Consciousness Live! with Matthias Michel (S6 E8)

0:01 all right we are live uh joining me today or should I say rejoining me today an extra special guest um Matias can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those unlucky persons who might not know you hi Richard I'm um I'm a researcher at NYU in philosophy I'm a pook uh working mostly on the Neuroscience of on the science of Consciousness you know um kind of studying methodological problems in the scientific study of Consciousness

0:33 and basically being I'm basically interested in how we can learn about this stuff uh scientifically I'm also interested in um uh unconscious mental processes so uh you know the difference between conscious and unconscious mental processes I guess is my uh my main area of focus yeah so the first time I talked to you you made a point of saying that you didn't do philosophy of Consciousness but you were interested in in uh philosophy of science related to Consciousness is that still how you would describe what you do yeah I mean I

1:06 I try to take a kind of philosoph science approach um so I'm not focusing uh particularly on you know these um metaphysical debates about Consciousness like the Mind Body problem or or the heart problem of Consciousness I have some views about this but um I don't think anything I have to say about these issues is particularly interesting um uh I think the the main approach that I take is a kind of philosophy of measurement approach well I think that U most of the problems we

1:41 have in Consciousness research are uh philosophical problems but that arise from within uh the science of Consciousness just to take one example you know split Brains it's not something it's there are philosophical problems related to split Brains it's not something that comes from a philosopher's imagination before we started studying Consciousness or blindsight is another example people who have U lesions to visual cortex can can still uh can still perform visual tasks

2:15 there are very very interesting philosophical questions associated with blindsight but U uh those questions come from the sence of Consciousness itself not not from outside right so that's very interesting way to frame the debate I'm a big fan of your work always have been but you've been putting out a lot of work lately really in the last few years you've been publishing quite a few papers um developing these ideas so one thing that has become sort of clear is that you have become a defender of the perceptual reality monitoring Theory um uh sort of advocated by hakwan Lao um so

2:51 I was wondering I want to ask you some something about the details of that theory but I'm wondering if you like what is your position on it is is it something that you think is like a working hypothesis something that you're convinced of as being true or something that's more speculative just curious about your own like take on it yeah I think it's speculative I mean um uh we're in 2024 it's it's very very imposible that any of the theories we develop is uh correct that would seem crazy to me we gotta wait to at least 2025 yeah you know a thousand years

3:27 yeah you need to have a longterm is approach oh no don't say that longm approaches are all the rage yes I know come on man to Consciousness no um most seriously yeah I think it's speculative I think um it's a very fruitful way of thinking about uh the role of Consciousness the function of Consciousness um and that's it you know um I think there's some evidence for it but um I wouldn't say it's um yeah wouldn't have a very high Credence in

4:01 that particular Theory or in any other particular theory for that matter okay interesting and so its relation to the prefrontal cortex is is the commitment to somehow the involvement of the prefrontal cortex um more firmly established in your mind or at the same kind of speculative level yeah I think it's more more established um um and then the question is uh what is it doing um for Consciousness and um another very important question is um I think there's

4:37 good evidence for the involvement of Consciousness but I also think that um uh a very plausible idea is that um it might be just a causal involvement and not a constitutive involvement uh it might be causally necessary but not constitutive of conscious experiences another uh important debate is uh whether pref cortex is um encoding contents or whether it's just responsible for um you know what and cause subjective character namely the fact that there that the

5:11 light is on or off without encoding the objects that are illuminated by the light right um you could think of that's the way I tend to think of the role of prefrontal Cortex but I you know it's it's really an open question okay interesting so I guess I wanted to start then ask you about the the preal cortex thing um and why you think that's more firmly established and you know I know you have papers on this which is what I'm trying to steer us towards but I am curious um that what I take to kind of be the argument against

5:46 uh this View and what your response to it is so can you tell us a little bit about why you think the prefrontal cortex and if I recall correctly I sort of remember you at one point in your early impetuous youth phase um sort of being very skeptical about the preon cortex and becoming convinced so I was wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how that came about yeah so the story was um so in 2012 204 in those years uh there were a few papers arguing you know distinguishing between consequences of

6:20 Consciousness um and uh constitute correlates of Consciousness and pre correlates of Consciousness pre NCS uh um and um of course that's also a distinction that was developed by net block a while ago uh and I thought at the time I have a paper in 2017 where where I argued reviewing the literat that um uh prefrontal cortex is a consequence of Consciousness and it's most U more precisely linked to the

6:54 reports I had a kind of version of the report argument against uh PFC being involved in Consciousness um now when I wrote that paper um I started having doubts because I started thinking oh gee actually uh if a reviewer asked me the following question I'm really not sure what to say and the question was this look subjects report in both the conscious and the unconscious conditions

7:27 so if PFC activity is associated ated with reports we should find it in the conscious and unconscious conditions but we only find it in the conscious condition when we compare when we contrast conscious versus unconscious and therefore FC activity is not associated with the report so that's a very very simple argument uh and that's what started making me doubt even though I it's not a sufficient to rule out all those uh worries with reports MH then um I work with Morales and we reviewed the

8:02 literature um the the common narrative at the time I think was that um no report paradigms have shown that uh PFC activi is not um actually associated with Consciousness but just with the reports there's this famous frer study where you compare um report condition with a no report condition in blear hry and uh you you I think this study became kind of famous because you have those two pictures of uh you know of two fmri results where pral cortexes

8:37 looks almost totally deactivated um but there are compounding factors with this study but um the the main idea was that yeah I mean um all the results are going to be like this one and uh what we showed with by prowing the literature is that is just totally wrong I mean the the common narrative at the time that you don't find PFC activity in no report conditions was just um was just wrong I mean there are many many studies

9:09 including bclear Hy that happened uh way way earlier um for example um in 1999 there's already a no report uh study with binocular rivalry by lummer and re uh finding PFC activity um you know V and colleagues in 2009 Panos in 2012 I think I mean there are there are multiple studies showing showing PFC activity no report or passive viewing paradigms you know I mean there are still confounding factors

9:43 um you know Ned's been talking about um n block has been talking about the Bal monkey problem you know that still be due to S um but at the very least the idea that PFC is associated with reports I think is not verified in the empirical T you MH so is it so is your view then that huh so the PFC is not associated with reports is your view that it's not at all associated with the reports uh or is it so it's like somewhere else like an a

10:15 parial cortex or something like that no I think um sorry I I think um the right way to say it would be that um it's not only associated with the I see I do think that you get a massive increase in PFC activity when you report um but uh of course that's not going to show up in the contrast between between conscious and unconscious conditions because you get reports in both conditions right also think that um so one of the main problems uh that um one of the main remaining issues with this uh report

10:53 argument uh is something that uh Michael P pits uh brings up so I argued you know in a paper I think in 2019 maybe or 2020 that um you know even confounding factors like uh working memory maintenance don't necessarily need to be confounding factors why because uh people in those tests don't have to maintain the stimulus identity right they don't have to maintain the identity of the stimulus they just have to

11:26 maintain the decision of having seen the stimulus or not and so there's just no reason to think that a decision of of reporting scene of or or maintaining the scene decision should increase PFC activity more than uh than maintaining the decision of reporting not seen right and um so yeah so so that was our argument that um even working memory maintenance is not really a confounding factor and then uh Michael pittz made a made a good point which which was that

12:00 um you know you could still have kind of incidental memory uh maintain serious identity even if you don't need to um so so that's still that that could still be an important confounding Factor also um now there's some some um more recent literature showing that uh this kind of uh incidental memory you know memory that you maintain without wanting to maintain it actively in working memory is actually encoded in uh changes in synaptic weights instead of um of being

12:34 encoded by active mainten maintenance the activity silent working memory silent working memory exactly and um so so if that's true then it can't be radi confounding Factor because uh it's activity silent you know I mean at that point the debate becomes more complicated and I'm not sure of what the right answer is but I think that by en large the report argument has been U kind of overrated yeah so I wonder what you might say to the kind of most obvious

13:09 objection um which is just that you know cognitive Neuroscience have established a well worn association between lower levels areas in the brain and conscious experience if if you damage V4 you don't see colors anymore you damage Mt you can't see motion you stimulate V4 you see colors uh and it just we haven't found anything like that in the prefrontal cortex so I know you've written extensively about this I'm just asking you to explain like what what your response to this view is right um I mean this is a very um very uh convincing point I think in a

