Alok Jha: Consciousness: the hard problem? - Discussion (2/2)

thank you very much to all our speakers you'll notice that I've asked I asked them to speak for a short time as possible when they've admirably kept to that so there's more time for questions I want this we wanted this event to be as much about your questions as possible and as much possible for you to come up questions that they haven't thought of so in a sense what they've done is throw lots of puzzles your way they've not given you lots of answers before we get to that point in the evening I'm just going to ask each of them one question of my own and then it's going to be over to you so take have some time to think about some crazy questions or good questions and I'm going to come to you first and I said at the beginning that it's only the last few decades really that scientists have started to really grapple with this people have been thinking about it for a long time though what what's taken scientists so long to get on to it in a sense actually science has been on about continence for a lot longer and in fact the birth of psychology which started maybe in the end of the 19th century with with William James we've heard about and we'll have learned in an in Germany the central topic for psychology at its inception was consciousness it's the broadest fact about it's the most simple psychological fact we are aware of the world and of ourselves and so it was almost by a kind of historical accident that that due to criticism of the main method of the time which was introspection and in Barrie's been referring to this a little bit about how far can we rely on our own judgments about what it is that we're experiencing this general method was was was cast into suspicion and the behaviorist took over and said ok now we can only really look at what people actually do in response to stimuli so but it was a kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well because as well as criticizing the method then of course the central topic became difficult to study so I think over recent years what's what's happened I mean I started as an undergraduate in the early 90s and and Cambridge and actually turning my cell there again was one of the few people talking about consciousness when I was there it was still not really allowed to be studied but what one thing that's happened is we have access to these wonderful new brain imaging things they don't give you an answer taken very literally it's just as just the same as phrenology you know you can say okay let's look for where free will is in the brain or where the experience of red is in the brain it's not in a place and one shouldn't be misled by just seeing hot spots light up it's more complicated than that nonetheless it's an invaluable tool for beginning to unravel what goes on while people are having different kinds of experience it gives us a a way of correlating what is what people are experiencing with what's going on in their brains and correlations and not explanations but they can incremental e grow towards becoming explanations as this kinds of things that we take as correlations gets more sophisticated so the first start might be to say okay let's look for an area that lights up when we're conscious versus not conscious let's say there's plenty of experiments you can do where if you show a face to one eye in a house to the other then your conscious experience will oscillate between Jason and house and the subject can say what they are experiencing any one time the actual sensory information is the same and then you can start to look at what parts of the brain correlate with the experience of a house versus face and that gives you a first start and then you might start to ask well what about how different regions connect together how do the connections between different brain regions correlate with whether you're conscious and that begins to be a little bit of an explanation because now one of the facts about our phenomenal experience is that it's bound together so we don't experience when we look at an object we don't experience its color and its shape separately we experience it together as a unified object within a unified conscious scene so there's the idea that the neural activity underpinning that should also be bound together somehow so we can start to look at things like synchrony and there was a lot of excitement about synchrony but now of course we go it one step further because synchrony by itself might not explain everything and indeed there are lots of experimental cases for example in absence epilepsy where people become the unconscious their brains are hyper synchronized there's too much synchrony going on and they're not conscious so we can get to yet more sophisticated concepts about how networks of brain regions interact this is the kind of thing we're working on at Sussex we'll say people like Juliet and own Ian in Wisconsin trying to come up with mathematical ways of characterizing how systems could capture formal descriptions of what an experience is like and then put them to the test using the new methods that we have so that's probably a bit longer answer but that would be my answer Barry oh we there's been a bit of a beating up a philosophy going on here I'm trying to encourage you to sort of come back from that if fighting and philosophers as you say have been on to this for a very very long time and the ideas that change as evidence comes along and we don't think in the same way as Descartes used to about mind-body dualism and with this sort of technological advance that neuroscience is giving you about the brain how does philosophy sort of take that into account and then come up with new ideas that push things on well I think it's interesting because one of the nice things about the rise of neuroscience especially cognitive neuroscience that's looking at experience and looking at conscious states is that it has systematically ignored what philosophers have said and the way they've categorized and described the problems in the past that's incredibly refreshing because they're coming up with their own terms their own distinctions their own theoretical frameworks and actually it's quite liberating because philosophers have this idea of saying we thought about it very hard we've now understood certain things are conceptually impossible it's conceptually impossible said Vic and Stein to experience a pain and not know whose pain it is by experience a pain then I know it's mine that's just conceptually required but of course Chris and and others here have uncovered patients with right parietal damage who've got something called alien hand where a patient might say this this arm doesn't belong to me whose arm is it you might ask they might say well it's yours to the doctor or it's my husband now when sometimes when they can feel since stations in the hand if you can prick the hand with a pin you can say is there pain and they say yes and you say is it your pain no whose pain is it I don't know so something that big ensign thought couldn't even be thought is actually part of the world of patients with this kind of sad and disruptive pathology so that's making us see that it's not enough for an experience to be yours that you experience it you also have to claim ownership of it you have to say it is my experience not just there is experience and Chris can enlighten us as well about people who have thoughts going through their minds and we tended Descartes tender to think that thoughts where what you identified as yourself I think therefore I am but there are patients who again with certain kinds of neural damage will say I'm having thoughts but they're not mine