July 18, 2013 • 40 mins
What is consciousness? Can we test for it? And how to we rectify the seemingly disparate realities of physical brain and immaterial mind? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie consider the hard problem of human consciousness and the philosophic warnings of the New Mysterians.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Duns. Julie,
do you ever just stop and think for a few moments?
I imagine you, dude, we all do um just start
(00:24):
to stop and think about your thinking, and stop and
think about your your being meta thinking. Yeah, bit, you know,
you're just you're you're setting there and maybe you're just
doing something you do every day. You're almost an autopilot.
And then you stop and you think, and it's like
and you realize, I'm this individual in this homined species.
It's evolved to this state where I'm I'm standing here
(00:45):
in this artificial structure, uh, that other people built for me,
other people designed for me, standing on the backbones of
other designers. I'm I'm wearing clothes for some reason, and
I'm loading a dish dishwasher, and I'm thinking about my thoughts. Yes,
I mean, how you could not work on this podcast
and not have this sort of self awareness to that degree?
(01:08):
I have to say, because of everything that we are researching,
sometimes it is a matter of just being really overly
aware of your conscious and what you're doing, and wondering
if the thing that you're doing at that very moment
is even uh something that is free will, or you're
doing it because you're subconsciously colored by some other experience. So, yes,
(01:30):
and I think it's fascinating, this idea of consciousness because,
as David Eagleman says, we're the only species that that
takes our own operating system and then sort of looks
at it, like the operating system comes up and sort
of looks at the screen and says, what are you?
What am I? So we're talking about we're talking about
the operating system in the screen. We're obviously talking about
(01:52):
this mind brain problem. Yes, yeah, the mind brain problem,
the mind body problems. I feel like mind brain problem
is more of an accurate description, because what we're talking
about here is, of course that, uh, inside of this
squishy meat body, we have this physical brain. This this
this brain that is a part of a part of
(02:13):
our body, all right, and out of this brain, this
brain manifests the mind. The mind, of course, is our thoughts.
The things that happened to us every day are wanting
to do something, our experience of doing something, are wishing
we had not done something. All of these things that
come together into this storm of consciousness. Yeah, because on
(02:34):
the one hand, you have this very concrete, uh, three
pounds of gelatinous goose stuff right stuff cock. The neuroscientist
calls it the most complex object in the known universe,
right because it's composed of roughly one billion neurons that
each electrically spike in response to outside stimulus. You have
all this going on, and then you have the concept
of mind or the concept of self or self awareness
(02:56):
that you know that all these things are going on
outside of you and inside of you. Yes, so one
is not the other, but certainly one arises from the other. Yeah.
We study, we continue to study the brain NonStop. We
continue to study the mind. Psychologists or working neuroscientists or
working philosophers are working theologians, are working in in in
our own part and our own individual work. We're struggling
(03:19):
to sort of figure it all out. But we just
continue to to wrangle uh and and fail to comprehend
the psycho physical nexus between the two. And this is
where we get into the mind body problem. Um, we
work towards the answer, but we can't grasp it, not
yet and why is it important? Because to me it
(03:39):
is the holy grail of our existence. If we could
find the center of consciousness, if we could pinpoint it,
then we could somehow, we think, explain how it is
that we came to be here perhaps what it all means. Uh,
you know, it opens up this one door opens up
portals to too many other doors of our existence. Yeah,
(04:01):
I mean, our consciousness is our experience of the world
is our experience. It is it is us so in
a sense, is figuring out what we are really on
on a deeper level than pure organism. I mean, and
it's easy. This is a question that trails off at
all the ends into into various uh less scientific fields
as well. I mean, it's easy to spill over. I
(04:21):
mean because because again it's the It's the subject of
not only neuroscience and uh and end of and of psychology.
It's also the stuff of philosophy and theology. It's stuff
that we've wrangled with since our ability to to question
what consciousness is and to grasp some notion or at
least grasp after the question of consciousness. Okay, so before
(04:42):
we use an overview of various philosophies behind consciousness or
ideas about consciousness. Let's talk about something called a mirror test,
which you actually have a video on right now, Yes,
which highly enough does not feature a mirror. But but uh,
but yeah, So we're always trying to figure out what
kind just his obviously and one of the hallmarks of
(05:03):
consciousness one of the things that we can say, yes,
this is definitely on the list when we try and
figure out the attributes of human consciousness self awareness, because
again I looked at the ideas. I look in a mirror,
and what do I see? I say, Hey, that's me.
Who's that handsome devil? Or who's that weirdo with with
the ketchup on his face? You know, we we see
(05:23):
that that that's us and uh and at the very
least we're it makes us think about ourselves. Right. So
you have this mirror test, which is again a measure
of self awareness. This is developed by Gordon Gallup Jr.
In the seventies and he used it to ascertain consciousness
and animals as well as identify when children were entering
(05:44):
into the mirror stage of self awareness. So the idea
is you put a mark on an animal, yeah, on
the face somewhere where they can't see it without a mirror,
and they also can't feel it, So like you couldn't
just like stab him with something because they're going to
feel it, right, So you'd have to use a little subterrafugia. Right,
So presumably they look into the mirror before the mark
(06:04):
is on them, right, and then they have the mark
on them, they turn and they look, and it's then
observed whether or not the animal is reacting in amanner
consistent with being aware that the mark is located on
their body. Are they turning around to get a better
angle on it? Are they seeing that something is awry
or amiss um? So, animals that have passed the mirror test,
(06:26):
we're talking about chimpanzees, Binobo's, orangatangs, dolphins, elephants, and possibly
even pigeons. Yeah, European magpies on the list. Yeah, So
of course this we've had an extensive conversations about personhoods.
We won't go into that. Um. If you're interested in
learning more about that, definitely check that out. But there's
this idea that consciousness exists not just in humans but
(06:48):
in another species, and it complicates things in a way. Yeah,
Like I mean one of the ones that I keep
coming back to is the octopi, which if you give
an octopus a straight up mirror tests, that going to
fail it because their brains have evolved almost entirely separately
from from the million brains. So they're they're not, as is,
clued into these visual to a visual understanding of the
(07:11):
world around them. Uh. They can reference a mirror, but
they don't see it as themselves. But then there are
a number of other tests that you can give an octopus,
and and you know, stuff like tool use and learning
and uh, and some other attributes begin to line up
to really make an argument for octopus consciousness. So it,
like a lot of this stuff, it comes down to
how are you going to measure it? How are you
(07:32):
going to and how are you going to judge the measurement? Well,
I mean the same thing with guerillas. They tend to
not look at each other in the eyes with themselves
in a mirror in the eyes because it's a sign
of aggressiveness. So they fail the test, even though they
probably have a conscious right as self awareness. Um, so
you're right, that's it's not a full proof way to
(07:53):
say definitively, this is what consciousness is at least in
this one aspect and the following species have it. So
he thought it was would be interesting to look at
a couple of brain mapping projects in the context of
this conversation, because the brain mapping projects which we talked
about before, like the Blue Brain project, Um, this is
(08:16):
this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human
brain and you could begin to see all these processes
happening inside of it. And uh, you know, much like
some of the fmr I technology that we talked about
in terms of crime and you know, trying to figure
out whether or not someone had committed a crime based
on what was going on in their hippocampus in their memory,
(08:39):
the same thing could happen in a sense where you
could begin to understand the mysteries of the human brain.
This idea of consciousness, like maybe this would manifest itself
in these projects. So we're talking about the Human Brain Project,
and this is an attempt to construct a massive computer
simulation of the Brainness is the European initiative and and
(09:00):
remark from is the coordinator of this. He's also the
Bluebrain guy. Yes, And then there's also this Brain Activity
MATT project and this is a decade long scientific effort
to examine the workings of the human brain. This is
what Obama back in I think April announced something like
a three billion UM budget against that. And so that
is this idea that you can build a comprehensive map
(09:21):
of its activity and try to do the same thing
for the brain that was done for the Human Genome project.
So we'll talk more about that later. But we are
so interested in the brain, how it works, and again
these mysteries that are wrapped up in it, including consciousness,
that we can't help but to to try to decode it.
(09:42):
All right, So let's back up just a little bit, um,
you know, just a few centuries or so, and talk
about some some various various philosophical ideas about what consciousness
is and uh and and how we're supposed to deal
with the with the mind body problem. And it's worth
the worth noting that so many of the philosophers were
gonna point out here they weren't only philosophers, they're also
(10:03):
also some of his mathematicians, biologists, just general men of science.
And then part of the questing after these answers involved
a multi disciplinary approach. Um. And these were. I should
also mention that these particular examples were brought up by
philosopher Column again. Uh this year's World Science Festival in
the Whispering Mind, the Enduring a conundrum of consciousness. Uh.