13:43 sense uh mostly the the stimulation studies you know showing that you can stimulate V1 and uh and get conscious experiences you can stimulate V4 and get conscious experiences or empty and get uh first F and so on and so forth um I mean um obviously if you uh leion an area that's um that's that happens before before prefontal cortex picks up the signal you're going to lose the signal in prefontal cortex you know it would be true that if you leion my

14:15 retina I'm going to be blind in part of the but no one would say that the retina is a neural corate of Consciousness now um uh you do have puzzling cases like charl Bonet syndrome where people apparently conscious experiences uh with um cical blindness um but I mean th those cases are are are pretty rare and it could still be some kind of activity in visual in nonlesioned uh visual areas um I mean the fact that

14:51 um that um you don't find uh specific lesions um that affect one sensory modality for example in PFC could come down to two factors so one um one the first Spector is this uh it depends on your view of what PFC is doing exactly um so um Benji kuk recently found the names for higher deck High deck PFC and lower deck PFC for

15:25 those two views uh I like those names so High deck PFC is the view that um the contents of Consciousness namely what your experience is like or the phenomenal character is encoded in PFC and lower deck PFC view is that uh the qualitative character is encoded in uh in uh areas that code for first order States like um for whatever is out there uh and um the role of the PFC is to light up those areas or to recruit those areas for

16:00 Consciousness um so you wouldn't expect like uh content specific uh content specific effects if you have a lower deck PFC view uh if you don't think that uh PFC contents are included in um in um sorry that conscious contents are encoded in PFC right um another another factor that comes into play here is that uh there are very very big differences in the way pral cortex and C

16:35 information compared to um compared to visual areas so visual areas have sparse coding uh the way Haan La puts it it's like you know um it's like a piano where you each key corresponds to to a particular sound uh whereas PFC has uh dance coding where uh you don't get a particular sound for each key you it's more like a trumpet where you need where where neurons Multiplex namely they are activated for many many different tasks the same neurons are involved in many many different tasks

17:09 and um and um the contents are encoded by a pattern of activity not by one population so that means that you're never going to find a very very specific deficit by just lesioning one area or or or or or a very very specific experience by simulating one one particular neuronal population it's not going to happen because cortex doesn't code things like that it codes things in a dense with a dense coding strategy which is very nice because um that means that

17:41 uh with very few neurons just by varying the patterns of activity you can encode infinitely many things or nearly nearly infinitely many things whereas um you can't you can't have that for sparse coding MH so that that's very interesting but if you take this I mean I I like Benji's work as well I'm very excited that he's going to come and visit and and in New York and be hanging around so that'll be cool but um if you take this like distinction between the high deck and the low deck stuff I assume that PRM and theories like hos are the low deck versions um but you

18:15 should it shouldn't so I guess one way to redirect the challenge towards those kinds of theories might be to say that we would expect you know changes in content when you stimulate these areas because that's what the low deck Theory say they're coding for but don't we also get changes in intensity by stimulating those areas as well so you can make the experience um more more Vivid more intense or whatever by stimulating V4 um you could have color experiences that uh pop out more and you know things like

18:49 that which you wouldn't expect on the low deck view so it's sort of suggest that maybe there's more of the content encoded at the lower level all right I why wouldn't you expect that on the low deck view because that's the part I I was assuming was done by the high that prefrontal I I literally think that all the all the qualitative content is uh so maybe that's a difference between Steve Fleming and hakwan and I maybe they think that there's some

19:22 kind of content that P CeX brings up um um I think that that um so I don't remember who said this but I love this expression I think that uh whenever whenever PFC lights up the uh the objects of Consciousness uh the cake is fully baked okay you get the content of Consciousness the cake is fully baked and uh that becomes conscious so um and it becomes conscious with its vividness

19:57 I think that um there's no I'm against K's idea of mental strength for example okay I don't think that PFC includes vividness um I think that all the vividness whatever that means uh is encoded in uh uh areas that in first order areas so I see okay I reject the distinction between being deemly conscious of a light and uh being high highly conscious of a dim light I think uh I think um the only thing there is is being conscious of a dim or strong light

20:33 you don't uh you don't get a difference between highly conscious of a dim light and uh weakly conscious of a strong light uhhuh okay interesting so let me just see if I understand this because uh so on PRM as I understand it you have at least three kinds of phenomenology that should be associated with the higher order pointer one is like it's reeling out there the other is it's in working

21:07 memory and the third is it's noise and those are all phenomenologically distinct they they they're different experiences but that's not encoded by the first order level is it oh so so um that's also another distinction between hakwan and I I think and maybe hakwan has changed his mind on this I'm not sure uh but um I think there are only two modes or actually I think there's only one mode even better which is uh just getting a

21:40 pointer in your belief box and that's it I don't think the pointer says anything now so that's a that's a case where I've changed my mind a bit in part because of U Steve Flemings and um NAD D's experiment that um it's more continuous between uh perception and um perception and mental imagery than um the uh uh than PRM would predict uh so PRM would predict that um something that seems to make sense which is that I in the

22:14 previous version of PRM the way I was thinking about it before was that okay you can have a you know Vis visual imagery and it doesn't make any impact on your beliefs um you know you know uh um it's visual imagery is non-commital and it has this non-commital phenomenology U and so so so that predicts that you should be able to separate quite cleanly between visual imagery and perception but uh there are very convincing experiments by nadra

22:50 showing that uh people are quite bad at this and that uh when they imagine something that's congruent with a stimulus you get a kind of reverse spy effect uh you know is the effect that you're going to judge the stimulus less visible if you think you imagine it and that's something that PRM would have predicted in a sense but you get the exact opposite effect namely that things are going to appear more Vivid if you also Imagine them which shows that in in in some sense uh mental imagery is committal uh so I think that U that um

23:24 uh when you imagine something when you have visual image you do have a very small tendency to actually believe uh that the stuff you're imagining is present uh a very small degree and it's counteracted by other beliefs that you have but um so you you won't form the belief that there's a pink elephant by just imagining that there by visually imagining that there's a pink elephant because you have other beliefs that are going to counteract this pointer but uh you're still going to have the a small tendency

23:59 to believe it and um it makes sense if you think about it this way suppose that you're in two situations first situation you imagine that there's a p pink elephant or or fly on the wall or something like that second situation you don't imagine this at all and think about something else um I I would still think that there's a very small change in your uh tendency to form the corresponding belief between those two cases uh which seems to to me indicates that um even in cases in which you have mental imagery and you know you have mental imagery there's still a small

24:34 impact on your beliefs which is um actually consistent with Steve Fleming's view right okay interesting so on your on your model in the PRM then um you have some content uh whether it's mental imagery or vertical or whatever and then you have a pointer to that content and that suffices for there to be a belief which is produced that you're seeing the thing that's the whole story once you de

25:09 reference the pointer namely once you attend to whatever is represented by the first order State uh you're going to form the explicit belief uh I'd like to put it in terms of so Alex burn has this view that um that uh conscious experiences are constituting beliefs is um is pretty similar except I think that um I put it in terms of a nurge to believe or or strong disposition to believe uh namely you're

25:43 going to have the tendency to form the corresponding belief it's like um when you get a pointer it's like for example if I get a pointer that there's a pen pen in front of me my pointer is like there's a pen in front of you there's a pen in front of you there's a pen in front of you believe that believe that believe that that's what the pointer is doing basically uh now I don't have to form the explicit belief if I um if I know I've taken hel noens and there's actually not a pen in front of me um I don't have to form the corresponding

26:17 beliefs so it's not a case where I'm going to have contradictory explicit beliefs but um I have the belief implicitly in a sense that the pen is in front of you okay so I mean I guess kind of backing up a second what is it that you take a theory of Consciousness to be for what what is it supposed to do yeah so um I think that theories of Consciousness primarily are about the difference between conscious States and unconscious States you know they have to accommodate

26:50 as much data and be as explanatory as possible um now I I I make a pretty strong distinction between uh theories of Consciousness and theories of perception or theories of well actually there should be three distinctions theories of Consciousness theories of perceptions and theories of qualitative contents uhuh or or or qualitative character so um I like this distinction between qualitative character and subjective

27:22 character um so coming back to the metaphor of the light in in the the of the objects in the room that are illuminated by some light qualitative character corresponds to the objects that are illuminated it's what your experience is like um a theory of qualitative character explains why your experience is like this instead of like that what it feels red instead of feeling like you're seeing a volcano or hearing the sound of a trumpet or smelling Pam um so that's what a theory of phenomenal or qualitative character does and then the