someone is putting thoughts into my head now they're not hearing voices very different they're they're having thoughts and they're not theirs now what that shows you is that again it's not enough just for thought to be taking place in a mind there has to be such a thing as laying claim to it or having ownership of it so the sense of ownership of your limbs of your experiences of your thoughts is an extra dimension to going into what it is to being a self or to being a person or to being a conscious mind and I think philosophers had not seen that in just one small feather example in my own case I mean the heart I work on taste and flavor and you know the hard problem of taste would be consigns and kinnor Oh science or physics describe tell us exhaustively what it is to have the taste of a lemon or the taste of a very fine Burgundy no no alas but but and I also want to know what is it like to taste these grape vines and I'll never know by reading anyone because they can't tell me so um they're nevertheless you might say well there's the hard problem so I shouldn't pay attention to neuroscience on the contrary because we now know that people's ordinary view of their own taste experience is completely false faulty they think they taste with the tongue in fact very little of what you get when you taste melon or mango or peach or parsley or mint comes from the tongue it comes largely from smell and it comes from the orders rising from the mouth to the nose and passing back out through the nose in all faction now the fact that what we're calling a taste is in fact our smell on any aftertaste is an after smell but is experienced as if in the mouth shows us that our experience is misleading so if you're going to understand how what we call tasting works you're going to understand what flavour is you're going to have to know exactly how it gets concocted and constructed from smell taste touch many other things and and the neuroscience of flavor perception is actually fascinating and enlightening in one sense also until experiments showed otherwise there was a sense that consciousness is something that either is off or on and it's one level or nothing yeah and clearly that's not the case in our philosophers who have said this in print Colin McGinn who very famous philosopher in this debate who said consciousness is so difficult we can never explain it can't be explained our brains are actually too limited to explain the problem of consciousness he nevertheless tells us that consciousness is like a light it's either on or off but actually the flickering of light and the dimming of light is much more inaccurate about what consciousness I mean we know that consciousness sometimes it's sort of diminishes that state between waking and dreaming you're you're half awake you're half aware things are in and out of consciousness whether or not consciousness is on or off and also Anil talked about the fact that everything seems to come together well there's a there's a an experience of everything being unified in consciousness but again some very nice work by Tony Marcel who's featuring largely in this way should be here again Simone's working working on the disunity of consciousness the fact that actually if you test people and get their reactions to particular stimuli and you make them react by speech or by gesture or by blinking you will get sometimes three different or two different answers answers will go in different directions consciousness may not be a single thing even though it appears that way Chris you talk to your work is involved in actually trying to find not maybe uses for understanding this but to try and work out through experiments a way of understanding consciousness and would you say that the what you and colleagues have been doing shows that different states of consciousness different amounts of consciousness and awareness --is are perhaps behind some of the psychiatric or psychological things don't exist in the population very difficult question certainly in the case of Barry was talking about with the alien arm where the person says this is no let's put another thing another we've talked mostly about some negative things but you can actually get positive things so one of them famous ones is the out of the body experience where patients and even other people experience their body floating up and looking down on them or something like that it has recently been shown that this effect seems to be specifically related to a particular bit of the brain so that people with epilepsy who actually have a focus in this bit of the brain so that they get abnormal activity here when the abnormal activity occurs then they have an algal body experience and this seems to be a dissociation between different representations of the body it causes we obviously represent we have different which relates to the unity of consciousness that we've just been talking about so you can you have a representation of where your body is in relation to you where it is in relation to the room and all sorts of other aspects which critically has to be all linked together to give you a unifying situation activity in this particular the brain seems to disrupt this unity and you start feeling your body and being in different places at the same time now interestingly it's interesting that after this was discovered then people suddenly realize that they create out of the body experience in perfectly normal people like you and me using essentially virtual reality and the original version was a so-called rubber hand illusion where you have your hand is here but you can't see it and there's a rubber hand here which you can see and the psychologist ropes the rubber hand and the real henselt aeneas lee and within 90 seconds or so you suddenly feel this rubber hand is my hand and you forget about the real hand and you can if you then hit the rubber hand with a hammer people get very upset and they finish it's now been done for the whole body so if you're wearing your virtual reality goggles and you're actually seeing a picture from a camera which is behind you you can replace your source or two meters a hint so the whole is in a sense what Barry was saying our whole conscious experience is much more fragile than we realize and this is maybe why philosophers have always been wrong because they've relied on sitting in their armchairs and thinking about what it's like I'm not realized how much they're being misled by this but I would agree this is this is why perhaps neuroscientists and cross was get on so well together because we're discovering all these new and impossible things but I wanted to ask Barry because he was saying how can science possibly ever possibly explain subjective experience and I have thought what it can do is it can explain how subjective experience is possible in the same way that you might have a quite a good scientific account of how it's possible to learn a language but it doesn't tell you what language you actually learn couldn't you have an explanation of how subjective experiences possible it doesn't need to tell you what the subjective experience actually is I think we would have left something out we wanted to know I mean it was interesting to put it back the other way you said well we can share our experience because we can tell each other about our experiences but one of the infuriating things is just this this thing that happens to some of us and from time to time and whew some people here you go to the doctor and you say I've got a pain but there's pain that's in my side and they say what kind of pain is it is it burning is it itching is it sort of throbbing is it is a while it's kind of like that but and as you