Consciousness Live! with J. Kevin O’Regan (S7 E3)

0:03 okay we are live I think we are live um you can never really be too sure on YouTube uh but but I think we are live so um joining me today uh as usual very special guest I'm very excited for today's discussion so today we have Kevin Oran um Kevin can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you so I'm Kevin Oran I did my bachelor's in theoretical physics and

0:38 then I did uh I started a PhD in solid state theoretical physics but then I changed to psychology here and moved to Paris where I studied eye movements in reading and doing that led me to become interested in understanding why we're able to see so well despite the terrible defects of our visual systems and I then thought up a way of understanding that problem which involved thinking in a completely

1:11 different way about Vision compared to what other people thought and uh that L led me to predict things like change blindness and uh and to realize that there are aspects of vision which the richness and of a vision is a little could could be said in some sense to be a kind of Illusion and then I realized that that same view could also apply to Consciousness to phenomen the phenomenal aspects of Consciousness so then I wrote these papers on what I call my sensory

1:45 motor approach to Consciousness but I was kind of a little bit peeved to see that nobody really likes this Theory and I'd like to know why philosophers don't like this Theory which I think is just so great um since it solves the problem you know the supposed hard problem of phenomenal Consciousness uh yeah it makes things so easy to understand so that's where I am now now I'm retired and I'm moving away from Consciousness to to uh to looking at understanding I'm trying to figure

2:21 out why current AI doesn't really understand anything and what we have to do to improve that situation uhuh interesting okay so there's a lot there uh to cover obviously so um I I will just can I before we get to the main point of our discussion hopefully um ask about that transition from because you say this in your book too it's but it's it one sentence um you started off as a undergraduate doing physics and then moved to Paris to do psychology what how did that transition happen what was it

2:54 that made you give well the reason I did actually was the only reason United physics and solid state physics for that matter was that I really was interested in the brain ever since I've been very young I I've always wanted to make a machine that thinks and I was convinced that understanding the thousands and millions of neurons in the brain as a multi-body system like you know in physics there's this thing called the nbody problem uh where they have developed statistical methods of

3:26 analyzing these very large interacting systems that's why I did solid state physics um but in the lab where I was uh I wasn't kind of really approaching that and and I met a man in in in Paris who who who uh who suggested I I switched to psychology but in fact even then I didn't start thinking about thinking or Consciousness or anything I worked on some I worked on Vision essentially but that really got me in the direction I wanted to go yeah interesting

4:00 okay so it it is somewhat surprising and interesting when you see all the connections that um arise early in people's careers like the interest in physics and stuff and so on because of interesting being interested in the brain so that's very cool um the new way of approaching things uh at least as you explain it often is trying to make sense of what you perceive has a lot of defects in the eye so I was wondering if you could just give us a brief overview of like what it is that the sensory motor account is and

4:34 how it accounts for these kinds of um phenomenal you want me to tell you about Vision or you want to tell me with regard to phenomenal Consciousness I would just talk about Vision specifically but if you want to talk about phenomenal Consciousness you can yeah whichever one you prefer well perhaps the easiest uh the F we can take the steps the way I took them which was to look at Vision so the problem with vision is that the eye seems at first sight to be a terrible device because it's got an gaping hole

5:08 in the middle of it the so-called blind spot where you don't see anything and yet you don't see a hole in your visual field um and then there are other terrible problems for example which people are not aware of usually which is that the color uh you know color actually is only present in the in a very small two degree Zone uh in this in central phobia uh and and in peripheral vision or color vision is really pretty poor uh so this impression we have of a colorful field in front of us uh um is is sort of mysterious and then of course

5:44 there's all these interruptions doing due to eye movements um so how do you explain that you don't see the world uh uh with all these defects and the classical view to explain it is to say well we have an internal representation of the outside world which has defects because of the eyes defects and then the brain by some compensation mechanisms corrects the defects by say filling in the the blind spot or correcting the lack of color in peral vision and so

6:16 people actually scientists uh over many decades uh started looking in the brain uh for evidence for these compensation systems and there was a lot of uh a lot of disc literature on this but I realized that that there was a completely different way of thinking about what seeing is uh which completely obviated the need for these compensation mechanisms and that way of thinking was to say that seeing is not making an internal representation of the outside

6:50 world seeing is not contemplating some such cartisian theater type thing instead useful way of thinking of seeing a more useful way is to say that seeing is an interactive activity where one is probing the outside world and obtaining information rather the same way as a blind man with his hand probes the world with his hands as he as he walks around so for example the blind man has gaps between his fingers and yet

7:24 one would not be tempted to think that one needs a compensation mechanism to comp compensate for the gaps between one's fingers when one feels the table L the table would seem to have holes in them right so if you if you if you think about Vision in rather the same way as one thinks about tactile exploration as an active exploratory interaction then it turns out that you completely get rid of uh the need for these compensation

7:57 mechanisms this led me to the addiction that actually what we seem to think is a rich visual field in front of us is sort of an illusion because um in fact if I have the impression that there's a that there's a red door off in my peripheral vision you know I I I'm convinced that I see this red door in my right peripheral visual field in fact um the fact is that you you do not have really sufficient information to really know exactly what the color is nor that it's a door and

8:31 the fact that you think you see it deres from the fact that if you were to wonder what there really was there you could immediately flick your eye over there and get the information so it's the immediate availability of the information in pereral Vision through the movement of your attention of your eye that gives you the impression that it's there continually right so it's like I always give the the analogy of the of the uh the light in the refrigerator you know

9:04 um when you open the refrigerator the light seems to be on right and you close the refrigerator well is the light still on you open the refrigerator yes it's on so the reason you think that the light is continually on is because whenever you look it's on and that is why we feel that the our feeling about the richness of of of of the visual field derives from the immediate availability of information with the slightest flick of your attention or of an eye so it it it you know one could say that it's an illusion

9:38 perhaps the word illusion is a wrong word but it's just a way of of showing that that having an internal repres a static internal representation may not be the right way of thinking about Vision one should think about the problems of vision in terms of active exploration now one doesn't always have to move around you know once you've moved your eye over to the red door and then you move your eye away from the door then you know that the door is red and you continue seeing it as red even though actually the information is not

10:11 currently impr impress impregnating your rer yeah the the feeling of seeing the the door continually derives from the potential ability to get that information through moving oh so one question that I have about the kind of view generally speaking is how you what you're going to say about certain kind of neuroscientific data that we have already so we have lots of evidence that the visual cortex is retinotopic organized in a certain way according to

10:45 the spatial uh spatial visual field we have evidence for motor certain kind of neurons in the hippocampus and related areas grid cells head cells Place cells so if these are not like part of an internal representational system then how how do you interpret those kinds of uh activities they are I don't know what you mean by a representational system they are they are doing processing in

11:19 the brain which allows you as a sear to to to act appropriately with regard to the information out in the visual field but I using the word representation seems to suggest a cartisian theater kind of thing where you have a a place in the brain where the information is somehow displayed and then the question arises who is looking at that display and and and it and it and it

11:55 causes you to think that that display that is displayed in the brain has to be perfect it must not have the defects that are the result of the defects of the visual apparatus whereas if you if you consider that what's going on in the brain is just what's enabling you to appropriately process the information in order to respond and act appropriately then you don't care so much about those defects provided the appropriate processing can give you the appropriate

12:28 uh Behavior so it's not that I don't think there's information in the brain it's just that it using the word representation leads one along along a a dangerous path of trying to think that that that it has to be somehow it has to somehow resemble the impression we have of uh when we're looking at it like for example you might think that in order to perceive the world as continuous in time and not interrupted

13:04 by by Cades or blinks for example that you would need the appropriate activity of the neurons in some visual area to be continuous in time like you know it's as though processing would have to be some kind of purring or humming motor type activity going on and only then would you have a con a sensation of continuity but my refrigerator light analogy shows that you can get the impression of

13:36 continuity without there being actual continuity in the brain yeah and I and I agree with that I guess so I guess what I'm trying to understand is like to to what extent is the is your view anti-representational um because you allow that there's informational states in the brain you allow you allow there's information processing um and at a certain level if you think that a state of the brain carries information about something in the environment then there's a sense in which it it what well what I mean that

14:11 seems like the beginning of something representational um since one model of what representational content is kind of carrying information about something in a certain way that's a that's used by the system in a certain way um so but it sounds like you want to deny that because of how you think that that can mislead theorists and think about representations but I I guess I mean I'm not denying I'm not denying that the brain is doing stuff it's just that I don't like the use of the word representation it's the word that I

14:43 don't like okay um yeah because for example I think in Consciousness research for example uh my impression is although again I'm not a philosopher so I don't read the literature perhaps with the right attitude and I don't read enough of it but often you know you that that you perceive something when it is represented in the brain what does that mean what does that mean there's obviously information in the brain what does it mean to represent and

15:16 why having a representation of something should make it somehow perceived perception is not it's it's it's it's just begging the question of what perception is to say you perceive when it's represented in the brain yeah that's an account of what it is to perceive I mean I think we're both trying to um I mean so I it comes of perception so forth I I'm one of these people that overuse the notion of representation perhaps but uh but I agree that like with respect what we're trying to explain is the behavior of an animal creatures like us as well as as

15:50 animals in in the environment and to say that they are informationally sensitive to certain properties in their environment so um one theoretical account of what that might be is that they're in states which which allow them to be informationally sensitive to that um by representing certain uh aspects of it that's one that's one kind of theory um I was just asking if you thought that we had evidence for that kind of theory or if you thought that that was

16:24 kind of misguided to think because a lot of the standard textbook stuff is put in these sort of way ways um and so I just wondering what your response to to that was basically for me that's not a theory what you just said there is a topology it's obvious that if you can respond to something then something must be going on in your brain that allows you to respond to it so you just re rephrasing that in terms of complicated language like informational sensitivity and representation doesn't add anything to the fact that something is going on in

16:57 the it it doesn't clarify anything to say that yeah what I what I I tried to add that it was information which was available to systems um in in the mechan in the organism that we're looking at or whatever the case may be that there's information which is available internally um so the have states make does that explain anything that I mean obviously if if an agent can respond appropriately to some external stimulation uh some information about

