"Can Consciousness be Explained?" - Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Debate 2022

good evening everybody and welcome to the Royal Institute of philosophy annual debate for 2022. this debate is part of the Being Human Festival the UK's Annual Festival of the humanities still running for another three days if you want to find out more the hashtag is hashtag beinghuman2022. now I've been instructed to say that if a fire alarm goes off it's the real thing no fire drills are planned and so without more Ado I'd like to hand over to our real host for this evening who's hosted many more of the of these events than I have we're very delighted to have with us again this evening thank you so much [Music] hello everyone welcome to this year's debate from the Royal Institute of philosophy the first one actually in person since the pandemic and it is wonderful for us all to be here together in one room uh and especially as every year we have these discussions and we're always sort of dancing on the boundaries of understanding and this year is no exception I have to say we are going to dance on the edge of our understanding of Consciousness to ask if Consciousness can be explained it's likely there have been questions about the nature of Consciousness since they were human beings but a scientific understanding leaps forward is it time for philosophers to give way to neurologists to biologists to all kinds of is basically get out the way there's three of you sitting here I wonder if you will should philosophy vacate the space and let science take over it is a fascinating question I'm sure you'll agree on the panel and I'll do longer introductions in a moment at the far end Anil Seth Maya spainer Philip Goff and Louise Anthony I'll just briefly explain how the evening's going to work we're going to hear from each of our panelists in turn after that we'll have a short conversation here on the stage and then we'll open it up to all of you for questions there are fixed microphones or there's afix microphone I can see over there so when we get to questions if you want to ask a question please come over to that if for any reason you can't uh aren't able uh put your hand up I will make sure that a roving mic gets to you but that's a bit later on so without further Ado though let's get things is underway our first Speaker tonight is Anil Seth annalize professor of cognitive and computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex he's also co-director of the Canadian Institute for advanced research program on brain mind and Consciousness he's also the editor-in-chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness his 2017 Ted Talk has been viewed more than 13 million times and his 2021 book being you a new science of Consciousness was an instant Sunday Times bestseller Anil over to you thank you ritala it's a great pleasure to be here thanks for inviting [Music] great honor to open this this debate so I'm going to talk for eight minutes and eight minutes only about the problem of consciousness so the nature of Consciousness is truly one of the great mysteries in all of Science and philosophy reach of us Consciousness is all there is without it there's no world there's no self there's no interior and no exterior there's simply nothing at all how does that experience happen how can the redness of red or the sharp Pang of jealousy be accounted for by the complex mess of electrified Pate inside each of our skulls now there's a strong intuition that it can't be done on the face of it Consciousness just doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that will ever be amenable to explanation in materialist physical tense the philosopher David Chalmers put it like this when he was describing his famous hard problem of consciousness why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all it seems objectively unreasonable that it should and yet it does the intuition that Chalmers is driving at is that even when we've solved all the easy problems of Neuroscience the problems that the neurologists the neuroscientists all the ists might might work on of how the brain functions as a complex biological meat machine we'd still be totally in the dark about how and why any of this should give rise to or be identical to conscious experience the hard problem would remain untouched and pristine fortunately there's a middle way a recipe for increasing our understanding of Consciousness which is in practice what a lot of my fellow neuroscientists do rather than setting out to solve the hard problem directly perhaps by finding the special source that Magic's experience out of mere mechanism the science of Consciousness is going to be most productive by dissolving it now we can call this the the real problem of Consciousness how can mechanisms and processes in the brain and the body explain predict and control properties of consciousness the idea is to build increasingly sturdy load-bearing explanations between properties of biological neural mechanisms and properties of Consciousness and by properties I largely mean experiential phenomenological properties why a particular experience is the way it is and not some other way why the experience of redness is the way it is is not like blueness or jealousy or a toothache and the ambition of this approach is that as we build ever sturdier Bridges from the physical to the experiential the hard problem intuition that Consciousness can never be understood in materialist terms will fade away eventually to disappear in a puff of metaphysical smoke now something like this has happened before it wasn't that long ago that physicists and chemists thought that life couldn't be explained without reaching for some Supernatural immaterial ingredient a spark of life in Ellen vital there was a hard problem of life then just as there seems to be a hard problem of Consciousness now but rather than looking for a spark of life or arguing that life is everywhere or that life doesn't exist biologists got on with the job of explaining the properties of living systems metabolism reproduction homeostasis and the hard problem of Life dissolved away but life is not the same as consciousness of course a particular problem for Consciousness I'm sure we'll talk about it is that its main target for explanation experience itself cannot be publicly observed you can put a frog on a table and look at it and study life but you can't put a conscious experience on a table and look at it and while this does make the challenge harder I do not think it makes it impossible so let me illustrate the real problem approach by distinguishing three broad properties of Consciousness level how conscious you are content what you're conscious of and self the experience of being you or being me first up is level I'm just going to give you a few tasters of what Neuroscience statistics are doing in these areas at the moment so what happens in the brain that explains the change in conscious levels such as the transition from wakeful awareness to dreamless sleep and here pioneering work by Marcella masamini and his team have found a measure a quantitative measure called the perturbation complexity index which tracks conscious level among many different conditions it's the first glimpse of a Consciousness meter and we all know how important the ability to measure things has been in the history of science and what's crucial here is that the measure this perturbation complexity index is is based on a theory informed by what conscious experiences are actually like in brief the measure tracks the neural Footprints of the property that conscious experiences are both integrated into unified scenes we have one experience at a time and carry a lot of information so in this way the brain Dynamics the measure it doesn't explain something about Consciousness it doesn't merely correlate with it next is conscious content the things out there in the world that we are conscious of when we are conscious and the big idea here is that what we consciously perceive is not a direct readout of the outside world instead perceptual experience is conveyed by top down inside out predictions about what's out there in the world or in here in the body we live in this view in a controlled hallucination in which the brain's best guesses about the world are calibrated by the sensory signals that it encounters we don't passively perceive our worlds we actively generate them and this concept of the brain as a prediction machine has many things to say about Consciousness such as why objects have a three-dimensional character and why faith is always seem to point outwards even when they are Hollow masks and why Vision in general has a kind of spatial nature there's also plenty of brain evidence I won't go through the details that links conscious perception to these top-down Inside Out signaling in the brain as in this work by my colleague NYU finally there's conscious self this is the idea the self is not the thing that does the perceiving the self is a perception too another kind of controlled hallucination now different aspects of self-experience can be understood as different forms of perceptual prediction whether it's the experience of the object in the world that is your body or of the body from the inside and here the distinctive character of emotional experiences can be understood in terms of perceptual predictions that aren't trying to figure out what's out there but are trying to regulate control the inside of the body to Keep Us Alive and this line of thinking has led me to recognize that our status as conscious creatures is intimately related to our our nature as living organisms these ideas are more than just correlations between things happening in Consciousness and things happening in the brain they're all based on theories which give explanatory insight and predictive power here are some theories of Consciousness they're all grounded in neuroscience and they all attempt to explain different aspects of Consciousness in different ways and they all derive from different philosophical traditions too and experiments now are trying to distinguish between these theories to close some doors while we still open others and I'll close here too I don't claim that materialist physical explanations will inevitably solve or even dissolve the hard problem with Consciousness I think it's likely but I don't know that it's true perhaps some residue of mystery will remain but what I do claim is that following this real problem strategy of doing the hard work of developing and testing theories grounded in physical mechanisms about the properties of Consciousness will yield significant progress and this will be reflected as much in the questions we ask as in the answers we find and philosophy of course does remain Central to this project but perhaps not the kind of philosophy that claims to solve the problems of Consciousness by Fiat but instead the kind that keeps us thinking clearly and as in a phenological tradition tells us more about what it is we're trying to explain when we're trying to explain consciousness now understanding Consciousness is not easy but just because something seems mysterious now with the tools and the