keep trying to explain what you really want them to know is it's like this you really want them to experience it and then and then you feel the doctor would say ah okay now I know what to give you now I know how to react you can't there's always something that eludes the the describer and something that eludes the person listening or even studying from the outside and I would have thought yes you can say there is subjective experience going on perhaps but you won't have given a full and comprehensive explanation of that state until you know what it's like to be in that state and maybe that's something that will just elude you but in your wine tasting example essentially what you're saying we may not have the right words to describe our experience to somebody else but the poled beauty of wine tasting is that you together under the Cabrio you get better and better at telling each other what it's like I think that's encouraging and I hope that's true and I think we have the illusion that's true I think I think that's right but but look I mean the sense of sharing that I worry about is the fact that just as in wine lovers but in young couples you know when they're together and they're having a great time and one looks into the other's eyes and says did you feel it too the other will say yes but that's just false it's nice to say that it's just false going to make a comment versa inappropriate time to mail it to follow daily after that but getting back to where you were before a bad on the the limits of subjective of describing subjective experiences and always leaving something out I think that might conflate two things so I mean one of the great virtues I think or philosophy is of course tears keeping us all honest and doing this an analytical conceptual hygiene so we keep on track the other thing is the phenomenological tradition in in philosophy which of course you have really involved in giving us the better language to actually describe what it is we're trying to explain so her Searle another point Ian people out I think underappreciated in in this field we always focus on Descartes and on that that side of it but the neuroscientists among us need to have a better set of experience retarget what is it that we're trying to explain what's the experience of time passing like and I think we can get quite a long way with that in fact and and the difficulty of verbally describing stuff isn't just limited to conscious experiences I'd have difficulty giving an exhaustive verbal description of the English coastline but I can still make measurements and begin to understand what it's like and so the other worry is is there still something left out given that we can do as well as we can using language to describe something there may well be something left out but it's that really a problem because the worry there is that we're expecting too much from an explanation an explanation is not going to be an instantiation we don't expect that a description or a scientific account of something that's not an experience should generate that expertise we then expect a model of the hurricane to be windy but somehow we still expect maybe a bit more from an explanation of consciousness that it will tell us what it's like to taste the wine I wonder why we asked that much more I think I know why and that's because we know there's more because we experienced it I mean when when you talk about the coastline it's true you can't give an exhaustive description of the coastline but you also can't know everything about the coastline whereas when you're talking about subjective experience if you're trying to get me to talk about it and I'm trying to convey it to you I know I'm leaving something out because I know there's still something there I can't get across and I know with certainty it's there whether I know exactly what it's like myself is the thing that we should be worried about because I think we're very misled but look here's the thought that Tom Tom Nagel had the philosopher Tom Nagel had long before the hard problem became the fashionable phrase when we think of other animals and we think you know are they conscious well maybe we'll never know but but we think if an animal is conscious there's something it's like to be that animal and that's the thing that we can't know perhaps by studying it in in other different ways we can know a lot about it and Chris is right I mean the answer to Tom niggles question what is it like to be a bat is boring and myopic but um but that doesn't still capture what it's like for the bat doesn't get it all and we're looking at the bats point of view from our much richer point of view isn't it that's why it's boring to answer to the bat we're probably it's probably too intense no what we experience if if you do the other way around now look we'll let's not get bogged down in the subjective experience business for now let's ask the audience some questions and see if they're interested if you want to ask more about the subjective experience please do now there are microphones going around so please wait for the microphone before and before you start speaking of those none will be able to hear you we'll go for someone at the front here and then here as well the Moog will will go towards the back as well yeah question directly related to the animal issue that you just brought up and the earlier issue about communication and do you think consciousness because you're talking about communicating it has to do with sort of language or communication to be able to think of it in those terms or would there be consciousness without having a sort of you know like a language try thing to think about it in and how far back like in evolutionary terms like in social animals say how much is conscious there versus not and in animals that communicate with each other versus not like how far back does this hypothetical zombie person go you know in the visionary line I would say I think human language is clearly very special and no other animal has it but I didn't but I think whatever the aspect of consciousness I'm talking about which is this ability to think about other people's points of view experiences and so on came first and it was because of that ability that language suddenly became something that was incredibly useful and that was a pressure for language to evolve so I think so I think the language comes second what we hadn't really talked about is different levels of consciousness so in a sense what I'm talking about is something like self-consciousness knowing what I know and being able to talk about it and again that may be particularly highly developed in humans but I guess there's another kind of consciousness which is simply being aware without knowing that you're aware and the nice example of this is an experiment by Donaldson Schuler where the sort of I mean he did a real experiment with the thought experiment would be that you're reading a very tedious but like principles of brain imaging bifurcate via a town and after about five minutes you suddenly realize that you weren't actually reading the book anymore you were thinking about what's going to happen in the evening and that's of course interesting because you were obviously conscious when you were not think reading the book but you were not aware that you were not doing what you were supposed to be doing so that's already a higher level of consciousness where you're thinking about what it is you're conscious of and this brings in this very interesting idea that refrigerator problem that you don't you only you can only explore consciousness by asking people about it so you never know when the light is still on when you close the fridge door