17:33 that stimulation must be available to its brain in order to allow the brain to respond appropriately it's not a theory it's an Evidence to me how what other Theory could one have What alternative could there be to that well I took it that you were trying to articulate one alternative to that which is that instead of building up an internal representation you use the world as a kind of its own model as the phrase sometimes is goes so that if you still uh so that you would deemphasize the notion that there were states of the um

18:06 organism that carried that information in a way that was used by the the mind of the organism because that's that that's what representations are that's what they're doing um well if that's maybe there's something about format and maybe there's something about you know um more fancy that you would want to lay on top of that but the basic idea is just that there are states that that characteriz the way things would have to be in the world if the states were accurate how could it be otherwise I I cannot that I have nothing

18:40 against that it's just the it's the it's the idea that that is an expl somehow an explanation of something that doesn't help in any way to explain what's going on it's just it's just well I don't want to get too distracted by this but so one way it could be otherwise is like the way that we measure the boiling and freezing temperature of a um using a thermometer so the old school way of doing that is to take some um uh Mercury put it in a tube and then put that in the water when the water's

19:14 freezing and then whatever level that goes to you simply Mark zero um then you put it in the boiling water whatever level it rises to you mark 100 and then you have your scale set from zero to 100 in a way that can't really be wrong and and we wouldn't really want to characterize in terms of representation um there's something we're imposing on it that we're using this as a way to represent something maybe but the system itself um doesn't have that that characteristic whereas there does seem to be systems in the brain that do have this kind of

19:46 characteristic where sorry you have you have to explain this again sorry I didn't understand so the thermometer is not a at the way you're you talking about a thermometer is not the same as talking about an agent that acts in an environment right right no I'm I'm using as at a contrast so can you explain that again I'm afraid I didn't understand well it's it's supposed to be an example of a case where there's something that's not

20:18 representational um which is that if you take the thermometer some so it's just some mercury in a tube and if you put that into some freezing water then the Mercury will contract to a certain point and you could Mark that point zero and say we'll call that 0 degrees uh and then you could put that same thermometer into a Boiling Pot of water and it could expand and whatever level it expands to you just draw a line and say that's 100 and then you have a you can mark the regular distances in between and get a scale from zero to 100

20:54 um and it will tell you you know something about the temperature of the water but it's not as though it represents it in the sense that we were talking about before because the information that the system uh embodies we imposed on it and it's not used by the system itself for any kind of control or um any kind of process that related to the control of Its Behavior whereas within the brain there does seem to be states that do kind of meet these requirements where the responses like for example I'm thinking of you know

21:26 just just take the um class experiments where they show the bar of light and measure the response of the neurons in in area V1 it does seem natural to say well that represents a line in the environment because you see there's the stimulus it's got this angle these cells are responding only when that certain when light is at that particular angle moving in a certain direction so um many people interpret that to be evidence for the representational states and then we can use those to build up so that so that

22:01 um anyway so yeah you disagree with that I think but I was wondering like how how do you interpret that kind of evidence I don't disagree and that's different than the thermometer kind of response that's the key contrast I think I don't I don't I'm afraid this is what this conversation is going to be very difficult because I just don't understand the distinction you're making there obviously the you know the the the cells in the visual cortex that are responsive to Lines Moving lines for example they they are responsive to the

22:37 moving lines and these are made use of by other areas in the brain to allow the brain to respond I um I just object to the to the use of the word represent to say that the those cells that are sensitive to the to the line represent the line what what what does that mean using the word represent seems to suggest that that somehow the lines are being perceived by the brain as lines whereas in fact those

23:15 cells may not at all be seeing lines in any sense there they may be being used as part of of a massive population code that allows the brain to respond not just to lies but all sorts of other stimuli you know it's not even clear that that that I mean and certainly they are not only sensitive to lines you can they they they they they're sensitive to all sorts of things in order to to see a line you need a population of many cells that have many different properties uh

23:50 so to say that they represent the line seems to suggest that this representation is being being seen by other parts of the brain and we don't know how they're being seen I mean I don't know why it would carry the suggestion that theyd be seen um because of what it's carry the suggestion is that that there's a characterization of how the world would have to be in order for the state to be accurate and that if you just activated

24:25 those systems alone without the stimulus in the environment the organism would respond as though the stimulus was there now I guess you're going to say yeah so what because you just get produce the same kind of activity um so if it's wired in the same way you'll get the same response um but uh it starts to look like maybe there's mostly just a verbal issue at that point for me for me this is just a verbal issue it's just that the the word representation has led in the study of vision anyway as concerns for example

24:58 the question of the blind spot and and the stability of the visual World thinking in terms of representations it's just the the word itself has led people to believe that there was a need for these compensation mechanisms that's that's my only but I have no issue with with the fact that you know there are cells in the brain that are sensitive I prefer just using the cells are sensitive to moving lines but but saying that they represent something is really something which an observer from the

25:34 outside could kind of deduce post Hawk after the fact and saying well in order to explain the behavior of the line of of the of the activity of that cell uh in the context of the of the agent's Behavior I could say that the that that cell represents the line it's a little bit like take a I don't know let's take a take a computer program right um uh uh take take the memory in a computer uh the memory in the computer could perhaps at a at a

26:08 moment during the execution of the program it could correspond to a pixel on a on a on a picture that that is currently being processed by the computer and you could say well that memory location at that point represents the pixel in the in the visual field of the computer but that's only that moment and it's only during that particular type of processing at a different moment of processing that same memory location might represent something completely different and and and the story of using the word represent is a story that we as

26:45 external observers uh uh uh impose upon the functioning of the computer in the context of its functioning it it's not a matter of fact it's not something inherent in the computer you know a different computer program it this pixel could be used for other purposes this this memory location could be used for other purposes right so saying that cells represent the outside world is tendentious and it

27:19 could be true uh at certain moments uh but again it's just a description that the scientist makes from the outside and describ in the the behavior of of the system uhuh so I mean I guess I'm curious like it's a verbal issue it's not a it's not a factual I have no problem with stuff going on in the brain it's just that I think the the the notion of representation is is is is is tricky okay yeah interesting okay

27:56 so what do we replace it with then so you you want to replace the notion of representation with the notion of a sensory motor contingency or law as I understand things um so can you tell us a little bit about how that replacement is supposed to go I mean you said a little bit already about how you move and so forth and so on but um I'm not replacing the notion of representation with sensory mode of contingency I'm getting rid of the notion of representation completely and I'm using I'm using words I'm trying to understand how the

28:32 the the the agent in his environment how to explain the way the agent feels and what he says about his about his mental and perceptual processes uh uh that's what I'm trying to do okay well by replace what I meant was like you want to use sensory motor Contin in in to explain the sensory quality of redness as opposed to representations

29:05 that's what I meant right right right so yeah so for example saying that imagine that you said well you see red when there's a a module in the brain that represents red things is activated okay now you know that for me is EXT extremely dangerous language right okay how could it how could it be that you know a module in the brain its its neural activity when it's triggered

29:39 creates or generates the feeling of red that just does not make any sense to me and it's that that causes the problem of qualia and the hard problem and all that if you think of what it means to say you're experiencing red it is not having a representation in your brain having a representation of your brain if if that means having information that's sensitive to some outside State that's red okay sure you have stuff in the brain that's sensitive to

30:12 outside uh stimulations that are red but having having something going on in the brain does not explain why that gives you the feel of red rather than green or the smell of an onion yeah so that's the traditional hard problem of Consciousness what you think can't be explained but but it does don't you get a version of this on your on your own view as well so let's suppose that you we Grant you the the the the point about the qualities although I'll come back and ask about that in a second but in addition to that there are these other

30:47 aspects grabin and um uh embodiment and so forth that do seem to on your view to be like composed or constituted by the brain activity uh they they don't involve uh they're not the same thing as the qualities that you are experiencing but they are something that you experience and that is something that's that's reliant on the brain activity there right or is that a misunderstanding of your view again I I just can you re re I didn't understand what you said there at

31:19 all so sorry it's okay yeah so just say one of those sentences again and we'll look at it in detail okay you said the grabb is constituted the grabbin is in the brain yeah so like for example when you discuss dreams and hallucinations um you say well this is not going to be a problem for my sensory motor view because you're activating the the the brain areas that are inv involved in this other

31:53 component um which is distinct from the phenomenal bit uh which made me think that that there was something about that that was generating The Experience so you got a version of the same problem I didn't understand again sorry sorry say that again what what do well just tell me what happens when you have a dream on your account okay no before I answer that let me look at it let me answer a a highly related question which is what happens when you

32:24 see let's let's say I'm looking at a apple and I'm really seeing the Apple okay how do I know that I'm seeing the Apple okay so what does it mean to say I'm seeing the Apple I'm what does it mean to say I'm really seeing the Apple so what it means to say that I'm really seeing the apple is that I know that certain things are true for example if I move my eyes over the Apple the Apple will translate across my retina

32:58 I know that if I close my eyes the stimulation caused by the Apple will change in a certain way I know that if the Apple suddenly rolls off the table this will trigger uh my attention because of the sudden movement and my eyes will move towards the apple and I will become aware of this movement of the apple and be surprised the um I know also that uh uh that uh the slightest movement of my

33:33 body will create movement on the retina uh related to the to the Apple that's what I call bodiliness grabbin is the fact that when the Apple moves by itself it attracts my my my attention because I have automatic in my brain I have automatic systems that register change sudden changes and it causes my processing to to be oriented towards those sudden changes that's grabin so so all those things uh are are are facts that I can verify by moving or

34:10 by noting what happens when the Apple moves by itself Etc which give me confidence that I am currently looking at a real apple right okay now um when I'm dreaming of an apple I can several of those things uh no longer are true like for example if the Apple if I'm dreaming of the Apple I can be convinced that I am I am in the same state as I was when I was actually

34:44 seeing the Apple no sorry let me go back when I'm let's go back to what happens when I'm actually seeing the Apple note that in order to be in order to know that I'm really seeing the Apple I have to have moved and I have to have noted that the Apple will attract my attention when it moves but at this moment I am not moving and at this moment the apple is not moving and yet because I know that in the past these uh these things could happen I have the faith that the that I am really

