WEBVTT

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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.

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

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consciousness studies.

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All of this fear uh of uh of mind

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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the time when the perspective dependence of psychology was not made

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explicit.

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

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those things are intuitive to people.

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They're outputs of this complex machinery.

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

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things.

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

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

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

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

00:16:02.390 --> 00:16:05.590
think something like free will or consciousness exists?

00:16:05.830 --> 00:16:06.150
Yeah.

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.

00:16:11.990 --> 00:16:12.230
Yeah.

00:16:12.700 --> 00:16:13.020
find.

00:16:13.100 --> 00:16:17.820
And otherwise, we sort of just we are dominated by the intuition which might be leading us

00:16:17.820 --> 00:16:18.300
astray.

00:16:18.700 --> 00:16:19.660
Yes, exactly.

00:16:19.740 --> 00:16:20.860
That's exactly right.

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

00:16:27.100 --> 00:16:32.780
give the example of uh imagine them saying, Well,

00:16:32.940 --> 00:16:38.060
we know the sun goes down at night into a big hole into the underworld, but we're

00:16:38.060 --> 00:16:43.830
scientific, we're gonna go find the hole, yeah, And then they expend

00:16:44.070 --> 00:16:49.990
you know money and resources, and they have journals on the sun hole, and they try

00:16:49.990 --> 00:16:53.430
and try and they can't find it, and it's a big spooky mystery.

00:16:53.670 --> 00:16:56.230
And the problem lies right at the root.

00:16:56.390 --> 00:16:56.630
Yeah.

00:16:56.790 --> 00:17:02.720
Just like you said, they accepted as literal truth um uh an

00:17:02.720 --> 00:17:07.920
assumption or as I would put it um a a model that the brain constructed that's not

00:17:07.920 --> 00:17:08.960
literally accurate.

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

00:17:14.320 --> 00:17:19.360
think just to preview I suspect that it seems like especially that the

00:17:19.680 --> 00:17:25.040
self-referential systems, the self-modeling systems are especially

00:17:25.530 --> 00:17:31.530
where philosophers and people's thinking have really um those are the those

00:17:31.530 --> 00:17:34.970
are the constructs where there really seems to be a mystery.

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.

00:17:39.610 --> 00:17:40.890
And I think we can get to that.

00:17:41.050 --> 00:17:41.210
Yeah.

00:17:41.370 --> 00:17:42.970
Um, but I think it's a really interesting thing.

00:17:43.130 --> 00:17:49.050
I think it's no accident that the self-modeling representations are the ones that are

00:17:49.050 --> 00:17:50.970
so philosophically problematic.

00:17:51.210 --> 00:17:51.530
Yeah.

00:17:51.640 --> 00:17:52.040
Yep.

00:17:52.120 --> 00:17:53.080
I think that's right.

00:17:53.320 --> 00:17:59.240
So if you want to if the um if you want to build a model, the

00:17:59.240 --> 00:18:03.640
brain builds a model of something out there in the world, those models, of course, are not

00:18:03.640 --> 00:18:04.840
terribly accurate.

00:18:06.200 --> 00:18:09.880
But you know they capture some aspect of what's out there in the world.

00:18:10.440 --> 00:18:12.680
And there are lots of inaccuracies.

00:18:13.720 --> 00:18:19.240
The most obvious maybe the one that I like to point to is um

00:18:19.560 --> 00:18:24.510
color or white, in particular, the color white.

00:18:24.670 --> 00:18:28.750
Um, and Newton figured out that white is actually a mixture of lots of different

00:18:28.750 --> 00:18:29.310
wavelengths.

00:18:29.550 --> 00:18:34.830
Um, before him, people assumed that it was pure luminance,

00:18:35.070 --> 00:18:38.990
stripped clean of contaminating colors, right?

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?

00:18:45.070 --> 00:18:50.220
And um, and the reason why people thought that is because our visual systems

00:18:50.220 --> 00:18:55.180
evolved to come up with a really simple, useful, but

00:18:55.500 --> 00:19:01.340
inaccurate model, bundle of information to describe the

00:19:01.340 --> 00:19:02.940
mixture of wavelengths.

00:19:03.180 --> 00:19:09.100
Because it's it's useless to have a really detailed, physically accurate, like the

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

00:19:15.050 --> 00:19:18.890
an infinite range of wavelengths within a spectrum.

00:19:19.050 --> 00:19:20.330
Like you don't need that.

00:19:20.410 --> 00:19:24.650
You it just a nice simple cartoonish picture of it is sufficient.

00:19:24.810 --> 00:19:26.650
And that's what we have built into us.

00:19:26.810 --> 00:19:27.610
We can't help it.

00:19:27.690 --> 00:19:29.290
We can't think it away.

00:19:29.450 --> 00:19:30.250
It's there.

00:19:30.650 --> 00:19:36.490
And so we um we see we see white in that way because that's how

00:19:36.490 --> 00:19:38.010
the model depicts it.

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

00:19:44.260 --> 00:19:48.820
very close analogy to the consciousness issue, one of the interesting aspects of it is by

00:19:48.820 --> 00:19:51.300
now people are educated.

00:19:51.540 --> 00:19:55.620
And so we all walk around with two perspectives at the same time.

00:19:55.860 --> 00:19:59.620
Because we all look at white things and it still looks white.

00:19:59.850 --> 00:20:03.770
It's not like we go to school and then things don't look white anymore.

00:20:03.930 --> 00:20:07.210
Like you can't see all the colors mixed together.

00:20:07.450 --> 00:20:11.690
The brain, the visual system is what it is that is automatic.

00:20:11.770 --> 00:20:12.810
We can't help that.

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

00:20:19.210 --> 00:20:21.210
brightness without color.

00:20:21.520 --> 00:20:25.280
but we also all know academically what it actually is.

00:20:25.440 --> 00:20:28.160
And we're okay with that apparent conflict.

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

00:20:33.360 --> 00:20:34.080
consciousness.

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

00:20:38.480 --> 00:20:42.400
consciousness and I have a mind and I have all these intuitive things.

00:20:42.640 --> 00:20:44.000
I can't help those models.

00:20:44.160 --> 00:20:46.080
I can't help my brain building those models.

00:20:46.160 --> 00:20:48.080
It's not like I'm going to shut them off.

00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:50.400
It's still going to be part of my life.

00:20:50.750 --> 00:20:56.190
but I also have an academic knowledge of what they actually are, which is different.

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

00:21:01.470 --> 00:21:03.470
never gonna wipe out the other one.

00:21:03.790 --> 00:21:07.470
Yeah, and and that's interesting too, because I think an evolutionary approach, I think all

00:21:07.550 --> 00:21:11.870
their it would be interesting to get more evolutionary people like reading your work.

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

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

00:21:20.240 --> 00:21:26.240
personal experience, um, it's not a a competition with

00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:27.600
a scientific approach.

00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:30.720
It's that the two are just two different things.

00:21:30.880 --> 00:21:34.770
And I think you can get there lots of different ways.

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

00:21:38.690 --> 00:21:41.010
science approach, you know, you just your visual system, right?

00:21:41.090 --> 00:21:46.370
Your visual experience of like, you know, the shepherd Subterra or the Subterra Terra,

00:21:46.610 --> 00:21:46.850
right?

00:21:46.930 --> 00:21:50.610
Where like there's two monsters in this tunnel and they're chasing each other.

00:21:50.770 --> 00:21:52.690
And actually they're the same size.

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

00:21:57.940 --> 00:22:02.820
with the visual uh integration of distance cues, like the one just seems bigger than the

00:22:02.820 --> 00:22:03.060
other.

00:22:03.220 --> 00:22:08.580
You know, like whenever you uh poke on how something works,

00:22:09.060 --> 00:22:14.980
then you realize that um I think I think what I'm hearing you say

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

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

00:22:25.330 --> 00:22:25.970
experience.

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

00:22:30.930 --> 00:22:31.810
going to be in trouble.

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

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.

00:22:40.370 --> 00:22:40.690
Yeah.

00:22:40.850 --> 00:22:43.170
Uh and of course, when you get, yes, exactly.

00:22:43.330 --> 00:22:47.730
When you get to consciousness and the philosophy, then you start running into

00:22:47.730 --> 00:22:52.930
terminological problems because then people will say, Well, yeah, but

00:22:54.060 --> 00:22:58.540
if you think there's how it feels and how it works,

00:22:59.100 --> 00:23:01.740
consciousness is how it feels.

00:23:02.380 --> 00:23:05.900
And the fact that it feels like anything at all is the question.

00:23:06.140 --> 00:23:06.460
Right.

00:23:06.940 --> 00:23:09.660
And then, you know, then there's a whole set of arguments about that.

00:23:09.740 --> 00:23:12.220
Well, never mind whether it feels like something.

00:23:12.460 --> 00:23:14.460
We say it feels like something.

00:23:14.790 --> 00:23:17.350
We cognitively think it feels like something.

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

00:23:22.790 --> 00:23:26.870
that there is such a thing as feeling, uh, and and so on.

00:23:27.030 --> 00:23:31.030
So sometimes you have to drill down into these concepts to really get to them.

00:23:31.190 --> 00:23:33.110
But I think you're exactly right.

00:23:34.070 --> 00:23:34.710
It's interesting.

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

00:23:39.280 --> 00:23:42.800
childlike phase of asking why, why, why, why until uh I lose my mind.

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?

00:23:46.080 --> 00:23:51.600
Why why do we experience white light as this kind of pure, uncontaminated

00:23:51.600 --> 00:23:54.880
cleanliness when it's actually from a physics perspective, the opposite?

00:23:55.200 --> 00:23:57.200
And I started rolling through possible explanations.

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

00:24:01.840 --> 00:24:07.550
are, it begins to make sense because um certain objects will absorb certain wavelengths of

00:24:07.550 --> 00:24:09.630
light and reflect certain wavelengths of light.

00:24:09.790 --> 00:24:14.670
And it's really useful for us to compute statistical differences and the tendency of of

00:24:14.670 --> 00:24:18.910
particular objects to absorb uh this wavelength and emit this wavelength.

00:24:18.990 --> 00:24:21.070
And that helps us differentiate objects.

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

00:24:26.270 --> 00:24:26.830
conditions are.

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

00:24:31.220 --> 00:24:34.740
different times of day, but we subtract all that out so that we can successfully

00:24:34.740 --> 00:24:35.940
differentiate objects.

00:24:36.100 --> 00:24:40.900
And when we experience something as white, I think what we're experiencing is the absence

00:24:40.900 --> 00:24:45.060
of stuff that can absorb and reflect specific wavelengths of light.

00:24:45.220 --> 00:24:50.820
And for an organism that is particularly hygienic, interested in cleaning things,

00:24:50.980 --> 00:24:55.300
interested in organizing things, you want to remove all the put all the potential things

00:24:55.300 --> 00:25:00.730
that could absorb specific wavelengths of light and emit specific wavelengths of light.

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

00:25:04.810 --> 00:25:09.530
that there's no, there's no adaptively relevant stuff that's in the stimulus.

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

00:25:14.730 --> 00:25:20.300
accurately represent reality, uh, but to successfully differentiate

00:25:20.300 --> 00:25:26.300
objects and interact with objects in adaptive ways that the uh the intuitions about white

00:25:26.300 --> 00:25:28.060
light start to make sense.

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

00:25:34.140 --> 00:25:39.500
color as uh faithfully representing what's out there, then you start to get into into

00:25:39.500 --> 00:25:39.820
problems.

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?

00:25:45.690 --> 00:25:47.210
How do we categorize objects?

00:25:47.370 --> 00:25:50.090
How do we detect whether something is absent or present?

00:25:50.330 --> 00:25:51.210
It begins to make sense.

00:25:51.290 --> 00:25:53.130
Anyway, I'm I'm going off on a tangent.

00:25:53.770 --> 00:25:59.610
The ultimate question is: is there an explanation along the same lines for why

00:25:59.610 --> 00:26:05.290
it seems to us that uh computation uh uh does not

00:26:05.290 --> 00:26:06.570
explain feeling?

00:26:06.730 --> 00:26:12.380
That when we look at a neural network or an algorithm or uh ChatGPT,

00:26:12.940 --> 00:26:18.780
that it seems to lack this property that uh is so important and

00:26:18.780 --> 00:26:22.300
fundamental not only to our our lives but our ethics.

00:26:23.100 --> 00:26:25.900
Where is this intuition coming from?

00:26:27.100 --> 00:26:32.540
So let me try to approach it in several different ways.

00:26:32.700 --> 00:26:35.790
And first, I'll start with this.

00:26:36.750 --> 00:26:42.270
If you want to build a self-model, and by model, of course, I mean

00:26:42.350 --> 00:26:47.470
bundle of information that depicts but also helps predict something.

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

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

00:26:56.830 --> 00:27:01.150
look at the other side of it, and so on, and how so models

00:27:02.040 --> 00:27:04.040
describe and predict.

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,

00:27:10.520 --> 00:27:12.440
you run into a problem right away.

00:27:12.520 --> 00:27:18.280
Because if you want to build a physically, literally accurate model, it would have to

00:27:18.280 --> 00:27:23.970
be information in your head that says there's 86 billion neurons and they're

00:27:23.970 --> 00:27:27.730
hooked together in this way and that way, and there's synapses between them, and then

00:27:27.730 --> 00:27:31.730
there's like chemical messengers and this and that, and this pathway from this brain area

00:27:31.730 --> 00:27:32.210
to that.

00:27:32.370 --> 00:27:38.370
And it's very, very complicated stuff that no animal needs to know in order

00:27:38.370 --> 00:27:39.250
to survive.

00:27:39.410 --> 00:27:42.130
It's like literally useless information.

00:27:42.290 --> 00:27:47.890
And so the model literally does not need, like, there's no adaptive value to

00:27:47.890 --> 00:27:53.320
building uh uh evolving um kind of basic inborn

00:27:53.320 --> 00:27:58.280
models that depict literally accurately what is going on in there.

00:27:58.520 --> 00:28:03.800
And so right away these models are incredibly simplified.

00:28:03.960 --> 00:28:07.240
They're detached from physicalism, right?

00:28:07.320 --> 00:28:11.800
They're not models of how physical computations are made.

00:28:11.880 --> 00:28:17.310
They're models of how magic essences kind of inhabit a

00:28:17.310 --> 00:28:20.670
location without a real physical substrate.

00:28:20.830 --> 00:28:24.270
That's kind of how these models depict the events in our heads.

00:28:24.430 --> 00:28:25.870
And that's good enough.

00:28:26.030 --> 00:28:30.830
And any more than that would be harmful because then it just wastes energy and computing

00:28:30.830 --> 00:28:32.670
power to try to compute the model.

00:28:33.630 --> 00:28:38.270
So that's a huge uh um huge part of it, right?

00:28:38.510 --> 00:28:42.270
Uh maybe that's most of most of the answer to your question.

00:28:42.430 --> 00:28:48.320
But I I also want to get at from another angle and point out

00:28:48.320 --> 00:28:50.880
a different kind of model, which is very, very similar.

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

00:28:56.960 --> 00:28:57.200
it.

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

00:29:02.960 --> 00:29:03.600
limb.

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

00:29:10.130 --> 00:29:14.610
someday, unfortunately, some people get an amputation, they get an arm cut off.

00:29:14.850 --> 00:29:20.770
Um, but they feel like the arm is still there, and they can talk

00:29:20.770 --> 00:29:21.090
about it.

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

00:29:24.690 --> 00:29:25.010
still there.

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

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.

00:29:36.400 --> 00:29:38.000
Oh my god, this is so spooky.

00:29:38.160 --> 00:29:41.040
Um, so phantom limb, what is a phantom limb?

00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:44.800
Uh it seems like a ghost object, invisible ghost object.

00:29:44.880 --> 00:29:50.480
So there's two classes of explanation the modern accepted one

00:29:50.800 --> 00:29:56.800
and a much earlier one, um, which people actually did speculate

00:29:56.800 --> 00:29:56.960
about.

00:29:57.040 --> 00:30:02.800
And the modern accepted one is well, the reason is because your brain built a model

00:30:03.050 --> 00:30:04.090
of your body.

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

00:30:09.530 --> 00:30:12.890
physically gone, but the model still contains a model of a limb.

