Brain and Mind: Understanding the Relationship

hello and welcome to the brain of mind workshop thank you all very much for coming we are very glad to be able to hold this event today after two-term intermission during the first lockdown we held out hope for an in-person event in mikkelma's term when that proved to be impossible the college unfortunately did not yet have the necessary technology in place in order to sustain such a large scale online event in addition to regular teaching we are all the more grateful to saint hilda's college and particularly to harris ferguson and claire harvey for providing the technological and administrative support that has made today's event possible we hope to make the experience on zoom equal to or even better than normal one advantage of being online is that we are joined today not only by a level students from in and around oxford but also from researchers across the world who would not ordinarily be able to join among others we are joined by a delegation from hamburg in germany as well as researchers from romania france the us and china tonight will be somewhat different from previous events in that our speakers will be members of the brain and mind executive committee rather than research as external to sun hilda's college this is the reason why i and my colleague annie gaul will be chairing today's event my name is barnaby burley and i am a graduate student in philosophy at st hilda's annie is a phd student in cognitive neuroscience at university college london she will now give you some background about the brain and mind hi i'm annie and it's a pleasure to be a part of what promises to be a very interesting event brain and mind was founded at st hilter's college in 2015. the workshop was designed with two central aims fostering interdisciplinarity between psychology philosophy and neuroscience and making accessible research from all three disciplines to non-specialists in past years the workshop has addressed various topics which have joint interest to these disciplines discussions have included diverse phenomena including among others time addiction perception criminality bilingualism and emotion tonight we come together to address head on the fundamental question which has been at the heart of the brain and mind workshop from the beginning how do brain and mind relate hence today's event gives us the opportunity to stand back and reflect on the very nature of the interdisciplinarity which the brain and mind workshop promotes our speakers today will share insights from their research which will help to bring us closer to an understanding of what is what exactly it is that unites their disciplines how does the brain relate to the body and what do the neuroscientists findings concerning the brain tell us about the nature of the mind how is the psychologist's understanding of our mental capacities impacted by emerging accounts of the structure and functioning of the brain and how might philosophy preserve what is distinctive and important in the study of mind while acknowledging the central role which neuroscience tells us the brain plays when it comes to explaining our cognitive capacities these are among the important questions that our speakers will address today we will hear three talks tonight each approximately 20 minutes long after the first talk which will be from the perspective of neuroscience we will have a short five minute break we will then return to hear our second talk on psychology and education after the second talk we will have a 10 minute question and answer session during which we welcome questions related to these first two talks you can write your questions in the chat box as you listen to the speakers depending on how many questions there are we may have to be selective in which ones are put to the speakers we would encourage you to start your question by indicating your institutional profession for example a level student colon and then your question after this q a we will have another five minute break and then come back to hear our final talk from the perspective of philosophy there'll be more time for questions on any of the talks after this it is now my pleasure to introduce you to our first speaker dr micah glitch dr glitch has held the title of muriel tomlinson tutorial fellow at st hilda's college since 2009 she is a reviewing editor for the journal of physiology and a fellow of the royal society of biology her research focuses on the regulation of synaptic transmission in the brain okay thank you very much for the kind introduction a very warm welcome to everybody and my mind the hamburg i'm going to disappear now um so that i can start my presentation okay it doesn't work okay i hope this works um as i've already been introduced i am a neuroscientist and for me thoughts and voluntary actions are consequences of physiological processes that occur in the brain and in the case of actions reach our muscles these processes involve release of chemicals called neurotransmitter from neurons and synapses synapses are sites of information transfer between two neurons the neuron releasing the neurotransmitter is the presynaptic neuron and the neuron receiving the neurotransmitter is the postsynaptic neuron some postsynaptic neurons receive as many synapses as two hundred thousand from presynaptic neurons but usually that number is much lower and typically anywhere between one and a few hundred synapses and a given presynaptic neuron may in turn contact anywhere between one and thousands of post-synaptic neurons so there can be a lot of divergence and convergence of information in neurons importantly synapses can change in their strength in an activity dependent manner and their strength can be up or down regulated hence some inputs may receive more importance than other inputs and the same presynaptic stimulation may with time result in larger or smaller postsynaptic responses we refer to this as synaptic plasticity and we believe that these processes are essential for learning and memory formation allowing us to store past experiences and to adjust our behaviors based on those experiences these past experiences will influence decision-making processes and hence our actions neurons are interconnected throughout the nervous system and their activity can be influenced by external and internal stimuli and in turn influence muscle contractions leading to movement so in a way the brain is an elaborate processing organ that allows us to react appropriately to a stimulus and by appropriate i mean in a manner most likely to secure our survival or the survival of the species we usually refer to an external stimulus as sensory input such as visual in this example here auditory touch temperature smell taste gravity and also painful stimuli internal stimuli could be hormone levels in the blood the stretch state of an internal organ for instance after eating or drinking our stomach will be distended or the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood so how does our brain arrive at the decision how to respond to a stimulus to address this question i'm going to start by considering a very simplified view of how the brain works this view ignores consciousness and it purely focuses on how we engage with our environment i have depicted the brain as five distinct systems here the sensory limbic reward decision making and motor system in reality there's some anatomical and functional overlap between these different systems so the representation that you see here on screen is highly schematic and simplified the sensory system is the input system to the brain which picks up the presence or absence of a particular stimulus the reward center makes predictions about whether a particular action is worthwhile doing and it can do this either by guessing or based on past experiences the limbic system is responsible for subconscious reactions to stimuli and one of these subconscious reactions could be emotions for instance the limbic system also governs processes that maintain certain body parameters such as the body temperature within a narrow range of values to guarantee optimal functioning of the body we call this body homeostasis all these systems interact with each other indicated by the arrows here and the decision-making system and it's the decision-making system that then makes a judgment as to what the most appropriate response to the stimulus and given the internal environment is it then instructs the motor system and this sets off events that culminate in movement so we have one input system the sensory system and two output systems the limbic and the motor system whose outputs are distinct but complementary the limbic system is responsible for subconscious responses that involve the release of hormones as well as the modulation of cardiac muscle contraction and smooth muscle contraction these responses are not under voluntary control and influence parameters such as blood pressure and dilation state of our pupils the motor system output on the other hand is under voluntary control and influences the activity of skeletal muscles that control the movement of our bodies and body parts importantly these muscles include our tongue and facial as well as hand and finger musculature and of course this is hugely important to us as humans as it allows us to control speech and enables the use of tools such as hammers but also pens and keyboards it is the activation of these muscles that enables me to interact with you and that i want to talk about today and these are the ones that we can control and willingly influence so let's delve into the motor system in its components skeletal muscles are effectors of the motor system they contract or relax thereby causing