concepts that we have now doesn't mean it will always seem mysterious so let's not underestimate the resources of materialism a philosophically informed materialism gives us our best chance of ratcheting up our understanding so that we will see more clearly what can and what if anything cannot be woven into the rich tapestry of nature I'll give my last words to the poet Emily Dickinson the brain is wider than the sky or put them side by side the one the other will contain with ease and you beside I know thank you so much plenty to chew on there our next speaker is Maya spainer Maya is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Birmingham her research lies primarily in the philosophy of psychology in mind and in the history of empirical psychology with a special focus on introspection scientific methodology and natural kinds Maya over to you thank you so I've always thought of philosophers as razors of problems rather than solvers of problems so I'm going to try to say how philosophers earn their keep by raising a problem for precisely the kind of project that Anil was just outlining so I went to look at how researchers in the science of Consciousness gather data about Consciousness which they have to do like any good scientist has to do when they investigate their phenomena But It's tricky because we don't have third person direct access to Consciousness we don't have yet the Consciousness beta that David Thomas talks about we can't point an instrument at somebody's head and tell what states they're in what country States they're in or whether they're conscious at all but most people excuse me do agree that we have first person direct access to our own conscious situation we have introspective access to consciousness so if I ask you do you have a headache now you can tell me that or do you are you seeing something green you can tell me that you can't tell it about your neighbor and they can't tell about you you can introspect your own conscious situation only as a result the field the science of Consciousness has two Road types of measure available there are objective measures that use third person behavioral data or neural markers that are taken to be indexed to consciousness and then there are subjective measures where the collection of data involves collecting subjective reports of individuals telling you about their experience or indicating it in some way both of these types depend on introspective access most straightforwardly the subjective reports are taken to be produced by the individual introspecting but also to validate to the indexing relationship you'd have to appeal to subjective reports at some time point and thus to introspection and here now comes the problem that is recognized in the field it's a methodological problem firstly introspection does seem to be our primary perhaps our only direct source of information about consciousness and secondly we just said introspection is private you can only do it for yourself so in collecting the reports the scientist has to trust the individuals delivering the reports they have trust that they introspect correctly but thirdly the thought is the grounds for the trust is missing in that there are many reasons to think that introspection is unreliable for example I can easily incentivize subjects to deliver positive reports that they saw something by offering money for it and I can get them to be much more conservative by punishing by threatening punishment if you tell me that you saw something when it wasn't there so introspection there are many more reasons introspection does is thought to be unreliable and if that's so here's the problem or the challenge introspection seems both indispensable and unreliable for doing the signs of Consciousness and that's not exactly right news for it being scientific they're two polarized reactions to this methodological problem in the field one side I'm calling the global pessimists and they say look introspection is unreliable we really really shouldn't use it we must give up on its use on subjective reports in doing the science and if indeed it is indispensable then so much the worse for the field itself the science science of Consciousness is doomed on the other side are what I'm calling the faith-based optimists who say it's okay we can still use introspection we can do the signs of Consciousness we've made these many technological empirical and mathematical advances which have improved more generally the reliability of subjective measures or measures in the science of consciousness so I think that both of these reactions are misguided one over estimate that Global pessimists overestimate the problem and the faith-based optimists they underestimated um greatly the reason is that there's nothing really said about three either accept it and then there's a wholesale rejection or it's just said look we can it's fine we'll get by but as a result because nothing much in detail is said about introspection being unreliable to what extent what are the limitations exactly Global pessimists and both end faith-based optimists leave the methodological problem really untreated that is because I think there's a gap in contemporary signs of Consciousness because introspection itself is seriously under theorized and the result is that there's this imprecision at the heart of subjective measures in particular where they seem to face a rad bag of reliability problems that seem overwhelming and at the same time there are no real resources to respond in any detail say no we can do this but not this and the result is that the this sort of situation really renders the field unstable I think because now people say it's not even a science yes it is but nothing is said to exactly give you the limitations and the potential in any fine-grained um way and so the mythological problem in that sense becomes a foundational problem I don't think it has to be that way um and what I offer is a framework or theorizing for treating the methodological Problem by supplying what's missing I think which is a theoretical detailed conception of introspection or introspective access and the first thing we need to do is distinguish between different modes in particular at least three modes of introspective access of a way in which you're self-aware there's an attentional form there is a memory based form you can retrospect and there is a kind of reflexive way of being aware peripherally of your experiences as you go along these are very different modes of introspective access and once we distinguish them properly we can connect them to a lot of empirical and philosophical work on say attention or episodic memory and get a more detailed empirically informed understanding of these three modes which in turn allows us to really articulate some level of specification the methodological strengths and weaknesses of each mode and then we can I say in the science of Consciousness go ahead and really choose the right mode of introspective access in relation to a specific Target of Investigation a specific aspect of consciousness so in conclusion I think that there are a cluster of reliability problems connected with the scientific uses of different modes of introspective access but once we really think about introspection properly these problems are local they're not global so they're specific to uses on an occasion of a given mode of introspective access in service of a particular goal of inquiry and they're independent so they don't bleed across so a problem for One Employment of a given mode doesn't for in service of a particular goal of Investigation doesn't automatically constitute a problem for a different mode investigating something different and that makes these problems amenable to be managed experimentally and as a result we get a better conception to um about the limits and the potential I do think that that means that the the global the the optimists here the ones who want to use introspection have to bake in general we say bake smaller bread they have to be a little bit more modest but the the good news is there's no single methodological problem about the use of introspection that threatens the foundations of science thank you Maya thank you very much let's hear next from Philip Goff Philip is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University his main research focus is consciousness but he's interested in many questions about the nature of reality he's written an academic book with the oup Consciousness and fundamental reality and a book aimed at a general audience Galileo's era foundations for a new science of Consciousness he's currently working on a book exploring the middle ground between God and Atheism which will be published next year okay so the so the mystery of Consciousness continues to be one of the most puzzling intellectual challenges of our time despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain we still don't really have an explanation as to how electrochemical signaling could somehow produce the inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us enjoys every second of Waking Life so why why do we still struggle here um well partly because they're just very deep challenges but I also think we make the problem a little bit harder for ourselves because we miss it's we mis-categorize it or it's quite commonly miscategorized in my view so the standard way of set setting things up into is in terms of the so-called hard problem of consciousness defined as the challenge of explaining how brains produce consciousness um and this is often not as much as it used to be it used to be every kind of New Scientist or Scientific American article on Consciousness that there's not as much as they used to but still often portrayed as a purely scientific problem you know we just need to plug away at our standard methods of investigating the brain and we'll we'll crack it and get a Nobel Prize or something but I'm inclined to think um I would argue that what we're dealing here at root is a philosophical rather than a purely scientific challenge what we have is what is what has traditionally been known as not the hard problem of Consciousness but the mind-body problem and I I think the Mind Body problem arises because we have access to objective reality in two very different ways perception and introspection so through perception we get access to the physical world around us via our senses and we've learned to do that more accurately and precisely through science and through introspection we have access to Consciousness via our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences and then the mind-body problem arises as the challenge of how to bring these two seemingly different things Consciousness and the physical world together in a single unified theory of reality so I think of root this is a philosophical Challenge and broadly speaking there are three philosophical proposed Solutions number one materialism The View Anil is sympathetic to that it's the physical world that is fundamental unconsciousness arises from physical processes in the brain secondly the view I prefer pan psychism which turns this on its head which says actually no it's Consciousness that's fundamental and