27:56 um the uh the of subjective character explains why it feels like anything at all uh it explains why some some of your stes are conscious rather than unconscious it doesn't explain why it feels like this rather than like that so H how serious do you take this sorry go ahead let me interrupt yeah you you you can apply this to to any Theory um for example for Global workspace if you combine Global workspace with um kind of representation view of qualitative

28:28 character you can say in virtue of what are some states conscious rather than not conscious well they're in the global workspace and and then you have the further question why do my States feel like that instead of like this well because in some cases I represent that this is the case and other cases that represent that something else is the case and you can take any Theory Of Consciousness you like uh you're going to have this distinction between between those two things yeah I definitely like the distinction between subjective and qualitative character 100% and endorse that uh but it so how seriously do you

29:02 take this requirement for explanation like what so because my in what I'm going to be trying to push towards is doesn't sound like much of an explanation that you're giving us in terms of Consciousness um sure you can explain to the qualitative character I guess although I have doubts about that as well but what is it exactly that gets explained on the PRM and the way that you're interpreting it because when I think about some first order State representing red and then a pointer towards it I guess I I wonder like

29:36 where's the explanation like what it sounds like a description well descriptions can be can explanatory not unless they explain um so um I think it explains what uh the kind of profile that conscious experences have namely that uh they St B uh if you have a pain so my view is really that conscious experiences are way of for states to have an impact on your

30:09 beliefs um so um when when you have a pain even if you know you have a you have a pain you have this uh very strong tendency to believe that U there's something wrong with your body um right did I say if you know you don't have a pain if if you know you have a pain I think is what I heard you say all uh even if you know you don't actually have a pain there's nothing wrong with your body you're still going to if you feel like you have the experience you're still going to have the very very strong tendency to have the um the belief now I think that Consciousness just is um this

30:44 Consciousness is qualitative content that acquires this particular functional profile um and that's it that's that's just what is I mean um is this illusionism it sounds like illusionism well um I think then after that you're going to have um a theory of uh problem intuitions that going that is going to um to explain why we have intuitions about um like why we have the intuition that

31:18 there's a heart problem and so on and so forth uh so that could be partly Illusionist um or um not Illusionist at all I mean um you could have you could combine my view with a kind of phenomenal concept strategy where oh we have those problem intuitions because the concepts we use in order to think about our experiences are inferentially isolated uh from the concepts we use to think about physics and therefore we can't see the link between the two and that's what explains prob intuitions that could be one view I don't really

31:50 have view on the hard problem I think that uh my view is going to be compatible uh with is uh multiple views on what generates the he problem exactly yeah Okay the reason why I'm asking is because it it doesn't so one might think that what you're trying to do with a theory of Consciousness is explain subjective phenomenal character um and phenomenal character is what it's like to be in the experience or to have the experience and if you break that down into the two components of subjective

32:24 and qualitative character then what you would hope for one would think is emerging out of that an explanation for why these states are experienced in the way that they are so saying there's a pointer that results in a kind of stubborn belief um doesn't sound like it's trying to explain that it doesn't sound like it's trying to it sounds like it's trying to explain why I I have I form these beds in in certain ways or something like that but not why the

32:56 experience gets lit up in in the first place it doesn't I don't really see an explanation for that in the theory well I think the um I mean you might have um so what exactly do you think is not explain I know maybe maybe how the light so where's this light coming from in the metaphor that's what's not explained on my view so there's some mysterious light it's shining down on these these other properties but the light itself

33:30 is I mean in need of explanation well now you have a state that can have a has a certain impact on your beliefs at a personal level and um in cases of unconscious States they don't have that impact on your beliefs right and uh that's what it is that's what the light is so the light is not phenomenal on your view it's it's not like so if you just had the pointer all by itself there would be no experience yes not

34:04 even exactly um I I I think that all experience is of qualitative character um so you need to combine so so um maybe what you're saying is that um um and it's true that on my view the problem of Consciousness is actually pretty easy and uh really difficult problem is the problem of qualities I think we have um a pretty good idea of um possible responses to the problem of Consciousness for example Global workspace theory is also a good response I think um um especially if you combine

34:38 that like like Peter carus does with um the phenomenal concept strategy to diffuse problem intuitions I think that's a very very beautiful Theory uh um but then there's the problem of qualitative character and um here I don't think we have the slightest idea of um how to answer the problem of qualitative character I'm a I'm a proponent of this Quality quality space Theory but uh at the same time the theory has so many problems uh that um it's kind of offputting

35:13 and all the other plausible accounts of qualitative character suck uh realism is not uh not very promising uh representational externalism is not very promising um I mean all those theories have massive issues and uh yeah I think um what makes the he problem hard is not not so much Consciousness or subjective character it's really qualitative character it's what explains that um the states feel like this instead of like

35:46 that what constitutes so yeah I mean so huh there's a lot of things I want to ask about this but just so before moving down the level sticking with the the pointer thing why is it on on your view that an empty pointer doesn't result in some sort of experience it seems a bit odd and ad hoc to say that when the pointer successfully points at something there's experience but when it doesn't there's nothing because it's got to be contributing something it's it's it's got to be doing something to light those

36:19 States up well you might have it might cly produce experiences um you know but uh it does doesn't constitute any any experience um because you don't think it's I don't think it's ad hog to say that um that um any experience is an experience as of something um and um the as of here describes what it is so I don't think it's ad to say that um any experience is

36:54 an experience with quties and that's it's almost definitional well that might be true but it's not what the theory predicts I mean that's what you think and you're kind of grafting on to the theory it sounds like but the if if the pointer really is like a light which is shining down on these first order qualities then there's got to be something that it's doing um it's got to be shining even if it's not shining on something I don't really see like what

37:26 the reason is for saying I mean so if you think like it's saying that um then it should still be doing that even when it's not successfully referencing something maybe that's one of one of the limits of the metaphor uh because you're right that the light does doesn't depend on the objects um but then if it's if that's not the right metaphor then what is the pointer really doing although you might think about it this way a conscious experiences a conscious experience is is just constituted by two things that are

38:01 necessary conditions namely the right and the objects and if you're missing one well you you don't have the experience uhuh I mean I guess you you could say that but that sounds like I mean that's part of what I'm saying it doesn't sound like an explanation because you would want to be able to explain why uh you would want so the theory to entail that this is the case not merely say that you know this has to be the way it is or something like that um but you want you want um an explanation for why it has to be necessary that U an experience is

38:35 constituted both by preditors and um and uh subjective character yes yeah and I and so so it sounds like you know you have a first order Theory but you don't want to admit it so you say there's this pointer thing that's doing some work but it's not clear what the work is really doing all of the work is down at the lower level and the only thing that you're saying is that somehow gets revealed but you can't really explain how it gets revealed by this thing except for that it results in this belief or something like that so I don't that's the part that's sort of

39:07 unsatisfying to me is I don't really understand why it should work that way given Machinery of the theory this way there are states that you have that you don't know you have and that you you're not aware you have that you don't have beliefs about explicit beliefs about and there are states that you have that you know you have and that you have beliefs about and you're able to like dispositions to believe and you're able to form explicit beliefs about those States as they as they occur um now you

39:42 you might think oh GE this distinction seems to correspond awfully well to um to the distinction between unconscious and conscious St right and I think the the theory explains that it explains the one thing we know about um or at least we think we know about conscious States is that they seem to have those different profiles and U and uh look if if you're a physicalist you're going to say that there's just no magic so I I I understand that it might be well I

40:14 thought you said this theory was compatible with like all metaphysical views yeah you can put the Magic in the qualities well the magic is in the pointer it sounds like to me so there's still magic here how is it I don't I don't really it sounds like quite magical in my opinion the demand that you're making for is for the pointer to have magical properties in addition to the properties that are functional properties that it already has and I I think I think so I think the demand that I'm making is one to make

40:46 intelligible how this pointer does the work you're positing that it does I I really don't understand this uh demand for something more yeah okay so here's let me so one way you could have this kind of answer is if you were someone who thought that you know the the qualities had their kind of qualitative properties independently of being conscious that they just were that way and then when

41:19 the pointer points at them it's pointing at the thing which was already there and the only thing that happens is you become aware of the thing which was there and the thing which was there has these qualitative properties okay so if that's the view then I sort of understand it um but then the qualitative properties were qualitative already oh yes and so you haven't explained how it is that the they uh come to be experienced in the way that they

