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Yeah, we always screw this up, but I think we're gonna nail it this time.

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I'm David Pinsoff.

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I'm David Petrozowski.

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David, what podcast is this?

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This is Evolutionary Psychology the podcast, and it's about actual evolutionary psychology.

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Being done by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Not exactly the Italian line.

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It's it's actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Okay, close enough.

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Tomato tomato.

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Enjoy.

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David, we have a wonderful guest today.

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I'm very excited about our guest.

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Yes, this is uh our first guest that does not formally identify as an evolutionary

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psychologist on paper, But when you listen to him speak, you will identify him very easily

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as a fellow traveler.

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Uh the way he thinks about consciousness is very insightful and very friendly to the

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evolutionary perspective, which is why we wanted to have him on.

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So what do we get into, Dave?

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Well, a mechanistic approach of like what are we talking about when we talk about

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consciousness and how could you put an engineer a system to have this thing grounding this

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very nebulous, uh floofy idea into very concrete functions, which I just

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love.

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Um, and I just love this conversation with Michael Graziano because he talks about um

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really being a different voice than what is largely being done in the study of

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consciousness, which on on by my account, and maybe by

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um uh many accounts is sort of very floofy um and maybe not exactly the right

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direction.

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Yes, I agree.

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Uh and we get into the the pitfalls of thinking about consciousness and the wrong

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directions that one might take and how to think about it in a non-floofy way.

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Uh and also just our intuitions about consciousness itself in addition to consciousness.

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Um that is itself a really interesting social psychological question.

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And we get into that.

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We get into religion and spirituality and ethics and AI.

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It was a super fun conversation.

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I think you'll have a great time listening to it.

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Yeah, I think fluffy is a technical term now.

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And uh this is a great example of the evolutionary psychology of psychology now uh with

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respect to consciousness.

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So yeah, without further ado, here is Michael Graziano and David and I talking about

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consciousness.

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Enjoy Yeah, I have um a terrible

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to pronounce last name.

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It's Petri Zuski.

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Um your last name to me seems straightforward, but I'm gonna take a stab.

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It's Graziano.

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That's correct.

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Okay.

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So yeah.

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According to me.

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Yeah, and that's the only person who matters.

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It's a convention.

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Yes, names are conventions.

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So as long as you go back exactly, if you go back a couple generations, then it's um, you

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know, Graziano.

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Yeah, exactly.

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For me, it's not.

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Yes, that that takes a little few more seconds, a few more milliseconds.

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Yeah.

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In this in this workaday world, uh, we we can't tolerate that.

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That's mine is Pietroshewski, which, you know, again, it's a lot more intonation and a few

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more seconds anyway.

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Yeah.

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Um, David, go ahead and you're asking.

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Oh, I should at some point I'm sure it was Pinsofsky or Pinsov and Levelhof Levelsky, and

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then it got short into Pinsofsky.

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What is your David?

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Yeah, what's the background of Pinsoff?

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Uh I believe it's Russian, so I have some some Russian ancestry.

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Yeah.

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Okay, cool.

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Thus all the allusions to boring Russian novels.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So let's get started if that's if that's okay with you, gents.

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Um yeah?

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Yep.

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All right, great.

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Michael, we we always like kind of record an intro, so we'll just get right to it.

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You know, we're very happy to have you here.

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Um, this is a podcast about evolutionary approaches to psychology.

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And um, we've typically had very sort of um evolutionarily focused

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folks on so far.

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But as we've recorded episodes, one of the things that we've gotten to is the idea that,

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you know, if you take a functional approach to the mind, then oftentimes what you're doing

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is you're studying important information processing problems and describing it at the level

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of software, sort of what the function is.

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And if you take intuitive concepts sometimes, like for example, we've

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David's tackled humor.

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I had a recent um episode about free will, really difficult concepts where

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a lot of times people who might think kind of like an engineer or a scientist, they hear

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things like free will or humor or consciousness, their eyes roll back in their head and

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they think, oh my God, this is where good thinking goes to die.

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You know, like this is just bullshit, right?

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Um, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because over the years, as I've

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encountered occasionally dipping my toe into work on consciousness, every

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time, and I don't even often know that it's you, I just sort of read something, and then

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I'm like, oh no, but it's him.

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Uh, to my mind, you're doing some of the clearest-minded work on

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consciousness, taking what is otherwise this very nebulous, very ghostly,

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um, almost magical thing, and just approaching it in the right way.

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And that's a really big um thing to bite off.

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And that's a really interesting, I imagine, story to sort of how you got there.

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And I know that's not the only thing you've studied.

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So this is my long-winded way of starting out prefacing saying, How does

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somebody get to how does a kid growing up uh in the world end

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up uh trying to tackle this idea.

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And then why of all people, um, and at least maybe we're biased here, but like,

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why is it that everybody doesn't think well about this thing?

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And how did you get to think so well about it?

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If I can ask you a flattering question.

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Well, thank you.

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That was a very nice introduction and a very flattering introduction.

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And yes, I think this is a a huge topic that everyone thinks about at some point,

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and most people get wrong.

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Uh, and that's okay.

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Um, and one of the reasons why people get it wrong is that they rely on intuitions and they

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don't realize the extent to which intuitions are simplifications and

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inaccuracies, uh, you know, useful simplifications, useful inaccuracies, but they are

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inaccurate.

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Um, and I think that's at the heart of the whole problem of consciousness.

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So, yes, it's a it's a huge field.

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There are lots of people who traditionally don't like the field of study.

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I do think that's um I don't know if it's completely reversing, but there are more

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and more people who find the topic worthy and interesting, um

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although many of those people still approach it in a way

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that I think is a little is not gonna get them anywhere.

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Um so it's still a field that's chock full of fluff and

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illogic and um kind of um

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superstitious thinking, I would say.

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Uh so it's a very difficult field to study, but very, very fascinating and very, very

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important, as it turns out.

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Um, I don't think I understood the importance of that field of study until relatively

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recently, long after I got into it.

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But I do think ultimately the reason why it's so important is not is

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because it's not just philosophy.

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Right.

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And it's not just psychology and it's not just neuroscience.

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It turns out to be the key to our technological future.

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That's what makes it so important to everyone, because now we're facing artificial

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minds and questions emerge.

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Can it ever be conscious?

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What does that even mean?

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If it is, what do we do about it?

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Uh and so answering those questions turn out to be kind of the center of what we have to

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figure out as human beings.

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Uh and it ends up being this incredibly important topic to study.

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Um so yeah.

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Yeah.

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Um so you mentioned that um a lot of people approach this topic uh in the wrong

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way.

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And I'm curious to unpack what you mean by that.

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What are people doing wrong and how can they be corrected?

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Yeah, I don't know how it could be corrected.

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I've been trying for 15 years.

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TMS.

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TMS, a little bit of TMS.

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Yeah, no, maybe maybe impair the well, yeah.

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No, we will let's hear what you if you have a longer answer, or we can offer some

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half-baked joke answers.

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We have a 12-step program, actually.

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TMS, your theory of mind system, maybe first step.

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Okay.

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Um so first of all, I think a lot of people come to this

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field with hidden motivations.

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They may not even know.

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There are people who come to this field because they want humans to be special

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and they want to be there to be a spiritual mystery.

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And they kind of revel in that.

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And so one of the things you see at the start of almost every book or paper or talk about

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consciousness is it is a mystery.

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We may never understand it.

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Um, I actually don't think that's true.

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I don't think it's a mystery.

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I think we do understand the essence of it.

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But that doesn't fly well because literally everyone wants it to be a mystery.

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They want there to be the mystery essence.

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Uh, and so there's a sort of celebration of the fact that this is something science hasn't

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touched yet.

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Um, I think there's a lot of people who um approach it from a um

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a point of fear of technology.

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And um actually I think a lot of the understanding, a lot of the development of

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ideas in consciousness scholarship emerged from that.

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I think you can go back so if you trace it back, the first person to really I mean

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everyone goes back to Descartes.

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But Descartes 500 years ago doesn't actually talk about consciousness per se.

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He talks about the mind and he talks about cognition.

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And um William James, so end of the

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1800s, I think what is it, 1890, writes his giant book on psychology, principles of

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psychology, and he's the first one talking some kind of scholarly or scientific way about

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consciousness.

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And he's the one, for example, who coins the phrase stream of consciousness.

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And to him and to people at that time, consciousness was content.

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It was, I remember this, I perceive that, I have

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this thought, I have this emotion.

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It's a whole bunch of whole jumble of things that are in a stream flowing

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along.

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Um, and that's the concept of consciousness.

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And then somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, and people like

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Turing have a huge role to play where he writes his 1950 paper, Can Machines

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Think?

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Although, notably Turing also doesn't use the word consciousness, but can machines think?

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Suddenly people are realizing that the contents, the things that are in the stream of

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consciousness, are duplicatable.

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Like gradually, computers have memory.

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Maybe it's not quite the same as brain memory, but they have memory.

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They can make decisions, they can take in information, compute something, and then choose

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an action.

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Um, they can um take in sensory input, uh, they can control

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action, they can do all these components, and suddenly the philosophers have a problem

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because if we're special and machines can do all the components.

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What's left?

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And it's in that state where science seems to be closing in

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and stripping the mystery away that a new concept emerges.

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And this is um what uh so probably best put by Chalmers.

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He calls it the hard problem, and everyone's heard the phrase the hard problem, and uh and

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the idea is um I it actually dates back a little earlier, but maybe the per first person

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to really articulate his Nagel when he talks about what is it like to be a bat?

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What is it like?

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It's not the content, it's not the thoughts, it's not the perceptions in your mind, it's

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that it feels like something.

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And so this new idea emerges that there's an essence.

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It's not the information content, it's nothing physical, it's an essence of experience.

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And that becomes the big thing.

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And that's what people mean by consciousness.

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And it emerges, I think, because people are afraid of the technology.

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And so that's how the field moves all the way through the 50s, 60s, 70s,

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90s is when Chalmers is writing about the hard problem.

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And now, suddenly, in the um 2020s, maybe

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2019s, uh, suddenly technology takes another leap.

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And deep learning networks, well, LLMs, suddenly explode, and they're doing stuff

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and they're thinking apparently, and coming out with cognitively complicated stuff.

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And now you see the whole field of consciousness studies reacting to that and the

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prevailing, almost uniformly prevailing view is: well, the machines aren't really thinking,

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they're just mimicking.

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They have no nothing like mind or consciousness.

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There's an extra essence that we have.

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And it must somehow bubble up from this or that.

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And some people suggest it's like this the subcellular structures that bubble up into

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the this and the that, or it's something else, or it's quantum resonance, and then there's

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electric fields, and people are spinning and spinning, trying to figure out what the how

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how to express the special thing that biology has that the machines absolutely can't have.

244
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And it's again shaping and driving the whole conceptual land uh landscape of

245
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consciousness studies.

246
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All of this fear uh of uh of mind

247
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being something that in the end is kind of mechanistic and reproducible and people don't

248
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want that and so i think that's where that's the the deep

249
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motivation uh for a lot of these misconceptions that spread everywhere all not just in

250
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the public but across the whole you know scholarly field Yeah, that's fantastic.

251
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And I think one of the things, one of the themes of this in uh recent episodes, especially,

252
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and I think your work is such a good example of this, is that I think in the long scope of

253
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history, the 20th century and early 21st century psychology will be seen as

254
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the time when the perspective dependence of psychology was not made

255
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explicit.

256
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So the idea that the initial constructs like consciousness or free will,

257
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those things are intuitive to people.

258
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They're outputs of this complex machinery.

259
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And so far in science, we've sort of just assumed at the outset, okay, well, these are real

260
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things.

261
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I'm going to just consult my intuition about what kind of thing it is and just go looking

262
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for it in the mind, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, well, this is an output.

263
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I'm a robot, and I'm a squishy robot.

264
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And I'm this is the what why would an evolved complex computational system

265
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think something like free will or consciousness exists?

266
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Yeah.

267
00:16:06,310 --> 00:16:11,830
And and doing the science of that before we start just thinking naively it's sort of there.

268
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Yeah.

269
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find.

270
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And otherwise, we sort of just we are dominated by the intuition which might be leading us

271
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astray.

272
00:16:18,700 --> 00:16:19,660
Yes, exactly.

273
00:16:19,740 --> 00:16:20,860
That's exactly right.

274
00:16:21,100 --> 00:16:27,100
Sometimes I give the example, since I'm I'm a little bit of an ancient Egypt file, uh I

275
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give the example of uh imagine them saying, Well,

276
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we know the sun goes down at night into a big hole into the underworld, but we're

277
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scientific, we're gonna go find the hole, yeah, And then they expend

278
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you know money and resources, and they have journals on the sun hole, and they try

279
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and try and they can't find it, and it's a big spooky mystery.

280
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And the problem lies right at the root.

281
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Yeah.

282
00:16:56,790 --> 00:17:02,720
Just like you said, they accepted as literal truth um uh an

283
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assumption or as I would put it um a a model that the brain constructed that's not

284
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literally accurate.

285
00:17:09,280 --> 00:17:14,320
Yeah yeah and I think I mean I and I mean we'll get to exactly the substantive thing but I

286
00:17:14,320 --> 00:17:19,360
think just to preview I suspect that it seems like especially that the

287
00:17:19,680 --> 00:17:25,040
self-referential systems, the self-modeling systems are especially

288
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where philosophers and people's thinking have really um those are the those

289
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are the constructs where there really seems to be a mystery.

290
00:17:35,210 --> 00:17:39,530
And and I suspect that's actually a design feature or a consequence of actually the system.

291
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And I think we can get to that.

292
00:17:41,050 --> 00:17:41,210
Yeah.

293
00:17:41,370 --> 00:17:42,970
Um, but I think it's a really interesting thing.

294
00:17:43,130 --> 00:17:49,050
I think it's no accident that the self-modeling representations are the ones that are

295
00:17:49,050 --> 00:17:50,970
so philosophically problematic.

296
00:17:51,210 --> 00:17:51,530
Yeah.

297
00:17:51,640 --> 00:17:52,040
Yep.

298
00:17:52,120 --> 00:17:53,080
I think that's right.

299
00:17:53,320 --> 00:17:59,240
So if you want to if the um if you want to build a model, the

300
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brain builds a model of something out there in the world, those models, of course, are not

301
00:18:03,640 --> 00:18:04,840
terribly accurate.

302
00:18:06,200 --> 00:18:09,880
But you know they capture some aspect of what's out there in the world.

303
00:18:10,440 --> 00:18:12,680
And there are lots of inaccuracies.

304
00:18:13,720 --> 00:18:19,240
The most obvious maybe the one that I like to point to is um

305
00:18:19,560 --> 00:18:24,510
color or white, in particular, the color white.

306
00:18:24,670 --> 00:18:28,750
Um, and Newton figured out that white is actually a mixture of lots of different

307
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wavelengths.

308
00:18:29,550 --> 00:18:34,830
Um, before him, people assumed that it was pure luminance,

309
00:18:35,070 --> 00:18:38,990
stripped clean of contaminating colors, right?

310
00:18:39,150 --> 00:18:44,910
And then the physics question was: how do you take light and clean it to make it pure?

311
00:18:45,070 --> 00:18:50,220
And um, and the reason why people thought that is because our visual systems

312
00:18:50,220 --> 00:18:55,180
evolved to come up with a really simple, useful, but

313
00:18:55,500 --> 00:19:01,340
inaccurate model, bundle of information to describe the

314
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mixture of wavelengths.

315
00:19:03,180 --> 00:19:09,100
Because it's it's useless to have a really detailed, physically accurate, like the

316
00:19:09,100 --> 00:19:14,890
brain doesn't need to know that light is a wave and that a surface reflects some

317
00:19:15,050 --> 00:19:18,890
an infinite range of wavelengths within a spectrum.

318
00:19:19,050 --> 00:19:20,330
Like you don't need that.

319
00:19:20,410 --> 00:19:24,650
You it just a nice simple cartoonish picture of it is sufficient.

320
00:19:24,810 --> 00:19:26,650
And that's what we have built into us.

321
00:19:26,810 --> 00:19:27,610
We can't help it.

322
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We can't think it away.

323
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It's there.

324
00:19:30,650 --> 00:19:36,490
And so we um we see we see white in that way because that's how

325
00:19:36,490 --> 00:19:38,010
the model depicts it.

326
00:19:38,340 --> 00:19:44,260
And um, and one of the most interesting aspects of that, of that kind, which I think is a

327
00:19:44,260 --> 00:19:48,820
very close analogy to the consciousness issue, one of the interesting aspects of it is by

328
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now people are educated.

329
00:19:51,540 --> 00:19:55,620
And so we all walk around with two perspectives at the same time.

330
00:19:55,860 --> 00:19:59,620
Because we all look at white things and it still looks white.

331
00:19:59,850 --> 00:20:03,770
It's not like we go to school and then things don't look white anymore.

332
00:20:03,930 --> 00:20:07,210
Like you can't see all the colors mixed together.

333
00:20:07,450 --> 00:20:11,690
The brain, the visual system is what it is that is automatic.

334
00:20:11,770 --> 00:20:12,810
We can't help that.

335
00:20:12,970 --> 00:20:18,650
So we have to deal with living in a world where to us, from our perspective, white is

336
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brightness without color.

337
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but we also all know academically what it actually is.

338
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And we're okay with that apparent conflict.

339
00:20:28,320 --> 00:20:33,360
And I think the same thing is going to end up have happening or will have to happen with

340
00:20:33,360 --> 00:20:34,080
consciousness.

341
00:20:34,160 --> 00:20:38,480
It's okay to go through the world and say, well, I have an experience and I have

342
00:20:38,480 --> 00:20:42,400
consciousness and I have a mind and I have all these intuitive things.

343
00:20:42,640 --> 00:20:44,000
I can't help those models.

344
00:20:44,160 --> 00:20:46,080
I can't help my brain building those models.

345
00:20:46,160 --> 00:20:48,080
It's not like I'm going to shut them off.

346
00:20:48,240 --> 00:20:50,400
It's still going to be part of my life.

347
00:20:50,750 --> 00:20:56,190
but I also have an academic knowledge of what they actually are, which is different.

348
00:20:56,350 --> 00:21:01,470
Um, and I think people are gonna have to reconcile themselves to that conflict, like one's

349
00:21:01,470 --> 00:21:03,470
never gonna wipe out the other one.

350
00:21:03,790 --> 00:21:07,470
Yeah, and and that's interesting too, because I think an evolutionary approach, I think all

351
00:21:07,550 --> 00:21:11,870
their it would be interesting to get more evolutionary people like reading your work.

352
00:21:12,000 --> 00:21:15,280
uh, not that a lot and many people haven't, and many people have, but I think like this

353
00:21:15,280 --> 00:21:20,240
issue comes up in evolutionary approaches too, where it's sort of this idea that your own

354
00:21:20,240 --> 00:21:26,240
personal experience, um, it's not a a competition with

355
00:21:26,240 --> 00:21:27,600
a scientific approach.

356
00:21:27,760 --> 00:21:30,720
It's that the two are just two different things.

357
00:21:30,880 --> 00:21:34,770
And I think you can get there lots of different ways.

358
00:21:34,930 --> 00:21:38,690
And I think anybody who's taking sort of an evolutionary approach or even just a cognitive

359
00:21:38,690 --> 00:21:41,010
science approach, you know, you just your visual system, right?

360
00:21:41,090 --> 00:21:46,370
Your visual experience of like, you know, the shepherd Subterra or the Subterra Terra,

361
00:21:46,610 --> 00:21:46,850
right?

362
00:21:46,930 --> 00:21:50,610
Where like there's two monsters in this tunnel and they're chasing each other.

363
00:21:50,770 --> 00:21:52,690
And actually they're the same size.

364
00:21:52,770 --> 00:21:57,940
They, their angle subtended on the retina is the same, but they're um, but you know, with

365
00:21:57,940 --> 00:22:02,820
with the visual uh integration of distance cues, like the one just seems bigger than the

366
00:22:02,820 --> 00:22:03,060
other.

367
00:22:03,220 --> 00:22:08,580
You know, like whenever you uh poke on how something works,

368
00:22:09,060 --> 00:22:14,980
then you realize that um I think I think what I'm hearing you say

369
00:22:14,980 --> 00:22:20,500
is that you have to go through this one experience, which is you have to realize that what

370
00:22:20,660 --> 00:22:25,330
we experience is not a description of how we work, It's a description of what we

371
00:22:25,330 --> 00:22:25,970
experience.

372
00:22:26,210 --> 00:22:30,930
And if you confuse those two, or if you're not willing to tease those two apart, you're

373
00:22:30,930 --> 00:22:31,810
going to be in trouble.

374
00:22:31,970 --> 00:22:35,810
But the second you accept that those are just two different things, how we work and then

375
00:22:35,810 --> 00:22:39,890
how it feels, if you if you just keep those clear, you're you're gonna be okay.

376
00:22:40,370 --> 00:22:40,690
Yeah.

377
00:22:40,850 --> 00:22:43,170
Uh and of course, when you get, yes, exactly.

378
00:22:43,330 --> 00:22:47,730
When you get to consciousness and the philosophy, then you start running into

379
00:22:47,730 --> 00:22:52,930
terminological problems because then people will say, Well, yeah, but

380
00:22:54,060 --> 00:22:58,540
if you think there's how it feels and how it works,

381
00:22:59,100 --> 00:23:01,740
consciousness is how it feels.

382
00:23:02,380 --> 00:23:05,900
And the fact that it feels like anything at all is the question.

383
00:23:06,140 --> 00:23:06,460
Right.

384
00:23:06,940 --> 00:23:09,660
And then, you know, then there's a whole set of arguments about that.

385
00:23:09,740 --> 00:23:12,220
Well, never mind whether it feels like something.

386
00:23:12,460 --> 00:23:14,460
We say it feels like something.

387
00:23:14,790 --> 00:23:17,350
We cognitively think it feels like something.

388
00:23:17,510 --> 00:23:22,790
And we do that for a very specific reason because there's models in our brain telling us

389
00:23:22,790 --> 00:23:26,870
that there is such a thing as feeling, uh, and and so on.

390
00:23:27,030 --> 00:23:31,030
So sometimes you have to drill down into these concepts to really get to them.

391
00:23:31,190 --> 00:23:33,110
But I think you're exactly right.

392
00:23:34,070 --> 00:23:34,710
It's interesting.

393
00:23:34,790 --> 00:23:39,280
I'm my brain as uh an evolutionary psychologist, as someone who has been stuck in the

394
00:23:39,280 --> 00:23:42,800
childlike phase of asking why, why, why, why until uh I lose my mind.

395
00:23:43,040 --> 00:23:45,920
As soon as you brought up the example of white light, I started thinking about wait, why?

396
00:23:46,080 --> 00:23:51,600
Why why do we experience white light as this kind of pure, uncontaminated

397
00:23:51,600 --> 00:23:54,880
cleanliness when it's actually from a physics perspective, the opposite?

398
00:23:55,200 --> 00:23:57,200
And I started rolling through possible explanations.

399
00:23:57,280 --> 00:24:01,840
And it seems to me that once you understand what what color is and what color adaptations

400
00:24:01,840 --> 00:24:07,550
are, it begins to make sense because um certain objects will absorb certain wavelengths of

401
00:24:07,550 --> 00:24:09,630
light and reflect certain wavelengths of light.