(10:25):
And we're gonna talk about McGain himself in a bit
as well. So let's go back to the days of
renetic arts. It's I think therefore I am. He was
a duelist. He saw the mind and body is separate.
He's had the essence of mind is thought and body
is an extension off it. Thoughts are not extended in space,
but the body is. Uh. There was leading Is born
in sixty six. He made this analogy of the mill. Okay,
(10:47):
if you walk through the meat of the brain, or
more likely, I guess just pod your hand around in it,
you wouldn't see thoughts. You'd only see electrochemical mechanisms. So
he stated that the mind exists invisible, but there's harmony
between mind and body. Uh. Then you had Thomas Huxley
born in and he compared the conscious mind and the
physical brain to a genie and a lamp. You rub
(11:08):
the you rub the lamp in this case the physical brain,
and out of it manifest this this uh ephemeral genie,
this consciousness. Okay, and uh, and so the the argument
that he's making here is that, uh, that we just
cannot equate the two because here we just have irritating
nervous tissue and here we have the wonders of human consciousness.
(11:30):
And Hutley was an epiphenomenalist, so he was a duelist,
but he saw the mind is kind of a byproduct
of the brain, uh, not necessary to the day to
day operations, but kind of a shadow cast by by
this by this organ which I think is very interesting
when we we think back to some of what we've
done about free will and about subconscious activities in the brain,
(11:50):
and this idea that that our experience of thought and
even body is kind of what happens above the surface
of a dark sea. And there's a lot that goes
on underneath the waves that we're not privy to, but
that's where most of the sausage is being made. Then
there's author Eddington born in two and he uh he
argued that consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness.
(12:13):
And then you have then you have some contemporary philosophers
worth any mentioning saw Crypti. He said that mind and
brain are not identical, and you can just look at pain.
If we look at pain as it's experienced in the brain, uh,
the scans and the neural activity, it's rather different from
the way we experience it. So we have we have
problems when we start trying to rate pain, like what
is what is a level seven pain? And there's some
(12:34):
efforts right now to try and do just this, but
but it's not as as simple as just saying what
did that hurt? How much did that hurts? That A
five or six and expecting that to pan out among
everyone's experience. It's the subjective nature of consciousness. And then
you had Nagel who are you? Said that to consciousness
cannot be reduced to the brain. And then finally Colin mcgainuh,
the new mysterianism guy, and we're gonna talk about him
(12:56):
in a bit. You know what, there's also this idea
that day different brain, right, I mean that there is
not this illusion that we have a stasis in both
our concept of ourselves, our self awareness in the world. Um,
this changes from day to day based on our experiences. UM.
Not to mention chemical changes in the brain. Yeah, our
(13:18):
mind changes constantly. We're we're not the same person we
were a year ago, five years ago. We're not necessarily
the same person we were yesterday and uh, and the
brain changes as well. A lot of the duellist arguments
are that the mind and brain are separate entities, but
that they are, that the mind can change the brain,
and the brain can change the mind. UM. I tend
(13:38):
to really like that, Like the idea of the of
the mind is the shadow cast by the brain. Um.
That one seems to resonate more with my own personal experience. Well,
especially when you look at something like the placebo effect.
We've talked about this before about how someone can take
the side effects, um, and they can take a cebo
drug and consider those side effects, right, the ramification who
(14:00):
you know, their self awareness, how they're going to operate
in the world with this knowledge that they could fall
asleep at the wheel or get hives or whatever other
side fact available to them, and then it manifests in
them physically. So here you have the brain and the
in the mind acting on each other. And it really
(14:20):
does blow the mind when you start thinking about it.
It's because and you can see where the problem of
resident rectifying these two things really grows and just becomes
increasingly difficult to wrap your mind around. All right, well,
let's take a quick break and when we get back,
we can begin at the beginning. When do we become
truly conscious? All right, we're back, and we are going
(14:54):
to talk about the darkness that comes before consciousness, right uh,
specifically in the womb. Uh uh. Neuroscientists Christoph coch or
Cock I believe, yes, yeah, And he was on this
panel at World Science and he's quite the firebrand he is.
He is so much fun to listen to and to watch.
Actually uh he is uh writing for Scientific American as well,
(15:17):
And in the article when does Consciousness Arising Human Babies?
He talks about something called the thalamo cortical complex and
he says this provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content,
and it begins to be put into place between the
two and the week of gestation, okay, within the womb.
And then he goes on to say that a lot
(15:38):
of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place
by the third trimester. But he says, because there's this idea, well,
you know, could could a fetus be conscious could have
some sort of awareness. He says that the fetus is
suspended in a warm and dark cave connected to the
placenta that pumps blood, nutrients, and hormones into its grow
(16:00):
body and brain. The fetus is asleep. So it's a
very interesting article. I encourage everybody to check it out,
but I just wanted to highlight a couple of points
from it. He goes on to detail the various ways
in which the fetus essentially is sedated within the womb,
and then he says the dramatic events attending delivery by
natural vaginal means cause the brain of the fetus to
(16:21):
abruptly wake up. The release from anesthesia and sedation that
occurs when the fetus disconnects from the maternal placenta arouses
the baby so that it can deal with its new circumstances.
It draws its first breath, wakes up, and begins to
experience life. Yeah, and it's it's pretty much the biggest
wake up of all time. Like it's really difficult to
(16:43):
even try and like put it in like adult human terms.
Like the closest thing I can think of is my
mind goes back to some of the recent experiments with
psilocybin that have been conducted where they're injecting individuals with psilocybin.
So there's like this blast off moment where they're just
suddenly experiencing intense psychedelic experience. Like that has got to
(17:04):
be at least similar to what's going on here, because
they're just going from zero to a hundred just like that.
Suddenly they are sensing the world. They are, in a
limited sense, seeing the world, and everything's just coming at
them there there, and they're they're they're unhooked from this
life support system that has previously sustained them. You know.
I couldn't help but think about the matrix. Yeah, yeah,
(17:27):
exactly when they're waking up out of that the tank,
right and ripping things out of canoe, Guiano reeves neck
right right, because otherwise they were just sitting there in
that in that sort of sedative um state, providing energy, right. Um.
So I did think it was interesting though that that
he talks about this, that cop talks about this emergence
(17:48):
into life and and and all the stimuli. And I
couldn't help but be reminded of cognitive psychologist Alice and
goth Nick And when she talks about the baby's brain
being completely soaked in neurotransmitters because everything matters. You know,
they don't have a neural pruning yet, and so they're
differently conscious from adults. And she makes the argument that
(18:08):
they are much more conscious than adults, which really kind
of puts a whole tale spin on this idea of
consciousness and self awareness. Of course, because if you give
them the test, the mirror test, it's eight months before
generally more or less eight months before they're going to
pass that thing. Right, they'll be interested in their image,
but they won't necessarily know that that's them staring back
(18:28):
at them. Um, we think, right, yeah, because earlier than that, though,
the ceiling fan is a big hit. I've been hanging
out with some baby afficiently and the ceiling fan is
apparently just amazing. It's like watching uh, it's it's like
the adult version of watching Baraka on an HD screen
with Blu Ray is just watching that ceiling fan go
around and around. You know, my daughter, when she was
(18:49):
an infant, was so interested in these trees. Um. I
don't know that they're crepe myrtles, but you know they're
very vertical trees. Outside of her windows. So when I
would feed her, she would just be absolutely engaged in this.
And then I learned later that the neurons that we
have in our visual cortex are much more dedicated to
the x y plane than diagonal, So it makes sense
(19:12):
that these really strong verticals appealed to children. Anyway, this
is a side note to consciousness here. Now we're talking
about the the the infant in the womb being asleep, um,
and in the course that instantly makes you think, well,
what are they dreaming about? Uh? Probably nothing, because one
of the studies we're looking at American and a psychologist,
David Folks, study the dreaming and cognitive development UH in
(19:35):
preschoolers and he believes preschoolers dreams are are generally static
and playing with no characters that move in act and
hardly any feelings or in no memories because what's to
be processed. I mean not to turn this into a
dream podcast, but the dream is a byproduct of cognition
and UH. And then to to look at preschoolers dreams
(19:57):
and there's like nothing going on. There's just not enough
deterial to process. But there is stimuli to be processed.
There is cognition in the womb because you have auditory
uh stimuli, and you do have light. Right. Um. I
guess you could to a degree say there's taste as well,
because you have the some of the molecules of taste
(20:18):
crossing over in the placenta. But anyway, the point is
that there's no context for it, right right, all right,
So back from dreams in the womb, back from the
explosive psychedelic experience of birth. Um, talking more about the
problem of consciousness. Now you can you can really divide
consciousness problems up into the easy problems of consciousness and
(20:39):
then the really hard problem of consciousness. Now, Uh, if
I may, I'll just run through the easy problems of
consciousness for us real quick. Um. The ability to discriminate, categorize,
and react to environmental stimuli. All right, we can do that.