35:20 seeing at this moment so it suffices for me to have the faith for me to really be seeing the Apple I don't actually have to be doing anything and that you know and that's what that's what happens a lot of the time a lot of the time like um uh for example I give this uh example of the harmonica in the uh in the uh in the in the paper bag right yes so so if

35:55 you've ever it's really interesting to actually do this experiment you you know you put your hand in the bag you feel whatever is in the bag and you just don't know what it is and then suddenly a veil Falls and you know it's a harmonica and you feel the whole harmonica despite the fact that you're just in contact with bits of it right so it shows that that that it's it having made the necessary exploration exploratory movements suffices for you to give this to get this feel of presence of the whole thing despite the fact that it's

36:28 actually not really at this moment continually exciting your tactile sensors it's like the refrigerator it's like the refrigerator light illusion you don't need continual activity you don't need to be moving if you have this this knowledge that if you were to move you would get the appropriate feedback that is what seeing is that is what feeling is right so it makes the explanation of Dreams much easier because actually nothing need be going on in the dream

37:00 other than that you have faith that if you were to move etc etc you would see the Apple you would you would get these grabbin and bod right but is one having an experience um at that point yes yeah because just like in the with a with a paper bag in the harmonica you're having the experience and just like most of the time when in real seeing you're seeing the Apple you are not moving and the Apple the Apple is not attracting your attention right so

37:35 real seeing is almost just like dreaming there's very little difference between them right but so that my um the point that I'm trying to make though is that in this case there's something that it's like for you you're having an experience as of seeing an apple um the only thing that could explain that is the activ activity of the relevant brain areas so no no no no what do you mean the activity of relevant bra well that's I mean it's it's the faith it's the the neural it's

38:10 the neural activity underlying the faith then yes so um that there's a kind of brain activity associated with that state and it's generating a kind of experience Consciousness but you you you you you think just like the humming of the machine that for you to be experiencing something now there must be some brain activity it must be some humming purring kind of activity uh that's generating the the feeling of uh of presence of the Apple um I would say

38:45 so yes I mean so we have like for example from the Sperling kind of experiments thing to suggest that you have whether you think it's so you know I'm sure you're very familiar with the Sperling kind of cases where they present the the flash of the letters and then in the partial report people can name quite a few of them where they couldn't without um in the uh post queue so it does seem like they have a representation of the letters whether they're conscious or not we could debate that um I think I know what your view of the matter would be based on the things

39:17 that you said earlier but but that's not what my point is my point is simply that there's evidence that they represent they have the information encoded in some way um in the brain uh and so that that seems to me to be that doesn't mean that in order to experience something there has to be activity in the brain um well no but it does suggest that we do have activity in the brain that's related to a lot of the detail of things which we see nobody would deny

39:53 that exactly so I guess it's just a matter of how you interpret it you were you were trying to argue that that uh in order for me to to be dreaming of an apple the area in my brain that has faith that I am currently seeing the Apple okay has to be active yeah okay now what I'm saying is that is a a mistake because brains because experiencing does not require activity of the brain

40:29 experiencing is an an an ongoing interaction with the world in let's let's not talk about dreaming let's talk about experiencing the Apple um experiencing that I'm seeing the Apple now okay so you say that to experience that I'm to experience the apple right now the area in my brain that has faith that

41:03 all of the qualities of appleless are currently uh satisfied has to be active now what I say is experiencing is not a brain State experiencing is something we do so when I dance the poka with somebody okay I'm dancing the even though at this moment I'm completely immobile because I'm about I'm I'm doing an about face in my in the twist of My Dance Movement I'm

41:37 not moving but I'm still dancing the pker and in the same way seeing the apple does not require any activity in the brain it just require it's when you say you see the Apple what you mean is you're in a potential State you're in a state of potentiality whereby if somebody would if you would ask yourself am I currently perceiving the Apple you are perceiving the you would answer yourself to yourself yes okay so I think I think the thing the thing is that this is where I have

42:12 such difficulty explaining my position because because uh most people seem to somehow think that that experiencing is something happening in the brain and that therefore you need brain activity that is doing this but experiencing is not uh a brain state or a brain activity experiencing is a thing we do it it's a way of talking about our mode of interaction with things right so I guess you know someone might push back on that by saying that there's the sense of

42:47 experiencing that we mean to be invoking which is that from Thomas Nagel the what it's like that there's something that it's like from my point of view and that does seem to be something which if you don't want to say it attaches to mental States that's fine you could say it's a property of the organism that there's something that it's like to be me um in virtue of my being in various States or whatever but the that when we're talking about experiencing we're talking about trying to explain the difference between the experiencing of red versus the experiencing of a sound so

43:22 um phenomenal Consciousness then would be I think the think that we're trying to explain and it's I'm not I'm curious whether you think that that's something that can be explained or rather that's something that has to be explained away um which is sort of sometimes I get the feeling which is your ultimate view so so there's two aspects I think explaining why something feels softer rather than feeling hard okay is something that needs to be explained and why softness is the way it

43:57 is why hardness is the way it is why red is the way it is rather than being like green that's something that I think I should be able to explain using physics essentially um and uh the the the uh the question of why I say things like it there's something it's like uh to see red or something it's like to to feel softness um I think I also want to explain that I'm not

44:34 explaining it away I'm explaining why people say what they say uh about their experiences I have to explain them and I think I can explain them so when somebody says there's something it's like to have a a a color sensation uh it feels like something to me I I think I can explain what that means why they're saying that it sounds like yeah so it sounds like you're saying you can explain why someone would say that but can you explain why there is something that it's like as opposed to

45:08 so how do you know what do you what do you mean there is something it's how do you know there is something it's like well in my own case it's something I think I know with like almost near certainty if not certainty that there's something that is like for me that's what you say that's what you say yes but I say it on the B of having that kind of uh experience yeah that's what you say and what I have to explain is why you say that and why most people with who have philosophical backgrounds say that right

45:41 but this is why I think that it sounds like what you're doing is trying to explain away Consciousness instead of because I really want to explain exactly what it feels like I want to say why it feels like this rather than that well you just said you want to explain why people say it feels that like this as opposed to like that well listen I want to do science science only talks about what people say or what can be said can be measured it makes no sense to talk about stuff that cannot be talked about from a scientific point of view

46:14 it's that well you can make indirect uh inferences to Things based that's that's part of what people say so I have to explain everything indirect that can be said as well so I'm not explaining it away I'm explaining it as far as science goes anything that can be measured or can be agreed upon by by people uh about their experiences I have to explain except for the one

46:48 thing which is so I mean I do I am curious about just and um and I mean this generally about your reaction to illusion ISM do you see this your view as a as a kind of illusionism I know you have an affinity with Dan danis work I'm not saying that's good or bad or that that means you're an Illusionist or not I'm just curious if you think of this as an Illusionist view or if you think of it as somehow distinct from that set of views Al I've had discussions with Keith Frankish okay uh and uh for

47:23 me this question about illusionism is hard to understand because it seems to me that what Keith Frankish is just seems to me to be claiming is that something that seems to be scientifically self-evident to me namely that the notion philosophical qualia as such it just makes no sense I mean saying that there should be something which of which one cannot say anything okay because it's ineffable and strictly first person

47:58 puts it completely immediately out of the realm of science so so so you know it's just not worth talking about but on the other hand I don't want to say that the fs we have are Illusions we we all agree that red feels different from Green and we know and we all agree that it feels like something rather than feeling like nothing etc etc all these things that we have that we agree on are definitely not iions they are things that we all agree upon and they're very important in our

48:32 lives so I I don't know whether I'm an Illusionist or not I don't I don't agree that the notion of qualia makes any sense but I certainly believe that that that Fields what I call fields are are are very are essential to our lives and have to be and I think I can with my Approach I think I can explain why they are the way they are and in particular why people say that they feel like something rather than nothing yeah okay so because this this is kind of where my question what's

49:07 coming from and um you sort of answered part of it already but it so so from my point of view when you want to try to solve the hard problem of Consciousness what you recognize is that well there's a question about why this particular brain state is related to any kind of experience at all so why is this one associated with red red instead of green or not you know pain or whatever sorry sorry sorry say that start again there you said something about our brain State yeah so the hard problem and so people like me when we think about the hard problem of

49:41 Consciousness we're thinking about why any particular brain state is related to the uh to conscious experience in the way that it is so why is this brain stay related to Green as opposed to red or why not pain or anything at all or nothing if you were to try to solve the hard problem then what you would try to do is to help someone understand why being in that particular brain State gave rise to red but but it sounds like you think that that cannot

50:16 um be done at all like so you agree that the traditional heart problem explanatory Gap or whatever suggests that a certain view of physicalism can't be right right is that correct I mean you do think that I I think that brain states do not give rise to experience it so so obviously you cannot explain why this brain State gives rise to the experience of red or green so I reject the need to connect brain states to experiences I say

50:53 experiences are not brain States experiences are modes of interaction with the world and it's a mistake to look in the brain in order to explain why the experiences are the way they are right so whatever it is that you give it the account of so suppose that we talk about just the sensory motory law sensory motor law that governs your interaction with red so that thing um is there any sense in you think you can explain why

51:28 it should like appear red to us as opposed to being swapped with green like why could it maybe not swapped in a certain way yes that I have to explain okay and how you started so I have not managed yet to do the difference between uh red and green exactly but I don't know if you looked at my work with philipona on color where we where we really do show that a simple sense murder laws can explain certain things about colors namely why they are they

52:02 seem more Salient to us than other colors why why red green yellow and blue are primary so-called primary colors despite the fact that in the in actual brain excitation there's no evidence whatsoever uh for them being in any way special so so it's because the red green blue and red green yellow and blue are governed by by certain sensory motor laws which are much simpler than all other colors but I have not yet managed to explain why red looks red rather than

52:36 green right however um but but I think that the approach I I I I have to say that the approach that I'm suggesting for color uh must if I am right manage to ultimately explain why red looks red or green very much like I think I have explained why soft feels soft rather than hard you know my example the softness of the sponge I I think many people even the my greatest doubters will say yeah well I

53:08 mean your account of what we mean by the feeling of softness does seem to make sense right it's a it's the fact that when you press it squishes that's what we mean by Soft yeah so well that that was going to be my next question actually so I I I don't think that is what we typically mean by soft or at least I could see how someone might want to challenge that because one thing you might say is yes there's this mechanical action of squishing but then there's also the subjective aspect of what it feels like to squish something and one wonders why on your view why couldn't it