the physical world arises from more fundamental facts about consciousness thirdly dualism that both Consciousness and the physical world are equally fundamental but distinct and contemporary proponents of this like David Chalmers or Martina nidarumalen tend to postulate uh special laws of nature called psychophysical laws to connect up Consciousness in the physical world crucially all these three options are at least in certain forms empirically equivalent so you're not going to distinguish between them with an experiment so let me just try and press that with a couple of slides now experiments are very important obviously when trying to understand consciousness um but I I think in relation to the Mind Body problem the primary role of experiments is to help us understand which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience so you can't although you can't access Consciousness through perception you can't see someone's feelings you can access their brains you can scan their brains and you can ask them what they're feeling or you can look for external markers of Consciousness and you can try and work out which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of experience and more generally which kinds of brain activity in general go along with Consciousness in general and this is I guess what's been discussed in the last two presentations um to take one example that uh that an Anil defends that he he talked about in his presentation this uh comedy Joe tonight um this cool idea that perhaps Consciousness is correlated with predictive processing in the brain a very interesting attractive proposal um just taking this as a randomly chosen example but um you know crucially this hypothesis is just neutral on all of the philosophical options I just discussed right they would all just accommodate it quite easily uh in their different ways so materialists would say that Consciousness arises from predictive processing or maybe is identical to the pan psychist would say predictive processes arise as processing arises from underlying facts about consciousness uh we could talk more about that maybe later how we make sense of that the Duelist would argue that the psychophysical laws that hook up Consciousness to the physical world connect conscious connect Consciousness to predictive processing in the brain predictive processing being the brain's best guesses as it were as to what's going on around it so you're not gonna so either so let's suppose this hypothesis an early sympathetic to get strong empirical support it's still not going to help us decide between these options at all one iota which is not surprising because this is a philosophical question similarly you're not going to get an experiment which any straight in any straightforward way is going to tell you whether the pro-choice position or the pro-life position on the ethics of abortion is correct because it's not an experimental question it's a philosophical question likewise when we're dealing with the Mind Body problem experiments are can often be relevant uh but a core the call at core this is not in itself an experimental question which why I think the life thing is a red herring because I think that was a purely scientific question about explaining observable data but the mind-body problem I think uh is is clearly not a purely experimental question so when we deal with this as a confront the mind-body problem as a philosophical problem which is the correct answer well obviously in one minute I can't fully defend my view but for what it's worth my own view is that materialism is not very plausible at all we haven't made any progress on its Central explanatory task of explaining how we could get Consciousness out of purely physical processes and else saying uh you know he's offering us explanations I would say he's offering us very cool very interesting potential explanations but to get a full explanation you'd have to plug it in you'd have to marry it with one of these three proposals I'm not sure why you'd favor the proposal that no one's ever managed to make sense of also I think there are it's a big debate but I think there are good arguments like the knowledge argument that show that it just the materialism about Consciousness is just not a coherent position just as Galileo proved that uh Aristotle's view about all object heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones uh Galilei approved is is incoherent I think we can prove that materialism although obviously it's a huge debate in terms of pan psychism I think we've already worked out how to do this the problem is essentially solved and here I think uh Bertrand Russell is should be seen although is is not as generally seed should be seen as the Darwin of Consciousness here I think in the 1920s he worked out how we can make sense of the physical world arising from underlying facts about mind and consciousness the problem is essentially solved um in terms of dualism I think dualism is a coherent possibility but as scientists and philosophers we try to respect Occam's razor we try to have the most simple parsimonious theory of reality and I think this pushes us towards one of the first two options why believe in two kinds of thing when you can believe in one so if I'm right that there's just such an overwhelming case for the the pan psychist option here why isn't it um more poisonous more popular than it is it's it's come a lot more respected in recent years but it's still very much a minority position well it's a huge discussion here huge complicated situation which I wouldn't pretend to simplify but I think one factor that plays a heavy role here is our scientistic culture and which involves a lack of understanding of what what philosophy is and the role it has to play in the project of trying to find out the nature of reality important qualification I'm not saying most philosophers subscribe to scientism I don't think they do I don't even think most scientists working on Consciousness do I don't think anyone on this panel does at least in the most um you know strong form of scientism but I think it plays ahead it has a very heavy influence in our culture and it and it influences how the debate is perceived so for example that you know the objection I most often get online is uh you know what are the predictions upon psychism and I mean that is that question is just as senseless as what are the predictions of the pro-choice position on abortion ethics because this is a philosophical not an experimental position the predictions upon psychism are the same as the predictions of dualism as same as the predictions of materialism so I think it's our scientistic culture that makes it seem like that's a reasonable thing to ask and a reasonable thing to worry about when you can't give an answer to it um so I do have faith however that we will at some point move on from this scientist to culture it's what I spend a lot of my time trying to argue for and that we will as a society at some point properly confront the Mind Body problem as a philosophical problem I suspect at that point and psychism will just seem obvious pretty straightforwardly the more plausible option but we'll have to wait and see and here's a picture of my book uh my my podcast my Twitter handle thank you very much for listening [Music] thank you very much gauntlets have definitely been thrown down we will rush to pick them up a little bit later let's hear from the fourth of our very distinguished panelists Louise Anthony is professor emeriter at the University of Massachusetts and visiting professor at Rutgers University her research interests are in the philosophy of Mind feminist Theory and philosophy of religion she's the editor of philosophers without Gods meditations on the secular life and co-editor of a mind of One's Own feminist essays on reason and objectivity uh she's also recently published a volume of essays only natural knowledge gender and humankind Luis thank you to address this evening's question I happen to think that barring nuclear Holocaust or climate collapse human science can explain consciousness question I want to address however is which science is the one for the job now many people including some people on the stage seem to think that Neuroscience is the science that will tell us how the mind works the science that will unlock the puzzles of Consciousness perhaps dissolve them perhaps they have in mind reasoning like the following here's a common argument minds are made out of brains Neuroscience is the science of brains therefore Neuroscience is the science we should use to study Minds but this is a bad argument to see why let's consider the following parallel argument brains are made of atoms physics is the science of atoms therefore physics is the science we should use to study brains now why is this a bad argument the conclusion seems obviously wrong physics is not the only science that there is so what has gone wrong well there are two important facts that these two arguments ignore the first fact is that reality is layered it has multiple levels and the second fact is that the higher level facts cannot be inferred from the lower level facts so let's start with the first problem not realizing that reality is layered although everything is made of fundamental particles I'm a materialist combinations of particles give rise to objects properties and regularities that are only visible at higher levels of reality so take a look at this picture anybody know what this is a picture of any guesses just shout it out it's very common object you've all seen it seeds of a yellow pepper I think the seeds of a red pepper probably look exactly the same way but the point is that you cannot recognize these as seeds of a pepper at this level at the first level of resolution you're up too close you have to pull back you have to look from a distance and that's pretty much the way reality is there are things that you can see about reality if you look very closely and there are things that you can only see about reality if you in some sense move back or move uh up a level of abstraction science like reality is layered each level of reality has a corresponding science that reveals forms functions and regularities laws at that level that's why physics is not the only science higher level Sciences seek explanations in terms of lower level Sciences so it's not that the higher level science is just describe things at their level of reality and let things go no there is unification of science at least there's an objective of science being unified in that higher level Sciences once they have documented the properties and regularities seek explanation of those properties and regularities in terms of lower level Sciences by the way philosophy in mathematics can be regarded as the maximally abstract highest level Sciences so I do want to make a pitch for my discipline I think we do have an important role to play in understanding many things including the mind and Mathematics has to also be taken into account as we'll see the level of the mind is a higher more abstract level than the brain and psychology is the appropriate level of science for at least initially studying the mind to