We can do that. I just didn't now. Uh. The
integration of information by a cognitive system. I've got information
coming in from three D ways. Like an individual is
(21:02):
telling me one thing, but their face is saying another.
How am I supposed to interpret to interpret that into
a general idea of what's going on? Um? The reportability
of mental states. You know, you can talk about how
you feel and how you feel. You that you feel
the ability of a system to access its own internal states.
I'm aware of how I'm feeling. The focus of attention.
(21:23):
I can focus my attention on this, that or the other. Uh.
Sometimes given the right amount of coffee. Uh. The deliberate
control of behavior. I'm not just a self moving soul.
I I am. It's just caught in the river of actions.
I can actually think about what I'm doing. I think
you're tamping down right now, the fact that you really
want to dance, right, Yeah, but all that gesticulation is right,
(21:44):
And even though that's on the easy problems list, you
have to admit that one really spills out into the
whole issue of free will as well. But still dancing, Yeah,
it comes on, I can't help myself. Well in a way,
you're you're right. To what extent can you disobey the beat?
I don't know. But then the final one of the
easy problems of conscious the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Um,
we've talked about this enough, so we're not going to
(22:06):
dive back into that one. But obviously being away can
being a sleeper to different states, different types of conscious
and unconscious is going on there, but but being aware
of the difference. Yeah, my top is still spinning, So
I think this is a dream reference. Uh So the
really hard problem, right, and this is David J. Chalmers
from the University of Arizona. He talks about this hard
(22:27):
problem of being experienced, right, because we think we perceive
there's a wre of information processing, but there is a
largely subjective aspect of this. Yeah, my experience of the
universe is not going to be like yours. And there
are ways that we can compare those experiences, but we
can't definitively really line them up one to one. And
(22:48):
then when you start looking at other species, this is
where you get into into naples work, which we've actually
mentioned before in our episode on bats. He had that
article what is it Like to be a bat? That's
a huge argument in the whole um problem of consciousness debate.
Uh for those of you don't remember, his whole thing
is that we're looking at We can look at it bad.
(23:09):
We can see how a bat's mind works. We can
we can we form all these theories and create an
understanding of how the bat experiences the world around it.
But we can never really know what it's like to
be a bat. We can never line up our experience
of the world, our consciousness with with with that bat
level of consciousness. Yeah, philosopher Bertrand for us all said
(23:30):
this about seventy years ago or so. He said, we
know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except
when these are mental events that we directly experience. Right,
so we can we can look at the bat and
all of its glory. But until we can you know,
physically embody this and mentally embody the bat, we don't
know what the deal is with the bat. Yeah, Nagel said,
(23:51):
But fundamentally, an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is to be
that organism, something it is like for the organism. So
he head spinning even just reading that. You know, Okay,
so yeah, let's let's let's gather in all of these threads.
What are we starting to uh sort of story starting
to weave here? The limits of understanding, yes, limits, And
(24:16):
that's where Colin McGain comes back into a British philosopher. Um.
He was on the panel at World Science and he
kept him, him and Christoph Cock. They were the ones
to Really they kept going at each other, uh in
in a fun way, in a very academic debate kind
of way, because both of them were were rock solid
on their their their views and their their opinions of
(24:37):
the world. Ones and neuroscientists, Ones a philosopher and uh
And it was a fabulous interaction. You can catch that
whole discussion online. Is that the one where McGann is
trying to really pin down Hawk on whether or not
he's a reductionist or and like Hawk is like, no,
don't try to label me. Yeah, yeah, and then he
kept saying I'm really, I'm really surprised you're actually a
(24:57):
do list and uh and yeah. That they kept kind
of picking each other. It was it was wonderful to
bold Um. And that's the great thing about the World
Science festivals. They'll put these panels will have people of
different disciplines on there. So it's not just a panel
of physicists talking about a topic or um neuroscientists talking
about a topic. There's a you know, a theologian or
in this case, a philosopher or two to spice things up.
(25:17):
So call them again. Is the most prominent of the
new mysterians. Um and uh, the new mysterian argument is
essentially that the the brain cannot conceive the natural coexistence
of mind and brain. And it's not that we're really
necessarily that we're dumb. It's not like that we're just
too stupid for this, but we've only evolved to carry
(25:38):
out certain cognitive feats. Okay, so we can navigate a
changing world. We can, we can do all of these
things that we mentioned in the the the easy problems
of consciousness. You know, we can. We can deal with
all this sense data and make sense of it. But
what is the possible evolutionary advantage of of gaining an
advanced understanding of the nature of consciousness? Of like, what
(25:59):
is the evolution very advantage to solving the mind body problem?
So he's saying this lines up really closely with the concept,
the philosophical concept of cognitive closure, that humans can only
hope to understand certain aspects of the universe, and we
simply lack the brains to understand everything. So you and
I were talking earlier, and I mentioned that perhaps this
(26:21):
is just me, you know, sitting here gobbledygooking, but perhaps philosophizing. No,
I think gobbledygooking with the capital g uh that perhaps
the reason why we have these limits is we can't
go beyond and really figure out what consciousness is and
pin it down is because it really is only helpful
to us in the context of theory of mind. And
(26:43):
we've talked about theory of mind, is is disability to
not just occupy our own perspective, but to occupy other
people's perspective, like me trying to figure out how Julie thinks,
or how Noel thinks, or how Bad thinks. Yeah, you
can't have one without the other. You have to have
a self awareness another in order to be aware of others.
(27:03):
So from an evolutionary perspective, perhaps there are limits to that,
to the understanding. You know, perhaps there's this sort of
line where it's like, okay, and now it's not useful
to us anymore. Yeah, it's it's one of those things
that on one level it does. It rings kind of
true to me, you know where, and I think it
rings more and more true with our our modern world,
(27:25):
you know, like you go back. Uh. I love looking
at the like retrofuturist stuff and looking at our our
our ideas about what the future would be like safe
in the fifties, sixties and seventies and eighties. Uh, and
now we're a lot were for the most part, we're
a little more limited and what we dare to dream
uh for ourselves in the future. Uh. And a lot
of that is realizing that there are limits, and if
if there are not hard and fast limits, then there
(27:47):
at least limitations on how quickly we can advance and
how quickly and into what extent we can will ourselves
to move forward. So that lines up really closely with
I can feel like how Ris arreencing the world and
how it's matching up with our dreams of where we
would be. But then uh, it's also something that Christoph
Cock was very strongly opposed to the idea during the talk,
(28:10):
and he said, this is just a featist, you know,
and because it does go right completely against the can
do attitude of science, the idea that like, yes, we're
gonna study this and we're gonna we're gonna buy God
figure it out. And then along comes the new mysterion
to say, ah, there's some things we'll never figure out.
Go home, you know, Okay, So which brings to this
to the table, this conversation about these brain projects the
(28:33):
reverse engineering of the brain. So if we're going to
try to move forward with us and try to understand
what the brain is, what the mind is, and where
consciousness ultimately sits in there, then hey, can't we just
throw a supercomputer at it? Right? Yeah? This is this
is an important topic to discuss because, uh, cognitive closure
(28:53):
mentioned earlier, you know, the idea that we can only
hope to understand so much. One of the things that
stands outside of cognitive closure is the steady of accumulation
and preservation of scientific data over the course of human history.
And in this I love to get a little um
fantastic with the with my imaginings of this, but I
tend to think of like science as this kind of
super intellect that we're building outside of ourselves. It's not
(29:15):
limited by the capacity of a single human mind or
even a dozen human minds. It's not limited by the
lifespan of an individual or even though the lifespans of
whole cultures. It stands outside of that, it grows larger
and larger. It's like the Internet itself, and the Internet
is a part of it, and it's becoming this kind
of super intellect. So it's this collective data of both
(29:36):
humans and machine, right, and it's affected by our own
cognitive closure, but it's not limited by cognitive closure. So
the idea is that you could get enough data here
going right, you could study the human brain. You could
try to have the supercomputer take every data point it
could and string together some sort of understanding of how
the brain actually works. And I say actually, because honestly,
(29:59):
we're at a point right out that neuroscience is still
very like this is a very young field. Yeah. I know.