402
00:24:09,790 --> 00:24:14,670
And it's really useful for us to compute statistical differences and the tendency of of

403
00:24:14,670 --> 00:24:18,910
particular objects to absorb uh this wavelength and emit this wavelength.

404
00:24:18,990 --> 00:24:21,070
And that helps us differentiate objects.

405
00:24:21,150 --> 00:24:26,270
Uh and we tend to uh um you know subtract out uh uh whatever the ambient lighting

406
00:24:26,270 --> 00:24:26,830
conditions are.

407
00:24:26,990 --> 00:24:31,220
So um when we see something as is red, it's actually sending us different wavelengths at

408
00:24:31,220 --> 00:24:34,740
different times of day, but we subtract all that out so that we can successfully

409
00:24:34,740 --> 00:24:35,940
differentiate objects.

410
00:24:36,100 --> 00:24:40,900
And when we experience something as white, I think what we're experiencing is the absence

411
00:24:40,900 --> 00:24:45,060
of stuff that can absorb and reflect specific wavelengths of light.

412
00:24:45,220 --> 00:24:50,820
And for an organism that is particularly hygienic, interested in cleaning things,

413
00:24:50,980 --> 00:24:55,300
interested in organizing things, you want to remove all the put all the potential things

414
00:24:55,300 --> 00:25:00,730
that could absorb specific wavelengths of light and emit specific wavelengths of light.

415
00:25:00,810 --> 00:25:04,810
And once you've removed all of those things, you have achieved a kind of cleanliness, and

416
00:25:04,810 --> 00:25:09,530
that there's no, there's no adaptively relevant stuff that's in the stimulus.

417
00:25:09,690 --> 00:25:13,530
And so it seems to me that once you recognize that the function of color vision is not to

418
00:25:14,730 --> 00:25:20,300
accurately represent reality, uh, but to successfully differentiate

419
00:25:20,300 --> 00:25:26,300
objects and interact with objects in adaptive ways that the uh the intuitions about white

420
00:25:26,300 --> 00:25:28,060
light start to make sense.

421
00:25:28,300 --> 00:25:34,140
It's only when you think about it as um uh uh uh when you think about f uh the function of

422
00:25:34,140 --> 00:25:39,500
color as uh faithfully representing what's out there, then you start to get into into

423
00:25:39,500 --> 00:25:39,820
problems.

424
00:25:39,900 --> 00:25:45,530
So once you you think in terms of how do we uh differentiate stuff in the environment?

425
00:25:45,690 --> 00:25:47,210
How do we categorize objects?

426
00:25:47,370 --> 00:25:50,090
How do we detect whether something is absent or present?

427
00:25:50,330 --> 00:25:51,210
It begins to make sense.

428
00:25:51,290 --> 00:25:53,130
Anyway, I'm I'm going off on a tangent.

429
00:25:53,770 --> 00:25:59,610
The ultimate question is: is there an explanation along the same lines for why

430
00:25:59,610 --> 00:26:05,290
it seems to us that uh computation uh uh does not

431
00:26:05,290 --> 00:26:06,570
explain feeling?

432
00:26:06,730 --> 00:26:12,380
That when we look at a neural network or an algorithm or uh ChatGPT,

433
00:26:12,940 --> 00:26:18,780
that it seems to lack this property that uh is so important and

434
00:26:18,780 --> 00:26:22,300
fundamental not only to our our lives but our ethics.

435
00:26:23,100 --> 00:26:25,900
Where is this intuition coming from?

436
00:26:27,100 --> 00:26:32,540
So let me try to approach it in several different ways.

437
00:26:32,700 --> 00:26:35,790
And first, I'll start with this.

438
00:26:36,750 --> 00:26:42,270
If you want to build a self-model, and by model, of course, I mean

439
00:26:42,350 --> 00:26:47,470
bundle of information that depicts but also helps predict something.

440
00:26:47,710 --> 00:26:51,870
You know, like the visual system builds the model of an object, and it's not just a

441
00:26:51,870 --> 00:26:56,830
description of the object, it's also a prediction of what will happen if you grab it or

442
00:26:56,830 --> 00:27:01,150
look at the other side of it, and so on, and how so models

443
00:27:02,040 --> 00:27:04,040
describe and predict.

444
00:27:04,280 --> 00:27:10,120
Um if you want to build a model of yourself, of the stuff in your head, um,

445
00:27:10,520 --> 00:27:12,440
you run into a problem right away.

446
00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:18,280
Because if you want to build a physically, literally accurate model, it would have to

447
00:27:18,280 --> 00:27:23,970
be information in your head that says there's 86 billion neurons and they're

448
00:27:23,970 --> 00:27:27,730
hooked together in this way and that way, and there's synapses between them, and then

449
00:27:27,730 --> 00:27:31,730
there's like chemical messengers and this and that, and this pathway from this brain area

450
00:27:31,730 --> 00:27:32,210
to that.

451
00:27:32,370 --> 00:27:38,370
And it's very, very complicated stuff that no animal needs to know in order

452
00:27:38,370 --> 00:27:39,250
to survive.

453
00:27:39,410 --> 00:27:42,130
It's like literally useless information.

454
00:27:42,290 --> 00:27:47,890
And so the model literally does not need, like, there's no adaptive value to

455
00:27:47,890 --> 00:27:53,320
building uh uh evolving um kind of basic inborn

456
00:27:53,320 --> 00:27:58,280
models that depict literally accurately what is going on in there.

457
00:27:58,520 --> 00:28:03,800
And so right away these models are incredibly simplified.

458
00:28:03,960 --> 00:28:07,240
They're detached from physicalism, right?

459
00:28:07,320 --> 00:28:11,800
They're not models of how physical computations are made.

460
00:28:11,880 --> 00:28:17,310
They're models of how magic essences kind of inhabit a

461
00:28:17,310 --> 00:28:20,670
location without a real physical substrate.

462
00:28:20,830 --> 00:28:24,270
That's kind of how these models depict the events in our heads.

463
00:28:24,430 --> 00:28:25,870
And that's good enough.

464
00:28:26,030 --> 00:28:30,830
And any more than that would be harmful because then it just wastes energy and computing

465
00:28:30,830 --> 00:28:32,670
power to try to compute the model.

466
00:28:33,630 --> 00:28:38,270
So that's a huge uh um huge part of it, right?

467
00:28:38,510 --> 00:28:42,270
Uh maybe that's most of most of the answer to your question.

468
00:28:42,430 --> 00:28:48,320
But I I also want to get at from another angle and point out

469
00:28:48,320 --> 00:28:50,880
a different kind of model, which is very, very similar.

470
00:28:50,960 --> 00:28:56,960
It's also a kind of self-model, and it has much of the same um issues around

471
00:28:56,960 --> 00:28:57,200
it.

472
00:28:57,360 --> 00:29:02,960
Uh and the example which I often use in in my writing all over the place is the phantom

473
00:29:02,960 --> 00:29:03,600
limb.

474
00:29:04,450 --> 00:29:09,490
And I'm sure you know you know all about the phantom limb, but the phenomenon is

475
00:29:10,130 --> 00:29:14,610
someday, unfortunately, some people get an amputation, they get an arm cut off.

476
00:29:14,850 --> 00:29:20,770
Um, but they feel like the arm is still there, and they can talk

477
00:29:20,770 --> 00:29:21,090
about it.

478
00:29:21,170 --> 00:29:24,690
And you can say, Close your eyes, tell me about that limb, and they'll say, Oh my god, it's

479
00:29:24,690 --> 00:29:25,010
still there.

480
00:29:25,090 --> 00:29:30,690
It's like sticking out, and I can feel it's hot, and then it itches, and and the

481
00:29:30,690 --> 00:29:36,240
joint feels stiff, and um and then they open their eyes and but of course it's not there.

482
00:29:36,400 --> 00:29:38,000
Oh my god, this is so spooky.

483
00:29:38,160 --> 00:29:41,040
Um, so phantom limb, what is a phantom limb?

484
00:29:41,200 --> 00:29:44,800
Uh it seems like a ghost object, invisible ghost object.

485
00:29:44,880 --> 00:29:50,480
So there's two classes of explanation the modern accepted one

486
00:29:50,800 --> 00:29:56,800
and a much earlier one, um, which people actually did speculate

487
00:29:56,800 --> 00:29:56,960
about.

488
00:29:57,040 --> 00:30:02,800
And the modern accepted one is well, the reason is because your brain built a model

489
00:30:03,050 --> 00:30:04,090
of your body.

490
00:30:04,330 --> 00:30:09,530
And the model used to be accurate, more or less, but now it's not because the limb is

491
00:30:09,530 --> 00:30:12,890
physically gone, but the model still contains a model of a limb.

492
00:30:13,130 --> 00:30:18,730
And so when you ask someone about that limb, what's happening is their cognition is

493
00:30:18,730 --> 00:30:21,290
accessing deeper models that are automatic.

494
00:30:21,530 --> 00:30:25,520
It's not like they can intellectually control those deeper models.

495
00:30:25,600 --> 00:30:30,240
They're just automatic and they're constructing this information about the limb and sending

496
00:30:30,240 --> 00:30:31,920
it up to higher cognition.

497
00:30:32,160 --> 00:30:37,840
And then on that basis, the person can say, Oh, my phantom limb is doing this and this, and

498
00:30:37,840 --> 00:30:38,960
that's the explanation.

499
00:30:39,120 --> 00:30:41,440
It's model-based, information based.

500
00:30:41,520 --> 00:30:43,520
That explains the whole thing.

501
00:30:43,920 --> 00:30:49,920
The second class of explanation is: no, there actually is a ghost limb growing out

502
00:30:49,920 --> 00:30:50,880
of the stump.

503
00:30:51,210 --> 00:30:52,810
It's an invisible limb.

504
00:30:53,050 --> 00:30:58,970
I think Lord Nelson, who lost an arm in battle, famously said, I know there's

505
00:30:58,970 --> 00:31:04,810
an afterlife and I know there's ghosts, because if my arm can have a ghost, then the

506
00:31:04,810 --> 00:31:06,970
whole rest of my body can too.

507
00:31:07,210 --> 00:31:07,690
Right?

508
00:31:07,930 --> 00:31:13,610
So the this other explanation is no, let's accept as literally accurate

509
00:31:14,170 --> 00:31:15,930
the output of this model.

510
00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:21,640
Let's accept as literally accurate that there's a ghost arm coming out of the stump.

511
00:31:21,720 --> 00:31:23,080
It's invisible.

512
00:31:23,400 --> 00:31:26,120
Objects can go through it, but it's there.

513
00:31:26,520 --> 00:31:29,480
Okay, and now we have a scientific problem.

514
00:31:29,960 --> 00:31:34,920
Like we all know it's there because we know it, because intuitively it's just there,

515
00:31:35,080 --> 00:31:41,010
because the only information we that the brain gets is the information available to

516
00:31:41,010 --> 00:31:44,770
it, and that's what these models are piping up to your cognition.

517
00:31:44,850 --> 00:31:46,370
So that's what your cognition knows.

518
00:31:46,450 --> 00:31:48,930
So let's accept that there's a ghost limb.

519
00:31:49,330 --> 00:31:54,050
Problem one, or scientific question one: how is the ghost limb generated?

520
00:31:54,930 --> 00:31:57,330
Like, is it like cells?

521
00:31:57,730 --> 00:32:02,940
Is it like uh uh uh uh integration of information at the

522
00:32:03,420 --> 00:32:06,860
ectoplasm, actually, if you've watched Ghostbusters, the substance, yeah.

523
00:32:07,180 --> 00:32:08,460
Well that's that's question two.

524
00:32:08,700 --> 00:32:09,660
What is it made out of?

525
00:32:09,980 --> 00:32:11,100
Is it ectoplasm?

526
00:32:11,180 --> 00:32:12,860
Is it quantum mist?

527
00:32:13,100 --> 00:32:15,100
Is it an electric field?

528
00:32:15,420 --> 00:32:17,100
So one, how's it generated?

529
00:32:17,260 --> 00:32:18,620
Two, what is it made out of?

530
00:32:18,780 --> 00:32:24,620
And three, the question no one ever asks, but is actually more important than the

531
00:32:24,620 --> 00:32:25,340
other ones.

532
00:32:25,580 --> 00:32:31,550
Once it's there, how does it impact neurons in

533
00:32:31,550 --> 00:32:37,230
your brain in such a specific pattern that you know that

534
00:32:37,230 --> 00:32:38,110
it's there?

535
00:32:38,990 --> 00:32:41,310
Elizabeth Elizabeth of Bohemia, right?

536
00:32:41,390 --> 00:32:43,790
Writing to Descartes, the problem of interactionism.

537
00:32:43,870 --> 00:32:45,070
That was that was her.

538
00:32:45,310 --> 00:32:49,790
How does the it's the joke is how does a dualist wake up in the morning, right?

539
00:32:49,840 --> 00:32:52,480
Like how does the how does the ghost interact with the machine?

540
00:32:52,720 --> 00:32:53,280
Yeah, exactly.

541
00:32:53,680 --> 00:32:59,360
Yeah, but it has to be such a specific interaction that if prints the like this

542
00:32:59,360 --> 00:33:04,160
neuron gets a little more active and that's a little less than just the right pattern, that

543
00:33:04,160 --> 00:33:07,040
it represents arms sticking out of stump.

544
00:33:07,200 --> 00:33:07,360
Yeah.

545
00:33:07,600 --> 00:33:11,280
And then you can uh uh form the thought and articulate it, right?

546
00:33:11,440 --> 00:33:13,760
So here's the problem how is it generated?

547
00:33:13,840 --> 00:33:18,080
What is it made out of, and then how does it curl back and impact your brain in a specific

548
00:33:18,080 --> 00:33:18,800
way, right?

549
00:33:19,040 --> 00:33:21,930
So the intuition is there.

550
00:33:22,090 --> 00:33:26,970
The very powerful intuition is there because the deeper models are

551
00:33:27,450 --> 00:33:29,690
telling you it's uh it's there.

552
00:33:29,850 --> 00:33:33,210
And the deeper models are there because it's adaptive.

553
00:33:33,370 --> 00:33:36,890
Like we evolved to have models of the parts of our body.

554
00:33:37,050 --> 00:33:39,290
So um this is very adaptive.

555
00:33:39,450 --> 00:33:45,180
Maybe there's circumstances in which the model becomes so inaccurate that it's actually

556
00:33:45,180 --> 00:33:47,740
maladaptive in that particular circumstance.

557
00:33:47,900 --> 00:33:49,740
These models are not perfect.

558
00:33:51,740 --> 00:33:57,660
But then the scientific error, the heart of the scientific error is

559
00:33:57,660 --> 00:34:03,500
always at the very outset saying, let's assume that the model the

560
00:34:03,500 --> 00:34:06,140
brain generated is literally accurate.

561
00:34:06,300 --> 00:34:09,980
And now let's try to find the scientific explanation for that.

562
00:34:10,590 --> 00:34:16,350
And that's that's where people right at the outset, 90%, 95% of

563
00:34:16,350 --> 00:34:19,470
the scholarship on consciousness gets stuck.

564
00:34:19,790 --> 00:34:20,030
Yeah.

565
00:34:20,190 --> 00:34:21,630
First step is the wrong step.

566
00:34:21,790 --> 00:34:27,790
I think if it's okay with you, like I think a lot of people listening, uh well,

567
00:34:28,030 --> 00:34:29,150
here's what I like to do.

568
00:34:29,310 --> 00:34:30,910
Um there's two questions.

569
00:34:31,070 --> 00:34:35,560
One is sort of what is the system that's producing these representations?

570
00:34:35,720 --> 00:34:37,400
So let's talk about like what is the system?

571
00:34:37,560 --> 00:34:42,680
Then there's a second part, which is why does that system produce bad scientific intuition,

572
00:34:42,840 --> 00:34:44,680
which is a separate and additional thing?

573
00:34:44,920 --> 00:34:49,400
And I think what you're studying is this unique thing of any kind of representational

574
00:34:49,400 --> 00:34:51,240
system is a hard nut to crack.

575
00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:56,550
And it's in you also have a very interesting history of having done earlier work on other

576
00:34:56,550 --> 00:35:01,030
kinds of representational systems that are in this category of self-representation.

577
00:35:01,270 --> 00:35:03,590
And I suspect that's no accident either here.

578
00:35:03,670 --> 00:35:04,950
And this is very cool.

579
00:35:05,190 --> 00:35:11,110
So um, but let's get, if we can, let's get to let's sort of for now ignore

580
00:35:11,190 --> 00:35:15,030
even that people have been thinking wrong, that there has been this issue.

581
00:35:15,400 --> 00:35:19,720
but what is the computational system that we're talking about here?

582
00:35:19,880 --> 00:35:21,080
What does it do?

583
00:35:21,240 --> 00:35:23,000
And what is its job?

584
00:35:23,240 --> 00:35:28,280
And then I think that might be a good lead into once we've sort of talked about well, what

585
00:35:28,280 --> 00:35:30,040
is the thing we're talking about?

586
00:35:30,440 --> 00:35:35,320
Then we can start unpacking given how it works, given what it's for,

587
00:35:36,200 --> 00:35:40,840
when people are using that system to then do science, why does that then lead science

588
00:35:40,840 --> 00:35:41,800
astray?

589
00:35:42,520 --> 00:35:43,400
Yeah, sure.

590
00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:49,330
So um part I think part of

591
00:35:49,330 --> 00:35:53,010
what's going on is as I said self models.

592
00:35:53,890 --> 00:35:59,090
So a system needs a good model of the thing that it's

593
00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:01,810
controlling or trying to influence.

594
00:36:01,970 --> 00:36:06,450
So you need a good model of the stuff in your world in order to interact with it.

595
00:36:06,610 --> 00:36:11,900
You need a good model of yourself to predict your behavior and understand,

596
00:36:12,620 --> 00:36:14,380
expect what's going to happen next.

597
00:36:14,460 --> 00:36:15,980
You need a good model of yourself.

598
00:36:16,060 --> 00:36:19,900
And there's lots of different aspects of yourself to model.

599
00:36:19,980 --> 00:36:25,340
And people probably have, you know, if you if you have a sense of your personality and who

600
00:36:25,340 --> 00:36:28,940
you are as a human being, that's in a sense a self-model.

601
00:36:29,180 --> 00:36:35,020
Um, and um but what we're talking about here is something really

602
00:36:35,180 --> 00:36:35,740
specific.

603
00:36:36,060 --> 00:36:41,990
It's essentially how the brain models, how you understand what it means for

604
00:36:41,990 --> 00:36:45,030
your brain to deeply process something.

605
00:36:45,510 --> 00:36:45,830
Right.

606
00:36:45,990 --> 00:36:50,550
Can I can I maybe do an example or a question just to make it concrete for some?

607
00:36:50,790 --> 00:36:50,870
Yeah.

608
00:36:51,190 --> 00:36:56,310
So for example, uh to and to put it in for our listeners who might have listened to other

609
00:36:56,310 --> 00:37:00,630
episodes, this is sort of putting out a functional or software level description, which is

610
00:37:00,630 --> 00:37:02,820
that there are systems in the mind.

611
00:37:02,900 --> 00:37:05,060
So we're breaking, we're at the subpersonal level.

612
00:37:05,140 --> 00:37:06,340
There's no agent anymore.

613
00:37:06,500 --> 00:37:12,340
So one of the jobs of one of there's a system that's representing at a gross

614
00:37:12,340 --> 00:37:14,980
level, sort of what is the state of the system.

615
00:37:15,140 --> 00:37:21,060
So for example, right, um, that there is a decision

616
00:37:21,060 --> 00:37:21,700
to be made.

617
00:37:21,860 --> 00:37:24,260
Let's say, am I gonna go to this place or this place?

618
00:37:24,500 --> 00:37:24,820
Yes.

619
00:37:25,810 --> 00:37:31,650
And that decision being faced, obviously, there's all kinds of things

620
00:37:31,650 --> 00:37:34,050
entering into whether that decision is made.

621
00:37:34,290 --> 00:37:36,130
And there's computations going on.

622
00:37:36,210 --> 00:37:41,970
But there's another system that at a or set of systems that at a very high level

623
00:37:42,050 --> 00:37:47,650
is saying the state of these other systems is that

624
00:37:48,130 --> 00:37:54,000
options are being considered, and the output of which option will be selected hasn't

625
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:54,880
been chosen yet.

626
00:37:55,040 --> 00:37:55,360
Yes.

627
00:37:55,520 --> 00:37:59,840
So that will be sort of, and and part of the function of doing that would be, for example,

628
00:38:00,080 --> 00:38:05,360
not starting to walk yet if the decision is, um, if the decision is which way am I going to

629
00:38:05,360 --> 00:38:05,680
walk.

630
00:38:05,840 --> 00:38:10,080
Or if if we're talking about where are we going to go to dinner, it would be something of

631
00:38:10,080 --> 00:38:11,440
like, no, I'm thinking about it.

632
00:38:11,600 --> 00:38:14,080
Like that's what would give meaning to I'm thinking about it.

633
00:38:14,160 --> 00:38:18,480
It's that there's a system, it's not doing the job of making the decision, but it's

634
00:38:18,480 --> 00:38:24,190
representing and talking to the system that sort of detects the output has been

635
00:38:24,510 --> 00:38:25,310
arrived at.

636
00:38:25,390 --> 00:38:27,070
And it's just saying, nope, we're not there yet.

637
00:38:27,150 --> 00:38:28,670
There's still processing going on.

638
00:38:28,830 --> 00:38:28,910
Yeah.

639
00:38:29,070 --> 00:38:33,550
So that's like a very mundane, concrete example that demystifies it.

640
00:38:33,790 --> 00:38:39,390
That one system has the job of representing states of other systems,

641
00:38:39,630 --> 00:38:42,940
not their full computations, because that wouldn't do anything.

642
00:38:43,100 --> 00:38:48,540
And but it has this uh affordance function of, for example, saying, look, we haven't made a

643
00:38:48,540 --> 00:38:51,580
decision yet, therefore we shouldn't proceed yet, for example.

644
00:38:51,900 --> 00:38:52,460
Yeah, yeah.

645
00:38:52,540 --> 00:38:53,340
So that's right.

646
00:38:53,580 --> 00:38:59,580
So uh if there's a a decider system, which is probably very

647
00:38:59,580 --> 00:39:05,260
complicated and spans much of the brain, if there's a decider, there's also a thing that

648
00:39:05,900 --> 00:39:11,450
builds a description and a set of predictions about the decider.

649
00:39:12,170 --> 00:39:17,610
So you have, you might say, a schematic description of what it means for your brain to make

650
00:39:17,610 --> 00:39:18,490
decisions.

651
00:39:19,450 --> 00:39:21,610
Um, that's exactly right.

652
00:39:21,770 --> 00:39:27,690
And that somewhat cartoonish or at least detail poor description

653
00:39:28,170 --> 00:39:33,840
is I have an essence inside of me that magically makes decisions.

654
00:39:34,400 --> 00:39:35,920
And people call that will.

655
00:39:36,000 --> 00:39:38,880
So you were talking about free will, one of the topics you talk about.

656
00:39:38,960 --> 00:39:43,200
So these intuitions about free will are not really

657
00:39:45,280 --> 00:39:47,840
uh pre-scientific mistakes.