there's a there's a question here and then we'll take some more - I'll come back to you and maybe animals have this lower but there's anyone else sort of further back okay great please this is a first off a call type of position but I want to put it to all of you and it may sound mystical the new-agey but I don't mean it that way I wonder if we're if we you all are making some sort of fundamental error or shortsightedness akin to the heliocentric or geocentric position until we realize that the earth is not the center of the universe and when we did or didn't things fell into place that the brain is necessary but not sufficient that there's some shortcoming like the new-agey view that consciousness is out there like the ether and our brains are just receivers other transmitters so that is a problem is a problem hard because you're missing something is sensual akin to the geocentric heliocentric shift could be could be but I'm not I'm not betting on that I mean when people tell me consciousness is out there and we're picking it up that seems to me to be a popular view among people who are so stuck with the problem that they are looking in new places for an answer and they say things like this they say well look physicists say the world is made of you know matter but matter itself is very puzzling and very complicated and when we look at the quantum level it's very complicated so maybe consciousness is sort of suffused through the world in this complicated way but that's just replacing one mystery with - so we've got complicated consciousness and we got complicated matter and I'm afraid that that view attracts Nobel prize-winning scientists in physicists in particular in Cambridge at the end of their days they tend to say I've been very clever and I've solved lots of problems and there's this consciousness problem and they just haven't had clever enough people to do it so let me you think about it I don't think looking at more sort of surrounding puzzles about physical phenomena is going to get at it because I do think there is something which for all its mystery seems very local and very rooted to a person and to a creature and if we don't find something with the creature I don't think we'll find the answer just just to add quickly to the question here you know sometimes I sit and think sometimes I just sit there can be consciousness without an awful lot going on in it but remember that everything that happens in consciousness depends a lot on what's happening before and what will happen after I mean what goes on at the moment of consciousness depends on much that goes on outside it and language is one of those things cultures and other social relations so an awful lot of the conscious experience cannot be got out by just looking at the moment you're going to have to look at what infuses it and what structures it and what shapes it and that's where I think we will get into the wider world okay there's a question here but Jason if there's a he would go microphone that's that I saw some hands up here yeah maybe you can come up here I'm coming to you guys as well are we finding it difficult to define consciousness because it doesn't exist now data like if you a prophecy consciousness is simply an emerging property or function of extreme complexity now you couldn't give a dog a bad name and call that reductionism but can you think of a good argument I'm not you tomorrow given why that proposition should not be true I want to go but I want him to answer first I kind of half a green half totally disagree with you and it's that it is it I think it's a premise if you're going to be interested in studying conscience you take it as a premise that it exists and otherwise there's nothing to actually do and in fact that there's a that it's sometimes it doesn't exist so if we didn't fall into a dreamless sleep every night we may not have ever realised that consciousness was something that had a particular physical substrate now when you say something like a proposition it's just a joke I think you said justice were an emergent property of a very very complex system I think that's quite an interesting idea the problem is what exactly do you mean by complex what exactly do you mean by emergent how do these things actually start to connect the things that we can observe within the brain to properties of phenomenology and in fact one recent line of thought and one of the things that got me interested in taking on this consciousness thing about 10 12 years ago was some work done by my old boss Gerald Edelman who was a Nobel laureate and then started working on conscious but I think did so in a sensible way wasn't he wasn't a physicist he was a biologist immunologist and immunologist and he with with timoni started to think okay what is it about an experience what's special about experience one of the things that's special about experience is that it combines a vast amount of different differentiated information every experience is one among a vast repertoire of possible experiences with unity at least at some sort there may be dis unities as well and how do we describe that kind of system where there's lots of independent things and some dependent things and that turns out to be within the remit of complexity theory as its as its studied in mathematics so we can start to take some of these concepts which on the face of it are equally vague and wooly as consciousness maybe or complex the emergence start to pin them down quantitatively and start to think how you can build explanatory bridges from one to the other and emergence is another one that we're looking at as well how actually do we measure the degree of emerges and and what's that got to do with the kinds of things that we experience so in a sense I I do agree but I think we have to be very precise about doesn't rule out by any means the the standard correlational approach of looking for what goes on in the brain how that relates to different sorts of experiences I was puzzled by your question because you told us maybe it doesn't exist and then you told us what it was so I mean either you don't think there is anything which case we don't need an explanation or you think it is something emerging at another level of complexity from from already rather complex phenomena you said is there a logical argument against that well you know Aristotle said don't ask the poet for a proof don't ask the mathematician for a poem I mean you have to find the right tools for explanation now when you've got a whole lot of complex fibers firing in the brain and then you talk about the complexity of the patterns and the dynamics of them you've got more complexity and then if you mathematize them you can describe it you can describe the dynamical processes mathematically still a little short of knowing what it's like to be you know asking that question maybe there's nothing it's likely you maybe you are a zombie but there's there's I think nought I think there is something it's like to be you and I think that's not going to fall out naturally of the complexity but it's certainly true that if you didn't have this level of complexity going on you probably couldn't ask the question you just asked okay we have question here but I'd like to take a question from the back third of the audience there so if there's someone close to you maybe maybe you there okay now here my name is charles ross from the brain 9 forum and in studying the problem of a hard problem of experience coming up learn something from the whole subject of learning because surely when we are born we aren't conscious or we're not conscious of very much yeah and as we grow up sailing we become conscious immoral or amoral