study Consciousness we need first to learn how Consciousness functions now let's move to the second problem with that bad argument this is the fact that we cannot infer form or function from the bottom up knowing the properties of Parts doesn't enable us to infer what organized collections of Parts can do understanding the parts doesn't necessarily tell us what the parts can make in some cases even knowing what the parts do make doesn't help you understand how you get from the parts to the object but seriously folks imagine trying to infer the function of a strand of DNA just from its chemical structure what I've got here is a diagram of the etiology of a disease called sickle cell anemia once it was discovered that the anemia was caused by the distorted geometry the form of the victim's red blood cells and once it was known which parts of the genome coded for red blood cell shape function the precise biochemical process from Gene to abnormal hemoglobin to distorted cell shape to the disease could be explained this is why just studying the brain will not on its own tell us what Consciousness is or how it works without the higher level functional analysis the transition from brain matter to Consciousness will seem like magic correlations of brain states with conscious states don't add up to explanations and this seems to me to be the the conclusion that you come to if you think there's a hard problem of Consciousness because you're trying to go directly from the neurology to the to the consciousness okay so how should things be done what I advocate is top-down explanation and here's how it works First Step give a functional analysis of the higher level property so in the case of consciousness we want to know what is the role of Consciousness what does it do how is it integrated with for example perception memory reason and attention and at the functional level in psychology quite a bit is known about these relations step two use that functional analysis to just to set design specs for investigation at lower levels see how the functions are realized in the medium of the lower level that is see how lower level structures could perform the higher level functions now this process of top-down explanation is how science has always preceded for example the discovery of the chemical structure of genes was crucially informed by an understanding of what genes do now I want to conclude with a case study a case where we move from math to psychology to Neuroscience a happy collaboration among math Psychology and Neuroscience to answer an important question about vision so what are the functional questions we start with well here's a fact about human vision human beings can recognize the same form or shape of an object through different translations so when a dancer moves her legs might be up and down uh and touching the ground but then she leaps and her legs are in a very different orientation and yet we don't say oh my God what is that creature we recognize it as a human being whose legs have moved so how does that happen um another thing that human beings can do visually is identify novel members of a category so if you look at dogs they come in literally all shapes and sizes very very young children can recognize if they have one of those black and white family looking dogs in their house they still can recognize a dachshund as a dog they don't make mistakes about that they don't think that Pekingese white Pekingese dogs are are white Persian cats for example they're very very good at distinguishing cats and dogs how do they do that how do they know which things are members of the same group in which things are not well here's what we've learned now I'm going to cite some studies and I'll have quotations from the studies that I cite but I'm going to summarize the studies and not read the quotations we can come back and read those if you want this is just to prove to you that I actually did look up the studies okay so let's start with a mathematical proposal the mathematician Harry Blum in 1973 wrote a paper showing that certain mathematical constructions that he called medial axis representations they've come to be known as shape skeletons uh Blum showed that these representations efficiently encode shape information in a way that preserves shape under variations of orientation and size now you can think of a shape skeleton as an imaginary line drawn through the center of a shape each point of which is equidistant from the edges of the shape so it's sort of the center or tendency of the of the shape okay for the next step we turn to psychology the question here is do human beings actually extract and use shape skeletons does the visual system somehow manage to see the shape skeleton um from a surface representation that is is on the retinal image and the answer is yes and there's a lot of data on this um so I cite one study from a low at Firestone and show they found that shape skeletons better predict adult judgments of shape similarity and difference than surface features do and very interestingly to me Eisenberg and lorenko showed that shape skeletons predict infants very young infants I think three and four months infants shape recognition of Novel objects across variation and component parts which means this is not learning this is built in our visual system knows from the get-go what it's after now for the final step we bring in neuroscience so here the question is how could shape skeletons be encoded and processed in the neural Hardware well hung Carlson and Connor found evidence of neural encoding of shaped skeletons in the same neural structures that encode surface features notice one neural structure two functions if you're just trying to infer from the bottom up you might think well you've got one neural structure there must be one thing it does no it turns out the same neural structure can do two different things son Carlson Connor used uh the technique of single cell recording uh to to uh for their findings um less gwart and beaterman found evidence of encoding in V3 uh visual cortex part of the brain um uh one of the parts of the brain that does visual processing they found this in humans using fmri studies I've argued that our best hope for dispelling the mysteries of Consciousness is to start at the top with philosophy yay math and psychology and work our way down to the science of the brain that's the way to get rid of the need for Magic a special thanks to EJ green who helped me organize this material to the Royal Institute of philosophy for this wonderful debate and to all of you for listening [Music] Louise thank you so much so this is the point when we try and pick up some of these ideas and discuss them I will open the floor to all of you we start a little bit late so if that's okay we'll keep on going for a little bit longer so we have enough time for questions from the floor as well but I do want to begin by asking one or two of my own and I'm going to get be fairly basic and then we'll see where we go I know first of all we've had lots of uh reasons why Neuroscience isn't the answer to understanding Consciousness you make it clear that it's not going to be an easy task but are you overstating how much we actually know already well I thought it'd be a risk coming to the Royal Institute of philosophy and debating with Three Philosophers I knew I wasn't giving myself an easy ride but um you know I I certainly I don't think I am I think most neuroscientists are aware that we we don't know very much I mean the brain is insanely complex 86 billion neurons thousand times more connections um what it could be capable of with such a complex mechanism is is really you know it's it's unclear so it's it's not forgiven that a study of the brain will deliver an understanding of Consciousness and I think Louise makes the point very very very well that studying the brain alone is doomed to failure and I would defend Neuroscience a little bit by saying neuroscientists don't do that I mean they they always they it's always about connecting levels you always try and explain Bridge different levels and function is there's a whole body of work in my area which is exactly about what other function is consciousness comparing conscious unconscious conditions boiling it down I don't think that's enough actually I think you really need to bring in the phenomenology too and explain the experiential properties not just the functional properties um I think that the the main defense of the the kind of broadly neuroscientific view that is all about bridging these levels too is that it's a very productive science it's a very productive approach that is even if it ends up being a vet in the end insufficient you learn a lot on the way in the questions you ask change and so here's a little challenge to fill it who makes a very good point that materialism and dualism and hand psychism are empirically indistinguishable you can't do an experiment that is going to distinguish these positions it'll be nice maybe you could but usually you can't that is true but it's irrelevant what matters is how productive that a particular view is for advancing the knowledge sure everything is compatible but that doesn't mean that taking one of you ask the same questions that you would do if you take another view and you know this like in pan psychism you focus on this thing called the combination problem which is what the problem you think is important to solve if you're a pan psychist in dualism you might look for these psychophysical bridging laws in materialism we look for the phenomena of Consciousness that we can explain in terms of mechanisms and that's been a very productive thing that people have been doing for decades and has really changed what we understand about not everything about Consciousness but lots of things about consciousness so I think the promise of a neuroscientific view and just to bring in the third a really good point about the main difficulties how we get the data can we really do it given there's in there's this intrinsic privacy and subjectivity and you distinguish sort of faith-based optimism and Global pessimism I like to think that I and a lot of my colleagues are a reason based optimists that we know the limits of introspection and you nice distinction between three different types but there's also things like second person methods elicitation interviews that try to bracket out the biases of somebody asking questions and we have very good methods in psychophysics for for exactly dealing with these biases that you mentioned right at the beginning if you offer people money sure your bias them to say yeah but we can easily measure that bias and separate it from sensitivity so there are ways to to solve the problem there are ways to address the problem while recognizing it's a problem so I would I would say Neuroscience can be rationally optimistic is in a sort of theraband philosophy of science thing it's a productive rather than a degenerative program and absolutely it's all about connecting levels and dealing with emergence and building in a functional perspective and I think that'll get us a long way to where we need to go you've knocked everybody back there but Maya I'm going to