Every day, especially if you follow any science feeds out there,
including our own, it's like they're always some sort of
new exciting bit of neuroscience coming out, and we talked
about a lot of them here. But and so it's
easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we
are we are much closer to a full understanding than
(30:20):
we are. Yeah. And so even if you could produce
the data by the machines into something we talked about earlier,
it doesn't necessarily mean that our mind, in its limited understanding,
could recognize the pattern that emerges. Right. It's like we
we create this this genie of science that stands outside
of ourselves, and then it reaches the point where it
(30:40):
can say, hey, I figured out that whole consciousness thing
for you, let me explain it to you, and then
it explains it to us, and we still have the
cognitive closure in place to where we still can't understand
what the the explanation is. So I wanted to bring
John Horgen into the conversation. Um. He is a writer
for Scientific and he has a blog called cross Check.
(31:02):
And he wouldn't, I don't think, paint himself as a
new mysterian, but he brings some very interesting arguments into
the limits of our understanding vs. The these brain projects. Yes,
and you mentioned Henry Markham earlier, the head guy at
the Blue Brain Project, and uh and Horgan was was
quite critical this gentleman. Yeah, he made the point of
(31:25):
well Markham actually he read a couple of Horgan's blog
because this is such likes this science gossip, the contents
he's founded in the comments and basically saying like, I
think there's something like the lack of vision basically on
Horgan's park. And Horgan said, well, I'm going to take
some of the comments that you made about another brain project,
(31:46):
like a mouse brain project, I believe, Yeah, and saying
that it wasn't doable, and then you know, but now
you're sort of heralding this brain project is being the
end all be all, this sort of like, can we
get to the unified theory of the brain, And so
Horrigan says, look, we you know, neuroscientists can't mimic brains
because they lack basic understanding of how the brains work
(32:07):
or how the brain works, and they don't know what
to include in the simulation and what to leave out.
In other words, he's saying that the neural code that
they're trying to figure out, they don't even have the
basic understandings to figure out what that code might consist of.
And so he's saying, you can't say that this is
an Apple's apples thing when it comes to like the
Brain project or the Human Genome project, because he's saying
(32:28):
that when the Human Genome Project began, uh, there was
already a basic understanding of genetics, and the genetic code
had already been deciphered, so they could make some real progress.
But he's saying, look, you have all sorts of factors
here that affect the brain. You have neural transmitters, hormones,
neural growth factors, chemicals, um. He says that there are
(32:50):
neurons that display a dizzing variety of forms and functions,
and that researchers have discovered scores of distinct types of
neurons just in the visual system. So he's basically saying,
if we don't know all the components yet, well, we
know the components, but we don't know necessarily how they operate,
then how can you reverse engineers something like that? Yeah,
he made a fabulous comparison Horgen did, comparing it to
(33:12):
the cargo cults um South Pacific, the Milanesian cults, where
the idea, of course is that they would see planes
flying over during the Second World War and they were
inspired by them, you know, supposedly they thought they these
were wholly magical things, and so they created versions of
them themselves. They created models out of out of you know,
straw materials and what have you around them, and they
(33:33):
could create, of course, the form of an airplane, the
shape of an airplane. They're understanding their model of what
an airplane is. But they couldn't take often and it
didn't fly. The function of it was was was not present.
So they could create a model, but not a working model.
They could create a model based on their limited understanding
of the thing. Now this is this is highly critical, right,
(33:53):
but there's some I think that there's some weight to
what he is saying is like, you know, this could
be premature and trying to do into reverse engineer the brain.
And he brought up neuroscientist Donald Stein the University of
Excuse Memory University, and in saying that they're completely ignoring
multiple levels of the brain. And we're talking about the
(34:15):
glial cells, and you and I talked about the glial
cells at length, and when we are talking about what
makes genius genius? Right, because the more white matter, the
more glial cells that you have. It's a great word
to just to say it sounds like something the nuttie
professor would would belt out glial cells, um, but sort
of this fiber optic system that can transport things really quickly.
(34:36):
Like the more you have that, the quicker you can
think and the quicker you can put together ideas. So
he's saying like this just is so nuanced, so complex,
you know, how can you really get to where you
need to go? And on top of that, there's the
microbiome and this is something we've talked about too. This
is this idea that we are colonized by microbial cells,
(34:56):
bacterial cells, and they are affecting our brain. And we
talked about this in the podcast about the gut being
in the second brain, because those microbial cells can determine
what sort of level of anxiety you're experiencing, um all
sorts of mental states, and even your immune system which
can dictate you know, neurological disorders. So it's just a yeah,
(35:22):
it brings us right back. There's a whole mind body
problem that we've talked not to buy mind body problem
of the mind body connection, the whole centaur thing where
we're not a rider on a horse, but we're a
ride er fused with horse. And so anytime you if
you really try to think of the brain cut off
on its own, you're not getting the full picture of
the organism. So yeah, like you say, it just gets
(35:43):
more and more complex the closer you look. Yeah, and
then sometimes I do. I think the problem of consciousness
is again it's subjective, and how do we all even
define it for ourselves? So even just pinning down exactly
what that is the hard problem, right The experience is
sort of the first part of trying to figure it
(36:03):
out or reverse engineering consciousness. Yet, like, are there are
there truly varying levels of consciousness among humans? You know,
because we getting into the realm of of of of
theology and New Ages and and Buddhist philosophy, you get
into the ideas that their individuals that higher states of consciousness.
You know, like someone who has achieved buddhahood is at
(36:25):
a different level of consciousness than than just somebody that's
completely lost in their thoughts. Someone who can say, Hey,
I'm feeling angry right now? Why am I feeling angry?
Is at a different level of consciousness than someone that
is simply angry or someone who is dreaming in their
angry right because they're in a they're sort of in
that wound sedative uh, quality of being. Right, So how
(36:47):
aware can you mean when you're dreaming? Yeah? And is
it possible for there to be some sort of a
super consciousness as well? And when will the Internet become
self aware? Exactly? When when could the the Internet becomes
the super consciousness? Again, this idea of we build all
this science and then it eventually becomes the genie that
we can ask this ever towering question about the nature
of consciousness. At what point does it become that that
(37:10):
that living genie, that that that just powerful intellect that
we can quiz about this stuff. And at what point
does it recognize that we can't even understand the data
that it's giving us and say, oh, man, so maybe
it just play gates as at that points and says, oh, well,
you'll you know, it's a I don't even know. I'm
not even sure what what the the the answer would be,
maybe they would just put us off. You're like, I'll
(37:31):
tell you tomorrow. Banianna, Banianna. Maybe the super unelect at
this point, I mean, essentially becomes God. Okay, So if
you're looking for a center, the seat of consciousness, you
could say that you're looking for a cohesive thing being
and that in some ways you're trying to cast off
(37:53):
entropy and cling to this idea that there's some sort
of stability a k A God the center. Right. So,
in some as I do think that this search for
consciousness is a bit of a red herring because these things,
this is a construct, and it's not it will always
be abstract. You're not going to be able to find
it in the concrete. So there you have it. The
(38:16):
quest to understand human consciousness. New Mysteriani is um and
I should point out that, you know, we're talking about
like building an imperfect model of something, but obviously building
imperfect models that's on the road to figuring out how
something works. And you look back through the history of
science and science is filled with imperfect understandings and imperfect models,
but those lead to two more perfected versions, like science
(38:40):
is often wrong, but science is not a solid state.
Science is a movement towards understanding. Yeah, And don't get
me wrong, I am very excited by these brain projects.
And I would love to have, you know, be able
to dump my brain into a machine and having a
nice little backup. That would be great. I think that
there's all sorts of really cool implications of this, but
(39:01):
in the context of the hard problem and um and
and as starting point to try to figure out what
we don't quite understand, you know, it's it's a valid conversation. Yeah,
And I also don't want to miscategorize Colin McGinn's new
mysterianism approach. He's not saying that we cannot understand the stuff.
He's just he's saying we should, uh, we should have
(39:23):
our minds open to that possibility. All right, Well, um,
consciousness it's the really the closest thing to us and
also the most mysterious. Uh. And of course someone could
say people have said the very same thing about God.
So there you got more connection between the quest for
understanding consciousness and the quest h to touch the face
of God. Right there. So since it's that close to everyone,
(39:44):
I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this particular topic
and we would love to hear them. Uh, tell us
how you perceive your own consciouness. How do you perceive
consciouness around you? Do you buy into this new mysterianism
or or the the cognitive closure or do you do
you really think can do it? You think it's just
a matter of time before we do crack that nut?
Or do we have to create the genie to crack
(40:05):
it for us and then we find it inedible? Anyway,
let us know. You can find us online a number
of different places. Of course, we're all over the social media.
We're on Twitter, we're on what d plus, We're on
uh tumbler, We're on Facebook. We're also on YouTube. That's
where our videos are at mind Stuff Show on YouTube
and then also the mothership, the main website, stuff to
(40:25):
Blow Your Mind dot com and you can always stop
us a line let us know your thoughts at blow
the Mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it How stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Duns. Julie,
do you ever just stop and think for a few moments?
