Consciousness Live! with Filipe De Brigard (S6 E1)

0:00 all right it looks like we are live all right all right fantastic well joining to me today uh for this very interesting episode very special guest uh Felipe can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do to get us started yes absolutely so thanks very much first of all for this invitation I am a professor uh uh Duke in the department of philosophy primarily but secondarily in the Phil in the psychology and Neuroscience department and I am also the principal investigator of the

0:33 imagination and modal cognition Lab at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience here at Duke University Okay cool so you have joint appointments in the psychology and the philosophy program that is correct I I am dually appointed you're dually appointed and you actually run your own psychology lab as well as your regular Professor duties and philosophy as well correct that is correct I have a background in both in philosophy and in Psychology and in cognitive Neuroscience uh and uh I have straddled the two

1:06 disciplines all my life I did my undergrad at the University National in Colombia in bot uh where I studied philosophy and neuropsychology was not such a thing as cognitive Neuroscience back then or at least not back in Colombia um and the only way of really sort of seeing the relationship between the mind and the brain was through neuros psychology so I studied uh a lot of neuros pychology and then I did a masters at T University uh where I studied philosophy and and I was Affiliated in the Center for Cognitive

1:38 studies and then I did sort of a parallel PhD in philosophy and in Psychology and Neuroscience at UNCC uh after that I did a post doog in that was only in Psychology and cogo at um at Harvard in Dan chats lab and then I came here as a you know one of those joint appoes in in philosophy and in Psychology and neuros science I yeah in both places yeah that's amazing I mean this is exact you're exactly the type of person I like to speak to because I'm

2:10 really interested in the insection of philosophy Psychology and Neuroscience um that's a lot of where my own work and interests are focused and so I really try to find other people that have this uh this interest but you have more than the interest you really have the the bonafides in in both Fields so that's rare but also I hope increasingly less rare you know it' be cool if more there were more people like you that that is that is the hope we're working on that uh a lot of the work that I do here at Duke not only in the lab but also for instance I co-direct the summer seminars in neuros science and philosophy which

2:44 have precisely that that goal to try to crust train people uh and uh you know you're starting to see more and more people that really have the the crust training now oh that's cool you know what I know about those snap things but I didn't know you co-directed it that's Co cool yeah this we're in our seventh year uh and uh and going strong still having to apply for Grants so if any of the listeners here want to donate uh but we're still applying for Grants but it's still going strong and I love that program so you basically you have your

3:18 typical kind of conference thing but also and what's really Innovative about is you try to pair like philosophers and Neuroscience together to propose an experiment which corre uh which they could run or work together on at the end of it or something like that right right it need not be an experiment it could be a theoretical project as well but uh the point is that it's a two we um thing in which in the first week 10 philosophers and 10 um neuroscientists psychologists uh there are in their early careers so typically Advanced CL students post dogs or early uh faculty they come together

3:53 and they take classes is very intense uh during the first week they take classes in each other's disciplines uh and uh then they start working toward the project and then then the second week what happens that there are debates or or like specific topics that are discussed by one philosopher and one scientist say like one day is emotion one day is consciousness one day is metacognition or what have you um and and in the afternoons they work and then there is a final conference and then

4:25 there's time to get feedback from all the speakers and all the teachers and so forth and then basically after all that feedback they have uh the teams have about uh a month to put together a grant that has the shape of an ro3 or an r21 uh then they can submit to us and then the idea is that we can if they earn it they get the grant but in addition to that they get the feedback to actually put a grant to NIH so so so it's a it's a it's a very very strong training uh program and I I love it it's really one of my highlights of the year that's

4:59 amazing so I'll put a make sure there's a link to to that because I thought of that that's that's very cool um so uh you do a lot of very cool stuff and hopefully there'll be more cool people doing cool stuff but it's interesting I'm glad you mentioned Consciousness is still in the list there um I I know something about your background that you and you mentioned that you were at tups and you had an interest in in Consciousness and so now you're primarily working on memory as I understand your research so and not Consciousness although there's some overlap perhaps uh but so I am a bit

5:32 curious about how you gravitate out I guess part of it is because you you're more interested in like experimental designs and it's hard to think of the how to really operationalize maybe the the variables when it comes to Consciousness but was is that part of it or was there more to it uh that was a little bit of it so um so I had when I was an undergrad uh I had a very very strong interest in in memory uh because as I mentioned in in addition to doing My Philosophy undergrad I was also a

6:05 student in neuros Psychology and my adviser but back then uh who's now an ameritus Professor Dr Patricia montz she was the head of the what it was called the clinic of memory uh in the military Hospital in bot and basically she was an expert on memory uh and uh she was seeing patients with with um you know normal and pathological aging but in addition to that because you know I'm from Colombia and I was rotating in the military Hospital many of our patients

6:38 had wounds that were like War wounds you know uh bullets or uh or mines or what have you and she was the specialist in in memory complaints uh and uh so I was exposed to memory issues since I was I don't know 18 or 19 years of age um and uh and and I loved it I thought it was very very interesting but at the same time I was very interested in philosophy and I was studing philosophy like really hardcore philosophy uh especially kind of like

7:11 Continental for the most part um so I read a lot of Boer I uh you know I was reading Classics and so forth and I took a couple of classes in analytic philosophy uh and uh and then um it's interesting because I was reading I was very interested in foto I was really interested in the language of thought and I was really interested in in in functionalism and only toward the end of my undergraduate career I came to to read Pat Churchland and Dan denet they were kind of like you know the right now the department of philosophy looks very

7:44 different but the pH Department that I went to as an undergrad was very continental and very anti- sciency uh so Churchland and denet and they were seeing as like maybe no NOS except what this one professor that sort of handed it to me under the table and I read them and of fell in love with them but there was a lot of Consciousness going on in those in those books um you know and so my feeling was that if I wanted to do philosophy of mind that was empirically oriented I needed to study or Consciousness or perception and that

8:17 that was where the action was for this intersection and if I wanted to be a scientist then I kept studying memory but there wasn't a philosophy of memory as it were right and that was my too and and uh and a tough I couldn't get into a PhD program coming uh directly from my undergrad in Colombia so I did my my masters at TS and at T I work under denet so I I did study a lot of Consciousness and and we talked quite a bit about it um in fact my writing

8:49 sample was uh for for my PhD program was on C's account of Consciousness and his biological dualism or whatever is the name of that he calls it biological naturalism but other people accuse them of dualism yeah yeah and that poor s yeah not poor S no never mind but still poor the view of s yeah exactly so so I was very interested and I thought that I wanted to do that um but then in grad school I you know I was doing the philosophy uh stuff but I was also

