is what is your brain doing right and you know i think you know my intuition is that most of what your brain is doing is sticking you to the world right and you know that's that's what needs to happen you need to kind of be appropriately connected to your environment in order to succeed in any of our animal business and also our kind of human social business um and you know

23:05 if we just agree that that's that's the main thing then we might not say we we might say we do that by building an internal model of the world but we might say that no we stick to the world by being with it as opposed to rebuilding it inside of our brains right i suspect that we do both so one question i mean one question i've always had and i've never really understood the affordance business is how to make sense of that thing you just said and i know that there's some business about maybe um some kind of monism in the

23:39 background here that make that kind of you know gets us to feel okay with the idea that these things are neither mental nor physical or both or something like that they're in a separate category maybe a neutral category but i guess i just don't really understand what an affordance is or how you could perceive one um and yeah so i don't really understand i know what an affordance is supposed to be it's supposed to be you know it's a way of doing something to the object or something like when you're interacting with it or something like that and so i know that

24:11 you know there's certain things you can say i look like i can make it from here to there it looks like i could grab that thing so i sort of get those those intuitions but more than that i don't really get um so what more than that is there um you know the thing so what i'm gonna do now is not gonna help my case okay the thing is you can't just like pour affordances into your cognitivist ontology right you have to buy the whole ball of crazy okay say look we are in the world with the world if you want to explain how we

24:44 do that we have to attend to us and the world simultaneously um and affordances basically are a way for things to be both mental and physical or neither if you prefer right um because you know uh the fact that i could reach the the coffee cup on the on the desk here um the reachability of that coffee cup that's what that's the kind of thing people talk about when they talk about affordances um the reachability of the coffee cup is not just a property of the material object and it's not just a property of

25:18 my abilities and experience it's a kind of combination of those right so you know the way to think about this is that things that we think of as kind of prototypically mental aren't in our brains but they're things they're things in the environment and the uses they have for creatures um so that's what undeformance is an affordance is is something i can do right um and and they're weirdly neither mental or physical in that you know the affordance for reaching the coffee

25:51 cup doesn't disappear um when you know or as far as drinking the coffee doesn't disappear if i'm not around to drink the coffee but in an important way it depends upon me right it depends upon the kinds of abilities that i have um so yeah what our affordances affordances are the stuff that we perceive um and or for the most part perceive and what we that and that means that they are kind of a relationship between what um our perceptual and behavioral abilities

26:24 and the stuff in the world right one way to say this is that i mean this makes the science harder is that it takes all of the things and makes them into relationships so it's a kind of structuralism in a sense um it's not you wouldn't go that i see i went too far i could tell already i've overstepped no i mean it's a i don't know so i don't know if i believe this but i've been trying to because it's

26:55 i think it's an interesting way to think um but it's what i take from reading the late work of william james like does consciousness exist and things like that um is that like if you say where is my experience i want to say this this is my experience not in here this is it right so that's the kind of i've been trying that way of thinking on and i can't quite convince myself of it sometimes um but but uh you know i think that's the kind of claim that ecological psychologists have to make right uh so so how do you square this with those so

27:28 like um hallucinations because that's one thing i didn't really see come up a lot in in what i was reading was how you deal with well illusions hallucinations like the hollow face illusion for example where you can show that people unconsciously sort of know what the orientation of the nose is so they ask them to reach they reach they touch the notes but if you ask someone looks like notice it's pointing out so they don't reach where it looks they reach where it is there's all sorts of things like that where um and so how do the affordances work there because what i'm perceiving is the nose

28:02 of the person i reach out to touch it i think i'm going to touch the tip i ended up reaching into the face and touching the back so i clearly wasn't the affordance was illusionary so can you have illusionary affordances or yeah so how do you make sense of those sorts of things in other words so one of the i guess here's the way to say it is that um if you think about uh what people do um we make mistakes all the time right um and from the ecological approach from this kind of gibsoni roughly gibsonian approach um that seems like a mystery

28:34 again like illusions seem like they're a direct refutation of the view um but the point isn't that when we say that perception is direct which is kind of what i haven't used that phrase yet but i say perceptions direct i mean it's kind of like direct contact between my activities and the environment not involving a representation but importantly you don't mean naive realism there right um it's a kind of realism uh you know but it's not a you know it's not it's not the kind of thing that we could

29:07 say oh there is a coffee cup and there's a desk and you know so it's like not a common sense realism but it's kind of like realism about perceivables i guess um so yeah i mean it's a kind of you know the phrase that people seem to prefer is direct realism not that that solves any mysteries um but it's different from naive realism i guess yeah i mean i don't want to get too distracted here but just because when i was thinking about your optic flow example and the the bird diving what kind of bird was it i forget something again or something yeah i get it so it's it's diving down and you're saying it's

29:42 the optic flow and it's uh a measurement of how quick till it hits the surface or whatever it's using that the gauge when it puts wings in there's evidence for that or whatever um so what's being perceived there yeah so it's anyway so i don't know how to make sense of that kind of example given what you were just saying um about hallucinations so so how do we fit as i don't i'm getting this is very confused i remember normally i like to

30:15 think i don't stutter this much but i am sort of uh mind boggled because of physical illness today so hopefully let's just attribute it to that that's why i'm sounding so dense but but the point that i'm trying to make is that yeah i don't know anyway how do you explain what's going on with the gannet right so let's go through the illusion first and then again okay right so the illusion you know i think that perception is correct it doesn't mean it's easy right and it doesn't mean we're foolproof it's just that for the things that we need to need to use for our everyday

30:50 being in the world um we have enough information in the environment in order to make those discriminations without calling on internal representations that doesn't mean we don't ever make mistakes because we don't always bother to get all the information we need like you know that you know if i say oh you know my wife is home because her car's there that's not enough information to know that my wife is home right yeah but it's it's enough for most things for most purposes so we make mistakes all the time and

31:22 hallucinations and illusions are versions of this well illusions are versions of this where we don't gather the right information or there's not enough information because it's a two-dimensional image or something like that um so that's the you know so and also we have malfunctions and maybe our perceptual systems aren't up to certain kinds of things we might ask them ask of them in the lab um but but more but i guess my question was about what the what's going on in that case so it seems like you have to be a kind of um

31:55 you know well how do you get around positive representations for the bad cases i guess is um you well you just say that there was an error right you know you say that the thing that the way that tony acted um didn't take into account the information available to him but don't you have to explain like what it's like for the person because in the in the case of the hollow face illusion it perceptually appears that the nose is pointing out but your perceptual systems are very much aware that noise is not doing that right so so i was

32:30 interested in the experiential aspect of it because i'm not perceiving an affordance there it seems to me well i think you are perceiving that you're not consciously right i think i think this is we're not what we you know you do that do the higher order theories of consciousness right and so i think what we our experience most of the time isn't experience of experience it's experience of things that's a way to say it right so i think you know and we're aware of all kinds of things all the time that we have a really hard time talking about

33:02 so i think that you know the bill like you know the kind of if you say if i say so richard how how is it that you're controlling your balance with respect to gravity now you can't talk about that but you're really good at it yeah thanks even though i follow a lot but you know the uh and the reaching is like you know how do you direct how do you guide your arm when you reach something that's really hard to talk about right and so you know i think the stuff that what we think of as consciousness um most of the time is the stuff that we're good at talking about