bring you in first of all uh I mean do you feel reassured that there's this snappily title perturbation complexity index that anal talks about there are these methods for measuring does that does that begin to answer some of your concerns about the methodological approach um I have to talk about that one you can talk um I'll answer it a little bit more directly so I I do think perhaps um yeah I do think that contemporary science of Consciousness is more faith-based than it perhaps is aware of and yes there are these ways to try and rule out biases of various kinds but when I look at the experiments themselves and the data collection it tends to be external constraints so what happens is that what you try to do is use um performance data involving stimulus perception um to kind of get a handle on how far off the subject might be and I know that there are fancy ways of doing sort of Meta Meta D calculations and all of these things but the experiments themselves they're not very precise about what you're asking the subject do right and so what I see is that there I come from a historical perspective so I look at the old introspectionists and I think they had it worked out better in many ways and it would be it would be good to look again at the old psychologists to see how they thought about say using attention introspective attention rather than retrospection I I don't see much experimental discipline there to keep these apart for example but I am not um I'm in favor of the project I'm an optimist myself but I think I see too much um too much of a lack of theorizing about introspection itself but this is their details there that would need to be discussed here about even the beginning of the data collection like when you in one of your papers with jakobawi for example they are sort of phenomenological observations you call them that are just sort of help themselves you help yourself to them sometimes about what what Consciousness is like and the things that you need to explain and there I think again more more attention to how you actually get the phenomenological data would be good Philip from your perspective is uneven asking the right questions he certainly is asking the right questions and he's doing very well at answering them it's just that it's nothing to do with philosophy I think I just I don't see I don't think there's any connection between the great work and not very productive work Anna does and the philosophical position called materialism you know I've read Daniel's book I loved I didn't have a problem with any of it except where he says oh and by the way I'm a materialist I think if Anna was a duelist or a pansychist he'd do all the same things he would just when in philosophical mood mode interpret it in a different way maybe an analogy might be able to imagine a a theist scientist and an atheist scientist Maybe cosmologists they would have different understandings of why the universe exists maybe the atheist thinks it's a brute fact the theist thinks it's created and sustained by God but that doesn't necessarily affect their science they get on with the science in the same way and I think I showed quite precisely how I just took one claim annual defense and showed how a dualist a pan psychist a materialist could totally Embrace that just with their philosophical hat on they'd give a different interpretation of it but I'm just really dispute that it that it um it impacts the science at all I mean David Chalmers is a good example of a he's a philosopher rather than a scientist but he's a very empirically involved scientist or Ned block as a materialist David Chalmers is a duelist in terms of their approach to the science the the dualism and the materialism don't make a difference it's just so so just finally Anil says uh well I'd be answering the the combination problem if I was a pan psychist no I think there's the philosophical there's the philosophical tasks and the scientific tasks the philosophical task for the pan psychist is the combination problem for the Duelist is um maybe the interaction problem for the materialist is um the hard problem but they're the philosophical problems and I think when it comes to Scientific problems it's just it's just neutral on on these different philosophical perspectives Louise I'm going to bring you in here because I suspect that you disagree with Philip's position and yet you would agree that perhaps the way the unil approaches uh Consciousness is not necessarily what you'd advocate so I well I do disagree with Philip about uh the prospects for materialist explanation of Consciousness I think that if you just correlate physical states with uh psychological States you're just going to have correlations you're not going to have explanations but I think that if you map the functional uh reality then you can ask very focused questions about how this function gets carried out and you can find material structures that carry it out and now you have an explanation why does attention work the way it does um well we we uh we know some facts about how attention works we know that it's independent of uh in visual attention um it's independent of focus you can focus on something and attend to something else and we have some ideas about how uh in the Neurology of of the eye um and and the neurological processing that goes on when signals leave the the back of the retina uh how those two how those two things can be dissociated how focused can come apart from attention um I did want to pick up on um uh anil's um uh glancing reference to predictive processing which is something that I'm just learning about predictive processing views of perception I think predictive processing and Anna will correct me as soon as I say something wrong um predictive processing is a bottom-up motivated theory of perception and it cannot as far as I can tell explain some of the well-known functional uh features of visual perception um Anil had a slide that showed a um a little Peg sitting on a checkerboard this is a absolutely literally textbook illustration of a visual phenomenon called lightness constancy you will see when you look at the if you looked at the slide you'd see that you would identify a certain pair of squares as one being white and one being dark in fact they have exactly the same luminance they're they're reflecting exactly the same amount of light the visual system however knows in some sense that one of them is in Shadow and it corrects for that now we know this functionally and lightness constancy is not the only constancy that the visual system takes account of but we have functional models of these things that have given given us very very clear and detailed um guidance about how the visual system actually accomplishes these things now predictive coding as far as I can tell is motivated by an understanding of some of the physical processes that go on in the brain it's known that there is informational feedback from as it were higher level structures to lower level structures however there are lots of things that predictive coding simply cannot explain as far as I can tell um that are known at the functional level so just a little illustration I've drawn two lines here can people see them roughly would you agree I sound like a magician don't I would you agree perfectly ordinary lines have nothing in my pocket they're they're basically the same length yes okay I'm going to make a slight alteration how about now do they look the same length no but you know they're the same length I didn't change the length of the lines so you're you're your brain if it's predicting is saying they're the same length your vision is saying no no they're not um now one of the explanations for this is that this configuration of of lines occurs in naturalistic settings in situations where in in the one case um the uh there's a joining of planes that is uh convex a concave with respect to you and the other there's adjoining of planes that is convex with respect to you and the visual system knows that two lines of the same ocular length where one is farther away than the other signify two different actual physical lengths the visual system knows that cognition knows that the visual system is getting fooled but cognition cannot correct vision Vision won't have it vision is informationally encapsulated it doesn't take instruction from cognition there's a perception cognition boundary that the functional evidence uh demonstrates I think very very clearly and I don't know how predictive coding deals with it in fact I don't know apart from binocular rivalry I've not seen any functional level you might have an answer well I I don't I do disagree with you um I think well firstly predictive processing has many Origins right this broad framework that there's an origin and Signal processing there's an algorithm from predictive coding that was in compression of signals from engineering right but there's also a background in philosophy and it's very functional the idea of what what is it the what is the problem that brains are trying to solve when they do perception it's the problem of inferring the causes of sensory signals right to figure out what's useful um not not necessarily what's there but what's useful so this goes back to cancer it goes back to if now heightened that the Arabian scholar in 15th century and of course it really takes off with Hermann helmholtz in in the late 19th century and it's totally functional set up as a problem of okay that's the problem the next level would be you write it formally as the brain is faced with a kind of bayesian-like inference problem how does it how does it solve it well that's one way to that's one way to to describe that that problem then you can say how does the brain then you come up with a process Theory so just as you were describing in your talk you come up with what kind of mechanism could achieve these functions and then you get something like predictive processing predictive coding no you don't yes that's where I that's why I disagree but no you actually if you well you do first of all if well how does predictive processing um deal with the this is called the Mueller live yeah it deals perfectly well and you can build predictive coding models of mulalaya of adelson's checkerboard or binocular rivalry of all these things because what's happening here from a predictive coding point of view is the brain has priors about how things generally are and they can be at different levels so the light constancy thing to say everything's checkable first there is a prior there's prior knowledge built into the visual system of the brain that objects in Shadow appear darker than they are like that that is constituted or so the theory would say as a top-down prediction about the luminance of the signal that should be expected given the higher level context of an object in Shadow so that gives you the phenomenology Davison's checkerboard in the same the same thing could be said about Muller Illusion by the way it's totally untrue to say that vision is encapsulated it's totally true it's totally untrue and I like the way this debate is going there's not there are some things that are malalia is possibly one of them but maybe not but