9:23 rotating in labs in the psychology department and I I started taking classes and rotating in the class of Jo Joe hinger who's a an attention researcher and back then as you might remember we're talking 2005 2006 there was this big discussion about the relationship between attention and Consciousness and people will say like oh attention is necessary for Consciousness and people like no no no you can have Consciousness in the near absence of attention I think is um and that's right when I got to New York so I remember that's right very much Jess P was my adviser in in philosophy and and

9:57 he was working on attention and conscious so I thought this just natural for me to work um but at the same time I was taking classes on memory wait so you went from tus to North Carolina yes that's right that's what I did my PhD at UNC okay cool uh and then to make a what could be an even longer story much shorter um part of my dissatisfaction has started with the fact that that operational ation is a very tricky thing

10:32 in in Psychology um defining something is not the same as operationalizing it and often times because the operationalization it has to be you know linked to a particular measure and oftentimes what I sense is that a bunch of people are sort of talking past one another their definitions of attentions were really operationalized and they became almost inconmensurable with one another because of often they were very specific to a particular uh to a particular technique and that made it

11:06 that made it pretty annoying to read uh and at the same time I was becoming more and more critical of the cognitive science methods per se uh and I just wanted better better measures and measures that I could sense that were more directly linked to something um so recognition was a measure that I felt more comfortable with hit rates and false alarm and stuff like that um so I slowly switched to working more and more on memory and then um I it was a big Gambit though because there was no philosophy

11:41 of memory back then right uh so it was like so do I have to write like two different dissertations one on on some you know metaphysics of propositional attitudes which is what I thought that I was going to be working on okay and because you like Photo right like what of thought yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh and uh or do and and you know and and then I do some scientific work on memory or should I try to do something with both of them um and that's how I ended up working on philosophy of memory you did that after your

12:15 dissertation during after you defended uh no no no dur my my dissertation was on philosophy of memory I wrote at UNC we have to write a master's thesis I actually published that Master's thesis in a book on uh that I edited too uh or helped to edit actually on content and Consciousness I wrote a I wrote a a long thesis um Master's thesis on on the semantics of propositional attitude reports basically ah you know I think I reviewed that book

12:50 you reviewed that book I did review that book oh yeah I should have reated my review dang it before so that article that I wrote for that book um was my master thesis and I thought that I was going to you know I had at that point a committee that had metaphysicians and and and so forth and I thought at that point well this is philosophical enough it looks like a space in place logical space I'm going to develop that into my dissertation but the truth is that I was working so hard on memory and I was so interested and I thought there are so many interesting philosophical issues

13:24 having to do with memory that are not explored in the philosophy of Mind there are perhaps explored in epistemology but they were also explored with very little regard for what we know of human memory right so it was kind of disheartening to see many of the discussions in epistemology of memory um so I thought I'm gonna take a Gambit and I'm gonna start writing stuff on on memory from the point of view of philosopher of mind yeah I mean that's interesting because you're right it's like the pre I'm thinking of like shoemakers paper for

13:57 instance on what's quasi memory and memory a lot of it's like philosophical debate what's a real memory and how how what about duplicates of you that have like same information is it the memory or not what about swam man but so it's it's interesting that you're saying what I'm hearing you say sort of is that as someone interested in empirical work you felt like your only option was to go and look at Consciousness and attention because that's like when you look at the books that's what you see it's like that's the philosophy of mind that's we're talking about you know tension and Consciousness nothing about memory so you really felt torn as between like empirical work and the philosophical

14:30 work and so you forg Your Own Way making this this area that should have been really known I guess it's now a thriving area I mean I've spoken to some people like Carlos monor for instance who does you know talks about memory and has a whole theory of and so I think it's it's safe to say that at this point philosophy of memory is a a subfield or do you think it's think yeah okay I think so for sure uh back then what was interesting is that you would see certain nuget of things that other people have written um that were that were really wonderful

15:04 to read so so two examples come to mind one was uh John Sutton's book uh on connectionism and memory traces which was on the card and and uh and just a very beautiful philosophical treatment of memory traces and and and how it relates to the card and so forth and then there was another book another paper that was very influential Maria Sheepman wrote a paper criticizing precis the Q memories quasi memories as being psychologically improbable uh and and that's exactly the sort of thing

15:37 that I was looking into is is the view that people particularly epistemologists uh in the 1980 well all throughout the 20th century to be honest but even as late as the 1980s uh 1990s in in philosophy um was a a very outdated view of memory uh it's just like this is not human memory it's not even computer memory it's like an idealized version of memory uh and one can dismiss it as this is a normative

16:09 claim of how memory should be but even if it is normative it looks as though this is wrong memory is not a copy of what happened in the past it cannot be so faithful and even if it was that faithful the rest of the Mind goes wrong as I wrote something like that in my dissertation that one of a there is Story by J borz that everyone quotes uh which is FES the memorius um in which there is this guy FES which is a Campesino in the argentinan Pampa that falls up a horse and loses his capacity to forget um so he has this perfect

16:44 ideal philosophical memory and what is amazing about that story is is that the rest of his mind breaks down when he has this idealized memory which is you know the kind of memory that want to respect a philosopher like shoem maker something like that will will be conial to is like it messes up the rest of the mind and I thought for me that was a very important Insight is is there is something very fundamental about the fact that our memory is not a copy perfect of what happened in the past it's something

17:17 fundamental about the fact that our contents in memory are forgotten at different rates uh there is that for me was was and also the fact that our that we have false memories that they're systematic and so forth interesting yeah you it's I'm thinking also of like people with highly Superior autobiographical memory um they they uh don't have like mental breakdowns uh but they do have it interfere with their ability to function in certain ways when they

17:51 have every single like memory interaction with any person that they've ever encountered coming up as they're talking to them so I've saw one interview with a woman with this who just said it's very hard to have a conversation because she's constantly distracted by this kind of running video on the side of every interaction that they've ever had so um one thing that is very interesting with people with highly with with really strong autobiographical memories like that you're exactly right there is a lot of distractability there is U one way in which you can think about it uh as you know using the

18:26 Machinery of of uh contemporary theories of memory is one one thing that your brain needs to be able to do is to to separate whether something that you're seeing right now say this pen is supposed to be interpreted as a Quee to remember a memory or if it is uh an item that you have to encode a new that is in they they call that pattern completion versus pattern separation do I need to use this information that is coming in through my eyes to complete a pattern that is already there or do I have to to

18:58 separate this new information from other existing patterns that's kind of like the idea and one way of thinking about it is that this this this conflict um is harder to be resolved in individuals with highly Superior autobiographical memories relative but one thing that is that is surprising too is that they are prone to the same kinds of memory Illusions you know uh MDS paradigms sort of things they also generate false memories and so forth they're equal systematic so so even having really really good memories there is still