33:34 um you know it's something we can put into that clause maybe or you know but i think that you know most of our activity in the environment doesn't rely on that and sometimes that gets in the way like sometimes you know describing things in the environment makes it harder for me to engage in the actions that i engage in um so what am i trying to say what i'm trying to say is that um the illusion is in the talking to yourself part of that hollow face experience as opposed to the reaching for it part of the hollow face experience

34:07 um but what but what am i perceiving in that case so like consciously i'm perceiving something differently than i'm perceiving unconsciously is that the story that you have to tell here yeah so i don't like unconscious um and this is goes back to goes back to you know i studied with danette um and an old book of his he talks about you know if you're controlling your behavior to something you are aware right so if i'm controlling my behavior with respect to the distance of that nose then i'm aware of the distance of that nose um that's the only way i could do it so

34:42 there's a kind of consciousness but i guess again it's not the kind of consciousness that we we in consciousness studies um circles might be talking about right um so i think again i think that we access the world in many many many ways um through many many many senses and and um you know the kind of verbally inflected access to the world is only a small portion of our conscious experience but it's the one that we're good at talking about and arguing about right um okay so let me try this a different way so

35:15 suppose you're trying to reach you know so you take the the famous case of df um a neurological patient who had some damage and kind of blinds out resulted right she was able to um put letters into a mail slot and adjust her position correctly but couldn't tell you or draw the orientation of the slots i'm sure you're familiar with this um so so here's so she's i mean so i want to use the p word here the phenomenal consciousness the experiential aspect of the

35:47 of the sense of consciousness she's not i mean one interpretation of that she's not experiencing the orientation of the angle consciously in the phenomenal sense but she obviously is aware of it that's the point you were just making because she's able to do the task so there's something in there that's doing it which is why many people would posit some kind of unconscious representation of the orientation that she's not aware of or whatever so what's the story in terms of affordances that make sense of people like her well i mean you know like this is a paper from like 20 years ago argued that

36:21 you know ecological psychology is about one visual stream cognitive psychology is about another visual stream right now right yeah that's one way to understand this right um is that you know there are multiple pathways in our brain that enable us to act the way that we do and this person has a problem with one of them but not the other right and so i would say from this that the person uh this neurological patient df df right um is aware is conscious of the um orientation but is not able to

36:55 report on that so she's having a phenomenal experience like she's phenomenally conscious but just can't say that she is i think that's right yeah i mean i mean i am not fully on board with the access consciousness phenomenal consciousness distinction um but but i think you know there's a deep sense in which she is consciously aware of of that um of the orientation even though she can't tell you about it this size

37:28 how blind side um seems to be it has to be from this point of view a kind of verbal deficit as opposed to a perceptual deficit right so even in blind sides kind of like in philips view it's like degraded vision but not absence of vision that's right yeah right yeah okay so i still don't really understand what we're perceiving in those cases because now it seems like you have a kind of conflict i mean i remember i'm total novice at this so i'm sure i'm asking very dumb questions but

38:00 it seems to me that like in the hall of face illusion case you have according to what you just said you have a conscious experience of the nose being convex and a conscious experience of the nose being concave one of those you can report about the other one you can't but they're both conscious um one of them guides your action the other one doesn't but they're both experienced and so it it looks like then yeah i guess that's what you were just saying that the one of the streams doesn't do affordances um it's a perception that's not affordance in the affordance business

38:32 so there's a kind of perception that doesn't do affordances according to this story then right there's a there's definitely i mean and gibson himself didn't say that we only perceive affordances i see okay i didn't realize i mean so you know if you think about what we have in conscious with the non-humans right that's the perception of affordances bit then there's stuff that we do that's weird in the animal kingdom and listen to music yeah that's right although i just read something about the musicality of bird song which yeah doesn't matter um the uh

39:09 right but my dog stares at me reading all the time and she's like what the hell are you doing over there um there's an onion store an onion onion story while they're like you know dogs puzzled at the humans love of glowing rectangles okay it's good um but yeah so i mean i think that this kind of these symbolic activities that we engage in are weird in the animal kingdom and and gibson what gibson wanted and what ecological psychologists want and you know they'll they'll say all kinds of strange things in order to make this point is that i

39:41 want a theory that's about a theory of perception full stop but not a theory of human perception i want right kind of general phenomenon um and so you know that's why they'll often say things like well why are you talking about brains when you're explaining perception because there are things that don't have brains that respond adaptively to the environment um so you know that's that's the kind of that's the kind of far end of the ecological approach just like this can't be at all about brands i don't i don't buy that at all but okay

40:14 but um so you don't think like your self-driving cars of the world perceive affordances or roombas or whatever so i guess one of the things about them is that you know they're well i guess i don't know how they're how current self-driving cars are built i think roombas don't perceive affordances they perceive you know you can make sense of them in terms of perceiving affordances but you know so you know what the code is that runs or someone knows what the code is that runs a roomba now if you're like getting involved in kind of like deep learning where you just have

40:45 a [ __ ] load of neurons connected in tons and tons of complicated ways and you know maybe that's perceiving affordances but you know you know if you're talking like code that i wrote i i would say that that's kind of starting with an image right and then using that image in order to reason about what's there and i think that a lot of perception isn't like that right okay um i mean that kind of brings up the point we were making earlier though if like you didn't know the roomba was designed suppose you found it you

41:17 thought it was a an animal of some sort of you start studying it you might postulate all these dynamical systems explanations and really the right answer is it's representing the environment and blah blah blah right we're going to run into that kind of danger a lot about what the real story is it's an interesting case though right because it's based on brooks's rodney brooks initial uh robot called allen which argued didn't represent the environment um but i think that you know the commercial product doesn't work exactly like alan did right yeah

41:51 yeah i mean i think all these questions are very very hard to know the answer to because whether he knew that it represent i mean he could have designed something that represented you know in a way that he didn't realize it was representing so i think that's always going to be a kind of a puzzle there but but i want to get back to the affordances stuff because it really bothers me um i'll let it go in a second but i just don't because i sort of know what an affordance would be like in a video game um the object over there i can interact with because there's something in the virtual environment that tells me i can interact with it and that stuff over there oh that's just background i can't

42:24 interact with it because there's no circle button you know there's no it's not twinkling in a certain way so there's always something in the video game that tells you hey you could do this you could jump over this you could grab it so so those could be a kind of affordance i guess but i don't see anything like that here in in the current environment so why think that these things are in the environment um as opposed to in the brain of the perceiving organism like i guess that's one of the questions i have is so i know you're going to say it's not in the environment somehow involves both

42:56 of them or something like that but why i think it's more than just the internal workings of the organism so excuse me um like i said this is the you have to buy the whole ball of craziness i'm trying to well you don't have to but you know um to be consistent and be tony you have to buy you know you know the but i mean if you were to again i keep talking about this um this example but like you know right now you're swaying everyone sways all the time and that

43:28 swaying is generating information for us and that information is about uh keeping our balance right because what happens when the thing in front of you and this is the gain and again suddenly gets really huge that means you're falling toward it right so now there's an affordance there and affordance for maintaining your balance that you are constantly kind of perceiving but you can't talk about this stuff right it's just it's not the kind of thing that you if i say you know so richard what's in the room you wouldn't

44:00 say well information that makes it so i don't fall down is in the room um but you know you know if you can make a list of the things uh in the room that they're not going to include the affordances right typically because i say oh look there's some books there's a sculpture there's a maybe a printer um and a plant behind you that's pretty good but you would say there's a brain and the brain has a cerebellum and this herb and cerebellum has a lot of activity which may be computing you know balance of distribution of weight and so forth