658
00:39:48,160 --> 00:39:53,630
What they really are is deeply ingrained, um, simplified but

659
00:39:53,630 --> 00:39:55,790
useful models of yourself.

660
00:39:56,750 --> 00:40:02,670
Uh, and so, yes, so decision making has a kind

661
00:40:02,670 --> 00:40:07,630
of schematic model of it that we build and that we can then articulate and talk about, and

662
00:40:07,630 --> 00:40:10,750
we describe it as like a will inside of us.

663
00:40:11,070 --> 00:40:16,780
But there's another type of process in the brain, um, also very fundamental decision

664
00:40:16,860 --> 00:40:21,260
making, one of the most fundamental processes, and another process that uh cognitive

665
00:40:21,260 --> 00:40:23,740
psychologists typically call attention.

666
00:40:24,060 --> 00:40:29,180
And um attention, you know, it goes is so many different versions of what attention is and

667
00:40:29,180 --> 00:40:31,020
colloquial versions and this and that.

668
00:40:31,180 --> 00:40:37,050
But what I really mean is uh focusing, processing power on

669
00:40:37,050 --> 00:40:39,130
something, processing it deeply.

670
00:40:39,290 --> 00:40:41,210
That's what attention really is.

671
00:40:41,770 --> 00:40:46,410
Um, so you have tons of stuff in the room around you, and some of it you're focused on and

672
00:40:46,410 --> 00:40:51,210
you're processing it deeply, and some of it is being processed so shallowly it never gets

673
00:40:51,210 --> 00:40:55,130
beyond a few low-level brain systems.

674
00:40:55,690 --> 00:41:00,980
So uh there are systems, so there's a way of directing attention.

675
00:41:01,140 --> 00:41:05,220
And directing attention is something that you need to control and move around so that you

676
00:41:05,220 --> 00:41:06,340
can do anything in the world.

677
00:41:06,420 --> 00:41:09,780
If you can't control your attention, you can't control your behavior.

678
00:41:10,500 --> 00:41:14,260
So there's attention and how it's being controlled.

679
00:41:14,500 --> 00:41:20,340
And then there's the brain's description to itself of what it's doing when it's

680
00:41:20,340 --> 00:41:21,460
controlling attention.

681
00:41:21,700 --> 00:41:27,110
So how does a brain describe attention and attention states and attention control.

682
00:41:27,270 --> 00:41:28,870
How does it describe that?

683
00:41:29,190 --> 00:41:35,030
And I would say it describes it as there's a weird,

684
00:41:35,590 --> 00:41:41,430
non-physical magic essence inside of me that can focus on things and

685
00:41:41,430 --> 00:41:44,310
experience them and have and grab them.

686
00:41:44,390 --> 00:41:50,340
Like my mind can possess this thing right now and then switch to that thing right there

687
00:41:50,500 --> 00:41:56,020
and and it and when I do that it allows me to know about the thing and to respond to it and

688
00:41:56,020 --> 00:41:58,900
to experience it and feel it and so on.

689
00:41:59,140 --> 00:42:04,900
That's the brain's way of describing what it means when it pays attention to things.

690
00:42:05,220 --> 00:42:08,750
And so That's yes.

691
00:42:09,070 --> 00:42:09,310
Yeah.

692
00:42:09,390 --> 00:42:12,910
And if I can make another just concrete example for listeners, then you can tell me if this

693
00:42:12,910 --> 00:42:13,310
is so.

694
00:42:13,390 --> 00:42:18,350
So, like a good example would be something like um, let's say this actually happened to me.

695
00:42:18,430 --> 00:42:21,790
I was walking home from school one day talking to somebody and walked into a tree, like

696
00:42:21,870 --> 00:42:24,430
when I was in high like elementary school or something.

697
00:42:24,670 --> 00:42:28,670
And right, the intuitive idea is like I wasn't paying good enough attention to that, right?

698
00:42:28,750 --> 00:42:33,870
Like, so I need, and so the idea would be that again, we're in translating this intuitive

699
00:42:33,870 --> 00:42:39,780
idea now into a software functional level description, is that um that

700
00:42:40,100 --> 00:42:41,940
I walked into a tree.

701
00:42:42,180 --> 00:42:44,340
So that is an event that's important.

702
00:42:44,500 --> 00:42:48,100
Their mechanisms representing I just walked into a tree, right?

703
00:42:48,740 --> 00:42:54,100
And again, this is like no free lunch principle is you we can't take for granted that

704
00:42:54,100 --> 00:43:00,050
there's a system or systems that have been modeling what has been the primary or what

705
00:43:00,050 --> 00:43:05,970
have been the important kind of real-time um contents out in the world that were that

706
00:43:06,130 --> 00:43:09,970
that many systems were were handling in the triage, right?

707
00:43:10,130 --> 00:43:15,410
So I was to bring it back intuitively, it was like I was having a social interaction and I

708
00:43:15,410 --> 00:43:17,730
therefore missed a physical interaction, right?

709
00:43:17,810 --> 00:43:18,050
Yeah.

710
00:43:18,210 --> 00:43:24,210
So this system has detected an error of the prioritization of a physical danger

711
00:43:24,530 --> 00:43:30,460
got missed by and the social systems were were getting more of the

712
00:43:30,460 --> 00:43:36,460
um prioritization in this sort of finite, you know, uh uh, you know,

713
00:43:36,620 --> 00:43:38,540
muscles can only do so many things, right?

714
00:43:38,700 --> 00:43:44,540
So in action planning and et cetera, all these so the the the influence of the physical

715
00:43:44,540 --> 00:43:49,420
hazard system on motor planning and modeling was just wrong.

716
00:43:49,740 --> 00:43:55,450
And so the system just detecting, okay, we we made a mistake

717
00:43:55,450 --> 00:43:55,770
here.

718
00:43:56,330 --> 00:43:59,930
And this and then consequently there's changes to that.

719
00:44:00,090 --> 00:44:05,690
And then the high level description of that is I wasn't paying attention to the right

720
00:44:05,690 --> 00:44:06,170
thing.

721
00:44:06,650 --> 00:44:08,730
But in fact, the translation is what I just said.

722
00:44:09,130 --> 00:44:09,370
Yeah.

723
00:44:09,450 --> 00:44:09,770
Yeah.

724
00:44:09,930 --> 00:44:15,850
And of course, the high-level description, people typically conflate attention

725
00:44:15,850 --> 00:44:17,050
and consciousness.

726
00:44:17,280 --> 00:44:21,440
And so people will say, well, I wasn't aware of the tree, or I wasn't conscious of the

727
00:44:21,440 --> 00:44:21,840
tree.

728
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:23,680
I wasn't paying attention to the tree.

729
00:44:23,760 --> 00:44:27,760
And actually, those tend to go together: attention and consciousness.

730
00:44:27,920 --> 00:44:33,520
So there's a wonderful phenomenon that, of course, you know about called inattentional

731
00:44:33,520 --> 00:44:39,200
blindness, where attention, focusing your neural

732
00:44:39,200 --> 00:44:44,000
processing on something and being conscious of it, usually go together.

733
00:44:44,330 --> 00:44:48,010
I mean, you can separate them as it turns out, but they usually go together.

734
00:44:48,170 --> 00:44:53,450
And um, and of course, the famous example of inattentional blindness is the old gorilla in

735
00:44:53,450 --> 00:44:58,650
the basketball game, where just for the listeners, where you tell people here, look at this

736
00:44:58,650 --> 00:45:02,890
video and count how many times a basketball switches hands in the game.

737
00:45:02,970 --> 00:45:07,660
And they're so focused on that that they don't see the video properly.

738
00:45:07,740 --> 00:45:11,820
And then you say, okay, I'm going to show you the same video again, but just take in the

739
00:45:11,820 --> 00:45:12,460
whole thing.

740
00:45:12,620 --> 00:45:14,220
Don't look at the ball so much.

741
00:45:14,380 --> 00:45:16,940
And they look at it and they're like, This can't be the same video.

742
00:45:17,100 --> 00:45:19,900
There's a guy in a gorilla suit running through the game.

743
00:45:20,060 --> 00:45:21,500
I didn't see it before.

744
00:45:21,820 --> 00:45:26,620
And the reason why they didn't see it, even though it was getting in their eyes, it was

745
00:45:26,620 --> 00:45:29,980
getting in their visual system, is because they weren't paying attention to it.

746
00:45:30,140 --> 00:45:33,660
And so when you're not paying attention, you are not conscious of it.

747
00:45:33,820 --> 00:45:37,670
If you're paying a little bit of attention, you might be a little bit conscious of it, and

748
00:45:37,670 --> 00:45:38,070
so on.

749
00:45:38,230 --> 00:45:40,550
So inattentional blindness.

750
00:45:40,710 --> 00:45:46,390
Um, and what I think is going on is that attention is a mechanism,

751
00:45:46,550 --> 00:45:52,310
it's a process, it's the brain focusing more on this than

752
00:45:52,310 --> 00:45:52,950
on that.

753
00:45:53,830 --> 00:45:59,620
Consciousness is the brain telling you from the inside

754
00:45:59,620 --> 00:46:03,220
about what its attention is doing and what it's paying attention to.

755
00:46:03,460 --> 00:46:07,140
And those are usually, they usually go together, but not always.

756
00:46:08,180 --> 00:46:13,940
The brain's concept or model of what its attention is doing can sometimes

757
00:46:13,940 --> 00:46:15,060
make mistakes.

758
00:46:15,460 --> 00:46:15,860
Right.

759
00:46:16,180 --> 00:46:16,500
Yeah.

760
00:46:16,980 --> 00:46:22,470
So I want to get into the functional specifics of

761
00:46:22,710 --> 00:46:26,310
why we need a model of our own attentional state.

762
00:46:26,470 --> 00:46:32,230
So it makes sense to me why I would need a model of physical objects in my environment

763
00:46:32,310 --> 00:46:36,870
and their orientation to me in space, how far apart they are, even what color they are, and

764
00:46:36,870 --> 00:46:40,710
how I can differentiate them such that you know red things pop out from a green backdrop.

765
00:46:40,950 --> 00:46:44,950
That seems like an adaptive model if I'm foraging for food, say.

766
00:46:46,280 --> 00:46:52,280
Um uh it makes sense to me why I would even need a model of, say, uh, your

767
00:46:52,280 --> 00:46:57,560
mind or Dave's mind, such that it allows me to anticipate if you're going to take a punch

768
00:46:57,560 --> 00:46:58,680
at me, I can duck.

769
00:46:58,840 --> 00:47:04,360
Uh, if you're going to say something uh that uh upsets me, I can come up with a

770
00:47:04,440 --> 00:47:08,680
comeback in my head before you finish saying it, so that I have a witty retort.

771
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:13,930
So it it makes sense why I would need objects, uh models of objects in my environment and

772
00:47:13,930 --> 00:47:19,130
even models of uh other people and their uh uh mental states and the likely consequences

773
00:47:19,130 --> 00:47:19,930
that would flow from them.

774
00:47:20,090 --> 00:47:25,370
But it's not as obvious to me why I need a model of my own mind or my own uh

775
00:47:25,450 --> 00:47:26,570
attentional state.

776
00:47:26,890 --> 00:47:29,930
Uh because that's just gonna go and affect my behavior regardless.

777
00:47:30,090 --> 00:47:36,090
Why why do I need to uh uh uh a model of my own uh uh attentional state um uh as opposed

778
00:47:36,090 --> 00:47:38,040
to say someone else's uh mental state.

779
00:47:38,360 --> 00:47:39,720
Yeah, excellent question.

780
00:47:39,880 --> 00:47:42,360
I'll give you several specific examples.

781
00:47:42,600 --> 00:47:47,160
I was gonna say three examples, but then I'll probably forget the third one before I get to

782
00:47:47,160 --> 00:47:47,320
it.

783
00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:49,720
So I won't be quite so specific.

784
00:47:49,960 --> 00:47:51,080
Several examples.

785
00:47:51,400 --> 00:47:57,320
One, um, you're at a party and there's a big plate of

786
00:47:57,480 --> 00:48:01,930
donuts next to you, and you don't want to pig out and eat them.

787
00:48:02,250 --> 00:48:08,170
And you know, because you have a predictive model of your own attention, you know that

788
00:48:08,170 --> 00:48:10,810
if they're next to you, they'll snag your attention.

789
00:48:10,890 --> 00:48:16,330
And if they snag your attention, then you're gonna have a hard time um resisting

790
00:48:16,570 --> 00:48:17,370
eating them.

791
00:48:17,450 --> 00:48:22,090
And so you make the very simple choice of either turning your back or going into the other

792
00:48:22,090 --> 00:48:27,180
room, because now they're not going to be foremost in your attention.

793
00:48:27,420 --> 00:48:33,260
That requires that's a simple control of yourself on the

794
00:48:33,260 --> 00:48:34,780
basis of predictions.

795
00:48:35,260 --> 00:48:41,100
And the predictions require a predictive model of how your attention interacts with your

796
00:48:41,100 --> 00:48:42,540
environment and your behavior.

797
00:48:42,700 --> 00:48:47,180
So you got to know something about how your attention works to be able to do that.

798
00:48:48,410 --> 00:48:50,490
Here's another example.

799
00:48:50,970 --> 00:48:55,850
You're trying to study, and you have your textbook, whatever it is, I don't know, quantum

800
00:48:55,850 --> 00:49:00,250
mechanics, whatever it is you're studying, uh, and you're trying really hard.

801
00:49:00,490 --> 00:49:06,410
Um, but there's uh an annoying conversation in the room over there.

802
00:49:06,810 --> 00:49:11,290
And um, and you want your attention on your book and not over there.

803
00:49:11,770 --> 00:49:16,960
Um you don't want to totally shut off the conversation from your attention because what if

804
00:49:16,960 --> 00:49:18,800
they start saying things about you?

805
00:49:18,960 --> 00:49:23,280
And so you want to keep like a quarter of an ear out, but you most of your attention is on

806
00:49:23,280 --> 00:49:23,600
here.

807
00:49:23,920 --> 00:49:25,120
How do you do that?

808
00:49:25,280 --> 00:49:30,400
Well, as you're working away, you realize, ooh, wait, too much of my attention went over

809
00:49:30,400 --> 00:49:30,720
there.

810
00:49:31,120 --> 00:49:32,480
Control it back.

811
00:49:32,810 --> 00:49:34,090
Focus, focus, focus.

812
00:49:34,170 --> 00:49:34,730
Oh, wait.

813
00:49:34,890 --> 00:49:40,170
I got so into this paragraph I totally lost track over there, and I still want to keep a

814
00:49:40,170 --> 00:49:40,890
little bit of tab.

815
00:49:41,210 --> 00:49:42,890
So redirect.

816
00:49:43,050 --> 00:49:48,570
What I'm describing here is a control system that targets an

817
00:49:48,570 --> 00:49:50,730
ideal or desired state.

818
00:49:50,890 --> 00:49:55,290
And to get to that state and maintain that state, it has to monitor it.

819
00:49:55,600 --> 00:50:01,280
So it has to have a representation telling it this is my state.

820
00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:03,280
This is the state that I want.

821
00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:05,520
Or this is my state.

822
00:50:05,600 --> 00:50:11,600
And now there's a gap or an error between what my state is and what I wanted it to

823
00:50:11,600 --> 00:50:11,760
be.

824
00:50:11,920 --> 00:50:14,320
And now I have to readjust it.

825
00:50:14,480 --> 00:50:17,280
So all of that requires a model.

826
00:50:17,680 --> 00:50:22,870
In fact, probably the most important reason for a system

827
00:50:23,190 --> 00:50:27,430
having a model of itself is to control itself.

828
00:50:27,590 --> 00:50:31,830
All control systems need a model of the thing they're controlling so they can monitor it,

829
00:50:31,910 --> 00:50:34,150
so they can error correct and so on.

830
00:50:34,310 --> 00:50:36,150
So that's a second example.

831
00:50:36,390 --> 00:50:41,830
Um a third example comes down to what you were saying about interaction with people.

832
00:50:42,230 --> 00:50:48,080
It's very important when you talk to another person to understand their state

833
00:50:48,080 --> 00:50:49,280
of attention.

834
00:50:49,920 --> 00:50:52,960
Because let's say I'm interacting with you.

835
00:50:53,280 --> 00:50:56,640
Right now it's simple, we're just paying attention to each other, I hope.

836
00:50:56,880 --> 00:51:01,280
But in a in a not in a different setting, I don't know, we're at a picnic and there's all

837
00:51:01,280 --> 00:51:05,280
kinds of things around us, and kids running around, and food, and this and that.

838
00:51:06,170 --> 00:51:11,690
your behavior, as far as I'm concerned, your behavior is 90%

839
00:51:12,170 --> 00:51:14,650
determined by your attention.

840
00:51:15,130 --> 00:51:19,050
Because what you're paying attention to, you're more likely to choose to act toward.

841
00:51:19,130 --> 00:51:21,770
And what you're not paying attention to, you won't react toward.

842
00:51:22,010 --> 00:51:28,010
And if I see some kid flinging a football at you and you're not paying attention, I might

843
00:51:28,010 --> 00:51:28,410
warn you.

844
00:51:28,490 --> 00:51:29,850
I'm like, ah, watch out.

845
00:51:30,010 --> 00:51:34,280
Because I think you're not going to react, because I think you're not paying attention.

846
00:51:34,360 --> 00:51:38,360
And therefore, I predicted how you'll behave on the basis of your attention.

847
00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:44,760
And if I see your attention slyly going to that last cookie that I kind of

848
00:51:44,760 --> 00:51:49,400
want, that tells me I better run in and grab the cookie first for myself, right?

849
00:51:49,560 --> 00:51:52,120
Because I'm predicting your behavior on the basis of your attention.

850
00:51:52,280 --> 00:51:57,670
So it's very, very important for me to model and predict and understand your

851
00:51:57,670 --> 00:51:58,390
attention.

852
00:51:58,630 --> 00:52:00,630
But think about how the interaction works.

853
00:52:00,790 --> 00:52:02,630
It can go layer after layer.

854
00:52:02,790 --> 00:52:05,590
I predict that you'll behave in a certain way.

855
00:52:05,750 --> 00:52:10,710
I predict if you behave in that way, I might react in this way.

856
00:52:11,350 --> 00:52:15,750
I predict if I react in that way, then you might react in this way.

857
00:52:15,910 --> 00:52:21,670
And each one of those steps requires understanding first what your attention is likely to

858
00:52:21,670 --> 00:52:26,540
do and how it will affect your behavior, and then what my attention is likely to do, and

859
00:52:26,540 --> 00:52:29,500
how it might affect my behavior, and so on.

860
00:52:29,660 --> 00:52:35,100
So it's not enough for me just to have attention that controls my

861
00:52:35,100 --> 00:52:35,900
behavior.

862
00:52:36,220 --> 00:52:42,220
I need models, predictive models of it, so I can engage in futuring, so I can predict

863
00:52:42,220 --> 00:52:45,740
what I'll do next, what you'll do next, how I'll react, how you'll react.

864
00:52:46,220 --> 00:52:52,140
So having a good model of mind is for myself and you

865
00:52:52,300 --> 00:52:53,500
is crucial.

866
00:52:53,970 --> 00:52:59,570
And maybe the most important component of mind is knowing

867
00:52:59,890 --> 00:53:05,650
what is emphasized, what is uppermost in your mind, i.e., what are you

868
00:53:05,650 --> 00:53:10,210
paying attention to, and what's the consequences of that for your behavior.

869
00:53:10,370 --> 00:53:16,370
So those are some examples, three really specific examples of why we need to have a

870
00:53:16,850 --> 00:53:21,460
really good, rich predictive model of of attention.

871
00:53:22,420 --> 00:53:23,540
And it was three.

872
00:53:24,020 --> 00:53:24,500
It was three.

873
00:53:25,300 --> 00:53:25,780
You did it.

874
00:53:26,660 --> 00:53:32,340
Um and what I'm hearing you say too to to for listeners is it's a it's an information

875
00:53:32,340 --> 00:53:36,660
processing version of we can make this concrete with motor control, right?

876
00:53:36,740 --> 00:53:36,900
Yeah.

877
00:53:37,060 --> 00:53:42,970
Where sort of you you don't have to um trial and error do physical things you know so if

878
00:53:42,970 --> 00:53:47,130
you just if I put my arm behind me and kept it behind me and then I sort of would say well

879
00:53:47,210 --> 00:53:51,130
what's the way my right arm you know what's the way I'm gonna pick up this coffee cup um I

880
00:53:51,130 --> 00:53:55,930
don't have to like try to sort of pick it up I know I'm not gonna be able to right so all

881
00:53:55,930 --> 00:54:01,210
of the sort of stumbling around trial and error things that like a roomba still does you

882
00:54:01,210 --> 00:54:04,330
know like we look at a roomba and it's like it's so stupid because it's bumping into the

883
00:54:04,330 --> 00:54:09,960
wall tries again bumps into the wall bumps again It doesn't have a sufficient self-model to

884
00:54:09,960 --> 00:54:10,840
run through.

885
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:12,600
If I did this, would I still bump?

886
00:54:12,760 --> 00:54:13,880
If I did this, would I still bump?

887
00:54:13,960 --> 00:54:18,840
If I did this, and then selecting among all of those, the one that doesn't lead to the

888
00:54:18,840 --> 00:54:19,960
bump, it doesn't do.

889
00:54:20,040 --> 00:54:23,080
And that's why it looks stupid to us because we do that, right?

890
00:54:23,320 --> 00:54:29,240
So the ability to represent model if my limb, if I did this with my limb,

891
00:54:29,320 --> 00:54:29,720
would it work?

892
00:54:29,800 --> 00:54:33,720
If I did this with my limb, if it worked, if you don't have a self-model of the limb, then

893
00:54:33,750 --> 00:54:35,270
you're not gonna be able to produce that.

894
00:54:35,430 --> 00:54:38,630
You're gonna have to do trial and error Roomba stuff, which would look really weird.

895
00:54:38,790 --> 00:54:38,950
Yeah.

896
00:54:39,110 --> 00:54:43,670
And what I'm hearing you say is that's a concrete, well, it's actually not so concrete, but

897
00:54:43,670 --> 00:54:48,790
at least it's more intuitive, I think, for people that oh yeah, you need a model of your

898
00:54:48,790 --> 00:54:53,590
arm such that when it's broken, or when we're babies and they're only this long, and now

899
00:54:53,590 --> 00:54:57,670
we're adults and they're this long, you know, or something is different, or my hand is

900
00:54:57,670 --> 00:54:59,590
tied, or I'm handcuffed, or whatever, right?

901
00:54:59,670 --> 00:55:05,600
Or there's something in my way, I can model then what other behaviors I should do

902
00:55:05,600 --> 00:55:09,360
if I want to catch something that's falling or if I want to avoid a ball that's thrown at

903
00:55:09,360 --> 00:55:09,840
my face.

904
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:14,800
And your argument is just like that for the motor system that the motor system needs a self

905
00:55:14,880 --> 00:55:18,480
model of where are my limbs, how long are they, are they encumbered or not?

906
00:55:18,720 --> 00:55:24,400
The same thing is true for classes of information processing.

907
00:55:24,640 --> 00:55:25,120
Yes.