53:42 have been the case that that these were like switched so when something feels hard that feeling of resistance why couldn't the feeling of resistance have been associated with the squish or vice versa with all the same neural activity and and motor contingencies and so forth and so on in place what what stops the feelings from being sort of arbitrarily associated in the same way well because I think that if you if you if you think about what you feel when you're feeling something

54:15 soft you realize that what you're doing is you're squishing to check whether it's soft or not if you were to squish and find that it did not seed under the pressure then you you would simply not feel it is is being soft it's like let's take I mean let's take the difference between riding a bicycle and uh driving a car okay do you think it's aable that one could have the impression of driving a car while one is riding a bicycle

54:48 um do I think it's feasible well I mean I think it's possible yes if I mean a philosopher a philosopher could can conceive of it like in an inverse inverse qualia type type setup okay yeah that's kind of what I'm getting at exactly so what on your view rules that out in my my view it's a matter of definition if you define what you mean by having an experience as interacting with a world following certain laws then it's by definition essentially

55:22 essentially that you're ruling it out right but I mean why can't like so someone who likes the identity Theory could do the same thing and say by definition what I mean by an experience is this type of brain State um so that doesn't explain there's still a kind of a there's kind of a a gap between brain activity and actual softness you know to so for example uh if if I say try and give a scientific

55:55 explanation of the feel of driving a bicycle as compared to the feel of of driving a car okay would you go looking in the brain to to explain those differences obviously not I mean looking at neurons neurons obviously play an important role and are essential to feel the feel of driving rather than the feel of bicycle riding but it's not in the brain you're going to look to explain why they they feel different they feel different because you do different things you know you I mean I would have thought you would look in the brain to

56:28 explain why they feel different I mean if you if one involves like a lot a lot of activity in a certain area related to motion sensitivity then that would explain differences you would expect differences in experiences to be explained in terms of the differences in the activity of those relevant areas um so if you so and I think we have learned some things from looking supposing you were right supposing okay let's let's take driving a driving a a car and riding a bicycle okay what you're saying is essentially

57:04 what Pro provokes the difference between the feel of One Versus the other is the brain activities and I'm saying no essentially what you mean by feeling bicycle riding is doing this and doing that whereas when you're driving you're doing this and you're doing that now look my explanation gives a much better scientific uh uh explanation of why they are the way they are okay because I

57:37 could explain well what's the difference between riding a bicycle and riding a motorcycle what's the difference between you know riding a bicycle and and a and a scooter and things like that I could because because I have access through scientific observation of all of the phys phical constraints that describe riding a bicycle and I can describe in everyday language what I mean by riding a bicycle and what I mean by riding a mo motorcycle right I can give you a reasonable scientific explanation of

58:11 what they feel like and why they're different the way they are whereas if you look in the brain you have to give me some explanation of why these neuro neurons when they fire they give you the bicycle riding and those when they fire they give you the uh the motorcycle and you have no aiori way of making that link because neur neural neither did you when you like were asked to explain the difference in terms of sensory motor contingencies you also said I I that has to be explained at some point and so I con see as well that that would have to

58:45 be explained at some point but my point was just that there seem to be on equal footing here they both kind of have an explanatory Gap at the end say say all L that again I was just trying to argue that these two theories have are an equal footing and that they both have a kind of explanatory Gap at the end so that because I can explain exactly in every detail why riding a bicycle feels the way it does because you can describe in everyday language all the things you have to do to ride a bicycle and why

59:17 they're different from riding a motorcycle whereas you have to say well what it is about the neural neural activities that somehow link to these rather than those feels right I mean yes I see what you're saying um but uh I guess I I'm objecting to the redefinition um since it seems to leave out the thing we were trying to explain in the first place why' you say that well because what we're trying to explain in the first place is the feel and the activities you're engaged

59:51 in generate the feeli or are involved in generating this the the pro the states which are involved in the field but I don't think redefining fields in terms of the activity gets at the thing that we're trying to explain you've put your finger here on our the ultimate incomprehension between the two of us and between me and everybody else I think because see you are absolutely adhering to the idea that what you want to explain is something extra whereas over

1:00:29 and above the actual activity that you engage in when you're feeling something you think that you can you could engage in squishing the sponge and it would be perfectly soft etc etc but somehow you think that you could then actually feel something completely different you're adding in an extra qual which has no which which which could have an arbitrary link to the actual physical activity that you're engaging well we don't know if it's arbitrary or not but I mean so

1:01:03 there there's cases where you can squish the um sponge and not feel anything like for example a certain kind of sensory blindsight for example um uh and so that there's a kind of squishing activity without any experience of the squishiness of it and then you can have the squishing activity with the experience of the squishiness and then you can have the experience of the squishiness without anything being squished so there's this range of of processes here that we want to explain

1:01:36 we want to explain why you could have a certain kind of behavior without the experience present why you can have the experience and the behavior co-present together and why you can have the experience without the behavior at all um and it seems like uh that that's what we're trying to explain is the commonality between those three which is the the notion of the experience whether it's present or not whether there something that it's like to be in those kinds of States uh so that that seems to be to be the kind of thing that we want that we're trying to explain um and if

1:02:09 we wanted to solve the hard problem we want to say well why is it that this activity is related to a certain kind of experience um so you know and that doesn't mean that every moment you're driving you have an experience of the driving it means there are certain states that are that every experience you have is going to be related to some component of the functioning of the of the brain um see see everything you said there is totally incomprehensible to me langage using but but but whether it is or not my point was just that your theory and this Theory kind of have the

1:02:45 same uh prediction if you take seriously the idea that there's something to explain called what the the phenomenal property or the what its likeness um I uh I I didn't I didn't understand I'm really sorry I did not understand my theory I'm trying to explain why things feel the way they do so that seems to be uh whereas you you are not trying to no I didn't understand I'm trying to

1:03:18 explain why things feel the way they do and I'm managing to do it by redefining what I mean by feel as things that you do so things feel the way they do because when you do things what you mean by having different feels is precisely those things that you do okay so like if you if you if you ask the man in the street you know what what does it feel like to to drive a car they say well you press the the pedals you turn the steering wheel you accelerate you

1:03:52 decelerate and you you feel things in your your your body is is pushed around all those things constitute the feel and there is that is what the feel is there's not the feel is not some some brain state that is activated if if that were the case obviously there are brain states that are activated but the feel is not generated by the activation of those brain States if that were the case you would have to explain why this brain State gives you this feel rather than

1:04:26 that feel you're your that as soon as you think about feels in terms of brain States you are up against the explanatory Gap because you have no scientific way of making a natural link between this brain State and this particular feeli right I am I say what I mean by Fields is the the things you do okay so I'm no longer faced with a problem of trying to link brain states to feeli I'm denying in fact that the brain States generate there is the notion of

1:05:01 brain States generating Fields is a mistake well generating or being fields or I mean so I I think that you know like you said this may be just a difference between us but I I take it as like an obvious starting point that we have experience that there's something that it's like to be me and that that's not exhausting by my interaction with the environment uh in addition to those things you mentioned about driving would also be the feeling of elatement and excitement the the visual perceptions

1:05:36 that I have of the environment the feeling of freeness the thoughts that may so there's many other things I think that don't involve something external to me although I'm not even really against externalism I just think that um uh what we what what we're after trying to explain is what it's like for me to be in that moment and one way to kind of put my point is that you could be able to reproduce that um without any of that other stuff going on so for example in Vision they

1:06:10 are actually trying to do this with respect to people who are blind who were sided but are blind I know you like sens substitution and all that stuff so this is a bit different though where they are trying to take um uh glasses hooked up with uh a camera and then to stimulate the visual cortex in the way that's similar to how it would have been stimulated had the eye been functioning in the in the normal way and people they can see F beames and they can see them well enough so they can you know read letters and stuff like that so they're not ex just like normal vision but the idea is that is that if you could

1:06:45 stimulate the the brain exactly as visual input would have stimulated it then you should produce the exact same experience um that does not mean the experience is produced by the brain well it it does seem to say to suggest that uh that view I would say why doesn't it mean that I mean if you can if you could have the exact experience without the environment being involved in the way that you're suggesting then it seems like that of

1:07:18 brain activity is what's important look if if I stimulate my retina in exact the same way as what would happen if I had my eyes open then that gives me the experience does that mean that it's the retina that causes the experience um no because it has to be hooked up to these other areas so we look for the area where right but that it just doesn't make sense it does does not make sense it's a mistake to think the brain is generating experience um well I was more talking just about the idea that there is

1:07:52 experience and that we know about it from the first person point of view and I was saying I was asking whether you agree with just that well that's a different issue right okay so let's talk about that uh I mean just to close the preceding discussion obviously I agree the that the brain is necessary for experience because in order to experience something you as a person you have to have a notion of self and you have to be able to deploy your attention in very much the same way as a higher order of thought type theories

1:08:26 suggest uh you have to deploy your attention upon something which you are currently engaged in doing and it and it is is that activity of deploying your attention in the appropriate way and being able to respond potentially uh and move potentially that is what we mean when we say we're experiencing okay but but but but so uh you you were asking what the and and so the brain is necessary for all that but that does not it means it's sort of

1:09:00 a category error it's a category mistake to think that somehow that means that the brain is creating the The Experience what we mean by the experience is being engaged in that activity well it depends on who you ask by what we mean but I mean so uh that that's a possibility um on the other hand we might mean by that there's a feeling um involved in some of these things that's what I mean by yeah what I mean when I say I'm having

1:09:34 an experience is that I am like when I'm driving the car I feel the experience of driving what I mean by that is that I'm engaged in doing various things and that's what I call having the experience that see I guess that that's that's my my point my Approach is to redefine what people mean by experiencing in that way because re using that notion of experience

1:10:08 overcomes the need to make the link with supposed brain activities because under that view of what experiencing is experiencing is not generated by the brain so the question of the explanatory Gap dissipates but there still is a physical state that's in the brain which is allowing one to to to do this and as the point about the dreaming stuff was that if that state is activated and you also have an experience then it does seem