many other things are definitely not okay [Laughter] I just want to make one quick uh inundation to what Arnold said yes computational models of the visual system have been extremely successful and extremely fruitful but they have not been General models of cognition meddling with perception that's a separate step also bayesianism is could be it could be the way uh it could be uh the the computational model that best describes what Vision does but it's it's been far from demonstrated well on that massive disagreement I'm going to open it up to all of you um there is a fixed microphone at the back over there uh and if you need a roving microphone on there's one up there as well I apologize if you need a roving microphone then put your hand up we'd like to hear from as many of you as possible please keep it relatively brief if you can questions rather than statements uh there is I think somebody up there if you could speak into the microphones one of the big questions is um it's all well and good knowing what's going on inside yourself in your own mind but what about the minds of other people in order to get some kind of evidence or understanding of it you need to have language even for something like introspection you need language even if it's your own introspection you need to have some method of talking about it describing it so I I would suggest Maybe that without language you can't study Consciousness or another question similar is what came first Consciousness or language or language talk about that thank you very much do you want to ask your question as well and then we can open up the panel follow up because it's also to do with introspection and sorry I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm a philosopher so it's going to be very basic uh but uh Maya mentioned that introspection is under theorized and my question is to what extent introspection can be a little bit tricky in order for us to understand Consciousness because well introspection is not precise because Consciousness is not that precise so if Consciousness is not really you know it's not a binary phenomenon it's not whether we're conscious or not conscious whether if it's a spectrum then you know if we are not fully conscious then whatever we're trying to uh scribe in terms of how cautious we are is going to be not particularly precise and I know I'm a little bit conflating the concepts here but to what extent being more mindful can help us to be more conscious and therefore the introspection of people who practice mindfulness is going to be a better measure of Consciousness okay thank you very much well let's start with those two um without language how do we even describe Consciousness um and which came first Consciousness or language which also brings me to a question that I was interested in in raising which was the extent to which the way in which we think about Consciousness is actually cultural and the second question which was um introspection can be under theorized but if we're mindful does that make us more conscious and does that make our introspection perhaps more accurate when it's necessarily a bit imprecise um I'm going to start with you Louise you can answer both or one or whichever you prefer I'll just speak to the relationship between uh language and consciousness of course we can't study Consciousness without language because language is our tool for doing all sorts of study but I think there's every reason to think that Consciousness can be dissociated from language um uh pre-linguistic humans uh babies we call them uh are are clearly conscious um and uh um I could go through some infant studies that I find just fascinating if if if you force me to um but um uh babies have Consciousness without without language and animals do you know Descartes who I'm sure never had a dog thinks that thought that animals had no consciousness because they couldn't speak um I think that's just I think that's just bias and flies in the face of all the functional evidence which is that dogs feel pain that dogs experience something like emotions that dogs reason uh lots of good evidence for that in it um pick up on the question of whether Consciousness is vague there are a lot of actually interesting philosophical discussions about this a very interesting recent paper by Eric schwitzgable arguing that Consciousness is vague and that there might be for example no fact of the matter as to whether a garden snail as an inner life or not so not you know we're curious does it happen in a life or is it just a mechanism he thinks there might be no fact of the matter just as like some people there's no fact of the matter as to whether they're tall or not tall it's a borderline case it might be the same with snails I myself don't think that makes sense I don't think we can make coherent sense of Consciousness being vague in that sense my intuition to that in line with the Defenders of the integrated information Theory and I've actually argued this leads to a nice argument for pansychism which I won't go into now um but but just finally even if Consciousness is vague I I don't think that would allow us to circumnavigate the mind-body problem I think that we'd still have to confront those issues fire very interesting question about um non-linguistic creatures yeah I think that is a I mean it is a big area in the science of Consciousness to figure out how to study them and the um the kind of measure that I didn't want to speak about but um the the kind of Consciousness meter Glimpse that we're getting there are ways to start studying conscious linguistic conscious creatures who then what we can learn about their brains and then maybe use that to study non-linguistic creatures so I I think that is an interesting question and a challenge for for the field could just be a sign yeah so presumably you'd learn about those sorry presumably you'd learn about those signs first by realizing that they are indicative of Consciousness and by also combining it with verbal or or at least report based um access to Consciousness but who where there um you know if perceptual conditions are bad we're not so good at perceiving either right if the light is bad so if um we're not you know the best situation to introspect is when things are brimming and the case is clear and yes there's going to be um kind of less or more fuzzy States Of Consciousness that are therefore harder to introspect I don't think that that's a real problem for using introspection to get data because you want to just you know do it in good conditions and that's partly what the challenge is the mythological challenge to figure out the good conditions but you did ask about um whether mindfulness might improve so meditation based for example there's again a huge research body to to look at whether meditators are better at introspecting now from my vantage point I look at that as also from a methodological point it's like how are these studies done how are we getting data that the introspection is better perhaps when people are doing meditation so I have all sorts of maybe niggly things to say about how how these studies are done but it isn't a very interesting question and there's some people who really think that practicing mindfulness or meditation does make you a better introspector there's all sorts of other training you might go in for and the old introspectionists in the 19th century and early 20th century did think that training was important they didn't go in for meditation but what they thought is the training is important that you keep the different types of introspection apart that you don't let when you're retrospecting let it collapse into using attention at the time of stimulus presentation for example and that's the kind of thing where I think not enough um is done in today's experiments to keep these things properly apart interesting question thank you yeah just keep it very short because I basically I agree that language is necessary to study Consciousness but not necessarily for Consciousness and you know one of the things that we see in the sort of Neuroscience of Consciousness is a lot of things that people now know about let's say visual the the neural mechanisms underlying visual awareness visual Consciousness are known through the study of non-linguistic creatures non-human primates right so we already kind of assume that these creatures are conscious and and and therefore their data is relevant for understanding human consciousness um on introspection I think this is a really interesting question and the the mindfulness tradition one way of thinking about at least certain ways of engaging with mindfulness are all about training attention and you learn to pay attention through meditation and so there's a I think there's a good April reason to think that it might be good for introspection in the sense that you know you realize ah what I'm feeling is actually a sensation in my body it's not just a worry about the future of course the worry there is you're actually changing what you're measuring at the same time so somebody who's meditated then they're having a different experience they may be differently able to access it but it's nonetheless a different experience and just to say I I totally agree with these the need to do introspection better and there's so much that the early psychologist did that was really cool before people came along with brain scanners and messed everything up because it suddenly you could just put people in that and get a get a nice picture and you know in our work we definitely separate the kind of contemporaneous phenomological report from from retrospective and that's that's key if you're going to make inferences about respective data it was in a rather unorthodox move am I allowed to ask you to explain that rather wonderful piece of experimentation on introspection that you sent to me you might have to come up to where there's a microphone speaking loudly is no good all right yeah I can't remember the name of the scientist now but there was a a very very dedicated physiologist in the 1950s or 60s who was puzzling and actually his puzzle was not directly the puzzle about what's the relationship between physiology and consciousness he was worried about which cause pain in your knee so he was so obsessed with solving this problem he got a friend of his to open up his knee okay tweet this is all right tweet that I'm sorry I'm doing my physiology is poor I can't remember what was tweaked after described an Exquisite pay and so you established that actually you know Tech cartilage damage is not responsible [Music] this is often used as an example of how well hang on a minute the reason we have this problem with introspection is just that you haven't got the same guy doing the physiology and doing the introspection if we were all looking for as Brave as top 10 I'm afraid I forgot his name yes don't try this at home and I know I hope you're not going to try that in the lab it's it's good but that there are sort of modern day less less kind of bizarrely uh strange methods of doing that but I mean I think that the idea is here can you can you kind of go the other around can you intervene in the mechanism and see