I imagine you, dude, we all do um just start
(00:24):
to stop and think about your thinking, and stop and
think about your your being meta thinking. Yeah, bit, you know,
you're just you're you're setting there and maybe you're just
doing something you do every day. You're almost an autopilot.
And then you stop and you think, and it's like
and you realize, I'm this individual in this homined species.
It's evolved to this state where I'm I'm standing here
(00:45):
in this artificial structure, uh, that other people built for me,
other people designed for me, standing on the backbones of
other designers. I'm I'm wearing clothes for some reason, and
I'm loading a dish dishwasher, and I'm thinking about my thoughts. Yes,
I mean, how you could not work on this podcast
and not have this sort of self awareness to that degree?
(01:08):
I have to say, because of everything that we are researching,
sometimes it is a matter of just being really overly
aware of your conscious and what you're doing, and wondering
if the thing that you're doing at that very moment
is even uh something that is free will, or you're
doing it because you're subconsciously colored by some other experience. So, yes,
(01:30):
and I think it's fascinating, this idea of consciousness because,
as David Eagleman says, we're the only species that that
takes our own operating system and then sort of looks
at it, like the operating system comes up and sort
of looks at the screen and says, what are you?
What am I? So we're talking about we're talking about
the operating system in the screen. We're obviously talking about
(01:52):
this mind brain problem. Yes, yeah, the mind brain problem,
the mind body problems. I feel like mind brain problem
is more of an accurate description, because what we're talking
about here is, of course that, uh, inside of this
squishy meat body, we have this physical brain. This this
this brain that is a part of a part of
(02:13):
our body, all right, and out of this brain, this
brain manifests the mind. The mind, of course, is our thoughts.
The things that happened to us every day are wanting
to do something, our experience of doing something, are wishing
we had not done something. All of these things that
come together into this storm of consciousness. Yeah, because on
(02:34):
the one hand, you have this very concrete, uh, three
pounds of gelatinous goose stuff right stuff cock. The neuroscientist
calls it the most complex object in the known universe,
right because it's composed of roughly one billion neurons that
each electrically spike in response to outside stimulus. You have
all this going on, and then you have the concept
of mind or the concept of self or self awareness
(02:56):
that you know that all these things are going on
outside of you and inside of you. Yes, so one
is not the other, but certainly one arises from the other. Yeah.
We study, we continue to study the brain NonStop. We
continue to study the mind. Psychologists or working neuroscientists or
working philosophers are working theologians, are working in in in
our own part and our own individual work. We're struggling
(03:19):
to sort of figure it all out. But we just
continue to to wrangle uh and and fail to comprehend
the psycho physical nexus between the two. And this is
where we get into the mind body problem. Um, we
work towards the answer, but we can't grasp it, not
yet and why is it important? Because to me it
(03:39):
is the holy grail of our existence. If we could
find the center of consciousness, if we could pinpoint it,
then we could somehow, we think, explain how it is
that we came to be here perhaps what it all means. Uh,
you know, it opens up this one door opens up
portals to too many other doors of our existence. Yeah,
(04:01):
I mean, our consciousness is our experience of the world
is our experience. It is it is us so in
a sense, is figuring out what we are really on
on a deeper level than pure organism. I mean, and
it's easy. This is a question that trails off at
all the ends into into various uh less scientific fields
as well. I mean, it's easy to spill over. I
(04:21):
mean because because again it's the It's the subject of
not only neuroscience and uh and end of and of psychology.
It's also the stuff of philosophy and theology. It's stuff
that we've wrangled with since our ability to to question
what consciousness is and to grasp some notion or at
least grasp after the question of consciousness. Okay, so before
(04:42):
we use an overview of various philosophies behind consciousness or
ideas about consciousness. Let's talk about something called a mirror test,
which you actually have a video on right now, Yes,
which highly enough does not feature a mirror. But but uh,
but yeah, So we're always trying to figure out what
kind just his obviously and one of the hallmarks of
(05:03):
consciousness one of the things that we can say, yes,
this is definitely on the list when we try and
figure out the attributes of human consciousness self awareness, because
again I looked at the ideas. I look in a mirror,
and what do I see? I say, Hey, that's me.
Who's that handsome devil? Or who's that weirdo with with
the ketchup on his face? You know, we we see
(05:23):
that that that's us and uh and at the very
least we're it makes us think about ourselves. Right. So
you have this mirror test, which is again a measure
of self awareness. This is developed by Gordon Gallup Jr.
In the seventies and he used it to ascertain consciousness
and animals as well as identify when children were entering
(05:44):
into the mirror stage of self awareness. So the idea
is you put a mark on an animal, yeah, on
the face somewhere where they can't see it without a mirror,
and they also can't feel it, So like you couldn't
just like stab him with something because they're going to
feel it, right, So you'd have to use a little subterrafugia. Right,
So presumably they look into the mirror before the mark
(06:04):
is on them, right, and then they have the mark
on them, they turn and they look, and it's then
observed whether or not the animal is reacting in amanner
consistent with being aware that the mark is located on
their body. Are they turning around to get a better
angle on it? Are they seeing that something is awry
or amiss um? So, animals that have passed the mirror test,
(06:26):
we're talking about chimpanzees, Binobo's, orangatangs, dolphins, elephants, and possibly
even pigeons. Yeah, European magpies on the list. Yeah, So
of course this we've had an extensive conversations about personhoods.
We won't go into that. Um. If you're interested in
learning more about that, definitely check that out. But there's
this idea that consciousness exists not just in humans but
(06:48):
in another species, and it complicates things in a way. Yeah,
Like I mean one of the ones that I keep
coming back to is the octopi, which if you give
an octopus a straight up mirror tests, that going to
fail it because their brains have evolved almost entirely separately
from from the million brains. So they're they're not, as is,
clued into these visual to a visual understanding of the
(07:11):
world around them. Uh. They can reference a mirror, but
they don't see it as themselves. But then there are
a number of other tests that you can give an octopus,
and and you know, stuff like tool use and learning
and uh, and some other attributes begin to line up
to really make an argument for octopus consciousness. So it,
like a lot of this stuff, it comes down to
how are you going to measure it? How are you
(07:32):
going to and how are you going to judge the measurement? Well,
I mean the same thing with guerillas. They tend to
not look at each other in the eyes with themselves
in a mirror in the eyes because it's a sign
of aggressiveness. So they fail the test, even though they
probably have a conscious right as self awareness. Um, so
you're right, that's it's not a full proof way to
(07:53):
say definitively, this is what consciousness is at least in
this one aspect and the following species have it. So
he thought it was would be interesting to look at
a couple of brain mapping projects in the context of
this conversation, because the brain mapping projects which we talked
about before, like the Blue Brain project, Um, this is
(08:16):
this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human
brain and you could begin to see all these processes
happening inside of it. And uh, you know, much like
some of the fmr I technology that we talked about
in terms of crime and you know, trying to figure
out whether or not someone had committed a crime based
on what was going on in their hippocampus in their memory,
(08:39):
the same thing could happen in a sense where you
could begin to understand the mysteries of the human brain.
This idea of consciousness, like maybe this would manifest itself
in these projects. So we're talking about the Human Brain Project,
and this is an attempt to construct a massive computer
simulation of the Brainness is the European initiative and and
(09:00):
remark from is the coordinator of this. He's also the
Bluebrain guy. Yes, And then there's also this Brain Activity
MATT project and this is a decade long scientific effort
to examine the workings of the human brain. This is
what Obama back in I think April announced something like
a three billion UM budget against that. And so that
is this idea that you can build a comprehensive map
(09:21):
of its activity and try to do the same thing
for the brain that was done for the Human Genome project.
So we'll talk more about that later. But we are
so interested in the brain, how it works, and again
these mysteries that are wrapped up in it, including consciousness,
that we can't help but to to try to decode it.
(09:42):
All right, So let's back up just a little bit, um,
you know, just a few centuries or so, and talk
about some some various various philosophical ideas about what consciousness
is and uh and and how we're supposed to deal
with the with the mind body problem. And it's worth
the worth noting that so many of the philosophers were
gonna point out here they weren't only philosophers, they're also
(10:03):
also some of his mathematicians, biologists, just general men of science.
And then part of the questing after these answers involved
a multi disciplinary approach. Um. And these were. I should
also mention that these particular examples were brought up by
philosopher Column again. Uh this year's World Science Festival in
the Whispering Mind, the Enduring a conundrum of consciousness. Uh.