1:10:41 like on your view the experiential aspect is associated with that brain activity not with the engagement with the environment so that there does seem to be a similar kind of um outcome on your view which is that you have to explain why it is this kind of activity is associated with with that as opposed to the other thing yes but you were going on to questions of H why you said why there it's there's something it's like for me okay and yeah

1:11:16 well I was just asking do you agree that from a pre-theoretical standpoint we can say that Consciousness exists that it's a real thing that there's something that is like from my point of view and from your point of at all as well yeah so so first of all I don't like the word Consciousness because again I think it's used in so many different ways so in my Approach I'm talking about the way Consciousness is used when I'm driving my car and I stop at the red light and I press on the brake and stuff and I say I'm conscious of the redness of the of

1:11:49 the light okay that I'm an adult doing those things and that that notion of Consciousness is the one that I I'm I'm addressing in my in my theory and that notion has several kind of components which are very similar to the components that they have in a higher order thought type Theory where there's this notion of self which is kind of hierarchically accessing or concentrating its attention on some activity which it is engaged in namely the activity of uh contemplating

1:12:24 the red light and evaluating whether it's red or green and and and the fact that I am able to do that at this moment is what I mean when I say that I'm conscious of the redness of the red light so that's what I mean by by being conscious of the red light and and and and when you say that it's something it's like for me okay what do you mean by saying that well I in my article on Frontiers did you see my article in

1:12:56 Frontiers yes so that article suggests that that that you can kind of decompose the meaning of what people mean when they say that there's something it's like to have a a perceptual sensation in terms of different aspects so what they mean maybe that it imposes itself on them like it kind of imposes themselves on and you feel you are uh kind of being submitted to it it's not something that that you can control like a thought so

1:13:28 it has more of a a grabby imposing aspect and it has a modal aspect in that it's visual rather than auditory what have you a whole lot of aspects of of what happens to you when you're perceiving the red light which are different from when you're thinking about a red light or when you're having an emotional experience or when you're having uh you know a digestive experience so that that I I think my my my my program my my my wager would be that if you can tell me more precisely

1:14:02 what what you mean when you say that it there something it's like to me to perceive things uh then if you can tell me what you mean by that then I can approximate in a pretty satisfactory way uh uh uh what what sensory motor interactions uh correspond to what what you mean there right but but even so wouldn't there so we could just reverse all the labels right so you have all these sensory M contingencies to the environment um and it doesn't seem like it really matters

1:14:37 on your view whether you call them red or green or blue or purple or her or happy so you could put whatever whatever labels you want on these things um calling the red one green the green one red the hurtful ones happy Etc and it wouldn't change anything about how these things were related um yeah okay so do you do you think you could do you agree that that's something that you could do on your view well different languages give different words for different fields so that's a concrete example of what you said but different words that

1:15:11 apply to red right right so if we if you call the the hurtful ones happy and the happy one's hurtful the behaviors of the person would be the same um but right so you could switch the labels and then they would that they when they act like they're hurt it'll be like what we would call acting like they're happy um so once you go as far as just switching the labels um then could you not go a step further and switch what it's like

1:15:44 actually like do do you think that is possible that you could you don't okay so why why not because what we mean by what it's like is what you do you can't switch from feeling you're riding a bicycle to to riding a car if when you ride the bicycle you do this rather than what you do when you ride a car you can't switch how it feels because how it feels resides in what you actually do I mean if you're in a simulator of a car you could be like on a bike actually and it could be still giving you a

1:16:16 simulation of driving in a car feel like driving a car yeah well then you would feel look then you would if if the simulator is giving you the same mode of interaction as a bike well then you feel a bike no if it give you the mode of interaction of a car but while you're on a bike well then you'd feel a car yeah you what whatever the mode of interaction is that's what you feel well you were just saying if you were on a bike you couldn't have this feel but I I think you could which suggest that it's not just in

1:16:48 interacting with the bike um it's it's something about some something else that's going on that determines whether or what it's likely he riding a bike or or not let's let's be clear about this let's so you're saying you're going to make a simulator where you're sitting on a saddle and you're holding a handlebars and you're pedaling with your feet okay and somehow despite that you feel you're driving a car is that what you're saying yeah so you can have it so that when you move your legs uh it it stimulates the

1:17:21 part of your brain that it feels like you're stepping on the gas or um stimulates a part of the brain that feels like you're um sitting in a car seat uh so that or not not the pre Prejudice the terminology stimulate the part of the brain that is active when you are engaged in those activities so you can systematically rig it up so that those parts of the brain became activated in response to your movements on the bicycle okay well that's possible it' be very very difficult to do because yeah totally but but my point is that it be a way of feeling like you're driving a car

1:17:55 when you're actually on a bike yes but but but the but your sensors your muscles and your sensors would be would be inputting information which would be which would have to be information that is uh uh corresponds to a bicycle riding rather than would it would have to be information that corresponds to what car uh riding involves so the input output relationships would still have to be simulated by the simulator correctly yeah

1:18:29 yeah that's it what counts is these sensory motor laws okay so if you're in a in a if you're a brain in a vat you could do a similar thing but it the what I'm saying is that it's the sensory motor law that constitutes the the feel right I guess that's what see that's what I'm this whole part of the discussion has been about that I don't understand is if you agree that you could have those States active when you're not engaged in the

1:19:01 activity and then also you have the experience at the same time but then you say that well it's not the brain State that's responsible for the experience is just a necessary component of it um but you vary the brain State you vary the experience you activate the brain State you generate you get the experience it does just seem like there's a lot of Cor coration between the occurrence of the state its level of activity and the kind of experience that you have yes that's that that's that's correct but you could have somebody else

1:19:36 like if I take somebody else their brain would be completely different but they would still have the uh the the bicycle riding experience if the appropriate sensory motor contingencies were were uh you know looking at people's brain states does not tell you very much about what they're feeling what tells you what they're feeling is what they're doing yeah I I guess [Music] um I mean I can see what you're saying like in a way there's an old an old joke in Psychology about this is

1:20:10 like someone's depressed and you do an fmar and say oh this part of the brain is active but the reason they're depressed is because they got divorced or their dad died or whatever um so the the depression is a result of something that happened in the environment so that's kind of um saying that they're depressed because their brain is in a certain state is kind of uh mixing up the level of exclamation sounds like you're saying something in in a bit of a similar way I guess so the the only thing that I've been pushing on is is two things which is one which is why to prefer one of

1:20:42 these instead of the other given that it seems like both of them are trying to um give an account of something and then one reason to prefer one instead of the other I've been trying to argue is that we can we're trying to account for something that's real and exists but you're saying you don't want to account for that and that seems to me to be at odds with the way our ordinary experience is um and you're saying no it's not that the ordinary experience is is like on my side so I think there's a dis a dis a disagreement there sorry sorry sorry say that again you're saying

1:21:16 that that the advantage of your view compared to mine is that your view is able to account for something which I say does not exist and that thing that it can account for is what phenomenal Consciousness but I account for all the aspects of phenomenal Consciousness no you redefine it in terms of something else which is what people are doing and how what they say which leaves out the the cause of all those doings and sayings is the thing itself it's like saying I can explain

1:21:49 the rustling of the bushes and therefore that's what a duck is but no the duck is the thing we're trying to explain that's what's in the bushes that's what's causing the rustling so if you redefine duck as like the rustling then yeah you got to you can explain that but that's not the same thing I it's like that's so my what I'm saying is on my view what we're aiming to explain is the actual thing and that's um right so I claim the actual I say the actual feel of car driving resides in everything I do the the wind rustling in my the wind blowing in my hair the

1:22:23 things I do when I press the accelerator I say the field of car driving is not a brain State yeah but each component of that is each component of that thing that you're discussing is related to the brain in a certain way and for example the feeling of the hair being blown in the wind we can trace that to a representation let's say in the semata sensory cortex and then if we stimulate that part of the of the brain we get a sensation related to that body area um exactly exactly wrong

1:22:58 that's exactly wrong it is okay ex I said exactly the other way I'd say that what we mean when we say that we have a uh the feel of driving a car is that we're doing certain things we're pressing The Brak we're stopping at the red light uh and so on uh it's not what we mean is not that we have our brains being activated in this way or that way and and and and the advantage of my view is that I can explain why car driving

1:23:33 feels more similar to uh tractor driving than it does to Bicycle driving because the things that you do can be can be in in natural language related whereas if you were to look in the brain to explain why motorcycle riding is more similar to if you looked in the brain to explain why tractor driving is more similar to car driver driving than bicycle riding uh you'd be hard put you know you've got these thousands of millions of neurons and you would never figure it out and

1:24:07 and and and also from one brain to another there would be completely different explanations you'd have to give you're just so that's a very complicated experience if you look at simpler experiences like color there is some reason to think that the neural activity associated with seeing red is more similar to the neural activity associated with seeing green than it is to the neural activity associated with seeing um uh gray or uh Brown um so that there the whereas the physical stimula

1:24:40 there aren't these resemblances there um and of course you know so it turns out that that's actually false the best way to explain what what colors feel like is is much more complicated and is is highly uncorrelated to neural activities that if you look at our paper with Filip puno we have some references uh about that uhuh um okay you cannot yeah it's an interesting empirical question okay so I didn't know about that that you think

1:25:12 that there's reason to doubt that um okay so um but but any rate though oh I the the kind of point that I'm trying to get at is just whether what we're trying to explain is a property of the organism itself namely that there's something that it's like and then explain the particular ways so even if you interpret it your way and you say it's not in terms of brain states there still is something that it's like for you to be driving the car to have the wind in your hair and there's going to be some physical state which is act uh which is you know

1:25:46 present when you have those experiences and I still think that you owe an explanation of why it's associated in the way that it is now your your your strategy is to say no I want to redefine it simply as just being that activity but it does seem to me as though you've left out the primary thing which we start off trying to explain which is the the the field but I I I thought that in my Frontiers article I satisfactorily explained or I was approaching an explanation of why people say they that there's something it's

1:26:20 like yeah but even if you have all those things you still have the question of why does it feel the way it does to have those things that what you POS it well that's what yeah you have those things about the degree of control that explains why people say there's something it's like and then you have the sensory motor laws themselves that distinguish between red and green or between hard and soft which explain why they look red rather than green or hard rather than soft so I can explain both why people say there something it's like at all and I can also explain why the

