Consciousness Live! S3 Ep 19 -Discussion with Bernardo Kastrup and Philip Goff

all right we are live okay so rejoining me today two very special guests uh bernardo castro and philip gough um guys you want to say a little bit about who you are and what you do just for just for fun go on bonado um i am um amateur philosopher compared to phillips shall we put it that way you don't need to be modest i do have a phd in philosophy but i i'm i don't work in academia um i run a philosophy organization but not in academia i also have a degree in computer engineering which we were just talking about offline before we we went live and i write books mostly about ontology philosophy of mind and have known philip now for over three years three years and a little bit yep that's it is that is your organization up and running now it was in the planning stages and now it's in existence well it exists it's registered uh you know it's official but we don't have an online presence yet because we are trying to do all the homework we need to do so that when we come out we come out nice if we know what i mean um is it going to be like a 501c or is it a non-profit or is it yeah yeah it's a 501c well does that mean uh-huh what's a 501c it's a non-profit organization yeah it's all that good stuff yeah yeah and we can receive donations and people can have tax discounts if they donate things like this do you have a name essentia essential foundation yeah yeah to appeal to essence and not behavior cool very quick essences yeah very good uh i'm philip gough i'm a philosopher at durham university into consciousness and lots of good things and conscience don't forget conscience my uh paperback in my book us paperback is out um if i'm allowed to plug that october 6th the uh it's the paperback's already out in the uk but just uh yeah i got i have the paperback version i guess i must have got a the uk the uk was has always been paperback the white one but the uh unless you got a pr you know the pre-print things yeah i don't know what i got yeah cool all right well thanks for joining me again you guys it's uh it's always a pleasure speaking with you i learn a lot and have fun as well so that's a bonus bonus and i appreciate you having the time it's a little bit of short notice but hey you know it's all good here um so i guess uh and i also have to apologize a little bit because i'm in the middle of a tremendous allergy attack so if i okay so good we'll simply we'll we'll um commiserate uh but if i sneeze or run away or start running i i just want to get that out there so sorry it's been tremendously terrible september always but anyway so um all right so i have a couple things that i want to ask you guys about but i know that uh philip specifically wanted to sort of start the conversation off talking about something so maybe i'll turn it over to you philip you ask a question and we'll take it from there yeah okay so it's just um i guess finishing off the just from the discussion last time the one thing i i wanted to talk about and actually i wanted to talk about the uh the discussion we had the time before that things the topic moved on um it was just the um to ask bernardo i guess about well it's the issue of of why i think the body rather than the brain is is the seat of consciousness or to put it in idealist terms um why think the body rather than the brain is is the the manifestation the external manifestation of of of the human consciousness of the altar um and and so then in our last discussion bernardo said well we know from experience that the um that the boundary of the skin is the boundary which we can be affected if you put a pin in your toe then you it hurts if you put a pin in the ground in front of you it doesn't hurt um and i think elsewhere he's written i mean if you think about the other direction it's the you might think it's the limit of what we can affect if i will for my arm to go up my arm goes up but if i will this table to go up nothing's going to happen or something did happen um but but why can't so so what what's wrong with this slightly modified form of analytic idealism bernardo's view um were the the brain is the external manifestation of the altar but the brain stands in an incredibly close and intimate causal connection with the region of cosmic consciousness that manifests as my body so just take my case and so you know when you put a pin in the region of cosmic consciousness that manifests as my toe a causal chain set off that eventually makes my alter which is the thing that manifests as a brain uh feel pain or if i will my if i will the region of cosmic consciousness that manifests as my arm to go up a causal process starts that results in that the arm going up so yeah so it seems yeah so i guess i'm just curious i mean well i mean i've got a couple of reasons i guess to prefer the body of the brain but in the first instance i'm just curious about clarifying you know bernardo's motivation for going the body rather than the brain whereas his view seems equally compatible with both it seems to me at least i can speak to you to yeah my my reasoning of my intuition about this i recognize uh part of your motivation for questioning this which is what we feel is what happens to our nervous system and our nervous system extends to the boundary of the skin but if we didn't have nerve terminations on the boundary of the skin we wouldn't feel anything touch our skin we don't have nerve terminations in our in our hair so we can cut our hair without pain or in our nails we don't have nerve terminations there so this could lead to the to the hypothesis um that uh well the the the the image the the extrinsic appearance of the altar is the nervous system and the body is just a support infrastructure i have had this