movement how is the contraction state controlled scattered skeletal muscles are innervated by so-called motor neurons these are neurons that reside within the spinal cord and directly control the activity of muscle cells the activity of motor neurons determines not only when a contraction takes place but also the force of the contraction of the muscle cell think about how much force you apply when you pick up a raspberry compared to a glass marble of the same size the formal process requires a delicate grip whereas the latter does not so how do we adjust the force of contraction well a muscle can consist of thousands to even tens of thousands of muscle cells and each muscle cell is innervated by a molecular neuron the more each muscle cell is contracted and the more muscle cells overall are contracted the stronger the force of the contraction the level of muscle cell contraction and number of muscle cells that contract are encoded in motor neuron activity patterns the more active the motor neuron the more contracted the muscle cells and the more motor neurons innervating the same muscle are active at the same time the stronger the force of the concentration the question now is how motor neurons in the spinal cord are instructed by neurons in the brain how do they know when to be active and how much force to generate in order to fill the gap between external stimulus and activation of motor neuron we need to return to the brain and the sensory system i.e the system that picks up the presence of the stimulus processes it and passes the information to other brain systems it is very important to appreciate in this context that the same external stimulus can evoke distinct and conceivably opposite reactions in the same human being based on their internal state or after a formative event for example smelling cake may entice us to eat the cake if we are hungry but if we are feeling sick it may make us turn away and leave the room or we usually like eating a particular food but on one location we eat a spoiled version of that food which makes us feel violently sick afterwards and from then onwards we avoid eating that particular food hence sensory information has to be contextualized under what conditions do i sense the particular stimulus and how does it tie in with everything else that is going on around and within me the part where the highest level of processing of sensory information and contextualizing of information takes place in the brain is the so-called neocortex more specifically the association cortex the association cortex combines all available information to create a perceptual experience of our environment to allow us to engage with it and that includes abstract thought and speech generation importantly this processing also involves taking into account stored information i.e memories of past events it is in the association cortex that the motivation and decision for a particular action in response to the external and internal environment is reached this decision is then communicated to the motor system of the brain which now needs to plan how best to carry out the desired action based on the current state of the body for instance a decision has been made to shake someone's hand exactly which muscles are going to be contracted how much will depend on our current body position do we need to get up to reach someone or do we need to walk towards the person whose hand we want to shake in addition the movement needs to be programmed i.e the plan that lays out exactly which muscle is contracted when and how much needs to be organized so that the motor neurons in the spinal cord can be instructed in a timely and organized manner several different brain structures are involved in the planning and programming of motor programs and a different one in the execution of motor programs three structures in particular are essential for the planning and programming of voluntary movements the motor cortex more specifically the pre-motor cortex the basal ganglia and the cerebellum the pre-motor cortex is divided into two functional components sma and pma these two structures differ in that the sma is more active when movements are intrinsically motivated while the pma is more active when a movement is more extrinsically motivated that is in response to sensory stimulation in other words the sma is more involved in throwing a ball and the pma in catching a board that is thrown in our direction accordingly the sma is active even when we just imagine carrying out a movement and this is something that athletes take advantage of when they mentally rehearse movements the pma in contrast is active when we watch people carry out movements and this allows us to imitate what other people are doing the involved neurons are called mirror neurons because their activity mirrors the observed movement the role of the basal ganglia is the selection of the most appropriate motor program for the desired outcome given the circumstances as well as the triggering of these movements accordingly pathologies of the basal ganglia display either lack of movements such as in parkinson's disease or uncontrollable and involuntary movements such as in huntington's disease the cerebellum is responsible for the fine tuning of movements pathologies of the cerebellum result in poorly coordinated muscle contractions but and this is in contrast to lesions in the basal ganglia movements are still possible and do not occur involuntarily so to simplify we can see the basal ganglia as responsible for the big picture which movement will be carried out when and the cerebellum as responsible for the nitty-gritty exactly how much will the muscle be contracted and how do we coordinate different muscle groups to achieve our goal the basal ganglia and the cerebellum communicate with a pre-mortal cortex which then passes on the optimized and final multi-program to the primary motor cortex which is essentially the output structure of the motor system neurons the primary motor cortex then instruct the motor neurons in the spinal cord thus leading to muscle contraction and hence movement and this is how activity in the brain is translated into movement intriguingly we can measure neuronal activity in higher motor centers in the person before said person is aware that they will carry out a particular movement or in other words a movement decision is arrived at subconsciously this might be taken as evidence when that we're not all together that different from the amoeba in this gary larsen cartoon here and raises the question why we say that movements are voluntary and under our control this can be reconciled however when we consider that whilst movement decisions are made subconsciously the movement the moment they reach our consciousness we can override them in that sense movements are voluntary in that we decide whether or not to go with a movement that was planned according to past experiences external and internal cues or to choose a different movement option so whilst our brain will present us with what it thinks is the best muscle response to an internal and or external stimulus we are free obviously within the constraints of physics and society to override that subconscious decision and opt for another movement thank you very much for your attention thank you very much dr glitch for a very interesting talk um we will now go into a short break um until half past five um at which time we will start again promptly with our next speaker so please be back on time um but yeah until then uh go and get a drink or uh relax for a bit and see you back here in five minutes thank you hi so now it's half past um it is my pleasure to introduce dr ann darker dr darker is a research lecturer at the department of experimental psychology in oxford and a college lecturer in psychology at st hilda's her research includes many aspects of developmental psychology and the psychology of individual differences and her work covers a wide range of topics including linguistic development mathematical cognition and theory of mind her work has influenced educational policy in the uk and she is involved in many cross-cultural educational projects just to say thank you very much ellie and i will now um leave oh or at least cease to be um visible on screen in order to share my powerpoint oh okay can uh people um here excellent so um before we move on um can um everybody um see my powerpoint um harris is about to put it on [Music] hello is it now visible yes it is oh wonderful okay um as you can see i'm not as expert in doing this on zoom as um some people in the devs are at any rate this is going to be about the implications of neuroscience for the psychology of education and in particular with regard to mathematics education and there are quite a few findings in neuroscience which have been applied to education and have turned out to have quite important applications and there is controversy about how important and valid some of the findings are which is are not unique to neuroscience findings but is often found with regard to almost any study in psychology and education but i should start out with a warning about the dangers of misuse and over simplification of some of the theories um at the risk of publicizing some of the more pernicious neural myths as they're sometimes called i will give a couple of examples uh and the words of josh billings uh american humorist the trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance as they're knowing so many things that ain't so and we all know some things that ain't so in these days of media uh whether social media or more traditional media sometimes giving wrong explanations and there are indeed many myths that have developed over the years about the brain