44:31 so that's part of what's in the room and that's something i think would count as the kind of thing we're talking about sure but i mean i guess here's one way to say it you know that your cerebellum is you it's not what you perceive it's not your pers you know so i mean it's part of the animal and all of these things all the discussion of affordance requires understanding that there's an animal with certain kinds of abilities and needs involved in the ex and what we're talking about right so again if i if i don't ask you to make a list of the things in the room but ask

45:03 you to get me something out of that top drawer um there's an affordance there that you can take advantage of and you can't you know you wouldn't have listed oh you know this thing i can i can by turning my hand just just so i can get my fingers underneath that uh ledge and pull the drawer out you wouldn't have lifted those as the things in the room but those are in the room right right so that's and the problem with affordances i think um this is like a public relations problem is that you know what we talked about oh

45:37 edibility and reachability and you know passability and sit on ability and create all this gap crossing and um but most of the things that we experience that i think are best that are that are well described by ecological approach are not things that we have names for not keeping your balance yeah like you know just so you know you are after this after we're done talking you're gonna walk out the door probably to go pick up your kids

46:10 um and you're gonna change from being on you know like a manufactured surface to being on a different kind of manufactured surface to being on the grass and all of that is going to change your gait in really subtle ways right and again you don't fall when you go from the carpet onto the wood floor but you don't you're not really able to talk about how you've changed the way you walk when you go from one surface to another and that's in situations like that like you know so you know i could say something's reachable but that doesn't matter that's not that's you know that matters

46:42 but it's not kind of like the kind of fine-grained understanding of what you experience it's you know it's grasp with your hand this way or this way with two fingers with your whole hand with two hands right so all these are the things that again we can't talk about them well but these are places where ecological psychology and the ecological approach and the dynamical approach get their best grip is in like real-time movement engaging with the environment i mean it sounds like that's real i mean low-level stuff so it doesn't sound like that's the sort of thing not that that's bad or anything but that's not the

47:13 um that's not the kind of thing which uh obviously cognitive science is interested in explaining that but that's not the brass ring or whatever the gold what's the good one gold ring whatever the one the ring that we want that's not the one we're after because that doesn't involve you know perception cognition so yeah i understand that that's where it's best at but it doesn't seem like that could be the whole picture um and i guess you're fine with that so maybe we don't want to make too much of that but it definitely seems like it's hard to scale up that kind of story to account for the whole picture well it's tricky right you know the from the very beginning

47:45 i'm not from the very beginning but from you know the the 90s embodied cognition craze that started um you know people said this doesn't scale up but if you think about affordances you know and andy clark talked about there are representation-hungry problems right but when you perceive affordances you're kind of perceiving possible future actions right so that seems like the kind of thing that would require representation but when we talk about the way people interact with affordances we don't need to bring that up now does it um does it scale up to planning a birthday

48:18 party for your kid right no it doesn't that's a different activity which will need a different kind of explanation and you know the that i believe um and most cognitive scientists don't that that explanation will be strongly constrained by what we learn about our kind of ground level uh real-time movement and motor control and percep you know perception of opportunities for action i think that theory is going to constrain the way we

48:50 explain how we plan the birthday party right i see so so it won't explain the whole thing but at least narrow down what will count as a good explanation and we can't just make up anything right i mean so i think you know the kind of natural way to go to explain how you plan a birthday party and this is um this is the base of the main topic of that book i mentioned earlier by depaolo cafari and yeager um linguistic bodies is that the way we were going to explain the kind of specifically human things the

49:24 the the precious ring that cognitive scientists were after is is going to be involves sociality and being in you know developing in an environment full of language and being able to take advantage of the opportunities for behavior that language allows um so i mean that's the kind of story that it has to be if if you know ecological people and the inactivist people are kind of are basically right about the real-time

49:56 interaction with the world the story of the everything else is going to have to be social interesting yeah i i want to but before we do downl to that um uh i i i guess i guess i gotta let go of the affordances i still don't really get it but um to to be honest because well maybe i won't let go of one try one more thing so suppose you were

50:32 suppose you were writing software that you know explained how ants find something to eat right now one way to do it would be to say oh the ant forms a representation of a white powder then infers that it's sugar and then infers that it can eat that thing or and then you know consults uh you know consults the kind of

51:04 satisfaction of hunger module and then makes a plan to get over to the sugar right um that seems like a lot of inferences to give an ant credit for right so instead you might just say well look what the ant sees is something it can eat and uh ants are motivated they you know they're they're active in the environment they move around all on their own and when they experience things that uh afford something to them they just interact with them

51:37 right so again that's the kind of explanatory value of affordances is that you know you don't want to give a hummingbird or an aunt credit for lots of meant a rich mental life and lots of kind of computational power they just interact and the way to understand how they interact um is to say that the things they interact with are actually in the environment waiting for waiting to be perceived right uh i still yeah i mean i i it's a nice picture it's just that filling it in so

52:09 that it it's not so that the ball of crazy is digestible is uh a bit a bit of a challenge but but i get the picture right so you see something that's that looks like you can eat it um but what does it mean to look like you can eat it if you can have that and not be aware of it and you know you say it looks like something else and so that's that kind of hall of face illusion stuff is that just seems to me that that well um maybe this is just a way that i was thinking of the word perception that's

52:41 different in the way that you're using it because it seems like that's the paradigm case of perception is conscious perception um where i can say look it's over there i see it um and uh there may be these other kinds of perception as well but those aren't the paradigm ones and in the hall of face illusion case the the the canonical perception is wrong the one that we think of as you know the thing that we perceive is wrong then there's this other thing which yeah in a sense we perceive as well but not consciously or not we're not aware of it or something um but

53:14 it sounds like the whole story here is well it can all be done kind of i mean you know does a tree perceive the affordance of how to grow its roots like there's water over there i mean you know so it just seems like once you start doing this there's there's no end to it right so again you know dennis talked about affordances as ontology bloating yeah okay good so yeah that's it but the um so we call in my lab in research group we call him saint jimmy

53:46 uh gibson saint jimmy taught us that we shouldn't um we shouldn't begin with the weird cases in understanding our mental lives our interaction with the world our perception our behavior so i'm still laughing at that sorry he pronounced that don't start with the weird case start with the stuff we're good at so you know you know what he would say and i think there's something to this is you don't want to build your theory of perception from our failures right you want to start with the things

54:18 that we can do well right right and so so yeah of course illusions are something to be explained but they're not going to be the kind of driver of the explanation of everything else i mean in a way i guess i sort of disagree with that because that's kind of been the crux of the whole philosophy perception debate is you know how do the direct realists make sense of hallucinations and is there a common contents between them and so a lot of theories of perception are are really caught up in this question but i guess this is sort of a piece of what you're saying earlier is like no we

54:51 want to just ignore those questions and do the science and see how far we can get well i mean and you will note if you if you're me and you care about being excited that those people don't read my work [Music] so like i don't i don't have much interaction with that that set of ideas but i mean i have opinions but you know i think what what philosophy of perception is focusing on isn't what i want to focus on i say i think of i think of myself as doing philosophy of cognitive science um and you know in paying attention more to kind of

55:25 what you know the people down the hall for me in my in one of my offices are doing as opposed to what you know philosophers are saying um this is partly why i'm a bad philosopher right i don't want to argue about things i just want to you know i i want to just like figure things out from a particular point of view and tell you about them right like i don't like to defend myself and print i just you know i i'm just this is a way in which my advisors failed me or i failed them how can you be a foster who doesn't like to argue yeah no i