19:33 these memory errors that are also prevalent right no that's an interesting point suggesting that there's lots of different systems here doing overlapping work although I know that you've uh done some work kind of criticizing the very strict separation of like these different systems and that they and I think so one of the central ideas of your work is that they overlap more than we think but also with other systems like imagination which have traditionally thought to be completely separate but but I I want to not get too distracted by that actually I'm already pretty distracted by that so

20:06 uh um I mean so one of the things that the reason I brought up the the people with this Superior autobiographical memory was in Counterpoint to the Vorhees kind of point that that you know they uh their their minds don't break down um but it's still not pleasant for them to to enjoy so if they and even though they don't really meet that ideal because they don't have the perfect recall of everything as you were just saying they still have Illusions and deficits in other areas so so maybe if you extended

20:41 it to every memory system that had perfect recall you really would have a kind of breakdown um especially in terms of these kind of models of these interior systems that are trying to distinguish between like you just said a cue to recall something versus something that needs to be doneal with as a percept right right exactly exactly and individuals with highly autobiographical memories vary as far as I understand and some of them what happens that they're they become a little obsessed with the past too so so some of the individuals that I know are collectors of memorabilia and so forth so they

21:15 basically live in a world of constant queuing um so so there is there is also this externalization of the queuing that it is helping to for them to have better recall um but as you're right they don't break down as much as in the bores but they partly because they don't have really perfect memories they just have really highly superior but not perfect but nevertheless in some cases they they do have difficulties in in every day ordinary life right yeah um I want to make sure not to forget to to bring

21:50 something up that I'm already kind of kind of forgetting to to bring up uh but in in this particular place that we're talking about right now um how much of a separation do you think there is between the semantic content the informational content of the memory and the episodic content the it's me that's encountering this so traditionally like since toling this was postulated to be like a really two separate systems and I know that

22:23 gradually over time we've come to think that this can't be right but even pre-theoretically it's it seems a bit weird to think that there would be this strict separation because in order to have the episodic memory it you've got to categorize all the stuff in it semantically or so it would seem so maybe that's too a naive way to think about this but doesn't it seem well it doesn't well it seems me to me weird that it would have been so firmly entrenched that there's this strict separation between them as opposed to kind of this intuitive idea

22:56 that they must overlap in sense that so was there like empirical results that suggested that they just really strictly were dis associable or something that that drove this or was it just the intuitive that the idea so that's a great question so there are two two important things there so first off um the idea that that our memory for facts uh and our memory for like episodes were distinct has been going on since forever you know uh aquinus distinguishes this in in uh and uh Augustine probably is the

23:31 earliest that you can think of there's some people and I discussed this a little bit in my book but there's some people that that argue that maybe in Aristotle is maybe I'm not sure but very clearly is in Augustine so Augustine in the 10th book of his confessions he just goes you know I love this confessions because it's like where is god let's try to figure out uh let's start with our minds and then he goes chapter by chapter going it's not here it's not here it's not here but in so doing he does this beautiful sort of um uh conceptual separation of of the faculties of the mind and when it comes

24:05 to memory he talks about the fact that you know sometime in our memory we store you know events that happen in the past or experiences but in addition to that we can store mathematical knowledge right universal laws he also distinguishes uh with emotional memory so so and then you can just move forward uh and other people have talked about like even Russell talks about this kinds of distinctions too so it's something that that is not that that tolin came up with with the distinction and knew no it existed uh in various ways even before

24:39 that what is original about toling and this is a point that gets it doesn't receive as much attention and I will explain in a second why because he literally operationalized the distinction so the distinction between episodic and semantic was an operationalization it was first introduced by him in 1972 in in a in a volume that had a bunch of papers he was one of the editors of the volume and the way in which he presents it is as a

25:14 contrast category you know said so he says people talk about immediate as opposed to long-term uh you know visual as opposed to auditory so what do we and this whole volume is about semantic memory because everything that people were doing at the time was you know extension of eing House's uh learning syllables and learning words and so forth and they they talk about uh that as semantic memory because he remembering the meanings of words or the lack of meanings of certain meaningless words and so forth so he asks in that

25:47 article what do you contrast episodic memory against I sorry semantic memory against and his idea which I think is a brilliant idea that that sometimes forget um came from his own research in the 60s on what is called serial ordering effect so what he has was showing is you know people know that that if if you show in a a list of words if you repeat a word three times versus if you repeat it two times versus if you repeat it only once you're going to be

26:20 more likely to remember that a word that was repeated three times was in the list relative to two relative to one right now what solving so is that the problem is that if this only a matter of repetition of like this this you know how strong the semantic meaning gets encoded if you want you're missing the chance of asking where in the list was the word presented uh was it the first episode or the second episode or the third episode so that's where it comes from it comes from for being able to capture the episodicity of the

26:56 presentation of of award in a Serial order list so he said and those two things are different because you're not encoding semantic relations or semantic information what you're encoding is something about the spatial temporal presentation of the word right and if you read that paper in 1972 he is literally giving a computational characterization of what is episodic memory in terms of information that is different from the information that gets encoded in semantic memory he never talk about consciousness at that point he never

27:28 talked about aono Consciousness or anything of that nature that came in 1985 um he described those in pure operational terms so um the of course it took off and people talk about different systems tovin was always cautious uh not always actually he became less cautious later on but he was back then kind of cautious in fact um the the traditional standard view of memory that we owe to to Z and Squire from from their work in which they clearly distinguish episodic

28:02 and semantic as two different systems was not very I don't think that toling accepted that double dissociation because he thought that the best evidence that we had was a single dissociation um so so even tling didn't think of them as entirely two dissociable systems later on when Consciousness became sort of a wedger uh between them that it seemed as for a lot of people it seemed pretty obvious that they were dissociable but the truth is that they they aren't uh and uh Not only was you know this is there's a little

28:37 bit of Sociology of memory here toling distinction just took off but there is a lot of people that were criticizing even his own views in 1983 in his elements of Epic memory and nowadays I think everyone would agree that the two of them are profoundly intertwined okay yeah good um there's there's a lot lot of stuff I want to follow up in there but so the thing that I keep meaning to bring up by putting off because we keep bringing other interesting things up is this idea that was we were mentioned way back before which was that you didn't see any

29:09 philosophy of memory for yourself uh but meanwhile I was thinking to myself but in the early psychology science of the Mind memory was an important topic especially for people like Freud um but e but even you know maybe later on uh with with some uh maybe positive psychologist and St like so anyway so and then obviously it develops into these things that you're talking about with the fool like once you get a operational oper oper operationalizable that's hard to say something which you

29:44 can operationalize um a distinction what you can apply this to then the science really takes off but it but it strikes me that that you know at least like the Freudian discussions from Freud and so forth that uh that that discussion while recognizably philosophical in many aspects was largely done in a under the opici of science so that people trained in philosophy weren't really exposed to it or or weren't really discussing that sort of thing um so anyway I just thought that that was interesting that