and how it works which can give quite misleading ideas about the nature of the brain which can have negative impacts on education and other areas so some of these are completely invented of which perhaps the most notorious is we only use 10 of our brains some are distorted and so here is um a diagram showing that we only use 10 of the brain which um is very definitely something that so we use all of our brains and there are as we go and other um theories involve the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain sometimes distorted into right and left brains so there are some functional differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and most people most notably the left hemisphere is dominant for language but it's not true that the left hemisphere is logical and the right hemisphere creative or any of the other myths that get promoted about the left and right hemispheres having totally different personalities and still unless is it the case that there are left-brained people who are more logical and right-brained people who are more creative more intuitive etc not true and there also is no evidence for the value of brain gym activities to integrate the two hemispheres which is certainly a way that individuals and schools have been parted from their money by um over-enthusiastic promoters of brain jib and here again at the risk of um publicizing what is however um well-known example um there is a diagram claiming that um the left brain is responsible for um language and right-hand control yes it is um but also that it's responsible for analytic thought logic and reasoning while the right brain is responsible for creativity imagination intuition etc and none of this is true and still less as i said are there some um logical left-brained people and some are right-winged imaginative people individual differences in such areas are due to entirely different things than which hemisphere is dominant so um without further ado i will um move into the subject of the neuroscience of one specific educationally relevant topic i.e the development of maths and arithmetic and this has there has been um since it became possible to do brain imaging including brain imaging of school-aged children there has been a certain amount of study of age differences in maths and age comparisons in children suggest that there are some changes with age from predominant use of frontal regions to predominant use of parietal regions for mathematics possibly reflecting a movement from strategies that are based on working memory to strategies more specific to numerical understanding and this has been found for um mental arithmetic and for comparing quantities and so perhaps as children automatize their math skills through practice they may um not need to use working memory as much and experience our maturation even just getting older may result in increasing specialization of rain areas associated with maths though it's not total even four year olds show some increased activation of the parietal areas when doing problems with numbers so um one may question though whether brain differences as children get older or between more able mathematically children and those with mathematical disabilities do these brain differences cause or result from differences in mathematical ability probably both um and uh kuchian for example found that after a computerized intervention children with mathematical disabilities not only improved their math but developed um more mature patterns of predominantly parietal rather than frontal activation in mathematical tasks and you don't need this i'm not trying at this stage to give detailed information about um exactly which bits of the brain do what but the main point is that these change with age and that these can change as a result of interventions in maths um now another very important aspect of the study of the brain and myths is that arithmetical ability is not unitary it's not just one ability that you've either got or you haven't um there is increasing evidence from our studies of atypical and typical mathematical development adults who've had brain damage causing mathematical disabilities and most recently from brain imaging studies of adults mathematical cognition and even more recently children's mathematical cognition and our such studies show that um arithmetical cognition is made up of many components and it's quite possible for children and adults to show strong discrepancies in either direction between almost any two components so that for example one might be very good at exact calculation but poor at arithmetical estimation or vice versa one might be good at written but not oral arithmetic or vice versa and so this has many implications for education and for interventions with children with mathematical difficulties no two children or adults with arithmetical difficulties are the same and it's important to find out what specific strengths and weaknesses an individual has and to investigate particular misconceptions and incorrect strategies they may have rather than just assuming they're good or bad at maths and um i will briefly describe finally the catch-up numeracy project which i've developed um in collaboration with graeme sigley wayne holmes and others of the cat truck trust it's uh which is a not-for-profit uk registered charity and it the project is based on a pilot study that i carried out on a very small scale in oxford um and um i have the ketchup um website um for anyone who's interested this um shows an adult working with a child at cat shop and the target pupils are children in years two to six of primary school who have numerous difficulties though it's been extended to some degree to older peoples and schools generally select whichever children they think are likely to benefit and usually we deal with children with moderate rather than extreme mathematical difficulties and children are assessed individually by a teacher or teaching assistant using catch-up numeracy formative assessments and this is used to determine the entry level for each of 10 numeracy components and the approximate focus for numeracy teaching and the crucial thing here is that what distinguishes ketchup from some other interventions is that it's not based on the on specific equipment but on careful advanced assessment and then proposing equipment and techniques that are already available in schools for numeracy teaching and teachers and teaching assistants get advance training equivalent of three mornings of training um and children get two 15-minute sessions per week and the components aren't regarded as all-inclusive either from a mathematical or psychological point of view but were chosen because curriculum documents and discussions with teachers showed them to be educationally important and research has shown them to elicit individual differences and the components um which i won't describe in detail through lack of time include counting verbally counting objects reading and writing numbers adding and subtracting tens and units ordinal numbers whether a bead for example on a string is second fourth or nine etc um word problems translating between on sets of objects and the representation in numerals or number words say five bricks represented by the number five um derived fact strategies for example that if eight and six is fourteen then six and eight must also be fourteen and fourteen minus eight must be six and you don't have to solve the problems again um estimation and memory for a number of facts and we in our first evaluation of the study we used 493 primary school children mean age 104 months so i'm just so sorry eight and a half years old and um in that first study most of them got the catch-up intervention program 50 got the same amount of time for individualized maths work but not targeted and 48 received no intervention except usual business as usual school instruction and they were all given a number of screening tests before and after the intervention um all grapes were similar in age and econological aging number eight we did a statistical analysis comparing the the roots on the months gained in mathematics age divided by the number of months between the short and final testing i.e the amount of time gained in chronological age and the children who got catch-up intervention made more than twice as much progress as would be expected from passage of time alone those who got to match time intervention about um one to one and a half times one of one and a half times as much um those who received no intervention um so progress slightly less than what we expected through the passage of time and we found that there was a very significant effect of group so that the catch-up intervention group made significantly higher gains than either of the other groups that differ from each other and a later study comparing uh catch up children with a similar number about 300 in each group of um children who had business as usual similarly ketchup the children did a lot better so to conclude um individually targeted interventions seem effective but um interventions that focus on particular components may be more um effective than one size though a lot more studies need to be done and um we need much more systematic research to compare different intervention programs and very likely different groups would be suitable for different groups of children and it and if we find out who which program works best with which group of children then this may not only be important educationally but may have implications for further research in neuroscience and in how components of arithmetic might be represented in the brain and whether intervention affects um brain organization okay um so thank you very very much