55:57 i i'm with you on that i find arguing very tedious uh so i wish we would redefine what it means to be a philosopher doesn't mean to love argument um not not not at all i agree with that completely um but okay so i still to have a bunch of things i would want to bother you about affordances but uh uh let's move on because uh we can't be here forever um although maybe we could so but i did want to ask about the embodied part so we talked about the radical part i think which is the non-representational part so the embodied part so one question i've always had about embodied

56:29 stuff is like how important is it really and how much of it is verbal so if i were let's just hypothetically say you could upload my consciousness to a computer simulation um so you just upload my brain like scan all the connections everything you put in there uh and you also create a virtual duplicate of my body am i then embodied in the virtual system or no so you know on some understandings of embodiment yes

57:04 okay i remember when this is when i was in grad school um people we were having these conversations about how do you understand like web spiders right and you know that they're embodied in that they're of their environment they're like made of same stuff as their environment and that's one of the senses of embodiment in question but the second part of that is you know i have to say that like the matrix is impossible um i have to say that there's no you know brain in a vat is impossible you have to say that i have to say that yeah even on the matrix though really because

57:36 i mean a matrix they have their physical bodies yeah but they don't move but they don't move right yeah and so like really you know what you talk about in bodybuilding when i talk about embodiment at least i'm talking about a shorthand in a shorthand way for moving right so moving is the main thing um and you know the main claim that we're making i think we talk about embodiment is that the way to understand our experiences of the world is in terms of our kind of the connections between

58:09 moving and experiencing right so how do things look when i move this way um and that's kind of what embodiment is is kind of being able to move around the world and sample it and and you know so it's not i don't mean it as something kind of metaphysical i mean it has kind of and this you know as much as i'm influenced by i tried really hard to not mention any phenomenologists in the book but i got in i'm equally influenced by it by you know meryl ponte and others like you know like he talks about the body all the time and

58:41 what your body really is is a kind of like set of habits of action right you know of course it has to be made of meat in our world but you know in a different environment it could be made of something else but it's really but in in the matrix though i don't want to i mean they are remaking the matrix so they this will be relevant again someday we won't be old just talking about old movies but uh they they do explore the in virtual environments they don't do their physical bodies but they uh but they are moving around in the virtual environment and so doesn't that count as a kind of exploration i mean

59:13 does it matter that the meat body is not moving why is it why doesn't the simulated body movie count well so i mean i guess the way to think about it is that um this is by hypothesis like all happening in their brains really right and that's what through the body though because they have the plugs and uh you know through the spinal cord and all through the body yeah but you know the plugs are just to influence the peripheral nervous system right so it's all in the nervous system right

59:44 instead so that's the kind of thing that you know i i you know have to die on this hill that that's not sufficient to make sense of our being and our experience the nervousness not enough so if we built a matrix type situation and people could go in and have experience then you would consider the view refuted um so this is actually i just published a short paper about this i think people bring this up all the time um when they talk about because we do

1:00:16 we have all kinds of virtual environments now right right people say well isn't that just a direct refutation of the idea of the necessity of embodiment right and um i think exactly the opposite i think that what virtual environments do and this is what what's good about them is they give us an opportunity to do and we do this in our lab to do experiments where your embodiment is manipulable right the properties of your the connections between your movement and what you experience which is what we think of as the main feature of embodiment

1:00:48 we can make those change have you been in a cave huh i mean a real cave yeah yeah a natural cave yeah yeah no i thought no sorry bite myself no but so you know the thing i you know my phd students are brilliant with this stuff and you know like i put on the headset and they're like and you're you appear to be in a gym and they're like hey tony do you think you can dunk on that basketball i'm like hell no and then they like they like adjust the visual gain so that a little bit of movement of the headset

1:01:22 looks like a huge movement i'm like you know i'm i can do a 360. right like now i could jump over the backboard [Laughter] right and that's really what it's doing is it's kind of adjusting the apparent features of your embodiment and i think this is this is the value of like the matrix vr is that it enables us to look at differences in embodiment and how they affect differences in experience and with a student um phd student uh patrick nordebeck um and and paula silva who's a colleague

1:01:57 um and tehran davis who's a colleague we did some experiments we're basically able to kind of give people a virtual tremor i think so as if they had parkinson's or super interesting palsy um by changing the kind of way the what they perceived aligned with what how they moved um and so like you know that we think of this as like we're changing people's embodiment and again this is in maryland sense where your embodiment is a kind of set of habits of action

1:02:29 um so i think you know i think i think if so here's the real answer this is a long answer to a simple question if you could build a real matrix that people never had to get out of the views refuted um but the fact that we can change people's experience of the world and of themselves by manipulating the connection between their perception and action as we do in virtual environments actually supports the embodied right so it sounds like the the issue is that in the way we do virtual reality currently you get to move around so what

1:03:02 what you're being presented with is virtual but you're moving your your body yeah um whereas in the matrix scenario by definition you're in a vat and you're not mobile at all um but but would it really matter if you never came out of the matrix so suppose that you could go in for a weekend and they hook you up in the way put you in the tank and then you go to paris or whatever and then you come back out so would that refute the view if you had the same kind of experience that we do now completely immobile in a virtual environment would that put pressure on the view it would absolutely but i mean i think

1:03:35 you know again if if you're there's this paper by um evan thompson and diego cosmelli all right where they talk about like so what does the brain and about really make sense and they said yeah it does if the vat is a human body yeah exactly so you know the the yeah i mean you know if we get if if you could go to paris without moving and you know go to le duma go and pretend you're

1:04:07 jean-paul sartre um without moving your body at all and you know seamlessly then then yeah we're wrong okay yeah because i mean in a related way uh you might think that like sensory deprivation also is something that is relevant i mean you know it's currently very popular obviously but in very short not now because of covert but you know but just before code there were like you know in in brooklyn there was a virtual reality excuse me a century deprivation place that opened up and you could go and have 10 minutes in there which is very strange i thought but anyway so it

1:04:39 was just a story you could walk into but in the original experiments they did where they tried to do it for like a weekend or something people you know they wrapped them they suspended them and all this stuff uh people reported having experiences they were very terrifying people quit early but they had experience they weren't sort of like normal experiences though yeah so i guess that's kind of is so that's a halfway point right is that once you're decoupled from the world your experience kind of goes all over the place but you still have it though right so this is um i have a you know half-formed theory about dreaming and hallucinations and

1:05:13 sensory deprivation which um which you know might just be stupid but but i i keep coming back to it um okay which is that so in in dynamics people talk about you know there are multiple kinds of couplings between systems and um so our perception is like our circadian systems right which is to say it's a slave system is the term that dynamical people use which is a terrible term but the idea is that it's driven by something that it doesn't drive

1:05:47 right so if our perceptual systems are slave systems when you decouple them or really dramatically reduce the coupling with the world around them they do what your circadian system does when you spend a long time in the dark or you go to a different time zone which is they wander right so the experiences that people have aren't you know that are not coherent because the coupling isn't there right um and so and again there's not the

1:06:18 kind of connection between eye movements and visual changes that you get all the time right right in a dream it's often the case you're like oh i think i could jump that and then you can't or like you know if i i feel like i could fly right now and then you barely can't really take off so that's that's a similar sense in which the authority we're not really perceiving affordances and dreams and i guess on on this field well right we're not i mean we're basically what we're doing is our perceptual systems aren't doing their job right they're in a way malfunctioning um and they because their job depends upon