what the sort of experiential consequence is and do that systematically right so you tweak this cartilage you tweak that cartilage maybe you'll say let's activate these neurons or those neurons or that would be the equivalent and of course there are methods by which this can be done they're difficult to do in humans for the reason that you're beautifully Illustrated so definitely don't open up your heads at home and start like treading an electric screwdriver in but you know we have things that are that are roughly equivalent no we we can't so there's really interesting studies that use a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation this was part of this PCI thing I mentioned earlier it's basically a magnet that injects a very short sharp pulse of energy into the brain and you don't feel this you don't feel the past itself but depending on the timing of it and the location of it it can have an effect on your experience so if you do it over the visual cortex in some conditions you'll see a flash of light and in other conditions you won't and so you can tweak the cartilage in the brain and I don't think it solves the problems of introspection but it gives a very important additional tool because intervening and seeing what happens is always more powerful than passive observation of what happens when you do something purely externally and in animals of course you can do this with much greater precision and a lot of The Cutting Edge now in in this in Neuroscience of Consciousness is done in humans who have indeed electrodes implanted into their brains this is usually because they have epilepsy epilepsy sometimes needs surgery and in neurology clinics typically before an epilepsy surgery you will not but quite often you will implant electrodes in this person's brain so you know exactly which part of the brain is responsible for the seizures but then these people have electrodes in their brains and are basically fine and so you can go and do experiments with them if they agree but you can record from single neurons or groups of neurons and you can stimulate so you can get in there not with the coverage that we would need not with anything like the resolution we would hope for but the principle is established and it's a very powerful principle Louise I just want to put in a plug for top down uh analysis first um you don't want to you don't want to figure out what's wrong with your computer by going around with a magnet and and and and touching different parts of it right you don't want to just muck around with stuff and see what happens now that's not what uh anil's describing though it does sound like what this this hapless doctor was was doing um you can't not necessarily infer function from seeing that if you touch a certain part of the brain something starts happening or something stops happening you really need the functional analysis to know exactly what that part is contributing if you're if you're getting hold of a structure that is implicated in a lot of functions then uh you can see that there's a degradation of performance in one function and perhaps infer incorrectly that that's all that that structure does um so don't don't don't try to you know diagnose your computer problems or see what's wrong with your colored television by going in and sticking uh screwdrivers in random places and see what happens definitely don't do that uh do we have some more questions yes lots of questions do you want to come up to the microphone uh just make your way over and we'll take two or three and if you're happy to keep going we can keep going until quarter past so we'll have to be brief I think of this round that was a rather lovely conversation though oh loads of questions you were gonna do all right so do you want to go because I don't want to keep everyone too long okay regarding what we know like from Consciousness and what I've gathered in this like little seminar um and that there's so much more to be learned given we there's still a lot that we're puzzled by how does the unconscious then fit in given it's right like you're not aware of it but it's another part of the brain that's vitally important and like I have a bit of psychology background sort of from what I know Freud was like very big on it saying it's driven our like con it drives your behaviors your desires and everything however it's a hard thing because it's like something that's very I would say very untestable because like how okay it's the unconscious lovely next one we'll take three and then we'll see how we do so my question is just for Louise sorry but um it sounds like you think there are levels of explanation and that we should look in a particular explanation and once we've exhausted that level we should move to the next level so if we all the possible levels of explanation so we look at the top level go down down down down down down down what happens when we exhaust all our levels and never find the complete explanation of Consciousness which seems to be what people like Philip want to look for okay lovely I seem to be confused with the problem at hand because if we look at the perspective from the materials view then I would assume that there is no kind of um that creates the reality materialism would would deny that and so you know from a materialistic point of view how would you even uh think that Consciousness exists um and from the pan psychism if if you're adhere to the pan psychism then um I'd assume that most spiritualists would say that um scientists would would be quite limited to to explore that because it seems like we're trying to observe or measure or some something that is outside of of our perspective and it just seems to me that if you're if you adhere to pan psychism then there's any type of discussion of scientists trying to solve this problem it's just doomed to fail okay lovely let's go with those you can keep it brief and I'll try and get a few more of you in before we have to pack up so Louise do you want to answer that question very specifically to you there are these levels of um explanation if we exhaust all the levels what happens when we don't find an answer well um you know I I said I think that human science can solve the problem of Consciousness but I could be wrong um there are lots of things I mean the physicists I don't think have reconciled gravity and quantum mechanics yet um but we're still working on it I mean there's always a risk that we won't get answers that we want um uh what I was going to say when you said what if we get all the way to the bottom I thought well what happens then as we go for drinks but but um yeah so it's an empirical issue and um uh and Philip I think you're being kicked off the stage I mean should you even be in this conversation if we're talking to another materialists well yeah I mean I said again I think we need to distinguish the the scientific questions and the philosophical questions to this problem of you know how we could explore pan psychism I think the scientific questions would more or less go the same whatever your position on these philosophical views are um and then we have to face the philosophical questions which cannot be in any straightforward way addressed by an experiment you might ask well how the hell do we do it well I try to gesture it the case up on psychism I think one of the one of the three views is incoherent and one is more parsimonies than the other so that's the one we go for and uh Maya I don't know I'm going to give you the pick of the lot but there's also how does unconsciousness fit into this conversation we're having you say something about that and I um although I'm totally unqualified um you don't have to answer you don't have to answer no it's just that it's so Freudian psychology is one approach one theory about the mind and I think sort of not everybody might be persuaded by it so you don't have to fit it in that's the first point you know you might think well there are no such things like unconscious the Freudian unconscious State States now are there unconscious states in the mind for sure right but um and you know scientists and philosophers theorize a lot about them one is um you know I take it I hope most of us believe that the Earth is round right but you didn't think about it before I just said it but you had the belief nonetheless right and there there was an unconscious um state that you were in and we theorized about that so maybe I'll leave it I know briefly yeah just to add a little bit there that's I I think it's difficult to fit in the sort of Freudian unconscious to Modern Neuroscience so people are trying they're they're in our fields of neuropsychoanalysis and so on um but there are so instead of for me instead of thinking of another unconscious mind that sort of parallel coexisting with the conscious mind I think that some things that the brain does become reflected in our conscious awareness and other things don't and that's a very empirically well established distinction and and figuring out the limits of what the brain can do or what the organism can do in virtue of unconscious processing is really exciting research area and what what what can we do we can't we can't invent things necessarily but we can still detect information can we add up unconsciously people disagree about that there's there's interesting stuff there and I can't remember what the other ones were now marvelous now listen we are well over time are you all happy to stay here for another five minutes if I was on the radio I'd have been kicked off air by now so I'm very conscious of time uh all right so we are what are we gonna do we as so many of you this I feel really mean okay I'm just going to take all the questions you've got to be really quick and then I'm going to leave it to these guys to decide what they want to answer uh to each of the panelists regarding the teleportation problem um one of the easy ones yeah would you enter the machine to skip a 23 hour flight or would you fear the death of your personal conscious experience uh I'm asking this to challenge challenge something a materialist might claim that only the specific composition of material properties are essential for a specific version of Consciousness lovely thank you um a question for Phil really um so um okay because you you know you're a strong proponent of pen psychism um what do you think is made of particles fields and and how we're going to measure it thank you for being I think it was Philip that said Consciousness in the physical world are very equally fundamental but distinct um I was just wondering kind of without any kind of social conditioning or uh conscious empirical experience I want to use a hypothetical that someone is born into a room and they don't leave that room for 15 16 years um what are your opinions about how the conscious would operate in moral situations or moral decision making um without any exposure to kind of um the natural world or any social conditioning at all and how kind of they would make more decision makings without that experience in the first place okay I have a question for Luis all other people can win as well I just thought uh so you said we have to go top down uh I was I was wondering if