for listening i hope the technology worked reasonably well thank you very much dr darker everything worked perfectly so we now have 10 minutes for questions for our speakers so far please do feel free to continue sending questions if you have anything you'd like to ask so the first question i have is for dr glitch and this is from deb fisher um what exactly does the speaker mean by consciousness oh yeah [Laughter] i guess an awareness that can be self-awareness or that can be awareness of the internal state so for instance as a neuroscientist an emotion to me is a physiological response to stimulus that could be the dilation of a pupil that can be an increase in my heart rate a feeling then is my conscious awareness of the changes in my body so it is then that i say okay i'm scared or i'm happy or i'm angry so yeah i hope that makes sense yeah it might make this a very big question it is a very good question and if people can hear me i think that's one that will come up in the philosophy section so we can come back to it at the end once i've had something to say about it and no doubt philosophy will have far more to say about it than i do thank you um and i have another question from b windsor for dr glitch who is an a level student uh b windsor uh do any other animals have the ability to make conscious decisions about their movements in the way that humans do i guess the difficulty here is how would we how would we determine that how would we how would we know um animals can't speak a language that we understand and therefore we can't kind of ask them i would imagine that certainly i would have thought this is something that primates can do there's no reason to assume that humans are different to other primates i would even go so far to say that probably a lot of hunters can do this if you think about mice for instance prey animals don't really have an option but if if they see a movement they have to look towards the direction of the movement because simply a movement might mean danger for them and hunter on the other hand has the privilege of focusing their attention on one spot and ignoring any other movement that goes around even though even for a hunter it might be important to know what's going on the best example is a cat who can focus their attention on something that well we don't see but really the cat sees um so so whether the question is whether that's a conscious decision or whether that is inbuilt so so we don't know because we can't test we can't we can't i don't know how we design an experiment in which we know whether an animal willingly changed a behavior or not that's not possible for us to do because we can't communicate but i i would imagine that primates can do this but we're not the only ones who can do it thank you and now i have a question for dr darko this is from emman knights who's a university student how do we ensure that teachers incorporate the latest programs uh rather than falling back on neuroscience myths oh well that's a very very interesting question and i would love to know the answer that um obvious issues including um incorporating all the latest research into um into courses in education and then into continuous professional development for teachers to perhaps develop blogs and websites which teachers can use which give the information in uh relatively processed form as one can as it's unreasonable to expect other teachers will be able to search um all possible articles um after our heart after this upon peoples so one has to select and provide the most relevant information for them and there are indeed some websites and loads in existence that are very useful for the purpose about further development and also um the this refers to um teaching them what is going on but also have a more publicity logical nature of uranus and um in particular make sure that myths are not taught in education courses which has sometimes happened thank you and i have another question for dr starker which comes from ellen white who is a trainee educational psychologist um ellen asks how can the findings from the catch-up intervention inform general math teaching to support all pupils from the beginning that's a very interesting topic and uh because um the majority of people's will not need um specific interventions nor would it be possible to deliver to them but i think the way or what the sort of things that are supported would be awareness that particular aspects of um naturally differentially difficult for different people so not to assume too regularly that some children are just bad at maths which comes for me a self-fulfilled also especially in these days of computers adaptive computer programs and computer games to help our kids and indeed adults with different thank you uh so we have time for a couple more questions i have another question for dr glitch um let me have a look here um so this is a question from jasmine patel are there differences in the methods of encoding of movements in the different areas of the brain that you mentioned no the brain works in terms of action potentials and the frequency of action potentials and the patterns of action potential firing encodes the message um the difference lies in the targets and in the message that is conveyed but the actual underlying mechanism will always be an action potential so a change in electric potential across the membrane of a cell thank you um i have another question here from nathaniel dixon who's an a level student and this is also for dr glitch what is the evidence for synaptic plasticity and how is it measured if it is okay so synaptic plasticity we can uh measure in different ways there are morphological changes and synapses as they mature as they get exposed to more activity so they become they they change their shape hence the term synaptic plasticity so that change in in the actual shape we can also measure electrophysiologically so we can measure the currents that cross the membrane when a neuron releases neurotransmitter that opens gates in the membrane of the postsynaptic cell that permit the passage of ions into and out of the cell and we can measure an increase in the passage of ions in the form of an electric current because ions are charged particles when charged particles move you get an electric current just like when water molecules move you get a water flow and so we weaken a water current so we can measure electric currents and we can see that they increase or decrease depending on the experience of a synapse thank you and we have one final question and this is for dr darker and it comes from lucy stubbs she asks what examples are there of successful interventions in the design of teaching and learning of other stem subjects that are based on psychology and neuroscience very interesting there's been quite a lot of work on leading development for example which is um which is based on our understanding of what um but leaving basic activities um are um regarded as different components of the legal process they have also been um a number of studies which have actually looked at ring on countries following intervention and some of these studies for example by mcclelland and his colleagues have shown that um justice i'm saying with maths of reading um interventions that improve reading also make other brain patterns on functional brain are more similar to those of non-dyslexic typical regions which again indicates that there's more brain plasticity in terms of often that has sometimes been thought and that the mere fact that things are um shown by brain differences doesn't mean they're immutable it may mean that ring changes may um [Music] may actually result from intervention so yeah there's been quite a lot with regards to reading as well as maths rather less i'd say with regards to other subjects and it would certainly be worthwhile to do more um look at science for example out of the small point of view it's also worth noting that a lot of research has shown um more general effects on learning of for example sleep that um that's going to sleep actually improves one's ability to lay down memories of what's once for example um and for control groups who've not had the opportunity to see so that there's some quite exciting results overall thank you uh so we have a few more minutes until the break we have time for just one more question and i think we have a nice one that's to both speakers um so can you please explain how both perspectives we have looked at link the mind to the brain in short so i guess each speaker could give their own opinion on that and this comes from emilia cornell okay so to me the mind is a physiological process that happens in the brain the brain is the site where it happens and the mind is essentially the result of thoughts ideas they're all the result of synaptic transmission in the brain very pragmatic view thank you um and i would uh reinforce this i mean i would say the mind is basically what the brain does um the ring also does other non-conscious processes but the brain that is getting the organ does our thinking and uh we have some of the um studies that notion that show that interventions that improve reading or maths that also appear to make the functional organization of the brain for these activities so um i would say um the brain influences the mind which to me as i think to my case is not actively separate um and entity that is a function of the brain and that the mind in turn influences the activity of the brain thank you um thank you very much to everyone for such interesting questions and um i'm sorry that i didn't have time to put all of these to the speakers yet but we do have another question and answer session coming up later so please continue to ask your questions