so surely as conscious is something we learn and secondly um it was my hard work learning to drive and I had to do that I think we all had to do that very consciously when I Drive home tonight thinking of what you've all been saying I'll be doing on the walkway I think we normally call autopilot so I wonder we've got the terminology er there's a bit wrong between consciousness and unconsciousness awaken asleep because if I want autopilot I'm not exactly conscious there hopefully I'm more sleep I I think that's absolutely right and that's why there are levels of consciousness I mean some people would say that when you're on autopilot you automate or you have very complicated techniques to learn and driving you're consciously aware and attending all the time but then eventually you you you you you automotive and you can do a lot of things without thinking about them now how conscious are you conscious enough that you have to react very quickly when something grabs your attention if you were completely out you wouldn't see the lorry that hits you but luckily things impress themselves on you at certain times as you're driving home and you react so I do think that the ability to have your attention captured means there's at least a minimal level of monitoring which which is important the learning thing is interesting I have a I have a friend who is a psychologist now professor of psychology who claims he wasn't conscious till he was 14 maybe not uh I don't know what that was like but so so I think that's a terminological thing because when people talk about consciousness not appearing until late I think they mean those sorts of things talking about knowing what conscious state you're in or even being able to reflect on it you see here's something philosophically we should concentrate on being in a conscious mental state is one thing knowing what mental state you're in is another that requires a feat of phenomenological taxonomy to be able to correct classify your state right now am i feeling is it anxiety or exhilaration don't know maybe it's sort of between you can you can be in states where it's quite difficult to tell how you should classify them but you know they're going on so I think being in a mental state one thing thinking about reflecting on and classifying it as another and that comes late surely surely that something that's acquired does a Russian psychologist called Michaela $0.06 Michaela something like that I think is great and he studies this this condition called called flow which is um which is when we are engaged maybe the taking your driving example to the extreme we're engaged in an activity and we're so engaged in it we lose all reflexive contact with this activity and one of my colleagues in America when I was living there used to claim exactly he said I'm unconscious when I'm driving home and you obviously think he doesn't really mean that what he probably means he's not reflectively aware of what he's doing but he's not unconscious by any means now we can start to look at what the different things are that differentiate being reflectively aware of something and being in this state of flow and there are very specific brain mechanisms and brain networks that that if you like it almost anti-correlated so when you're very very reflexively aware Conte and looking very much into yourself and what your experience is like then you're less in a state of flow and there's a balance between what's happening inside the brain so these things are empirically interrogate herbal I think okay now there is a question over here I think but I want to come and get a question from you guys up there and I can't actually see anyone so I can only see a sort of hand so whoever's got the microphone just pick someone up there and get ready and Jason do you mind picking some of them over here whoever's got a question over here let's go for you first the defining features of consciousness it seems to me is that it's meaningful on on all sorts of levels when science cognitive science approaches the study of consciousness it usually does so through the kind of notion of information information has meaning but it's not quite the same as meaning so is there a way I wondered get to neurologically scientifically to questions about meaning or is this the purveyor of philosophy well in information theory is becoming increasingly useful in in neuroscience that that's right and I think as you alluding to information theory itself doesn't necessarily have any meaning it's really about the reduction of uncertainty in a system it's a very simple thing and when shannon developer's information theory really about the capacity of a channel to reduce to carry something with a given level of uncertainty the meaning only comes in when we as observers see what's being transmitted from one place to another and apply meaning to it so there is there is a gap there but on the other hand one of the one of the founding concepts really throughout cognitive science psychology and philosophy of mind is that of intentionality so that our conscious experiences always seem to be about something and whether it's something to do with ourselves or something in the world and this is certainly a core feature of what it seems like to have a conscious experiences now I don't have a good answer that how one connects these two things together how one might use concepts that that derive from something like information theory to say why conscious experiences seem to be intentional but they're certainly informative in the sense that the experiences that we have reduced an awful amount of uncertainty about the kinds of experiences we could have so that carries a lot of meaning just just just wanted my scientific colleagues to be on the spot for a minute or two but um you could be asking two questions so let me just try try either one one you buy meaning you could mean significant so there are certainly events that are significant for us and it's quite hard to say what that is but I think even in neuroscience you could you could have some something to say about that especially if you believe there's an emotional component to certain experiences when you see the face of a familiar person you can have an emotional response that's very much part of the recognition and engagement of them as a familiar and probably friendly face and even people who then have damage to the fusiform face area and and lose some of their ability to recognize faces can still have a skin conductance reaction when seeing a face so significance might come from emotional staining or gilding of some experience that might be part of significance but in dreaming has significance for us in the sense that victim Stein was very good about this he said in criticizing Freud he said Freud always wanted to explain why things turned up in our dreams but what we actually want is to know how the dream ends we feel there's a kind of significance there that's always just out of reach and that were aiming for and and Vic and Stein wanted us not to lose sight of certain experiences like the sense of wonder and fascination which even if we could explain the skin conductance reaction wouldn't quite capture why it's so significant he's got this lovely example he said I Vic and Stein talks about visiting a doctor a family friend and he was watching the two children playing in the garden and they put a live fly in the head of a doll bury it underground and run away laughing why does that raise the hairs in the back of our neck now he's right that that's kind of spooky and he wanted to say even if you knew everything that was going on in the body you won't explain the kind of stuff wonder or the fascination