41:54 do because uh okay so um note that I'm putting a lot of weight on the theory of qualities and the theory of qualities of qualitative character is really going to do most of the explanatory work um I think what you want from me is to say that my theory of Consciousness um ex what you're saying is that my theory of Consciousness should explain more um and what I'm saying is that it's just a theory of subjective character and it

42:27 can be very um simple and then most of the work is going to be carried out by the theory of qualities and I agree with you that U uh um my view is that um that um qualitative character can occur unconsciously um which is a very naive View and uh you know people find it weird but um take the simplest view of qualitative character which is that the qualitative character of my experience is like that here I'm pointing to the white wall in front of me MH um like

43:03 naive realism yeah if you're real about qualitative character that the qualitative character is literally constituted by properties of external objects if that's what you think then qualitative character occurs unconsciously all the time and here it's just the same but for for Creative character this right but then but on the so that's exactly the problem because on the naive realism View the thing out there is like the way that you're aware of it all the time but that can't be the view that you have with respect to the

43:34 mental qualities they have to be so you know that that your the way that you're putting the view is completely as far as I can tell 100% compatible with like Ned Block's overflow thesis that they're they're phenomenal the whole time and then you get point they something points down there and then you get beliefs about it and so forth and so on and what you're saying is no no no when you're not pointing at them they're not phenomenal it's not like it's overflow they're these unconscious qualitative things and and the Overflow person says yeah they're unconscious in the sense

44:08 that you're not aware of them but they're not unconscious in the phenomenal sense so how do you get both of those to come out um that you can say that these things are phenomenally experienced when they're pointed at but not when they're not pointed at uh without just stipulating something about a belief um well in in one case they don't have the functional profile that conscious states have and uh if they're not conscious then they can't be phenomenal

44:42 so the problem begging the question the problem with the term phenomenal is that it mixes up a qualitative character and subjective character by making um by making subjective character or constitutive condition of qualitative character um but then I I I I I just don't see the reason for believing that uh I mean what what's the argument for thinking that uh that uh qualitative character can't occur unconsciously I mean again it's the it should be the

45:15 naive View and the default position um another um I'm pretty sure that is the Overflow position that's exactly the Overflow position but it occurs unconsciously so there's an ambiguity on the word conscious and what you're saying is it occurs unconsciously by which you mean it occurs without you being aware of it uh and they say yes exactly but it's still phenomenal no the the difference I think is that um Ned and first order localists uh well not all of them but most of them would think that um uh

45:49 there something is like when you have uh the first all of states and you're not aware of it whereas uh I think that um the awareness uh um is necessary for there being something it's like there's nothing it's like if you're totally unaware of it yeah right I know but that's what I'm challenging so how on your view do you get to have that given all the things that you've said um it seems mysterious to me that it sounds like there is no way to differentiate your view from that

46:22 view from which view from from from The View that there's something that it's like without you being aware of it you mean empirically or or philosophically philosophically like you can say that they're different but what in your theory makes it the case that these states when you're not aware of them are not experienced that there's nothing that it's like to have them other than saying that so so the way that I think about this is like Rosenthal and the

46:56 quality space people like Austin and those guys they have a view of qualitative character on which in a real sense it's never conscious sure you're aware of it but that that never like those first order States never do anything other than what they always do um and the way you experience them is by re-representing them you know in a high deck way I guess or whatever uh but but on your view you want to take the same kind of theory of mental qualities but somehow promote them to doing all the

47:31 work themselves and it's just like you're they're they weren't made for that job um if you're someone like Sam Coleman I guess you can you can do that because he thinks these things are like it's naive realism all the way down all the way down to the you know the Proto phenomenal stuff or whatever so in that sense okay great but if you don't have that view um then I guess I just don't really understand why you think that you like how would you rule out overflow on this view like how how would you how would you do it just with the simple

48:05 argument that you know like an simple argument doesn't it an argument against U against first order of theories and for high order of theories uh the simple the simple argument is um is uh the premise is that a conscious state is a state you're aware of basically is unconscious if if you're not aware of it uh the best the second premise is the best way of uh

48:40 interpreting the aware of relation is in terms of representation and therefore a state's conscious only if it's represented by one of your other states yeah but the term conscious in the first premise is like question begging because it says a state is conscious equals being aware of it only when you're aware of it um it reads completely different if you say a state is phenomenally conscious only if you're aware of it that's a completely different statement and that's not plausible like intuitively you can't just you can't win the debate against first sorder of theories with the simple

49:13 argument and in fact even like and says in that paper this is one sense of the word conscious there may be others I mean so I I don't think you can really make that work well I mean um I think that um you know one thing we know about Consciousness is that um there's this awareness difference another thing we know about Consciousness is that um there something it's like to be in some conscious State um what I'm saying is that U they're the same thing that um the awareness difference makes uh subjective it constitutes subjective

49:46 characters character and makes makes it the case that there's something is like instead of nothing is like now that seems like a pretty simple hypothesis if these are literally the two things the only two things we know about Consciousness um you know now you might insist that um there are being something is like and the awareness are um are totally different but um you know I think that uh if those two things seem to come together a good explanation is that um they're the same

50:19 thing but I don't see how you get to say they come together so we know there's something that it's like and we know that there are states that we're not aware of we don't know that states that we're not aware of are not like something those are different so you have to have an argument that somehow connects the two so the Overflow hypothesis is exactly the hypothesis that some of the states that we are not aware of are like something to be in well I can't really rule out the possibility that U there are overflowing cases uh you're asking me too much

50:52 Richard sorry I I just don't understand the theory because it s I mean I don't understand how what you're saying is not 100% compatible with overflow what you're saying is not that you don't understand the theory what you're saying is that uh there's an objection against the theory yeah namely out my ignorance you're saying that there are other plausible views yes I agree there other PL All Views um I just think that empirically and philosophically that the two views are like by the time you're done saying what you said they're

51:25 indistinguishable I can't see what the difference is between Block's View and yours view um except that you want to say that these states are not experienced there's nothing that it's like to be in them and and Ned wants to say there is um and what I would hope for is that there would be something in the theory which would make that clear that would answer that question but I can't I can't find it I don't understand what it is that's supposed to answer

51:58 that question and whenever I put this same kind of objection to hakwan he just says I don't care about that I only care about fitting data and I say great but which data are you trying to fix because you're gonna I mean you it doesn't I don't think you can really get out of it that way either so um if the question is um whether there's phenomenal overflow or not um then I agree with you that it's a pretty um difficult debate bate to solve um I mean one possibility is that

52:37 um that even um uh first order theories shouldn't POS it overflow and that's one possibility for example Rafi Malak defends a view A first order view where there's no overflow yeah obviously Global workspace is another example um that's not 100% clear that that's true to me but uh okay no no no of a global workpace that it doesn't predict overflow yes it certainly could predict overflow where is that well because in

53:16 the global workspace there may be things which you can't report it's not I mean it's an it's an optional tagon to say that you have can report everything in the global workspace I thought that um Global workspace at least in humans was basically reportability well that's the way certain Defenders of the theory interpret it but that's it's I mean it's not clear that it has to be that way so if you identify the workspace with the contents of working memory then maybe um but uh you don't need to do

53:52 that all you need gold workspace theory in assessin says there's wide bu widespread sharing of information so it could be widespread but not shared with the reporting mechanisms I mean it has to be the case in nonhuman animals um so the reporting or introspection mechanism can't possibly be a a necessary condition for Global broadcast yeah um yeah but um I was think

54:29 let me try a different angle on this so do you think that uh I guess you have to deny that as part of the phenomenology of a typical experience that the subjective character is play is there or that there is excuse me let me rephrase that you have to deny that it's part of our experience that we have subjective character yes um I SPS so you know there there are some like introspective reports that seem to

55:01 suggest that subjective character is a part of the experience yeah some people report kind of pure Consciousness things like that yeah exactly uhuh and even in like you know you have your your rreal types who think that they can sort of introspect as peripheral awareness so you don't need pure awareness to get it but uh maybe yeah I don't believe them don't believe okay uh but but wouldn't it be nice if your theory could accommodate that even if you didn't believe

55:34 them it's a prediction of the theory that you don't have cases like that uhuh okay yeah that's interesting find that um too hard to uh yeah I'm always puzzled um when people report these cases of pure consciousness um because surely they they report those experiences as happening to them um you know it's also cases where where people they don't