um we will now have a quick break from five past six until 10 past and so we look forward to seeing you back then foreign um welcome back everyone uh we now come to the third part uh of our event uh which is the philosophical section um and it is my pleasure to welcome our third speaker dr anita avramides dr aramides was the south over manor trust fellow in philosophy at st hilda's college for 30 years and was awarded a senior research fellowship in 2020 she works in the philosophy of mind and language and has published extensively on the topic of other minds her latest book co-edited with dr matthew parrott and published by oxford university press is entitled knowing other minds hello can you hear me my yeah okay well good evening and i hope you have a little mental energy left to listen to just one more talk i'm now going to do the hardest thing that i have to do tonight which is share my screen so bear with me and let's see if i can do that there we go i think i've done it good so now some of you may have been perplexed to read the topic of tonight's event but not by some of those questions which i think you'll get a bit of an answer for those of you who were perplexed you may have wondered what there is to understand here after all if we want to understand the mind we study the brain whoops let me see let me just get my there we go what more is there to understand what we need to understand some will say is just the workings of the brain in this short talk i'm going to try and convince you that understanding the mind is a more complex business tonight we're focusing on the question of how we might understand the way in which these two things brain and mind fit together or relate to one another and i use this word thing very loosely especially in connection with the mind if we stop to think about it the brain is fairly straightforwardly a thing it's a physical thing here are some other physical things tables cars thermometers like these physical things we can put a brain on display before us we can cut it open touch its squishy substance study how it connects to other parts of the body basically we can study how it works if we now turn to consider mind things are somewhat less straightforward i sometimes ask my students if they were asked to put a mind on the table what would they put there i ask you to think about that now maybe some of you will put a brain on the table but perhaps there are some who will put a whole body on the table and if the latter i wonder if i would find only human bodies or whether someone might put a cat on the table a bat or even an ant hence the question we had in the first q a how might we decide who put the right thing on the table my point is that it's much harder to know what kind of thing a mind is or even if it is any kind of thing let's now consider what we're talking about when we use this word mind we use it to refer to a collection of activities that most adult human beings go in for and for this short talk i'm going to leave aside other creatures that's a very hard question we might agree that these activities include thinking and feeling in this connection we talk of having beliefs desires hopes expectations and the like we talk of a range of emotions anger fear resentment and the like and we most likely include feeling pain experiencing joy and like all these activities are connected with having a mind maybe you don't need all of them to count as having a mind but i trust you get the idea again think how one might put a belief a desire a pain or a fear on display on a table it seems more likely than that one will be disposed when thinking about the things that make up the mind that one will put a whole organism on display in the case of an adult human being we might show a person looking at the world having a belief reaching for a bowl of ice cream exhibiting desire wincing and crying suffering pain or trembling before a growling dog exhibiting fear now you may agree with all this but be impatient to pull me back to the subject of my talk by saying it's all well and good to talk of these activities of mind but we now know that all of these are controlled by the brain and in this i cannot but agree of course the brain controls behavior or at least it controls the movements of my body that display the behavior we call believing desiring feeling pain and the like but what is it we want to understand here do we want to understand what controls the activities that constitute what we call mind well yes and this is important indeed vital understanding but i think there's something more that we want to understand it's clear to us now that the brain controls the movement of the bodily limb and we might build a system call it a robot that has a control center that controls the movement of artificial limbs have we now understood what it is to have a mind well some might say yes that's all there is to understand if we can design a system that can do certain things move in certain ways then we've designed a system no different from ourselves the philosopher dan dennett thinks something along these lines and many of you may be familiar with his work he's the author of among other books consciousness explained and brainstorms but i would suggest that building such a system while it explains a lot about us also leaves a lot to be explained many of us may not yet be convinced that such a system really does have beliefs and desires really does have hopes and fears really does experience joy and pain in other words we're not convinced that such a system really is like us but what's been left out what more do we want to understand well the answer lies in the word really that i've been emphasizing maybe such a system moves like we do but there seems more at stake here than just how we move it seems like we're asking something about what's going on in the interior of this system or creature again i urge caution when i say in the interior i don't mean literally inside the skin or outer parameters of the system or creature if that's all i meant then we would simply have to open up the creature and examine its insides but what would we find there find in there more physical stuff and that all-important control center no when i say that there's more at stake and that this has to do with what's going on in the interior what i mean is that it has something to do with how things are for that system or for that creature we're asking about the subjects or creatures subjective world for all that that creature may be made up of skin and bones nerves and muscles and for all that it's controlled by a brain that is itself gray matter constituted by among other things axons and neurons for all this we want to understand the something more that makes us talk of human thoughts feelings and emotions again i'm going to refer to the work of dan dennett dennett would say that we just don't know what we're talking about when we use these words we think we mean something coherent but on reflection we have no coherent notion of what we're talking about here yes we're in pain but being in pain is nothing more than the sum total of the organization of the system and that includes in large part the working of the brain in the body now i think both of our speakers earlier hold down dignity and line here so if we can replicate this this working of the brain in the body then we've replicated a thinking feeling system that itself thinks and feels more recently philosophers following in dennett's footsteps insist that we're under an illusion to think that there's anything more here but while some philosophers agree with dennett many do not and i'm one of those i do not think that my use of words like pain are incoherent when i move away from talk about the way my body works and i would suggest that if i'm under the illusion that i'm in pain then i'm in pain think about it how do you distinguish pain from the illusion of pain i may not be able to say a whole lot about my pain that sounds coherent to someone like dennett but i think i'm aiming to talk about something that i recognize from the inside i recognize it because i feel it this is what some philosophers refer to as the phenomenology of pain the philosopher david chalmers has written a book entitled the conscious mind the adult human mind is conscious and it's this consciousness that we seek to understand but chalmers helpfully teases out two concepts here one is what he calls psychological consciousness which he associates with what psychologists mainly study that is associated with the activities of perceiving learning and various forms of information processing the other concept chalmers called phenomenal consciousness which he associates with the following very important question why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all it's phenomenal consciousness that chalmers and others associate with what they call the hard problem of consciousness thomas nagle puts the point in a most engaging manner he asks that we consider the taste of chocolate you bite the chocolate it melts on your tongue chemical changes take place on your taste buds which send electrical signal signals to your brain where physical changes occur now consider a neuroscientist examining your brain as you eat the chocolate all she would see is the activation of various neurons in the gray matter of your brain where would this neuroscientist see the taste of chocolate chalmers thinks that it's relatively easy to understand how we process information and i use the word relatively here advisedly he appreciates just how difficult the task is but what he is saying is that the difficulty here is of a different order to that associated with understanding phenomenal consciousness understanding