the or of that I think that's right that's quite a good observation the other thing you might mean is word meaning so Anil is right that if we talk about intentionality that's meant to be an easy problem of consciousness we're meant to have theories about the causal contact between ourselves and certain objects such that causal covariance when I'm in a certain state and it's correlated with the presence of an object that makes that state about the object but there's another aspect to say learning a language and that's hearing words with meaning so just now the words I'm using seem to get straight through to you right into the mind uninvited to kind of affect you and upset you or move your interest or whatever because they're immediately recognizable but if I use a word you don't know if I I don't know I'd say to people do you know what the word preached means some of you say no it's just like a sound so when you hear a word with meaning again that concern says it's as if meaning seems to be all there at once in the mind as if the significance of it's completely there at the front of the mind and that's very difficult that phenomenology is difficult to explain even if you know what the word is about so maybe these are the things you mean by significance or meaning quick can I just I mean just cause you brought up the thing about not recognizing exam with his face but still having the emotional response you can actually get the opposite syndrome called Capgras delusion where the person says my wife has been in replaced by an impostor and the explanation here is that you know you can you your fusiform face area is working fine so you can see this looks like your wife but the system that brings you this emotional recognition bit has failed so it looks just like my wife but it can't be doesn't mean the same must be an impostor like five seconds I'm hoping there's a question up there somewhere wherever you are yeah okay I have a David Chen here I'd like to just it's slightly rambley but in physics you can measure temperature temperature is the vibration of molecules if you go down another level the molecules vibrate but they also have an energy level due to the electrons around an atom go down another level into quantum theory each level of electron has an energy level I wonder whether by using an all-embracing term like consciousness that we are not segregating different levels and the reason why and the question I want to ask is most Buddhists believe only 3% of the world are conscious clearly they're using consciousness in a different sense but I know I personally do meditate and I know when I am in a meditation state I appear I'll feel like being a different level of consciousness so a question is are we using this term into an encompassing way and should we really look at different levels or maybe different words for different levels constant temperature versus quantum energy well there's a good point which I wanted to raise error actually there are levels of consciousness and this is a almost a semi defined thing now and if experiments to show to exist in different levels well maybe well you could talk a bit about some of those experiments they're under the conditions that we sometimes have to examine yeah I think actually just leading on from that the tradition of Buddhism is very interesting and the Dalai Lama actually spoke it so one of the main neuroscience meetings about seven years ago to audience of thirty thousand neuroscientists in Washington DC and he's engaged in a program in which very very highly experienced meditators are taking into to brain imaging sensors precisely because they're having different kinds of experiences so it's important to recognize just as with things like out-of-body experiences just as with people who have interesting and disruptive psychiatric conditions things like deep meditative state a phenomenally real for those for those people and and it's interesting to know what's going on that is a different level if you like of consciousness and now we can begin to to sort of extend on from that with some maybe more systemic explanations in anaesthesia gradually changing people's levels of consciousness under various different kinds of anesthetics the question of what's the right level to look whether you go right down into the the electrons and the super strings or whatever is a very difficult question to answer and I think in all honesty we're still struggling with what would be the right level but for my money it's going to be somewhere between neurons and lots of neurons Kristian harloff is that no I I mean there are different aspects of level I mean I think this is a very interesting point I did and I would agree entirely if it's somewhere between neurons and lots of neurons but the there's levels of consciousness in the sense that you can be highly awake and vigilant and probably have very narrow focus on the world and you can be sleepy which is much wider focus on the world and you can be asleep and I have no focus on the world at all but so that's one aspect of level and so characters used to talk about something called clouding of consciousness which is again a an abnormal reduction of this level of consciousness but the other level we just touched upon was you can be aware and then you can be aware that you're aware so should you call that meta consciousness and probably what we're talking about is ability to be aware that we're aware that we're aware also then what about like comas and persistent vegetative States these are very different states of consciousness well then that's an interesting question out of thought in locked-in syndrome I mean that the the key question is it when someone is in a coma are they actually conscious but unable to communicate in any way and that's a very important clinical problem which very very imaging and other techniques may be beginning to address in locked-in syndrome I would see this as that they this is someone who is unable to move anything except say maybe an eye I look and there's a famous case of someone who actually wrote a novel using this means of communication so you I would argue this person is their state of consciousness is just like ours would be in this position where we can't actually move so I don't think that that's actually a different kind of consciousness and the interesting question for the clinician is how you decide how you discover can you discover that someone is fully conscious who is unable to respond in any way and one solution to this was to try you know say to present words and say this then measure their brain activity and say this person is the brain is responding to these words therefore they must be conscious but of course we know from studies with normal people that you can respond to words without being aware that you're seeing words and the best in my opinion the best results that have been obtained so far to cope with this problem is actually to say we're using the brain imaging not to ask the question is there a marker of consciousness we're using it to give the person a means of communicating so they can't move their finger but they can change the activity of their brain in a certain region this is basic the technique that's used you say to the person imagine you're playing tennis and when you do this without any movement at all you can see but characteristic sort of activity in the brain and this can be measured so you can then use that as a communication system and say I'm going to ask you a series of questions when the answer is yes you mentioned you're playing tennis and when the answer is no imagine something else and I think there are now two cases in the world where