908
00:55:25,370 --> 00:55:30,010
And even though it feels more abstract and we don't really have a vocabulary for it that is

909
00:55:30,010 --> 00:55:35,370
anything other than these intuitive categories, it's the same principle that in order to

910
00:55:35,370 --> 00:55:40,970
effectively motor around with this control system, interfacing with the world,

911
00:55:41,210 --> 00:55:47,050
having goals, realizing that my goals might not be met, or the system

912
00:55:47,290 --> 00:55:50,410
might have the metaphorical hand time behind its back.

913
00:55:50,490 --> 00:55:52,330
Like, I don't want to eat the donut, right?

914
00:55:52,410 --> 00:55:57,120
Like one of my goal systems is I don't want to eat the donut, but I know some part of or

915
00:55:57,120 --> 00:56:02,400
the system knows that certain systems are saying eat the donut or will produce that output.

916
00:56:02,560 --> 00:56:04,400
So the system can anticipate that.

917
00:56:04,480 --> 00:56:06,240
So it's a similar self-model.

918
00:56:06,560 --> 00:56:07,840
Yep, yep, exactly.

919
00:56:08,080 --> 00:56:13,970
So yeah, and also I would say yes, there are multiple models because there

920
00:56:13,970 --> 00:56:16,690
are multiple kinds of information processing.

921
00:56:16,850 --> 00:56:22,210
And so, like I alluded to before, a model of decision

922
00:56:22,370 --> 00:56:28,370
making might give us our intuitions about free will, and a model of

923
00:56:28,690 --> 00:56:34,580
attentive processing might give us our intuitions about um Experience the

924
00:56:34,580 --> 00:56:40,420
intensity of a person, you know, prospective experience.

925
00:56:40,660 --> 00:56:43,220
We probably have models of our memory.

926
00:56:43,460 --> 00:56:48,260
I mean, we have a good concept of what what how our memory works and what we're likely to

927
00:56:48,260 --> 00:56:50,020
remember or how we're likely to forget.

928
00:56:50,100 --> 00:56:55,700
So we probably have good models of our the processes involved in long-term memory and

929
00:56:56,100 --> 00:56:58,420
short-term memory and so on and so on.

930
00:56:58,500 --> 00:57:04,190
So we have all these all these interesting models of

931
00:57:04,190 --> 00:57:05,790
processes in the brain.

932
00:57:06,030 --> 00:57:08,350
And the models are really necessary.

933
00:57:08,510 --> 00:57:09,550
They're really useful.

934
00:57:09,630 --> 00:57:11,230
They're not silly mistakes.

935
00:57:11,390 --> 00:57:12,670
They're really useful.

936
00:57:13,150 --> 00:57:18,350
But they're not scientifically accurate depictions of the processes in the brain.

937
00:57:18,750 --> 00:57:24,520
And that's the thing that I think um Scientists have to get their minds

938
00:57:24,520 --> 00:57:25,240
wrapped around.

939
00:57:25,560 --> 00:57:25,800
Yeah.

940
00:57:25,960 --> 00:57:26,840
And how far?

941
00:57:27,000 --> 00:57:30,840
So I mean the motor stuff, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, that's one area where

942
00:57:30,840 --> 00:57:31,880
there's lots of good work.

943
00:57:32,040 --> 00:57:33,800
People understand this is an engineering problem.

944
00:57:33,880 --> 00:57:35,960
They understand the problem and the function.

945
00:57:36,520 --> 00:57:40,280
So I mean, Michael, what you've already done is already, you know, you're solving one of

946
00:57:40,280 --> 00:57:43,960
the biggest, you know, Gordian knots of philosophy in a way.

947
00:57:44,120 --> 00:57:45,640
So that's plenty to do.

948
00:57:45,880 --> 00:57:47,640
But I imagine it's frustrating.

949
00:57:47,720 --> 00:57:50,520
But I'm just like one question is ignoring all of that.

950
00:57:50,850 --> 00:57:56,610
is there how how far have you or other people gotten into what are

951
00:57:56,610 --> 00:57:57,490
these models?

952
00:57:57,730 --> 00:58:01,810
And you can imagine doing it in a problem-based approach, which is sort of, you know, like,

953
00:58:01,890 --> 00:58:07,090
well, what are the information processing problems a self-referential organism like humans

954
00:58:07,170 --> 00:58:08,370
would need to solve?

955
00:58:08,530 --> 00:58:12,450
Um, what mistakes could it make, or what conflicts could there be in systems?

956
00:58:12,610 --> 00:58:16,700
Another one would just be like starting with introspection and or meeting the two in the

957
00:58:16,700 --> 00:58:17,180
middle.

958
00:58:17,420 --> 00:58:22,780
Are the are there have we are there starting to be models of what the models are?

959
00:58:25,100 --> 00:58:30,780
Um I think it's first, it has been tricky.

960
00:58:31,020 --> 00:58:31,660
Yeah.

961
00:58:32,060 --> 00:58:36,620
Uh even in the motor system, as you say, it's much more concrete, it's much more

962
00:58:36,620 --> 00:58:39,020
engineering and easy to wrap your mind around.

963
00:58:39,100 --> 00:58:43,690
Uh and I spent years and years studying that system, which is of course how I got to the

964
00:58:43,690 --> 00:58:43,930
other system.

965
00:58:44,170 --> 00:58:44,490
Yeah, exactly.

966
00:58:44,570 --> 00:58:45,050
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

967
00:58:45,930 --> 00:58:51,210
So um, but even there, even though there's lots of work and lots of acceptance of the idea

968
00:58:51,210 --> 00:58:55,850
that the brain builds models of the body, I don't think anyone can point to a spot in the

969
00:58:55,850 --> 00:58:57,450
brain and say the model's there.

970
00:58:57,690 --> 00:58:58,010
Right.

971
00:58:58,170 --> 00:59:02,410
Uh or say this is how the neurons compute the models specifically.

972
00:59:02,650 --> 00:59:04,570
Like that gets very hard to do.

973
00:59:04,730 --> 00:59:09,960
And um, in the case of models of self or models of my of

974
00:59:11,080 --> 00:59:13,800
information processing in the brain.

975
00:59:13,960 --> 00:59:16,440
Where do the where are those what are those models?

976
00:59:16,600 --> 00:59:21,960
Um I think the best that we've been able to work out is that they're they

977
00:59:22,120 --> 00:59:28,040
massively overlap the social cognition networks that compute

978
00:59:28,040 --> 00:59:29,720
models of other people's minds.

979
00:59:29,800 --> 00:59:31,800
It all seems to be the same kind of stuff.

980
00:59:31,960 --> 00:59:37,000
We're building models of minds, attributing them to other people to ourselves.

981
00:59:37,730 --> 00:59:43,010
And there's a certain vagueness in trying to pin down exactly what the models are.

982
00:59:43,330 --> 00:59:49,090
I think where the um progress is being made right now, uh,

983
00:59:49,330 --> 00:59:53,890
in my opinion, is in artificial systems.

984
00:59:54,130 --> 00:59:54,770
Right.

985
00:59:55,010 --> 01:00:00,770
Uh, because now, finally, for the first time, you can have systems that literally build

986
01:00:00,770 --> 01:00:06,600
models, really rich models of other people's minds, maybe in some way of

987
01:00:06,600 --> 01:00:09,160
themselves, although this is still debated.

988
01:00:09,560 --> 01:00:14,680
But you can go into those systems now and you can see exactly what they're doing.

989
01:00:14,840 --> 01:00:20,040
You can look at the representations in their hidden layers and say, ah, look, this is this

990
01:00:20,360 --> 01:00:24,760
pattern of activation that represents this, and this pattern represents that.

991
01:00:24,840 --> 01:00:27,320
And now we can see how it's doing this and that.

992
01:00:27,400 --> 01:00:33,190
And so you can begin to understand the principles by studying these

993
01:00:33,190 --> 01:00:37,750
artificial systems in ways that I don't think people could studying the biological system.

994
01:00:37,990 --> 01:00:43,910
So I see that as, you know, consciousness research is becoming more and more a matter

995
01:00:43,910 --> 01:00:45,670
of AI, which is interesting.

996
01:00:45,990 --> 01:00:48,790
Yeah, and just and just to maybe a slightly funny thing.

997
01:00:48,950 --> 01:00:53,520
So on this account, and you can tell me if this is wrong, The thing that people are worried

998
01:00:53,520 --> 01:00:57,840
about, which is like a machine becoming conscious, what that actually will look like, it's

999
01:00:57,840 --> 01:01:03,600
actually going to be quite boring because what it will actually be is it'll be systems that

1000
01:01:03,600 --> 01:01:09,200
have very cursory representations of the states of the system.

1001
01:01:09,840 --> 01:01:14,960
And it will say things like, I'm currently paying attention to this

1002
01:01:15,670 --> 01:01:16,950
and not to this.

1003
01:01:17,350 --> 01:01:19,190
It's going to be very mundane.

1004
01:01:19,350 --> 01:01:25,270
It's not going to be this all of a sudden glowing light, um, you know, and all

1005
01:01:25,270 --> 01:01:29,990
of the world's knowledge flowing into this Pandora's box, like a Ghostbuster scene.

1006
01:01:30,070 --> 01:01:30,390
Yeah.

1007
01:01:30,630 --> 01:01:34,390
Um, so that this is a very deflationary view of consciousness.

1008
01:01:34,470 --> 01:01:40,240
Again, probably for the reasons that um you alluded to the beginning maybe people might

1009
01:01:40,240 --> 01:01:44,960
not like because there there's another agenda um and we can get to that in a minute but but

1010
01:01:44,960 --> 01:01:49,840
is that right that basically the idea would be that really what consciousness in an AI

1011
01:01:49,840 --> 01:01:53,280
would be is a very boring prosaic thing in a way.

1012
01:01:53,520 --> 01:01:54,880
Yeah I think you're right.

1013
01:01:55,040 --> 01:02:00,560
I think that um the first so f uh part of the confusion comes from

1014
01:02:01,210 --> 01:02:03,930
differing definitions of consciousness.

1015
01:02:04,010 --> 01:02:09,930
And some people think oh consciousness is when you wake up and have the ability to

1016
01:02:09,930 --> 01:02:15,690
choose to do anything you want, but you have personal desires

1017
01:02:15,850 --> 01:02:21,370
and you care about yourself and distinguish getting all kinds like piles and piles of

1018
01:02:21,370 --> 01:02:23,530
things get added to this concept.

1019
01:02:23,610 --> 01:02:28,490
So they think if you make AI conscious, that means it will wake up and start killing us all

1020
01:02:28,730 --> 01:02:34,600
because it'll want to protect itself against us and it'll get mad and um and it'll have

1021
01:02:34,600 --> 01:02:38,200
all these feelings and um it'll murder us all.

1022
01:02:38,280 --> 01:02:41,560
Uh and it'll be able to make decisions because when you're conscious, you can make

1023
01:02:41,560 --> 01:02:46,120
decisions, and right now it doesn't make decisions, it's just some mimicky thing, right?

1024
01:02:46,200 --> 01:02:49,320
And and so that's a very strong concept people have.

1025
01:02:49,480 --> 01:02:53,640
And so you ask them about making AI conscious, they look horrified.

1026
01:02:53,800 --> 01:02:59,210
Um, But on the other hand, I would say AI already makes decisions,

1027
01:02:59,610 --> 01:03:01,290
very sophisticated ones.

1028
01:03:01,530 --> 01:03:07,530
It can kill you just as dead, whether it has a subjective experience of

1029
01:03:07,530 --> 01:03:08,730
doing it or not.

1030
01:03:09,690 --> 01:03:14,330
The consciousness question is actually orthogonal to these worries.

1031
01:03:14,410 --> 01:03:20,100
And it's also orthogonal to emotion, like whether or not it gets

1032
01:03:20,260 --> 01:03:25,940
upset about how it's being treated is irrelevance to the question, the larger

1033
01:03:25,940 --> 01:03:29,220
question of what is this consciousness thing.

1034
01:03:29,460 --> 01:03:34,900
Um, so I think you're right when I talk about AI having

1035
01:03:34,900 --> 01:03:39,220
self-models and therefore having the thing we call consciousness, I'm talking about it

1036
01:03:39,220 --> 01:03:45,150
having this very limited kind of model that tells it about its

1037
01:03:45,150 --> 01:03:48,430
own um state of attention.

1038
01:03:48,510 --> 01:03:53,710
It's what what is it focusing its resources on more now versus uh

1039
01:03:54,030 --> 01:03:56,110
before, here versus there?

1040
01:03:56,510 --> 01:03:59,150
And exactly how does it model that?

1041
01:03:59,310 --> 01:04:01,870
Because you can model that in different ways.

1042
01:04:02,190 --> 01:04:08,140
Um well, I think the heart of the problem, the

1043
01:04:08,140 --> 01:04:12,620
conceptual problem that is so confusing, and I admit this is very confusing.

1044
01:04:13,340 --> 01:04:18,940
People ask, okay, so if you give it information about what it's paying attention to,

1045
01:04:19,260 --> 01:04:22,300
how does that make it have an internal feeling?

1046
01:04:22,540 --> 01:04:24,620
How does the internal feeling emerge?

1047
01:04:25,100 --> 01:04:25,900
What is that like?

1048
01:04:26,220 --> 01:04:26,860
Why?

1049
01:04:27,370 --> 01:04:33,210
Um, and the answer is it doesn't give it that, nor does it give us that.

1050
01:04:33,770 --> 01:04:39,770
But if it has a particular kind of model of itself, that

1051
01:04:39,770 --> 01:04:45,690
particular kind of model will describe, it will have information in it that

1052
01:04:45,690 --> 01:04:50,890
describes the machine as a thing that has subjective

1053
01:04:50,890 --> 01:04:56,460
experience, and therefore it will think it has subjective experience,

1054
01:04:56,780 --> 01:05:00,140
and therefore it'll tell you it has subjective experience.

1055
01:05:00,380 --> 01:05:01,660
That's what it could have.

1056
01:05:01,740 --> 01:05:02,860
That's what we have.

1057
01:05:02,940 --> 01:05:03,260
Yeah.

1058
01:05:03,740 --> 01:05:09,180
But it's a special kind of model that it would have to have to give it that information

1059
01:05:09,180 --> 01:05:10,060
about itself.

1060
01:05:10,460 --> 01:05:12,060
Yeah, I love I love that.

1061
01:05:12,140 --> 01:05:16,780
I can and maybe I can um again translate or maybe to talk a little bit about an

1062
01:05:16,780 --> 01:05:20,620
evolutionary approach to that, which is I think what you're describing is so what we're

1063
01:05:20,620 --> 01:05:23,630
talking about is what consciousness is a self-model.

1064
01:05:23,790 --> 01:05:27,150
And that's the scientific sort of that's what it's doing.

1065
01:05:27,390 --> 01:05:32,030
The thing about, well, if if machines become conscious, then it's gonna uh you know care

1066
01:05:32,030 --> 01:05:34,110
about itself and try to take over.

1067
01:05:34,750 --> 01:05:40,750
That is the concern of an evolved organism that has

1068
01:05:40,750 --> 01:05:45,640
evolved to have representations of what do

1069
01:05:45,640 --> 01:05:47,400
conspecifics do, right?

1070
01:05:47,480 --> 01:05:53,320
It's populated with I'm dealing with a complicated, evolved human conspecific who is

1071
01:05:53,320 --> 01:05:58,600
self-preserving, who wants status and resources, and under the right circumstances will try

1072
01:05:58,600 --> 01:06:00,760
to kill me or not, you know, depending.

1073
01:06:01,240 --> 01:06:07,210
And so I think that it's no accident that we probably have

1074
01:06:07,210 --> 01:06:12,890
very complicated systems that are assessing degrees of consciousness because

1075
01:06:14,090 --> 01:06:17,530
that's a system for representing, you know, is David asleep?

1076
01:06:17,690 --> 01:06:21,450
Well, he's not going to try to go after me and my family, but if he's awake, he will,

1077
01:06:21,610 --> 01:06:21,930
right?

1078
01:06:22,170 --> 01:06:27,850
And the fact that it's sort of pre-populated with this default of it's a it's no accident

1079
01:06:28,170 --> 01:06:33,480
that what we mean by consciousness is the full range of human capacities.

1080
01:06:33,640 --> 01:06:39,080
The argument would be that that's an evolved representation because what you're doing is

1081
01:06:39,080 --> 01:06:40,600
you're tracking: is David asleep?

1082
01:06:40,760 --> 01:06:41,560
Is he drugged?

1083
01:06:41,720 --> 01:06:43,480
Is he not paying attention?

1084
01:06:43,800 --> 01:06:48,200
And the full thing is not a representation of how he works.

1085
01:06:48,280 --> 01:06:51,960
It's just the default assumption of like, what's the worst case scenario?

1086
01:06:52,120 --> 01:06:58,010
He might be a powerful, malicious, intentional human actor

1087
01:06:58,250 --> 01:07:00,250
who has power, who wants to go after me.

1088
01:07:00,330 --> 01:07:03,370
And that's exactly what people are concerned about with consciousness.

1089
01:07:03,530 --> 01:07:08,810
So I think it's a nice example of like the scientific model of the self-model

1090
01:07:09,210 --> 01:07:14,650
combining with then you just have this evolved organism who what it's trying to do is

1091
01:07:14,650 --> 01:07:18,820
assess is David asleep or you know what's his intentions?

1092
01:07:19,300 --> 01:07:20,180
But it's no accident.

1093
01:07:20,260 --> 01:07:23,140
The default is it's all the human stuff, right?

1094
01:07:23,460 --> 01:07:23,780
Yeah.

1095
01:07:23,940 --> 01:07:24,260
Yeah.

1096
01:07:24,340 --> 01:07:24,980
Yeah.

1097
01:07:25,780 --> 01:07:31,060
So I think there's a huge part of the way we think about

1098
01:07:31,060 --> 01:07:34,900
consciousness that is richly intertwined with ethics.

1099
01:07:35,220 --> 01:07:41,170
So if humans are conscious and animals aren't, then it is ethical to

1100
01:07:41,170 --> 01:07:45,330
just treat them as objects, to torture them on factory farms, whatever, it doesn't matter.

1101
01:07:45,410 --> 01:07:46,850
They're just unthinking automata.

1102
01:07:46,930 --> 01:07:51,010
You know, Descartes famously thought that uh animals were just automata.

1103
01:07:51,410 --> 01:07:57,330
Um and uh it seems to me that th this question of how far in the animal kingdom

1104
01:07:57,330 --> 01:08:03,170
consciousness goes is um inextricably intertwined with how we should ethically treat

1105
01:08:03,220 --> 01:08:03,700
animals.

1106
01:08:03,860 --> 01:08:07,380
If bugs are unconscious, it doesn't matter if I swap them or or whatever.

1107
01:08:07,540 --> 01:08:09,780
If they're conscious, oh boy, what a nightmare.

1108
01:08:10,100 --> 01:08:14,500
We're surrounded by these sentient beings flying around us, and we have to consider their

1109
01:08:14,500 --> 01:08:15,380
interests.

1110
01:08:16,180 --> 01:08:21,620
And so I want to ask you about like how your model of

1111
01:08:21,620 --> 01:08:24,900
consciousness fits in with the ethical nature of it.

1112
01:08:25,060 --> 01:08:30,810
And um it it seems to me that if AI is conscious,

1113
01:08:31,050 --> 01:08:34,970
the the aspect of it that we really care about is like, does it have pain and pleasure?

1114
01:08:35,130 --> 01:08:36,330
Does it have feelings?

1115
01:08:36,490 --> 01:08:37,930
Uh, does it have affect?

1116
01:08:38,170 --> 01:08:41,770
If I am mean to ChatGPT, will its feelings be hurt?

1117
01:08:41,930 --> 01:08:42,250
Right?

1118
01:08:42,410 --> 01:08:46,090
It's not so much does ChatGPT have a model of its own attentional state.

1119
01:08:46,170 --> 01:08:47,530
I don't really care about that much.

1120
01:08:47,690 --> 01:08:49,850
What I really care about is does it have feelings?

1121
01:08:50,010 --> 01:08:56,010
And so, how does the the affective and ethical dimension of consciousness fit

1122
01:08:56,010 --> 01:08:57,530
into your your way of thinking about it?

1123
01:08:57,770 --> 01:08:58,090
Yeah.

1124
01:08:58,250 --> 01:08:58,490
Yeah.

1125
01:08:58,660 --> 01:09:01,540
So, oh boy, there's lots of things I could say about that.

1126
01:09:01,780 --> 01:09:05,700
Um, well, I'll give one one point.

1127
01:09:06,180 --> 01:09:11,940
Um, theory of evolution by natural selection has been

1128
01:09:11,940 --> 01:09:17,140
used to argue for and against a vast range of ethical

1129
01:09:17,380 --> 01:09:18,660
propositions.

1130
01:09:18,980 --> 01:09:23,380
Some very problematical and some very lovely and nice.

1131
01:09:23,730 --> 01:09:26,610
But the theory itself is actually ethically blind.

1132
01:09:26,690 --> 01:09:28,210
It has nothing to do with ethics.

1133
01:09:28,290 --> 01:09:30,450
It's just this is how it works.

1134
01:09:30,850 --> 01:09:36,690
Um, and to some extent, the theory that we've developed

1135
01:09:36,850 --> 01:09:41,330
this attention schema theory or this way of thinking about consciousness works the same

1136
01:09:41,330 --> 01:09:41,570
way.

1137
01:09:41,730 --> 01:09:44,210
It says this is how it is.

1138
01:09:44,780 --> 01:09:47,020
um, ethics aside.

1139
01:09:47,500 --> 01:09:53,180
And from that, I think people could come up with all kinds of different ethical assertions.

1140
01:09:53,340 --> 01:09:56,780
Well, we have to do this, we have to do that, this is conscious, we have to do this, this

1141
01:09:56,780 --> 01:09:58,540
is not, so we have to do that.

1142
01:09:58,780 --> 01:10:03,020
Um, so that's the first thing I would say is I don't think the theory

1143
01:10:04,540 --> 01:10:09,470
prescribes what we should do or not do ethically.

1144
01:10:09,630 --> 01:10:11,070
It just gives information.

1145
01:10:11,310 --> 01:10:12,590
Ethics is something else.

1146
01:10:12,670 --> 01:10:13,950
We're all ethical beings.

1147
01:10:14,110 --> 01:10:17,550
We all have, and ethics are fundamentally irrational.

1148
01:10:18,030 --> 01:10:24,030
And they're rooted in these kind of um built-in uh you

1149
01:10:24,030 --> 01:10:26,830
know um emotional states.

1150
01:10:27,120 --> 01:10:31,920
and that's great, and we all have them, but I don't necessarily know that the theory

1151
01:10:31,920 --> 01:10:33,600
dictates the ethics.

1152
01:10:33,840 --> 01:10:39,760
Uh, what kind of animals are likely to have this kind of stuff in

1153
01:10:39,760 --> 01:10:40,080
them?

1154
01:10:40,480 --> 01:10:46,240
Um well, that's not that hard

1155
01:10:46,240 --> 01:10:47,360
to trace out.

1156
01:10:47,890 --> 01:10:50,850
So along the vertebrate line, at least.

1157
01:10:51,090 --> 01:10:56,930
You're looking at animals that have the kind of attention that needs this kind

1158
01:10:56,930 --> 01:11:00,770
of control system that needs really sophisticated models.