30:16 that there was very I mean Freud's theory is very deeply philosophical and not you know maybe not very empirical uh but it's it's interesting that even there there wasn't much uptake yeah I mean yes and no uh so I I I take it that what you're meaning that you're you're referring to is this discussions on repressed memories uh right so um that's that's interesting because this notion of

30:49 repressed memory has gotten the attention of a bunch of people uh particularly sort of outside of the scientific realm of memory research unless they because because the notion of repressed memory and I I wrote recently about this the notion of repressed memory is it's a theoretical term that comes with a huge theoretical baggage uh and uh but the problem is that it comes from a theory that has been utterly debunked can I stop you for one second before I I

31:21 want to keep let you continue but and I notic you did this in the in the paper that you were wrote on this as well I wanted to ask you about this do you make a distinction between repression and repressed memory so do you think repressed memory is a separate category from repression like that there's some psychological mechanism a defense or not which aims to keep certain information repressed as opposed to Memories or do you think that're synonymous in Freud's theory because I would say couldn't there be like thoughts that are repressed and

31:53 intentions as well as it's not just memories right in the in the Freudian picture at least yeah I mean so so well they are in a sense because in the original um in his original theory of uh the his original seduction Theory which is where uh the notion of of uh repression comes first he rejects that theory later on this we're talking about 1880 199 1893 then the the the rejection of that seduction comes the theory in theend is in um 1897 or something like that but

32:27 repression repression plays a role in his cognitive architecture According to Freud you have you know this this unconscious ideas and the unconscious ideas have as a property of them like ideas could be I don't know abstract concrete or what have you but one of the properties that all ideas had um was traumatic Force right so uh every every idea that comes in your mind has a level of traumatic Force some of them have very low levels of of traumatic Force some of they have high levels of

32:59 traumatic Force repression this remember this is the whole hydraulic uh uh model of the Mind repression was like a valve uh that will prevent uh things in the unconscious to emerge onto the conscious so that's what the RO of repression was right um if the stuff has and your unconscious has too much traumatic Force repression might not be strong enough and then it comes out and you have sleep of the tongues uh you know weird habits weird behaviors and and and and the very strange dreams and so on and so forth

33:31 right uh so so the the first reference to to repress the memories were precisely there like ideas that were stored in your unconscious like we're not talking about memory systems there because that was not an idea then but they were stored in your unconscious like memories that had a certain level of traumatic Force um and if they were repressed by this valve then they were repressed memories that that's a um the theory I mean I don't I don't think that the theory holds any water whatsoever uh

34:05 there but just before we move on though but couldn't there also be like a a thought like a spontaneous thought that's not a memory like your you know your mother walks in and you have some kind of occurring thought that repression is trying to keep the mechanism keep Consciousness that's not a memory right sure if you want to call your your desire to distract your set yourself from thinking about that thought and think about something else uh if you want to call that repression that's up to you but that's not exactly the same mechanism that that Freud is

34:38 talking about you're just basically using the same term but you're referring to something entirely different and that is fine I think that part of what why would it be something different because for Freud that repression is a mechanism it doesn't it doesn't have to do with attentional allocation it's a mechanism of his cognitive architecture right uh it has a particular it's a it's it's something a a a particular ontological status between the conscious and the unconscious right so you have to really change your mind about the mind about

35:12 how the mind is structured for the term this what I argue in my paper for the term repressed memory to have a reference it's like we it is as as as if you say like well why don't you call oxygen flist then if it is the exact same thing well the problem is that for it to be the exact same thing you would need to change a lot of the laws of physics and the laws of chemistry that would change so sure you can call it fistone but it's not really I say I was asking a more simple-minded question about Freud's theory not like so I I was just asking within Freud's theory is

35:47 there such a thing as repressed thoughts as well as memories and are you skeptical about that as well um because you said thoroughly debunk but then when you went on to say what was thoroughly debunked it was just repressed memories so I was curious about whether that was like all there was that was repressed on his account or you thought that was enough to do away with everything he uses uh interchangeably well thought is not a a a word that is used that much ideas is is used more uh okay and uh and anything that it is on the unconscious that it is

36:20 forced to remain there by the strength of your repression and you can mod modulate your repression and stuff all that is going to be repressed X where X could be a feeling a memory a thought an idea okay yeah so but but then when So when you say repressed memory you're just using that as like a a placeholder for anything that's repressed and you think that's the thing that's been rebunk debunk is it just the idea that there is yeah I think that there are people that use the notion of repressed memory as equivalent to uh something that I rather not think about right

36:54 right uh but that's not what what what what Freud meant uh so so by comparison you talk about disassociative Amnesia or uh not not I'm sorry not yeah go ahead you tell us associative Amnesia which is some people say like oh well but there are instances of dissociative Amnesia and um part of what I claim in that in that paper is that uh they're not equivalent you know they they overlap a little bit what what repress memory is but they are not that clear they are

37:27 extraordinarily rare to be honest this so one of the things that happens with this instances of dissociative Amnesia is that um you forget a a period of your time right but by a period I mean you know like what happened between January and March of 1997 say like I have any memories like that that's very different from having one memory of one episode that is repressed and I cannot get to that so the phenomena are not identical right uh so so again I I talk a little bit in in more this kind of like a

38:02 philosophy of sciencey paper uh but the the semantic the semantic field of both terms are not identical they don't refer to exactly the same phenomena so it's not that that people have been using repressed memory in on a guise of a different term like dissociative Amnesia no that they are not exactly identical phenomena so the the stuff that Freud originally thought that the term would refer to just doesn't have a reference uh it is not only false it has no sense in the in the fragance so that's I like

38:36 this argument that you have because you're like so one thing we could say is does it pick out something regardless of what the meaning in the theory was and you say no and then the other is okay so but does it have any role to play in a theory that we take seriously in our current psychology and no so therefore it's neither unless someone wants revive it and give it a new sense or something I guess that's but but the question that's right the question is why would they do it it's like oh I Am pro flist bring back lised bring back like why so uh so that's the thing the thing

39:10 is it the term is very attractive uh Freud as you know um had captured the attention of a bunch of people it's very interesting because I'm Colombian and in Colombia he had to study a lot of Freud like and and there were two possibilities you know you were purely Freudian you can also become lacanian if you wanted but I studied as an undergraduate um I studied at least a year of Freud I read all the interpretation of dreams I read the you know I've read a ton of Freud in my in my life because frud was very and

39:43 continued to be very very very important uh but not so much in the United States uh I read among other things groom bounds uh awesome uh uh Foundation of Psych analysis uh book so so and when I moved to the US Freud was not as important and this as it was for me you know and undergrad 24 years ago or whatever uh so there is I think that there is an an an interesting division here that that people in the in Academia