this has actually worked what is interesting to me is this is actually saying the only way we know some of these conferences if they can communicate with us these are people have sinned homazooma Chrysostom vegetative state yeah well it's a good question so this is the famous work by Adrian Owen and colleagues where he's asking people to respond but if you ask Adrian Owen do you think the people in persistent vegetative state are in states of consciousness just like ours except this is the only way they can communicate he's inclined to say no and therefore to mark a difference from the locked-in patient and and to say it may be more like someone who's hypnotized you know is your name John yes where you don't think of them as truly they are but they are able to answer yes or no questions and and that would be important to know there was something going on but it leaves all the moral questions open is that enough of a level of consciousness for you to keep that person alive indefinitely if that was what they had I mean I said to Adrian why don't you ask them if they are conscious and he said they'd think I was crazy so but I would like to ask them that but but nonetheless he says quite rightly he doesn't ask that because he has to check whether their answer is intelligible and he can only do that if he knows the answer so he can check whether the yes or no is correct I'll just quickly following on that this I think these experiments are very good and and when you get a positive response from them that can be very meaningful if you ask somebody to imagine playing tennis for 30 seconds and then you see the relevant part of the brain doing its stuff at 30 seconds that's very strong evidence that at least akin they can engage in that voluntary imaginative activity but of course we're still relying on their ability to understand language in this case and to exercise volition both of these things may be quite disturbed in conditions like the vegetative state again because it's likely to be a very different kind of consciousness from from the locked-in or from from our waking consciousness so there's actually very recent line of work I think is promising which is coming out of Steven Laureus creeping in Belgium where you you use these transcranial magnetic stimulation devices which at some point will probably be made illegal but what you do is you basically put a very very strong and brief pulse of electromagnetic energy into a part of the brain and watch what happens next and it's great I've done it and what you find is that in four people in the waking State if you if you bang them with a bit of TMS and then you record what goes on you see a very differentiated pattern of activity the TMS pulse wanders all around the cortex for quite a long time this also happens when people are dreaming it doesn't happen when you're under general anesthesia it doesn't happen when you're in dreamless sleep and people have been recently applying this to cases of vegetative state and noticing that for those patients where you saw a similarly kind of complex reverberation of the TMS pulse those are the patients that go on to recover into some form of minimal consciousness or fully recover and in this case you don't know whether they were conscious at the time but it's an incredibly valuable prognostic marker and one that doesn't rely on them being able to understand language or follow it so that's another approach well let's have some more quick questions is one here and we want to go through one at the back there and then another one up there but that side is possible so why don't you go first yeah how's interested to know in the course of the evening move in Spokane a lot of times things are coming up about other sorts of input so we're talking a lot about brain imaging and the wonderful new techniques but at the same time against that it's always coming up in body moon is what happens the other end what happens to the other end of the nervous system and what I'd like to ask the panel is one of the things that I noticed on the bomb for this talk was can we solve the whole whole problem of consciousness with neuroscience and I found myself thinking what's or techniques can they imagine for the future that would marry looking at the activity in the brain with also looking at motor activity because it seems to be so key and there's only so much you can do static in the scanner I've been in one and it's not like me alive you know I mean I absolutely agree with you these these brain scanners are wonderful but you're lying on your back they're very loud they're very noisy you can't move you see just a little thing in front of your eyes it's incredibly limiting and the the role of the body in structuring our conscious experience maybe being a necessary condition for it I think has been overlooked William James when he was talking about consciousness he always he talked about our experience of the body it's always the same old body always there all the time but it's of course an essential component of our experience or being a self so being a self is not just being able to recall what I did last week or last month and it's also about the experience of ownership of a particular body and how it moves in an environment how it reacts to motor commands and motor signals and we heard a little bit already from from Chris about how this experience of body ownership which seems so fundamental can be distorted and manipulated by rubber hand illusion by patients here who experience this ownership of body parts or even of their whole body or false ownerships of other body parts and and so on so Sussex as well we're doing some some work with you go quickly where we're looking at how the signals from deep within the body might underlie not only our experience of emotions that's one thing that's clearly very important our body is the ground for our experience of emotions but also experience of the outside world but depending on when the heart beats we will perceive the external world slightly differently so I think there's a lot to be done in terms of bringing the body back into the heart of cognitive science and technologically what we need it the ability to combine brain imaging with being able to move freely around in different kinds of environments and we're still lacking that if an EEG which is a another form of brain imaging can be applied when you're moving around and I just need to advertise that my friends in Denmark have apparently developed an app for the mobile phone which gives you real-time source reconstruction from 14 electrodes as you wander about just so we can ask any questions and more questions because there's only a few minutes left why don't we get a few questions at once so there was someone here and hopefully there someone up there as well so why don't you both you go first then you ask and then we'll get the panel to answer whatever they over the yeah I just want to quickly say just upon what you were just talking about consciousness being in various different degrees that truly really the only true unconscious would be when you're dead you know be the owner and then everything else is is somewhere in between with you're asleep or not but moving onto that is really what what's what's the key thing I think it was whether consciousness can be explained or not is it actually hard or ease it was an easy problem is it an easy way for me to describe how I look or how I grew up or how I developed DNA can I explain that to you no I can't as a natural my DNA built up I think if you look at consciousness in the same way as being a giant flowchart of decision making it maybe one day explainable in the same way as DNA is in that