1:26:53 things are like the way they are why red looks red rather than green so I can explain both aspects I mean I haven't really heard an explanation except for you saying we'll redefine what we mean by these things and then we get an explanation you tell me what you mean by what what do you mean by there is something it's like to see to feel red I mean the redness of the red um no no not the redness yeah what what it's like to have the red there is something it's like rather than nothing

1:27:24 to see the rid to see anything or to hear or whatever to experience what do you mean by that um what I mean by it is the thing which is in common between every experience that I have that's conscious so when I hear a sound and when I see a color there's there difference in terms of the sound and the color but what they share is that there's something that is like from my point of view um what what do you mean by that what do you you mean by that why why do you say there's something it's like rather than

1:27:59 nothing because I'm kind of just directly I mean I think you have to start from there you're kind of just directly acquainted with it from their first person point of view but that doesn't work I'm sorry as a scientist I can't accept that but it does I mean you have to say something you can say well I I am directly acquainted with it not only that but my friends and relations and everybody else would agree with me in saying that indeed there is something it's like and then I say to you okay I accept that you all say that there is something it's like but I as a scientist

1:28:31 I have to figure out I have to explain it and I'm trying to explain it in my Frontier paper I try and say well what might people actually mean when they say that there's something it's like rather than nothing and I think I've made progress in doing it there's the modal issue there's the there's the there's the imposing there's the uh uh and then there are the the in the intramodal differences there uh there are all these aspects which I think I can approximate

1:29:05 by uh from my sensory motor point of view where somebody looking in the brain is never going to be able to do very much because first of all people just being Satisfied by saying oh well we all all agree that there's something it's like but we can't Define what we mean we know it intimately but we can't what we mean that is scientifically unproductive I'm not sure how though because well we we can agree that we're not trying to Define it at least I would say that you can't Define it you have to kind of just point to it um in a certain

1:29:39 way uh but it's associated with certain brain States and we have evidence that links the two so we can still do science um I don't see why it's anti-scientific or something like that to say that there's the the take the subjective first personal component of reality seriously it's it's it's going to be very difficult to do any empirical experiments uh to test any Theory where you're trying to show the existence of something that that you cannot by definition

1:30:12 defined if you if you if you say that part of what you mean by there something it's like is that you cannot talk about it you cannot Define it more precisely okay well then do science about that is hopeless um well we we can say give examples of it and I think it's often the case in science where you start with something as an example of something and try to figure out what it is uh this is a kind of more extreme version of that um we we can point to it from our own first person and say this is the sort of

1:30:45 thing that we mean the the redness of red the painfulness of pain the uh angerness of anger whatever the case may be and then we look to see like okay so how are these things like what's a good theory of these types of things you have one account um there are other accounts so then we go about our theorizing but it seems like that we want to start with the recognition that before you do any Theory there's something there that we want to explain whereas like what you're doing is the like the heterophenomenology the denit kind of

1:31:17 move where you say look I don't explain that I can't explain but what we can explain is what people say about it how they the reactive attitudes they have the sort of things that are characterizable in third personal terms um and I'm not even denying that Consciousness can't be characterized in third personal terms but I'm just saying that there's you got to start like part of the data that we have starts with the first person and to deny that I think you're missing kind of the thing that we're looking for I I'm I'm I'm saying that you have to assemble statistics about what

1:31:50 everybody agrees from a firstperson point of view I'm not denying that first person's views should not be should should be used I'm saying you can't just take one person's view you have to take first person views from a number of people and if they all say yeah well I I think there's something it's like well then you can take that seriously and then you can try and explain why they say that and that's exactly what I do in right in my but it isn't one explanation that they have that there is something that is like for them that there is phenomenal

1:32:22 Consciousness I said one explanation would be that they it is the way they think it is that there is phenomenal Consciousness I don't know what you mean by phenomenal conscious people say there that they have feels they say red is red and different from Green if you want to call that phenomenal Consciousness yes and and I don't deny that well I want to talk about the thing that they that causes them to say that the thing that they have which in response to they say things like oh and you know there's something that is like

1:32:55 for me well that's just I really see it's very interesting listen this discussion has been very interesting for me and it just goes I still it's to me it's a very much like you know the the question of vital Spirit you know uh science brances by redefining things like life I think people who post

1:33:29 postulated a vital Spirit had a view of life which is very similar to The View you have about Consciousness you think it's something extra that's added over and above what people do whereas now Modern Biology thinks life is not is is just a collection of capacities it's a collection of capacities that certain systems have to inter with their environment and the idea that there's something over and above this namely a vital Spirit has been simply abandoned and I think that there was

1:34:03 tremendous tremendous uh uh uh metaphysical uh difficulty with that with that idea and even in the 1950s apparently uh Crick was saying in a lecture that uh that that that half of the audience still believe were were still ultimately vitalists yeah and I think same is happening with consciousness and it's well I don't think it's a spirit I just think it's a real thing I mean so if you don't think life is a real thing I guess um you know that that's a separate issue but uh I think life is a real

1:34:37 thing um it's the natural kind that exists uh we we've the difference between life and Consciousness is that life it was always kind of clear that we were trying to explain some set of capacities or functions the debate was over whether or not they could be done by a physical system the vitalists had thought about it the way you're thinking about Consciousness I think they thought that there were these capacities but they thought they could not be explained by physical uh interactions and that there was something extra namely vital Spirit yeah except I'm a physicalist so I'm not I

1:35:12 mean um I'm not thinking that there's something exra I just think that there's something real which is uh not extra but it's a a real thing which we start with and most of our theorizing begins with the recognition that we have experience that there's something that is like to be us and that we can differentiate between our experiences in terms of what it's like for us so I don't think it's like vitalism at all um it's like saying some things are alive and other things are not alive uh the the vitalist thought that you're right that you could have

1:35:46 all the mechanisms and that they're still wouldn't be something that was alive um so that's the opposite of what I'm saying what I'm saying is that you could have the physical state there there would be Consciousness we don't need something extra uh I'm saying we don't have an explanation for it but it's likely that we could have one um at some future date there's no reason to expect that we wouldn't ever be able to provide some kind of account but that also your own view seems to have the same kind of result which is that if you want to say well why is this particular sensory mode or contingency linked with

1:36:20 that experience the only thing you can do is say well it's defined that way you know you can't there's no like derivation from independent principles that would allow you to see it so that you kind of ultimately have to admit that yeah the hard problem can't be solved um uh even with your preferred like alternative so you're you're sort of telling me that what it's like to drive a car is consists in all the things you drive of a car you don't disagree with that but you say

1:36:54 that there is an extra something it's like uh which cannot be at the moment physically explained is that it I don't think it's extra I think that there's a state of the body or brain or maybe it's involved in the activity of relation between you and the world I mean I you could be open to different ways of thinking about its nature um but that there is something that it's like for you to to drive the car my own view would be that you could recreate exactly what it was like by just stimulating the brain in which case it seems to me that

1:37:31 um the brain being in those States is what's importantly involved in you having that experience and probably all of that you could agree with it's only once you start calling them representations and try to label this stuff that you start seem like you you you do disagree well I disagree with using the word representation but I also disagree with saying that the brain is the cause of these and that the that the that the the what it's like is emerging from the brain yeah but I didn't say that though what I what I just said was that if you

1:38:04 reproduce that brain activity then you get the experience yeah but you're looking in the well I agree on that yeah that's what I'm saying you could agree with yeah exactly yeah but so what is our difference then um well you're still looking for something because you you you say that this what it's like uh needs extra explanation whereas I saying well what more is there to explain if you tell me what you really mean by saying that this is extra what

1:38:36 it's like well I'll try and give you an explanation in terms of sensory motor laws but you don't seem to want to tell me what this what it's like is like so I can't I can't exercise my my theory you you you just throw your hands up in the air and you say well it really feels like there's something extra um but I just can't explain it if I I I have the feeling that if you if you really look in detail at what you mean by by saying that there's an extra

1:39:10 what it's like well then uh then you you'll you'll realize that each of those things that you mean can be uh can be explained in terms of sensory motor laws like I but what you explain with the sensory motor laws is like why you behave or say something but it seems like you could still have like a completely different experience associated with each one of those sensory motor laws unless you just by definition say well what I mean by this experience is just acting this way but short of doing that it's not clear

1:39:45 like what what why you couldn't have like arbitrary associations with the experiences and the sensory motor contingencies which is why it does you're right you're right in saying that I'm defining by defining what I mean by a feel as things that you do uh I obviate that difficulty you're right it's a definition but it's just like it's just like uh you know uh the way science advances is by defining terms so you

1:40:19 know helmoltz specified what was meant by the notion of Force and and and and managed to completely revolutionize modern physics whereas before people were using the word force in arbitrary ways they used it to mean power or energy or what we mean today by force and once you become very precise about what you mean by a term well then you can do science and I think that if you try and be precise about this idea of what it's like then and that's what I tried to do in

1:40:54 this last article I wrote uh I I think I demonstrated in the article that you use that definition then then then you can really make progress and you can make predictions I mean I guess that was sort of the last thing I was gonna since you brought that up the last thing I was going to say about your view is that I think that a lot of the things that you say are predictions of your view are compatible with other views as well so it's not you know epicycles was also an alternative view to elliptic orbits there's always an alternative

1:41:27 view yeah but if there are several current like views that people are interested in and they all kind of agree that there's an interpretation of a certain phenomenon then you can't really use that phenomenon as evidence for any of the views though would you agree with that that's always the case in science what makes a theory what makes a theory useful is that it's productive makes predictions and it provokes new uh directions of of scientific activity and that's what happened with change

1:42:00 blindness it's because I had this view that Vision was not as rich as it seemed in fact it was the very view that I'm taking about what seeing is seeing is a mode of interaction with the environment is not representing something in the brain it's that view that gave rise to the whole literature on change blindness M yeah and I mean I I of course you know there's an alternative interpretation of change blindness which is that it's not really a kind of

1:42:33 blindness but it's a Memory failure or something like that so that you maybe did have a an experience of the thing which was changing with just without you being able to notice or or be aware of it um that's not incompatible with my view it's not incompatible no I mean the fact is you have information available in the brain okay and you can exploit that information now or later and whether you're conscious of something what you mean by being conscious is currently paying attention