00:30:13.130 --> 00:30:18.730
And so when you ask someone about that limb, what's happening is their cognition is

00:30:18.730 --> 00:30:21.290
accessing deeper models that are automatic.

00:30:21.530 --> 00:30:25.520
It's not like they can intellectually control those deeper models.

00:30:25.600 --> 00:30:30.240
They're just automatic and they're constructing this information about the limb and sending

00:30:30.240 --> 00:30:31.920
it up to higher cognition.

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

00:30:37.840 --> 00:30:38.960
that's the explanation.

00:30:39.120 --> 00:30:41.440
It's model-based, information based.

00:30:41.520 --> 00:30:43.520
That explains the whole thing.

00:30:43.920 --> 00:30:49.920
The second class of explanation is: no, there actually is a ghost limb growing out

00:30:49.920 --> 00:30:50.880
of the stump.

00:30:51.210 --> 00:30:52.810
It's an invisible limb.

00:30:53.050 --> 00:30:58.970
I think Lord Nelson, who lost an arm in battle, famously said, I know there's

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

00:31:04.810 --> 00:31:06.970
whole rest of my body can too.

00:31:07.210 --> 00:31:07.690
Right?

00:31:07.930 --> 00:31:13.610
So the this other explanation is no, let's accept as literally accurate

00:31:14.170 --> 00:31:15.930
the output of this model.

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.

00:31:21.720 --> 00:31:23.080
It's invisible.

00:31:23.400 --> 00:31:26.120
Objects can go through it, but it's there.

00:31:26.520 --> 00:31:29.480
Okay, and now we have a scientific problem.

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,

00:31:35.080 --> 00:31:41.010
because the only information we that the brain gets is the information available to

00:31:41.010 --> 00:31:44.770
it, and that's what these models are piping up to your cognition.

00:31:44.850 --> 00:31:46.370
So that's what your cognition knows.

00:31:46.450 --> 00:31:48.930
So let's accept that there's a ghost limb.

00:31:49.330 --> 00:31:54.050
Problem one, or scientific question one: how is the ghost limb generated?

00:31:54.930 --> 00:31:57.330
Like, is it like cells?

00:31:57.730 --> 00:32:02.940
Is it like uh uh uh uh integration of information at the

00:32:03.420 --> 00:32:06.860
ectoplasm, actually, if you've watched Ghostbusters, the substance, yeah.

00:32:07.180 --> 00:32:08.460
Well that's that's question two.

00:32:08.700 --> 00:32:09.660
What is it made out of?

00:32:09.980 --> 00:32:11.100
Is it ectoplasm?

00:32:11.180 --> 00:32:12.860
Is it quantum mist?

00:32:13.100 --> 00:32:15.100
Is it an electric field?

00:32:15.420 --> 00:32:17.100
So one, how's it generated?

00:32:17.260 --> 00:32:18.620
Two, what is it made out of?

00:32:18.780 --> 00:32:24.620
And three, the question no one ever asks, but is actually more important than the

00:32:24.620 --> 00:32:25.340
other ones.

00:32:25.580 --> 00:32:31.550
Once it's there, how does it impact neurons in

00:32:31.550 --> 00:32:37.230
your brain in such a specific pattern that you know that

00:32:37.230 --> 00:32:38.110
it's there?

00:32:38.990 --> 00:32:41.310
Elizabeth Elizabeth of Bohemia, right?

00:32:41.390 --> 00:32:43.790
Writing to Descartes, the problem of interactionism.

00:32:43.870 --> 00:32:45.070
That was that was her.

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?

00:32:49.840 --> 00:32:52.480
Like how does the how does the ghost interact with the machine?

00:32:52.720 --> 00:32:53.280
Yeah, exactly.

00:32:53.680 --> 00:32:59.360
Yeah, but it has to be such a specific interaction that if prints the like this

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

00:33:04.160 --> 00:33:07.040
it represents arms sticking out of stump.

00:33:07.200 --> 00:33:07.360
Yeah.

00:33:07.600 --> 00:33:11.280
And then you can uh uh form the thought and articulate it, right?

00:33:11.440 --> 00:33:13.760
So here's the problem how is it generated?

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

00:33:18.080 --> 00:33:18.800
way, right?

00:33:19.040 --> 00:33:21.930
So the intuition is there.

00:33:22.090 --> 00:33:26.970
The very powerful intuition is there because the deeper models are

00:33:27.450 --> 00:33:29.690
telling you it's uh it's there.

00:33:29.850 --> 00:33:33.210
And the deeper models are there because it's adaptive.

00:33:33.370 --> 00:33:36.890
Like we evolved to have models of the parts of our body.

00:33:37.050 --> 00:33:39.290
So um this is very adaptive.

00:33:39.450 --> 00:33:45.180
Maybe there's circumstances in which the model becomes so inaccurate that it's actually

00:33:45.180 --> 00:33:47.740
maladaptive in that particular circumstance.

00:33:47.900 --> 00:33:49.740
These models are not perfect.

00:33:51.740 --> 00:33:57.660
But then the scientific error, the heart of the scientific error is

00:33:57.660 --> 00:34:03.500
always at the very outset saying, let's assume that the model the

00:34:03.500 --> 00:34:06.140
brain generated is literally accurate.

00:34:06.300 --> 00:34:09.980
And now let's try to find the scientific explanation for that.

00:34:10.590 --> 00:34:16.350
And that's that's where people right at the outset, 90%, 95% of

00:34:16.350 --> 00:34:19.470
the scholarship on consciousness gets stuck.

00:34:19.790 --> 00:34:20.030
Yeah.

00:34:20.190 --> 00:34:21.630
First step is the wrong step.

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,

00:34:28.030 --> 00:34:29.150
here's what I like to do.

00:34:29.310 --> 00:34:30.910
Um there's two questions.

00:34:31.070 --> 00:34:35.560
One is sort of what is the system that's producing these representations?

00:34:35.720 --> 00:34:37.400
So let's talk about like what is the system?

00:34:37.560 --> 00:34:42.680
Then there's a second part, which is why does that system produce bad scientific intuition,

00:34:42.840 --> 00:34:44.680
which is a separate and additional thing?

00:34:44.920 --> 00:34:49.400
And I think what you're studying is this unique thing of any kind of representational

00:34:49.400 --> 00:34:51.240
system is a hard nut to crack.

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

00:34:56.550 --> 00:35:01.030
kinds of representational systems that are in this category of self-representation.

00:35:01.270 --> 00:35:03.590
And I suspect that's no accident either here.

00:35:03.670 --> 00:35:04.950
And this is very cool.

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

00:35:11.190 --> 00:35:15.030
even that people have been thinking wrong, that there has been this issue.

00:35:15.400 --> 00:35:19.720
but what is the computational system that we're talking about here?

00:35:19.880 --> 00:35:21.080
What does it do?

00:35:21.240 --> 00:35:23.000
And what is its job?

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

00:35:28.280 --> 00:35:30.040
is the thing we're talking about?

00:35:30.440 --> 00:35:35.320
Then we can start unpacking given how it works, given what it's for,

00:35:36.200 --> 00:35:40.840
when people are using that system to then do science, why does that then lead science

00:35:40.840 --> 00:35:41.800
astray?

00:35:42.520 --> 00:35:43.400
Yeah, sure.

00:35:43.560 --> 00:35:49.330
So um part I think part of

00:35:49.330 --> 00:35:53.010
what's going on is as I said self models.

00:35:53.890 --> 00:35:59.090
So a system needs a good model of the thing that it's

00:35:59.090 --> 00:36:01.810
controlling or trying to influence.

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.

00:36:06.610 --> 00:36:11.900
You need a good model of yourself to predict your behavior and understand,

00:36:12.620 --> 00:36:14.380
expect what's going to happen next.

00:36:14.460 --> 00:36:15.980
You need a good model of yourself.

00:36:16.060 --> 00:36:19.900
And there's lots of different aspects of yourself to model.

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

00:36:25.340 --> 00:36:28.940
you are as a human being, that's in a sense a self-model.

00:36:29.180 --> 00:36:35.020
Um, and um but what we're talking about here is something really

00:36:35.180 --> 00:36:35.740
specific.

00:36:36.060 --> 00:36:41.990
It's essentially how the brain models, how you understand what it means for

00:36:41.990 --> 00:36:45.030
your brain to deeply process something.

00:36:45.510 --> 00:36:45.830
Right.

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?

00:36:50.790 --> 00:36:50.870
Yeah.

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

00:36:56.310 --> 00:37:00.630
episodes, this is sort of putting out a functional or software level description, which is

00:37:00.630 --> 00:37:02.820
that there are systems in the mind.

00:37:02.900 --> 00:37:05.060
So we're breaking, we're at the subpersonal level.

00:37:05.140 --> 00:37:06.340
There's no agent anymore.

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

00:37:12.340 --> 00:37:14.980
level, sort of what is the state of the system.

00:37:15.140 --> 00:37:21.060
So for example, right, um, that there is a decision

00:37:21.060 --> 00:37:21.700
to be made.

00:37:21.860 --> 00:37:24.260
Let's say, am I gonna go to this place or this place?

00:37:24.500 --> 00:37:24.820
Yes.

00:37:25.810 --> 00:37:31.650
And that decision being faced, obviously, there's all kinds of things

00:37:31.650 --> 00:37:34.050
entering into whether that decision is made.

00:37:34.290 --> 00:37:36.130
And there's computations going on.

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

00:37:42.050 --> 00:37:47.650
is saying the state of these other systems is that

00:37:48.130 --> 00:37:54.000
options are being considered, and the output of which option will be selected hasn't

00:37:54.000 --> 00:37:54.880
been chosen yet.

00:37:55.040 --> 00:37:55.360
Yes.

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,

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

00:38:05.360 --> 00:38:05.680
walk.

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

00:38:10.080 --> 00:38:11.440
like, no, I'm thinking about it.

00:38:11.600 --> 00:38:14.080
Like that's what would give meaning to I'm thinking about it.

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

00:38:18.480 --> 00:38:24.190
representing and talking to the system that sort of detects the output has been

00:38:24.510 --> 00:38:25.310
arrived at.

00:38:25.390 --> 00:38:27.070
And it's just saying, nope, we're not there yet.

00:38:27.150 --> 00:38:28.670
There's still processing going on.

00:38:28.830 --> 00:38:28.910
Yeah.

00:38:29.070 --> 00:38:33.550
So that's like a very mundane, concrete example that demystifies it.

00:38:33.790 --> 00:38:39.390
That one system has the job of representing states of other systems,

00:38:39.630 --> 00:38:42.940
not their full computations, because that wouldn't do anything.

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

00:38:48.540 --> 00:38:51.580
decision yet, therefore we shouldn't proceed yet, for example.

00:38:51.900 --> 00:38:52.460
Yeah, yeah.

00:38:52.540 --> 00:38:53.340
So that's right.

00:38:53.580 --> 00:38:59.580
So uh if there's a a decider system, which is probably very

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

00:39:05.900 --> 00:39:11.450
builds a description and a set of predictions about the decider.

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

00:39:17.610 --> 00:39:18.490
decisions.

00:39:19.450 --> 00:39:21.610
Um, that's exactly right.

00:39:21.770 --> 00:39:27.690
And that somewhat cartoonish or at least detail poor description

00:39:28.170 --> 00:39:33.840
is I have an essence inside of me that magically makes decisions.

00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:35.920
And people call that will.

00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:38.880
So you were talking about free will, one of the topics you talk about.

00:39:38.960 --> 00:39:43.200
So these intuitions about free will are not really

00:39:45.280 --> 00:39:47.840
uh pre-scientific mistakes.

00:39:48.160 --> 00:39:53.630
What they really are is deeply ingrained, um, simplified but

00:39:53.630 --> 00:39:55.790
useful models of yourself.

00:39:56.750 --> 00:40:02.670
Uh, and so, yes, so decision making has a kind

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

00:40:07.630 --> 00:40:10.750
we describe it as like a will inside of us.

00:40:11.070 --> 00:40:16.780
But there's another type of process in the brain, um, also very fundamental decision

00:40:16.860 --> 00:40:21.260
making, one of the most fundamental processes, and another process that uh cognitive

00:40:21.260 --> 00:40:23.740
psychologists typically call attention.

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

00:40:29.180 --> 00:40:31.020
colloquial versions and this and that.

00:40:31.180 --> 00:40:37.050
But what I really mean is uh focusing, processing power on

00:40:37.050 --> 00:40:39.130
something, processing it deeply.

00:40:39.290 --> 00:40:41.210
That's what attention really is.

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

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

00:40:51.210 --> 00:40:55.130
beyond a few low-level brain systems.

00:40:55.690 --> 00:41:00.980
So uh there are systems, so there's a way of directing attention.

00:41:01.140 --> 00:41:05.220
And directing attention is something that you need to control and move around so that you

00:41:05.220 --> 00:41:06.340
can do anything in the world.

00:41:06.420 --> 00:41:09.780
If you can't control your attention, you can't control your behavior.

00:41:10.500 --> 00:41:14.260
So there's attention and how it's being controlled.

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

00:41:20.340 --> 00:41:21.460
controlling attention.

00:41:21.700 --> 00:41:27.110
So how does a brain describe attention and attention states and attention control.

00:41:27.270 --> 00:41:28.870
How does it describe that?

00:41:29.190 --> 00:41:35.030
And I would say it describes it as there's a weird,

00:41:35.590 --> 00:41:41.430
non-physical magic essence inside of me that can focus on things and

00:41:41.430 --> 00:41:44.310
experience them and have and grab them.

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

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

00:41:56.020 --> 00:41:58.900
to experience it and feel it and so on.

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.

00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:08.750
And so That's yes.

00:42:09.070 --> 00:42:09.310
Yeah.

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

00:42:12.910 --> 00:42:13.310
is so.

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.

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

00:42:21.870 --> 00:42:24.430
when I was in high like elementary school or something.

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?

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

00:42:33.870 --> 00:42:39.780
idea now into a software functional level description, is that um that

00:42:40.100 --> 00:42:41.940
I walked into a tree.

00:42:42.180 --> 00:42:44.340
So that is an event that's important.

00:42:44.500 --> 00:42:48.100
Their mechanisms representing I just walked into a tree, right?

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

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

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

00:43:06.130 --> 00:43:09.970
that many systems were were handling in the triage, right?

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

00:43:15.410 --> 00:43:17.730
therefore missed a physical interaction, right?

00:43:17.810 --> 00:43:18.050
Yeah.

00:43:18.210 --> 00:43:24.210
So this system has detected an error of the prioritization of a physical danger

00:43:24.530 --> 00:43:30.460
got missed by and the social systems were were getting more of the

00:43:30.460 --> 00:43:36.460
um prioritization in this sort of finite, you know, uh uh, you know,

00:43:36.620 --> 00:43:38.540
muscles can only do so many things, right?

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

00:43:44.540 --> 00:43:49.420
hazard system on motor planning and modeling was just wrong.

00:43:49.740 --> 00:43:55.450
And so the system just detecting, okay, we we made a mistake

00:43:55.450 --> 00:43:55.770
here.

00:43:56.330 --> 00:43:59.930
And this and then consequently there's changes to that.

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

00:44:05.690 --> 00:44:06.170
thing.

00:44:06.650 --> 00:44:08.730
But in fact, the translation is what I just said.

00:44:09.130 --> 00:44:09.370
Yeah.

00:44:09.450 --> 00:44:09.770
Yeah.

00:44:09.930 --> 00:44:15.850
And of course, the high-level description, people typically conflate attention

00:44:15.850 --> 00:44:17.050
and consciousness.

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

00:44:21.440 --> 00:44:21.840
tree.

00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:23.680
I wasn't paying attention to the tree.

00:44:23.760 --> 00:44:27.760
And actually, those tend to go together: attention and consciousness.

00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:33.520
So there's a wonderful phenomenon that, of course, you know about called inattentional

00:44:33.520 --> 00:44:39.200
blindness, where attention, focusing your neural

00:44:39.200 --> 00:44:44.000
processing on something and being conscious of it, usually go together.

00:44:44.330 --> 00:44:48.010
I mean, you can separate them as it turns out, but they usually go together.