it's it's a code or it's a way of dealing with the environment around us and reacting to it okay that's some of the point from there well the same theme of levels of consciousness consciousness you could say that it is not like anything to be wrong it might be like might feel like something starting more to be an ant or a chicken and maybe you're almost on to us you could say I had a dolphin now I feel fairly conscious but can any of you answer my challenged is there anything that is like to be more conscious than the human being is there a maximum level of consciousness and be like okay maximum level and then and then what was there something here yep and yeah I once had a friend who told me that and she thought she was weird because she thought all the time she thought that other people went didn't go around constantly thinking about things and narrative in their heads and that maybe when he talked about things like this ruptor thoughts that's what came to mind I thought well we're unreliable witnesses when it comes to describing what's going on in our own heads we only know what other people tell us when it comes to judging what's normal so how do we draw that line between something that's passive just having a human consciousness human mind and things that are deviant or things like having a split personality how do we how can we ever really tell the difference okay now I said there's only really one more one final one you've got one Jason Hey yes yep go for it I was just wondering do we really need to understand consciousness I mean it obviously it brings up an interesting debate but is there really any application of this sort of this research and thinking rah okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna pass from Krista and it will take whichever ones you want from those last few Cris or maybe last one first I guess well the I mean the understanding consciousness we've mentioned one sort of practical application which is to deal with people in comas and whether they're conscious or not I guess one of the things that's emerging is that we're actually rather bad at knowing about our own conscious experiences so if we understood it better we might get better at introspection and the end I would therefore believe also at communication which would be a good thing and maybe that's where the more consciousness question could emerge from there of course when I was a child of the 60s I read um acts Lee's doors of perception and Heaven and Hell where he was thinking that he believed at that time that you could expand consciousness by taking miss Curran and things like this although the net result of this is a lot of people just sat around saying how Mar was it was so that's the nearest we've got so far so expanding consciousness so um the first question about building up a roadmap there's definitely something right about the uniqueness of each person's consciousness and it's not it's not uncorrelated with their unique path through the world nobody else actually space your temporally goes through the world that the way you did and is subject to some of the inputs you had so you you realize that what of what you have in consciousness depends on your encounters with the outside world so we need a kind of inside outside explanation but but just the spatio-temporal roots not enough but but but that's definitely part of the story um and you were talking about other other thoughts or other people's thinking and deviance and so on I just wanted to stress something we haven't talked about and and that is the fact that we knew are not a lot about other people's minds we forget that when we talk about consciousness because we can't and we can't experience other people's consciousness but we know a lot about other people's minds what they think what they feel what they like what they don't like we predict what they'll do or how they'll react and we do that because we have something like a kind of theory of mind and one of the great experts and exponents is Souter Fred who's here and and we can use that without having access to other people's consciousness but it's used in a very sophisticated way to tell the difference between what they tell us and what we think is going on so I think there are many more things to understanding the mind than just what we're focusing on with consciousness and lastly more consciousness well there is this nice passage in Kingsley Amos where he talks about a character who goes off to a nightclub and with his secretary and behaves very badly and he comes home afterwards and he said I feel very bad and then he thinks about feeling very bad and he thinks it's very good that I feel very bad so I'm a rather I'm a rather nice fellow and then he thinks well thinking I'm a rather nice fellows not very nice and so he feels very bad and they thinks well the fact he's recognised as he feels very good and and he realizes this is a constant oscillating state that eventually degrades where you can't get any more so I think there are kind of limits that consciousness self-consciousness oh I'll take a couple of them I think in terms of do we need to why do we need to study it well the it's there because it's there for me is that the prime thing it really is the center of our lives in our world but there are more practical applications as well as we've talked a little bit about them but I think for example and both Chris and fraternity faretta been seminal in bringing connecting basic signs of consciousness to psychiatric issues and psychiatric issues are becoming ever more widespread and prevalent in society and at the moment most existing treatments of psychiatric disorders are about suppressing the symptoms that they provoke and one of the things that kind Errol scientific understanding of experiences can do is give us a mechanistic hold on what's going on so Chris's work beautifully provides a hypothesis that that positive for destinations that you get in schizophrenia are due to abnormalities in how we predict and the consequences of sensory input or of our own actions and this goes back to Helmholtz we mentioned right at the beginning there's unconscious inferences there's something awry about that system perhaps in schizophrenia and if we can start understand the mechanism by which psychiatric disorders are occurring and generating abnormal experiences that provides a very different way to think about possible more much more targeted much more specific interventions that could result in better treatments and as people are living longer and other and we've all got to die something in the end but with dying less of heart disease less of cancer than we used to there's going to be a huge burden on neurological disorders not just like yatri but things like Alzheimer's and so on these can also be thought of as disorders of experience in some way so I think there's it's not just the few people who end up in comas and vegetative state it's going to affect all of us and we need to understand not just symptoms but really the mechanisms of it okay well we're going to have to leave it there I'm afraid thank you for all your questions and I'm really sorry for ever to everyone who we didn't get to get to ask yours and the panel will be here for a few more minutes afterwards so do pigeon-holed them and ask them more questions if you if you like and for now can we just say thanks very much to Anna Barry and Chris you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 41,245

Rating: 4.8149781 out of 5

Keywords: Alok, Jha, Consciousness, Discussion, 720p, Anil Seth, Barry Smith, Chris Frith

Id: H8Z3dR2BSyc

Length: 63min 11sec (3791 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2013