1:06:50 dense connection with the environment and you're really connected to the environment pretty almost in you know almost to the same extent when you're sleeping just you're you lose some of the connection to the environment and that your systems to kind of wander um right so but but just on this topic though if i'm a dreaming and i'm seeing a red tomato in the dream um and i think i can reach it and then i can't or whatever it flies away or something uh how do you ex what so perceptually or experientially

1:07:25 how does the kind of picture that you're advocating make sense of the kind of experience that i'm having without invoking representations right so again um the tomato that you perceive in your dream um doesn't have many of the properties of a tomato and you are making errors when you perceive tomatoes in your dream because they don't respond to interacting with them by moving your head moving your eyes reaching for them in the same way that typical tomatoes do um right

1:07:56 right so a tomato in the environment wouldn't fly away when you reached for it right but in a dream because you lose the coupling with the environment um all kinds of weird [ __ ] happens yeah so the weird [ __ ] that's happening though is happening experientially wise so i guess that's what i'm trying to make sense of is that is this like the stuff that we experience is it supposed to be the affordance stuff is it dependent on affordances it depended on embodiment but it seems like here there's experience

1:08:31 it's not the same exact kind of experience as you have when you wake but there is experience and it doesn't depend on you interacting with the world and all that sort of stuff that we've been talking about so let me say a little more about the dynamical story i'm trying okay in the background here so you know and i apologize to people listening who because i'm gonna just start dropping jargon um but you know complex systems have what's called endogenous dynamics right that is they have typical ways of behaving and they don't depend upon you know stimulation or anything to

1:09:03 you know they don't depend upon external causes to have their endogenous dynamics right and the brain is the default mode network right yeah that's part of it i mean your whole body has endogenous dynamics your pancreas hasn't dodged but you know so every living thing has a kind of built-in way of acting over time as it's metabolizing uh using energy excuse me um now so you are a system with endogenous dynamics typical ways of in typical kind of modes of acting and you know

1:09:39 then you couple that to a world right which is another system with endogenous dynamics it has its own dynamics the environment has its own way of behaving and you couple those two things together and when you couple those two things together they influence one another they affect one another strongly and um that's the typical perceptual case right now so but when you pull that away the decoupled endogenous dynamics of your nervous system and body um are no longer in the same way coupled to the

1:10:12 environment but they still have activity right so they still have the kind of activity that that is kind of part of their habitual modes their kind of energetically efficient modes and so on of interacting with the world when they're coupled to it but those don't go away right so but it does put pressure on this idea that the system it's one system that they're not it's not decomposable into the environment in me but that it's me an environment and so it seems like what you're saying right now is actually yeah we can't decompose them

1:10:44 it's just that we're not going to get typical experience uh but we still have experiences i mean i guess what i'm trying to get at is that what i'm trying to say well two things first is that like this kind of endogenous dynamics of your nervous system feels like something right even when it's not coupled to the environment um so that's that's one way to say it is that it's not experience it's just the endogenous dynamics of your nervous system um doing its business um and it's kind of in a sense it's a

1:11:16 failure of experience um that's the first thing the second thing is um with the coupling and decoupling right i mean in the typical perceptual case you're going to have coupling right in cognitive science and the site things we do in the lab you're going to have that coupling so that when i say that they're non-decomposable it's a word i use again i apologize to everyone for the jargon when you say they're non-decomposed we're like for the purpose of this explanation you can't make sense of them separately right i see for the purpose of the explanation by the way don't apologize for the jargon because we have google and they

1:11:48 can look it up that's my attitude about that but yeah so so that makes sense then so it's for the purposes of this explanation we can't deco we can't decompose the system into these constituent parts but that doesn't mean that in other instances they can't come apart and then we say ah the explanation for why this is so strange and [ __ ] up is because it's decoupled in in this way yeah and the thing too is that um uh you know we can decouple your nervous system into parts too and they'll behave weirdly if we you know if you take a neuron out of out of your brain and put in a petri

1:12:20 dish it's to be weird it's not going to be the way because of your brain right so it's very awkward and i think so like when you take something out of a dense coupling with the things it's typically densely coupled with it's going to express you know the dynamics that work really well when it's coupled but they don't work so well when it's decoupled yeah yeah i guess i could buy that i mean i'm the more i fight against the view the more it sucks me and it's like quicksand so that's that's

1:12:51 one of the nice virtues of it um but so what does what are the things that drives a lot of representationalists because i hang out with a lot of rippers i mean i have a whole i like representations and i hang out with them a lot doesn't mean that i think that you know it's the right story or but anyway so i know a lot of representationalists i guess and one of the things that they would say is that you know for instance like conscious experience is representational why because it puts accuracy conditions on the world um so if i perceive a red tomato then in order for that experience to be accurate there's got to be something round and read in the environment um so as a reason for positing explain uh representational content like in the

1:13:26 dream case why am i getting it wrong there what's the mistake well i'm treating this round red thing as though it were something in the environment when it really isn't so i'm making a mistake so in order to make sense of why the dream thing is a mistake in some sense it seems like you would need to invoke like the content that the experience had like that it says there's something red and around in the environment um and that seems like it requires representations right um so let me take a step back um because i mean i think that the

1:14:00 what i'm what i've been trying to get across for the last hour or so um is fully in line with what you and your representationless friends say about consciousness oh okay cool um so i think like you know the higher order theory of consciousness is actually you know what we think about is consciousness is our attention to our own experiences instead of attention to the world right so i think what i'm saying is actually completely in line with the kind of theory of consciousness that you've defended

1:14:32 right which is that this my conscious experience what we think of as our conscious experience is the stuff that when i say i see a red thing and that that's because like i'm not looking at the thing i'm like noticing by seeing of it right um and you know the so the case i'm trying to make is that the seeing of the thing isn't representational but the noticing the seeing of the thing like this i think this is exactly in line with what yeah no that clears that that clears a lot up from actually

1:15:03 putting it that way um yeah so no wonder i was being sucked in because i like the view okay interesting um so okay uh let i see we're running out of time here because i'm supposed to be at another class in a bit uh i'm gonna be listening to um noam chomsky talk about language uh and of course he's in the other camp i guess um he's not 100 god in our world yeah exactly but i did want to ask you about your more recent stuff about synergies and because i think some of the stuff

1:15:36 we've been talking about feeds naturally into that so i wonder if i could just ask you a little bit about you can you tell us about synergies and why you think they're important and how you've been applying these ideas sure um so synergy is a you know when i mentioned earlier that i've been interested in these dynamical data analyses a synergy is something that is discussed in these in these kind of complex systems dynamic circles um and basically you know i people make fun of me now because i always show videos of flushing toilets i've seen the video actually i saw one

1:16:10 where it didn't work so i haven't seen the flushing of the toilet i saw you try to flush the toilet you know basically what happens when you flush the toilet is that all of the water molecules become part of this kind of uh helical structure whirlpool um which they both make up and are constrained by the water molecules are behaving really weirdly when they're in there they're not you know they're kind of tending to go like this um in a way that they wouldn't typically um

1:16:41 so a synergy is the whirlpool is a synergy the whirlpool is a macro thing that's composed of components yet influences the behavior of those components constrains them affects them causally this is i mean here's the problem with the idea of synergy is that it goes against analytic metaphysics right except for they're everywhere so you know every time your whole body is a collection of synergies you you know at every scale and even the stuff we've been talking about like affordances and perception of

1:17:14 them are synergies in a sense yeah perception of affordance is certainly you know is a synergy absolutely but so um so there's this weird idea um from complex systems theory that um people have been trying to use in the cognitive sciences i mean this is i don't know if you when you are connected you interact with michael turvey much but uh not really but i know who he is yeah um and arden holden and tervy were i think the first to really bring this idea into into the cognitive sciences and what they basically talk about is