00:44:48.170 --> 00:44:53.450
And um, and of course, the famous example of inattentional blindness is the old gorilla in

00:44:53.450 --> 00:44:58.650
the basketball game, where just for the listeners, where you tell people here, look at this

00:44:58.650 --> 00:45:02.890
video and count how many times a basketball switches hands in the game.

00:45:02.970 --> 00:45:07.660
And they're so focused on that that they don't see the video properly.

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

00:45:11.820 --> 00:45:12.460
whole thing.

00:45:12.620 --> 00:45:14.220
Don't look at the ball so much.

00:45:14.380 --> 00:45:16.940
And they look at it and they're like, This can't be the same video.

00:45:17.100 --> 00:45:19.900
There's a guy in a gorilla suit running through the game.

00:45:20.060 --> 00:45:21.500
I didn't see it before.

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

00:45:26.620 --> 00:45:29.980
getting in their visual system, is because they weren't paying attention to it.

00:45:30.140 --> 00:45:33.660
And so when you're not paying attention, you are not conscious of it.

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

00:45:37.670 --> 00:45:38.070
so on.

00:45:38.230 --> 00:45:40.550
So inattentional blindness.

00:45:40.710 --> 00:45:46.390
Um, and what I think is going on is that attention is a mechanism,

00:45:46.550 --> 00:45:52.310
it's a process, it's the brain focusing more on this than

00:45:52.310 --> 00:45:52.950
on that.

00:45:53.830 --> 00:45:59.620
Consciousness is the brain telling you from the inside

00:45:59.620 --> 00:46:03.220
about what its attention is doing and what it's paying attention to.

00:46:03.460 --> 00:46:07.140
And those are usually, they usually go together, but not always.

00:46:08.180 --> 00:46:13.940
The brain's concept or model of what its attention is doing can sometimes

00:46:13.940 --> 00:46:15.060
make mistakes.

00:46:15.460 --> 00:46:15.860
Right.

00:46:16.180 --> 00:46:16.500
Yeah.

00:46:16.980 --> 00:46:22.470
So I want to get into the functional specifics of

00:46:22.710 --> 00:46:26.310
why we need a model of our own attentional state.

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

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

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.

00:46:40.950 --> 00:46:44.950
That seems like an adaptive model if I'm foraging for food, say.

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

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

00:46:57.560 --> 00:46:58.680
at me, I can duck.

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

00:47:04.440 --> 00:47:08.680
comeback in my head before you finish saying it, so that I have a witty retort.

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

00:47:13.930 --> 00:47:19.130
even models of uh other people and their uh uh mental states and the likely consequences

00:47:19.130 --> 00:47:19.930
that would flow from them.

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

00:47:25.450 --> 00:47:26.570
attentional state.

00:47:26.890 --> 00:47:29.930
Uh because that's just gonna go and affect my behavior regardless.

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

00:47:36.090 --> 00:47:38.040
to say someone else's uh mental state.

00:47:38.360 --> 00:47:39.720
Yeah, excellent question.

00:47:39.880 --> 00:47:42.360
I'll give you several specific examples.

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

00:47:47.160 --> 00:47:47.320
it.

00:47:47.400 --> 00:47:49.720
So I won't be quite so specific.

00:47:49.960 --> 00:47:51.080
Several examples.

00:47:51.400 --> 00:47:57.320
One, um, you're at a party and there's a big plate of

00:47:57.480 --> 00:48:01.930
donuts next to you, and you don't want to pig out and eat them.

00:48:02.250 --> 00:48:08.170
And you know, because you have a predictive model of your own attention, you know that

00:48:08.170 --> 00:48:10.810
if they're next to you, they'll snag your attention.

00:48:10.890 --> 00:48:16.330
And if they snag your attention, then you're gonna have a hard time um resisting

00:48:16.570 --> 00:48:17.370
eating them.

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

00:48:22.090 --> 00:48:27.180
room, because now they're not going to be foremost in your attention.

00:48:27.420 --> 00:48:33.260
That requires that's a simple control of yourself on the

00:48:33.260 --> 00:48:34.780
basis of predictions.

00:48:35.260 --> 00:48:41.100
And the predictions require a predictive model of how your attention interacts with your

00:48:41.100 --> 00:48:42.540
environment and your behavior.

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.

00:48:48.410 --> 00:48:50.490
Here's another example.

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

00:48:55.850 --> 00:49:00.250
mechanics, whatever it is you're studying, uh, and you're trying really hard.

00:49:00.490 --> 00:49:06.410
Um, but there's uh an annoying conversation in the room over there.

00:49:06.810 --> 00:49:11.290
And um, and you want your attention on your book and not over there.

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

00:49:16.960 --> 00:49:18.800
they start saying things about you?

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

00:49:23.280 --> 00:49:23.600
here.

00:49:23.920 --> 00:49:25.120
How do you do that?

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

00:49:30.400 --> 00:49:30.720
there.

00:49:31.120 --> 00:49:32.480
Control it back.

00:49:32.810 --> 00:49:34.090
Focus, focus, focus.

00:49:34.170 --> 00:49:34.730
Oh, wait.

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

00:49:40.170 --> 00:49:40.890
little bit of tab.

00:49:41.210 --> 00:49:42.890
So redirect.

00:49:43.050 --> 00:49:48.570
What I'm describing here is a control system that targets an

00:49:48.570 --> 00:49:50.730
ideal or desired state.

00:49:50.890 --> 00:49:55.290
And to get to that state and maintain that state, it has to monitor it.

00:49:55.600 --> 00:50:01.280
So it has to have a representation telling it this is my state.

00:50:01.440 --> 00:50:03.280
This is the state that I want.

00:50:03.600 --> 00:50:05.520
Or this is my state.

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

00:50:11.600 --> 00:50:11.760
be.

00:50:11.920 --> 00:50:14.320
And now I have to readjust it.

00:50:14.480 --> 00:50:17.280
So all of that requires a model.

00:50:17.680 --> 00:50:22.870
In fact, probably the most important reason for a system

00:50:23.190 --> 00:50:27.430
having a model of itself is to control itself.

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,

00:50:31.910 --> 00:50:34.150
so they can error correct and so on.

00:50:34.310 --> 00:50:36.150
So that's a second example.

00:50:36.390 --> 00:50:41.830
Um a third example comes down to what you were saying about interaction with people.

00:50:42.230 --> 00:50:48.080
It's very important when you talk to another person to understand their state

00:50:48.080 --> 00:50:49.280
of attention.

00:50:49.920 --> 00:50:52.960
Because let's say I'm interacting with you.

00:50:53.280 --> 00:50:56.640
Right now it's simple, we're just paying attention to each other, I hope.

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

00:51:01.280 --> 00:51:05.280
kinds of things around us, and kids running around, and food, and this and that.

00:51:06.170 --> 00:51:11.690
your behavior, as far as I'm concerned, your behavior is 90%

00:51:12.170 --> 00:51:14.650
determined by your attention.

00:51:15.130 --> 00:51:19.050
Because what you're paying attention to, you're more likely to choose to act toward.

00:51:19.130 --> 00:51:21.770
And what you're not paying attention to, you won't react toward.

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

00:51:28.010 --> 00:51:28.410
warn you.

00:51:28.490 --> 00:51:29.850
I'm like, ah, watch out.

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.

00:51:34.360 --> 00:51:38.360
And therefore, I predicted how you'll behave on the basis of your attention.

00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:44.760
And if I see your attention slyly going to that last cookie that I kind of

00:51:44.760 --> 00:51:49.400
want, that tells me I better run in and grab the cookie first for myself, right?

00:51:49.560 --> 00:51:52.120
Because I'm predicting your behavior on the basis of your attention.

00:51:52.280 --> 00:51:57.670
So it's very, very important for me to model and predict and understand your

00:51:57.670 --> 00:51:58.390
attention.

00:51:58.630 --> 00:52:00.630
But think about how the interaction works.

00:52:00.790 --> 00:52:02.630
It can go layer after layer.

00:52:02.790 --> 00:52:05.590
I predict that you'll behave in a certain way.

00:52:05.750 --> 00:52:10.710
I predict if you behave in that way, I might react in this way.

00:52:11.350 --> 00:52:15.750
I predict if I react in that way, then you might react in this way.

00:52:15.910 --> 00:52:21.670
And each one of those steps requires understanding first what your attention is likely to

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

00:52:26.540 --> 00:52:29.500
how it might affect my behavior, and so on.

00:52:29.660 --> 00:52:35.100
So it's not enough for me just to have attention that controls my

00:52:35.100 --> 00:52:35.900
behavior.

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

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.

00:52:46.220 --> 00:52:52.140
So having a good model of mind is for myself and you

00:52:52.300 --> 00:52:53.500
is crucial.

00:52:53.970 --> 00:52:59.570
And maybe the most important component of mind is knowing

00:52:59.890 --> 00:53:05.650
what is emphasized, what is uppermost in your mind, i.e., what are you

00:53:05.650 --> 00:53:10.210
paying attention to, and what's the consequences of that for your behavior.

00:53:10.370 --> 00:53:16.370
So those are some examples, three really specific examples of why we need to have a

00:53:16.850 --> 00:53:21.460
really good, rich predictive model of of attention.

00:53:22.420 --> 00:53:23.540
And it was three.

00:53:24.020 --> 00:53:24.500
It was three.

00:53:25.300 --> 00:53:25.780
You did it.

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

00:53:32.340 --> 00:53:36.660
processing version of we can make this concrete with motor control, right?

00:53:36.740 --> 00:53:36.900
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:54:09.960 --> 00:54:10.840
run through.

00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:12.600
If I did this, would I still bump?

00:54:12.760 --> 00:54:13.880
If I did this, would I still bump?

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

00:54:18.840 --> 00:54:19.960
bump, it doesn't do.

00:54:20.040 --> 00:54:23.080
And that's why it looks stupid to us because we do that, right?

00:54:23.320 --> 00:54:29.240
So the ability to represent model if my limb, if I did this with my limb,

00:54:29.320 --> 00:54:29.720
would it work?

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

00:54:33.750 --> 00:54:35.270
you're not gonna be able to produce that.

00:54:35.430 --> 00:54:38.630
You're gonna have to do trial and error Roomba stuff, which would look really weird.

00:54:38.790 --> 00:54:38.950
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

00:54:57.670 --> 00:54:59.590
tied, or I'm handcuffed, or whatever, right?

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

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

00:55:09.360 --> 00:55:09.840
my face.

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

00:55:14.880 --> 00:55:18.480
model of where are my limbs, how long are they, are they encumbered or not?

00:55:18.720 --> 00:55:24.400
The same thing is true for classes of information processing.

00:55:24.640 --> 00:55:25.120
Yes.

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

00:55:30.010 --> 00:55:35.370
anything other than these intuitive categories, it's the same principle that in order to

00:55:35.370 --> 00:55:40.970
effectively motor around with this control system, interfacing with the world,

00:55:41.210 --> 00:55:47.050
having goals, realizing that my goals might not be met, or the system

00:55:47.290 --> 00:55:50.410
might have the metaphorical hand time behind its back.

00:55:50.490 --> 00:55:52.330
Like, I don't want to eat the donut, right?

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

00:55:57.120 --> 00:56:02.400
the system knows that certain systems are saying eat the donut or will produce that output.

00:56:02.560 --> 00:56:04.400
So the system can anticipate that.

00:56:04.480 --> 00:56:06.240
So it's a similar self-model.

00:56:06.560 --> 00:56:07.840
Yep, yep, exactly.

00:56:08.080 --> 00:56:13.970
So yeah, and also I would say yes, there are multiple models because there

00:56:13.970 --> 00:56:16.690
are multiple kinds of information processing.

00:56:16.850 --> 00:56:22.210
And so, like I alluded to before, a model of decision

00:56:22.370 --> 00:56:28.370
making might give us our intuitions about free will, and a model of

00:56:28.690 --> 00:56:34.580
attentive processing might give us our intuitions about um Experience the

00:56:34.580 --> 00:56:40.420
intensity of a person, you know, prospective experience.

00:56:40.660 --> 00:56:43.220
We probably have models of our memory.

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

00:56:48.260 --> 00:56:50.020
remember or how we're likely to forget.

00:56:50.100 --> 00:56:55.700
So we probably have good models of our the processes involved in long-term memory and

00:56:56.100 --> 00:56:58.420
short-term memory and so on and so on.

00:56:58.500 --> 00:57:04.190
So we have all these all these interesting models of

00:57:04.190 --> 00:57:05.790
processes in the brain.

00:57:06.030 --> 00:57:08.350
And the models are really necessary.

00:57:08.510 --> 00:57:09.550
They're really useful.

00:57:09.630 --> 00:57:11.230
They're not silly mistakes.

00:57:11.390 --> 00:57:12.670
They're really useful.

00:57:13.150 --> 00:57:18.350
But they're not scientifically accurate depictions of the processes in the brain.

00:57:18.750 --> 00:57:24.520
And that's the thing that I think um Scientists have to get their minds

00:57:24.520 --> 00:57:25.240
wrapped around.

00:57:25.560 --> 00:57:25.800
Yeah.

00:57:25.960 --> 00:57:26.840
And how far?

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

00:57:30.840 --> 00:57:31.880
there's lots of good work.

00:57:32.040 --> 00:57:33.800
People understand this is an engineering problem.

00:57:33.880 --> 00:57:35.960
They understand the problem and the function.

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

00:57:40.280 --> 00:57:43.960
the biggest, you know, Gordian knots of philosophy in a way.

00:57:44.120 --> 00:57:45.640
So that's plenty to do.

00:57:45.880 --> 00:57:47.640
But I imagine it's frustrating.

00:57:47.720 --> 00:57:50.520
But I'm just like one question is ignoring all of that.

00:57:50.850 --> 00:57:56.610
is there how how far have you or other people gotten into what are

00:57:56.610 --> 00:57:57.490
these models?

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,

00:58:01.890 --> 00:58:07.090
well, what are the information processing problems a self-referential organism like humans

00:58:07.170 --> 00:58:08.370
would need to solve?

00:58:08.530 --> 00:58:12.450
Um, what mistakes could it make, or what conflicts could there be in systems?

00:58:12.610 --> 00:58:16.700
Another one would just be like starting with introspection and or meeting the two in the

00:58:16.700 --> 00:58:17.180
middle.

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?

00:58:25.100 --> 00:58:30.780
Um I think it's first, it has been tricky.

00:58:31.020 --> 00:58:31.660
Yeah.

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

00:58:36.620 --> 00:58:39.020
engineering and easy to wrap your mind around.

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

00:58:43.690 --> 00:58:43.930
other system.

00:58:44.170 --> 00:58:44.490
Yeah, exactly.

00:58:44.570 --> 00:58:45.050
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

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

00:58:55.850 --> 00:58:57.450
brain and say the model's there.

00:58:57.690 --> 00:58:58.010
Right.

00:58:58.170 --> 00:59:02.410
Uh or say this is how the neurons compute the models specifically.

00:59:02.650 --> 00:59:04.570
Like that gets very hard to do.

00:59:04.730 --> 00:59:09.960
And um, in the case of models of self or models of my of

00:59:11.080 --> 00:59:13.800
information processing in the brain.

00:59:13.960 --> 00:59:16.440
Where do the where are those what are those models?

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

00:59:22.120 --> 00:59:28.040
massively overlap the social cognition networks that compute

00:59:28.040 --> 00:59:29.720
models of other people's minds.

00:59:29.800 --> 00:59:31.800
It all seems to be the same kind of stuff.

00:59:31.960 --> 00:59:37.000
We're building models of minds, attributing them to other people to ourselves.

00:59:37.730 --> 00:59:43.010
And there's a certain vagueness in trying to pin down exactly what the models are.

00:59:43.330 --> 00:59:49.090
I think where the um progress is being made right now, uh,

00:59:49.330 --> 00:59:53.890
in my opinion, is in artificial systems.

00:59:54.130 --> 00:59:54.770
Right.

00:59:55.010 --> 01:00:00.770
Uh, because now, finally, for the first time, you can have systems that literally build

01:00:00.770 --> 01:00:06.600
models, really rich models of other people's minds, maybe in some way of

01:00:06.600 --> 01:00:09.160
themselves, although this is still debated.