56:07 actually but yeah to but why do they report those experiences as personal anecdotes uh well they don't I mean so the idea is supposed to be that they don't it's not the eye is like ego dissolved and it's supposed to be somehow pure awareness without uh an awareness of you know any particular thing and not even of the self as being present yeah I I shouldn't talk about this because I I don't know the rant uh

56:42 okay my reaction is to not believe them okay um okay so I do see a couple questions from people over here in the chat I want to ask you really quickly before I get back to the main line of of pressing you but before I forget so Victor barcelones uh barcelos I for know how to say that barcelos he says uh mattius what are your thoughts about a limit ofis positions regarding mental representation such as an activism and sensory motor theories regarding phenomenal Consciousness uh I think they're

57:14 false um uh for uh the simple reason that um enactivism and uh em embodied theories and um most of the theories have never really provided U uh counter arguments against um responses to obvious counter arguments like what about dreams what about hallucinations what about cases where you're paralyzed uh you know what about where you have none of the sensory motor contingencies um I haven't seen very

57:47 very good uh responses to this pretty basic uh basic arguments um yeah I had me with Ken isawa recently who wrote many of those papers um against um against um embeded cognition um Al the is it 4 e embodied inactive what are the four e yeah I don't remember uh embodied inactive extended and there's one other one um embodied Ena yeah I don't

58:23 know embedded maybe EMB maybe yeah yeah something like that yeah I agree I I have never understood like what the what the Crux of the issue is supposed to be Al um one one thing um um I've talked to Kevin Oregon quite a bit uhuh when I was in Paris and um and there are some aspects of his view that I really really like uh but more as a view of qualities and uh what I don't like is the rejection of mental representations of

58:55 I'm a representationalists and um I also defend that the language of thought hypothesis for thoughts but one of his yeah sorry go ahead one of Kevin's views is that um uh in some cases the uh fit the qualitative character is going to be constituted by the things you can do and uh in some cases that uh seems convincing to me so for example in order to distinguish between auditory experiences and visual

59:29 experiences um he says that they have different functional profiles and that's why they feel different uh for example why is it that a sponge feels squishy is because if you if you were to press on it it would it would affect your sensory system in a certain way um that that I think um might be true that some qualities are partly constituted by sensory motor contingencies that doesn't and then you're going to get the pointer that points to those to those states that embody the contingencies or something yeah maybe I mean that's one

1:00:04 possibility um that's possible theory of qualities that you could have I don't think it's true all the way uh but I think it it might be um might be true for some experiences okay and we have one other question from omry who we know what's up omry um omry and uh it sort of I think is on similar lines to what I was pressing you on so he says it sounds to me like the pointer provides a mechanism by which hired representations index first order of representations rendering them conscious I'm wondering why wondering

1:00:37 why such an indexing mechanism is necessary why is this Mech uh why this mechanism over neural mechanisms why this mechanism over neural mechanisms that are well described perhaps hippocampal ripples are thought to retrieve cortical representations akin to a pointer but that's the only similar mechanism that comes to mind so what does the pointer do for higher order theories again uh it gives you a an impact on your beliefs it's a it's a kind of um uh so the way I think about Consciousness is really as the interface

1:01:10 between perception and cognition that um you have many many first order States and uh all the first order States you might have should have totally different um um uh consequences on your beliefs right uh so for example there's evidence that um when you expect to see something neuronal activity is going to be um driven up by your expectation in um first order areas but just because you expect to see a dog doesn't make you hallucinate a dog or at

1:01:43 least not all the time uh because we have many many expectations otherwise we would be hallucinating all the time um and then I mean if that's the case what happens when you're expectations are violated like like you expect to see a dog and there's no dog you see a dog but then it disappears immediately I mean what happens um so it can't be the case that this first order activity constitutes um constitutes conscious experiences same thing for noise we know that there's a very beautiful experiment

1:02:16 by the way by Schwarz and colleagues in 2020 where they just Rec called uh from uh uh the phys form face area and show that just because of noise you sometimes have firing rates that are just as high as when you're actually seeing a face um just because of noise the person is not thinking about a face or anything like that um so you know you don't want to believe that there's a face when uh when the face neurons are activated because of noise another case is working M maintenance for example if I maintain uh

1:02:51 the identity of a particular person in in in my mind like the face of a particular person if I think about the face of my grandmother and maintain that in my mind in order to compare it to the face of the Pope for example I don't want to like believe that my grandmother is in front of me so um you need because first order States should have drastically different uh completely different uh cognitive consequences you need this kind of interface between uh first order States and uh your cognitive State first order qualitative States and

1:03:27 your uh cognitive States yeah so that's what the PRM mechanism is for and then um omry you say that um that um that uh why not favor uh neuronal mechanisms um and um I think I think those are realized in neuronal mechanisms yeah exactly just we we don't know exactly what the mechanisms are I mean it's very very plausible that um that there are Pointers um that the brain can do that

1:04:03 um for one thing computers do it so it should be doable physically another another reason for thinking that there are Pointers is that they're like super useful uh in computer architectures namely otherwise you would have to duplicate the content all the time um and you know some people like Nick Shay and and Jake qu have recently developed theories of Concepts where concepts are akin to to pointers there similar to pointers so I feel like this is a

1:04:38 concept this is an idea that we need in multiple theories and um the fact that it's not very clear how the brain does it is not a good argument for saying that we don't do it because who the knows how we do anything exactly okay fair enough um okay good so that that does I want did want to ask more about these point I'm obsessed with the pointers and what job they're supposed to be doing in in them to okay good so how so if they are if there is an account of pointers that's akin to

1:05:10 Concepts and if the anything like yes yes so there's a version of the hodc um uh High Theory oh cheers by the way HF um there's a version of Heek PFC that collapses into a into low deck pfcu or vice versa if you think that high order thoughts are really pointers then they're the same Theory then they're the

1:05:43 same Theory yeah and I mean because that's kind of the question I was going to get you you you anticipated correctly but it seems like you know especially once you distinguish by the way omry saying that you should say attention instead of point pointer no attention is the way of De referencing the pointer it's a way of dereferencing it aha so attention I mean attention does play a crucial role in the sense that I thought I heard you say you don't really get experience until it's de referenced no uh I think you have a disposition to believe and then to form

1:06:17 the explicit belief you need to references is that the same as explicit belief is the same as it enters experience that you phenomenally experience it no so at what stage at what stage is it like something for you to see the Apple at the stage where the pointer points to the representation of the apple or where it's de referenced poter points okay uhuh good okay so and the thrust of my question was how you deal with this kind of objection which I

1:06:50 think we both know about coming from Rosenthal in various places that once you make this distinction between the level of the psychological level of explanation and the neural level of explanation then theories like PRM look like a neural implementation of this psychological theory which at the psychological level you would describe as like in the normal way I seeing red or some kind of typical higher thought and that what this is really giving us is some kind of implementation story about that so I am wondering what what your official view on that kind of argument is it really depends on your theory of Concepts um you know if it

1:07:25 turns out that um that um concepts are realized in this way um by pointers I would not be against it um but one thing though is that um um one difference is that they're not they don't combine like Concepts usually combine um for example you can't have not uh in your experience yeah you can't have um an experience as

1:07:57 of a green or a red object or red or something like that um why are you so confident about that I was going to say that I'm not so [Laughter] confident that you can't have that I was just thinking that maybe you could have like um uh experiences that are indeterminate between green and red right and maybe one way of catching out that content is that you represent green or red exactly was that in mind yes

1:08:35 um um so one one uh one thing about um uh thought is that um I think the the in order to get the stubbornness of um of conscious experiences you need some kind of thing that's going to prevent um um to prevent to get some kind of encapsulation basically um to prevent your high order beliefs your your explicit beliefs of influencing very very

1:09:08 directly uh your your conscious experiences so for example you know when uh take the pain example I was mentioning earlier even if you don't if you if you know you don't have a pain you'll still feelit it and um thir at least if you accept something like the language of thir hypothesis they have this property of being quenan and isotropic namely namely all of your Concepts all of your thoughts can in principle influence all of your other thoughts uh or you might believe in fragmentation