1:17:48 how um you what you do when you engage in a task is you kind of turn yourself into a temporary special purpose device that does that task and that device is a synergy and synergies require energy to maintain themselves because organization requires energy um you know second law of thermodynamics um so it requires energy to keep a whirlpool going which is the water in the tank has potential energy um it requires energy to kind of keep you on a task

1:18:20 right because you're forming yourself into a device that does this this is the way they talk about it um and what's interesting is that this idea of synergy works at every scale right so you know your cells are your organs are synergies that are made of cells um and so on you know up the ladder until you get a whole person and a person in an environment i mean what i've been interested in and this is um building on work from my current and former colleagues uh

1:18:52 mike richardson mike riley kevin shockley veronica ramonzoni i've been interested in how interpersonal interactions are actually synergies right so that is when it's hard on this kind of bandwidth the low bandwidth interaction we're having now but when you're like talking to someone the two of you form a synergy a unit that has its kind of own identity and that identity um is it just is the kind of way it um constrains the activity of the individuals who are involved in it

1:19:25 right so i'm really interested in these interpersonal synergies um and they're they're weird they're weird they're fun to talk about but um they are you know basically when you when you interact with someone the kind of interaction is its own thing that is current that is constraining your activity even though you're making up the interaction it's constraining activity the same way the water molecules are constrained by being part of the helix yeah i like some of these examples like you walking with the four-year-old i think is an example that you talked about which made a lot of sense yeah you both you both have to

1:19:57 adjust yeah right um and again i think this has all kinds of weird consequences right because in even though it's short-lived like the kind of you and your you know you and your partner dancing is a short-lived synergy unless you know for you know the length of the song say um it's a real thing right a similar dynamics that to what you have as an individual so you know i i'm interested in a way right now right now i'm interested in the way this kind of

1:20:29 uh bumps up against our kind of assumptions of like psychological individualism like that yeah so how can you say well how does it do that is it a cultural thing like that you find less um rugged individualistic cultures like less americanized western cultures have different synergies is that the idea um interpersonal relations or something i mean i think they do but what i was trying to get at is that um like this is a huge part

1:21:03 of our existence this kind of forming of synergies with other humans um and it's kind of invisible in the cognitive sciences because what do we do when we do an experiment in the cognitive sciences we bring you in the lab and make you push buttons in response to it's like it responds to stimuli and right so we have methodological solipsism which has been like standard for a long time now yeah so we're interested in what i'm interested in is that this whole this kind of

1:21:34 thing that's crucial okay if you think about it you've always been social right like you know in utero you're social totally so like that we can't like ignore that the way that we do when we focus when we do cognitive science that's what that's what i'm trying to that's what i've been grappling with for the last couple of years is what does this mean for the cognitive sciences and for everything else really yeah that's interesting i mean it's just kind of a note that's been around for a long time right the aristotle famously said someone who doesn't isn't social is like either what an animal or a god or

1:22:08 something i forget the exact quote but they're not like human in other words um because we are social by nature some people may think uh but so and so i think that's that idea has been around but why is it important for the cognitive sciences to understand how the mind works to incorporate that kind of sociality that's what your idea was right yeah um so you know this really this is vygotsky so you know what we think about as thinking the stuff that you know the high order stuff that you're interested in

1:22:39 that stuff is like from the ground social and it depends upon our abilities to couple with other people to form synergies with other people we wouldn't have we wouldn't have you know the kind of traditionally understood cognitive faculties if we weren't social right so the question i'm interested in is what does that mean about our traditional cognitive faculties what does it mean about what it is to be a person or to have experiences yeah so can you give us an answer to it what

1:23:14 does it mean so i can give you a little bit of an answer a little bit of an answer one is that um one is that i think that what we think of as a person in politics is not what we are right so like we're not we are not individuals um you know if you like if you go back and look at lock right you know like mind self person those are really all the same thing yeah and if in the cognitive sciences and this weird end of the cognitive scientists

1:23:45 sciences where i hang out we're finding out that minds are kind of necessarily sticky with other minds um then that also affects you know the idea of a person and a self because they're the same idea at heart right so that's what i'm interested in the kind of effects of our i like to say we're like necessarily social what does that mean about what we say about ourselves as selves minds persons yeah that's interesting i mean so i guess one question that i have is uh

1:24:19 how would you make sense of like hermits like hermetic uh sorts of persons maybe um you know like aesthetics uh old school you know they go in the desert and just desert quest or whatever um so because they've been socialized they'll continue to have all of these things so it's not it's not as though i guess what i'm asking is does the sociality that you're postulating is it required to maintain these structures or only to get them in the first place to possess

1:24:51 them well i think definitely to get them in the first place and partly to maintain them i think um i think that you know a person who spends 40 years in the woods by themselves is not the same kind of person that we are right um but they can still do all the same they could plan like you know next week i'm gonna go chop down that tree or i'll put it on the mark over here or right you can still do those sort of things right so this is one of the things about that i like about this um this discussion we're having now is

1:25:23 that um this is the very same arguments that were made against the intentional stance and so you know i don't talk about dennett very much anymore because i was 30 years ago that i was hanging out with him but you know he definitely has a huge influence on my work and so like you know this is a problem for me the same way it's a problem for the intentional scenes you know is if you're on a desert island you suddenly stop having thoughts right an answer that you want to give is you

1:25:54 don't have thoughts the way we do we um typical social people have friends you have and it's not that different from the way in which your endogenous dynamics in your dreaming gives you not quite correct experiences right so once you're decoupled from the system it kind of goes haywire in other words it goes off off its uh rhythm yeah that's so that i mean i think that's what i that's what i think i think so

1:26:25 you get the you get the ball rolling but if it's absent it's typical interactions with the environment in the social environment in this case then it wanders so so i know that you think i have heard you say that this is a skill this uh kind of being with other people i guess that's sort of taking it from who is that heidegger that's a heidegger who's wrong someone is one of those guys yeah merlot hunty primarily okay i i don't know anything yeah i was part of my ignorance but yeah i don't know anything about that stuff although i i thought i had read somewhere a little punchy but that's

1:26:58 neither here anyway okay so um you have this the sense of being with other people and it's the interactions the dynamics so you'll be saying become coupled with them right to become like one system temporarily so it's organized it comes into organization it's there for a brief moment and then it dissipates um that's the idea of the synergy but it's a skill it's something that we have to learn how to do and i've heard you say that you know you think it's skill because you know people can't do it right so some people the awkward person can't walk with them they walk too fast they walk too slow

1:27:31 you can't adjust your gait just right you have trouble talking with them they're always talking when you're talking and trying to kiss someone they tilt their head the wrong way it's like so there's all these sort of little interpersonal things that can go wrong um so if it's a skill then i guess one of the questions i had could you change it right could you learn to do it in other ways and sort of change the kind of persons that we are or the kinds of things that we are on this view i think so i mean you know we're not like we're not like ultimately 100 plastic but

1:28:04 i think that we can make adjustments to the kind of ways that we to the kinds of abilities that we have to interact with other people um but you couldn't train someone to be asocial well i mean who would train them right like another person would have to be training them well ai could do it or you could set the environment up in a certain way so you know administering shocks and they interact all kinds of things i mean there's kind of a there's a show on netflix sort of about this what's called mother have you seen this i've not seen that now okay well it's not really about this but it's about a house that's you know kind