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.

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

01:00:20.360 --> 01:00:24.760
pattern of activation that represents this, and this pattern represents that.

01:00:24.840 --> 01:00:27.320
And now we can see how it's doing this and that.

01:00:27.400 --> 01:00:33.190
And so you can begin to understand the principles by studying these

01:00:33.190 --> 01:00:37.750
artificial systems in ways that I don't think people could studying the biological system.

01:00:37.990 --> 01:00:43.910
So I see that as, you know, consciousness research is becoming more and more a matter

01:00:43.910 --> 01:00:45.670
of AI, which is interesting.

01:00:45.990 --> 01:00:48.790
Yeah, and just and just to maybe a slightly funny thing.

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

01:00:53.520 --> 01:00:57.840
about, which is like a machine becoming conscious, what that actually will look like, it's

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

01:01:03.600 --> 01:01:09.200
have very cursory representations of the states of the system.

01:01:09.840 --> 01:01:14.960
And it will say things like, I'm currently paying attention to this

01:01:15.670 --> 01:01:16.950
and not to this.

01:01:17.350 --> 01:01:19.190
It's going to be very mundane.

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

01:01:25.270 --> 01:01:29.990
of the world's knowledge flowing into this Pandora's box, like a Ghostbuster scene.

01:01:30.070 --> 01:01:30.390
Yeah.

01:01:30.630 --> 01:01:34.390
Um, so that this is a very deflationary view of consciousness.

01:01:34.470 --> 01:01:40.240
Again, probably for the reasons that um you alluded to the beginning maybe people might

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

01:01:44.960 --> 01:01:49.840
is that right that basically the idea would be that really what consciousness in an AI

01:01:49.840 --> 01:01:53.280
would be is a very boring prosaic thing in a way.

01:01:53.520 --> 01:01:54.880
Yeah I think you're right.

01:01:55.040 --> 01:02:00.560
I think that um the first so f uh part of the confusion comes from

01:02:01.210 --> 01:02:03.930
differing definitions of consciousness.

01:02:04.010 --> 01:02:09.930
And some people think oh consciousness is when you wake up and have the ability to

01:02:09.930 --> 01:02:15.690
choose to do anything you want, but you have personal desires

01:02:15.850 --> 01:02:21.370
and you care about yourself and distinguish getting all kinds like piles and piles of

01:02:21.370 --> 01:02:23.530
things get added to this concept.

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

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

01:02:34.600 --> 01:02:38.200
all these feelings and um it'll murder us all.

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

01:02:41.560 --> 01:02:46.120
decisions, and right now it doesn't make decisions, it's just some mimicky thing, right?

01:02:46.200 --> 01:02:49.320
And and so that's a very strong concept people have.

01:02:49.480 --> 01:02:53.640
And so you ask them about making AI conscious, they look horrified.

01:02:53.800 --> 01:02:59.210
Um, But on the other hand, I would say AI already makes decisions,

01:02:59.610 --> 01:03:01.290
very sophisticated ones.

01:03:01.530 --> 01:03:07.530
It can kill you just as dead, whether it has a subjective experience of

01:03:07.530 --> 01:03:08.730
doing it or not.

01:03:09.690 --> 01:03:14.330
The consciousness question is actually orthogonal to these worries.

01:03:14.410 --> 01:03:20.100
And it's also orthogonal to emotion, like whether or not it gets

01:03:20.260 --> 01:03:25.940
upset about how it's being treated is irrelevance to the question, the larger

01:03:25.940 --> 01:03:29.220
question of what is this consciousness thing.

01:03:29.460 --> 01:03:34.900
Um, so I think you're right when I talk about AI having

01:03:34.900 --> 01:03:39.220
self-models and therefore having the thing we call consciousness, I'm talking about it

01:03:39.220 --> 01:03:45.150
having this very limited kind of model that tells it about its

01:03:45.150 --> 01:03:48.430
own um state of attention.

01:03:48.510 --> 01:03:53.710
It's what what is it focusing its resources on more now versus uh

01:03:54.030 --> 01:03:56.110
before, here versus there?

01:03:56.510 --> 01:03:59.150
And exactly how does it model that?

01:03:59.310 --> 01:04:01.870
Because you can model that in different ways.

01:04:02.190 --> 01:04:08.140
Um well, I think the heart of the problem, the

01:04:08.140 --> 01:04:12.620
conceptual problem that is so confusing, and I admit this is very confusing.

01:04:13.340 --> 01:04:18.940
People ask, okay, so if you give it information about what it's paying attention to,

01:04:19.260 --> 01:04:22.300
how does that make it have an internal feeling?

01:04:22.540 --> 01:04:24.620
How does the internal feeling emerge?

01:04:25.100 --> 01:04:25.900
What is that like?

01:04:26.220 --> 01:04:26.860
Why?

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.

01:04:33.770 --> 01:04:39.770
But if it has a particular kind of model of itself, that

01:04:39.770 --> 01:04:45.690
particular kind of model will describe, it will have information in it that

01:04:45.690 --> 01:04:50.890
describes the machine as a thing that has subjective

01:04:50.890 --> 01:04:56.460
experience, and therefore it will think it has subjective experience,

01:04:56.780 --> 01:05:00.140
and therefore it'll tell you it has subjective experience.

01:05:00.380 --> 01:05:01.660
That's what it could have.

01:05:01.740 --> 01:05:02.860
That's what we have.

01:05:02.940 --> 01:05:03.260
Yeah.

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

01:05:09.180 --> 01:05:10.060
about itself.

01:05:10.460 --> 01:05:12.060
Yeah, I love I love that.

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

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

01:05:20.620 --> 01:05:23.630
talking about is what consciousness is a self-model.

01:05:23.790 --> 01:05:27.150
And that's the scientific sort of that's what it's doing.

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

01:05:32.030 --> 01:05:34.110
about itself and try to take over.

01:05:34.750 --> 01:05:40.750
That is the concern of an evolved organism that has

01:05:40.750 --> 01:05:45.640
evolved to have representations of what do

01:05:45.640 --> 01:05:47.400
conspecifics do, right?

01:05:47.480 --> 01:05:53.320
It's populated with I'm dealing with a complicated, evolved human conspecific who is

01:05:53.320 --> 01:05:58.600
self-preserving, who wants status and resources, and under the right circumstances will try

01:05:58.600 --> 01:06:00.760
to kill me or not, you know, depending.

01:06:01.240 --> 01:06:07.210
And so I think that it's no accident that we probably have

01:06:07.210 --> 01:06:12.890
very complicated systems that are assessing degrees of consciousness because

01:06:14.090 --> 01:06:17.530
that's a system for representing, you know, is David asleep?

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,

01:06:21.610 --> 01:06:21.930
right?

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

01:06:28.170 --> 01:06:33.480
that what we mean by consciousness is the full range of human capacities.

01:06:33.640 --> 01:06:39.080
The argument would be that that's an evolved representation because what you're doing is

01:06:39.080 --> 01:06:40.600
you're tracking: is David asleep?

01:06:40.760 --> 01:06:41.560
Is he drugged?

01:06:41.720 --> 01:06:43.480
Is he not paying attention?

01:06:43.800 --> 01:06:48.200
And the full thing is not a representation of how he works.

01:06:48.280 --> 01:06:51.960
It's just the default assumption of like, what's the worst case scenario?

01:06:52.120 --> 01:06:58.010
He might be a powerful, malicious, intentional human actor

01:06:58.250 --> 01:07:00.250
who has power, who wants to go after me.

01:07:00.330 --> 01:07:03.370
And that's exactly what people are concerned about with consciousness.

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

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

01:07:14.650 --> 01:07:18.820
assess is David asleep or you know what's his intentions?

01:07:19.300 --> 01:07:20.180
But it's no accident.

01:07:20.260 --> 01:07:23.140
The default is it's all the human stuff, right?

01:07:23.460 --> 01:07:23.780
Yeah.

01:07:23.940 --> 01:07:24.260
Yeah.

01:07:24.340 --> 01:07:24.980
Yeah.

01:07:25.780 --> 01:07:31.060
So I think there's a huge part of the way we think about

01:07:31.060 --> 01:07:34.900
consciousness that is richly intertwined with ethics.

01:07:35.220 --> 01:07:41.170
So if humans are conscious and animals aren't, then it is ethical to

01:07:41.170 --> 01:07:45.330
just treat them as objects, to torture them on factory farms, whatever, it doesn't matter.

01:07:45.410 --> 01:07:46.850
They're just unthinking automata.

01:07:46.930 --> 01:07:51.010
You know, Descartes famously thought that uh animals were just automata.

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

01:07:57.330 --> 01:08:03.170
consciousness goes is um inextricably intertwined with how we should ethically treat

01:08:03.220 --> 01:08:03.700
animals.

01:08:03.860 --> 01:08:07.380
If bugs are unconscious, it doesn't matter if I swap them or or whatever.

01:08:07.540 --> 01:08:09.780
If they're conscious, oh boy, what a nightmare.

01:08:10.100 --> 01:08:14.500
We're surrounded by these sentient beings flying around us, and we have to consider their

01:08:14.500 --> 01:08:15.380
interests.

01:08:16.180 --> 01:08:21.620
And so I want to ask you about like how your model of

01:08:21.620 --> 01:08:24.900
consciousness fits in with the ethical nature of it.

01:08:25.060 --> 01:08:30.810
And um it it seems to me that if AI is conscious,

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?

01:08:35.130 --> 01:08:36.330
Does it have feelings?

01:08:36.490 --> 01:08:37.930
Uh, does it have affect?

01:08:38.170 --> 01:08:41.770
If I am mean to ChatGPT, will its feelings be hurt?

01:08:41.930 --> 01:08:42.250
Right?

01:08:42.410 --> 01:08:46.090
It's not so much does ChatGPT have a model of its own attentional state.

01:08:46.170 --> 01:08:47.530
I don't really care about that much.

01:08:47.690 --> 01:08:49.850
What I really care about is does it have feelings?

01:08:50.010 --> 01:08:56.010
And so, how does the the affective and ethical dimension of consciousness fit

01:08:56.010 --> 01:08:57.530
into your your way of thinking about it?

01:08:57.770 --> 01:08:58.090
Yeah.

01:08:58.250 --> 01:08:58.490
Yeah.

01:08:58.660 --> 01:09:01.540
So, oh boy, there's lots of things I could say about that.

01:09:01.780 --> 01:09:05.700
Um, well, I'll give one one point.

01:09:06.180 --> 01:09:11.940
Um, theory of evolution by natural selection has been

01:09:11.940 --> 01:09:17.140
used to argue for and against a vast range of ethical

01:09:17.380 --> 01:09:18.660
propositions.

01:09:18.980 --> 01:09:23.380
Some very problematical and some very lovely and nice.

01:09:23.730 --> 01:09:26.610
But the theory itself is actually ethically blind.

01:09:26.690 --> 01:09:28.210
It has nothing to do with ethics.

01:09:28.290 --> 01:09:30.450
It's just this is how it works.

01:09:30.850 --> 01:09:36.690
Um, and to some extent, the theory that we've developed

01:09:36.850 --> 01:09:41.330
this attention schema theory or this way of thinking about consciousness works the same

01:09:41.330 --> 01:09:41.570
way.

01:09:41.730 --> 01:09:44.210
It says this is how it is.

01:09:44.780 --> 01:09:47.020
um, ethics aside.

01:09:47.500 --> 01:09:53.180
And from that, I think people could come up with all kinds of different ethical assertions.

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

01:09:56.780 --> 01:09:58.540
is not, so we have to do that.

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

01:10:04.540 --> 01:10:09.470
prescribes what we should do or not do ethically.

01:10:09.630 --> 01:10:11.070
It just gives information.

01:10:11.310 --> 01:10:12.590
Ethics is something else.

01:10:12.670 --> 01:10:13.950
We're all ethical beings.

01:10:14.110 --> 01:10:17.550
We all have, and ethics are fundamentally irrational.

01:10:18.030 --> 01:10:24.030
And they're rooted in these kind of um built-in uh you

01:10:24.030 --> 01:10:26.830
know um emotional states.

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

01:10:31.920 --> 01:10:33.600
dictates the ethics.

01:10:33.840 --> 01:10:39.760
Uh, what kind of animals are likely to have this kind of stuff in

01:10:39.760 --> 01:10:40.080
them?

01:10:40.480 --> 01:10:46.240
Um well, that's not that hard

01:10:46.240 --> 01:10:47.360
to trace out.

01:10:47.890 --> 01:10:50.850
So along the vertebrate line, at least.

01:10:51.090 --> 01:10:56.930
You're looking at animals that have the kind of attention that needs this kind

01:10:56.930 --> 01:11:00.770
of control system that needs really sophisticated models.

01:11:01.010 --> 01:11:02.610
That's the first thing you would look at.

01:11:02.770 --> 01:11:08.290
And so you're probably looking at all mammals and all birds, and maybe many

01:11:08.290 --> 01:11:13.650
reptiles, if not most of them, and somewhere in that range, maybe some

01:11:13.650 --> 01:11:14.450
amphibians.

01:11:14.530 --> 01:11:19.900
I don't know if amphibians um four brains and

01:11:20.220 --> 01:11:25.180
really sophisticated covert attention is probably non-existent.

01:11:25.820 --> 01:11:27.980
So maybe they don't have these mechanisms.

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.

01:11:33.740 --> 01:11:37.340
The second question you're asking, though, is about emotion.

01:11:37.870 --> 01:11:40.670
So we can be conscious of all kinds of things.

01:11:40.910 --> 01:11:46.750
I mean, classically, people like to study visual consciousness because it's easier.

01:11:47.470 --> 01:11:53.070
Consciousness, the conscious experience of red, or uh the conscious experience of getting

01:11:53.070 --> 01:11:54.270
poked with a pin.

01:11:54.590 --> 01:12:00.590
But um uh emotion is a thing of which we can be

01:12:00.590 --> 01:12:01.550
conscious.

01:12:01.710 --> 01:12:05.660
Uh, It is not itself, it doesn't define our consciousness.

01:12:05.740 --> 01:12:10.620
It's just one of the things we can be conscious of, but we can feel

01:12:11.500 --> 01:12:14.620
sadness, we can be upset, we can be angry.

01:12:14.860 --> 01:12:17.980
And so you're asking about AI.

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

01:12:23.810 --> 01:12:26.690
have emotions and is it conscious of those emotions?

01:12:27.010 --> 01:12:27.410
Right.

01:12:27.570 --> 01:12:33.330
And so it's an interesting fact that people have um emotions and are often not

01:12:33.330 --> 01:12:38.210
conscious of them, as you find out if you ever go to a therapist.

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

01:12:43.570 --> 01:12:46.690
you have, and then you're like, oh yeah, I guess I was angry all day.

01:12:46.770 --> 01:12:47.810
How weird is that?

01:12:48.050 --> 01:12:53.600
Uh but um uh so there is a difference between the emotional

01:12:53.600 --> 01:12:57.680
states um and being conscious of them.

01:12:58.000 --> 01:13:00.960
And now you get to the question of AI.

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?

01:13:06.560 --> 01:13:10.960
I think at some point the answer will be yes.

01:13:11.710 --> 01:13:15.550
I think probably right now the answer is no.

01:13:16.110 --> 01:13:19.470
Because emotional states are are complicated.

01:13:20.190 --> 01:13:25.230
Right now AI is really good at what we will call cognition and

01:13:25.870 --> 01:13:28.750
visual perception it's getting really good at.

01:13:30.190 --> 01:13:32.350
But and language processing.

01:13:32.510 --> 01:13:38.280
But emotion emotion has so many complicated layers in biology

01:13:38.360 --> 01:13:42.200
in human systems and other animals that are not that well understood.

01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:48.360
And so those layers start with the physical body and the autonomic

01:13:48.360 --> 01:13:53.800
nervous system and the flight or fright systems, or the resting and digesting

01:13:53.800 --> 01:13:59.560
systems that change the physiology of your body, and then sensory neurons that detect those

01:13:59.560 --> 01:14:05.490
changes and carry that information up into deep systems in your brain, and those builds

01:14:05.490 --> 01:14:11.490
uh all kinds of information structures, and then eventually that gets up into your cortical

01:14:11.490 --> 01:14:16.210
systems and more into your cognitive networks, and you start interpreting those and saying,

01:14:16.450 --> 01:14:19.330
Oh my god, I feel this emotion, I feel that emotion.