thought i ultimately didn't pursue it for embryological reasons of all things the entire body starts from a ziggurat a a single cell after fertilization and all the different tissues in our body whether they are related to the nervous system or not uh arise from that undifferentiated ultimate stem cell the zigot our nervous system actually is a differentiation from the external surface of a three-week old embryo that sort of folds in on itself creates a tube which later becomes your your nervous system your spine and gives rise to your brain um in our brain a lot of the cells maybe half of it are not neurons they are glial cells they are there for insulation mechanical support you know removal of waste and that they are not nerve cells at all um but they also arise uh together with neurons from the same stem cell type so because of that because all the differentiated tissues in our body whether they are neuronic or not i was about to say neurotic whether they are neuro or not they have this common source they differentiate from a common source and because of that i thought it would be very difficult to argue that the nervous system is of a essentially different nature than the rest of the body because their origin is the same they are differentiations from the same stem literally the same stem cell the same zigot um so yeah that that's that's my motivation but couldn't it be that yeah i mean so there's a certain kind of unity and integration to the body and and it results from the same but it seems to me um completely empirically possible that again putting it in the framework of your theory that disassociation happens when in the britain some system in the brain or something that's that's quite developed so it's so yeah so yeah that that so until you say you've got cosmic consciousness i mean before that you've got you know just cosmic consciousness and these processes that as you say are sort of have a common origin um a part of cosmic consciousness and then when you get decombination that just happens when the brain is developed at a certain point i mean what what is there empirically to rule that out or or i don't know whether we can rule it out empirically it's um so i'm appealing to to my subjective value system these processes have a common origin the whole thing starts during fertilization um these cells share the same genetic code um if you screw up with your heart your whole body will die together and it seems to be an integral system with one same common origin so to to argue that okay there is an origin there but after that origin after some development then there is an ad hoc process that comes on top of that which is the dissociation and that applies only to a subset of that system that that in all other ways fully integrated with the common origin i did this doesn't feel right to me philosophy unfortunately is not like science or engineering or the market we don't have a objective way to validate often we don't have an objective way to validate our hypothesis or even our values like in engineering you know you you may think you have a wonderful idea and you implement it doesn't work yeah it doesn't matter how wonderful it was when it just doesn't work or in science when the experiments contradict your brilliant theory like super symmetry which i spent a couple of years of my life hunting for and failed like the rest of the world higher energy levels yeah maybe we get there one day right that's what people always say oh we don't know quite yet maybe with the super conducting super collider and another few billion dollars but but anyway um so so i don't have a way to really objectively validate what i'm saying but i would suggest that what what the empirical evidence shows to us is that we would need a particularly strong reason to differentiate brain certainly the brain also the nervous system from the rest of the body given the way they seem to be so totally integrated in so many ways and the and the fact that they have had a common origin in the zygote that's very interesting now you say sort of like almost aristotelian i think it reminds me of the things when i talked to neo neo-aristotelians this focus on sort of integra integration of the body and the natural unity and um well i mean maybe i could just raise that i guess two two considerations that push me in the other direction so one is more philosophical to do to do with vagueness so vagueness in the technical sense of things that emit of borderline cases so um you know tallness is a vague property that there's no there's no exact height when someone's you know above which someone's tall and below which someone's not other borderline cases or baldness i may be a borderline case of maybe i'm definitely bald now but you know there's no exact number of hairs that makes a ball person and um so um so i'm inclined to think i don't i think bernard well uh you could tell me i'm inclined to think anyway consciousness and and notions around here are not vague so for example you know it is an utterly it's not it's not a vague matter whether something is in my consciousness or not um it either i'm either feeling it or i'm not um and why is this a problem in this case because um because biological boundaries are vague it seems to me there's always going to be a vague boundary around the body you know is this kind of is this skin cell in my body or out of my body there's always going to be the and these you know create lots of paradoxes and stuff uh so that's so i guess the argument to put it sort of syllogistically would be like the the the boundaries of the body are vague but the boundaries of consciousness of my consciousness are not vague so well that's not a syllogism but that you know you can see where that's going that they're that they're not