40:15 in the United States uh especially in Psychology in the United States don't think of as Freud as important a figure as uh people in other countries do interesting but you do see Freud quite over represented in non- psychological disciplines so I uh so for instance Freud is has a lot of importance in literature and in English departments and and so forth um so there is quite an attractive component to the theory of of of Freud and there is some things that

40:48 seem sort of undeniable I mean there is this is what happens with with with theories um you know like poer would tell would say that are unfalsifiable many of them the Allure of the the terms and the apparent uh coverage of their explanations and their predictions is just so alluring that people just love them and they hate when they are shown to that they are wrong right um so I think that a little bit of that is what happens with terms like repressed memory and people want them to be true right so you know what I've when I've spoken to

41:21 people about this and to be honest I haven't spoken to many but I know a couple Pro odans and one thing that I've heard them say is that look fine great his theory of the mind has been debunked wonderful but we're not interested in that we're like interested in helping people understand themselves and come to deeper realizations about blah blah blah and Freud's theory helps people do that so in a therapeutic setting talking about repressed memories and traumatic events that you're keeping from yourself that helps people come to grips with

41:55 things that they whatever ever psychologically need to and so one argument that and I'm curious about your reaction to this yeah one argument is that yeah the science of it great it's not science it's a way it's an interpretive um well I don't want to say story but it's an interpretive framework that you can get people to make progress towards well-being within and therefore it's good um and should be kept yeah I mean the problem is that yes yes and no so the thing that I would say to that is uh

42:27 it I think it's true that for a lot of people Psychotherapy Psychotherapy works I did Psychotherapy for four years and you worked it was great when I was in college partly because I was very interested in Freud and I was I was uh very interested in mental health too and so forth and I must say it worked beautifully on me but that being said I think it work beautifully on me not because of the reasons the theory says that it is working but because I was talking to a person with whom I have

42:59 what freudians will call transference namely meaning I really got along with which was my therapist three times a week uh the power of talking to someone that cares is extraordinary for a lot of people um so um you know for some people uh the bring Meyers uh you know categories uh might work for them for a lot of people the horroscope works talking to someone that cares works for an enormous amount of people and if you are doing that three times a day a a

43:34 week as for 45 minutes which is what you need to do at a minimum for Psychotherapy of course that it is going to is going to work uh but notice that that there are other therapies that are not Freudian based and that are not necessarily cognitive behavioral therapies either that are also based on talking that are quite successful so there is this literary uh therapist that last name Ellis was the psychiatrist I forgot his first name who was one of the pioneers of this in which uh for

44:07 instance you have particular kinds of of difficulties say uh I don't know as as I was I was bullied in high school like severely bullied so you read the your therapist puts you to read The Hobbit or uh you know where we smaller IND adventurous courage building experience exactly exactly and then you go three times a week and discuss the books and then they see how those books relate to you and so forth and for a lot of people are extraordinarily helpful um do they work because of the Freudian transference and the unconscious and the

44:40 traumatic fors like no there is something extraordinary therapeutic about talking there is something extraordinary therapeutic about being P being liked and and people presenting a different perspective and so forth um I mean viin had had criticisms of that nature that I am entirely sympathetic with with viin criticized uh Freud by saying he has a this beautiful metaphor um in the remarks and the foundations of philosophy psychology where uh he says that that the Psychotherapy is is one is

45:16 like those drawing exercises in which they show you just an arm and they say complete the rest of the figure they said like there are lots of ways in which the rest of the figure could go um and and I think that that's a lot of what happens with therapy uh and they could go in in ways that are consistent with Freud's view but they could go in all sorts of way that are also going to help people interesting yeah I mean well I know I know you have to go in in within the next that's all right so I don't want to I I could be dwelling on this forever because you're interesting

45:48 your work is interesting and your thoughts about it are even more interesting but uh um I I want to if you could connect this or if we could connect this up to the the memory Wars and I wonder what your sort of considered position if you have one on this so you know the memory Wars refers to this extraordinary debate between memory researchers but but also the larger public I would say um about repressed memories of childhood abuse and all sorts of I mean there was the satanic panic in the 80s that a lot of this revolved around people recalling you

46:21 know ritualistic abuse apparently and and later people argued it was under the you know guidance of certain sorts of therapeutic methods um involving a lot of counterfactual thinking and and recalling of things uh in the past and going over them that we sort of now think influence the way that these things go so there's a long history of that and you're more of an expert on this than I am but I sort of wonder if you could tell us a little bit more than I just said about it and also what where you sort of think things stand uh currently with respect to this

46:54 question well so I guess there there lots of things to say about that because depending on when you're coming from uh you you might have um sympathies for one side more more than than the other so um so I have a lot of sympathy for sites in which people remember events that happened in the past and for which they didn't think do too much and some something trigger a particular memory of that and it turns

47:27 out that they're true events and and some of them are like horrible events too but I also like to think from the other side so I'll give you an example I don't know if you have read a book called picking cotton W um are you familiar with that so that book was uh so like a bestseller in a while back and it's it's a it's a real life story of a woman whose name I'm forgetting uh who has an undergraduate at at Wake Forest um in the in the

48:00 80s and uh and at some point an individual walked to uh her apartment and raped her repeatedly that night and stay with her for a for a little while and so forth and then left and escaped and and and and um his and his last name is cotton and uh uh later on there was an individual that was uh that was captured uh well actually the individual that

48:32 that rap her I just destroyed the story that the individual that Raper was not named coton I I now I know the story but I didn't know the name of the book okay but the individual name cotton was was captured at some point and it was put you know on a a line and so forth and she identified him immediately basically said like that's that's the person that that raped me and so forth and when you and this happens like with within less than a day you know or I forgot it was almost immediate and this is this was a very close encounter uh it was not very quick it you know it it took some time

49:08 like they were like together and she was 100% completely sure that this was the individual and he was in prison for like 11 years or so until finally uh other evidence exonerated him and nowadays both the victim and uh and um and Mr cutton toward the United States talking about you know the problems and the and the ease with which you can uh misidentify someone like like in this particular situation right um so and

49:43 this is 11 years of a person in prison for being falsely like wrongly identified for by a person who whose memory was you know such such that she thought completely for sure that this was the individual right so you have those two those two sides of course that it could happened that uh that because of awfulness that happened when you were a child and so forth you did everything within your power not to encode any information everything within your power to distract yourself from never having

50:15 those thoughts and as it happens when you have information that you don't rehearse you forget it right right uh you maybe you have never thought of quadratic formula for the past how dare you bring up the quadratic formula maybe you haven't thought about it for the past 20 years but then all of a sudden your son comes to from school and said dad I have this homework and then you see the quadratic formula you're like oh I remember this uh so I cannot deny that those are are are experiences that are very common as well