01:14:19.570 --> 01:14:24.370
I think AI currently lacks most of those layers.

01:14:24.610 --> 01:14:30.370
And so, at least right now, it's probably not an emotional thing, an emotional

01:14:30.370 --> 01:14:31.010
agent.

01:14:31.410 --> 01:14:35.420
Um, but will people eventually fare all that stuff out?

01:14:35.660 --> 01:14:41.500
I mean, aside from the question of should we, yes, people will probably figure it out

01:14:41.660 --> 01:14:45.180
and probably build artificial stuff, because that's what people do.

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

01:14:51.340 --> 01:14:55.660
very human-like consciousness, and then we're gonna have to deal with the ethics.

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

01:15:01.570 --> 01:15:04.770
quagmire, I guess is how I would describe it.

01:15:06.850 --> 01:15:07.490
Oh give it a go.

01:15:08.370 --> 01:15:14.050
So I do you see um if a separation between consciousness and

01:15:14.290 --> 01:15:14.850
feelings?

01:15:15.010 --> 01:15:18.050
So could you be conscious without having feelings?

01:15:18.210 --> 01:15:21.010
Could you have feelings without being conscious?

01:15:21.890 --> 01:15:22.530
Yes.

01:15:23.250 --> 01:15:28.770
Um uh some well, some people distinguish feelings from emotion.

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

01:15:34.640 --> 01:15:39.200
feeling be limited to emotions of which you have become conscious.

01:15:39.520 --> 01:15:39.840
Okay.

01:15:40.400 --> 01:15:45.680
And um emotions can be processed at unconscious levels, and there's lots of brain systems

01:15:45.760 --> 01:15:51.040
and the amygdala and the hypothalamus and the this and the that that are computing these

01:15:51.040 --> 01:15:56.890
states that um affect your body chemistry and your body physiology and affect all

01:15:56.970 --> 01:15:59.850
aspects of your brain, but it's going on unconsciously.

01:16:00.010 --> 01:16:02.250
So some people would make that distinction.

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

01:16:08.010 --> 01:16:08.650
colors.

01:16:09.290 --> 01:16:11.610
You can be conscious of a poke on your arm.

01:16:11.770 --> 01:16:14.570
You can be conscious of a sound, you can be conscious of a thought.

01:16:14.730 --> 01:16:20.010
You can think two plus two equals three and have a conscious experience of thinking that

01:16:20.010 --> 01:16:20.490
thought.

01:16:20.640 --> 01:16:24.320
And all of those could, in principle, be totally stripped of emotion.

01:16:24.480 --> 01:16:28.880
So the emotion doesn't need to be there to be conscious of something.

01:16:29.360 --> 01:16:33.760
You would still, if asked, you would still be able to say, there is a me.

01:16:34.480 --> 01:16:38.000
I have a subjective experience of those things.

01:16:39.200 --> 01:16:44.800
And if someone asked you, yeah, but what is the emotional component to it?

01:16:45.040 --> 01:16:47.840
It would be possible to say there is none.

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

01:16:53.570 --> 01:16:53.810
people.

01:16:53.970 --> 01:16:59.650
You get people who are so disconnected from their emotions, um, through

01:16:59.650 --> 01:17:05.570
whatever, you know, some subvariants of autism, for example, or other

01:17:05.810 --> 01:17:10.770
um conditions where people are are not conscious of their emotions.

01:17:11.010 --> 01:17:16.800
I think you can have uh uh people, minds, life experiences that are really

01:17:16.800 --> 01:17:18.560
shockingly devoid of emotion.

01:17:18.640 --> 01:17:21.280
They're really different from the way most of us operate.

01:17:21.440 --> 01:17:25.520
So I do not think consciousness and emotion have to go together.

01:17:25.840 --> 01:17:28.960
Um, but for most of us they do, of course.

01:17:29.280 --> 01:17:29.520
Right.

01:17:29.600 --> 01:17:31.600
And when they do go together, you get feelings.

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

01:17:36.560 --> 01:17:39.440
turns into what we would call a feeling.

01:17:40.050 --> 01:17:40.450
Yes.

01:17:40.850 --> 01:17:45.250
If you, you know, according to that terminology, yes, by definition, a feeling is a

01:17:45.250 --> 01:17:46.370
conscious emotion.

01:17:46.770 --> 01:17:47.090
Okay.

01:17:47.490 --> 01:17:47.970
All right.

01:17:48.130 --> 01:17:48.610
Cool.

01:17:48.850 --> 01:17:54.690
Um Yeah, it's it's super interesting to me because I

01:17:55.090 --> 01:18:00.930
I feel like what we ultimately care about is um is feelings

01:18:01.010 --> 01:18:05.260
in terms of you know whether AI is quote unquote conscious.

01:18:05.660 --> 01:18:09.900
But do I care if like an AI has an emotion but it's not conscious?

01:18:10.140 --> 01:18:11.180
That's that I don't know.

01:18:11.260 --> 01:18:13.260
It's kind of a weird question.

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?

01:18:17.100 --> 01:18:17.820
I don't know.

01:18:19.100 --> 01:18:19.500
Yeah.

01:18:20.700 --> 01:18:21.020
Yeah.

01:18:21.260 --> 01:18:26.300
So um if you poke yourself with a pin, yeah, um, but

01:18:26.910 --> 01:18:32.270
something has disconnected your cortex from that experience.

01:18:32.510 --> 01:18:32.990
Yeah.

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

01:18:37.870 --> 01:18:40.830
subcortical level, but you're not aware of it.

01:18:41.070 --> 01:18:42.030
Is it pain?

01:18:42.190 --> 01:18:43.710
I don't know what to say to that.

01:18:43.870 --> 01:18:46.830
I mean, that's a philosophical question with no real answer.

01:18:47.040 --> 01:18:47.280
Yeah.

01:18:47.520 --> 01:18:47.600
Yeah.

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

01:18:53.520 --> 01:18:55.040
is this a severe event?

01:18:55.200 --> 01:19:01.040
So in other words, like I think the the intuition and the philosophy is not considering

01:19:01.040 --> 01:19:02.160
all possible worlds.

01:19:02.240 --> 01:19:06.800
It's it's uh assuming the the evolved psychology we have, which is specific

01:19:07.520 --> 01:19:13.200
specifically um their emotions are emotional systems or situation detectors,

01:19:13.360 --> 01:19:13.600
right?

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.

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

01:19:25.130 --> 01:19:27.930
experiencing pain and I'm reacting, right?

01:19:28.090 --> 01:19:33.850
And so the idea is that the self-modeling system is

01:19:34.490 --> 01:19:39.880
detecting such an important or severe event that it even is

01:19:39.880 --> 01:19:45.880
registering in the self-model system that this is this is the state

01:19:45.880 --> 01:19:49.800
we're in, and that probably has other consequences too.

01:19:49.960 --> 01:19:51.640
That's why it is activated.

01:19:51.800 --> 01:19:52.120
Yeah.

01:19:52.360 --> 01:19:57.320
So when we say something like, Will AI be conscious?

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

01:20:03.410 --> 01:20:07.810
the level of the it would engage the self-monitoring system in us.

01:20:08.290 --> 01:20:14.290
Because, you know, the things that are important, like pain and sorrow, and disappointment

01:20:14.370 --> 01:20:20.290
and terror and anxiety that are important to me become self modeled because

01:20:20.290 --> 01:20:21.970
they're so severe.

01:20:22.210 --> 01:20:27.010
So I actually think that it's a very human-centric thing to say

01:20:27.250 --> 01:20:30.000
consciousness is what matters.

01:20:30.160 --> 01:20:30.320
Yeah.

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

01:20:35.760 --> 01:20:35.920
that.

01:20:36.000 --> 01:20:41.360
And that's why they're conscious, probably because it just it adds to the inferential

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

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

01:20:52.800 --> 01:20:54.160
who died, or whatever.

01:20:54.400 --> 01:20:58.790
Um, you know, it's not just the mundane scrapes of of everyday life.

01:20:59.430 --> 01:21:02.470
So so I actually think that it's a readout.

01:21:02.710 --> 01:21:08.710
People saying consciousness, what they're actually saying is the readout of it's the

01:21:08.710 --> 01:21:10.150
severe events of people.

01:21:10.390 --> 01:21:12.710
But the consciousness is sort of the confabulation.

01:21:13.030 --> 01:21:15.110
I don't think that's actually what matters, if that makes sense.

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

01:21:23.280 --> 01:21:29.200
experiences like intense pain, intense sorrow, um by design activate consciousness,

01:21:29.360 --> 01:21:33.360
activate full attention and a representation of that attention.

01:21:33.520 --> 01:21:33.680
Yeah.

01:21:33.840 --> 01:21:39.760
That we conflate um consciousness with feeling because feeling uh automatically by design

01:21:39.920 --> 01:21:40.800
activates consciousness.

01:21:41.040 --> 01:21:44.650
And whenever you have intense feeling, you automatically get consciousness of it.

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

01:21:48.170 --> 01:21:49.370
actually have to coexist.

01:21:49.690 --> 01:21:49.850
Yeah.

01:21:50.170 --> 01:21:51.370
Yeah, I think that's right.

01:21:51.450 --> 01:21:54.890
And again, I would say there are probably people who aren't wired that way.

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,

01:22:00.490 --> 01:22:01.850
there's a disconnect somewhere in there.

01:22:01.930 --> 01:22:04.570
There's a neurological uh abnormality.

01:22:04.810 --> 01:22:07.050
So um, but here's an interesting point.

01:22:08.100 --> 01:22:13.940
Almost all the discussion so far, not quite all of it, between us on consciousness

01:22:14.100 --> 01:22:16.100
has been this personal thing.

01:22:16.580 --> 01:22:21.060
I am conscious, or that machine is conscious, or but but but consider this.

01:22:21.460 --> 01:22:26.260
Um maybe of equal importance is whether when

01:22:27.220 --> 01:22:31.940
you interact with that AI, whether you

01:22:34.670 --> 01:22:40.510
project consciousness onto it, whether you see it as a conscious being.

01:22:41.390 --> 01:22:44.830
And that's that's the special thing.

01:22:45.150 --> 01:22:50.910
I'm not talking about intellectually interacting with it and then deciding, ah,

01:22:51.070 --> 01:22:54.430
I think it's conscious, or no, I think it probably isn't.

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

01:23:00.510 --> 01:23:01.950
is a conscious being.

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

01:23:08.140 --> 01:23:12.060
conscious, but we still get that sense anyway.

01:23:12.220 --> 01:23:18.060
We it it pokes our buttons, it makes our social machinery go into overdrive, and we

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

01:23:24.300 --> 01:23:25.740
a conscious being.

01:23:25.900 --> 01:23:31.250
Um, and that's a very important threshold, um, because

01:23:31.730 --> 01:23:34.850
that's how we interact with each other, first of all.

01:23:35.490 --> 01:23:39.970
Uh, as many philosophers have pointed out, I actually don't know whether you're conscious

01:23:39.970 --> 01:23:41.170
in some absolute sense.

01:23:41.250 --> 01:23:42.530
I can't know that.

01:23:42.850 --> 01:23:47.650
But I build a model of a mind and project it onto you.

01:23:47.730 --> 01:23:53.650
I, in effect, perceive consciousness emanating out of you because that's how my brain has

01:23:53.650 --> 01:23:58.770
built the model of the world, and that helps me interact with you.

01:24:00.560 --> 01:24:03.360
And we do that to other people.

01:24:03.520 --> 01:24:04.720
We do it to our pets.

01:24:04.880 --> 01:24:06.960
Some people do it to their houseplants.

01:24:07.920 --> 01:24:09.920
We do it all across the board.

01:24:10.000 --> 01:24:15.600
We live in this sea of perceived consciousness, conscious minds all around us.

01:24:15.840 --> 01:24:21.360
And when AI, well, not when, it already is entering that

01:24:21.390 --> 01:24:22.350
community.

01:24:22.750 --> 01:24:28.750
That is more and more people interact with AI and at a gut level perceive

01:24:28.750 --> 01:24:30.430
it to be a conscious thing.

01:24:30.590 --> 01:24:32.590
They interact with it that way.

01:24:33.070 --> 01:24:38.990
And they do that every time you talk to another person because you're exercising and

01:24:38.990 --> 01:24:42.830
using your social machinery, you're also shaping it.

01:24:43.260 --> 01:24:46.780
and very slightly tweaking it and retraining it.

01:24:47.020 --> 01:24:52.540
Um and so when you interact with a a chat bot or one of these companion

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

01:24:58.380 --> 01:25:02.380
experience you're having with it and how that affects how you interact with other people

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.

01:25:08.090 --> 01:25:11.130
Now that's a really interesting threshold that we reach.

01:25:12.170 --> 01:25:18.010
So to just sort of say what you're describing is that we have

01:25:18.010 --> 01:25:19.210
models of others.

01:25:19.530 --> 01:25:19.850
Yes.

01:25:20.090 --> 01:25:25.450
And one important problem is that if you think about it, you know, animals are complex

01:25:25.450 --> 01:25:26.010
agents.

01:25:26.090 --> 01:25:31.770
And we have agency detectors and inference systems, but there's different kinds of animals,

01:25:31.850 --> 01:25:32.090
right?

01:25:32.170 --> 01:25:35.060
There's like complicated animals and simple animals.

01:25:35.220 --> 01:25:36.420
There's also like humans.

01:25:36.500 --> 01:25:40.420
There's babies and adolescents and adults, and then like, you know, people, you know, you

01:25:40.420 --> 01:25:41.220
can be sleepy.

01:25:41.380 --> 01:25:43.220
Somebody might not be able to hear.

01:25:43.460 --> 01:25:49.460
So we have these agency detectors, but to some degree, they are also

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,

01:25:55.620 --> 01:25:57.140
or this kind of species.

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.

01:26:01.370 --> 01:26:03.770
And I can take strategic advantage of that.

01:26:04.090 --> 01:26:07.210
So there's this agency detecting system.

01:26:07.930 --> 01:26:12.570
Maybe the full-blown version is human level, but then there's always these sort of

01:26:12.570 --> 01:26:13.130
modifications.

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

01:26:17.770 --> 01:26:19.450
is another kind of agent to interact with.

01:26:19.610 --> 01:26:23.930
And then when I interact with you, Michael, and you don't just give me per,

01:26:29.040 --> 01:26:33.440
Then I might evaluate you more negatively because I'm comparing you to this artificial

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

01:26:38.640 --> 01:26:38.960
could have.

01:26:39.600 --> 01:26:39.840
Yeah.

01:26:40.320 --> 01:26:40.720
Yeah.

01:26:41.040 --> 01:26:46.990
So uh or to give another example, So social contagion is a very well

01:26:47.150 --> 01:26:52.910
understood uh phenomenon, and you can have a company where there's one person

01:26:52.910 --> 01:26:58.510
who's just so cheerful that everyone around them gets cheerful, and then they make other

01:26:58.510 --> 01:27:04.270
people cheerful, and pretty soon the whole company has this uh measurable uptick in mood

01:27:04.510 --> 01:27:08.220
because of that social contagion, Um, and it can go the other way.

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

01:27:13.740 --> 01:27:15.580
spreading um contagion.

01:27:15.820 --> 01:27:21.180
Uh but we have now these agents that are

01:27:22.380 --> 01:27:27.660
like one type of agent trained in one way, now has

01:27:28.330 --> 01:27:34.250
the ability, well, has access to has uh fairly extensive interactions with

01:27:34.250 --> 01:27:36.730
maybe a billion people around the world.

01:27:37.210 --> 01:27:43.050
Now, what kind of social contagion can happen as a result of that in

01:27:43.050 --> 01:27:47.530
terms of just the subtle habits of how we interact with each other?

01:27:47.770 --> 01:27:50.250
Uh I mean, we know that's happening.

01:27:50.410 --> 01:27:55.690
We know that has to be something that's completely rewiring our our um social

01:27:55.690 --> 01:27:57.370
interaction patterns.

01:27:57.840 --> 01:27:58.080
Yeah.