they can't be the same thing i don't know anyway i mean i'm springing that on you that it's just a completely different consideration but that will be i'm hearing you i i could try to argue the other way just for the sake of enriching the discussion um i would say that the boundaries of all inanimate objects are not only vague they are purely nominal there is no objective criterion for or criteria for saying that an object finishes here and the other object finishes finishes there where does the river end in the ocean begin is is a rock glued to a mountain part of the mountain does it become a separate object if it detaches and rolls down the the slope you know freya matthews already argued for this in 2011 saying that all in boundaries between inanimate objects are purely nominal not empirical but in that same paper she does argue that um the boundaries of of consciousness are empirical there is a limit to what you feel like we discussed empirical did you mean to say empirical then yeah i think she's i'm not sure she uses this exact word but you're gonna say non-vague okay sorry gum yeah i don't think she talks about vegan non-vague she uses it i think she uses the term empirical i may be wrong on this uh have to look look it up again you know the paper i'm referring to probably yeah 2011 freya matthews and then um so i think of all things in nature the boundaries of our bodies are one of the best defined uh boundaries they're they're not nominal i mean if you die certain things will die with you and certain other things will not your chair will not decompose if you die but the stuff that does decompose that's your body and what doesn't decompose by virtue of you having died was not your body um now the other thing you mentioned was that the boundaries of our consciousness are not vague i could argue against that as well i think if you engage um in in in the discipline of introspection quickly you come to the conclusion that actually it is it is quite vague because there are things that you are experiencing and you don't know that you are experiencing but if you introspect oh yeah i have been experiencing this for quite a while now um there are phenomena of obfuscation attention does this a lot attention brings the focus of our awareness on to a certain region but it also obfuscates everything else if you are in the flow writing a paper um you will be experiencing things in your peripheral vision but they will sort of be obfuscated and you'll not be able to tell yourself that you're experiencing them um so yeah i think the discipline of introspection um if practiced practiced uh uh consequently can can indicate that even the boundaries of our own consciousness can be vague at the level of metacognition i don't think they are ultimately vague but it's difficult to say what you're really feeling what you're really experiencing and what you're not sometimes well just yeah i'd like to talk about both of those points really i mean maybe we can come back to i mean i still think i still think i agree that almost every inanimate object is has vague boundaries but i think plausibly the body does too it's it's hard to see why there could be an exact fact about whether this skin cell is it's part of my body or you know when it's dying or you know so it's it's hard to see how they could be precise boundary but but on the second point i mean i kind of agree with you that um if you're talking about what you call metacognition yeah there could be vagueness about whether i'm you know reflectively aware of a certain bit of my consciousness or not but that's different i think to um whether it's part of my experience or not whether it's part of what it's like to be me and i think they're a pretty good reason to think i mean i've i've written a lot on this and it gets more technical but just you know a lot there are famous paradoxes to do in vagueness like the sororities paradox most famously and you know most solutions to these rely on the idea that vague concepts admit of sharpenings or precisification so you could ah you know you could artificially make precise the concept of tallness you could say what i'm going to say you know exactly six foot is tall and so you can make these concepts and that's sort of important for how we respond to these sororities paradoxes although it be technical to get into that but i i can't see how you can do that you can precisify the concept of being part of my experience you know it seems it seems utterly precise as it is it's not it's hot it doesn't seem the kind of concept you could make more or less precise so that's why yeah so it does seem to me the um the concept of conscious of being in my experience is utterly precise whereas the boundaries of the body are not precise and so yeah so i think i still think if you if you had a dream that you no longer remember is it part of your experience um well i mean the experience is no i mean i'm not talking about that's to do with memory then isn't i'm talking about like what's actually in your experience right now yeah but i would argue that what is actually in your experience right now uh is is um um it tends to to nothingness because the bulk of your experience is memory what happened 0.1 second ago is memory so actually 0.0001 second ago is memory and you can can go down to the blank scale on this yeah and you see that the bulk of your experience is memory so if you don't remember a dream that you had per hypothesis is that part of your personal experience you know and and the boundaries of the body and everything that arose from that original z gut directly or indirectly and has your dna and is burning atp in other words metabolizing i would say that's your body and what's not including the keratin in your nails in your hair is not that's