1:09:42 actually uh it's not necessarily true but um it's it's a common view that um you know my thoughts about botanics could influence my thoughts about about about astronomy as and it seems like that would um I mean those are systems that are precisely not encapsulated informationally encapsulated and so the profile of conscious experiences and their stubbornness seem to be I wouldn't say contradict this but intention with this feature of

1:10:18 thought so um I want to I can't keep you forever I I had to have a doctor's appointment at noon so unfortunately I have to uh be aware of the time more than usual um can't torture you indefinitely today sorry but uh I do want to um ask about the the pointer in the sense well well let let me leave the pointers Alone um we could talk about pointers forever but let's let's talk about the the qualities um in the way that you

1:10:51 want to try to explain them now you already said that you think every theory of mental qualities is bad um and you think that maybe quality space theory is the best one um I'm wondering why you think quality space theory is the best one out of the view out of the bunch um I think it's the only view uh with um externalist representationism that is going to be um a reductionist view of uh of qualitative character all the other views if you for example if you are an internal represent

1:11:26 um and you don't have anything like Quality quality space quality space theory is going to be difficult to um to uh remain uh to remain um uh to keep a reductionist view okay so for Adam Pals ends up being a non-reductionist about um the mental representation relation right but why can't why don't you end or something like mental paint or like you know papo's uh version of um

1:12:02 non-representational mental qualities or something like that he doesn't have a quality space Theory or is it that you think Ned needs a quality space Theory to make sense of his view yeah I would think so I would think so so you don't think that these things because part of the quality space package seems to me to be the claim that you can't just have red you need red in relation to a bunch of other stuff or something like that um that that what red is is only defined relational you know that there's a kind of holism involved um so what what's why think that I guess is one

1:12:38 question um it's just a a promising uh promising research program and way of um of catching out what qualities are in in uh in functional terms or in physical terms I mean um uh we know two things about qualities uh one thing we know about qualities is what they're like when they're conscious uh so okay that could be your starting point if you go that route you're going to end up buing in the Quia in a strong sense if you take that as your starting point and I

1:13:14 think an alternative starting point is to say well we know what they're like qual it is but we also know something else about them namely that cash out what green surface and red

1:14:27 surface mean in terms of physical TS like a red surface is a surface that reflects light in a particular way and so with that you get a kind of full full physicalist account of of uh color quites that's the idea so it does seem like it's important to you to have a physicalist theory yeah uhhuh see I'm more interested in the theory of consciousness and then how it turns out afterwards is like just how it turns out as cherry-picking views to make sure

1:15:00 that physicalism stays true is not something I think we should be doing um well I think that uh otherwise it's cheating how is it cheating well because um I think that um uh non- physicalist views often have to posit I mean in a sense you could Define non- physicalist views as U views that are going to take some explanatory Concepts as primitive and so um so um to me that's kind of cheating okay I see what you

1:15:38 mean because they're like helping themselves to the thing they want then using it to theorize rather than trying to get to yeah I see what you mean but but I but still is so it's it's not cheating to I mean even with discriminability you have to start with conscious discriminability right um no you don't because I think that um quity is unconsciously right but um but where we start from is conscious

1:16:13 discriminability that's what you said we we start with and then wherever you end up that's a different question but uh you you don't start with unconscious qualities we start with there are ones that we know what they're like and also we can discriminate amongst them so why wouldn't so how so can I ask what do you mean by uh qualia in the strong sense which you said it would be an unwelcome so is Ned's view a quality in the strong sense view I don't know because uh he doesn't really Define define qualia um I was thinking that uh there are properties

1:16:46 that are properties of your experience um that you're aware of and um those properties constitute the uh the qualitative character of your experience and that's somehow nonreducible to functional properties that's see yeah so I mean but like Ned's view is that they aren't functional properties but they are phys physical properties nonetheless so it's I mean

1:17:22 taking that view doesn't necessarily commun to non- physicalism yeah I agree I agree but then is going to be very difficult to say what they are exactly I mean note that um net doesn't really have a theory of what what um what they are yeah um well are you sure he has his theories that they're brain States yeah that brain States yeah that's a theory of what they are yeah I would like to to to to know a bit more I guess so it does seem a little bit unfair to require that you know more

1:17:55 about his view but that we can't know the same thing about your view what do you mean because you're saying I'm demanding too much of you asking for this explanation that I'm expecting magic or something like that um but uh when it when it comes to Ned's view you're demanding the same thing well I mean um look the the when you when you develop the quality space Theory you're going to say why red feels different from Green and you're going to try to explain that but that's not really what you're doing is it there's a there's a there's an at

1:18:30 least an attempt at an explanation for saying well these are different functional States uh you have different discrimin abilities then you get huge problems with saying well but where is it the case that a audition auditory stimuli and visual stimuli feel different I mean are they in the same quity space and so on and so forth I know you get huge problems that arise from from um from the way the theory is described um for Net's view I wouldn't be able to point to any problem because um I don't

1:19:04 know what the view is uh it doesn't tell you that um you get uh this quity when you get a state that's more like this and this quality when you get a brain State that's more like this is uh is is a physicalist view that's first first Theory well actually that's quite similar to um to Quality space to well yeah so I I wonder why you think you can make that connection between discriminability and what it

1:19:38 feels like because uh when you unconsciously discriminate them it doesn't feel like anything on your view so why isn't discriminability completely separate from anything to do with you know what it's like well I mean know one thing we find introspectively I guess is that um qust seem to play this functional role and then empirically we discovered that um uh you know you can have this functional role fulfilled

1:20:11 unconsciously and so um combined with the view that um you know it's plausible that you have unconscious qualities on many many views uh I don't see a strong argument for rejecting the existence of unconscious qu is um yeah no I agree with you but unconscious quality should feel like something if you take that view seriously okay we back we I've never left this is what I've been on the whole time so if you if you say that

1:20:45 discriminability is linked to it feeling a certain way and what it's like for you and then you're led to the conclusion that those things can occur unconsciously you should be accepting the conclusion that there something that is like in independent of there being you being emphas for you that's what let's emphasize the something is like for you okay well what do you mean well I I think that the subjective character is the for you in a sense you know D D derivative sense you can say that there something is like uh

1:21:19 but it's in a kind of non phenomenal sense if you interpret phenomenal as meaning qualitative character plus subjective character yeah I but I was just saying if you take your line of argument seriously it seems like you should be led to the view that they disassociate that what dissociate sorry well if you start with discriminability and you say well there's two things we know about qualities on the one hand there's something that it's like to be in them and on the other hand we

1:21:51 discriminate between them and then you find out that we do that without our being aware of it it seems like the natural implication is there's something that is like without our being aware of it yeah some people go this way um and say that there's unconscious phenomenal character I this point I don't really know what it means I I'd rather say that there's unconscious qualitative character and um and that qualitative character can occur both consciously and unconsciously Okay so another way of

1:22:25 asking the same question is why I think that's really qualitative um so you know I'm thinking of people like in Phillips um and the idea that these these states like in blindsight you know may maybe there's a kind of degraded visual experience there but uh that um in generally the case is that uh we don't really have reasons for thinking that these things are cons are excuse me qualitative in the same way that they are when they're conscious when they occur if they occur unconsciously that they seem like

1:22:57 different things um I think the button of proof is on the um other side on this um look um when I start my wall and uh I turn away uh you know I don't think that just because it's not conscious suppose na realism is true um the quality is not there you know uh I think the qu is still there and the quties don't magically disappear um so you know I think uh one when when you don't know one reasonable assumption is that it's

1:23:31 all the same but the qualities don't magically disappear but the qualitative character does uh no the qualitative character stays but um but it doesn't constitute a conscious experience yeah I'm asking why I think that that the qualitative character yes or because we have no reason to think that it doesn't stay um we do have a reason to think it doesn't stay namely that qualitative

1:24:04 character is conscious and when it's not conscious what reason is to think it's there seems like you're Bing the question you're saying that Quita K is conscious yeah that's what we know about it that that's I'm just taking your word at at face value that that's one of the things that we know about qualities is that conscious and that there's something that it's like so you have to convince us otherwise I didn't say that uh one thing we know about qualitative character is that it's conscious I said that one thing we know about qualities about differences in qualitative

1:24:37 characters is that differences in qualitative characters lead to differences in the way things feel for you right so that that unnecessarily conscious well it implies that where there's differences there's something that you feel not necessarily well it seems like at least it puts the burden back on you rather than on me or whoever I'm pretending to be come back come back to Native realism um you know uh differences between uh in qualitative character are going to be