1:43:07 to that and making use of it in your present or future Behavior right so whether that information is in some memory that you're not that you were not previously accessing or whether it's some in some other circuits doesn't m make any difference but the point is the change blindness is a consequence of the of the fact that uh we do not we are not simultaneously paying attention to everything in the visual field we have

1:43:40 to what our impression of richness and and and uh and uh colorfulness and of the whole visual field spread out in front of us is caused by us qu qu entially having the possibility of of accessing that information in the visual world or possibly in our memories or in some short-term memory banks in in lowlevel Vision but the main underlying I would say metaphysical idea that seeing is not

1:44:15 activating an internal representation seeing is the activity of interacting with the world that was what predicted the change blindness phenomenon and and uh and there are alternative explanations that are still possible okay but it it was a productive idea and I think that my ideas about what it's like you know like in the Frontiers articles makes predictions about pain for example uh uh and uh and it made

1:44:49 predictions about sensory substitution and stuff so it's a productive scientific approach very much like Modern Biology the abandonment of the vital Spirit yeah I mean I don't know why you couldn't abandon the vital Spirit without adopting your view as well but I mean I'm not against the view I I like it I I guess my main issue and what started all this was trying to understand how it explains the the heart problem or gets rid of it but now I think I understand that the the way that you do that is by sort of acknowled in

1:45:23 that as the hard problem stands it it can't be solved and that it has to be redefined and um part of my push back has been to try to argue for the non redef I don't think we need to redefine things in order to uh to to to to to to challenge the the heart problem so but I but I recognize that your point of view is a good one and that it's interesting um I I still just think that there's something that's left out uh which is even evident in your theory

1:45:57 about the color so if you have three of these primary colors um why think that one is like red and one is like green and one is like yellow as opposed to something else um it doesn't seem that the theory answers it no it doesn't at the moment although you know the theory says red is different from green and blue because the dimensionality of the space of possible interaction with red is one dimensional whereas it's two-dimensional for green and blue and yellow so so it suggests that red really is the simplest color compared to the

1:46:33 other two so it it it sort of partly explains why red really seems more special even than the than the special colors of green blue and yellow okay so that's a first step but I admit you know it doesn't explain why red looks particularly red rather than green you know right so that's why I was saying it seems like you get a similar kind of explanatory Gap at the end of the day sorry um but so I I recognize that I

1:47:16 can't keep you here forever um so we've talked about a lot of stuff but I'm wondering if there's anything which hasn't come up would you want to get the final uh bring something up again or resumate or have a final word or something like that at the end no I think I think this discussion has been very I should say difficult for me and typical of the discussions I've had with other philosophers I was hoping to that you would be able to explain to me why I

1:47:50 never managed to get across to anybody with this Theory which to me seems you know really the solution to the hard problem and um but I have been trying to get that across I mean that the fact that it seems like it leaves something out I think is the reason so so let's summarize that you think it leaves something out because you refuse to redefine what you mean by feel you you want to keep your definition of f which is that it is something going on in the brain um no no I don't think that I

1:48:28 think that my definition of f is that there's something that it's like and then I I think that you can associate that with what's going on the brain that's a separate step but it it could work out okay okay so you say so so you say say that again without talking about the brain you say that there's something extra which is something it's like but I've explained something it's like in my Frontiers article yeah but that's what I'm saying I don't think you have done because you still have these questions about um well why is it like that as opposed to something else so tell me tell me so what do you

1:49:04 want to know what more have I got to explain about what it's like let's take some particular experience the squishing of a the smooth the softness of the sponge I I think I can explain everything it's like to squish a sponge the to feel the softness what more is there to be explained um what is like part to the part where what what do you mean by that you can't you can't experiential quality what you mean so what do you mean by the EXP so so the experiential quality so what do you mean by saying it has experiential

1:49:37 quality that's exactly what I address in my Frontiers article what do you mean by something being an experience one thing you mean is that it imposes itself on you and I have an explanation for that another thing that you mean by by having an experiential quality is the fact that it has a kind of spread out before you quality and I've tried to go into everything people might mean by what they say when they say that it has an experiential quality what more do you want well why it fails the way that it does well I told feels soft rather than

1:50:13 hard okay what do you want to know why it feels soft rather than what what do you mean by rather than hard yeah I told you why that is um if you ask yourself what you mean by hard and what you mean by Soft I can then it then then it exactly explains the difference but but I don't think that's what I mean by it what I mean is that there's a particular experiential subjective feeling associated with squishiness so so what is it it's what it feels like to squish things but what is it what is it I've told you what I

1:50:47 think it might be if you have other ideas well it's like the texture of the sponge the right okay let's talk about the texture let's talk about the texture okay because when you squish a sponge there's one thing that makes it soft which is when you press it squishes but the texture is something different the texture can be rough or smooth okay it can be sticky or smooth right what do you mean by rough what you mean by rough is when you move your thumb along it there's a kind of vibration it's not smooth because when you move your thumb along it it's so there again I can

1:51:21 explain exactly what you mean by rough versus smooth okay what else but what I mean is what the way it feels when there's that vibration um a particular subjective ex quality of rubbing my thumb feeling the contact and the um yes so I think every if you try and be more precise about every single thing that you mean by having this quality or that every single one of those things that you that you mean is accessible through my sensory approach and there's a very

1:51:54 very large number of them because the softness is not just the fact that when you press it squishes there's also as you say the the the the texture the lightness you know feathers you could say feathers or soft the meaning of soft is not entirely clear but everything you might want to say about softness I claim needs a scientific explanation and my wager is to say that I can go deeper and deeper and deeper into every single aspect that you might want to mention by using the sensory motor alls right but

1:52:27 it just seems that no matter what you say there's always going to be the question why doesn't it feel like hardness feels so if well don't you agree with me that that that that my argument is that that that what you mean by hardness is among other things the fact that it presses when it squishes how could it possibly feel hard if when you press it doesn't squish okay what I'm saying you could squish it and get the experience of it being hard perhaps if somebody did some brain implants Etc but then that would only be because

1:52:59 those brain implants simulated the phenomenon that would usually occur when if you press it squishes because ultimately the origin of of the feel lies not in the brain but in what you do that's what you mean by a feeli yeah I'm just not convinced that's what I mean so I I I agree it's part of what we mean that when you press it it squishes but there's a feeling associated with that and it seems sort of like that the whatever is whatever results in you having that feeling

1:53:35 there's a question about why it feels that way as opposed to feeling some other way which you haven't addressed all you've done is say well you behave in a certain way and that's what I mean by feeling but so so that if if you you are the Bold is in your cour because you have to say what you mean when you say that there's this extra this extra component it's like you're saying there's these qualia and I can't talk about them and as long as you keep talking about about this extra stuff that you can't describe scientifically well then obviously you can always hang

1:54:08 on to your theory but my claim is that you might as well give up because because whenever you come out and actually say what you mean then it'll turn out that that thing that you're talking about can be expressed in terms of everyday physical laws and you don't need that extra thing um yeah I mean I I guess I just come at it from a different point of view where it just seems like it's like you're going around saying here here's a bunch

1:54:41 of trees and you name each tree Alfred George Bob and then you're like see we don't need any Forest we we all we have is individual trees but of course there there's something that's there that also could be um that that could be accounted for which is the nature of how those things relate to the larger entity and so I agree that there is the doing and all that stuff but then there is the experience um so what do you mean by The Experience sorry what what do you mean when you say there's this how do you

1:55:14 know that so tell me how do you know that you are experiencing what do you mean when you say you're having an experience uh well there's a sense in which kind of having is knowing though that just having the experience is kind of knowing it uh it's it's it's um something I'm immediately seemingly immediately acquainted with I would say the experiential quality of the what's happening to me at this moment what it's like do an experience how do you an experience rather than just

1:55:49 knowledge um well I think having knowledge is a kind of experience yeah but it has a different quality right yeah what we mean by yeah so how do you know what this extra thing that you're talking this what it's like okay well I don't think it's extra it's just a thing okay but what what do you mean by what by having it what is it it's a subjective first person what it's likeness What You Know by having it and there's not really much more you can say than that which you you kind of just

1:56:22 assume other people have it too and then they can point to their experiences and say what's that thing whatever it is well if if if that's as far as you can go well then you can't do much science about it well you no no you can just postulate that it occurs in people and that there's some extra substance but since since you can't describe it you can never test whether people this person is having it or or that person is not having it well there's lots of methods for indirectly measuring things we we can't you know we have dark matter and dark energy not

1:56:55 because of direct observation but because of indirect observations and so we can still theorize about things that are not directly accessible to us um and Consciousness is directly accessible from our point of view I directly access my Consciousness so each of us has that at least access to it and there are reliable correlations uh report is you know you're right that's really our best method but there are no report paradigms and there are ways to try what we try to do is take the best overall summation of the total evidence and construct an account of what's going

1:57:29 on on the basis of that um so I don't think we need to be have certainty or rule out all possible counter objections but uh certainly that's what we're trying to do you can do that even if Consciousness is you know the way that I'm saying that it is you don't need to redefine it in order to um take it seriously although if you want to that's fine I think there's an argument to be had here I just don't think anything forces us to to do it well I think that I think my my

1:58:03 Approach consisting of abandoning the idea that this is this extra magical what it's like stuff and trying to actually get down scientifically to qu qualifying what people mean when they say that there's something it's light that this that the the that the uh scientific uh project of trying to actually get down and nail down what people mean when they say what it's like is a project which is worth pursuing yeah I

1:58:37 agree and uh so I think it's isn't it related to what chus calls The Meta Meta problem of the meta hard problem essentially I'm saying my purpose is to to explain everything that can be said about the meta problem but of course you can continue believing in some extra thing which by definition cannot be described namely qualia if if if that's what this extra what it's like is well then you know it's like poetry it cannot be

1:59:11 subjected to Scientific analysis but it's not productive from a scientific point of view but if it's a part of reality then you need to take account of it so the question is like when people say reality is what can be treated by science if people talk about it then you can you can you can you can uh you can analyze what people say and that's what I've done in my Frontiers article I analyze what it might mean to say that there's something it's like yeah and and it also might mean something else I just