1:28:37 of controlled by an ai that messes with someone and to short train them a certain way so what you know it's interesting being you're younger than me i think but you know being my age to think to myself sometimes i don't watch enough television no that was not i never said that when we were young exactly you need one black mirror more get out there come on exactly but so so you you couldn't have it so what does an ai system count as a person suppose you're just interacting with ai

1:29:10 and and not you know other persons um but like a advanced ai like siri so you could talk to it and you know ask questions and stuff like that is that good enough or no that's a good question i don't know i mean there's a comic series called east of west where one of the characters interacts only with or almost only with a kind of ai that kind of floats above him feeding into his visual system and you know he's like covered in in ways that the ai can influence him um and

1:29:43 you know in this history in the story um he is you know the creature that brings the end of the world so so but not the right kind of person yeah oh yeah that's that's you know often it's better to make a joke than answer a difficult philosophical question i think you would you wouldn't be like us right yeah um and besides vickinstein already said we could write a whole book just with jokes so that's fine uh but right because i guess what

1:30:15 started me on down this because you were saying the kind of person we think of you know i guess the kind of person that can't identify it as like the enlightenment figure that that kind of person you're it sounds to me like you're saying it doesn't exist really we're not really that kind of creature um we're a different kind of creature uh which is not bad it's just you know different and interesting but my question was could we make that kind of creature like the one that kant was talking about through this like rugged individual you know anyway so yeah what do you think about i mean i think we try i

1:30:49 think we try in in the west at least we try really hard to make those right without without great success i mean that's kind of how in america we're both from america this is how you're kind of enculturated right it's like right you know you're your own man and you have to you know make make make something of yourself right and and um i think that that's the kind of ideology that we have and i think it makes our lives worse that we have this ideology because it's not what you know we

1:31:22 biologically evolutionarily are right yeah i mean that's that's that's an interesting point because i think that yeah the kind of brain that we have obviously you know is not very much different from the kind of brain that uh our ancestors had five thousand years ago um cognitively speaking at least uh we're very very similar maybe we have some stuff once you're fully adult right we can read and things like that maybe they couldn't do so there's some some differences but at least at birth the brains are roughly the same um and yet our society is changing very differently and so this is something we were talking about a little bit before we went on but like given the pandemic this you know the

1:31:55 physical contact is missing um we don't really expect we haven't really brought up the empathy word but i was going to say we don't really experience that kind of empathy with other people in the way that we used to anymore being with them and like you know just yeah adjusting ourselves to them um and uh that that's that detrimental i guess and people are having effects with that but um but i guess that's a separate question from the one we were just talking about about whether you know in the west so anyway so i'm getting distracted

1:32:26 like 500 years from now in america maybe we maybe not five hundred thousand years from now uh in america maybe we will have turned into those kinds of creatures if we pursue it long enough i guess that was one of the questions i was asking might be i mean you know and what i'm about to say is just like copying some feminist political theorists right is that this kind of idealized person that we think we actually are but aren't um trying to be that person is actually harmful to us and also that person is male

1:33:01 right what what but the point that they make is that it's bad for men to try to be that as well these feminist political theorists um but but it's not the idea that it's bad given like the way we are now but if we were different it wouldn't be bad right so again you know if if in 10 000 years we actually kind of gradually turn into that kind of person um then you know capitalism would be great exactly i mean because because one thing

1:33:36 is like uh i'm a fan of like transhumanism in certain respects i mean i think um there's a lot of issues about social justice that make it you know hard to do but just theoretically speaking enhancing is to me um a good way of overcoming all these shortcomings that we've been endowed with by nature um and so the way that we envision like the trans human and first of all i wonder like what your feelings about transhumanism are and but secondly it seems like the way we envision it going is well these are going to be cognitive enhancements that involve a lot of

1:34:09 representations like you know art augmented reality and puts representations everywhere you put the glasses on as like labels things um represents them in various ways and so that was kind of by what was driving that question is like if we keep down this road that we're going sort of technology enhancements etc then it's would we become those kind of creatures or do you expect we'd be more like the borg at the end or does this not something that you care about so yeah just get curious about your views i mean i care about it and and you know um you know i've we've always been trans human right i mean you know this

1:34:44 is you know donna haraway right we're cyborgs already um and you know the question is like you know how do we develop our our kit that we carry around with us i mean and i think if we you know i think that it could go really badly right that is the way in which we are kind of becoming internetted um you know that that might not have good outcomes it could go really badly for what humans are like but it also could turn out okay um so yeah because i mean predictions but i think you know

1:35:18 this kind of being with technology is kind of part of humanity from the beginning including like language as a kind of technology as well exactly yeah yeah no i agree but uh but i think there's more here because like for instance you and your work talk about in in this particular context talk about mere touch synesthesia that's kind of one of the way entryways in here is like you know so people have this condition you touch them they feel the touch when someone else is touched um that has beneficial results maybe uh in terms of empathy

1:35:50 um for the person who senses that so couldn't theoretically i modify myself so that i have that i mean i would just have to implant a device such that when i visually see you being touched stimulate the right part of me so that i feel the touch too so that's a kind of enhancement story that i was i was thinking about partially as like building ourselves um to outstrip the [Music] deficits that nature has given us because we don't live that way anymore we're not going back to the villages in small society so

1:36:24 so is this a way of of kind of building ourselves into better versions of fitting our environment maybe i mean the so that the article you're talking about the chapter is from a book about mira touch synesthesia uh edited by daria martin who's an artist um but the idea in is uh that well people who have the experiences describe them differently but they typically describe describe themselves as being like hyper empathic and you know despite what you know jesse prince says

1:36:59 more empathy might just be better and if we could you know make ourselves into mirror touch synthesis then that might we'd be less violent certainly definitely we probably would like sex a lot more yeah i mean so you know that there it would change us dramatically um this is there's a book by octavia butler where she she describes people who are hyper empathic and you know they have very different lives right they have

1:37:31 i mean yeah you certainly couldn't have the bystander effect if we all had that sort of condition right we would immediately jump in to stop someone being assaulted or something like that and and there's all sorts of other ways that um that you could envision this so it's like one one one um one way that i thought was interesting was like you know you suppose you're driving around in brooklyn you enter a neighborhood and suddenly you're like oh is this a sketchy neighborhood like am i gonna get mugged around here um and maybe it's irrationally associated with like the demographics of the neighborhood like oh this is a black neighborhood or this is an asian and so you're rationally like oh these people are going to come and get me and

1:38:04 that's obviously where a lot of racism and those sorts of violent you know bad things that we don't like come from so if there was a way that you could i i saw someone talking about this this is a long time ago but if there's a way that you could like implant something that was connected to real-time crime statistics in the neighborhood you were in it was giving you some sort of signal like a buzz or something like that so if you went into a high crime neighborhood it went buzz buzz buzz buzz in a local crime neighborhood it went you know just like buzz um then that would be a way of of sort of sensing like how dangerous the neighborhood was

1:38:37 that would let you transcend well it's this kind of person here because you might walk into a white neighborhood and get the buzz buzz buzz buzz you're like oh this is a high crime neighborhood and i walk into a black neighborhood and find out it's a low crime neighborhood and so this would be a way of sort of combating these racial stereotypes that we have by by augmenting us um but that's is that a is that anyway so yeah i think that's a good idea but does it fit into this picture about sure but you know it could also make us worse because it could make us more racist