what it's like to taste chocolate why is this let me try to explain the difficulty by laying out just a few proposals there have been for understanding the mind brain relationship one simple theory is that the mind is the mind brain identity theory it's a simple theory in that it just simply says the mind is the brain these theorists want us to think of the relationship here on the model of water which just is two hydrogen molecule and one oxygen h2o the identity theorist is the person who puts a brain on the table when asked to put a mind on the table so the idea is this we accept that water is h2o and in the same way we should accept that the mind is the brain or that mental states are just brain states now there's a rather simple problem with accepting an identity in the case of mind and brain i can imagine going to the doctors one day and he looks at my brain and exclaims that i must be in great pain but i do not concur i hope you can see on the slide i found her on the nice slide the woman is looking not too interested or too in agreement with the doctor now the question is am i in pain or not for my part i would say that if i don't feel pain well then i'm not in pain my body may be damaged but this isn't the same thing as feeling pain in a part of my body some have proposed a relationship weaker than brain and mind identity and that's this this is a little more complicated they hold that if two creatures share all their physical states then they will share their mental state so that's the picture on the top the view differs from the identity theory because it allows the two creatures maybe alike in all mental respects but different physically i hope the bottom picture shows you that the relationship i just described is called in philosophy the super veniance relationship and this is a fairly complicated idea and i'm only mentioning it for those who are more advanced in their knowledge here all i want to say about the supervenience relationship is that it's very complicated and it's not at all clear exactly what it explains now there's another different and very popular way account of accounting for the mind and that's functionalism according to functionalism pain isn't to be identified directly with any part of the body like the identity theory but is to be identified by reference to a whole functioning system one finds that state in the system that arises as the result of break of b of certain inputs which state interacts with other states of that system and which state then gives rise to certain outputs now functionalism has proved extremely popular in part because it allows that creatures who are composed of stuff very different from human beings still experience say pain functionalism allows that we might come upon creatures on a far away planet who may not be carbon based but who may respond to their environment in the same way that we do and it's on the basis of this observed relationship to input and output that we can say that they experience pain the functionalist is the person who's likely to put a whole human body on the table when asked to put a mind on the table but what many find well many find that functionalism is a very good theory others find that it's not helpful when it comes to understanding phenomenal consciousness what functionalism looks custom-made to understand is psychological consciousness it's not hard to imagine creatures who feel pain but respond very differently to it or respond as we do but don't feel pain so i've briefly touched on only three ways have been that have been proposed to account for mind there are many more more recently there are those who've resuscitated a view that was popular in the 19th and early 20th century and is associated with among others bertrand russell this view holds that we should not think of mind and body as separate but rather as one thing mental physical this sometimes gets called neutral monism and it's a view held by those who are called pan psychists pan psychists hold that mind is a fundamental part of the is part of the fundamental stuff in the world this view has one big thing in its favor it gets around the problem of understanding how mind comes into existence in a physical world it does this by postulating that mind is there from the start it's part of the fundamental stuff of the universe while it does this however it requires that we accept that the natural world that is rock sand trees etc are just a little bit conscious some find this very hard to accept and i'm one of them let me now draw my remarks to an end tonight i've given you the tiniest flavor of a small variety of responses to what philosophers call the mind body problem but it may be thought that i've been unduly negative about the various proposals on the table does this mean that i'm suggesting that we return to a position we find in the work of rene descartes am i a cartesian dualist someone who believes in immaterial souls that are distinct from the physical body not at all like most all philosophers of today i hold out the hope of a purely naturalistic understanding of mind but that doesn't mean that i will accept any theory i'm on the lookout for a theory that really does yield the understanding that we want this leads me to my very final remark which is what it is that i think philosophy can bring to the understanding of the mind-body relationship one of the most important contributions that i believe philosophy can make here is in helping us to understand what it is we're talking about what it is we want to understand this may sound trivial but it really isn't and i hope i've illustrated this with the first part of my talk we want to understand the mind but do we really know what we're talking about dennett tries to convince us that we don't really know what we're talking about in an effort to persuade us to stop trying to seek further understanding here there's so many books written with the word consciousness in the title books that aim to explain or give us a theory of consciousness but so many of these books assume that we know what it is we want explained it's philosophers who aim in some detail to understand the phenomenon to be explained why is this important for the following reason without a very clear understanding of the phenomenon to be understood we're in no position to judge of any given theory if it's adequate to the task set or not so what i hope to have convinced you of tonight in this very few minutes at my disposal is not the truth or even the falsity of any given proposal rather i hope to have convinced you that we really need to stop and ask ourselves just what the mind is just what the conscious mind is thank you very much thank you dr avermedis uh for a very interesting talk um we now certainly have a lot of stuff on the table to discuss and we've also had several questions come in um and i think the these questions are are really nice because most of them uh involve really what all speakers have been all three speakers have been talking about um and so i want to begin by uh asking dr avramidis a question which comes from liv um and liv wants to know about the significance of language uh when we're examining the relationship between the brain and and the mind um and i suppose there are two things uh driving this kind of question the one question is well what's uh if we're comparing the human mind to to other beings and saying well is is language significant here does it make a difference but the other kind of question uh here i suppose is is more about the particular views in in the philo in the philosophy of mind which you've outlined and looking at what role language plays to our very understanding of the concept of a mind wow liv that's that's a tough question um and if i were answering this question 40 years ago when i was a graduate student i would have said language is very important because there are those people who think you can't back then who very much thought that thought and language were interconnected now um that's not very popular anymore and part of that is because i think there's quite a lot of work um that has persuaded people that cognition is more uh spread across different species so um then we might ask well is language uh present in those species so again we get this question what is language okay well i'm i'm gonna assume that that we will accept for now that there is cognition in creatures that don't have language let's let's say that for now although i think it's a it is a question um how then do we think about this relationship well i guess if you're going to think about language's behavior so you could say that language was a particular fine-grained kind of behavior that gave us access to mind maybe we should just be looking at behavior more generally and that would give us a way of spreading out where we find mind by seeing where we find the relevant behavior and it doesn't necessarily have to be linguistic i hope that at least gives you a little bit of insight into that question liv thank you very much uh dr aramides um and i think we can basically take that answer straight into the the next uh question actually there have been several questions on this topic uh one from b windsor and the other from zhonya popazov uh which um i mean they really both want to know about the relation between the philosophical approach and the the neuroscientific approach which have been taken here um and uh b wants to know um whether there is really a contradiction here between uh what dr avromedis has been saying and what uh dr glich and dr dauco have been saying um or whether they these two kinds of approaches can can actually be combined can i just start and then i'll let my colleagues say their peace um i think that a