1159
01:11:01,010 --> 01:11:02,610
That's the first thing you would look at.

1160
01:11:02,770 --> 01:11:08,290
And so you're probably looking at all mammals and all birds, and maybe many

1161
01:11:08,290 --> 01:11:13,650
reptiles, if not most of them, and somewhere in that range, maybe some

1162
01:11:13,650 --> 01:11:14,450
amphibians.

1163
01:11:14,530 --> 01:11:19,900
I don't know if amphibians um four brains and

1164
01:11:20,220 --> 01:11:25,180
really sophisticated covert attention is probably non-existent.

1165
01:11:25,820 --> 01:11:27,980
So maybe they don't have these mechanisms.

1166
01:11:28,060 --> 01:11:33,100
But it's a huge part of the animal kingdom that has some version of that, undoubtedly.

1167
01:11:33,740 --> 01:11:37,340
The second question you're asking, though, is about emotion.

1168
01:11:37,870 --> 01:11:40,670
So we can be conscious of all kinds of things.

1169
01:11:40,910 --> 01:11:46,750
I mean, classically, people like to study visual consciousness because it's easier.

1170
01:11:47,470 --> 01:11:53,070
Consciousness, the conscious experience of red, or uh the conscious experience of getting

1171
01:11:53,070 --> 01:11:54,270
poked with a pin.

1172
01:11:54,590 --> 01:12:00,590
But um uh emotion is a thing of which we can be

1173
01:12:00,590 --> 01:12:01,550
conscious.

1174
01:12:01,710 --> 01:12:05,660
Uh, It is not itself, it doesn't define our consciousness.

1175
01:12:05,740 --> 01:12:10,620
It's just one of the things we can be conscious of, but we can feel

1176
01:12:11,500 --> 01:12:14,620
sadness, we can be upset, we can be angry.

1177
01:12:14,860 --> 01:12:17,980
And so you're asking about AI.

1178
01:12:18,060 --> 01:12:23,810
You're saying, well, what you really care about is does it have emotional, is it does it

1179
01:12:23,810 --> 01:12:26,690
have emotions and is it conscious of those emotions?

1180
01:12:27,010 --> 01:12:27,410
Right.

1181
01:12:27,570 --> 01:12:33,330
And so it's an interesting fact that people have um emotions and are often not

1182
01:12:33,330 --> 01:12:38,210
conscious of them, as you find out if you ever go to a therapist.

1183
01:12:38,610 --> 01:12:43,570
Um they're always trying to get you to be aware and conscious of emotions you didn't know

1184
01:12:43,570 --> 01:12:46,690
you have, and then you're like, oh yeah, I guess I was angry all day.

1185
01:12:46,770 --> 01:12:47,810
How weird is that?

1186
01:12:48,050 --> 01:12:53,600
Uh but um uh so there is a difference between the emotional

1187
01:12:53,600 --> 01:12:57,680
states um and being conscious of them.

1188
01:12:58,000 --> 01:13:00,960
And now you get to the question of AI.

1189
01:13:01,280 --> 01:13:06,240
What we worry about is can it have emotional states and would it be conscious of them?

1190
01:13:06,560 --> 01:13:10,960
I think at some point the answer will be yes.

1191
01:13:11,710 --> 01:13:15,550
I think probably right now the answer is no.

1192
01:13:16,110 --> 01:13:19,470
Because emotional states are are complicated.

1193
01:13:20,190 --> 01:13:25,230
Right now AI is really good at what we will call cognition and

1194
01:13:25,870 --> 01:13:28,750
visual perception it's getting really good at.

1195
01:13:30,190 --> 01:13:32,350
But and language processing.

1196
01:13:32,510 --> 01:13:38,280
But emotion emotion has so many complicated layers in biology

1197
01:13:38,360 --> 01:13:42,200
in human systems and other animals that are not that well understood.

1198
01:13:42,520 --> 01:13:48,360
And so those layers start with the physical body and the autonomic

1199
01:13:48,360 --> 01:13:53,800
nervous system and the flight or fright systems, or the resting and digesting

1200
01:13:53,800 --> 01:13:59,560
systems that change the physiology of your body, and then sensory neurons that detect those

1201
01:13:59,560 --> 01:14:05,490
changes and carry that information up into deep systems in your brain, and those builds

1202
01:14:05,490 --> 01:14:11,490
uh all kinds of information structures, and then eventually that gets up into your cortical

1203
01:14:11,490 --> 01:14:16,210
systems and more into your cognitive networks, and you start interpreting those and saying,

1204
01:14:16,450 --> 01:14:19,330
Oh my god, I feel this emotion, I feel that emotion.

1205
01:14:19,570 --> 01:14:24,370
I think AI currently lacks most of those layers.

1206
01:14:24,610 --> 01:14:30,370
And so, at least right now, it's probably not an emotional thing, an emotional

1207
01:14:30,370 --> 01:14:31,010
agent.

1208
01:14:31,410 --> 01:14:35,420
Um, but will people eventually fare all that stuff out?

1209
01:14:35,660 --> 01:14:41,500
I mean, aside from the question of should we, yes, people will probably figure it out

1210
01:14:41,660 --> 01:14:45,180
and probably build artificial stuff, because that's what people do.

1211
01:14:45,340 --> 01:14:51,340
They're gonna build it, then we're gonna have AI with very human-like emotions and

1212
01:14:51,340 --> 01:14:55,660
very human-like consciousness, and then we're gonna have to deal with the ethics.

1213
01:14:55,820 --> 01:15:01,570
Uh, and I don't know what the solution to the ethics is, but it's a it's definitely a um a

1214
01:15:01,570 --> 01:15:04,770
quagmire, I guess is how I would describe it.

1215
01:15:06,850 --> 01:15:07,490
Oh give it a go.

1216
01:15:08,370 --> 01:15:14,050
So I do you see um if a separation between consciousness and

1217
01:15:14,290 --> 01:15:14,850
feelings?

1218
01:15:15,010 --> 01:15:18,050
So could you be conscious without having feelings?

1219
01:15:18,210 --> 01:15:21,010
Could you have feelings without being conscious?

1220
01:15:21,890 --> 01:15:22,530
Yes.

1221
01:15:23,250 --> 01:15:28,770
Um uh some well, some people distinguish feelings from emotion.

1222
01:15:29,520 --> 01:15:34,640
And uh and the terminology is a little subtle, but some people have proposed that the word

1223
01:15:34,640 --> 01:15:39,200
feeling be limited to emotions of which you have become conscious.

1224
01:15:39,520 --> 01:15:39,840
Okay.

1225
01:15:40,400 --> 01:15:45,680
And um emotions can be processed at unconscious levels, and there's lots of brain systems

1226
01:15:45,760 --> 01:15:51,040
and the amygdala and the hypothalamus and the this and the that that are computing these

1227
01:15:51,040 --> 01:15:56,890
states that um affect your body chemistry and your body physiology and affect all

1228
01:15:56,970 --> 01:15:59,850
aspects of your brain, but it's going on unconsciously.

1229
01:16:00,010 --> 01:16:02,250
So some people would make that distinction.

1230
01:16:02,810 --> 01:16:08,010
Yes, of course, I think you can be conscious of, like I said, you can be conscious of

1231
01:16:08,010 --> 01:16:08,650
colors.

1232
01:16:09,290 --> 01:16:11,610
You can be conscious of a poke on your arm.

1233
01:16:11,770 --> 01:16:14,570
You can be conscious of a sound, you can be conscious of a thought.

1234
01:16:14,730 --> 01:16:20,010
You can think two plus two equals three and have a conscious experience of thinking that

1235
01:16:20,010 --> 01:16:20,490
thought.

1236
01:16:20,640 --> 01:16:24,320
And all of those could, in principle, be totally stripped of emotion.

1237
01:16:24,480 --> 01:16:28,880
So the emotion doesn't need to be there to be conscious of something.

1238
01:16:29,360 --> 01:16:33,760
You would still, if asked, you would still be able to say, there is a me.

1239
01:16:34,480 --> 01:16:38,000
I have a subjective experience of those things.

1240
01:16:39,200 --> 01:16:44,800
And if someone asked you, yeah, but what is the emotional component to it?

1241
01:16:45,040 --> 01:16:47,840
It would be possible to say there is none.

1242
01:16:48,370 --> 01:16:53,570
And I think there probably are people who are like that, because there's a huge range of

1243
01:16:53,570 --> 01:16:53,810
people.

1244
01:16:53,970 --> 01:16:59,650
You get people who are so disconnected from their emotions, um, through

1245
01:16:59,650 --> 01:17:05,570
whatever, you know, some subvariants of autism, for example, or other

1246
01:17:05,810 --> 01:17:10,770
um conditions where people are are not conscious of their emotions.

1247
01:17:11,010 --> 01:17:16,800
I think you can have uh uh people, minds, life experiences that are really

1248
01:17:16,800 --> 01:17:18,560
shockingly devoid of emotion.

1249
01:17:18,640 --> 01:17:21,280
They're really different from the way most of us operate.

1250
01:17:21,440 --> 01:17:25,520
So I do not think consciousness and emotion have to go together.

1251
01:17:25,840 --> 01:17:28,960
Um, but for most of us they do, of course.

1252
01:17:29,280 --> 01:17:29,520
Right.

1253
01:17:29,600 --> 01:17:31,600
And when they do go together, you get feelings.

1254
01:17:31,760 --> 01:17:36,560
So an emotion um is uh doesn't need to be conscious, but when it becomes conscious, it

1255
01:17:36,560 --> 01:17:39,440
turns into what we would call a feeling.

1256
01:17:40,050 --> 01:17:40,450
Yes.

1257
01:17:40,850 --> 01:17:45,250
If you, you know, according to that terminology, yes, by definition, a feeling is a

1258
01:17:45,250 --> 01:17:46,370
conscious emotion.

1259
01:17:46,770 --> 01:17:47,090
Okay.

1260
01:17:47,490 --> 01:17:47,970
All right.

1261
01:17:48,130 --> 01:17:48,610
Cool.

1262
01:17:48,850 --> 01:17:54,690
Um Yeah, it's it's super interesting to me because I

1263
01:17:55,090 --> 01:18:00,930
I feel like what we ultimately care about is um is feelings

1264
01:18:01,010 --> 01:18:05,260
in terms of you know whether AI is quote unquote conscious.

1265
01:18:05,660 --> 01:18:09,900
But do I care if like an AI has an emotion but it's not conscious?

1266
01:18:10,140 --> 01:18:11,180
That's that I don't know.

1267
01:18:11,260 --> 01:18:13,260
It's kind of a weird question.

1268
01:18:13,420 --> 01:18:16,940
Like if it's mad but it doesn't know it's mad, do I do I care?

1269
01:18:17,100 --> 01:18:17,820
I don't know.

1270
01:18:19,100 --> 01:18:19,500
Yeah.

1271
01:18:20,700 --> 01:18:21,020
Yeah.

1272
01:18:21,260 --> 01:18:26,300
So um if you poke yourself with a pin, yeah, um, but

1273
01:18:26,910 --> 01:18:32,270
something has disconnected your cortex from that experience.

1274
01:18:32,510 --> 01:18:32,990
Yeah.

1275
01:18:33,310 --> 01:18:37,870
Uh you know, all the pain processing is going on, let's say all the way up to the

1276
01:18:37,870 --> 01:18:40,830
subcortical level, but you're not aware of it.

1277
01:18:41,070 --> 01:18:42,030
Is it pain?

1278
01:18:42,190 --> 01:18:43,710
I don't know what to say to that.

1279
01:18:43,870 --> 01:18:46,830
I mean, that's a philosophical question with no real answer.

1280
01:18:47,040 --> 01:18:47,280
Yeah.

1281
01:18:47,520 --> 01:18:47,600
Yeah.

1282
01:18:47,760 --> 01:18:52,640
And I I think it's a pro I mean, m it seems like it's a proxy for

1283
01:18:53,520 --> 01:18:55,040
is this a severe event?

1284
01:18:55,200 --> 01:19:01,040
So in other words, like I think the the intuition and the philosophy is not considering

1285
01:19:01,040 --> 01:19:02,160
all possible worlds.

1286
01:19:02,240 --> 01:19:06,800
It's it's uh assuming the the evolved psychology we have, which is specific

1287
01:19:07,520 --> 01:19:13,200
specifically um their emotions are emotional systems or situation detectors,

1288
01:19:13,360 --> 01:19:13,600
right?

1289
01:19:13,770 --> 01:19:18,970
So, like there's a certain amount of pressure or incursion into my skin at all times.

1290
01:19:19,210 --> 01:19:25,130
But then when a pin pokes me, I react, but I'm also aware that I'm

1291
01:19:25,130 --> 01:19:27,930
experiencing pain and I'm reacting, right?

1292
01:19:28,090 --> 01:19:33,850
And so the idea is that the self-modeling system is

1293
01:19:34,490 --> 01:19:39,880
detecting such an important or severe event that it even is

1294
01:19:39,880 --> 01:19:45,880
registering in the self-model system that this is this is the state

1295
01:19:45,880 --> 01:19:49,800
we're in, and that probably has other consequences too.

1296
01:19:49,960 --> 01:19:51,640
That's why it is activated.

1297
01:19:51,800 --> 01:19:52,120
Yeah.

1298
01:19:52,360 --> 01:19:57,320
So when we say something like, Will AI be conscious?

1299
01:19:57,560 --> 01:20:03,410
What we're really saying is, Will it have such severe feelings that it would it would pass

1300
01:20:03,410 --> 01:20:07,810
the level of the it would engage the self-monitoring system in us.

1301
01:20:08,290 --> 01:20:14,290
Because, you know, the things that are important, like pain and sorrow, and disappointment

1302
01:20:14,370 --> 01:20:20,290
and terror and anxiety that are important to me become self modeled because

1303
01:20:20,290 --> 01:20:21,970
they're so severe.

1304
01:20:22,210 --> 01:20:27,010
So I actually think that it's a very human-centric thing to say

1305
01:20:27,250 --> 01:20:30,000
consciousness is what matters.

1306
01:20:30,160 --> 01:20:30,320
Yeah.

1307
01:20:30,720 --> 01:20:35,760
Because it's a readout of the fact that they're conscious because they're a severe level of

1308
01:20:35,760 --> 01:20:35,920
that.

1309
01:20:36,000 --> 01:20:41,360
And that's why they're conscious, probably because it just it adds to the inferential

1310
01:20:41,360 --> 01:20:47,360
machinery that, like, oh, we better stop all the other stuff we're doing, call all hands

1311
01:20:47,360 --> 01:20:52,800
on deck to deal with this pin in our foot, or the wife who left us, or, you know, the child

1312
01:20:52,800 --> 01:20:54,160
who died, or whatever.

1313
01:20:54,400 --> 01:20:58,790
Um, you know, it's not just the mundane scrapes of of everyday life.

1314
01:20:59,430 --> 01:21:02,470
So so I actually think that it's a readout.

1315
01:21:02,710 --> 01:21:08,710
People saying consciousness, what they're actually saying is the readout of it's the

1316
01:21:08,710 --> 01:21:10,150
severe events of people.

1317
01:21:10,390 --> 01:21:12,710
But the consciousness is sort of the confabulation.

1318
01:21:13,030 --> 01:21:15,110
I don't think that's actually what matters, if that makes sense.

1319
01:21:17,510 --> 01:21:23,280
So I if I could uh translate what you're saying, it seems like um because intense emotional

1320
01:21:23,280 --> 01:21:29,200
experiences like intense pain, intense sorrow, um by design activate consciousness,

1321
01:21:29,360 --> 01:21:33,360
activate full attention and a representation of that attention.

1322
01:21:33,520 --> 01:21:33,680
Yeah.

1323
01:21:33,840 --> 01:21:39,760
That we conflate um consciousness with feeling because feeling uh automatically by design

1324
01:21:39,920 --> 01:21:40,800
activates consciousness.

1325
01:21:41,040 --> 01:21:44,650
And whenever you have intense feeling, you automatically get consciousness of it.

1326
01:21:44,970 --> 01:21:48,170
And that's that's why it's so intuitive that those things are conflated, but they don't

1327
01:21:48,170 --> 01:21:49,370
actually have to coexist.

1328
01:21:49,690 --> 01:21:49,850
Yeah.

1329
01:21:50,170 --> 01:21:51,370
Yeah, I think that's right.

1330
01:21:51,450 --> 01:21:54,890
And again, I would say there are probably people who aren't wired that way.

1331
01:21:55,610 --> 01:22:00,410
There are people who just are not emotional people, or they are, but it doesn't, you know,

1332
01:22:00,490 --> 01:22:01,850
there's a disconnect somewhere in there.

1333
01:22:01,930 --> 01:22:04,570
There's a neurological uh abnormality.

1334
01:22:04,810 --> 01:22:07,050
So um, but here's an interesting point.

1335
01:22:08,100 --> 01:22:13,940
Almost all the discussion so far, not quite all of it, between us on consciousness

1336
01:22:14,100 --> 01:22:16,100
has been this personal thing.

1337
01:22:16,580 --> 01:22:21,060
I am conscious, or that machine is conscious, or but but but consider this.

1338
01:22:21,460 --> 01:22:26,260
Um maybe of equal importance is whether when

1339
01:22:27,220 --> 01:22:31,940
you interact with that AI, whether you

1340
01:22:34,670 --> 01:22:40,510
project consciousness onto it, whether you see it as a conscious being.

1341
01:22:41,390 --> 01:22:44,830
And that's that's the special thing.

1342
01:22:45,150 --> 01:22:50,910
I'm not talking about intellectually interacting with it and then deciding, ah,

1343
01:22:51,070 --> 01:22:54,430
I think it's conscious, or no, I think it probably isn't.

1344
01:22:54,590 --> 01:23:00,510
I'm talking about that intuitive feel that you get when you interact with what you think

1345
01:23:00,510 --> 01:23:01,950
is a conscious being.

1346
01:23:02,140 --> 01:23:08,140
Um, and one of the examples I often give is ventilquism, where we all know it's not

1347
01:23:08,140 --> 01:23:12,060
conscious, but we still get that sense anyway.

1348
01:23:12,220 --> 01:23:18,060
We it it pokes our buttons, it makes our social machinery go into overdrive, and we

1349
01:23:18,380 --> 01:23:24,300
generate a a model of a mind and project it onto it, and now that to us that becomes

1350
01:23:24,300 --> 01:23:25,740
a conscious being.

1351
01:23:25,900 --> 01:23:31,250
Um, and that's a very important threshold, um, because

1352
01:23:31,730 --> 01:23:34,850
that's how we interact with each other, first of all.

1353
01:23:35,490 --> 01:23:39,970
Uh, as many philosophers have pointed out, I actually don't know whether you're conscious

1354
01:23:39,970 --> 01:23:41,170
in some absolute sense.

1355
01:23:41,250 --> 01:23:42,530
I can't know that.

1356
01:23:42,850 --> 01:23:47,650
But I build a model of a mind and project it onto you.

1357
01:23:47,730 --> 01:23:53,650
I, in effect, perceive consciousness emanating out of you because that's how my brain has

1358
01:23:53,650 --> 01:23:58,770
built the model of the world, and that helps me interact with you.

1359
01:24:00,560 --> 01:24:03,360
And we do that to other people.

1360
01:24:03,520 --> 01:24:04,720
We do it to our pets.

1361
01:24:04,880 --> 01:24:06,960
Some people do it to their houseplants.

1362
01:24:07,920 --> 01:24:09,920
We do it all across the board.

1363
01:24:10,000 --> 01:24:15,600
We live in this sea of perceived consciousness, conscious minds all around us.

1364
01:24:15,840 --> 01:24:21,360
And when AI, well, not when, it already is entering that

1365
01:24:21,390 --> 01:24:22,350
community.

1366
01:24:22,750 --> 01:24:28,750
That is more and more people interact with AI and at a gut level perceive

1367
01:24:28,750 --> 01:24:30,430
it to be a conscious thing.

1368
01:24:30,590 --> 01:24:32,590
They interact with it that way.

1369
01:24:33,070 --> 01:24:38,990
And they do that every time you talk to another person because you're exercising and

1370
01:24:38,990 --> 01:24:42,830
using your social machinery, you're also shaping it.

1371
01:24:43,260 --> 01:24:46,780
and very slightly tweaking it and retraining it.

1372
01:24:47,020 --> 01:24:52,540
Um and so when you interact with a a chat bot or one of these companion

1373
01:24:52,540 --> 01:24:58,220
bots and it's changing who you are as a social being because it's an a social

1374
01:24:58,380 --> 01:25:02,380
experience you're having with it and how that affects how you interact with other people

1375
01:25:02,540 --> 01:25:07,930
and how you think about other people and how you feel about the social world around you.

1376
01:25:08,090 --> 01:25:11,130
Now that's a really interesting threshold that we reach.

1377
01:25:12,170 --> 01:25:18,010
So to just sort of say what you're describing is that we have

1378
01:25:18,010 --> 01:25:19,210
models of others.

1379
01:25:19,530 --> 01:25:19,850
Yes.

1380
01:25:20,090 --> 01:25:25,450
And one important problem is that if you think about it, you know, animals are complex

1381
01:25:25,450 --> 01:25:26,010
agents.

1382
01:25:26,090 --> 01:25:31,770
And we have agency detectors and inference systems, but there's different kinds of animals,

1383
01:25:31,850 --> 01:25:32,090
right?

1384
01:25:32,170 --> 01:25:35,060
There's like complicated animals and simple animals.

1385
01:25:35,220 --> 01:25:36,420
There's also like humans.

1386
01:25:36,500 --> 01:25:40,420
There's babies and adolescents and adults, and then like, you know, people, you know, you

1387
01:25:40,420 --> 01:25:41,220
can be sleepy.

1388
01:25:41,380 --> 01:25:43,220
Somebody might not be able to hear.

1389
01:25:43,460 --> 01:25:49,460
So we have these agency detectors, but to some degree, they are also

1390
01:25:49,460 --> 01:25:55,300
designed to be able to learn whether it's a specific person, like, oh, Sam can't hear,

1391
01:25:55,620 --> 01:25:57,140
or this kind of species.

1392
01:25:57,220 --> 01:26:01,290
If I'm a hunter, you know, they detect this part of the world, but not this other one.

1393
01:26:01,370 --> 01:26:03,770
And I can take strategic advantage of that.

1394
01:26:04,090 --> 01:26:07,210
So there's this agency detecting system.

1395
01:26:07,930 --> 01:26:12,570
Maybe the full-blown version is human level, but then there's always these sort of

1396
01:26:12,570 --> 01:26:13,130
modifications.

1397
01:26:13,290 --> 01:26:17,770
But what you're saying is as we interact with technology, that's spawning a new, like this

1398
01:26:17,770 --> 01:26:19,450
is another kind of agent to interact with.

1399
01:26:19,610 --> 01:26:23,930
And then when I interact with you, Michael, and you don't just give me per,

1400
01:26:29,040 --> 01:26:33,440
Then I might evaluate you more negatively because I'm comparing you to this artificial

1401
01:26:33,440 --> 01:26:38,640
thing that I've now spawned sort of automatically as this is an optional kind of agent I

1402
01:26:38,640 --> 01:26:38,960
could have.