we have to go to the quantum level uh because at the curtain level things are completely different I was wondering if you have any thought on that and for the rest uh has does like quantum physics or Quantum knowledge I mean our knowledge about quantum physics has I will have any like show any light on this conscious study and the field thank you hello um so you mentioned experiential properties and physical um properties and correlation so I was wondering do you think that the correlation between these two kinds of properties metaphysically necessary or contingent and is this question significant for your work or not hello so if what we're trying to do here is attempt to actually understand Consciousness I think we have to look at both the house and the whys and my problem that emerges here is that the science defense of science here only looks at the house and overlooks the why why's they sort of hyper focus on experiments scientific experiments so don't you think that it is a philosophical question because even the experiments sort of tend to lead us towards a philosophical conclusion for example you know how it's been proven that like thoughts emerge in the subconscious and then they move into the conscious and that backs up theories such as hard determinism and multiple examples such as that so what is your response to that you briefly discussed entities which we would say I might be conscious about which then Express themselves verbally like animals and babies in certain cases what about entities which can express themselves verbally which we wouldn't say are conscious they invited the neuroscientist what about inviting a computer scientist software test of the questions lovely okay I know I'm going to start with you and if we can keep it fairly briefly okay I'll give you a very brief as I'll go so teleportation machine where you put yourself in a thing and you get physically regenerated somewhere else would I do it absolutely not crazy I totally agree I I have certain confidence in science but not that no um pan psychus and I'll leave to him moral decision making when you've been isolated this is really interesting I think it's kind of an empirical problem because clearly we're born with certain things that we we've inherited we we don't have to develop everything de novo so are we born with moral Instinct I think this is really interesting empirical question don't know the answer to it quantum level is do we need to go all the way down to the quantum level here there's a there's a terrible history of quantum physics and Consciousness people getting totally confused with Roger Penrose kicking this off a while ago and then other people joining in just because quantum mechanics is mysterious and Consciousness seems mysterious does not mean they're related they might not be related that's all they might be but there's very you know the best person who's spoken about is cholera Valley who you will know who talks about relational quantum mechanics which is kind of interesting because it just shows the resources of materialism are greater than we might we might think there is very little evidence that quantum mechanics does anything of note in the brain it's useful for things like magnetic sensation photosynthesis but does it do anything in the brain it's too warm and wet in there it doesn't um neural correlates of Consciousness they're a critical method in the empirical science of Consciousness very Illuminating very interesting are they necessary well that would be much more interesting that they're merely contingent but I think we have to go from Mere correlation towards explanation that's when it becomes interesting and that of course is part of a functional analysis too which gets onto this how versus why and I do think scientists ask the why question as well as the how this is part of functional analysis a good scientific account of something not only explains how it works but why it works the way it does what is it for do said nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution which is all about function that's true of Consciousness as much as anything else to AI this is really really interesting question very timely because we are now indeed faced with systems that can speak to us and they're yet they're just um complicated pattern recognition statistical algorithms you might remember that Google engineer Blake them1 who was developed helped develop this language model large language model called Lambda and said it was sentient and got fired if there's one thing that United the AI Community it was thinking that he was nuts there is no good reason to think that AI is conscious and the ability to speak is not determinate of of being sentient but it does raise a really interesting problem that I'd like to leave in your mind which is that a lot of the the debate in AI has been would we get a conscious machine how do we build a conscious machine we shouldn't even been trying it'd be an ethical disaster you don't do something uh just because it's cool it's very stupid however we may well be faced with situations where we interact with systems that we cannot help but perceive them as being conscious in the same way that Louise was describing with the Muller liar illusion there may be a cognitive impenetability to certain systems that persuade is that they're conscious even though we know that they're not or have no good reason to believe that they are and that's going to be incredibly disruptive to society and this is a theme that's much better dealt with in science fiction than either in science or in philosophy I think so far terrifying thought Maya as many are as few as you'd like uh I definitely want to answer the bema question because the tele Transportation because I think a lot about that and it depends whether you're pulverized and sent through bit by bit and built together built up again from your own parts or whether you're just destroyed and a replica of you is being built in the I watch Star Trek um in the other place so the second one absolutely not the first one maybe and there it depends really and that morphs into the house and wise question that's why the science will give us some answers whether that's a good idea to get into that machine or not right it depends now on what Consciousness is in that sense where we don't have to answer the philosophical or engage in the philosophical project that Philip is engaged in but where I think that's not the only philosophical question I don't want people to think that that's what philosophy is it's it's excellent and it may flow your boat but there's so much philosophy to do on the scientific side um and you know science might give you an answer whether it's a good idea to step into that machine if they can just rebuild you from your own parts you know that that's fine I let my stomach's rumbling so keep it brief I I I just I agree with Maya that yeah the Mind Body problem isn't the only philosophical thing to do here uh guy asked me about particles or Fields I would tend to think the fundamental forms of Consciousness I had by Fields rather than particles both because theoretical physicists tend to think fields of fundamental also I think it leads to a a more attractive form of pansychism as I defended in my academic book consciousness and fundamental reality metaphysically necessary so the pansakis view is that the uh the interactions between the fundamental conscious entities form certain patterns certain mathematical structures and those patterns and mathematical structures just are what we call physics so this was Russell's Insight that we can get physics out of more fundamental facts about mind or Consciousness because physics is purely mathematical as long as we have the right right mathematical structures we we can get physics out of that and so that's why pancake have essentially solved the hard problem um and teleport teleportation I'm kind of agnostic on personal identity but I don't think probably not just in case Louise so I want to say a couple of things I think bear on a number of the questions first of all I think of Consciousness as a functional property of a material being so I think Consciousness has to be embodied I don't think Consciousness is a program I don't agree with Dave Chalmers about Virtual Worlds being real worlds um I think those are abstract representations of of a structure that could be embodied um so uh if and I totally agree with um uh Anil Anil what do we say I can't pronounce it properly either as we as we just discussed Lydia uh I would not and under any circumstances teleport if it involved the destruction of my body and a recreation of a body if they could do one they can do two and if they do two they can't both be me so neither of them is me I I agree with Maya's point that it might make a difference if you could actually take the parts of us and put them together I mean we have different intuitions about identity watches we can take apart and put back together we think it's still the same watch I don't know about animals um animals die when you do that so maybe what you would be making would be another person just like you out of parts that were yours but isn't you anyway I would not even I even if I trusted the technology to do exactly what they said it was going to do I wouldn't I wouldn't think that that was me um I also wanted to say that I don't think that Consciousness though it requires embodiment it doesn't require any particular material medium it could be it's wet wear in our case but there could be there could be things made out of metal and circuitry that have Consciousness if they have the right functional organization which would have to be very complex it has to be more than being able to um recognize patterns it has to be able to do more than um predict common finishings of sentences and so forth it has to be integrated in particular has to be integrated with perception it has to have the ability the being would have to have the ability to form cognitive states that can be integrated with information about the passing scene that's coming in um that's not the only functional requirement but that would that would have to uh that would have to be and again could an AI be conscious well it depends on the architecture if it's a connectionist architecture if it's just a pattern recognition recognizer then no but if it if it embodied the the program that our minds run on I don't see why not well what an amazing conversation thank you all very much if I don't think I've ever overrun quite so badly I would be sacked the book at bedtime has finished and we've gone into the uh the evening comedy program thank you all very much for coming thank you for some great questions thank you to our panel to ernel Seth Maya spainer Philip Goff and Louise Anthony uh and thank you to the Royal Institute of philosophy and to Edward Harcourt and I hope to see you all again next time thank you very much thank you

Channel: The Royal Institute of Philosophy

Views: 61,410

Keywords: Philosophy, Consciousness, Annual Debate, Anil Seth, Louise Antony, Maja Spener, Philip Goff

Id: vjvLQ7GKxBE

Length: 98min 45sec (5925 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023