(10:25):
And we're gonna talk about McGain himself in a bit
as well. So let's go back to the days of
renetic arts. It's I think therefore I am. He was
a duelist. He saw the mind and body is separate.
He's had the essence of mind is thought and body
is an extension off it. Thoughts are not extended in space,
but the body is. Uh. There was leading Is born
in sixty six. He made this analogy of the mill. Okay,
(10:47):
if you walk through the meat of the brain, or
more likely, I guess just pod your hand around in it,
you wouldn't see thoughts. You'd only see electrochemical mechanisms. So
he stated that the mind exists invisible, but there's harmony
between mind and body. Uh. Then you had Thomas Huxley
born in and he compared the conscious mind and the
physical brain to a genie and a lamp. You rub
(11:08):
the you rub the lamp in this case the physical brain,
and out of it manifest this this uh ephemeral genie,
this consciousness. Okay, and uh, and so the the argument
that he's making here is that, uh, that we just
cannot equate the two because here we just have irritating
nervous tissue and here we have the wonders of human consciousness.
(11:30):
And Hutley was an epiphenomenalist, so he was a duelist,
but he saw the mind is kind of a byproduct
of the brain, uh, not necessary to the day to
day operations, but kind of a shadow cast by by
this by this organ which I think is very interesting
when we we think back to some of what we've
done about free will and about subconscious activities in the brain,
(11:50):
and this idea that that our experience of thought and
even body is kind of what happens above the surface
of a dark sea. And there's a lot that goes
on underneath the waves that we're not privy to, but
that's where most of the sausage is being made. Then
there's author Eddington born in two and he uh he
argued that consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness.
(12:13):
And then you have then you have some contemporary philosophers
worth any mentioning saw Crypti. He said that mind and
brain are not identical, and you can just look at pain.
If we look at pain as it's experienced in the brain, uh,
the scans and the neural activity, it's rather different from
the way we experience it. So we have we have
problems when we start trying to rate pain, like what
is what is a level seven pain? And there's some
(12:34):
efforts right now to try and do just this, but
but it's not as as simple as just saying what
did that hurt? How much did that hurts? That A
five or six and expecting that to pan out among
everyone's experience. It's the subjective nature of consciousness. And then
you had Nagel who are you? Said that to consciousness
cannot be reduced to the brain. And then finally Colin mcgainuh,
the new mysterianism guy, and we're gonna talk about him
(12:56):
in a bit. You know what, there's also this idea
that day different brain, right, I mean that there is
not this illusion that we have a stasis in both
our concept of ourselves, our self awareness in the world. Um,
this changes from day to day based on our experiences. UM.
Not to mention chemical changes in the brain. Yeah, our
(13:18):
mind changes constantly. We're we're not the same person we
were a year ago, five years ago. We're not necessarily
the same person we were yesterday and uh, and the
brain changes as well. A lot of the duellist arguments
are that the mind and brain are separate entities, but
that they are, that the mind can change the brain,
and the brain can change the mind. UM. I tend
(13:38):
to really like that, Like the idea of the of
the mind is the shadow cast by the brain. Um.
That one seems to resonate more with my own personal experience. Well,
especially when you look at something like the placebo effect.
We've talked about this before about how someone can take
the side effects, um, and they can take a cebo
drug and consider those side effects, right, the ramification who
(14:00):
you know, their self awareness, how they're going to operate
in the world with this knowledge that they could fall
asleep at the wheel or get hives or whatever other
side fact available to them, and then it manifests in
them physically. So here you have the brain and the
in the mind acting on each other. And it really
(14:20):
does blow the mind when you start thinking about it.
It's because and you can see where the problem of
resident rectifying these two things really grows and just becomes
increasingly difficult to wrap your mind around. All right, well,
let's take a quick break and when we get back,
we can begin at the beginning. When do we become
truly conscious? All right, we're back, and we are going
(14:54):
to talk about the darkness that comes before consciousness, right uh,
specifically in the womb. Uh uh. Neuroscientists Christoph coch or
Cock I believe, yes, yeah, And he was on this
panel at World Science and he's quite the firebrand he is.
He is so much fun to listen to and to watch.
Actually uh he is uh writing for Scientific American as well,
(15:17):
And in the article when does Consciousness Arising Human Babies?
He talks about something called the thalamo cortical complex and
he says this provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content,
and it begins to be put into place between the
two and the week of gestation, okay, within the womb.
And then he goes on to say that a lot
(15:38):
of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place
by the third trimester. But he says, because there's this idea, well,
you know, could could a fetus be conscious could have
some sort of awareness. He says that the fetus is
suspended in a warm and dark cave connected to the
placenta that pumps blood, nutrients, and hormones into its grow
(16:00):
body and brain. The fetus is asleep. So it's a
very interesting article. I encourage everybody to check it out,
but I just wanted to highlight a couple of points
from it. He goes on to detail the various ways
in which the fetus essentially is sedated within the womb,
and then he says the dramatic events attending delivery by
natural vaginal means cause the brain of the fetus to
(16:21):
abruptly wake up. The release from anesthesia and sedation that
occurs when the fetus disconnects from the maternal placenta arouses
the baby so that it can deal with its new circumstances.
It draws its first breath, wakes up, and begins to
experience life. Yeah, and it's it's pretty much the biggest
wake up of all time. Like it's really difficult to
(16:43):
even try and like put it in like adult human terms.
Like the closest thing I can think of is my
mind goes back to some of the recent experiments with
psilocybin that have been conducted where they're injecting individuals with psilocybin.
So there's like this blast off moment where they're just
suddenly experiencing intense psychedelic experience. Like that has got to
(17:04):
be at least similar to what's going on here, because
they're just going from zero to a hundred just like that.
Suddenly they are sensing the world. They are, in a
limited sense, seeing the world, and everything's just coming at
them there there, and they're they're they're unhooked from this
life support system that has previously sustained them. You know.
I couldn't help but think about the matrix. Yeah, yeah,
(17:27):
exactly when they're waking up out of that the tank,
right and ripping things out of canoe, Guiano reeves neck
right right, because otherwise they were just sitting there in
that in that sort of sedative um state, providing energy, right. Um.
So I did think it was interesting though that that
he talks about this, that cop talks about this emergence
(17:48):
into life and and and all the stimuli. And I
couldn't help but be reminded of cognitive psychologist Alice and
goth Nick And when she talks about the baby's brain
being completely soaked in neurotransmitters because everything matters. You know,
they don't have a neural pruning yet, and so they're
differently conscious from adults. And she makes the argument that
(18:08):
they are much more conscious than adults, which really kind
of puts a whole tale spin on this idea of
consciousness and self awareness. Of course, because if you give
them the test, the mirror test, it's eight months before
generally more or less eight months before they're going to
pass that thing. Right, they'll be interested in their image,
but they won't necessarily know that that's them staring back
(18:28):
at them. Um, we think, right, yeah, because earlier than that, though,
the ceiling fan is a big hit. I've been hanging
out with some baby afficiently and the ceiling fan is
apparently just amazing. It's like watching uh, it's it's like
the adult version of watching Baraka on an HD screen
with Blu Ray is just watching that ceiling fan go
around and around. You know, my daughter, when she was
(18:49):
an infant, was so interested in these trees. Um. I
don't know that they're crepe myrtles, but you know they're
very vertical trees. Outside of her windows. So when I
would feed her, she would just be absolutely engaged in this.
And then I learned later that the neurons that we
have in our visual cortex are much more dedicated to
the x y plane than diagonal, So it makes sense
(19:12):
that these really strong verticals appealed to children. Anyway, this
is a side note to consciousness here. Now we're talking
about the the the infant in the womb being asleep, um,
and in the course that instantly makes you think, well,
what are they dreaming about? Uh? Probably nothing, because one
of the studies we're looking at American and a psychologist,
David Folks, study the dreaming and cognitive development UH in
(19:35):
preschoolers and he believes preschoolers dreams are are generally static
and playing with no characters that move in act and
hardly any feelings or in no memories because what's to
be processed. I mean not to turn this into a
dream podcast, but the dream is a byproduct of cognition
and UH. And then to to look at preschoolers dreams
(19:57):
and there's like nothing going on. There's just not enough
deterial to process. But there is stimuli to be processed.
There is cognition in the womb because you have auditory
uh stimuli, and you do have light. Right. Um. I
guess you could to a degree say there's taste as well,
because you have the some of the molecules of taste
(20:18):
crossing over in the placenta. But anyway, the point is
that there's no context for it, right right, all right,
So back from dreams in the womb, back from the
explosive psychedelic experience of birth. Um, talking more about the
problem of consciousness. Now you can you can really divide
consciousness problems up into the easy problems of consciousness and
(20:39):
then the really hard problem of consciousness. Now, Uh, if
I may, I'll just run through the easy problems of
consciousness for us real quick. Um. The ability to discriminate, categorize,
and react to environmental stimuli. All right, we can do that.