1:25:13 constituted by by differences between the the objects that constitute your experiences MH um this is going to stay the same perspective of whether you're conscious of the objects or not right so at least on that view qualitative character is not like intrinsically conscious but it's still true that on that view um uh differences in qualitative character are constituted by differences in the objects of perception is the same here I mean this

1:25:46 is kind of my problem with this move um is that so if naive realism is true I don't know why you're neglecting my nice red shirt I wore for you by the way what is this white wall you keep staring at um I have a nice red shirt 92 Mario Karts yes um so if the quality is really there in the same way that I'm conscious of it which is what the view is committed to

1:26:18 that nothing changes when I'm aware of it the only thing that changes is my awareness of it but the thing itself has intrinsically that same property it is that way like red it is really red on the naive realist view it is actually red just like this even when I'm not aware of it that's the problem that to me gives up the whole game already because that that is a very so you could say yeah it's not phenomenally conscious by which I stipulate meaning I'm not aware of it

1:26:51 but you still have admitted that the thing is the exact same that that that is the part that I can't wrap my head around there's a dilemma there it seems either the way it is is phenomenal already and then you just become aware of that or it isn't in which case how does the awareness do anything it wouldn't be there it has to add something either it's phenomenal and then it's conscious or it's not phenomenal and then what does your awareness do is that the the dma

1:27:25 yeah exactly so either it's phenomenal and the awareness does nothing or it's not phenomenal and the awareness is Magic it turns it into something it wasn't before but that's not the view again I think the uh the it's a it's a false otomy because the term phenomenal collapses subjective and qualitative character so it has qualitative character but it has no subjective character and in order to get a conscious experience you need both because all conscious experiences are like that yeah but the qualitative

1:27:58 character that you're so so the qualitative character that you're stipulating is the same in both cases well that might be that that's um so that's like a mental paint view like I can understand that view it's it's like the thing is there the way it is and all the awareness does is make you aware of the thing which was already there in the way in which it was already there in which case uh it's overflow that's naive realism overflows true all the time as

1:28:32 we already kind of said I think um why why do you um oh you think that na realism is committed to overflow of yes 100% if if the red is out there in the same way that it is in my experience then that is exactly the the of overflow no it's just that I'm not experienced I'm not aware of it no because look if you're a na there's nothing it's like for you to experience

1:29:04 the Eiffel Tower the phenomenal Char the the qualitative character of the Eiffel Tower is there um yes and if it's there in the same way as when it's something that is like for me then I don't see how you you can't possibly believe that there's something is like for you to experience the Eiffel Tower even when you're you're not seeing the Eiffel Tower I mean um I mean I could believe that but I'm not saying I do but sure no you're I know you're not

1:29:38 a native realist but um I don't think any na realist should be committed to that view instead I think what na realists will say is um that um that this qualitative those qualities are there um unconsciously and um and then you just so take Pan protoc psychism the access is just um giving subjective character on something that has uh has intrinsically in the objects in that

1:30:11 case has um qualitative character it's the same for my view except the objects are in your head yeah I know that's the part I can't understand so the thing so the thing it so if you what you say is that thing is the way it is intrinsically and then I just become aware of it and you want to call that phenomenal character you can call it whatever you want but the thing out there was already that way so the mystery is there how does it get to be that way so the naive the

1:30:43 problem with naive realism is that we can't really make sense of how it sort of fits with our picture of the world um because we don't find properties like that so the same kind of objection applies inside the head as well it just seems completely mysterious how there could be something which is exactly the same as the conscious experience of red but just not me being aware of it and yet there's nothing that is like for me uh at that moment I I just it just it just something this this the thing you're positing has all the properties

1:31:17 already so it is like that there's nothing you can add to it except being aware of what's there yeah I mean know so what's there must have been there even when you're not aware of it in the same way that um to a large extent you get the same discrimination profiles the same qualities and then um that becomes conscious or or not and uh when it's conscious you get to experience the the relevant qualities yeah so I I I'll give up

1:31:51 because I just don't understand I mean I hear what you're saying I understand the words but it doesn't make sense to me I I don't see how you get to say that um except by stipulation so the thing was the same in both cases so so on the Rosenthal view I understand it and that's why I spend a lot of time defending that kind of view because the first sort of qualities they don't do anything they're they're not doing anything they're always unconscious except in this honorific sense the what it's like for you is generated by your awareness

1:32:24 of being in that state and that requires some kind of content in the high order state that to account for that the first order state by itself is not and never was exactly like my experience of red but just unconscious that is not the quality space view that is something that it's that's why I think it's like you took this uh this Theory which was made for a completely different job and then promoted it into something like a naive realist view which turns it into a completely different

1:32:59 Theory oh yeah yeah it's a it's a different Theory uh note that um that um the um it's called be the case that uh the true quity space that um that um defines your experiences is um I mean that it's a very difficult view to hold that um your discrimination profiles that constitute differences in um qualitative differences uh that those discrimination

1:33:32 profiles don't depend on Lower order areas on first order areas yeah and I doubt that you're going to find a a kind of higher order quality space that mirrors the the first order quality space well that's an empirical question but yeah that's how is that an objection well I'm thinking that um you know you could have uh well I'd like some evidence that

1:34:05 there's this right um I know that um you know there there are very very good correlations between the first order States and discrimination profiles and also with what people experience so I think a very simple hypothesis is just that um they they're the same and [Music] um I just don't see what reason there is to think that there are these like intrinsically protoc conscious things which when you point at them you they they are the same as before but now it's

1:34:40 suddenly like red for me like this um and it was exactly like that before so if it was exactly like that before then it must have been like red for me um I don't see how you can add anything to it and in fact on your own view you said you don't add anything to it the pointer does nothing but point at it that all the stuff is there already it's fully baked so the phenomenal character must be fully baked as well the light just reveals what's there already that's that's what you said the light just reveals what's there already

1:35:13 so it must reveal the for meanness and it must reveal the phenomenal it it's that stuff's already got to be there in order to make sense of the view yep yeah so you're that's a first sort of [Laughter] theory I don't think it's a first all the theory because you need the awareness you need the awareness for you to be aware of it but not for it to be the way that it is intrinsically or that it's like something or that I I just I

1:35:47 can't yeah one way of framing the view uh is that it's a first order Theory except that I accept the simple argument I was mentioning earlier MH and so I think that you need um you need higher order awareness in order to constitute qualitative character yeah I guess I'd say that's an overly simple argument subjective what it's just overly simple that argument because it begs the question as between these two these two senses of awareness of

1:36:21 Consciousness so that first premise of the argument nobody who's not already a high theorist will ever accept it it just I trust me I met these people they they just laugh at you they're like what are you talking about a conscious state is one you're aware of what's the evidence for that I think it's uh just a hypothesis about Consciousness and if it seem seems to um so that's why I I agree with h um so by the way that's something uh David venol told me at some point I I told David um you know some people say that

1:36:55 high order theories are begging the question because um because um they Define what it is to a Consciousness a conscious state in terms of um of um High awareness basically yeah and uh what it told me is um I think the right way to think about it is that look there are there there aren so many meaningful things that um it's in we can say about about Consciousness and one hypothesis is just this high order awareness

1:37:30 hypothesis and then uh we we do some work we argue we we we find um empirical evidence that fits or contradicts those hypothesis and we decide whether the um the hypothesis is true um that's why I I I I don't think it's begging the question I think um it's just describing one uh plausible hypothesis about uh what the difference between conscious and unconscious states are and that's it yeah but is the difference between pomal conscious and unconscious States or

1:38:05 between some aw some other less important sense that's the question and by the way that's a disingenuous answer from David because that is not at all what he does the whole point of his argument is that a state that we're not aware of is not one we intuitively call conscious that's a folk psychological plat it's almost like an a priori truth actually um and that is completely absurd it is no such thing so I don't really think he thinks of it as a hypothesis at all he thinks of it as almost a conceptual

1:38:39 Truth David certainly does not accept conceptual Truth uh he doesn't know what he accepts but he's so the way he defends The View absolutely makes it a conceptual truth okay interesting well um here's a my view is that it's not a conceptu truth yes so then why think it's true so all so you don't have so that the theory that you're developing is compatible with the first order View and it's compatible with a higher