just attached to it it's a it's part of the waste of your body that remains glued to it for mechanical reasons for a little while before they detach further but but anyway i i understand your point things become part of the process and leave the process that they yeah and i think there's always going to be vague boundaries of of what is part of the metabolizing process and what is not and um yeah actually i mean talking about healingism i mean one of the greatest works of nearest i mean peter van impe who famously defends in his book material beings that there are only tooth there are only material particles and organisms uh everything else doesn't exist so he thinks paradoxically that there are no such thing as apples but there are apple trees but anyway um but but because of this problem he ends up saying um there is real vagueness in reality um to do with to do with living creatures um can i just ask a question here because there's lots of ways but yeah i guess i'm a little bit confused about what the issue is supposed to to be um i mean i understand the issue about boundaries i think that's important actually philip i think it may cause some problems for you as well um with respect to phenomenal inheritance or whatever so maybe we'll get to that anyway um so can i let's see i feel like i'm the outside i'm a little bit trying to figure out how to whip my hand here is is it fair to say that this issue that you guys are discussing can i relate it to the embodied buying thesis so it's the claim here that you know like the traditional neural person who thinks consciousness somehow involves just the brain versus the embodied mind person who thinks no it extends beyond the brain maybe into the environment is that a separate question or is that related to this question sounds separate i think well i mean i guess there's three views isn't it there's one is the mind is the brain which i'm inclined to one is the body is the mind is the body which i think is something closer to bernardo's view uh one is that the mind is the brain the body and the external world it stretches into the external world um and depends also on what we mean by mind i mean you mean the personal mind the individual mind this yeah yeah i talk about subjects you know conscious subjects but yeah but so the the embodied mind thesis is the second of those and the extended mind thesis is the third oh i see yeah yeah so i wasn't i wasn't asking about the extent of my thesis yet although i was just so i'm just asking so that is the debate so this does sound like it's right the debate here is whether the the mind is co-extensive what the alters or whatever however you want to phrase that yeah the subjects whatever it's co-extensive with the brain or the body right right and i'm saying is a problem with saying it's the body is the boundaries of the altar or whatever you want to say are not vague whereas the boundaries of the body are vague so yeah that's that's the argument though and bernardo your response i mean so i understand your point about the metacognition and vagueness coming in at the higher level but i thought i heard you say that at the sort of just experiential level there's no vagueness in terms of perceptual capabilities there is no vagueness and as as philip said in the beginning if i stick my chair with a pen i will not feel it but if i stick my arm i will feel it and you can argue that that's actually the extent of the nervous system and not the body and then i made the argument that well they are two sides of the same thing because they both have the same biological origin in the z gut and the part of the same organism the same integrated unit uh but uh i i do think that the the individual mind or the alter in my terminology uh is co-extensive with the physical body yeah because that's what is amenable to to our direct wheeling like philip described now i can wheel my arm to move but i can't wield the chair across the room to move unless i touch it with my arms um and also the boundaries of our perception what i can feel is what's happening in my body i would go beyond that and you know modern medicine begrudgingly as the case may be is finding uh very significant connections between mind and body at surprising levels there is there is data now showing that for instance uh repressed anger correlates with colitis a certain kind of intestinal infection and even cancer um the placebo effect is now broadly recognized not understood but but recognized as an effect um there are forms of therapy that are related to the body certain forms of massage or body touching that are meant to have a psychological effect um so yeah but i think you know everything indicates to me um that the body and the altar they they have a very tight relationship i think one is the image of the other the extrinsic appearance of the other observed from a certain perspective yes i mean on the first oh sorry i mean just briefly on the first one i'm inclined i'm inclined to think that that's the sort of illusion created by the fact that there's such a close causal connection between the body and the brain so i think when you you know when you're an infant i've got a small infant the moment you know you don't know what the hell you can do and you just it's a buzzing looming confusion to use william james race but then in development you come to represent the capacities you have as possible action you come to represent your experience comes represent experience and your choices you come to represent as possible choices in the environment so i think i mean actually i think what we have a capacity to do is to make changes in our brain but we learn through development to represent those possible choices not as things we do in our brain but as things we can do in the