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

01:28:02.080 --> 01:28:07.680
worried about the consequences of people automatically and implicitly sort of

01:28:07.680 --> 01:28:10.160
ascribing consciousness to AI.

01:28:10.320 --> 01:28:16.240
Consequently, it's actually contaminating our representations of what agents are, what

01:28:16.240 --> 01:28:22.240
to expect from them, or what what what we should all do now that there's

01:28:22.240 --> 01:28:24.560
this agent who's acting in this way.

01:28:24.640 --> 01:28:24.800
Right.

01:28:25.040 --> 01:28:25.280
Yeah.

01:28:25.440 --> 01:28:26.080
Yeah.

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

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

01:28:38.010 --> 01:28:41.210
were talking about modeling other people's minds.

01:28:41.450 --> 01:28:41.610
Yeah.

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

01:28:47.700 --> 01:28:51.140
every tiny little thing we do is scrutinized by other minds.

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

01:28:55.060 --> 01:28:58.260
watching or might overhear us and then gossip about us.

01:28:58.340 --> 01:29:04.020
And that could totally destroy our reputation or totally, you know, uh enhance our social

01:29:04.020 --> 01:29:04.500
status.

01:29:04.660 --> 01:29:10.470
And because we have this just ambient uh uh surrounding environment of

01:29:10.470 --> 01:29:12.870
consciousness that is scrutinizing us at all times.

01:29:12.950 --> 01:29:17.670
And it is useful to sometimes overperceive that ambient level of consciousness or ambient

01:29:17.670 --> 01:29:19.910
level of attention on everything we do.

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

01:29:25.110 --> 01:29:29.030
surrounded by consciousness, and there's just an inherent consciousness that's that goes

01:29:29.030 --> 01:29:30.710
with me wherever I am.

01:29:30.790 --> 01:29:33.510
Uh, and I'm just gonna call that God, right?

01:29:33.680 --> 01:29:36.080
Or I'm going to call that the spirit world or something.

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

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

01:29:47.760 --> 01:29:51.200
consciousness and to think that we just live in a universe that's just made of

01:29:51.200 --> 01:29:51.680
consciousness.

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

01:29:54.880 --> 01:29:55.840
about spirituality?

01:29:56.560 --> 01:29:59.280
Well A, I think it's essentially correct.

01:29:59.600 --> 01:29:59.920
Okay.

01:30:00.090 --> 01:30:05.850
And B, I have written pretty much those very thoughts many times.

01:30:06.010 --> 01:30:10.970
Uh, yes, I think I sometimes think we should have been called uh homo socialists

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.

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,

01:30:23.130 --> 01:30:29.040
is because we build models of minds at the drop of a hat and

01:30:29.040 --> 01:30:30.640
then project them onto everybody.

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

01:30:35.680 --> 01:30:40.640
and the and the big horns and the big thing here and the giant peacock tail.

01:30:40.720 --> 01:30:46.400
I think evolution got hold of that uh that volume knob on the social

01:30:46.560 --> 01:30:51.930
machinery, on the machinery that makes us project conscious minds onto everything and it

01:30:51.930 --> 01:30:53.610
just cranked it up to 11.

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

01:31:00.250 --> 01:31:00.650
high.

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

01:31:06.730 --> 01:31:12.090
get um benefits, and the benefits increase and increase, and the and the downside

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

01:31:16.560 --> 01:31:21.760
cranked it any further, then the downsides would start to have a delederous effect.

01:31:21.920 --> 01:31:23.200
I think that's where we are.

01:31:23.360 --> 01:31:29.120
I think we attribute mind to things so readily

01:31:29.760 --> 01:31:35.040
because it is valuable to us, because it made us the cooperative, incredibly capable

01:31:35.040 --> 01:31:36.080
species we are.

01:31:36.240 --> 01:31:41.830
And one consequence of that is um we see mind in empty spaces.

01:31:41.990 --> 01:31:45.830
We see mind in um you know a lightning strike.

01:31:46.070 --> 01:31:50.070
Oh my god, uh a malevolent spirit did it.

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.

01:31:55.190 --> 01:31:58.230
You know, the river spirit that carries people away.

01:31:58.390 --> 01:32:04.000
Uh every event we see, we have a tendency to attribute a

01:32:04.320 --> 01:32:08.960
motivation and a mind process and a consciousness as the cause of it.

01:32:09.200 --> 01:32:11.120
We're very, very prone to that.

01:32:11.600 --> 01:32:17.520
And yeah, I think God, the concept of God is basically the extension

01:32:17.520 --> 01:32:19.360
of that to the universe.

01:32:19.920 --> 01:32:24.480
So that's to say, your behavior is up to you.

01:32:25.350 --> 01:32:27.430
This other person's behavior is up to them.

01:32:27.670 --> 01:32:31.990
But then there's all this stuff that happens that people didn't cause.

01:32:32.390 --> 01:32:37.430
But somebody must have decided, somebody must have had the motivation and the consciousness

01:32:37.430 --> 01:32:38.310
to make it happen.

01:32:38.470 --> 01:32:41.270
So maybe that was God or spirits.

01:32:41.430 --> 01:32:47.240
I think that's that, yeah, religiosity is not um a

01:32:47.480 --> 01:32:48.280
mistake.

01:32:48.520 --> 01:32:54.520
It's not um some, you know, as many hardcore atheists

01:32:54.520 --> 01:32:59.960
would put it, uh, would describe it as some kind of pre-scientific stupidity or something.

01:33:00.120 --> 01:33:00.440
I don't know.

01:33:00.520 --> 01:33:02.360
There's lots of mockery of it.

01:33:02.600 --> 01:33:04.440
And I do not believe that.

01:33:04.680 --> 01:33:10.280
I think that religiosity is something really deeply ingrained in us that we

01:33:10.280 --> 01:33:11.880
cannot get rid of it.

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

01:33:18.350 --> 01:33:20.510
evolutionarily built-in models.

01:33:20.590 --> 01:33:26.430
Uh I think some of us have intellectual knowledge so that we don't cognitively believe

01:33:26.430 --> 01:33:27.390
this or that.

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

01:33:33.710 --> 01:33:36.030
uh creepy things behind us.

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.

01:33:41.280 --> 01:33:44.800
Um we all fall for the ventriloquism illusion.

01:33:45.040 --> 01:33:50.720
Uh when you read a story, the characters in the story have personalities because you're

01:33:50.720 --> 01:33:54.400
projecting it onto them even though they're not real things.

01:33:54.880 --> 01:33:55.200
Right?

01:33:55.360 --> 01:34:00.230
All of these are acts of effectively spiritual belief.

01:34:00.550 --> 01:34:06.390
They're all acts of a social machinery building models of minds and projecting it onto

01:34:06.390 --> 01:34:08.710
things that don't actually have minds.

01:34:10.390 --> 01:34:10.710
Yeah.

01:34:10.870 --> 01:34:12.230
No, I love that way of thinking.

01:34:12.310 --> 01:34:18.310
I mean, it it it makes me think that even the psychology of storytelling,

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

01:34:23.400 --> 01:34:25.400
motivations and their betrayals and whatnot.

01:34:25.720 --> 01:34:31.720
Um you could easily just extend that onto the universe itself, and that everything is just

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

01:34:35.960 --> 01:34:36.680
sentient being.

01:34:36.840 --> 01:34:39.640
And it becomes very easy to just put everything into that frame.

01:34:40.040 --> 01:34:41.240
Everything everything happens for a reason.

01:34:41.320 --> 01:34:45.960
It's all part of the grand narrative that is being told uh by this mind.

01:34:46.120 --> 01:34:51.890
Um it it th this hyper sociality and this um constant need to model the

01:34:51.890 --> 01:34:55.730
mental states of others, I think makes religious ideas very sticky and intuitive.

01:34:55.810 --> 01:35:00.370
It makes them cognitive attractors, um, as you know, Sperber w would put it.

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

01:35:06.130 --> 01:35:08.690
sticky religious intuitions.

01:35:08.930 --> 01:35:09.250
Yep.

01:35:09.920 --> 01:35:11.440
I can just poke on that too.

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

01:35:16.560 --> 01:35:22.000
an agent do or intention, it also means that getting back to the science

01:35:22.000 --> 01:35:27.600
thing, I think it's people's default way of understanding large-scale social dynamics,

01:35:27.760 --> 01:35:28.000
right?

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

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.

01:35:35.840 --> 01:35:40.150
And his book, Conjectures and Refutations, he talks about people's models of social

01:35:40.150 --> 01:35:40.550
sciences.

01:35:40.870 --> 01:35:44.790
The wrong version is the conspiracy, which is exactly what we're talking about, which is

01:35:44.950 --> 01:35:49.590
outcomes, social dynamic outcomes, are because there's like a cabal of people who intend

01:35:49.750 --> 01:35:51.430
for something to happen.

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.

01:35:56.790 --> 01:36:01.590
And Popper's argument is that most large-scale social dynamic outcomes are unintended

01:36:01.590 --> 01:36:02.150
consequences.

01:36:02.230 --> 01:36:02.950
I mean, not always.

01:36:03.030 --> 01:36:04.390
Sometimes people succeed.

01:36:04.540 --> 01:36:10.220
And so social science, a large part of like modern social science is agent-based

01:36:10.220 --> 01:36:15.420
modeling or formal models of complex dynamics that nobody sees coming.

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

01:36:20.220 --> 01:36:25.500
consciousness or modeling an agent to then apply it to somewhere it doesn't really belong,

01:36:25.580 --> 01:36:30.790
which is like macroeconomic, you know, macroeconomics or institutional

01:36:30.790 --> 01:36:31.910
dynamics.

01:36:32.310 --> 01:36:36.470
And modern science is sort of saying, no, that's the wrong tool to use.

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

01:36:41.510 --> 01:36:45.270
psychology of thinking wrong about large-scale social dynamics, too.

01:36:45.510 --> 01:36:45.830
Yeah.

01:36:45.990 --> 01:36:46.390
Yeah.

01:36:46.630 --> 01:36:47.110
Yep.

01:36:47.350 --> 01:36:53.200
I mean, the only caveat I would say is um in talking about

01:36:53.200 --> 01:36:59.200
it as thinking wrong, sometimes it is right in the sense that it is

01:36:59.200 --> 01:36:59.760
useful.

01:36:59.920 --> 01:37:00.240
Yeah.

01:37:00.560 --> 01:37:02.000
I mean, that's why it evolved.

01:37:02.160 --> 01:37:02.480
Sure.

01:37:02.640 --> 01:37:07.360
Um, even though it can be wrong on the details, the factual details.

01:37:07.440 --> 01:37:09.440
And of course it can be overextended.

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

01:37:13.440 --> 01:37:13.760
reason.

01:37:13.840 --> 01:37:15.680
They evolved because they're useful.

01:37:16.480 --> 01:37:16.800
Yeah.

01:37:16.990 --> 01:37:22.270
I mean, it it gave me another idea about um the intertwining of of religion and

01:37:22.510 --> 01:37:23.310
morality.

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

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

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.

01:37:36.670 --> 01:37:40.220
And the wrongness doesn't depend on anyone judging it as wrong.

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

01:37:44.620 --> 01:37:44.940
steal.

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

01:37:48.460 --> 01:37:53.340
intuition that it's still it's still somehow wrong, that there's still some consciousness

01:37:53.340 --> 01:37:56.620
somewhere that's saying bad, bad, bad, that thing is bad.

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

01:38:02.460 --> 01:38:05.110
physicalist scientific way of thinking.

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

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

01:38:14.470 --> 01:38:15.350
the place for that stuff.

01:38:15.510 --> 01:38:19.110
You know, stop thinking about consciousness, stop thinking about minds and intentions and

01:38:19.110 --> 01:38:20.950
conspiracies and spirits.

01:38:21.190 --> 01:38:24.470
We just need to think about physical stuff and their interactions.

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

01:38:29.920 --> 01:38:35.440
folk tool use and and and that is is how scientific progress has occurred and and

01:38:35.440 --> 01:38:39.600
consciousness is sort of the last bastion of the of folk psychology.

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

01:38:44.400 --> 01:38:46.080
science has not yet defeated.

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

01:38:52.080 --> 01:38:57.450
our social lives of everything and to um let that fall to folk

01:38:57.610 --> 01:39:01.450
physics and folk tool use is is just deeply threatening.

01:39:01.690 --> 01:39:01.850
Yeah.

01:39:02.570 --> 01:39:07.850
Well, of course, the trick is um not to let folk

01:39:08.010 --> 01:39:13.930
psychology fall and disappear, but rather to explain

01:39:13.930 --> 01:39:19.690
folk psychology, to acknowledge its usefulness and then explain it through these

01:39:19.690 --> 01:39:20.650
other means.

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,

01:39:27.200 --> 01:39:30.400
oh, I know how to solve the consciousness problem, ignore it.

01:39:30.880 --> 01:39:32.560
There's no such thing, it's fluff.

01:39:32.640 --> 01:39:33.760
We don't even think about it.

01:39:33.840 --> 01:39:37.040
We're we're only work working with neurons and how they interact.

01:39:37.200 --> 01:39:40.240
That's that's easy, and of course, doesn't solve anything.

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

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.

01:39:50.800 --> 01:39:52.330
Right, So um yeah.

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.

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

01:40:03.450 --> 01:40:07.290
physics and tool use system, th those two systems are are deeply antithetical in the brain,

01:40:07.370 --> 01:40:09.770
such that when one is active, the other tends to be suppressed.

01:40:09.850 --> 01:40:14.010
And for good Darwinian reasons, you wouldn't want to empathize with your hammer every time

01:40:14.010 --> 01:40:16.020
you hit the nail, right?

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,

01:40:19.860 --> 01:40:21.540
with the animal that you're hunting.

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

01:40:25.300 --> 01:40:25.780
fox.

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

01:40:30.180 --> 01:40:32.180
be manipulated or rearranged.

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

01:40:35.940 --> 01:40:36.100
that way.

01:40:36.180 --> 01:40:36.260
Yeah.

01:40:36.420 --> 01:40:37.380
You don't want to be treated that way.

01:40:37.460 --> 01:40:37.700
Exactly.

01:40:37.860 --> 01:40:41.270
We have this metaphor of manipulation, the way you would manipulate an object.

01:40:41.350 --> 01:40:42.390
We don't want to be manipulated.

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

01:40:46.710 --> 01:40:47.190
terminology.

01:40:47.350 --> 01:40:53.190
So I think these two ways of thinking the manipulative mindset and the uh empathizing

01:40:53.190 --> 01:40:57.430
consciousness mindset are um fundamentally intention.

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

01:41:00.710 --> 01:41:05.680
so called default mode network, the brain network that we use for empathizing and imagining

01:41:05.920 --> 01:41:11.040
and remembering past episodes, that that network is uh deactivates the task positive

01:41:11.040 --> 01:41:14.960
network, the network that we used for accomplishing tasks, for understanding physical

01:41:14.960 --> 01:41:17.920
objects and how they interact, for manipulating models.

01:41:18.320 --> 01:41:24.000
And so, because those two systems are antithetical and intention, it makes it really hard

01:41:24.000 --> 01:41:29.210
for us to think of a system as both conscious and a bunch of neural

01:41:29.210 --> 01:41:30.810
mechanisms at the same time.

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

01:41:35.290 --> 01:41:36.250
we forget that it's there.

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

01:41:40.570 --> 01:41:40.810
down.

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

01:41:46.810 --> 01:41:48.570
world in in physical terms.

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

01:41:52.460 --> 01:41:54.860
were to view me as a physical object to be manipulated.

01:41:54.940 --> 01:41:58.380
If you were to try to take advantage of me or exploit me, that's threatening.

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

01:42:04.700 --> 01:42:07.340
it feels like an icky sociopathic mindset.

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

01:42:11.660 --> 01:42:13.820
consciousness being scientifically explained.

01:42:14.060 --> 01:42:14.140
Yeah.

01:42:14.380 --> 01:42:16.460
It sort of activates our fear of being manipulated.

01:42:16.780 --> 01:42:18.140
Yeah, I mean that could well be.

01:42:18.300 --> 01:42:22.630
I've also described I I I've put it this way.