50:50 uh now my point with this is you know one has to be very careful both things can can happen and both things do happen uh my point is simply that the science of of memory has the resources to explain many of these cases without having to appeal to magical mechanisms of repressions or super egos jumping on our eids and so forth right yeah exactly so both things do happen that's something that we have to be very careful to make sure you do

51:22 spontaneously recall things that you didn't realize happen until I mean you didn't realize that had happened but did actually happen and you also can falsely remember like really seemingly like from the inside it feels like 100% you could just have that phenomenology and be wrong I mean it could happen one way of of that I like to think it is to normalize those events hasn't it happened to you at some point that someone reminds you a family member say reminds you of something that happened when you were a child that you literally

51:55 haven't thought of for 20 years yeah that happens right that's a and so what we're talking is about that kind of phenomenon as well it could occur that it just happens that it's a kind of different experience instead of like oh yeah I remember that baseball card uh you know now you're remembering something that it is and the the immediate intuition is uh but how is it possible that if this is the sort of thing that you would remember right yeah no I know exactly you know just that's the that's the intuition but it turns

52:27 out that uh no there is there it might be possible that precisely what you try was not to think about it and the power of not thinking about it something uh I mean we know this from HEB right so I I tell this sometimes to people who say like oh why is it that every time that I cross this this this corner where I used to have ice cream with my ex-boyfriend I always end that thinking about him and said like well because you keep doing it so change the corner go to other places break wire together they wire together so that let them not wire together and

53:02 you can do that with with lots of different kinds of memories yeah is this uh related in any way to what's called motivated forgetting a a a little bit but the problem would motivate it forgetting but but yes so so it does have to do with that the problem with and and some people say like well you know repressed memory and motivated forgetting are probably kind of like the same thing uh the problem with the motivated forgetting is that our best evidence is that it's not super good at erasing the whole event right a lot of the tests

53:38 that we have for Motivated for getting are basically lists of words and what you do is that imp people that are in the condition of motivated forgetting uh versus not like tend to recall fewer but it's not that they don't call Annie or uh so um but there is a there is another kind of motivation this gets a little bit in like I guess philosophy of action you can be motivated to not remember something right now or you can be motivated to not be reminded of something you know in your life like right so it's like when people say I I

54:12 think that um the distinguish between synchronic and dionic strategies for motivation right so there is a motivated forgetting um which is so again going back to my example of uh the person who said like I always remember my boyfriend you know my for former boyfriend whenever because we used to have ice cream here and when I drive to the ice cream like I always remember him so like well stop doing that like change your route you know there are lots of ways in which you can avoid you know you can avoid the paths that will make you remember something uh if you hate that

54:46 house then you move away from the house and then you have fewer ways of so that's a way of motivating forgetting that it is more dionic rather than synchronic um so my guess is that a combination of those two things can really lead to a very powerful forgetting interesting um so once again there's a million things that I want to follow up on but uh just selecting from those million things um and bringing this sort of uh because the question I was asking about

55:19 the memory Wars um and one of the things that's came out of our you know discoveries or our investigation of this was the ideas of consolidation and the ideas of reconsolidation um and this has led to I would say psychologist sort of rethinking the idea that of memories of being any sort of like stabil stored in long-term memory or anything like that um and and led to more of a a widespread recognition that that uh well the more you rehearse a memory the more malleable

55:54 it is in a sense um and so and some of the techniques that we know that induce these kind of what are called implanted or false memories involve you know thinking about you know past situations with uh would have gone a certain way or something like that and you can get people to kind of accept generally that you know this is the famous Maul experiment from lus a long time ago so um I I was wondering what your thoughts about this phenomenon are uh about memory implantation in generally and whether this is not just what happens all the time time uh as opposed to some specific like this is

56:28 what memory is Right memory is just this malleable system that's never really quite accurate or do you think of it uh in in a different way yeah I mean that's a great question there's lots of things uh to to say there so the first one is the issue about consolidation and reconsolidation so for the people listening to this the discussion so the term consolidation is an old term uh that suggested that when memories actually precedes the semantic itic distinction but the thought was that um that when a when a memory um has been encoded it became sort of fixed and

57:04 it is uh and it is unchangeable right um and kind of like stored this if you want this and it's another way of of thinking it gets Consolidated and the thought is that once the memory is Consolidated then you will you will be able to retrieve it um later on the idea of memories being Consolidated was linked to the the need for the hippocampus to to produce the consolidation uh namely the thought was the hippocampus is required for encoding of a memory and it is required until it's Consolidated um but once the memory is Consolidated then

57:38 the hippocampus is no longer required and the reason why it was thought that that happened is because individuals with uh hipocampal damage like hm for instance allegedly had uh they have anterior grade Amnesia they could not encode new memories after after the accident but they could still recover uh memories that happened prior to the accident um that I think is been sort of if not fully debunked has been really really hard questioned uh there was some

58:12 work by Ladell and colleagues and moris movich and others showing that uh that actually the extent to which your hippocampus and surrounding areas uh that that tissue remain um correlates linearly with your what is called reot log which is the the the regression of how much your memories have and even and I have written a little bit about this too but um even when you look at the at what hm remembered you wouldn't say that he had an intact autobiographical memory of his

58:46 past he actually remembered very few events and here is the second point of what you were saying it is not clear that the events were fully episodic they seem to be highly semantization that tends to sort of devoid the memory from its modal components or is it sensory components and make it more and more abstract if

59:18 you want people call that semantization um so you know it might be possible that the first time that you learned that karakas was the capital of Venezuela you sort of rehearsed the words of your teacher saying karakas is the capital of Venezuela and maybe you rehearsed a little bit you you know the map of Venezuela seeing where kakas was but soon enough you're studying for that test and so forth just seeing the words and seeing the words you completely forgot about the teacher you completely forgot about the classroom but kakas is the capital of Venezuela remains right

59:51 so that process is is a process of semantization that that that takes place and repetition helps for that uh it is thought to be computationally efficient right because you're just sort of stripping off the essential components from all this computationally very expensive details um now the other kind of rehearsal that that you're right that it is is highly uh malleable is is when you you rehearse the autobiographical episodic memory in a context that pollutes as it were the original memory

1:00:26 Trace with external information um the example that you have um of the the the shopping mall is a good one is they call that imagination inflation which is the idea that when you recall a memory in the context in an imaginative context that that also involves I mean if you think about it if you recall a memory and recall memory involves the reactivation of lots of the same sensory areas that were active during coding and in addition to that you're using those very same areas to evoke uh new sensory