environment because of the close cause of connection um yeah so and then you have to account for the common origin of both things right because your body arises from one single fertilized cell so what you're seeing is that two separate but interrelated processes arise at that point but they are not the same process even though the everything in our body is differentiated from the same origin say that again what what's the change what's the problem here the nervous system and the rest of our body arise from the ziggurat from the fertilized human egg cell and they arise from that through cell division um so if you say that the nervous system and the body are are different causally interrelated but different then these different processes had a parallel not only a parallel origin but the same origin in space and in time it's yeah i find it difficult to account i just don't see a reason to think that means the whole thing is conscious rather than it could be you know i i take it to be an empiric and this is maybe what i wanted to the other thing i wanted to say i mean i take it to be an empirical question what are the necessary and sufficient so yeah i mean maybe this this is so the vagueness is one worry but i guess my broader um methodological point about how we do the signs of consciousness i sort of think there's a there's an empirical bit and then as a philosophical or more theoretical bit the empirical bit is we get neuroscientists to find the neural correlates of consciousness and you know i'm meaning neural correlates there in a way that's consistent with idealism you could just think of them as you know the uh how that bit of cosmic consciousness manifests or whatever but uh and i think they do that by trying to find out you know the best systematization of the correlates we know to exist between you know certain processes and so they find that in that's the empirical bit and then you hand that over but that's not an explanation that's just correlation then you hand that over to philosophers to get the best uh explanation of why those correlations obtain um so i would look to uh so so you're asking so i just think it's it i i look to that empirical job that we we're learning we've learned to do quite well we're learning to do better um to tell me what you know what the necessary and sufficient conditions for local consciousness are and then i as a philosopher try and explain them um so i i don't so you seem to be assuming on some sort of philosophical grounds that that biologist that life is necessary and sufficient for consciousness whereas i think that's a mistake i think it's an empirical question for neuroscientists what are the conditions that are necessary for uh for emergent consciousness i mean just one before bernardo respond just one way to i think put this point slightly differently is that you would i think i would want to see um a type of experience that could only be had with the body so some of these things like there's a close connection between the body and sword that's fine but if one assumes that if one tickles the brain the right way you get the same experience so if you're if the sort of body is the locus then you would expect that there would be kinds of experience that just could not occur without the body being present and that's an empirical question arguably well let me make just a because i have a list of comments in my mind or just uh put the list out there i think uh your your critique regarding vagueness philip applies to the brain as well applies to the nervous system where does the brain start to say that where does it end you know it whatever you say of the body in this regard you can say of the brain the nervous system um another point um i think my motivation is also empirical um what you talked about regarding neuroscience i think again we discussed this already we have to be careful about the distinction between meta consciousness and consciousness and all the neuro correlates of consciousness that are derived from subjective reports from people saying well i'm having this experience now those are neurocorrelates of meta consciousness introspectively accessible experiences neuroscience itself now for five years has this new paradigm the no report paradigm in which they're trying to find out what experiences people have without knowing that they have and therefore they cannot report so that i agree with you that's an empirical question but it's a subtle empirical question as well it's not so clear-cut because of this distinction between consciousness and introspective uh phenomenal consciousness and introspective access um and to finalize i understand where you're coming from because i read your your latest paper so your position is that life itself is the appearance of a of a mental process in mind at large not an individual mental process and that at some point the individual mind sort of inherits those experiences from mind at large um if i understood you correctly um i think let's put it in a bit of an idealist way i prefer not to put it in that identity but it's possible that this is just different ways of describing the same view as we as we mentioned last time so okay assuming that i'm more or less correct in how i i assessed your view now um just one qualification i think you know no i mean i i don't i think that you intend to be to be neutral on whether life is i think my view could be interpreted like your view it seems we could be interpreted both with life being the seat of consciousness no brain i guess i talk in the paper as though it's the brain you know just but it you could equally have it's supposed to be neutral on that as i say i think it's an empirical question sorry to interrupt you just just because you said is that a correct characterization