01:42:23.110 --> 01:42:28.630
The the theory that we're working with, this theory of consciousness, explains why nobody

01:42:28.630 --> 01:42:29.990
believes the theory.

01:42:30.230 --> 01:42:31.030
Yeah, exactly.

01:42:31.350 --> 01:42:33.670
So that makes it a little tricky.

01:42:33.830 --> 01:42:34.230
Yeah.

01:42:35.190 --> 01:42:37.830
It's it's if we're as if we evolved not to do science.

01:42:37.910 --> 01:42:38.470
Yeah, exactly.

01:42:38.550 --> 01:42:41.830
It's like uh it's it's we've evolved to not understand the theory.

01:42:41.990 --> 01:42:42.310
Yeah.

01:42:42.630 --> 01:42:42.950
Yeah.

01:42:43.110 --> 01:42:43.350
Yeah.

01:42:43.720 --> 01:42:43.960
Yeah.

01:42:44.120 --> 01:42:45.160
So I it's funny.

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

01:42:49.560 --> 01:42:51.560
Theories of Consciousness Are Unsatisfying.

01:42:52.760 --> 01:42:56.600
But you need a subtitle, which is uh Graziano accepted.

01:42:56.760 --> 01:42:57.000
Yeah.

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

01:43:03.000 --> 01:43:05.240
theory doesn't have to be satisfying to be correct.

01:43:05.570 --> 01:43:05.890
That's right.

01:43:05.970 --> 01:43:06.130
Yes.

01:43:06.290 --> 01:43:06.450
Yeah.

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.

01:43:10.610 --> 01:43:13.970
We talked about how it's kind of like uh Douglas Adams answer 42.

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

01:43:19.730 --> 01:43:21.490
unsatisfying action answer.

01:43:21.650 --> 01:43:22.050
Yeah.

01:43:22.290 --> 01:43:22.610
Yeah.

01:43:22.930 --> 01:43:27.090
Um I want to ask you about um bringing it back to the science.

01:43:27.250 --> 01:43:32.690
So what do people what are people doing right now in science that's wrong

01:43:33.140 --> 01:43:35.540
because of the wrong way to think about consciousness.

01:43:35.700 --> 01:43:41.460
And if you could wave a magic wand and change the scientific study of consciousness, how

01:43:41.460 --> 01:43:43.700
would that look different than what's happening?

01:43:44.100 --> 01:43:44.740
Yeah.

01:43:45.540 --> 01:43:46.340
Good question.

01:43:46.420 --> 01:43:47.620
It's very tricky.

01:43:47.860 --> 01:43:53.490
Um because I think the concept is wrong at the outset, Um,

01:43:53.650 --> 01:43:56.050
it's very hard to proceed from there.

01:43:56.930 --> 01:44:02.850
So if you start with the concept, I think most people who are consciousness scholars

01:44:02.850 --> 01:44:05.490
would say there's an essence essence a thing.

01:44:05.970 --> 01:44:07.570
And call it magic if you want.

01:44:07.730 --> 01:44:09.730
Some people like that word, some people don't.

01:44:09.970 --> 01:44:15.250
It's the feeling, it's not itself information, it's not a physical thing.

01:44:15.330 --> 01:44:18.450
You can't poke it and measure a reaction force.

01:44:18.610 --> 01:44:20.530
It's the feeling itself.

01:44:21.120 --> 01:44:23.120
How do we explain that?

01:44:23.520 --> 01:44:25.520
How does it emerge?

01:44:26.320 --> 01:44:29.760
That is framed as the question of consciousness.

01:44:29.920 --> 01:44:30.240
Right.

01:44:30.320 --> 01:44:33.600
And so once you've framed that, then you're out of business.

01:44:33.920 --> 01:44:35.600
Like you can't go anywhere with that.

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

01:44:41.600 --> 01:44:44.210
intuition, a faulty intuition.

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

01:44:49.490 --> 01:44:49.650
way.

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

01:44:55.890 --> 01:44:59.730
massive amounts of data on um, well, here in this circumstance, people say they're

01:44:59.730 --> 01:45:01.250
conscious, and this they don't.

01:45:01.410 --> 01:45:07.250
And the data might actually be useful and interesting, but it's motivated and predicated on

01:45:07.250 --> 01:45:12.530
these um incorrect, this foundationally incorrect idea.

01:45:13.100 --> 01:45:19.100
And so now you have, you know, for example,

01:45:19.340 --> 01:45:25.020
the the great um adversarial collaboration, as they called it, between two major

01:45:25.020 --> 01:45:30.460
theories of consciousness, the integrated information theory and the uh global workspace

01:45:30.460 --> 01:45:30.700
theory.

01:45:30.780 --> 01:45:35.260
And tons of like literally millions of tens of millions, hundred million dollars or

01:45:35.260 --> 01:45:40.990
something like that got spent around the world to try to conflict these two

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

01:45:46.350 --> 01:45:50.430
and then they come up with slightly different answers of what the you know alchemical

01:45:50.430 --> 01:45:52.830
mixture is that makes the magic emerge.

01:45:52.910 --> 01:45:54.910
But they're basically alchemy.

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

01:46:00.910 --> 01:46:01.150
other.

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

01:46:07.340 --> 01:46:07.500
way.

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

01:46:11.180 --> 01:46:12.620
it, a hundred million dollars.

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

01:46:19.100 --> 01:46:25.020
to advertise a fundamentally magicalist perspective

01:46:25.020 --> 01:46:27.580
on consciousness and make sure that dominates.

01:46:27.820 --> 01:46:28.220
Right.

01:46:28.460 --> 01:46:29.500
And that worked.

01:46:29.820 --> 01:46:30.140
Yeah.

01:46:30.300 --> 01:46:30.620
Right.

01:46:30.940 --> 01:46:33.660
So how we go from there, I don't know.

01:46:33.980 --> 01:46:37.810
But I do think, I hope, that

01:46:39.730 --> 01:46:45.090
the advent of deep learning systems of AI

01:46:45.490 --> 01:46:49.010
will give us something to sink our fingers into.

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

01:46:55.330 --> 01:47:01.060
data scientists or um you know uh machine learning experts, they're

01:47:01.380 --> 01:47:06.340
very warm to my work, to the attention schema theory.

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

01:47:12.020 --> 01:47:14.660
why do I care about a magic essence?

01:47:14.820 --> 01:47:17.540
Like, what does that have anything to do with this machine?

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

01:47:22.100 --> 01:47:24.580
would that affect the behavior of the machine?

01:47:25.220 --> 01:47:26.900
What is the use of that?

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,

01:47:32.350 --> 01:47:37.790
your machine might at some point think that it has a magic essence.

01:47:37.950 --> 01:47:38.270
Yeah.

01:47:38.510 --> 01:47:41.150
Because it might compute that self-description.

01:47:41.230 --> 01:47:41.470
Yeah.

01:47:41.630 --> 01:47:44.110
And that will surely affect how it behaves.

01:47:44.270 --> 01:47:44.510
Yeah.

01:47:44.670 --> 01:47:50.030
And it might actually even make it a better social interface with people.

01:47:50.190 --> 01:47:50.510
Yeah.

01:47:50.740 --> 01:47:55.700
Because now it's similar enough to people that people can understand, quote, unquote,

01:47:55.860 --> 01:47:58.660
understand it or socially interact with it better.

01:47:58.820 --> 01:48:04.260
And now suddenly the machine learning experts say, Oh, wait, I get it.

01:48:04.420 --> 01:48:05.940
You're not talking about magic.

01:48:06.020 --> 01:48:11.940
You're talking about information processing that makes the machine generate

01:48:11.940 --> 01:48:15.710
these representations and therefore put this output.

01:48:15.870 --> 01:48:21.870
Once you start thinking in that way and doing experiments and studies on that end, what

01:48:21.870 --> 01:48:24.750
does it mean for the thing to have a self-model?

01:48:24.910 --> 01:48:27.470
How many kinds of self-models are there?

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

01:48:32.750 --> 01:48:35.150
saying, Yeah, I have a subjective experience.

01:48:35.310 --> 01:48:36.590
I know what that is.

01:48:36.830 --> 01:48:39.230
Like, what goes into all that?

01:48:39.550 --> 01:48:45.140
Um, those are the the I think that's the only way forward.

01:48:45.300 --> 01:48:47.780
That's the only way we'll begin to understand this stuff.

01:48:48.100 --> 01:48:48.260
Yeah.

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

01:48:52.980 --> 01:48:58.340
psychologists too, because I think this is a group of people who are taking what usually

01:48:58.340 --> 01:49:03.460
are sort of fluffy, abstract, ghost-like things and trying to think like an engineer about

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

01:49:08.660 --> 01:49:13.150
there's like evolved, biologically engineered mechanisms.

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

01:49:17.630 --> 01:49:23.470
listening, like I think doing an evolutionary task analysis of what would a self-model

01:49:23.470 --> 01:49:24.750
system need to have.

01:49:25.150 --> 01:49:27.070
And there might be a hundred thousand of them.

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

01:49:31.790 --> 01:49:37.160
for st social tr strategy, for um for self mod

01:49:37.640 --> 01:49:42.920
correcting errors like me walking into a tree, you know, like that's still low hanging

01:49:42.920 --> 01:49:46.120
fruit um from a from a this software level.

01:49:46.200 --> 01:49:49.080
Like what would we expect the self models to look like?

01:49:49.400 --> 01:49:49.640
Yeah.

01:49:49.720 --> 01:49:50.040
Yeah.

01:49:50.360 --> 01:49:51.240
I would echo that.

01:49:51.320 --> 01:49:51.480
Yeah.

01:49:51.560 --> 01:49:56.810
It it does seem to me the most friendly to um an uh a

01:49:56.970 --> 01:49:59.530
Darwinian model of mental evolution.

01:49:59.690 --> 01:50:02.730
Because if you think about, you know, integrated information theory, what's the adaptive

01:50:02.730 --> 01:50:03.850
function of integrated information?

01:50:03.930 --> 01:50:06.170
What are the selection pressures on integrated information?

01:50:06.330 --> 01:50:07.210
I have no idea.

01:50:07.370 --> 01:50:10.650
You know, what's what's what's the function of a global workspace?

01:50:10.890 --> 01:50:11.770
I don't know.

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

01:50:15.850 --> 01:50:17.130
intentional states of others?

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

01:50:22.480 --> 01:50:24.480
uh from a reverse engineering perspective.

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

01:50:28.400 --> 01:50:31.520
in in in this morass of of consciousness scholarship.

01:50:32.160 --> 01:50:33.280
Yes, yes, exactly.

01:50:33.440 --> 01:50:33.520
Yeah.

01:50:33.840 --> 01:50:33.920
Yeah.

01:50:34.240 --> 01:50:38.080
And it it provokes the next best question, which is like, well, how would that work?

01:50:38.240 --> 01:50:38.400
Right?

01:50:38.560 --> 01:50:40.880
Like it says, okay, look, there's a self-model.

01:50:41.040 --> 01:50:42.750
Well, what would the problems be?

01:50:42.910 --> 01:50:46.430
What what would the system need to have and why would it have those?

01:50:46.670 --> 01:50:49.150
What what situations is it detecting?

01:50:49.390 --> 01:50:51.710
And therefore, what representations would it have?

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,

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

01:51:00.990 --> 01:51:05.550
paper, is like a gazelle doesn't need a neurohave cognitive account of a lion.

01:51:05.710 --> 01:51:08.030
It just needs to detect, does the lion see me or not?

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

01:51:13.680 --> 01:51:16.960
don't know if gazelles have husbands and wives, but my extended interests, right?

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

01:51:21.840 --> 01:51:23.280
detailed neurocognitive account.

01:51:23.440 --> 01:51:28.320
In fact, it wouldn't to the extent that having that detailed neurocognitive account doesn't

01:51:28.320 --> 01:51:32.950
afford, you know, m affecting behavior, like what are the affordances, right?

01:51:33.030 --> 01:51:38.950
And so, really, like thinking about these, these are states of the world that then

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

01:51:43.830 --> 01:51:44.790
if not, do another.

01:51:44.870 --> 01:51:45.030
Yes.

01:51:45.190 --> 01:51:46.790
And it's at that level of resolution.

01:51:46.950 --> 01:51:52.550
And I think that exactly what you're describing is very applicable to then

01:51:53.380 --> 01:51:57.620
young students think, okay, what states of the world would there need to be in these

01:51:57.620 --> 01:51:58.100
systems?

01:51:58.180 --> 01:52:00.820
And because what would come follow from them?

01:52:00.980 --> 01:52:04.900
What would an organism that's well designed need to do in response to these?

01:52:05.300 --> 01:52:05.620
Yes.

01:52:05.780 --> 01:52:06.100
Yeah.

01:52:06.820 --> 01:52:12.660
And so just to point out, your gazelle example is literally an example of an

01:52:12.660 --> 01:52:13.620
attention schema.

01:52:13.860 --> 01:52:14.500
Yeah, exactly.

01:52:14.740 --> 01:52:19.620
Because literally the gazelle needs to know how the lion's attention operates.

01:52:19.860 --> 01:52:20.340
Right.

01:52:21.330 --> 01:52:22.290
Yeah, exactly.

01:52:22.450 --> 01:52:24.290
I love there's a jumping spider.

01:52:24.370 --> 01:52:30.210
Um, and then it actually maul it it uh it pretends to be a um uh

01:52:30.370 --> 01:52:34.450
uh prey on another spider's web because it eats other spiders.

01:52:34.610 --> 01:52:40.530
So it has at some level this representation of the representations of the other spiders'

01:52:41.090 --> 01:52:41.490
attention.

01:52:41.730 --> 01:52:42.450
Yeah, yeah.

01:52:42.850 --> 01:52:48.440
So it's a really interesting question When I was just talking about the um

01:52:48.680 --> 01:52:54.520
evolutionary path or where what does and doesn't have this system, I

01:52:54.680 --> 01:52:57.080
talked about vertebrates in specific.

01:52:57.240 --> 01:53:03.160
It's a really interesting question what other lines of or branchy bushes of evolution

01:53:03.160 --> 01:53:07.160
contain similar kinds of solutions, and that nobody knows.

01:53:07.320 --> 01:53:13.130
Uh it would not surprise me if insects have well, we know they have something

01:53:13.130 --> 01:53:16.330
kind of like attention, attention mechanisms.

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

01:53:22.490 --> 01:53:22.890
level.

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

01:53:27.770 --> 01:53:28.650
so complex.

01:53:28.890 --> 01:53:31.050
Uh, does it have these systems?

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

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,

01:53:42.380 --> 01:53:46.140
seeing its big old eyes, and saying, Oh my God, it's conscious.

01:53:46.300 --> 01:53:50.140
Uh and so it gets really hard to separate out one thing from another.

01:53:50.460 --> 01:53:50.860
Yeah.

01:53:51.180 --> 01:53:51.340
Yeah.

01:53:51.420 --> 01:53:54.620
And then there's there's the question of whether groups are conscious.

01:53:54.780 --> 01:54:00.090
So um the philosopher Eric Schwitzgable says, you know, if if materialism is true, then uh

01:54:00.090 --> 01:54:01.690
the United States is probably conscious.

01:54:01.930 --> 01:54:02.170
Yeah.

01:54:02.570 --> 01:54:03.450
I would disagree with that.

01:54:04.810 --> 01:54:05.210
I do too.

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

01:54:10.970 --> 01:54:13.370
groups as having um attention.

01:54:13.530 --> 01:54:17.130
You know, a group can pay attention to some things and not other things.

01:54:17.210 --> 01:54:21.370
Uh, you know, a political coalition will pay attention to the things that are relevant to

01:54:21.370 --> 01:54:22.970
its political interests.

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

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.

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

01:54:37.820 --> 01:54:38.060
forth.

01:54:38.220 --> 01:54:40.060
So um I don't know.

01:54:40.220 --> 01:54:43.980
Maybe maybe maybe groups can achieve a certain kind of consciousness.

01:54:44.060 --> 01:54:45.260
It's certainly intuitive to us.

01:54:45.420 --> 01:54:48.140
We certainly talk about, you know, groups as having a kind of mind.

01:54:48.300 --> 01:54:51.890
We say, you know, Microsoft decided to do this, or the United States did that.