1:01:01 Contents I mean the probability that the pattern of activation gets contaminated upon reconsolidation is pretty high so a lot of that uh you know is I think that that's kind of like what underlies imagination inflation and that's why it is very easy for you to especially with details that are not as Central details that are less as iated with other store details uh those details that are less Central that tend to be much more likely to be overwritten for the by the information that you are imagining at

1:01:34 the time of retrieving interesting um you used a couple words there that made me think you said polluted and contaminated um but it's not always bad because you know you you need to update memories with new information if you find out something new like you know you're talking to someone and you tell them remember that time we went blah blah and you're you were wearing not scarf so you want to encode that or update your so sometimes it's useful um but in this case I understand the mall case it wasn't useful they were trying to commit this kid that he was left alone at the mall oh absolutely I I mean 100% a lot of my research it

1:02:10 experimental research is literally to say exactly the reason the reason why we update our our memories with uh information that is strous is probably actually quite adaptive uh I think that for instance contactual thinking um when used in certain ways has this this benefit right um here's what happens so something uh bad happens to you so certain outcome doesn't occur to you that you want it right so your typical

1:02:43 reaction is to have regret uh and uh but one another reaction that you some sometimes have is like well at least this didn't happen instead that could have been much worse right so suppose that you you you get into a car accident and as a result of that you know your car was total and it's like oh this sucks but it could have been much worse like you could have let lost your legs or maybe like your capacity to walk I guess if you lose your legs you probably lose your capacity to walk too but uh uh like something much worse and often times this is the kinds of imaginations

1:03:15 that we get in um you know of course that we imagine could have been regretful but when you compare yourself to these imaginative worlds in which which you are um actually worse off then you compare and you start saying like well maybe this wasn't as bad good have been worse and what is happening well that you're entertaining certain uh emotions that are changing the tone of the original memory such that the next time that you remember the accident is not going to hurt as much um so that's part of what we what we do in using

1:03:49 contrafactual thinking in the context of of uh autobiographical memory reactivation patient to try to mify uh those memories um often times they're bad right I mean it's not that we do it all all the time for for for good a lot of our regrets and our repetitive ruminations precisely use this mechanism for non-adaptive purposes because people end up thinking like you know they end up having even more negative thoughts about it but the but I think that that they can be employed for good so you're you're right contamin

1:04:24 ating memories is not always a bad thing often is a good thing so what uh in the case of like controlling the emotional volume so to speak of the memory I know you you coined a term for that I forgot what the term was uh memory mollification yeah mollification right yeah mollifying the memory not noty uh so is this this is related to like some what's sometimes called memory dampening maybe um yes but that's drug induced obviously but this is like a

1:04:57 natural version of that is that the idea yeah yeah and then they often I mean it is very likely that's if if the dampening for instance is with um with certain uh certain chemicals that have an acid component like propanolol for instance and and things like that it's very likely that the mechanisms are similar to that I mean uh there is a little bit of discussion as to exactly what the mechanisms in the brain are because for once some people think well there might be an Extinction kind of memories uh I mean mechanisms or another possibility is that they are propanolol

1:05:29 IND or or rather like you know this this kind of amnestic induced right um I I I I think it might be possible that that there's a combination of the two I I don't have a view specifically and what what they are uh but yes it's it's related I think that all in the family uh interesting and because you know you could think of it going the other way too not so you know maybe you had an a family vacation and there was like a a big fight between the uncle and the cousin or something but also you had a fun time at the ride at you know the amusement park so you could choose to

1:06:03 focus on that and try to amplify in a sense the good feelings associate then you would remember the whole trip with this kind of pleasant even though you remember the fight you wouldn't remember it maybe as like as unpleasant or something like that so there's this this constant reinterpretation of the not just the content but the emotional aspect of memor absolutely highlighting often times we do that I mean that happens a lot and often times we do that in in Collective recollection I mean when you when you get along with friends from

1:06:35 high school or when friends with college and you remember the same episodes and the same events that you were in together often times what you're doing is hiding those positive emotions together right um there is there is a huge component of of uh you know this modification that happens in in in in joint reminiscing but also this amplification that happens in joint reminiscing this is such an interesting discussion I I know you have to go so I know I want to give you some some time to be able to go I I would ask just one

1:07:09 question to sort of end this maybe this is not a quick question but um you know uh Freud we've been talking about Freud a lot and you said his th his theories thoroughly debunked repress memories don't have a reference or a sense so at this point I think it would be safe to say that your view is that Freud's theory doesn't count as like a um a scientific theory that we should have any confidence in but I also heard you say that was unfalsifiable maybe so do you think it Freud counts as that that currently we should think of it as suo science or just as not a scientific theory or as

1:07:44 something else interesting um so if you take Freud's and and here is interesting because he had like at least three different views but suppose that what you refer by Freud's view is something like the seduction Theory yeah if you take the seduction Theory uh to be a scientific theory that should be put you know on a par with um I don't know theories of reinforcement learning or something like that um I would call

1:08:19 it and as a result that it should be treated in the market of ideas as uh at the same level then I would call it as a pseudo science uh for me I mean the term pseudo science is complex and I have recently involved in lots of discussions about pseudoscience yeah I thought we were talk about that but to have a second discussion we have 12 minutes so but but um you know this is part of the the information integration Theory letter uh and and pseudo science is is a is a tricky word because it's a word that is is primarily a social science

1:08:53 sanction right it it seems to me more so than uh that clear demarcations of what is science and what it is not science I think it is a social sanction and I understood this actually after reading On The Fringe which is a wonderful book that I recommend to absolutely everyone who is interested in issues having to with what countes pseudo science and non pseudo science the bottom line is there are lots of ways of being pseudo science uh there is no clear scientific demarcation of this is science this is not science but it serves a purpose to call something pseudo science and and

1:09:26 the reason why I think it and in my view for something to be pseudo science is for it to claim that it is the kinds of the sort of thing that deserves NSF funding NIH funding that they has a place in hospitals to make predictions about whether someone is alive or is not alive or conscious and non conscious and so forth it is if it is an Endeavor that it is is trying to compete for the same kind of resources that scientific theories are competing and it is not a

1:09:59 science it is a pseudo science however if it is an Endeavor that it is not trying to compete with that it is right um like uh the horoscope like astrology right yeah they are not claiming to be pseud doen like I read the horoscope from time to time yesterday I was having a discussion with my wife as to whether uh you know such and such were compatibles and and so forth um but I don't I don't I don't think that I am engaging in the kind of of of rigorous sort of Enterprise that I engage when

1:10:31 I'm so if if so the question is for def Freudian is the Freudian thinking that uh they should have access to uh NSF money to identify where the organ of repression is in the brain uh you know all those things if they say yes and I said well this is pseudo science and I don't think that they should deserve Grand money to do this research but by contrast if they are saying well we're not interested in cognitive architecture we're not trying to say anything literal about the structure of the mind we're trying to say something metaphorical