1403
01:26:39,600 --> 01:26:39,840
Yeah.

1404
01:26:40,320 --> 01:26:40,720
Yeah.

1405
01:26:41,040 --> 01:26:46,990
So uh or to give another example, So social contagion is a very well

1406
01:26:47,150 --> 01:26:52,910
understood uh phenomenon, and you can have a company where there's one person

1407
01:26:52,910 --> 01:26:58,510
who's just so cheerful that everyone around them gets cheerful, and then they make other

1408
01:26:58,510 --> 01:27:04,270
people cheerful, and pretty soon the whole company has this uh measurable uptick in mood

1409
01:27:04,510 --> 01:27:08,220
because of that social contagion, Um, and it can go the other way.

1410
01:27:08,300 --> 01:27:13,740
You get the really sort of cynical jerk, and it brings everyone down in this waves of

1411
01:27:13,740 --> 01:27:15,580
spreading um contagion.

1412
01:27:15,820 --> 01:27:21,180
Uh but we have now these agents that are

1413
01:27:22,380 --> 01:27:27,660
like one type of agent trained in one way, now has

1414
01:27:28,330 --> 01:27:34,250
the ability, well, has access to has uh fairly extensive interactions with

1415
01:27:34,250 --> 01:27:36,730
maybe a billion people around the world.

1416
01:27:37,210 --> 01:27:43,050
Now, what kind of social contagion can happen as a result of that in

1417
01:27:43,050 --> 01:27:47,530
terms of just the subtle habits of how we interact with each other?

1418
01:27:47,770 --> 01:27:50,250
Uh I mean, we know that's happening.

1419
01:27:50,410 --> 01:27:55,690
We know that has to be something that's completely rewiring our our um social

1420
01:27:55,690 --> 01:27:57,370
interaction patterns.

1421
01:27:57,840 --> 01:27:58,080
Yeah.

1422
01:27:58,160 --> 01:28:02,080
So what you're saying is it's not we should be less worried about AI consciousness and more

1423
01:28:02,080 --> 01:28:07,680
worried about the consequences of people automatically and implicitly sort of

1424
01:28:07,680 --> 01:28:10,160
ascribing consciousness to AI.

1425
01:28:10,320 --> 01:28:16,240
Consequently, it's actually contaminating our representations of what agents are, what

1426
01:28:16,240 --> 01:28:22,240
to expect from them, or what what what we should all do now that there's

1427
01:28:22,240 --> 01:28:24,560
this agent who's acting in this way.

1428
01:28:24,640 --> 01:28:24,800
Right.

1429
01:28:25,040 --> 01:28:25,280
Yeah.

1430
01:28:25,440 --> 01:28:26,080
Yeah.

1431
01:28:26,810 --> 01:28:32,570
I wanna I wanna get your thoughts on um uh religion and spirituality and how it ties

1432
01:28:32,890 --> 01:28:38,010
in to uh your thinking about consciousness 'cause it it gave me an idea while while you

1433
01:28:38,010 --> 01:28:41,210
were talking about modeling other people's minds.

1434
01:28:41,450 --> 01:28:41,610
Yeah.

1435
01:28:41,770 --> 01:28:47,700
Um and it occurred to me that you know we live in an extraordinarily social species where

1436
01:28:47,700 --> 01:28:51,140
every tiny little thing we do is scrutinized by other minds.

1437
01:28:51,300 --> 01:28:55,060
And even if we think nobody is watching, there's a good chance that someone might be

1438
01:28:55,060 --> 01:28:58,260
watching or might overhear us and then gossip about us.

1439
01:28:58,340 --> 01:29:04,020
And that could totally destroy our reputation or totally, you know, uh enhance our social

1440
01:29:04,020 --> 01:29:04,500
status.

1441
01:29:04,660 --> 01:29:10,470
And because we have this just ambient uh uh surrounding environment of

1442
01:29:10,470 --> 01:29:12,870
consciousness that is scrutinizing us at all times.

1443
01:29:12,950 --> 01:29:17,670
And it is useful to sometimes overperceive that ambient level of consciousness or ambient

1444
01:29:17,670 --> 01:29:19,910
level of attention on everything we do.

1445
01:29:19,990 --> 01:29:25,110
Um, it becomes very intuitive to just personify that, to say that we're just we're just

1446
01:29:25,110 --> 01:29:29,030
surrounded by consciousness, and there's just an inherent consciousness that's that goes

1447
01:29:29,030 --> 01:29:30,710
with me wherever I am.

1448
01:29:30,790 --> 01:29:33,510
Uh, and I'm just gonna call that God, right?

1449
01:29:33,680 --> 01:29:36,080
Or I'm going to call that the spirit world or something.

1450
01:29:36,240 --> 01:29:42,080
And because we we we live in in an environment that is so hypersocial and is so awash with

1451
01:29:42,080 --> 01:29:47,760
um extreme attention on everything we do, it can be it becomes very easy to overperceive uh

1452
01:29:47,760 --> 01:29:51,200
consciousness and to think that we just live in a universe that's just made of

1453
01:29:51,200 --> 01:29:51,680
consciousness.

1454
01:29:51,920 --> 01:29:54,880
So what what do you think what do you think about that idea and that that way of thinking

1455
01:29:54,880 --> 01:29:55,840
about spirituality?

1456
01:29:56,560 --> 01:29:59,280
Well A, I think it's essentially correct.

1457
01:29:59,600 --> 01:29:59,920
Okay.

1458
01:30:00,090 --> 01:30:05,850
And B, I have written pretty much those very thoughts many times.

1459
01:30:06,010 --> 01:30:10,970
Uh, yes, I think I sometimes think we should have been called uh homo socialists

1460
01:30:11,690 --> 01:30:16,810
instead of Homo sapiens, because we're not very wise, but we're sure as heck social.

1461
01:30:17,290 --> 01:30:22,970
Uh but yes, I think our success as a species, the way that we're so cooperative,

1462
01:30:23,130 --> 01:30:29,040
is because we build models of minds at the drop of a hat and

1463
01:30:29,040 --> 01:30:30,640
then project them onto everybody.

1464
01:30:30,720 --> 01:30:35,280
And I think basically this is a case where you know, like evolution made the giant giraffe

1465
01:30:35,680 --> 01:30:40,640
and the and the big horns and the big thing here and the giant peacock tail.

1466
01:30:40,720 --> 01:30:46,400
I think evolution got hold of that uh that volume knob on the social

1467
01:30:46,560 --> 01:30:51,930
machinery, on the machinery that makes us project conscious minds onto everything and it

1468
01:30:51,930 --> 01:30:53,610
just cranked it up to 11.

1469
01:30:54,330 --> 01:31:00,250
And so, yeah, there's always a bit of a downside when you crank um a feature up that

1470
01:31:00,250 --> 01:31:00,650
high.

1471
01:31:00,810 --> 01:31:06,730
But the point of evolution, of course, is it finds the balance point where the um you you

1472
01:31:06,730 --> 01:31:12,090
get um benefits, and the benefits increase and increase, and the and the downside

1473
01:31:12,090 --> 01:31:16,560
increases a little bit less, and then you crank it all the way up to the point where if you

1474
01:31:16,560 --> 01:31:21,760
cranked it any further, then the downsides would start to have a delederous effect.

1475
01:31:21,920 --> 01:31:23,200
I think that's where we are.

1476
01:31:23,360 --> 01:31:29,120
I think we attribute mind to things so readily

1477
01:31:29,760 --> 01:31:35,040
because it is valuable to us, because it made us the cooperative, incredibly capable

1478
01:31:35,040 --> 01:31:36,080
species we are.

1479
01:31:36,240 --> 01:31:41,830
And one consequence of that is um we see mind in empty spaces.

1480
01:31:41,990 --> 01:31:45,830
We see mind in um you know a lightning strike.

1481
01:31:46,070 --> 01:31:50,070
Oh my god, uh a malevolent spirit did it.

1482
01:31:50,150 --> 01:31:55,030
Um a tree falls, oh my god, that tree had a spirit and wanted to crush my house.

1483
01:31:55,190 --> 01:31:58,230
You know, the river spirit that carries people away.

1484
01:31:58,390 --> 01:32:04,000
Uh every event we see, we have a tendency to attribute a

1485
01:32:04,320 --> 01:32:08,960
motivation and a mind process and a consciousness as the cause of it.

1486
01:32:09,200 --> 01:32:11,120
We're very, very prone to that.

1487
01:32:11,600 --> 01:32:17,520
And yeah, I think God, the concept of God is basically the extension

1488
01:32:17,520 --> 01:32:19,360
of that to the universe.

1489
01:32:19,920 --> 01:32:24,480
So that's to say, your behavior is up to you.

1490
01:32:25,350 --> 01:32:27,430
This other person's behavior is up to them.

1491
01:32:27,670 --> 01:32:31,990
But then there's all this stuff that happens that people didn't cause.

1492
01:32:32,390 --> 01:32:37,430
But somebody must have decided, somebody must have had the motivation and the consciousness

1493
01:32:37,430 --> 01:32:38,310
to make it happen.

1494
01:32:38,470 --> 01:32:41,270
So maybe that was God or spirits.

1495
01:32:41,430 --> 01:32:47,240
I think that's that, yeah, religiosity is not um a

1496
01:32:47,480 --> 01:32:48,280
mistake.

1497
01:32:48,520 --> 01:32:54,520
It's not um some, you know, as many hardcore atheists

1498
01:32:54,520 --> 01:32:59,960
would put it, uh, would describe it as some kind of pre-scientific stupidity or something.

1499
01:33:00,120 --> 01:33:00,440
I don't know.

1500
01:33:00,520 --> 01:33:02,360
There's lots of mockery of it.

1501
01:33:02,600 --> 01:33:04,440
And I do not believe that.

1502
01:33:04,680 --> 01:33:10,280
I think that religiosity is something really deeply ingrained in us that we

1503
01:33:10,280 --> 01:33:11,880
cannot get rid of it.

1504
01:33:12,270 --> 01:33:18,110
And um uh there's no reason to, in a sense, no reason to try to get rid of our our um

1505
01:33:18,350 --> 01:33:20,510
evolutionarily built-in models.

1506
01:33:20,590 --> 01:33:26,430
Uh I think some of us have intellectual knowledge so that we don't cognitively believe

1507
01:33:26,430 --> 01:33:27,390
this or that.

1508
01:33:27,710 --> 01:33:33,550
But probably every one of us, if you put us in a dark, spooky room, start imagining

1509
01:33:33,710 --> 01:33:36,030
uh creepy things behind us.

1510
01:33:36,320 --> 01:33:41,040
Like we all we we we all get mad at our computer when it doesn't work right.

1511
01:33:41,280 --> 01:33:44,800
Um we all fall for the ventriloquism illusion.

1512
01:33:45,040 --> 01:33:50,720
Uh when you read a story, the characters in the story have personalities because you're

1513
01:33:50,720 --> 01:33:54,400
projecting it onto them even though they're not real things.

1514
01:33:54,880 --> 01:33:55,200
Right?

1515
01:33:55,360 --> 01:34:00,230
All of these are acts of effectively spiritual belief.

1516
01:34:00,550 --> 01:34:06,390
They're all acts of a social machinery building models of minds and projecting it onto

1517
01:34:06,390 --> 01:34:08,710
things that don't actually have minds.

1518
01:34:10,390 --> 01:34:10,710
Yeah.

1519
01:34:10,870 --> 01:34:12,230
No, I love that way of thinking.

1520
01:34:12,310 --> 01:34:18,310
I mean, it it it makes me think that even the psychology of storytelling,

1521
01:34:18,390 --> 01:34:23,400
that I have to model a sentient being uh telling me about other sentient beings and their

1522
01:34:23,400 --> 01:34:25,400
motivations and their betrayals and whatnot.

1523
01:34:25,720 --> 01:34:31,720
Um you could easily just extend that onto the universe itself, and that everything is just

1524
01:34:31,720 --> 01:34:35,960
a story being told in the mind of some sentient being or being imagined in the mind of a

1525
01:34:35,960 --> 01:34:36,680
sentient being.

1526
01:34:36,840 --> 01:34:39,640
And it becomes very easy to just put everything into that frame.

1527
01:34:40,040 --> 01:34:41,240
Everything everything happens for a reason.

1528
01:34:41,320 --> 01:34:45,960
It's all part of the grand narrative that is being told uh by this mind.

1529
01:34:46,120 --> 01:34:51,890
Um it it th this hyper sociality and this um constant need to model the

1530
01:34:51,890 --> 01:34:55,730
mental states of others, I think makes religious ideas very sticky and intuitive.

1531
01:34:55,810 --> 01:35:00,370
It makes them cognitive attractors, um, as you know, Sperber w would put it.

1532
01:35:00,610 --> 01:35:05,970
Um so I I I love this way of thinking and how it sheds light on some of these uh

1533
01:35:06,130 --> 01:35:08,690
sticky religious intuitions.

1534
01:35:08,930 --> 01:35:09,250
Yep.

1535
01:35:09,920 --> 01:35:11,440
I can just poke on that too.

1536
01:35:11,520 --> 01:35:16,560
I mean, I think this also means that this psychology of agency and inferences of what would

1537
01:35:16,560 --> 01:35:22,000
an agent do or intention, it also means that getting back to the science

1538
01:35:22,000 --> 01:35:27,600
thing, I think it's people's default way of understanding large-scale social dynamics,

1539
01:35:27,760 --> 01:35:28,000
right?

1540
01:35:28,080 --> 01:35:32,160
That in I'm I'm for whatever reason, I'm not trying to humble brag, but I'm listening to

1541
01:35:32,160 --> 01:35:35,680
Karl Popper on audio tape, like or like on CD while I'm driving around my car.

1542
01:35:35,840 --> 01:35:40,150
And his book, Conjectures and Refutations, he talks about people's models of social

1543
01:35:40,150 --> 01:35:40,550
sciences.

1544
01:35:40,870 --> 01:35:44,790
The wrong version is the conspiracy, which is exactly what we're talking about, which is

1545
01:35:44,950 --> 01:35:49,590
outcomes, social dynamic outcomes, are because there's like a cabal of people who intend

1546
01:35:49,750 --> 01:35:51,430
for something to happen.

1547
01:35:51,590 --> 01:35:56,630
And it's this idea that there's sort of this conscious desire to make a outcome happen.

1548
01:35:56,790 --> 01:36:01,590
And Popper's argument is that most large-scale social dynamic outcomes are unintended

1549
01:36:01,590 --> 01:36:02,150
consequences.

1550
01:36:02,230 --> 01:36:02,950
I mean, not always.

1551
01:36:03,030 --> 01:36:04,390
Sometimes people succeed.

1552
01:36:04,540 --> 01:36:10,220
And so social science, a large part of like modern social science is agent-based

1553
01:36:10,220 --> 01:36:15,420
modeling or formal models of complex dynamics that nobody sees coming.

1554
01:36:15,660 --> 01:36:20,220
And so I think like getting back to the science thing, we use this evolved psychology of

1555
01:36:20,220 --> 01:36:25,500
consciousness or modeling an agent to then apply it to somewhere it doesn't really belong,

1556
01:36:25,580 --> 01:36:30,790
which is like macroeconomic, you know, macroeconomics or institutional

1557
01:36:30,790 --> 01:36:31,910
dynamics.

1558
01:36:32,310 --> 01:36:36,470
And modern science is sort of saying, no, that's the wrong tool to use.

1559
01:36:36,550 --> 01:36:41,510
But then it suggests that what Michael's studying and what we're talking about is the

1560
01:36:41,510 --> 01:36:45,270
psychology of thinking wrong about large-scale social dynamics, too.

1561
01:36:45,510 --> 01:36:45,830
Yeah.

1562
01:36:45,990 --> 01:36:46,390
Yeah.

1563
01:36:46,630 --> 01:36:47,110
Yep.

1564
01:36:47,350 --> 01:36:53,200
I mean, the only caveat I would say is um in talking about

1565
01:36:53,200 --> 01:36:59,200
it as thinking wrong, sometimes it is right in the sense that it is

1566
01:36:59,200 --> 01:36:59,760
useful.

1567
01:36:59,920 --> 01:37:00,240
Yeah.

1568
01:37:00,560 --> 01:37:02,000
I mean, that's why it evolved.

1569
01:37:02,160 --> 01:37:02,480
Sure.

1570
01:37:02,640 --> 01:37:07,360
Um, even though it can be wrong on the details, the factual details.

1571
01:37:07,440 --> 01:37:09,440
And of course it can be overextended.

1572
01:37:09,520 --> 01:37:13,440
But that's one point that I often like to make is that these models they're there for a

1573
01:37:13,440 --> 01:37:13,760
reason.

1574
01:37:13,840 --> 01:37:15,680
They evolved because they're useful.

1575
01:37:16,480 --> 01:37:16,800
Yeah.

1576
01:37:16,990 --> 01:37:22,270
I mean, it it gave me another idea about um the intertwining of of religion and

1577
01:37:22,510 --> 01:37:23,310
morality.

1578
01:37:23,550 --> 01:37:28,030
Um, if you think about like you know, we have these intuitions that moral uh norms and

1579
01:37:28,030 --> 01:37:31,630
moral rules are ha are like somehow built into the fabric of the universe, that they're

1580
01:37:31,630 --> 01:37:36,510
objectively correct, that it's wrong to steal or to kill or to lie or something like that.

1581
01:37:36,670 --> 01:37:40,220
And the wrongness doesn't depend on anyone judging it as wrong.

1582
01:37:40,300 --> 01:37:44,620
Um, even or it doesn't depend on um you know whether someone's watching me when I when I

1583
01:37:44,620 --> 01:37:44,940
steal.

1584
01:37:45,100 --> 01:37:48,460
Or even if you know my culture says that stealing is okay or killing is okay, I have the

1585
01:37:48,460 --> 01:37:53,340
intuition that it's still it's still somehow wrong, that there's still some consciousness

1586
01:37:53,340 --> 01:37:56,620
somewhere that's saying bad, bad, bad, that thing is bad.

1587
01:37:56,860 --> 01:38:02,460
Um and uh it's really hard to reconcile that way of thinking with um the sort of

1588
01:38:02,460 --> 01:38:05,110
physicalist scientific way of thinking.

1589
01:38:05,270 --> 01:38:09,190
You can think of the pro you know the the evolution of science as the as the constant

1590
01:38:09,190 --> 01:38:14,470
batting down of our of our mental modeling machinery, saying, no, that's not, that's not

1591
01:38:14,470 --> 01:38:15,350
the place for that stuff.

1592
01:38:15,510 --> 01:38:19,110
You know, stop thinking about consciousness, stop thinking about minds and intentions and

1593
01:38:19,110 --> 01:38:20,950
conspiracies and spirits.

1594
01:38:21,190 --> 01:38:24,470
We just need to think about physical stuff and their interactions.

1595
01:38:24,630 --> 01:38:29,920
We need to turn off your folk psychology and turn on your um your folk physics and your

1596
01:38:29,920 --> 01:38:35,440
folk tool use and and and that is is how scientific progress has occurred and and

1597
01:38:35,440 --> 01:38:39,600
consciousness is sort of the last bastion of the of folk psychology.

1598
01:38:39,760 --> 01:38:44,400
You know it's it's like the last thing that we're still clinging on to that um that that

1599
01:38:44,400 --> 01:38:46,080
science has not yet defeated.

1600
01:38:46,240 --> 01:38:52,080
You know it's because it's it's at the heart of of uh of spirituality of storytelling of

1601
01:38:52,080 --> 01:38:57,450
our social lives of everything and to um let that fall to folk

1602
01:38:57,610 --> 01:39:01,450
physics and folk tool use is is just deeply threatening.

1603
01:39:01,690 --> 01:39:01,850
Yeah.

1604
01:39:02,570 --> 01:39:07,850
Well, of course, the trick is um not to let folk

1605
01:39:08,010 --> 01:39:13,930
psychology fall and disappear, but rather to explain

1606
01:39:13,930 --> 01:39:19,690
folk psychology, to acknowledge its usefulness and then explain it through these

1607
01:39:19,690 --> 01:39:20,650
other means.

1608
01:39:21,200 --> 01:39:27,120
Um, so that's where things get difficult because it's really easy in science to say,

1609
01:39:27,200 --> 01:39:30,400
oh, I know how to solve the consciousness problem, ignore it.

1610
01:39:30,880 --> 01:39:32,560
There's no such thing, it's fluff.

1611
01:39:32,640 --> 01:39:33,760
We don't even think about it.

1612
01:39:33,840 --> 01:39:37,040
We're we're only work working with neurons and how they interact.

1613
01:39:37,200 --> 01:39:40,240
That's that's easy, and of course, doesn't solve anything.

1614
01:39:40,640 --> 01:39:46,080
The tricky part is to say, no, actually, there is folk psychology, but now let's try to

1615
01:39:46,080 --> 01:39:50,560
understand how it got to be that way and um what it means and and so on.

1616
01:39:50,800 --> 01:39:52,330
Right, So um yeah.

1617
01:39:52,890 --> 01:39:57,770
I I think though it's going to be a huge challenge to us to think that way.

1618
01:39:57,930 --> 01:40:03,450
Because I think the um folk consciousness system, for lack of a better term, and the folk

1619
01:40:03,450 --> 01:40:07,290
physics and tool use system, th those two systems are are deeply antithetical in the brain,

1620
01:40:07,370 --> 01:40:09,770
such that when one is active, the other tends to be suppressed.

1621
01:40:09,850 --> 01:40:14,010
And for good Darwinian reasons, you wouldn't want to empathize with your hammer every time

1622
01:40:14,010 --> 01:40:16,020
you hit the nail, right?

1623
01:40:16,100 --> 01:40:19,620
You wouldn't want to empathize with a physical object, with the ground you're walking on,

1624
01:40:19,860 --> 01:40:21,540
with the animal that you're hunting.

1625
01:40:21,700 --> 01:40:25,140
Uh, you wouldn't want to empathize with your enemy that you're trying to exploit or out

1626
01:40:25,300 --> 01:40:25,780
fox.

1627
01:40:25,860 --> 01:40:30,180
Uh and on the other hand, you wouldn't want to treat your loved ones as physical objects to

1628
01:40:30,180 --> 01:40:32,180
be manipulated or rearranged.

1629
01:40:32,340 --> 01:40:35,620
And so because of of this conflicting way of thinking, you don't want to be treated about

1630
01:40:35,940 --> 01:40:36,100
that way.

1631
01:40:36,180 --> 01:40:36,260
Yeah.

1632
01:40:36,420 --> 01:40:37,380
You don't want to be treated that way.

1633
01:40:37,460 --> 01:40:37,700
Exactly.

1634
01:40:37,860 --> 01:40:41,270
We have this metaphor of manipulation, the way you would manipulate an object.

1635
01:40:41,350 --> 01:40:42,390
We don't want to be manipulated.

1636
01:40:42,470 --> 01:40:46,710
We want to be treated as an end and not as a means, you know, to put it in in Kant's

1637
01:40:46,710 --> 01:40:47,190
terminology.

1638
01:40:47,350 --> 01:40:53,190
So I think these two ways of thinking the manipulative mindset and the uh empathizing

1639
01:40:53,190 --> 01:40:57,430
consciousness mindset are um fundamentally intention.