1:59:44 think that there is actual a matter of fact here um that things either are the way you say they are or they the way that that I'm saying that they are or some other way still but that the there is a fact of the matter about whether there is phenomenal Consciousness in the sense that I mean to use it um and I mean I know that you know there there's people like dennet who think there's no fact of the matter and that's one reason not to think that it's there I just disagree with that sort of argument from the coining qualia paper I don't think that it establishes what what he thinks that it does um and I'm not arguing for

2:00:18 a qualia if what you mean is private ineffable uh qualities Etc but there certainly are things that seem to be that way um whether they are actually that way is is a separate question but I don't think I I personally don't see how you can deny that you start with your first person experience and then you work your way out from there um so and then there's what people say and what you say but part of what people say is I'm having this experience and there's something

2:00:51 that it's like for me to have it so if you really wanted to explain everything you would want to explain what makes that true and not just that they say it though that's exactly my project to explain why people say I'm having that experience and what it's like and I think I'm managing better than people who shrug their shoulders and say these things are generated by the brain we're not struggling our shoulders we're saying we need a theory of it um so we don't have it yet but you know

2:01:25 that's like saying you know what mass and energy are identical to someone who doesn't understand relativity physics they don't have any way of of latching on to what you're saying so we could be in a similar case um I agree there's an explanatory promiser notee here um but I just don't see how taking your point of view advances us on the project it reorients the project and and that's why I'm I was kind of wondering like is it really the sensory motor view that's doing that or is it this kind of Quasi illusionism that you have so it's not

2:01:59 really the sensory motor component that's doing the work because you could still have a hard problem if you took if you weren't an Illusionist even with the sensory motor view but it's really this illusionism that's doing the dissolving or reorienting of the hard problem so in that case you could have many different kinds of views why the illusionism I first of all I'm not sure I'm an Illusionist I mean well I said quasi illusionism yeah I'm not sure whether I'm a quasy or I agree that people say that there's

2:02:34 something it's like and that and that there are differences in similarities between the their different experiences and I my project is to explain exactly that and to explain what they say about them so uh so and and and and I don't know why you say that it's the illusionism that is the that's doing the work what's doing the work is to look not in the brain for an explanation but in what people mean when they say that they uh that they're having an experience well that's basically the illusionism bit because what you're

2:03:08 saying is we need to reorient it from the thing Consciousness itself to what people say about Consciousness and if you take the meta problem approach where all you're trying to explain is what people say about Consciousness then that's compatible with Consciousness not really existing um or with it existing so uh but you but it's only if it doesn't exist that you actually get the explanation that you're going for I don't understand that for me when I say what people say about

2:03:41 Consciousness I just mean everything that can be said or measured uh about Consciousness I'm just doing science I'm looking at as a phenomenon uh that that that can be addressed by science that's what I'm trying to explain yeah all science all science ever does science does not tell you what really exists in the world science just tells you tells tells you how to tell a good story about what people say about what happens in the

2:04:14 world there is no science does not give you any guarantee about the existence of anything right but but first person experience does it it tells you that Consciousness exists no first person experience when it is confirmed by numerous people is an interesting scientific fact okay uh and that has to be explained I don't think I need to con have it like conferred with other people in order for

2:04:48 it to exist um I'm simply saying that there's Consciousness we have it and then we want to understand it um so science is a way to understand things I think that we could understand Consciousness from a scientific point of view um I don't think that we do now but I think it's possible I'm not a phys A non-ph physicalist or a dualist or a psychist or anything like that I'm I'm open to those kind of I I'm not I'm kind of as you proba guess more of an the identity

2:05:20 Theory type boat but of course that's exactly the opposite view that you want to push on me but it's a kind of physicalism at least but all I'm saying is that there's a there's some data which comes from the first person which involves Consciousness and what it's like um and then there's also all this other stuff about what people say and how they behave and so forth but we need both sources of data whereas like you just want it seems to me you want to limit us to just one of those sources which is just the the third person stuff and not take seriously the first person no that's not no that's not true I take

2:05:55 seriously the first person as soon as it as a source of data as a source of data yeah yeah okay that's what science does that's what science does well it seemed like you were saying that it didn't um because it's not scientific if it's like you know you take Consciousness seriously as a real thing we can be wrong about what we what we experience and you know I believe in heterophenomenology there whatever I

2:06:28 think that's what it's called and I I think that uh the fact that everybody agrees that there's something it's like has to be explained so if you want to call that I don't know if you want to call that first person or third person but the fact that everybody agrees on this you know if there was just One Lunatic who said this well then you wouldn't try and do science about it the fact that everybody agrees um makes it a thing that you have to explain and uh and and that's what we mean by Consciousness right I mean there's nothing extra than over and above what

2:07:05 people claim there is right well I mean that way to me is a little bit dangerous because like you can make the same Claim about foot about Bigfoot um what I said you could if you like you can make the same kinds of claims about Bigfoot that all is about Bigfoot Bigfoot yeah Bigfoot what's Bigfoot oh he's uh you know the the part man part gorilla ape um you don't know about Bigfoot H the the

2:07:40 yeti oh yeah uhuh so there's a bunch of beliefs that people have about this this being but there is probably no such being so in order to explain everything that you want to explain about the yeti you explain what people believe about it and how they got those beliefs but if the yeti is a real existing object then explaining just those things is not enough so I'm I'm I'm trying to take the point of view that Consciousness is not like the yeti we need to do more than to merely

2:08:12 explain what people think about it we need to take account of the actual thing itself it's more like um a planet in that sense that we're trying to infer to orbit from the effects around it well that's not incompatible with a scientific approach I mean science causes says things are really they kind of as a shortcut a scientist will say the electron exists okay but I mean the notion of existence there is a result of you know long scientific investigation

2:08:45 coming to coming to eventually use the term in a in a in a consistent uh way and uh and then we we we shouldn't really say the electron exists we don't we don't know anything about about what really is is there in the universe universe might have 21 d well people say physicists say it might have 21 Dimensions you know might be something completely different from what we experience yeah so I mean do I don't think this distinction between what

2:09:18 people say and what exists uh should be made because science does not really make should not make that distinction when I when I'm trying when I'm trying to explain Consciousness uh um and when I say I'm trying to explain what people say about Consciousness what I mean is doing precisely what a scientist would do which is to explain everything that can be said about about Consciousness and uh I don't think that

2:09:51 could anything worth discussing in addition to that so I mean when I say I'm explaining what people say about Consciousness I really mean what science can be done about Consciousness so I'm rejecting qualia because because qualia by their definition cannot be treated by Consciousness by by science yeah yeah listen this conversation is going around in circles isn't it yeah we and it's exactly the same

2:10:26 conversation I have with most philosophers and nobody seems to be willing to take the metaphysical shift that I'm suggesting which is to redefine what they mean by feel so that it is just a mode of interacting with the world and and taking that redefinition I think solves a lot of problems and and and avoids infinite

2:11:02 discussions uh philosophical discussions and it also avoids making scientific uh investigations which are in my opinion useless it's like people looking in the brain for a filling in mechanism that fills in the blind spot looking in the brain for something that generates Consciousness is a category mistake Consciousness is not generated by the brain rather no I should say a scientific view that adopts the view that that that we should consider it'll

2:11:36 be more scientifically productive to abandon the view that there is something that is being produced by the brain instead science suggests that it would be much more productive to abandon that just like we abandoned The Ether hypothesis and we AB abandon the vital spirit and we just say well what we mean by Consciousness is all the capacities that uh we uh we might be referring to when we use the word Consciousness there is no single thing called Consciousness there's just a whole lot of things you

2:12:09 can do and they have different properties and there's no mystery whatsoever involved and I think it's scientifically more productive okay well on that note I think that's a pretty good summary of your view um I do want to thank you for taking this time you might not have convince me or are you but nonetheless I thought this was a good conversation and I did learn a lot by rereading your book of course I read it uh a while ago but I reread it and your subsequent paper so I do think your approach is interesting and worth

2:12:42 considering um so I'll put a link to the book and all that stuff so that people can check it out um but thanks thanks Kevin I really appreciate it I I really enjoyed speaking with you well thanks for your patience and I'm uh I'm really um I'm I'm going to there's a few philosophers who who I think would be willing to take my point of view what what I would like to do is let them listen to our discussion here and see if they could perhaps

2:13:14 summarize the or pinpoint the real point of disagreement because I think we've been turning around in circles around the real point of disagreement I think when you said it's The Illusionist aspect that's doing the work I don't think that's true uh um I think there really is a meta a metaphysical difference between your view in my view which in my view is analogous to the vital Spirit or the or the ether hypothesis you know where one really has to completely abandon a particular view

2:13:49 about what experience is uh in order to adopt my view but as soon as you adopt the view you immediately see the scientific Advantage so I think I think it'd be worth Su getting a professional philosopher yeah toiz our discussion here send my way I'd happy to I'd be happy to have them on and we can even have a group discussion if you want to come on with them and or or I could just talk to them or whatever but yeah I'm open to having more discussions um you know a part of what I have this Channel and what I do what I'm doing

2:14:21 here is because I want to expose myself to all the different views on Consciousness and think about it from all these different perspectives um so even though I you know I I was asking some questions doesn't mean that I don't think there's something valuable or worthwhile in the way that you're approaching these issues so I quite the opposite I think it is valuable and very interesting so that just just one more point I think like take the question of the what Charmers calls The Meta hard problem okay okay MH now I think what I did in the Frontiers article about what

2:14:55 it's like really is productive first steps towards solving the metah hard problem okay and I'm surprised that nobody seems to realize this okay so I'll be sure to put a link to that paper but yeah the metah hard problem of course is explain why we think the things or say the things that we do about Consciousness and that's of course an important thing that we want to explain which is what you've been saying basically is your what a large part of your project yeah yeah very good okay well thanks very much and again thanks for

2:15:27 your patience my pleasure not to I'm sorry not to really understood I really can't understand I've got myself into a a kind of point of view about things which make it impossible for me to understand certain things that that people like you say it's just kind of turned into some kind of alien yeah well I mean when you yeah have an entrenched theory on both sides it's sometimes it's hard for me to understand but that's why I like having these kinds of conversations because do help you try to bust out and see things from a different

2:16:01 point of view um so I I think you you did a good job um gave me a lot to think about but all right hang out for just a second I'll say bye after