We can do that. I just didn't now. Uh. The
integration of information by a cognitive system. I've got information
coming in from three D ways. Like an individual is
(21:02):
telling me one thing, but their face is saying another.
How am I supposed to interpret to interpret that into
a general idea of what's going on? Um? The reportability
of mental states. You know, you can talk about how
you feel and how you feel. You that you feel
the ability of a system to access its own internal states.
I'm aware of how I'm feeling. The focus of attention.
(21:23):
I can focus my attention on this, that or the other. Uh.
Sometimes given the right amount of coffee. Uh. The deliberate
control of behavior. I'm not just a self moving soul.
I I am. It's just caught in the river of actions.
I can actually think about what I'm doing. I think
you're tamping down right now, the fact that you really
want to dance, right, Yeah, but all that gesticulation is right,
(21:44):
And even though that's on the easy problems list, you
have to admit that one really spills out into the
whole issue of free will as well. But still dancing, Yeah,
it comes on, I can't help myself. Well in a way,
you're you're right. To what extent can you disobey the beat?
I don't know. But then the final one of the
easy problems of conscious the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Um,
we've talked about this enough, so we're not going to
(22:06):
dive back into that one. But obviously being away can
being a sleeper to different states, different types of conscious
and unconscious is going on there, but but being aware
of the difference. Yeah, my top is still spinning, So
I think this is a dream reference. Uh So the
really hard problem, right, and this is David J. Chalmers
from the University of Arizona. He talks about this hard
(22:27):
problem of being experienced, right, because we think we perceive
there's a wre of information processing, but there is a
largely subjective aspect of this. Yeah, my experience of the
universe is not going to be like yours. And there
are ways that we can compare those experiences, but we
can't definitively really line them up one to one. And
(22:48):
then when you start looking at other species, this is
where you get into into naples work, which we've actually
mentioned before in our episode on bats. He had that
article what is it Like to be a bat? That's
a huge argument in the whole um problem of consciousness debate.
Uh for those of you don't remember, his whole thing
is that we're looking at We can look at it bad.
(23:09):
We can see how a bat's mind works. We can
we can we form all these theories and create an
understanding of how the bat experiences the world around it.
But we can never really know what it's like to
be a bat. We can never line up our experience
of the world, our consciousness with with with that bat
level of consciousness. Yeah, philosopher Bertrand for us all said
(23:30):
this about seventy years ago or so. He said, we
know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except
when these are mental events that we directly experience. Right,
so we can we can look at the bat and
all of its glory. But until we can you know,
physically embody this and mentally embody the bat, we don't
know what the deal is with the bat. Yeah, Nagel said,
(23:51):
But fundamentally, an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is to be
that organism, something it is like for the organism. So
he head spinning even just reading that. You know, Okay,
so yeah, let's let's let's gather in all of these threads.
What are we starting to uh sort of story starting
to weave here? The limits of understanding, yes, limits, And
(24:16):
that's where Colin McGain comes back into a British philosopher. Um.
He was on the panel at World Science and he
kept him, him and Christoph Cock. They were the ones
to Really they kept going at each other, uh in
in a fun way, in a very academic debate kind
of way, because both of them were were rock solid
on their their their views and their their opinions of
(24:37):
the world. Ones and neuroscientists, Ones a philosopher and uh
And it was a fabulous interaction. You can catch that
whole discussion online. Is that the one where McGann is
trying to really pin down Hawk on whether or not
he's a reductionist or and like Hawk is like, no,
don't try to label me. Yeah, yeah, and then he
kept saying I'm really, I'm really surprised you're actually a
(24:57):
do list and uh and yeah. That they kept kind
of picking each other. It was it was wonderful to
bold Um. And that's the great thing about the World
Science festivals. They'll put these panels will have people of
different disciplines on there. So it's not just a panel
of physicists talking about a topic or um neuroscientists talking
about a topic. There's a you know, a theologian or
in this case, a philosopher or two to spice things up.
(25:17):
So call them again. Is the most prominent of the
new mysterians. Um and uh, the new mysterian argument is
essentially that the the brain cannot conceive the natural coexistence
of mind and brain. And it's not that we're really
necessarily that we're dumb. It's not like that we're just
too stupid for this, but we've only evolved to carry
(25:38):
out certain cognitive feats. Okay, so we can navigate a
changing world. We can, we can do all of these
things that we mentioned in the the the easy problems
of consciousness. You know, we can. We can deal with
all this sense data and make sense of it. But
what is the possible evolutionary advantage of of gaining an
advanced understanding of the nature of consciousness? Of like, what
(25:59):
is the evolution very advantage to solving the mind body problem?
So he's saying this lines up really closely with the concept,
the philosophical concept of cognitive closure, that humans can only
hope to understand certain aspects of the universe, and we
simply lack the brains to understand everything. So you and
I were talking earlier, and I mentioned that perhaps this
(26:21):
is just me, you know, sitting here gobbledygooking, but perhaps philosophizing. No,
I think gobbledygooking with the capital g uh that perhaps
the reason why we have these limits is we can't
go beyond and really figure out what consciousness is and
pin it down is because it really is only helpful
to us in the context of theory of mind. And
(26:43):
we've talked about theory of mind, is is disability to
not just occupy our own perspective, but to occupy other
people's perspective, like me trying to figure out how Julie thinks,
or how Noel thinks, or how Bad thinks. Yeah, you
can't have one without the other. You have to have
a self awareness another in order to be aware of others.
(27:03):
So from an evolutionary perspective, perhaps there are limits to that,
to the understanding. You know, perhaps there's this sort of
line where it's like, okay, and now it's not useful
to us anymore. Yeah, it's it's one of those things
that on one level it does. It rings kind of
true to me, you know where, and I think it
rings more and more true with our our modern world,
(27:25):
you know, like you go back. Uh. I love looking
at the like retrofuturist stuff and looking at our our
our ideas about what the future would be like safe
in the fifties, sixties and seventies and eighties. Uh, and
now we're a lot were for the most part, we're
a little more limited and what we dare to dream
uh for ourselves in the future. Uh. And a lot
of that is realizing that there are limits, and if
if there are not hard and fast limits, then there
(27:47):
at least limitations on how quickly we can advance and
how quickly and into what extent we can will ourselves
to move forward. So that lines up really closely with
I can feel like how Ris arreencing the world and
how it's matching up with our dreams of where we
would be. But then uh, it's also something that Christoph
Cock was very strongly opposed to the idea during the talk,
(28:10):
and he said, this is just a featist, you know,
and because it does go right completely against the can
do attitude of science, the idea that like, yes, we're
gonna study this and we're gonna we're gonna buy God
figure it out. And then along comes the new mysterion
to say, ah, there's some things we'll never figure out.
Go home, you know, Okay, So which brings to this
to the table, this conversation about these brain projects the
(28:33):
reverse engineering of the brain. So if we're going to
try to move forward with us and try to understand
what the brain is, what the mind is, and where
consciousness ultimately sits in there, then hey, can't we just
throw a supercomputer at it? Right? Yeah? This is this
is an important topic to discuss because, uh, cognitive closure
(28:53):
mentioned earlier, you know, the idea that we can only
hope to understand so much. One of the things that
stands outside of cognitive closure is the steady of accumulation
and preservation of scientific data over the course of human history.
And in this I love to get a little um
fantastic with the with my imaginings of this, but I
tend to think of like science as this kind of
super intellect that we're building outside of ourselves. It's not
(29:15):
limited by the capacity of a single human mind or
even a dozen human minds. It's not limited by the
lifespan of an individual or even though the lifespans of
whole cultures. It stands outside of that, it grows larger
and larger. It's like the Internet itself, and the Internet
is a part of it, and it's becoming this kind
of super intellect. So it's this collective data of both
(29:36):
humans and machine, right, and it's affected by our own
cognitive closure, but it's not limited by cognitive closure. So
the idea is that you could get enough data here
going right, you could study the human brain. You could
try to have the supercomputer take every data point it
could and string together some sort of understanding of how
the brain actually works. And I say actually, because honestly,
(29:59):
we're at a point right out that neuroscience is still
very like this is a very young field. Yeah. I know.