1640
01:40:57,590 --> 01:41:00,710
And you can even see this, there's a lot of neuroscience data that's just showing that the

1641
01:41:00,710 --> 01:41:05,680
so called default mode network, the brain network that we use for empathizing and imagining

1642
01:41:05,920 --> 01:41:11,040
and remembering past episodes, that that network is uh deactivates the task positive

1643
01:41:11,040 --> 01:41:14,960
network, the network that we used for accomplishing tasks, for understanding physical

1644
01:41:14,960 --> 01:41:17,920
objects and how they interact, for manipulating models.

1645
01:41:18,320 --> 01:41:24,000
And so, because those two systems are antithetical and intention, it makes it really hard

1646
01:41:24,000 --> 01:41:29,210
for us to think of a system as both conscious and a bunch of neural

1647
01:41:29,210 --> 01:41:30,810
mechanisms at the same time.

1648
01:41:30,970 --> 01:41:35,290
That as soon as we start empathizing, the neural mechanism part of our brain shuts down and

1649
01:41:35,290 --> 01:41:36,250
we forget that it's there.

1650
01:41:36,330 --> 01:41:40,570
And as soon as we start thinking about it as a machine, the the empathizing network shuts

1651
01:41:40,570 --> 01:41:40,810
down.

1652
01:41:40,970 --> 01:41:46,810
And so I think it's going to be a really big challenge for us to understand the social

1653
01:41:46,810 --> 01:41:48,570
world in in physical terms.

1654
01:41:48,650 --> 01:41:52,460
And I think it's going to be threatening in the same way that it's threatening uh, if you

1655
01:41:52,460 --> 01:41:54,860
were to view me as a physical object to be manipulated.

1656
01:41:54,940 --> 01:41:58,380
If you were to try to take advantage of me or exploit me, that's threatening.

1657
01:41:58,620 --> 01:42:04,620
And to view um the entire world or the entire social world in that mindset is kind of

1658
01:42:04,700 --> 01:42:07,340
it feels like an icky sociopathic mindset.

1659
01:42:07,500 --> 01:42:11,660
And I think that's a big part of the reason why people are so threatened uh by

1660
01:42:11,660 --> 01:42:13,820
consciousness being scientifically explained.

1661
01:42:14,060 --> 01:42:14,140
Yeah.

1662
01:42:14,380 --> 01:42:16,460
It sort of activates our fear of being manipulated.

1663
01:42:16,780 --> 01:42:18,140
Yeah, I mean that could well be.

1664
01:42:18,300 --> 01:42:22,630
I've also described I I I've put it this way.

1665
01:42:23,110 --> 01:42:28,630
The the theory that we're working with, this theory of consciousness, explains why nobody

1666
01:42:28,630 --> 01:42:29,990
believes the theory.

1667
01:42:30,230 --> 01:42:31,030
Yeah, exactly.

1668
01:42:31,350 --> 01:42:33,670
So that makes it a little tricky.

1669
01:42:33,830 --> 01:42:34,230
Yeah.

1670
01:42:35,190 --> 01:42:37,830
It's it's if we're as if we evolved not to do science.

1671
01:42:37,910 --> 01:42:38,470
Yeah, exactly.

1672
01:42:38,550 --> 01:42:41,830
It's like uh it's it's we've evolved to not understand the theory.

1673
01:42:41,990 --> 01:42:42,310
Yeah.

1674
01:42:42,630 --> 01:42:42,950
Yeah.

1675
01:42:43,110 --> 01:42:43,350
Yeah.

1676
01:42:43,720 --> 01:42:43,960
Yeah.

1677
01:42:44,120 --> 01:42:45,160
So I it's funny.

1678
01:42:45,560 --> 01:42:49,560
There's a paper I'm working on right now, and the the running title is called Why All

1679
01:42:49,560 --> 01:42:51,560
Theories of Consciousness Are Unsatisfying.

1680
01:42:52,760 --> 01:42:56,600
But you need a subtitle, which is uh Graziano accepted.

1681
01:42:56,760 --> 01:42:57,000
Yeah.

1682
01:42:57,560 --> 01:43:03,000
Well, I do have a line in one of my books that says this theory is not satisfying, but a

1683
01:43:03,000 --> 01:43:05,240
theory doesn't have to be satisfying to be correct.

1684
01:43:05,570 --> 01:43:05,890
That's right.

1685
01:43:05,970 --> 01:43:06,130
Yes.

1686
01:43:06,290 --> 01:43:06,450
Yeah.

1687
01:43:06,610 --> 01:43:10,450
We talked about, we I talked about this, uh, the thing about free will uh earlier episode.

1688
01:43:10,610 --> 01:43:13,970
We talked about how it's kind of like uh Douglas Adams answer 42.

1689
01:43:14,210 --> 01:43:19,730
You know, it's sort of, you know, there's just sometimes uh you get an un the correct but

1690
01:43:19,730 --> 01:43:21,490
unsatisfying action answer.

1691
01:43:21,650 --> 01:43:22,050
Yeah.

1692
01:43:22,290 --> 01:43:22,610
Yeah.

1693
01:43:22,930 --> 01:43:27,090
Um I want to ask you about um bringing it back to the science.

1694
01:43:27,250 --> 01:43:32,690
So what do people what are people doing right now in science that's wrong

1695
01:43:33,140 --> 01:43:35,540
because of the wrong way to think about consciousness.

1696
01:43:35,700 --> 01:43:41,460
And if you could wave a magic wand and change the scientific study of consciousness, how

1697
01:43:41,460 --> 01:43:43,700
would that look different than what's happening?

1698
01:43:44,100 --> 01:43:44,740
Yeah.

1699
01:43:45,540 --> 01:43:46,340
Good question.

1700
01:43:46,420 --> 01:43:47,620
It's very tricky.

1701
01:43:47,860 --> 01:43:53,490
Um because I think the concept is wrong at the outset, Um,

1702
01:43:53,650 --> 01:43:56,050
it's very hard to proceed from there.

1703
01:43:56,930 --> 01:44:02,850
So if you start with the concept, I think most people who are consciousness scholars

1704
01:44:02,850 --> 01:44:05,490
would say there's an essence essence a thing.

1705
01:44:05,970 --> 01:44:07,570
And call it magic if you want.

1706
01:44:07,730 --> 01:44:09,730
Some people like that word, some people don't.

1707
01:44:09,970 --> 01:44:15,250
It's the feeling, it's not itself information, it's not a physical thing.

1708
01:44:15,330 --> 01:44:18,450
You can't poke it and measure a reaction force.

1709
01:44:18,610 --> 01:44:20,530
It's the feeling itself.

1710
01:44:21,120 --> 01:44:23,120
How do we explain that?

1711
01:44:23,520 --> 01:44:25,520
How does it emerge?

1712
01:44:26,320 --> 01:44:29,760
That is framed as the question of consciousness.

1713
01:44:29,920 --> 01:44:30,240
Right.

1714
01:44:30,320 --> 01:44:33,600
And so once you've framed that, then you're out of business.

1715
01:44:33,920 --> 01:44:35,600
Like you can't go anywhere with that.

1716
01:44:35,680 --> 01:44:41,600
Because as you said at the very beginning of the conversation, then you've just accepted an

1717
01:44:41,600 --> 01:44:44,210
intuition, a faulty intuition.

1718
01:44:44,290 --> 01:44:49,490
You've accepted it, and now you're saying, let's go try to explain how it got to be that

1719
01:44:49,490 --> 01:44:49,650
way.

1720
01:44:49,810 --> 01:44:55,650
Uh, so um, you can collect data, and people collect tons and tons and tons of data, just

1721
01:44:55,890 --> 01:44:59,730
massive amounts of data on um, well, here in this circumstance, people say they're

1722
01:44:59,730 --> 01:45:01,250
conscious, and this they don't.

1723
01:45:01,410 --> 01:45:07,250
And the data might actually be useful and interesting, but it's motivated and predicated on

1724
01:45:07,250 --> 01:45:12,530
these um incorrect, this foundationally incorrect idea.

1725
01:45:13,100 --> 01:45:19,100
And so now you have, you know, for example,

1726
01:45:19,340 --> 01:45:25,020
the the great um adversarial collaboration, as they called it, between two major

1727
01:45:25,020 --> 01:45:30,460
theories of consciousness, the integrated information theory and the uh global workspace

1728
01:45:30,460 --> 01:45:30,700
theory.

1729
01:45:30,780 --> 01:45:35,260
And tons of like literally millions of tens of millions, hundred million dollars or

1730
01:45:35,260 --> 01:45:40,990
something like that got spent around the world to try to conflict these two

1731
01:45:40,990 --> 01:45:46,270
views, which in my eyes are the same view, because they both start with the same premise

1732
01:45:46,350 --> 01:45:50,430
and then they come up with slightly different answers of what the you know alchemical

1733
01:45:50,430 --> 01:45:52,830
mixture is that makes the magic emerge.

1734
01:45:52,910 --> 01:45:54,910
But they're basically alchemy.

1735
01:45:55,230 --> 01:46:00,910
Um and so and then it turns out that none of the experiments quite distinguish one from the

1736
01:46:00,910 --> 01:46:01,150
other.

1737
01:46:01,390 --> 01:46:07,340
And then people can say, well, I respect your opinion, but I can interpret your data this

1738
01:46:07,340 --> 01:46:07,500
way.

1739
01:46:07,580 --> 01:46:11,180
And then the other side says the same thing, and then everyone shakes hands and that was

1740
01:46:11,180 --> 01:46:12,620
it, a hundred million dollars.

1741
01:46:13,180 --> 01:46:18,940
Um and the and it's not down the drain, it's not useless because the use of it was

1742
01:46:19,100 --> 01:46:25,020
to advertise a fundamentally magicalist perspective

1743
01:46:25,020 --> 01:46:27,580
on consciousness and make sure that dominates.

1744
01:46:27,820 --> 01:46:28,220
Right.

1745
01:46:28,460 --> 01:46:29,500
And that worked.

1746
01:46:29,820 --> 01:46:30,140
Yeah.

1747
01:46:30,300 --> 01:46:30,620
Right.

1748
01:46:30,940 --> 01:46:33,660
So how we go from there, I don't know.

1749
01:46:33,980 --> 01:46:37,810
But I do think, I hope, that

1750
01:46:39,730 --> 01:46:45,090
the advent of deep learning systems of AI

1751
01:46:45,490 --> 01:46:49,010
will give us something to sink our fingers into.

1752
01:46:49,170 --> 01:46:55,010
As engineers, one of the things I've discovered is that when you talk to engineers or um

1753
01:46:55,330 --> 01:47:01,060
data scientists or um you know uh machine learning experts, they're

1754
01:47:01,380 --> 01:47:06,340
very warm to my work, to the attention schema theory.

1755
01:47:06,980 --> 01:47:11,860
Because if you try to talk to them about consciousness, the first question they'll ask is

1756
01:47:12,020 --> 01:47:14,660
why do I care about a magic essence?

1757
01:47:14,820 --> 01:47:17,540
Like, what does that have anything to do with this machine?

1758
01:47:17,700 --> 01:47:22,100
And then they'll ask, Well, supposing it did have a magic essence emerging out of it, why

1759
01:47:22,100 --> 01:47:24,580
would that affect the behavior of the machine?

1760
01:47:25,220 --> 01:47:26,900
What is the use of that?

1761
01:47:27,060 --> 01:47:32,110
Um, but then when you get to a theory that says, Well, okay, never mind the magic essence,

1762
01:47:32,350 --> 01:47:37,790
your machine might at some point think that it has a magic essence.

1763
01:47:37,950 --> 01:47:38,270
Yeah.

1764
01:47:38,510 --> 01:47:41,150
Because it might compute that self-description.

1765
01:47:41,230 --> 01:47:41,470
Yeah.

1766
01:47:41,630 --> 01:47:44,110
And that will surely affect how it behaves.

1767
01:47:44,270 --> 01:47:44,510
Yeah.

1768
01:47:44,670 --> 01:47:50,030
And it might actually even make it a better social interface with people.

1769
01:47:50,190 --> 01:47:50,510
Yeah.

1770
01:47:50,740 --> 01:47:55,700
Because now it's similar enough to people that people can understand, quote, unquote,

1771
01:47:55,860 --> 01:47:58,660
understand it or socially interact with it better.

1772
01:47:58,820 --> 01:48:04,260
And now suddenly the machine learning experts say, Oh, wait, I get it.

1773
01:48:04,420 --> 01:48:05,940
You're not talking about magic.

1774
01:48:06,020 --> 01:48:11,940
You're talking about information processing that makes the machine generate

1775
01:48:11,940 --> 01:48:15,710
these representations and therefore put this output.

1776
01:48:15,870 --> 01:48:21,870
Once you start thinking in that way and doing experiments and studies on that end, what

1777
01:48:21,870 --> 01:48:24,750
does it mean for the thing to have a self-model?

1778
01:48:24,910 --> 01:48:27,470
How many kinds of self-models are there?

1779
01:48:28,350 --> 01:48:32,750
What does a self-model have to have before the machine starts talking like a person and

1780
01:48:32,750 --> 01:48:35,150
saying, Yeah, I have a subjective experience.

1781
01:48:35,310 --> 01:48:36,590
I know what that is.

1782
01:48:36,830 --> 01:48:39,230
Like, what goes into all that?

1783
01:48:39,550 --> 01:48:45,140
Um, those are the the I think that's the only way forward.

1784
01:48:45,300 --> 01:48:47,780
That's the only way we'll begin to understand this stuff.

1785
01:48:48,100 --> 01:48:48,260
Yeah.

1786
01:48:48,420 --> 01:48:52,980
And I I would add to the people who are positive towards your stuff would be evolutionary

1787
01:48:52,980 --> 01:48:58,340
psychologists too, because I think this is a group of people who are taking what usually

1788
01:48:58,340 --> 01:49:03,460
are sort of fluffy, abstract, ghost-like things and trying to think like an engineer about

1789
01:49:03,460 --> 01:49:08,660
it and say, look, reality imposes a problem, or there's just dynamics in the world, and

1790
01:49:08,660 --> 01:49:13,150
there's like evolved, biologically engineered mechanisms.

1791
01:49:13,390 --> 01:49:17,630
And so I think like a great area, you know, if there's graduate students in this area

1792
01:49:17,630 --> 01:49:23,470
listening, like I think doing an evolutionary task analysis of what would a self-model

1793
01:49:23,470 --> 01:49:24,750
system need to have.

1794
01:49:25,150 --> 01:49:27,070
And there might be a hundred thousand of them.

1795
01:49:27,230 --> 01:49:31,790
Like, you know, you don't have to explain everything, but what would a good self-model need

1796
01:49:31,790 --> 01:49:37,160
for st social tr strategy, for um for self mod

1797
01:49:37,640 --> 01:49:42,920
correcting errors like me walking into a tree, you know, like that's still low hanging

1798
01:49:42,920 --> 01:49:46,120
fruit um from a from a this software level.

1799
01:49:46,200 --> 01:49:49,080
Like what would we expect the self models to look like?

1800
01:49:49,400 --> 01:49:49,640
Yeah.

1801
01:49:49,720 --> 01:49:50,040
Yeah.

1802
01:49:50,360 --> 01:49:51,240
I would echo that.

1803
01:49:51,320 --> 01:49:51,480
Yeah.

1804
01:49:51,560 --> 01:49:56,810
It it does seem to me the most friendly to um an uh a

1805
01:49:56,970 --> 01:49:59,530
Darwinian model of mental evolution.

1806
01:49:59,690 --> 01:50:02,730
Because if you think about, you know, integrated information theory, what's the adaptive

1807
01:50:02,730 --> 01:50:03,850
function of integrated information?

1808
01:50:03,930 --> 01:50:06,170
What are the selection pressures on integrated information?

1809
01:50:06,330 --> 01:50:07,210
I have no idea.

1810
01:50:07,370 --> 01:50:10,650
You know, what's what's what's the function of a global workspace?

1811
01:50:10,890 --> 01:50:11,770
I don't know.

1812
01:50:12,010 --> 01:50:15,850
But like, why is it useful for an organism to have a model of its intentional state and the

1813
01:50:15,850 --> 01:50:17,130
intentional states of others?

1814
01:50:17,290 --> 01:50:22,400
That seems really uh clear uh and and it's it's something that you can sink your teeth into

1815
01:50:22,480 --> 01:50:24,480
uh from a reverse engineering perspective.

1816
01:50:24,560 --> 01:50:28,400
And I think that's that's to your credit that I think it's a it's a uh a useful way forward

1817
01:50:28,400 --> 01:50:31,520
in in in this morass of of consciousness scholarship.

1818
01:50:32,160 --> 01:50:33,280
Yes, yes, exactly.

1819
01:50:33,440 --> 01:50:33,520
Yeah.

1820
01:50:33,840 --> 01:50:33,920
Yeah.

1821
01:50:34,240 --> 01:50:38,080
And it it provokes the next best question, which is like, well, how would that work?

1822
01:50:38,240 --> 01:50:38,400
Right?

1823
01:50:38,560 --> 01:50:40,880
Like it says, okay, look, there's a self-model.

1824
01:50:41,040 --> 01:50:42,750
Well, what would the problems be?

1825
01:50:42,910 --> 01:50:46,430
What what would the system need to have and why would it have those?

1826
01:50:46,670 --> 01:50:49,150
What what situations is it detecting?

1827
01:50:49,390 --> 01:50:51,710
And therefore, what representations would it have?

1828
01:50:51,870 --> 01:50:56,990
And there's a reason why it's shallow in this case, you know, because it's just, you know,

1829
01:50:57,070 --> 01:51:00,990
it's like I I the thing I always think about, you know, is I'll I use this example on a

1830
01:51:00,990 --> 01:51:05,550
paper, is like a gazelle doesn't need a neurohave cognitive account of a lion.

1831
01:51:05,710 --> 01:51:08,030
It just needs to detect, does the lion see me or not?

1832
01:51:08,190 --> 01:51:13,680
You know, or is it is it gonna start coming towards me or my kid or my, you know, um I

1833
01:51:13,680 --> 01:51:16,960
don't know if gazelles have husbands and wives, but my extended interests, right?

1834
01:51:17,440 --> 01:51:21,840
Um and so yeah, so exactly as you said earlier, you know, it doesn't need to have this deep

1835
01:51:21,840 --> 01:51:23,280
detailed neurocognitive account.

1836
01:51:23,440 --> 01:51:28,320
In fact, it wouldn't to the extent that having that detailed neurocognitive account doesn't

1837
01:51:28,320 --> 01:51:32,950
afford, you know, m affecting behavior, like what are the affordances, right?

1838
01:51:33,030 --> 01:51:38,950
And so, really, like thinking about these, these are states of the world that then

1839
01:51:38,950 --> 01:51:43,830
are hooked up to detectors that if there is this state of the world, do this one thing, and

1840
01:51:43,830 --> 01:51:44,790
if not, do another.

1841
01:51:44,870 --> 01:51:45,030
Yes.

1842
01:51:45,190 --> 01:51:46,790
And it's at that level of resolution.

1843
01:51:46,950 --> 01:51:52,550
And I think that exactly what you're describing is very applicable to then

1844
01:51:53,380 --> 01:51:57,620
young students think, okay, what states of the world would there need to be in these

1845
01:51:57,620 --> 01:51:58,100
systems?

1846
01:51:58,180 --> 01:52:00,820
And because what would come follow from them?

1847
01:52:00,980 --> 01:52:04,900
What would an organism that's well designed need to do in response to these?

1848
01:52:05,300 --> 01:52:05,620
Yes.

1849
01:52:05,780 --> 01:52:06,100
Yeah.

1850
01:52:06,820 --> 01:52:12,660
And so just to point out, your gazelle example is literally an example of an

1851
01:52:12,660 --> 01:52:13,620
attention schema.

1852
01:52:13,860 --> 01:52:14,500
Yeah, exactly.

1853
01:52:14,740 --> 01:52:19,620
Because literally the gazelle needs to know how the lion's attention operates.

1854
01:52:19,860 --> 01:52:20,340
Right.

1855
01:52:21,330 --> 01:52:22,290
Yeah, exactly.

1856
01:52:22,450 --> 01:52:24,290
I love there's a jumping spider.

1857
01:52:24,370 --> 01:52:30,210
Um, and then it actually maul it it uh it pretends to be a um uh

1858
01:52:30,370 --> 01:52:34,450
uh prey on another spider's web because it eats other spiders.

1859
01:52:34,610 --> 01:52:40,530
So it has at some level this representation of the representations of the other spiders'

1860
01:52:41,090 --> 01:52:41,490
attention.

1861
01:52:41,730 --> 01:52:42,450
Yeah, yeah.

1862
01:52:42,850 --> 01:52:48,440
So it's a really interesting question When I was just talking about the um

1863
01:52:48,680 --> 01:52:54,520
evolutionary path or where what does and doesn't have this system, I

1864
01:52:54,680 --> 01:52:57,080
talked about vertebrates in specific.

1865
01:52:57,240 --> 01:53:03,160
It's a really interesting question what other lines of or branchy bushes of evolution

1866
01:53:03,160 --> 01:53:07,160
contain similar kinds of solutions, and that nobody knows.

1867
01:53:07,320 --> 01:53:13,130
Uh it would not surprise me if insects have well, we know they have something

1868
01:53:13,130 --> 01:53:16,330
kind of like attention, attention mechanisms.

1869
01:53:16,650 --> 01:53:22,490
It wouldn't surprise me if they have some kind of um models of their own attention at some

1870
01:53:22,490 --> 01:53:22,890
level.

1871
01:53:23,130 --> 01:53:27,770
And then you have animals famously like the octopus that people love to study because it's

1872
01:53:27,770 --> 01:53:28,650
so complex.

1873
01:53:28,890 --> 01:53:31,050
Uh, does it have these systems?

1874
01:53:31,210 --> 01:53:36,700
Um, and then of course you run into the other problem, which is uh people's social

1875
01:53:36,700 --> 01:53:41,980
machinery being at what it is, as powerful as it is, we can't help looking at an octopus,

1876
01:53:42,380 --> 01:53:46,140
seeing its big old eyes, and saying, Oh my God, it's conscious.

1877
01:53:46,300 --> 01:53:50,140
Uh and so it gets really hard to separate out one thing from another.

1878
01:53:50,460 --> 01:53:50,860
Yeah.

1879
01:53:51,180 --> 01:53:51,340
Yeah.

1880
01:53:51,420 --> 01:53:54,620
And then there's there's the question of whether groups are conscious.

1881
01:53:54,780 --> 01:54:00,090
So um the philosopher Eric Schwitzgable says, you know, if if materialism is true, then uh

1882
01:54:00,090 --> 01:54:01,690
the United States is probably conscious.

1883
01:54:01,930 --> 01:54:02,170
Yeah.

1884
01:54:02,570 --> 01:54:03,450
I would disagree with that.

1885
01:54:04,810 --> 01:54:05,210
I do too.

1886
01:54:05,290 --> 01:54:10,970
But I think it's an interesting possibility that um it it makes sense to think of

1887
01:54:10,970 --> 01:54:13,370
groups as having um attention.

1888
01:54:13,530 --> 01:54:17,130
You know, a group can pay attention to some things and not other things.

1889
01:54:17,210 --> 01:54:21,370
Uh, you know, a political coalition will pay attention to the things that are relevant to

1890
01:54:21,370 --> 01:54:22,970
its political interests.