contradiction i don't know there's an issue there's a a discussion to be had that's what philosophy is about i don't think we have to rush to contradictions there's a discussion to be had and i tried to touch on it i think i by by by making reference to dan dennett's work i think i was touching on what my colleagues may hold but let them speak for themselves i mean i as i said dan dennett thinks if you have been able to replicate the system if you could do everything about the inputs and outputs and all the relationships etc that's it there's nothing more to be explained and he thinks that any further thing you think there like the taste of chocolate he'll say what taste of chocolate what are you talking about can you tell me anything coherent about the taste of chocolate so there is a real debate here and a lot of philosophers there's a big philosophical debate about whether this is an illusion whether we're coherent or not so i wouldn't say contradiction i'd say a debate needs to continue yeah i think i would agree with that um i mean as a neuroscientist i tend to be pragmatic and to me without synaptic activity there won't be any mind as simple as that but i appreciate that discussions need to be had the example of using pain is of course a really fascinating one and i would actually suggest we do a pain in the brain uh at one point i already have a speaker in mind from hamburg um with bumgarn um we pain is something that every neuroscientist will accept is it's highly is conceptual so that can be damaged to a body in the person doesn't feel pain and that can be no damage to a person and the person feels pain no neuroscientist with this dispute that pain is one of these things that is a construct that is very difficult or that we don't fully understand and there's dissociation from pain so you can feel pain and stop feeling pain etc um so yes i i think a lot needs to be discussed i i have issues with thinking that a rock has a consciousness frankly i wouldn't share that view um i'm i'm not sure about the link between language and consciousness because i'm not sure that the way we define language is necessarily fair because it's very human-centric um so yeah yeah i think discussions need to be had that's why we're doing these workshops i would um agree with this and i think that uh it does depend how you define the mind and um whether you um i suppose i find it difficult to conceive of the mind existing in the absence of the brain also the rocks for example um the i would agree that not everything that the brain produces is necessarily or does is necessarily um what most people would consider as the mind and in particular is not necessarily conscious i mean many of what the things that you were um discussing earlier are in the category of implicit procedural um memory rather than explicit declarative memory for example um and some aspects of some of what the brain um controls is even less close to consciousness so that the brain is involved in respiration heart rate etc which at least if we are um in um reasonable health we don't even think about so um that i would certainly i mean i think my view is that you um can't have mind without some actions of the brain but you could have actions of the brain without the necessarily being describable i think that's really important i don't think anybody denies that there's a dependence that's what i mean by saying we're not cartesian dualists okay we're looking for a naturalist understanding of mind but the nature of the dependence and what that explains i think are up for grab okay that's really interesting can i just push you in that point a little bit because this was exactly sonia's question uh really about um phenomenal consciousness and sort of what kind of study can help us solve this this hard problem and sonia was really interested in uh is it is science going to give us the answer to this question and if it's not science then then what other discipline what other discipline do do you think it's philosophy or do you do you think we need a different form of study altogether i i wonder if anita's example of a robot artificial intelligence will provide the answer to it and we may not like it or we may like it if if we can create artificial intelligence that can develop a consciousness and the minds then i think that would be proof i guess also a direct correlation yeah unfortunately though i think it gets back to something you said earlier which is how would we know this is this is the dilemma right and it's it's i think it's one of the things that scientists don't get when philosophers and and i think and i think thomas nagle did it beautifully he tried to unders explain there's this phenomenon called subjectivity yeah and it just seems different from any physical thing in the world it's not it doesn't seem to be objective in the sense that you can't see my subjective states but you can see my body you can see my brain but you can't see my taste of chocolate and that's what's so perplexing and and i think what a lot of us want to say is let's re let's stay perplexed let's not let's not rush to think there is nothing to be perplexed about here because it is perplexing what does it mean who knows maybe we need to re-conceptualize our view of the physical world who knows i mean a lot of us think we've got to go radical if we're ever going to get a grip on this problem but again i'm just telling you one perspective yeah i i think especially with you can't see my taste of chocolate um i could probably answer that that might depend on your taste receptors that you express in your system it might depend on experiences that you had when eating chocolate so maybe had some positive experiences when eating one type of chocolate and negative experiences when eating other chocolates or your brain connects to events that actually weren't linked together so genetics will come into it experiences will come into it so yes i can't look at you and say you will definitely like white chocolate but if i know your history and if i know your genetic makeup i can probably say ah i can see this here oh but in order to see it you need to set up a correlation and in order to set up that correlation you've got to talk to me if you couldn't talk to me you'd open up my brain what would you see you wouldn't see the taste of chocolate no that's that's what we're yeah that's what we're all about yeah i mean i've been um thinking about um some um medical issues that may affect how we taste chocolate and two different aspects one is something that's very very publicized right now which is that if you get coded it's quite likely to impair or uh to change your sense of knowledge taste so that um there was somebody in the newspaper today who said that um since um disrupted her sense of smell she now finds um the smell of a public laboratory unpleasant with something that generally wouldn't for example and um people may and indeed impairment of sense of smell is seen as one of the diagnostic factors in whether you should go for a covet test and of course in that case one is dependent on somebody or the the same person being able to compare how they tasted or smelled in the past and whether it's changed uh so that it's um self awareness another example from that i remember from quite a few years ago is um somebody who had experienced a broken nose in childhood as a result he could not smell he then um because he um developed other complications of the broken news such as headache sinus pain and so on he um eventually underwent surgery on the broken nose and rather unexpectedly that was not expected to change by that time he recovered his sense of smell and it was very interesting that some of his um associations had to be learned so that for example for some time he thought that the smell of petrol was actually the smell of the body of a car because he almost had that um experience that smell when he was near cars and it took some time for him to realize it was the petrol and not the car i always thought that it might have been interesting to do for someone to do uh research study the same way that blind people who have recovered their sight have been studied um nobody did but um it is still i think this is um interesting in some ways and showing what one's senses of smell and taste may be influenced by also um general um cultural learning experiences so that people in some brought up in some countries may on average be much more keen on spicy tastes than those brought up in some other countries for example thank you very much um well we're already three minutes over what we how long we said we take but fortunately our speakers have have said that they can stay and keep answering questions until 7pm so i i will keep asking them questions until that time um so we have about another 10 minutes um there there is another enormous question which i received a couple of minutes ago which i would like to ask um because it's also a very interesting question um and um it's sort of particularly directed towards uh dr glitch and doctor avramides and it concerns the problem of free will um uh so um yes uh sophie clargo uh wants to know uh whether uh research such as dr griff's research on uh the predetermination of movements uh before our awareness of them uh could tell us something about free will yes i had that in my talk and then i took it out again um well free will as in we can always decide against what we're going to do we have but we cannot deny that whatever we do is a result of experiences that we've had either upbringing or environment it'll be a result of our genetics to some extent and it will be a result of stimuli of the types of stimuli we receive and if if people have unusual responses to a given stimulus