Every day, especially if you follow any science feeds out there,
including our own, it's like they're always some sort of
new exciting bit of neuroscience coming out, and we talked
about a lot of them here. But and so it's
easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we
are we are much closer to a full understanding than
(30:20):
we are. Yeah. And so even if you could produce
the data by the machines into something we talked about earlier,
it doesn't necessarily mean that our mind, in its limited understanding,
could recognize the pattern that emerges. Right. It's like we
we create this this genie of science that stands outside
of ourselves, and then it reaches the point where it
(30:40):
can say, hey, I figured out that whole consciousness thing
for you, let me explain it to you, and then
it explains it to us, and we still have the
cognitive closure in place to where we still can't understand
what the the explanation is. So I wanted to bring
John Horgen into the conversation. Um. He is a writer
for Scientific and he has a blog called cross Check.
(31:02):
And he wouldn't, I don't think, paint himself as a
new mysterian, but he brings some very interesting arguments into
the limits of our understanding vs. The these brain projects. Yes,
and you mentioned Henry Markham earlier, the head guy at
the Blue Brain Project, and uh and Horgan was was
quite critical this gentleman. Yeah, he made the point of
(31:25):
well Markham actually he read a couple of Horgan's blog
because this is such likes this science gossip, the contents
he's founded in the comments and basically saying like, I
think there's something like the lack of vision basically on
Horgan's park. And Horgan said, well, I'm going to take
some of the comments that you made about another brain project,
(31:46):
like a mouse brain project, I believe, Yeah, and saying
that it wasn't doable, and then you know, but now
you're sort of heralding this brain project is being the
end all be all, this sort of like, can we
get to the unified theory of the brain, And so
Horrigan says, look, we you know, neuroscientists can't mimic brains
because they lack basic understanding of how the brains work
(32:07):
or how the brain works, and they don't know what
to include in the simulation and what to leave out.
In other words, he's saying that the neural code that
they're trying to figure out, they don't even have the
basic understandings to figure out what that code might consist of.
And so he's saying, you can't say that this is
an Apple's apples thing when it comes to like the
Brain project or the Human Genome project, because he's saying
(32:28):
that when the Human Genome Project began, uh, there was
already a basic understanding of genetics, and the genetic code
had already been deciphered, so they could make some real progress.
But he's saying, look, you have all sorts of factors
here that affect the brain. You have neural transmitters, hormones,
neural growth factors, chemicals, um. He says that there are
(32:50):
neurons that display a dizzing variety of forms and functions,
and that researchers have discovered scores of distinct types of
neurons just in the visual system. So he's basically saying,
if we don't know all the components yet, well, we
know the components, but we don't know necessarily how they operate,
then how can you reverse engineers something like that? Yeah,
he made a fabulous comparison Horgen did, comparing it to
(33:12):
the cargo cults um South Pacific, the Milanesian cults, where
the idea, of course is that they would see planes
flying over during the Second World War and they were
inspired by them, you know, supposedly they thought they these
were wholly magical things, and so they created versions of
them themselves. They created models out of out of you know,
straw materials and what have you around them, and they
(33:33):
could create, of course, the form of an airplane, the
shape of an airplane. They're understanding their model of what
an airplane is. But they couldn't take often and it
didn't fly. The function of it was was was not present.
So they could create a model, but not a working model.
They could create a model based on their limited understanding
of the thing. Now this is this is highly critical, right,
(33:53):
but there's some I think that there's some weight to
what he is saying is like, you know, this could
be premature and trying to do into reverse engineer the brain.
And he brought up neuroscientist Donald Stein the University of
Excuse Memory University, and in saying that they're completely ignoring
multiple levels of the brain. And we're talking about the
(34:15):
glial cells, and you and I talked about the glial
cells at length, and when we are talking about what
makes genius genius? Right, because the more white matter, the
more glial cells that you have. It's a great word
to just to say it sounds like something the nuttie
professor would would belt out glial cells, um, but sort
of this fiber optic system that can transport things really quickly.
(34:36):
Like the more you have that, the quicker you can
think and the quicker you can put together ideas. So
he's saying like this just is so nuanced, so complex,
you know, how can you really get to where you
need to go? And on top of that, there's the
microbiome and this is something we've talked about too. This
is this idea that we are colonized by microbial cells,
(34:56):
bacterial cells, and they are affecting our brain. And we
talked about this in the podcast about the gut being
in the second brain, because those microbial cells can determine
what sort of level of anxiety you're experiencing, um all
sorts of mental states, and even your immune system which
can dictate you know, neurological disorders. So it's just a yeah,
(35:22):
it brings us right back. There's a whole mind body
problem that we've talked not to buy mind body problem
of the mind body connection, the whole centaur thing where
we're not a rider on a horse, but we're a
ride er fused with horse. And so anytime you if
you really try to think of the brain cut off
on its own, you're not getting the full picture of
the organism. So yeah, like you say, it just gets
(35:43):
more and more complex the closer you look. Yeah, and
then sometimes I do. I think the problem of consciousness
is again it's subjective, and how do we all even
define it for ourselves? So even just pinning down exactly
what that is the hard problem, right The experience is
sort of the first part of trying to figure it
(36:03):
out or reverse engineering consciousness. Yet, like, are there are
there truly varying levels of consciousness among humans? You know,
because we getting into the realm of of of of
theology and New Ages and and Buddhist philosophy, you get
into the ideas that their individuals that higher states of consciousness.
You know, like someone who has achieved buddhahood is at
(36:25):
a different level of consciousness than than just somebody that's
completely lost in their thoughts. Someone who can say, Hey,
I'm feeling angry right now? Why am I feeling angry?
Is at a different level of consciousness than someone that
is simply angry or someone who is dreaming in their
angry right because they're in a they're sort of in
that wound sedative uh, quality of being. Right, So how
(36:47):
aware can you mean when you're dreaming? Yeah? And is
it possible for there to be some sort of a
super consciousness as well? And when will the Internet become
self aware? Exactly? When when could the the Internet becomes
the super consciousness? Again, this idea of we build all
this science and then it eventually becomes the genie that
we can ask this ever towering question about the nature
of consciousness. At what point does it become that that
(37:10):
that living genie, that that that just powerful intellect that
we can quiz about this stuff. And at what point
does it recognize that we can't even understand the data
that it's giving us and say, oh, man, so maybe
it just play gates as at that points and says, oh, well,
you'll you know, it's a I don't even know. I'm
not even sure what what the the the answer would be,
maybe they would just put us off. You're like, I'll
(37:31):
tell you tomorrow. Banianna, Banianna. Maybe the super unelect at
this point, I mean, essentially becomes God. Okay, So if
you're looking for a center, the seat of consciousness, you
could say that you're looking for a cohesive thing being
and that in some ways you're trying to cast off
(37:53):
entropy and cling to this idea that there's some sort
of stability a k A God the center. Right. So,
in some as I do think that this search for
consciousness is a bit of a red herring because these things,
this is a construct, and it's not it will always
be abstract. You're not going to be able to find
it in the concrete. So there you have it. The
(38:16):
quest to understand human consciousness. New Mysteriani is um and
I should point out that, you know, we're talking about
like building an imperfect model of something, but obviously building
imperfect models that's on the road to figuring out how
something works. And you look back through the history of
science and science is filled with imperfect understandings and imperfect models,
but those lead to two more perfected versions, like science
(38:40):
is often wrong, but science is not a solid state.
Science is a movement towards understanding. Yeah, And don't get
me wrong, I am very excited by these brain projects.
And I would love to have, you know, be able
to dump my brain into a machine and having a
nice little backup. That would be great. I think that
there's all sorts of really cool implications of this, but
(39:01):
in the context of the hard problem and um and
and as starting point to try to figure out what
we don't quite understand, you know, it's it's a valid conversation. Yeah,
And I also don't want to miscategorize Colin McGinn's new
mysterianism approach. He's not saying that we cannot understand the stuff.
He's just he's saying we should, uh, we should have
(39:23):
our minds open to that possibility. All right, Well, um,
consciousness it's the really the closest thing to us and
also the most mysterious. Uh. And of course someone could
say people have said the very same thing about God.
So there you got more connection between the quest for
understanding consciousness and the quest h to touch the face
of God. Right there. So since it's that close to everyone,
(39:44):
I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this particular topic
and we would love to hear them. Uh, tell us
how you perceive your own consciouness. How do you perceive
consciouness around you? Do you buy into this new mysterianism
or or the the cognitive closure or do you do
you really think can do it? You think it's just
a matter of time before we do crack that nut?
Or do we have to create the genie to crack
(40:05):
it for us and then we find it inedible? Anyway,
let us know. You can find us online a number
of different places. Of course, we're all over the social media.
We're on Twitter, we're on what d plus, We're on
uh tumbler, We're on Facebook. We're also on YouTube. That's
where our videos are at mind Stuff Show on YouTube
and then also the mothership, the main website, stuff to
(40:25):
Blow Your Mind dot com and you can always stop
us a line let us know your thoughts at blow
the Mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it How stuff Works
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