1:39:12 economic conditions and affect races and neighborhoods right you know so it could that could go wrongly um but so those are the social justice issues i think i've mentioned earlier i think are incredibly important when you think about this stuff yeah yeah um i remember a long time ago 20 years ago now there was a i think it was rumbleheart um had done a study where he could teach asian japanese speakers to distinguish between ours and l's when they speak and linger um you know but just by using and

1:39:47 basically uh uh back propagation right um and and you know so this is written up in the mainstream press and rumble heart i'm i'm gonna say it's real hard it might be mcclelland um says we you can imagine we could do this to we could you know make people not be racist using the same techniques and that seems awfully orwellian to me i mean i don't know if that's the future we want um but i mean we're going to the future in which

1:40:20 we are going to have you know like the kind of crime crime rate detectors built in to our eyeglasses that's going to happen right i don't know if it's going to be good huh interesting i guess yeah i mean i could see always all kinds of ways that it could go bad um but uh it got i could see some ways that it could go good um but sort of besides the practical issues i guess i was i was curious about do you think that these sorts of things give us like access to new affordances um is that what how you would cash that

1:40:53 out yeah i mean yeah you know so again if you think about affordances as kind of opportunities for particular kinds of action um and they have to be perceivable and so what this does is it makes it so that a new kind of information that can guide your behavior is available to you and so that's good that's you know that's that's an affordance um and again i i don't know if that's the kind of affordance that i think has the best explanatory power as i was saying we've been out this long time but like

1:41:26 an hour or so ago i was saying um that you know it's kind of like changes in grasp and gate and things like that but our best it's best purchase for affordances but i mean you know the definition of the word does fit you know a kind of crime rate sense right okay um yeah interesting okay so you could be a trans humanist and also an ecological psychologist i think so yeah i think okay yeah interesting because that was one of the things i was i was wondering about is

1:41:57 like how how much normativity is built into like this is the way we should be and this is you know uh but it sounds like what you're saying is not not much like just it's a descriptive claim this is like a way that we are but it's not like the way that we're best or something like that i mean i guess i would so here's this is i'm just this is andy clark um you know what computational technology is so valuable for us because it does things really differently than our biological bodies do

1:42:28 right so something that could kind of do that kind of work for us is going to change our behavior change the kind of people we are ultimately um yeah so you know that's you know i don't i'm not a fan of the fact value distinction so i think that this is normatively laden but i don't also don't think that um i don't think that you know you would say no i'm opposed to computational enhancement because i believe in ecological psychology okay yeah i mean that's yeah i sort of

1:43:01 got the feeling that maybe you would say that but i'm glad that we i brought it up because i thought the idea was sort of like uh yeah anyway so i i had a different picture of it so i'm glad i'm glad that we picked we picked up on that but like you said we have been going at this for a while and i i am sensitive that uh we can't go on forever so i i wonder if i could just ask you sort of towards the end of this if there's anything that you were hoping or expecting we would talk about that hasn't come up yet and the answer can be no but uh you know maybe the answer is yes so what one story i was prepared to tell um okay

1:43:36 so i i think it's weird that i am on a show called consciousness live because i've studiously avoided talking about consciousness there's a bit of it in the last chapter of your body a bit um and you know the reason for that is dave chalmers like he was finishing his phd when i started my phd in the same program and i had come from tufts so i was suddenly his dead so i i had to talk about consciousness with david and you know by then there were already

1:44:07 chalmersy and grad students so yeah in particular so i had to talk like i had to talk about i had to talk about consciousness with them all the time and did it say to this kind of way um that's why i kind of just like i don't want to talk about that anymore so so that's part of the reason why i can do your higher order theory of consciousness like i don't engage with that literature very much because because [ __ ] dave chalmers [Laughter] i love dave too but i could see why he would have a million you would be the

1:44:40 the dunnington oracle consultant you know and also um i don't know what you're like but you know when it's getting near bar clothes i want to be done with philosophy and talk about you know rock bands or something yeah i i definitely have to turn it off at some point and talk about something else as well yeah exactly he doesn't no i know exactly he never shuts down yeah no that's that's definitely uh definitely the case but yeah but just you know um consciousness to me if it's about the mind it's about consciousness

1:45:12 even if it's about you know unconsciousness still a question about the mind so the reason you're on the show is because i'm interested in cognitive science and how cognitive science can explain consciousness but just cognition in general and so i think your work is really cool and i especially like to seek out people who hang out this interface that uh that we do which is the interface uh philosophy and science and take both of them equally respectful because i don't like that people say you know [ __ ] philosophy science is the only way to do it i don't like the people who say science is the only way to do a [ __ ] philosophy excuse me the other way [ __ ] science

1:45:44 philosophy is the only way um but i like the people who say we've got to take each side seriously and each have something to offer it may be slightly different but they they need to work together and so that's to answer your question implicitly there that's why i thought of you well thank you this has been fun yeah it's been a lot of fun for me too um and there's i feel like we barely scratched the surface because there's so much more things we could talk about so maybe someday i'll haunt you again and uh and maybe even have do this in person once the uh the world allows that yeah exactly can i

1:46:17 see your tattoo which one arm uh left arm yeah oh cool it's uh it's a detail of a work by greg dunn um it's called a cortical circuit board so it's a kind of stylized neuron that's been made to look like and on the other arm over here i have a ramonica hall um cat neuron right so like that that book of his beautiful drawings came out a few years ago yeah the beautiful brain right it's amazing um let's call it i thought one of my colleagues here has like the

1:46:50 darwin sketch on his forearm oh cool and rob skipper and so i thought i was like do you have the same [Laughter] no mine's like a misguided attempt to sort of tattoo eyes the um computationalism versus biologicalism uh debate so one side is like the brain has computer and the other side is like the brain as a biological entity and so anyway that's my my presence to myself when i got tenure i was like [ __ ] i'm gonna get a tattoo just for myself i don't care if it's cool or not but uh and i mean that's i kind of i

1:47:24 guess that's one of the things which i should have asked you about which i didn't which was like whether where the ecological psychology comes down on this debate um about biological you know bio-psychism versus computationalism or functionalism or something like that but i think actually sort of implicitly you were saying that you would be okay if we could go in a computer and have conscious experience without a brain yeah i mean i i think that it wouldn't i guess what here's the way to say it is that i think that

1:47:56 the fact that that might be possible doesn't mean that's an explanation of how we're doing the thing we're doing now right um yeah because i tend to if if i had like if our king of philosophy and uh metaphysic ones i would say make biology by biopsychism true so that only biological organisms have conscious experience and computers couldn't have conscious experience um now whether that's actually true or not i don't know but it sounds like so but the ecological psychologist the the radical embodied cognitive psychologist doesn't need to take a stance on that um i don't think

1:48:28 so i mean i kind of do but i mean i don't think you have to um i don't think you have to yeah good okay good the more i find out about the view the more i like it so i really appreciate you uh taking the time to explain to a nimkan poop like me the basics of this stuff because that really it really was difficult but i found your book really enlightening and it's really carefully argued funny too actually a couple jokes in there i liked i think that's your homage to photo maybe right which i wish more people wrote like that i have to say just anecdotally

1:49:01 yeah um i sent him a copy of the book and uh he wrote me a letter saying he looks forward to reading it with profound misgivings [Laughter] cool i wonder what misgivings there were there yeah but he's anyway so we'll have to have a whole separate discussion about folder and uh what's going on with him at some points but um anyway i do have to run i hate to break this to cut the shorts but uh um let me just thank you again and hang out i'll say i'll buy off air for in just a second but thanks again hi everyone

1:49:36 they said bye okay people are laughing at your dave