other people will find that weird and will will um will not want to associate very often with that person just think how children can be ostracized if they like certain things that the vast majority of kids don't like for instance um free will i i think there is such a thing as free will and i think cognitive behavior therapy goes along those lines and that is that yes to recognize that what however we respond to stimulus is a result of past experiences etc and that we can once we recognize that this is the case we can try to counter it and we can try to combat it and adopt different strategies so if before when you were stressed out your strategy was to eat a lot once you recognize that you can on your way to the fridge decide actually i'm not going to eat i'm going to do sing loudly to music maybe to alleviate my stress that way so in that sense there's free will in that we can try to interfere with patterns of behaviors that we have established i hope that makes sense um okay well i think this as uh our chairman said is a very big question um and in a sense it's one that we could have a whole evening on um i'll i'll i'll say a little bit from the philosophical perspective on this um i think that the line that dr klitsch is taking again i'm not surprised neuroscientists would take but of course and you're not going to be surprised that what i'm going to do is say something like this first of all let's see what we mean by free will and um in the philosophy you know the centuries of philosophy actually they teased out several different notions of free will now there are those who think that free will is perfectly compatible with a deterministic approach because being free is just being able to do what you want to do um now there are others who say no no but you have to be free to want what you want to do and so that pushes the question back and then those people get called libertarians they're they they're the hardcore though there's something free at the very core of our being and that's what this um literature from uh neuroscience looked or looks to some like it may contradict now the literature is really up in the air there's a lot of discussion about it whether it does show what it claims to show um the idea is i think to put it very very crudely that it looks like the dis that we report consciously the decision to move after the movement has been initiated by the body so it looks like the initiation's already taken place and all we can do is stop it but this idea that we're actually initiating it just looks like it contradicts that experimental work um so you know as i said some people question the design of the experiment what the question shows other people question whether it really does show that we're not free because you can take other views of freedom other people take the line that dr glitch took again big debates here and maybe we should do one of these events as well um in the future to discuss this question in more depth very interesting thank you um so uh we still have lots and lots of questions and we're not going to be able to tackle it anywhere near all of them but but i i hope that at least um uh the answers that the speakers are giving are sort of quite uh quite detailed so um hopefully uh we're addressing sort of several questions at once and i think i i'd like to finish with a question which comes from samanyu kathapala um and it's about um the problems that arise from the fact that we cannot see inside the mind um and so the question is um how do we know um that people perceive physical things in the world in the same way and and an example given is does a color look the same to everyone i i think that's the inherent problem right how how do you know i i i could take the scientific view and i can say that light color is a wavelength and the wavelength hits my photoreceptors and the photoreceptors then trigger activity in the visual cortex at some point and then i see color however photoreceptors can be slightly different in each person due to mutations it might matter how the neurons are exactly connected there might be more or less fewer synapses in some neurons than in others who is to say it's really really hard um i i don't see how we can ever solve that problem of saying what i say is orange and everybody else says is orange whether they actually see the same color that i see yes i mean i think that one can get some ideas from our behaviors but not but only to a limited extent so that we know that some people have um genetic deficits in their color perception and that such people are likely to match two colors which would uh look different to people with more typical color vision we also know that um different animal species may have somewhat different um types of color perception from their behavior again and may some will differentiate colors which others won't so some of this is simple or not so simple variations in abilities so that animals that are nocturnal very often don't have color discrimination such while some other animals have limited range of color perception and others like bees for example actually discriminate our colors that we don't and one thing that at least as i understand it is interesting with regards to bees is that it's not only that they make finer discriminations than we do but that they actually perceive weakness that we don't know something sleepers have some perception in the ultraviolet range while some poultry who i think actually have similar um i may be corrected by someone here but i think um poultry have comparable uh accuracy or the refinement of color perception to humans but inside somewhat different range so that they can they can perceive some things in the infrared range and this um is demonstrated by behavioral characteristics however um if one is talking about two people who have typical color perception and who um respond differently rather than who which apparently responds similarly from the behavioral point of view to um color discrimination tasks one may be able to tell that they can distinguish between the colors commonly regarded as red and green but one can't tell or at least i can think of a way of telling whether they chris whether they perceive red the same way that have the same sensation from perceiving something red and the same sensation as one another from perceiving something green is there time for me to just say yes yes please do that make it the closing statement oh god okay well that's a that's a heavy burden um all right philosophers used to talk in somewhat old-fashioned language but i'll i'll make it more contemporary i'm going to start with the old-fashioned language we used to say look all the photoreceptors in the wavelengths could be exactly the same but god could have made it that we saw red where another person sees green leave god out of the picture we can simply say things evolved so that um different creatures saw different colors with respect to the same wavelength same photoreceptors now you might think that's implausible but it seems possible in some sense of possibility even if we accept that however i think we can we can get a happy medium i think we can accept that there's enough similarity to allow for communication we seem to be able to communicate and there we're back to that language that i think it was liv asked at the beginning and language is very important we're able to communicate to a certain degree okay our behavior as dr dauker says shows us that we're able to maybe sort things in the same way but even though we're sorting things in the same way we can't be a hundred percent sure that you're seeing the same color that i am because i may have learned way back to sort things in the same way that other people sort things okay so but we are able to communicate we are able to survive and that's good evidence that something is roughly similar is going on but of course they're going to be variations even if it's not wildly different there's the context that dr glitch talked about and context for each individual is going to be different i'll feel my pain differently i might experience green differently because i hate the color you might like the color and so you experience it slightly differently it's more vibrant for you whatever so there are lots of issues even here and i think you know the fundamental problem of can we know of another person's mind comes down to can we really understand the mind-body relationship because if we could we could just look at the brain and read it right off but if we can't do that right then we're back to having the mind-body problem so in a sense this question brings us back to the very heart of what we've been discussing tonight so thank you for the question thank you very much i'm afraid that brings us to the end of today's event um thank you to everyone uh further your questions uh which were really interesting and provoked a very interesting discussion um thank you to our speakers again for your very insightful talks and and the wonderful discussion um and thank you to saint hilda's college and again in particular to harris ferguson and claire harvey for enabling this event and before everyone signs off um just to let you know that the next workshop will be on the 13th of may 2021 and that tonight's event will remain on the scent hilda's college youtube channel where you can also access previous brain and mind events um so on behalf of everyone i'd just like to thank you again for being a part of tonight's workshop and we very much look forward to seeing you again at future events and i'd like to add to that thanks to andy

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Length: 117min 30sec (7050 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021