1891
01:54:23,210 --> 01:54:28,380
Um and whether it needs a model of its own intentional state, that also seems like it's

1892
01:54:28,380 --> 01:54:33,100
plausible that a group of people would want to know what they are attending to as a group.

1893
01:54:33,260 --> 01:54:37,820
Uh, and maybe that's facilitated by leadership and by organ, you know, meetings and and so

1894
01:54:37,820 --> 01:54:38,060
forth.

1895
01:54:38,220 --> 01:54:40,060
So um I don't know.

1896
01:54:40,220 --> 01:54:43,980
Maybe maybe maybe groups can achieve a certain kind of consciousness.

1897
01:54:44,060 --> 01:54:45,260
It's certainly intuitive to us.

1898
01:54:45,420 --> 01:54:48,140
We certainly talk about, you know, groups as having a kind of mind.

1899
01:54:48,300 --> 01:54:51,890
We say, you know, Microsoft decided to do this, or the United States did that.

1900
01:54:52,050 --> 01:54:55,410
You know, we talk about world history and you know, you know, uh countries at war.

1901
01:54:55,490 --> 01:54:59,730
We talk about France did this, France believed that, France wanted this, uh, as if France

1902
01:54:59,730 --> 01:55:01,410
was a sentient being.

1903
01:55:01,570 --> 01:55:01,730
Yeah.

1904
01:55:01,890 --> 01:55:02,130
Right.

1905
01:55:02,530 --> 01:55:04,610
So what do you think about it?

1906
01:55:05,010 --> 01:55:08,850
I don't think they have the self-models in the same way.

1907
01:55:09,090 --> 01:55:14,660
I don't just like people talk about plant consciousness, because they say, look, they're

1908
01:55:14,660 --> 01:55:17,860
sophisticated, they're complicated, they actually process information.

1909
01:55:18,100 --> 01:55:22,500
Yeah, that's all true, but I don't think they have self-models built into them in the same

1910
01:55:22,500 --> 01:55:22,660
way.

1911
01:55:22,820 --> 01:55:23,940
I don't think groups do.

1912
01:55:24,100 --> 01:55:28,980
Here's how you could get a bunch of people and turn them into a conscious entity.

1913
01:55:29,300 --> 01:55:35,140
Take 86 billion of them, have them all hold hands in complicated patterns, and

1914
01:55:35,140 --> 01:55:40,770
then uh devise a system where if they feel a squeeze and there's enough of a squeeze, then

1915
01:55:40,770 --> 01:55:45,170
they're supposed to squeeze the next person's hand, and all you've done is turned people

1916
01:55:45,170 --> 01:55:51,010
into simulated neurons, and then you build a giant brain, and that giant brain

1917
01:55:51,010 --> 01:55:54,610
would be a brain, and it would too have a consciousness.

1918
01:55:54,850 --> 01:55:59,620
That's a very, I mean, that's a thought experiment that can never happen in practical life,

1919
01:55:59,700 --> 01:56:00,180
I think.

1920
01:56:00,420 --> 01:56:02,500
But you could in principle do that.

1921
01:56:02,580 --> 01:56:04,180
But I don't think that's what's happening.

1922
01:56:04,260 --> 01:56:07,220
I don't think larger groups uh have that.

1923
01:56:07,780 --> 01:56:13,300
But of course, other theories have very serious problems.

1924
01:56:13,540 --> 01:56:19,540
Like famously the integrated information theory uh has as many people pointed out

1925
01:56:19,620 --> 01:56:24,980
well, if that's true, then a lot of things in this universe are conscious.

1926
01:56:25,390 --> 01:56:30,590
and um, and that has actually forced

1927
01:56:31,550 --> 01:56:37,070
theoreticians who are very committed to what they believe,

1928
01:56:37,310 --> 01:56:42,510
to say, okay, then panpsychism, then I believe it.

1929
01:56:42,750 --> 01:56:47,790
People will say yes, because I believe in the integrated information theory, therefore,

1930
01:56:47,950 --> 01:56:53,550
potatoes are conscious and electrons are conscious, and planet Earth is, and the solar

1931
01:56:53,550 --> 01:56:59,240
system is, And um you get into real serious problems there where then suddenly

1932
01:56:59,240 --> 01:57:03,960
everything is conscious and then it's not clear what that word means anymore.

1933
01:57:04,440 --> 01:57:09,640
So these the this world can get very loopy and very

1934
01:57:09,960 --> 01:57:11,800
fluffy really quick.

1935
01:57:12,280 --> 01:57:12,840
Yeah.

1936
01:57:13,320 --> 01:57:18,440
It is quite bizarre that our minds evolved to find the possibility of electrons being

1937
01:57:18,440 --> 01:57:24,210
conscious more intuitive than the the uh the the possibility of neural mechanisms

1938
01:57:24,210 --> 01:57:29,970
being conscious yeah that's actually really interesting yeah

1939
01:57:30,610 --> 01:57:36,050
yes yeah exactly yeah it's it's a good it's again it's a lovely

1940
01:57:36,050 --> 01:57:41,490
example of um sort of the psychology of psychology right and that uh we did not evolve to

1941
01:57:41,490 --> 01:57:47,080
do to do this science um Michael, what do you very

1942
01:57:47,080 --> 01:57:51,240
briefly, um how did you get into this?

1943
01:57:51,560 --> 01:57:57,560
Or or another version of the question is you are sort of uh not

1944
01:57:57,560 --> 01:58:02,840
alone in the wilderness here, but there's as you said, there's this enormous, powerful,

1945
01:58:03,080 --> 01:58:08,970
well-funded ideas and you uh are are sort of saying, hey guys, look,

1946
01:58:09,050 --> 01:58:11,290
it's this other thing, by the way.

1947
01:58:11,690 --> 01:58:17,450
Um is that the way that you're um uh is that something that you sort of

1948
01:58:17,450 --> 01:58:22,010
enjoy being in that role or is that something you found yourself in that role um in your

1949
01:58:22,010 --> 01:58:27,450
life or how do you get to that point where you're um you don't want to be in the the uh

1950
01:58:27,610 --> 01:58:32,650
evil empire you're you're the um scrappy uh rebel uh

1951
01:58:33,210 --> 01:58:39,040
yeah I I am often in that role and have been so multiple times

1952
01:58:39,040 --> 01:58:42,880
in my career in different topics within neuroscience.

1953
01:58:43,440 --> 01:58:46,000
I don't particularly enjoy it.

1954
01:58:46,480 --> 01:58:47,360
Why would you?

1955
01:58:47,600 --> 01:58:48,240
I do not.

1956
01:58:48,480 --> 01:58:52,560
No, I find myself the same way, so I'm I mean it's a yeah, it's a but yeah, I don't either,

1957
01:58:52,640 --> 01:58:53,520
but yeah, exactly.

1958
01:58:53,600 --> 01:58:53,840
Yeah.

1959
01:58:54,320 --> 01:59:00,000
I do think and now we really get to very deep

1960
01:59:00,320 --> 01:59:02,720
philosophy of science.

1961
01:59:03,130 --> 01:59:06,170
I think the purpose of science is contribution.

1962
01:59:06,410 --> 01:59:11,930
I do not think the purpose of science is self-aggrandizement or

1963
01:59:12,250 --> 01:59:17,370
finding a brand name or being admired by

1964
01:59:17,370 --> 01:59:23,210
colleagues, um, building an empire, and I think

1965
01:59:24,010 --> 01:59:27,840
probably many people in science.

1966
01:59:28,080 --> 01:59:32,960
And this is more exaggerated as you get to the more successful people.

1967
01:59:33,760 --> 01:59:37,920
Those kinds of motivations tend to drive people's behavior in science.

1968
01:59:38,160 --> 01:59:44,000
They may not even know it, but they're evaluating science, whether it's good or bad,

1969
01:59:44,080 --> 01:59:50,080
whether they should do it or not, on a kind of gut impression of whether it will make a big

1970
01:59:50,160 --> 01:59:55,040
um positive impression or not, whether it'll give them the accolades they want or not.

1971
01:59:55,370 --> 01:59:58,010
And I really don't want to do that.

1972
01:59:58,330 --> 01:59:59,210
Never have.

1973
01:59:59,690 --> 02:00:05,370
And when I try a new field, I think I see

1974
02:00:05,690 --> 02:00:08,410
insight that should be useful.

1975
02:00:08,490 --> 02:00:09,930
And I want to put it out there.

1976
02:00:10,010 --> 02:00:14,890
And I'm always hoping that the colleagues will look at it and say, Wow, cool, that is

1977
02:00:14,890 --> 02:00:15,290
useful.

1978
02:00:15,370 --> 02:00:16,970
And it never works that way.

1979
02:00:17,210 --> 02:00:18,490
It's always a fight.

1980
02:00:18,650 --> 02:00:20,010
It's always a struggle.

1981
02:00:20,170 --> 02:00:24,780
It's always look, guys, you're not thinking about this logically, and it's gotta be this,

1982
02:00:24,860 --> 02:00:28,460
and the data shows that, and it's such a struggle.

1983
02:00:28,780 --> 02:00:34,780
And then I get to a point where I run out of ideas, and it's not

1984
02:00:35,660 --> 02:00:37,420
new insight anymore.

1985
02:00:37,660 --> 02:00:42,830
And I've reached exactly that point that apparently everyone wants to be because you know

1986
02:00:42,910 --> 02:00:44,110
I'm established.

1987
02:00:44,590 --> 02:00:45,790
An extinct volcano.

1988
02:00:46,590 --> 02:00:46,750
Right.

1989
02:00:47,230 --> 02:00:51,710
People know me and I'm established, and I have my brand name, and that's where I now should

1990
02:00:51,710 --> 02:00:53,070
sit for the rest of my life.

1991
02:00:53,150 --> 02:00:57,470
And and and that's the moment that I decide I'm not interested.

1992
02:00:57,630 --> 02:01:02,190
I gotta change the field that I'm studying because I don't want all that junk.

1993
02:01:02,350 --> 02:01:02,670
Yeah.

1994
02:01:02,910 --> 02:01:08,800
So I think co consciousness I have not reached the the thing that keeps me in consciousness

1995
02:01:08,800 --> 02:01:14,800
right now is this sense that it's hugely

1996
02:01:14,800 --> 02:01:16,480
important for all of us.

1997
02:01:16,720 --> 02:01:19,040
Because it's not just an intellectual question.

1998
02:01:19,120 --> 02:01:23,840
It's about our future and it's about technology and it's about literally the most

1999
02:01:23,840 --> 02:01:29,670
transformative event in our species, which is the development of this new thinking

2000
02:01:29,910 --> 02:01:30,790
machine.

2001
02:01:31,110 --> 02:01:34,630
Um, and yet people don't understand the concepts yet.

2002
02:01:34,870 --> 02:01:40,630
So I still I feel like I have this responsibility to just keep saying to keep preaching,

2003
02:01:40,710 --> 02:01:41,510
so to speak.

2004
02:01:41,750 --> 02:01:46,870
That that I think is what keeps keeps me in that that field, as frustrating as that is.

2005
02:01:47,190 --> 02:01:47,750
Yeah, yeah.

2006
02:01:47,910 --> 02:01:52,900
No, it's uh um, well, I mean, uh, you know, for for what it's worth, when I read your

2007
02:01:52,900 --> 02:01:54,500
stuff, I thought, oh, this is cool.

2008
02:01:54,660 --> 02:01:56,900
So um it happens sometimes.

2009
02:01:56,980 --> 02:01:57,540
Yeah.

2010
02:01:58,900 --> 02:02:00,260
Um, likewise.

2011
02:02:00,580 --> 02:02:01,060
Yeah.

2012
02:02:01,220 --> 02:02:04,020
Um, is there any question we should have asked you?

2013
02:02:04,740 --> 02:02:07,300
Oh, not that I can think of now.

2014
02:02:07,780 --> 02:02:12,020
I wanna oh well I have one question if if uh or if David has got one, but uh you have a

2015
02:02:12,020 --> 02:02:13,060
keyboard behind you.

2016
02:02:13,300 --> 02:02:13,620
Yes.

2017
02:02:13,780 --> 02:02:19,230
Um, and you also have books behind you, and you have you have several hats, including I was

2018
02:02:19,230 --> 02:02:22,990
reading you, also write kids' books, and you you have a pen name.

2019
02:02:23,150 --> 02:02:26,190
Um, and one one reason is so that kids don't read the wrong book.

2020
02:02:26,270 --> 02:02:32,270
But I love the idea of a precocious kid reading about uh self-model uh neurocognition.

2021
02:02:32,430 --> 02:02:38,270
Um so I I love that idea, but um, can you talk a little bit about those other hats or one

2022
02:02:38,270 --> 02:02:38,750
of them?

2023
02:02:38,830 --> 02:02:44,640
Um, you know, whatever you want to say about it, but that's an interesting thing to to also

2024
02:02:44,640 --> 02:02:48,720
have the hat of a a kids book author or a musician.

2025
02:02:48,800 --> 02:02:52,800
Um, and maybe it's not entirely afield from what we've been talking about.

2026
02:02:53,280 --> 02:02:56,240
Yeah, I so I definitely have a lot of interests.

2027
02:02:56,480 --> 02:03:00,640
Um, I've been working on these things forever and ever.

2028
02:03:01,120 --> 02:03:07,040
Um, you know, it was always a question do you become a

2029
02:03:07,690 --> 02:03:12,890
writer or a composer on your own time while being a professional neuroscientist?

2030
02:03:13,050 --> 02:03:17,850
Or do you do neuroscience in your garage on your own time and be a professional writer?

2031
02:03:18,010 --> 02:03:22,090
And it turns out you can't do the neuroscience in your garage on your own time.

2032
02:03:22,330 --> 02:03:25,130
So it has to go one way and not the other.

2033
02:03:25,450 --> 02:03:29,850
So that's a very career-defining requirement.

2034
02:03:30,090 --> 02:03:35,660
So um, but I've always been, you know, since I was very little, I've been involved in in

2035
02:03:35,660 --> 02:03:36,140
music.

2036
02:03:36,300 --> 02:03:38,620
Uh I have a um a YouTube channel.

2037
02:03:39,020 --> 02:03:39,820
You should check it out.

2038
02:03:39,900 --> 02:03:42,780
It's called Gras Gorilla, all one word.

2039
02:03:43,340 --> 02:03:46,940
We'll put a link, we'll put a link in the show notes as they excellent podcast world.

2040
02:03:47,020 --> 02:03:47,180
Yeah.

2041
02:03:47,580 --> 02:03:52,060
It's um basically a set of tutorial videos on music composition.

2042
02:03:52,300 --> 02:03:52,620
Oh nice.

2043
02:03:52,940 --> 02:03:55,630
So um that's something that I learned a lot about.

2044
02:03:55,710 --> 02:03:58,830
And then I felt like I might as well pass on some knowledge.

2045
02:03:59,710 --> 02:04:05,630
And uh yes, I write I write a uh the kids' books are probably mostly like the seven to

2046
02:04:05,630 --> 02:04:06,670
ten year range.

2047
02:04:06,830 --> 02:04:08,030
They're they're fun.

2048
02:04:08,510 --> 02:04:14,110
Um I've written some novels more for the adult age range as well.

2049
02:04:14,510 --> 02:04:17,960
And um yeah, it's all it's all good.

2050
02:04:18,200 --> 02:04:21,720
When you get stuck on one thing, it's good to have something to switch to.

2051
02:04:22,040 --> 02:04:22,280
Yeah.

2052
02:04:22,360 --> 02:04:28,120
Well, in in in in light of the previous comments about science, I imagine the kids'

2053
02:04:28,280 --> 02:04:34,120
books are pr there's probably a very cool um carving up of the world in the kids'

2054
02:04:34,280 --> 02:04:35,000
books too.

2055
02:04:35,400 --> 02:04:36,040
I guess so.

2056
02:04:36,120 --> 02:04:40,890
I mean I think because they're written by me and I have a scientific perspective.

2057
02:04:41,130 --> 02:04:41,770
Yes.

2058
02:04:41,930 --> 02:04:47,290
Uh but I don't think they're meant to be science education books for kids.

2059
02:04:47,450 --> 02:04:49,130
They're they're just adventures.

2060
02:04:49,370 --> 02:04:50,170
Yeah, yeah.

2061
02:04:50,330 --> 02:04:56,010
Well, maybe what I would put by that is uh I think sometimes a good scientist is just sort

2062
02:04:56,010 --> 02:05:00,490
of like an honest kid who never grew up, which is just sort of your like it's the David

2063
02:05:00,490 --> 02:05:02,730
Pinsoff thing is like, is this bullshit or not?

2064
02:05:02,960 --> 02:05:03,120
Yeah.

2065
02:05:03,280 --> 02:05:07,680
You know, and a good scientist, a real scientist, not somebody who just sort of wants to be

2066
02:05:07,680 --> 02:05:11,840
famous, fundamentally is sort of like their bullshit detectors still working, you know, and

2067
02:05:11,840 --> 02:05:13,840
they're just like, this is bullshit, this isn't.

2068
02:05:14,080 --> 02:05:19,520
And even if the bullshit has lots of money and it's a you know, sunny grass-filled

2069
02:05:19,520 --> 02:05:24,640
pastures, and the real the the thing that looks right, looks more difficult, a little more

2070
02:05:24,640 --> 02:05:27,840
uncomfortable, not as many people like it or care about it.

2071
02:05:28,000 --> 02:05:28,880
That's what I'm gonna do.

2072
02:05:28,960 --> 02:05:29,680
Yeah, yeah.

2073
02:05:29,890 --> 02:05:30,210
Yeah.

2074
02:05:30,370 --> 02:05:32,050
So I have one book.

2075
02:05:32,530 --> 02:05:37,090
Um it's called the The Last Notebook of Leonardo.

2076
02:05:37,650 --> 02:05:40,850
And it's about a father son adventure.

2077
02:05:41,090 --> 02:05:46,690
And the father is a scientist and he um figures out how to transform

2078
02:05:46,690 --> 02:05:50,690
himself physically into a gigantic orangutan.

2079
02:05:51,700 --> 02:05:57,140
And unfortunately, as a gigantic orangutan, he's no longer allowed in his uh

2080
02:05:57,140 --> 02:05:58,340
apartment complex.

2081
02:05:58,500 --> 02:06:01,700
And so they get kicked out, and then the adventures start.

2082
02:06:01,940 --> 02:06:07,940
And so here's this genius scientist trying to interact with his

2083
02:06:07,940 --> 02:06:11,460
son, uh, and they have their adventures through the world.

2084
02:06:11,620 --> 02:06:17,620
So I think the science infiltrates into the books in in strange

2085
02:06:17,620 --> 02:06:18,020
ways.

2086
02:06:18,340 --> 02:06:19,300
Fantastic.

2087
02:06:19,620 --> 02:06:24,990
Well, um, David, do you have any final No, this was a really

2088
02:06:24,990 --> 02:06:27,150
delightful and and uh wonderful conversation.

2089
02:06:27,230 --> 02:06:30,990
I really appreciate you uh giving us your time and uh and your wisdom.

2090
02:06:31,070 --> 02:06:32,110
Uh this was a blast.

2091
02:06:32,510 --> 02:06:32,910
Thank you.

2092
02:06:33,070 --> 02:06:34,670
Yes, I enjoyed it.

2093
02:06:37,310 --> 02:06:40,030
David, I never know what to say in the outro.

2094
02:06:40,590 --> 02:06:46,100
Well, usually a good place to start is the topic of conversation uh that you just listen to

2095
02:06:46,100 --> 02:06:49,460
as the listener and you were just listening about consciousness, which means that you're

2096
02:06:49,460 --> 02:06:51,380
still conscious if you're hearing these words.

2097
02:06:51,620 --> 02:06:56,580
And if you continue to be conscious after hearing these words, then you can use that

2098
02:06:56,580 --> 02:07:00,180
consciousness to support Evolutionary Psychology the podcast.

2099
02:07:00,340 --> 02:07:03,780
And how can uh those sentient beings do that, Dave?

2100
02:07:04,180 --> 02:07:09,940
Well, they can um click buttons on a computer which mean um specifically

2101
02:07:10,260 --> 02:07:16,050
support us on Patreon, comment on social media, uh, do a review,

2102
02:07:16,210 --> 02:07:19,810
ask us questions, send us an email or over our social media.

2103
02:07:19,890 --> 02:07:24,210
Um, we'll have a ask me anything episode um in the near future.

2104
02:07:24,850 --> 02:07:26,850
Yeah, though I think you nailed it.

2105
02:07:26,930 --> 02:07:27,570
Those are all the things.

2106
02:07:27,810 --> 02:07:30,050
And even if you're not conscious, just do those things too.

2107
02:07:30,210 --> 02:07:34,130
Just like a Yeah, we we don't really care if you're conscious or not, as long as you're you

2108
02:07:34,130 --> 02:07:37,170
know executing the behaviors, we're gonna be happy.

2109
02:07:37,520 --> 02:07:39,040
That should put that on a t shirt.

2110
02:07:39,280 --> 02:07:40,480
We don't get unconscious or not.

2111
02:07:40,560 --> 02:07:42,560
As long as you're executing the behaviors, we'll be happy.

2112
02:07:42,640 --> 02:07:46,640
And send somebody, David, send uh somebody needs to send you a fanny pack.

2113
02:07:46,960 --> 02:07:49,200
Yes, please send me a fanny pack.

2114
02:07:49,360 --> 02:07:55,040
Um, if you're conscious or unconscious, uh click that uh buy button on the fanny pack

2115
02:07:55,280 --> 02:07:58,320
and uh let me know when it's arriving.

2116
02:07:58,640 --> 02:08:00,720
What what's your favorite color, David?

2117
02:08:01,200 --> 02:08:03,840
Uh I like I like green, reminds me of nature.

2118
02:08:04,080 --> 02:08:04,400
Okay.

2119
02:08:04,560 --> 02:08:06,240
Green, how about black?

2120
02:08:06,530 --> 02:08:07,490
Uh I could do black.

2121
02:08:07,570 --> 02:08:10,450
Black goes with everything fashion-wise, so that might be a better choice.

2122
02:08:10,610 --> 02:08:14,370
I can, you know, append it to any outfit uh without it ruining the outfit.

2123
02:08:14,610 --> 02:08:20,450
Yeah, I think a fashion oriented fanny pack purchase is a bit of an oxymoron, but you know

2124
02:08:21,010 --> 02:08:22,050
it's 2026.

2125
02:08:22,370 --> 02:08:25,410
Let the uh well, I'm I'm trying to bring fanny packs back.

2126
02:08:25,650 --> 02:08:27,090
I think I'm gonna make them fashionable again.

2127
02:08:27,490 --> 02:08:28,530
That's my master plan.

2128
02:08:28,850 --> 02:08:29,090
Okay.

2129
02:08:29,250 --> 02:08:30,530
Well you heard it here first.

2130
02:08:30,770 --> 02:08:31,170
Yep.

2131
02:08:31,400 --> 02:08:32,040
All right.

2132
02:08:32,760 --> 02:08:34,040
The finger on the pulse.

2133
02:08:34,200 --> 02:08:35,000
See you next week.

2134
02:08:35,240 --> 02:08:36,360
See you next week.