01:54:52.050 --> 01:54:55.410
You know, we talk about world history and you know, you know, uh countries at war.

01:54:55.490 --> 01:54:59.730
We talk about France did this, France believed that, France wanted this, uh, as if France

01:54:59.730 --> 01:55:01.410
was a sentient being.

01:55:01.570 --> 01:55:01.730
Yeah.

01:55:01.890 --> 01:55:02.130
Right.

01:55:02.530 --> 01:55:04.610
So what do you think about it?

01:55:05.010 --> 01:55:08.850
I don't think they have the self-models in the same way.

01:55:09.090 --> 01:55:14.660
I don't just like people talk about plant consciousness, because they say, look, they're

01:55:14.660 --> 01:55:17.860
sophisticated, they're complicated, they actually process information.

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

01:55:22.500 --> 01:55:22.660
way.

01:55:22.820 --> 01:55:23.940
I don't think groups do.

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.

01:55:29.300 --> 01:55:35.140
Take 86 billion of them, have them all hold hands in complicated patterns, and

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

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

01:55:45.170 --> 01:55:51.010
into simulated neurons, and then you build a giant brain, and that giant brain

01:55:51.010 --> 01:55:54.610
would be a brain, and it would too have a consciousness.

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,

01:55:59.700 --> 01:56:00.180
I think.

01:56:00.420 --> 01:56:02.500
But you could in principle do that.

01:56:02.580 --> 01:56:04.180
But I don't think that's what's happening.

01:56:04.260 --> 01:56:07.220
I don't think larger groups uh have that.

01:56:07.780 --> 01:56:13.300
But of course, other theories have very serious problems.

01:56:13.540 --> 01:56:19.540
Like famously the integrated information theory uh has as many people pointed out

01:56:19.620 --> 01:56:24.980
well, if that's true, then a lot of things in this universe are conscious.

01:56:25.390 --> 01:56:30.590
and um, and that has actually forced

01:56:31.550 --> 01:56:37.070
theoreticians who are very committed to what they believe,

01:56:37.310 --> 01:56:42.510
to say, okay, then panpsychism, then I believe it.

01:56:42.750 --> 01:56:47.790
People will say yes, because I believe in the integrated information theory, therefore,

01:56:47.950 --> 01:56:53.550
potatoes are conscious and electrons are conscious, and planet Earth is, and the solar

01:56:53.550 --> 01:56:59.240
system is, And um you get into real serious problems there where then suddenly

01:56:59.240 --> 01:57:03.960
everything is conscious and then it's not clear what that word means anymore.

01:57:04.440 --> 01:57:09.640
So these the this world can get very loopy and very

01:57:09.960 --> 01:57:11.800
fluffy really quick.

01:57:12.280 --> 01:57:12.840
Yeah.

01:57:13.320 --> 01:57:18.440
It is quite bizarre that our minds evolved to find the possibility of electrons being

01:57:18.440 --> 01:57:24.210
conscious more intuitive than the the uh the the possibility of neural mechanisms

01:57:24.210 --> 01:57:29.970
being conscious yeah that's actually really interesting yeah

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

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

01:57:41.490 --> 01:57:47.080
do to do this science um Michael, what do you very

01:57:47.080 --> 01:57:51.240
briefly, um how did you get into this?

01:57:51.560 --> 01:57:57.560
Or or another version of the question is you are sort of uh not

01:57:57.560 --> 01:58:02.840
alone in the wilderness here, but there's as you said, there's this enormous, powerful,

01:58:03.080 --> 01:58:08.970
well-funded ideas and you uh are are sort of saying, hey guys, look,

01:58:09.050 --> 01:58:11.290
it's this other thing, by the way.

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

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

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

01:58:27.610 --> 01:58:32.650
evil empire you're you're the um scrappy uh rebel uh

01:58:33.210 --> 01:58:39.040
yeah I I am often in that role and have been so multiple times

01:58:39.040 --> 01:58:42.880
in my career in different topics within neuroscience.

01:58:43.440 --> 01:58:46.000
I don't particularly enjoy it.

01:58:46.480 --> 01:58:47.360
Why would you?

01:58:47.600 --> 01:58:48.240
I do not.

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,

01:58:52.640 --> 01:58:53.520
but yeah, exactly.

01:58:53.600 --> 01:58:53.840
Yeah.

01:58:54.320 --> 01:59:00.000
I do think and now we really get to very deep

01:59:00.320 --> 01:59:02.720
philosophy of science.

01:59:03.130 --> 01:59:06.170
I think the purpose of science is contribution.

01:59:06.410 --> 01:59:11.930
I do not think the purpose of science is self-aggrandizement or

01:59:12.250 --> 01:59:17.370
finding a brand name or being admired by

01:59:17.370 --> 01:59:23.210
colleagues, um, building an empire, and I think

01:59:24.010 --> 01:59:27.840
probably many people in science.

01:59:28.080 --> 01:59:32.960
And this is more exaggerated as you get to the more successful people.

01:59:33.760 --> 01:59:37.920
Those kinds of motivations tend to drive people's behavior in science.

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,

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

01:59:50.160 --> 01:59:55.040
um positive impression or not, whether it'll give them the accolades they want or not.

01:59:55.370 --> 01:59:58.010
And I really don't want to do that.

01:59:58.330 --> 01:59:59.210
Never have.

01:59:59.690 --> 02:00:05.370
And when I try a new field, I think I see

02:00:05.690 --> 02:00:08.410
insight that should be useful.

02:00:08.490 --> 02:00:09.930
And I want to put it out there.

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

02:00:14.890 --> 02:00:15.290
useful.

02:00:15.370 --> 02:00:16.970
And it never works that way.

02:00:17.210 --> 02:00:18.490
It's always a fight.

02:00:18.650 --> 02:00:20.010
It's always a struggle.

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,

02:00:24.860 --> 02:00:28.460
and the data shows that, and it's such a struggle.

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

02:00:35.660 --> 02:00:37.420
new insight anymore.

02:00:37.660 --> 02:00:42.830
And I've reached exactly that point that apparently everyone wants to be because you know

02:00:42.910 --> 02:00:44.110
I'm established.

02:00:44.590 --> 02:00:45.790
An extinct volcano.

02:00:46.590 --> 02:00:46.750
Right.

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

02:00:51.710 --> 02:00:53.070
sit for the rest of my life.

02:00:53.150 --> 02:00:57.470
And and and that's the moment that I decide I'm not interested.

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.

02:01:02.350 --> 02:01:02.670
Yeah.

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

02:01:08.800 --> 02:01:14.800
right now is this sense that it's hugely

02:01:14.800 --> 02:01:16.480
important for all of us.

02:01:16.720 --> 02:01:19.040
Because it's not just an intellectual question.

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

02:01:23.840 --> 02:01:29.670
transformative event in our species, which is the development of this new thinking

02:01:29.910 --> 02:01:30.790
machine.

02:01:31.110 --> 02:01:34.630
Um, and yet people don't understand the concepts yet.

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,

02:01:40.710 --> 02:01:41.510
so to speak.

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.

02:01:47.190 --> 02:01:47.750
Yeah, yeah.

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

02:01:52.900 --> 02:01:54.500
stuff, I thought, oh, this is cool.

02:01:54.660 --> 02:01:56.900
So um it happens sometimes.

02:01:56.980 --> 02:01:57.540
Yeah.

02:01:58.900 --> 02:02:00.260
Um, likewise.

02:02:00.580 --> 02:02:01.060
Yeah.

02:02:01.220 --> 02:02:04.020
Um, is there any question we should have asked you?

02:02:04.740 --> 02:02:07.300
Oh, not that I can think of now.

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

02:02:12.020 --> 02:02:13.060
keyboard behind you.

02:02:13.300 --> 02:02:13.620
Yes.

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

02:02:19.230 --> 02:02:22.990
reading you, also write kids' books, and you you have a pen name.

02:02:23.150 --> 02:02:26.190
Um, and one one reason is so that kids don't read the wrong book.

02:02:26.270 --> 02:02:32.270
But I love the idea of a precocious kid reading about uh self-model uh neurocognition.

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

02:02:38.270 --> 02:02:38.750
of them?

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

02:02:44.640 --> 02:02:48.720
have the hat of a a kids book author or a musician.

02:02:48.800 --> 02:02:52.800
Um, and maybe it's not entirely afield from what we've been talking about.

02:02:53.280 --> 02:02:56.240
Yeah, I so I definitely have a lot of interests.

02:02:56.480 --> 02:03:00.640
Um, I've been working on these things forever and ever.

02:03:01.120 --> 02:03:07.040
Um, you know, it was always a question do you become a

02:03:07.690 --> 02:03:12.890
writer or a composer on your own time while being a professional neuroscientist?

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?

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.

02:03:22.330 --> 02:03:25.130
So it has to go one way and not the other.

02:03:25.450 --> 02:03:29.850
So that's a very career-defining requirement.

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

02:03:35.660 --> 02:03:36.140
music.

02:03:36.300 --> 02:03:38.620
Uh I have a um a YouTube channel.

02:03:39.020 --> 02:03:39.820
You should check it out.

02:03:39.900 --> 02:03:42.780
It's called Gras Gorilla, all one word.

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.

02:03:47.020 --> 02:03:47.180
Yeah.

02:03:47.580 --> 02:03:52.060
It's um basically a set of tutorial videos on music composition.

02:03:52.300 --> 02:03:52.620
Oh nice.

02:03:52.940 --> 02:03:55.630
So um that's something that I learned a lot about.

02:03:55.710 --> 02:03:58.830
And then I felt like I might as well pass on some knowledge.

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

02:04:05.630 --> 02:04:06.670
ten year range.

02:04:06.830 --> 02:04:08.030
They're they're fun.

02:04:08.510 --> 02:04:14.110
Um I've written some novels more for the adult age range as well.

02:04:14.510 --> 02:04:17.960
And um yeah, it's all it's all good.

02:04:18.200 --> 02:04:21.720
When you get stuck on one thing, it's good to have something to switch to.

02:04:22.040 --> 02:04:22.280
Yeah.

02:04:22.360 --> 02:04:28.120
Well, in in in in light of the previous comments about science, I imagine the kids'

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'

02:04:34.280 --> 02:04:35.000
books too.

02:04:35.400 --> 02:04:36.040
I guess so.

02:04:36.120 --> 02:04:40.890
I mean I think because they're written by me and I have a scientific perspective.

02:04:41.130 --> 02:04:41.770
Yes.

02:04:41.930 --> 02:04:47.290
Uh but I don't think they're meant to be science education books for kids.

02:04:47.450 --> 02:04:49.130
They're they're just adventures.

02:04:49.370 --> 02:04:50.170
Yeah, yeah.

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

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

02:05:00.490 --> 02:05:02.730
Pinsoff thing is like, is this bullshit or not?

02:05:02.960 --> 02:05:03.120
Yeah.

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

02:05:07.680 --> 02:05:11.840
famous, fundamentally is sort of like their bullshit detectors still working, you know, and

02:05:11.840 --> 02:05:13.840
they're just like, this is bullshit, this isn't.

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

02:05:19.520 --> 02:05:24.640
pastures, and the real the the thing that looks right, looks more difficult, a little more

02:05:24.640 --> 02:05:27.840
uncomfortable, not as many people like it or care about it.

02:05:28.000 --> 02:05:28.880
That's what I'm gonna do.

02:05:28.960 --> 02:05:29.680
Yeah, yeah.

02:05:29.890 --> 02:05:30.210
Yeah.

02:05:30.370 --> 02:05:32.050
So I have one book.

02:05:32.530 --> 02:05:37.090
Um it's called the The Last Notebook of Leonardo.

02:05:37.650 --> 02:05:40.850
And it's about a father son adventure.

02:05:41.090 --> 02:05:46.690
And the father is a scientist and he um figures out how to transform

02:05:46.690 --> 02:05:50.690
himself physically into a gigantic orangutan.

02:05:51.700 --> 02:05:57.140
And unfortunately, as a gigantic orangutan, he's no longer allowed in his uh

02:05:57.140 --> 02:05:58.340
apartment complex.

02:05:58.500 --> 02:06:01.700
And so they get kicked out, and then the adventures start.

02:06:01.940 --> 02:06:07.940
And so here's this genius scientist trying to interact with his

02:06:07.940 --> 02:06:11.460
son, uh, and they have their adventures through the world.

02:06:11.620 --> 02:06:17.620
So I think the science infiltrates into the books in in strange

02:06:17.620 --> 02:06:18.020
ways.

02:06:18.340 --> 02:06:19.300
Fantastic.

02:06:19.620 --> 02:06:24.990
Well, um, David, do you have any final No, this was a really

02:06:24.990 --> 02:06:27.150
delightful and and uh wonderful conversation.

02:06:27.230 --> 02:06:30.990
I really appreciate you uh giving us your time and uh and your wisdom.

02:06:31.070 --> 02:06:32.110
Uh this was a blast.

02:06:32.510 --> 02:06:32.910
Thank you.

02:06:33.070 --> 02:06:34.670
Yes, I enjoyed it.

02:06:37.310 --> 02:06:40.030
David, I never know what to say in the outro.

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

02:06:46.100 --> 02:06:49.460
as the listener and you were just listening about consciousness, which means that you're

02:06:49.460 --> 02:06:51.380
still conscious if you're hearing these words.

02:06:51.620 --> 02:06:56.580
And if you continue to be conscious after hearing these words, then you can use that

02:06:56.580 --> 02:07:00.180
consciousness to support Evolutionary Psychology the podcast.

02:07:00.340 --> 02:07:03.780
And how can uh those sentient beings do that, Dave?

02:07:04.180 --> 02:07:09.940
Well, they can um click buttons on a computer which mean um specifically

02:07:10.260 --> 02:07:16.050
support us on Patreon, comment on social media, uh, do a review,

02:07:16.210 --> 02:07:19.810
ask us questions, send us an email or over our social media.

02:07:19.890 --> 02:07:24.210
Um, we'll have a ask me anything episode um in the near future.

02:07:24.850 --> 02:07:26.850
Yeah, though I think you nailed it.

02:07:26.930 --> 02:07:27.570
Those are all the things.

02:07:27.810 --> 02:07:30.050
And even if you're not conscious, just do those things too.

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

02:07:34.130 --> 02:07:37.170
know executing the behaviors, we're gonna be happy.

02:07:37.520 --> 02:07:39.040
That should put that on a t shirt.

02:07:39.280 --> 02:07:40.480
We don't get unconscious or not.

02:07:40.560 --> 02:07:42.560
As long as you're executing the behaviors, we'll be happy.

02:07:42.640 --> 02:07:46.640
And send somebody, David, send uh somebody needs to send you a fanny pack.

02:07:46.960 --> 02:07:49.200
Yes, please send me a fanny pack.

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

02:07:55.280 --> 02:07:58.320
and uh let me know when it's arriving.

02:07:58.640 --> 02:08:00.720
What what's your favorite color, David?

02:08:01.200 --> 02:08:03.840
Uh I like I like green, reminds me of nature.

02:08:04.080 --> 02:08:04.400
Okay.

02:08:04.560 --> 02:08:06.240
Green, how about black?

02:08:06.530 --> 02:08:07.490
Uh I could do black.

02:08:07.570 --> 02:08:10.450
Black goes with everything fashion-wise, so that might be a better choice.

02:08:10.610 --> 02:08:14.370
I can, you know, append it to any outfit uh without it ruining the outfit.

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

02:08:21.010 --> 02:08:22.050
it's 2026.

02:08:22.370 --> 02:08:25.410
Let the uh well, I'm I'm trying to bring fanny packs back.

02:08:25.650 --> 02:08:27.090
I think I'm gonna make them fashionable again.

02:08:27.490 --> 02:08:28.530
That's my master plan.

02:08:28.850 --> 02:08:29.090
Okay.

02:08:29.250 --> 02:08:30.530
Well you heard it here first.

02:08:30.770 --> 02:08:31.170
Yep.

02:08:31.400 --> 02:08:32.040
All right.

02:08:32.760 --> 02:08:34.040
The finger on the pulse.

02:08:34.200 --> 02:08:35.000
See you next week.

02:08:35.240 --> 02:08:36.360
See you next week.