1:11:03 about structure of divine no different than pl's distinctions of in the soul uh right and comparing it with the city and the Republic and so forth um if that's what they are doing then I will call it a non-science and go ahead and and and continue doing that that that that's where I I do think that the term pseudoscience is a social science fun and it is a it is um it's but it's a useful term uh it is a term that helps to curb certain certain projects uh so that they don't waste taxpayers money

1:11:37 yeah you know I was uh asked to sign the letter um and I didn't sign it uh mostly because uh I wanted to add something about what pseudo science was and they said it's already written and I was like well then you I can't yeah yeah but uh CU I agree with you that the word pseudo science should be used in certain contexts but um I also think that because it's is a social sanction you can't just throw it around without saying like why you think the thing is and I really felt like the letter was sort of bringing up too many things like

1:12:10 the pan psychism stuff that's not relevant like so some of it like I was like okay well why we got to say more about what the pseudoscientific aspect is um so I agree with you that I think that uh what the important what to my mind was a main complaint which wasn't highlight enough and I think maybe there's a followup that will highlight enough was that that people are presenting this as though there's lots of evidence for it when it's not clear that there's could be evidence for it or even uh so that that's really the main question in my mind is like how are people saying this

1:12:43 is a main empirical Theory when like it's not clear that there could be any empirical evidence I mean you know some people are going around saying that the that the neurons don't even exist because they don't have causal power so it's like H okay um then how is that a neuroscientific theory and empirical Theory at all uh no I'm not saying you can't answer that I'm just saying that I think you're right that the the real the thing you want to focus on what makes something pseudoscientific is whether they're asking for scient scientific funds money um from right right right so so there is there is that

1:13:15 issue it's funny because when when hacken then and the others asked me to sign the letter I thought that the word pseudo science was one of the least controversial aspects of the letter part of what happens too is that I have been used you know in science there are letters that are expressions of concern and that it seemed pretty obvious to me that that's what it was expressions of concern are typically fewer than 500 Words uh and what happens is that it is you know experts in the field when a paper is publishing science saying like

1:13:47 you know we discovered the genan for uh I don't know long nails or whatever and uh and and some long nail experts um think that there is something completely wrong about this but they weren't part of the reviewers or anything of that nature they want to say like look this is presented as the position of the field but we are in that field and we're prominent in that field and we just have an expression of concern and we only have 500 words right so that is what I thought that the letter was going to be

1:14:20 so of course that you cannot get into de debates I I think I wrote a little bit about this in myself I don't think that you can get into debates of I I thought that the issue with psychism was also like not great it's like oh look look this theory is false because it has this weird metaphysical consequences like n that's just not a very good argument but pseudo science the word was definitely not controversial for me um for reasons that I explained there it seemed to me that it was pseudo science for for this for this reasons trying to buy for but I will have to just say though that while

1:14:52 I really enjoyed your substack article and I'll make sure there's a link to it so other people could read it because it really lays it all very nicely out your position none of those arguments were in the original letter so like your personal history going and talking with Julio and being at the conference and having dinner with him and really getting to the bottom of like some of his views um that led you to this considered opinion um in my sort of view rightly uh that wasn't clear in the letter so anyone reading it wouldn't wouldn't know that they' be like who what why is this word pseudo science there CU to me that that is a bit of a flag if you're going to throw a word out

1:15:26 like that then it's like okay we want to make sure that the reasons for it are are clearly laid out rightly or wrongly so everyone sort of knows what's going on the problem is that a 500 letter you can't do it exactly you cannot do it and I and again what I thought was you know I never thought that it was going to explode like that partly because I am well let me just say you know what real fast though because we wrote an earlier letter that was a letter of concern to the ne or someone ni someone yeah and some somebody saying you know hey IIT

1:16:00 there some worry about it being empirical and you're you're listing it as one of the main like research focuses here and that letter didn't blow up and cause controversy and I think part of the reason was that we didn't use that term um which is kind of you know gets people riled up uh so yeah I I mean that's true but like I I when I signed it uh and I didn't hesitate a whole lot to be honest because I just thought well if anyone ask me I will say what I say in my substack for instance I do have my reasons these are 500 letters and if I'm going to go down in history as one of the signatories of a theory of saying

1:16:34 like this this theory is pseudo scientific I don't mind like that you know I prefer to be on that side of the history than the other so I feel uh like I that's that is the honest thing for me to do and people might say oh but that was very cruel and so forth but there were people like that lism was I'm not saying that it was cruel or anything like that so that's not what I'm saying no but but uh at any rate I think I I think that that letter was very useful uh because we have an expression in Spanish that says that if the river

1:17:07 rumbles is because it's cattering rocks uh which is like if there is a lot of noise is because there is something really going on yeah that's a good expression and and and I feel that that this just uncover that there is something really deeply concerning in the science of Consciousness that it could for what all I know be just prevalent a lot a lot of cognitive Neuroscience which is we have a bunch of theories out there lots of those theories have relatively um you know similar to my concerns that I have when Consciousness

1:17:40 when I switch more to memory and I got well yeah maybe a lot of people started pointing fingers at the IIT but they noticed that they were three fingers pointing at that yeah exactly that's a good point and me I wanted to ask ask about I I mean I'm curious why or if you are I mean this is total nonsecular but something I wanted to bring up before but whether you are an El limitative this about memory given what the science of memory has has uncovered uh an eliminativist about the folk psychological category um or or or whether you think that that's still like

1:18:13 something that's useful to keep around or and I think it's very useful I am a I'm a kind of like a pragmatist in in in my my need to keep those terms around uh I'm definitely not an eliminativist I am what I was guess what you would call a nonreductive materialist I mean I'm dennet student after all so I am very sympathetic to this kind of like stances sort of thing um and a lot of the stances are practical and a lot of the stances are just sort of I have leanings to behaviorism I do think

1:18:48 that I I don't think that the brain is easily distinguishable in terms of of systems the way in which we used to think right right I I I think the brain is clunky and and and it's is a mess it's very entangled like L Biza said in his in his latest book uh and finding onetoone correlates between you know F psychological terms and neural terms is I think basically impossible it might happen but it will be most like the exception rather than the rule and and

1:19:22 faculty like what the faculties is is an exercise a lot more in pragmatism than than it is in like you know one to one onology it seems to me interesting well I I really got it you have literally 30 seconds to get to your next meeting so I got to let you go but Felipe thank you so much for joining me this been a tremendously fun discussion I hope you'll come back I feel like we barely scratched the surface on so many interesting things so I'd love to have another conversation with you as a matter of fact I'll be happy too thank you so much for inviting me thank you thank you for accepting and uh just hang on for a second I'll say bye off air but