1:39:12 order interpretation of that and I don't really see how you get to pick between those two you can't use the simple argument that's definitely out because that as you said is is uh it's fairly weak it's compatible with oh you you're saying it's compatible with both views because um one possibility is that the um the pointers doesn't add add subjective character and subjective character is already baked into the cake yes precisely you said everything's already baked the light turns on it's all baked

1:39:46 if it's all baked character is there as well you don't see you don't see the cake if if you don't see the cake if there's no light there's nothing it's like for you to see their cake best question begging so how do you know there's nothing that is like for you to see the cake if the light's not on that it could be it is a hypothesis and then we work and we find out whether it's through or not so how could you find that out well for example if you

1:40:20 find uh the right kind of pointer States in um in PFC and they correspond to um to uh to the distinction between conscious and unconscious State between states you're aware of and States you're not aware of that's not the same thing that's that's not the same thing the question is whether there's something that whether they're phenomenally conscious so a state is phenomenally conscious when there's something that it's like for you to be in the state that's the question so it's a different question whether you're aware of that state or not that's a completely different

1:40:52 question you need some way to connect them um the the question we're debating is whether um cases in which um uh there something it's like for you to be in those states are coextensive with the states with the States you aware of I'm saying they're coextensive uh and that they're the same thing they're the same state and um um you're saying well but other people disagree with you matus and um what I'm saying is actually that you don't have any way to distinguish the two

1:41:28 views so you can't invoke the simple argument you can't invoke further empirical work because everything you discover is compatible with the two uh namely that um yeah I think I mean you you do have some Simplicity considerations um that come into play for example I think that uh the view that the cake is fully baked is baked is quite simple um things like that but the even more simple is that it's fully fully

1:42:00 baked including with the subjective character including with subjective character that's the simplest view how could we differentiate between those twoes um I'm thinking empirically is going to um because there going to say that uh there's massive overflow right uh on that view yes

1:42:37 um oh okay sir uh one prediction that I make that this view doesn't make is that I predict that there are access conscious states that are not phenomenally conscious so states that are available for for action and so and so forth that are that are still unconscious States and so they don't have subjective character they do have qualitative character now note that since they have qualitative character and since they access conscious had they had subjective character you would have

1:43:11 experienced them but you don't okay so that's one that's one way of differentiating between those two views and I think there are there's empirical evidence for the view that you have access conscious states that are not phenomenally conscious by access conscious you mean globally broadcasts so what's that evidence uh the case of um so here's a very cool case um uh in the um attentional blink um so in the attentional blink you know um uh for those who still who are still

1:43:44 listening some people still are actually you present a stream of um of um of of letters for example and in that stream of letters you include two Targets which could be numbers for example from one to n and there's a letter say every 100 milliseconds and so it's a you know pretty rapid visual presentation of of letters and you you have to detect the two Targets within that stream and uh what people have

1:44:18 found is that um if you detect the first Target um and then the second target is presented 200 300 milliseconds later you're going to miss the second Target and the explanation for the attentional blink um is that one possible explanation is that uh it's difficult to deploy attention twice in a short amount of time and so the first if the first representation is globally broadcast um uh the second representation is not going to be globally broadcast so that's why

1:44:51 according to Global workspace Theory you miss the second representation now um that means uh now there's a very very cool effect uh that's called lag one sparing in the attentional BL which means that um the effect is this if you instead of presenting the second target 200 or 300 milliseconds later you present it immediately after the first Target you're going to be able to report the identity of the two Targets so um lag Lagan sparing it it's sparing the second target from the attentional blink and

1:45:27 the idea here is is that the reason why that happens is that you encode both targets at the same time in working memory um but uh there's a very cool experiment by uh pincham and colleagues in 2016 where they found that um Lagan sparing spares performance but not visibility uh so subjects judge the the second target when it's presented at lag one to be just as visible as when they can't identify it at all in the attentional in

1:46:02 the true attentional blink effect so it's just as visible as no not seeing it basically and you get the same uh effect uh uh with confidence ratings people judge that the second target is is uh are not confident at all in their decision for the second target even when they can discriminate it very very well now if the story is that um well a counter argument to this is that it's just a response bias but it's it's it's it's not just response bias um for

1:46:35 reasons that I can explain if you want now go ahead with the I I'll grant that so the the the sorry what I said I'll accept I accept that it's not response bias so let's accept that it's not response bias um uh what that means is that the second Target is incuded in working memory right that's the explanation for lag when sparing yeah uh and globally broadcast just as the first Target is uh but you don't experience it uh that what it's like for you to see the

1:47:08 second target is just as what it's like to see the target uh which means nothing it's like for you to see the second target I guess that's the premise that we would have to wonder about so I mean it it might just be that well I guess it's not response bias but it might just be a failure to to notice a report well it's um note that uh contrary to the other cases of overflow that's why I thought this case was interesting okay contr cases of overflow are supposed to be cases in which um you uh you don't encode anything in working

1:47:44 memory um right uh that that where you don't pay attention here it's a case where the effect occurs because and you you pay attention yeah um here's another very cool case uh a Fantasia so oh you have a Fantasia yeah I do although I have been meditating a lot lately and I see all kinds of cool things in meditation lots of visual yeah so I think I have what I call involuntary Fantasia it's like I can't

1:48:17 control it but under certain circumstances it does manifest yeah so um that evidence that uh you know people with a Fantasia their reports of not experiencing imagery are are correct uh like we can use other methods to validate their reports a cool method for example is pupil dilation yeah if you imagine staring at the sun your p is going to constrict just a bit but that doesn't happen in people with a Fantasia like they don't show a nuic

1:48:50 effect for um yeah it's a study by kog and colleagues that showed that they don't show an obl effect namely that we bad at reporting at identifying obl orientations for working memory maintenance so if they maintain something in working memory they don't have a noque effect but they do have effect in perception uh and that also tracks uh what people report on these vividness questionnaires anyway um so we have good reasons to think there's no phenomenal Consciousness but we also have good

1:49:22 reasons to think there's access Consciousness in those cases um uh because there's evidence also that uh you can decode visual representations in a Fantasia and we can link those representations directly to uh the performance of the tasks so that's um something that was done recently by vber and colleagues at John P's lab uh where they directly linked uh the Precision of encoding in uh a working memory T in visual cortex in strong and very weak

1:49:56 images and performance on the task um so the better the decoding the better your per your Precision on the task even if you you don't have any imagery at all uh other cases include like mental rotation in uh uh in aant Asia so these would be cases of so Ned and I uh uh have this paper we are working on that we call cases of blank access so blank access is access Consciousness without phenomenal Consciousness it's the reverse of

1:50:29 overflow yeah like a super Blindside almost but without the uh what makes aasia so interesting the possib might be a kind of blind side for your mind's eye yeah interesting well I have a million things that I want to grill you on but I do have this doctor's appointment so unfortunately I'm going to have to cut this short I I you got me because I can't can't respond mat so we'll leave at that and obviously I'm playing Devil's Advocate uh to some degree or another I'm really just trying

1:51:01 to understand the view uh rather than you know really voice my TR um I don't really know what I think until I argue with people for a long time and then I sort of settle on something so I I haven't been well I I am generally puzzled by the things that I'm saying but I don't know like uh exactly what the make of the puzzlement but um and I I read I even met to the trouble of reading one of your papers in French dude and I was going to ask you about acquaintance and uh omniscience and all that but we ran out of time so maybe we'll have to come back at some other point because

1:51:32 I I don't know why that paper's not in English but it's a very cool paper actually I mean I barely speak French but I do I took four years in in school so I have a little bit you never told me that yeah well when I went to France and tried to speak French to them they they sneered at me and said oh yeah they have AAS well the one thing that uh that I will say is that when I went to France I noticed a lot of other people who were like trying to ask questions they were getting responses back in French like that people won't even pretend to know English but I would try to speak French

1:52:05 to them and they would just go H and then talk to me in English yeah so at least I felt like they recognized I was trying a little bit like you know yes I have a high school vocabulary and I read a lot of SRA um so I have a little bit of philosophical book but still so yeah I that paper's really interesting I wanted to link it up to this discussion about the pointer because I sort of think of the pointer as a kind of acquaintance uh friendly sort of view and I was going to ask you about that but um anyway I do have to run I'm sorry about that uh hopefully you'll be sticking around I I'll torture

1:52:37 you some other time um in the meantime though thanks for have putting up with these questions I know I can be quite annoying so I appreciate that and if you will just hang out for one second I'll say bye off the air thank you for having me my pleasure