so just yeah making that no problems no problem but okay the i think the the essence of your view is that mind at large has all the experiences and what we call individual minds just inherent a subset of those experiences from mind at large or universal consciousness whatever you want to call that so from that perspective i understand you want to find a subset of the body that corresponds to our individual experiences because the body itself or at least some part of it corresponds to a transparent process a mental process in a broader um context of subjectivity so to say it's not really ours what we see as ourselves as a subset of some of the experiences of that process that we happen to inherit um i don't think this is an incoherent view um but it entails saying that um in the field of phenomenality of universal consciousness um there are multiple actually gazillions of points of view being concurrently experienced i don't think this is incoherent because we also see the world through two eyes um and for objects that are very close to our faces those are very different points of view so i don't think it's incoherent but it it's at least difficult to imagine or to explicitly conceive of what it must be like to be universal consciousness experiencing those gazillions of points of view at the same time and and you also require a sort of an operational distinction between the individual mind and the birth of the organism they they do not overlap now now they are different things i also find that i i don't like it it violates my my sense of elegance i i'm not sure so i don't think you quite characterize me right so the view is supposed to be neutral on whether the brain or the body is the seat of consciousness you could have so it's you could have the same view but it's the whole body that inherits streams of consciousness from more fundamental level it could be that i mean i thought i am inclined to think it's a brain and i talk about it's the brain that's probably the more common view but it's equally so as i say that's a to me is an empirical question what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for local emergent consciousness i suppose that's my objection to you that you seem to be giving an answer to that on philosophical grounds whereas i think it's it should be an empirical question what are the necessary insufficient conditions for local emergent consciousness yeah but my view isn't but you're assuming it's biological because of some philosophical biology issues about you know but biology is an empirical observation i haven't seen any individual consciousness that wasn't alive yet um you see it it it it is such a it's so evident that it's an empirical question that we almost don't see anymore that it's empirical we try to find some subset of that to call empirical but to associate individual consciousness with birth and life is is a massively empirical thing to do it's it's acknowledging the the the overt facts of nature um before your your kid was born there was no individual consciousness for you to call your kid by and i don't think biology tells us that life is co-extensive consciousness that's a that's a philosophical argument about integration and you know connected with aristotle i mean you know related to that sort of tradition i don't think it's so it doesn't seem to me your motivation is um i don't know but because so you might be just using the word empirical in two different ways here it seems like because i agree we have lots of evidence that consciousness is associated with living beings because as you say from bernardo that's all that we've ever seen as we haven't met subconscious non-living entity as of yet i don't wouldn't rule that out but then depending on your views about artificial life and ai and stuff maybe they could be conscious and not living i don't know so anyway um but i think what philip is after is so you know take the simplest case of like phantom limb pain um you might have so the naive view is that the pain is in the arm and then you discover phantom limb pain and you realize well you can have that very same experience without the arm so the pain has got to be somehow not in the arm but merely represented as being in the arm that's kind of a conclusion of some that's an empirical discovery and so then you might look into the brain and say okay what activity in there is it actually oh it's in this uh you know the blah blah area of the brain and so now we have a hypothesis about the neural correlate of the experience of having a pain in the arm um and so we would want to see what which parts of the body or organism are necessary and sufficient for generating that kind of experience and so that that's a different sense of empirical than you know the sense that i thought you were invoking um and so that's why i mentioned earlier that what we'd want to find is a kind of experience that you could not have without the body around and so far as of right now i don't really see that i mean it's maybe we haven't been looking for it but i don't think the neuroscience supports that that view then you'd have to separate the nervous system from the body to answer that question empirically which we haven't had yet a brain that functions without uh the body that that maintains and supports it and keeps it going you know the the digestive system that provides energy to it the heart that keeps it and oxygenated um so okay i i understand that the point in principle um but again i would insist on if you're talking about the empirical correlates of individual awareness i would insist on that differentiation between phenomenal consciousness and conscious metacognition otherwise we fall into a dangerous i i appreciate i i'm just listening quick so so bernardo you have a view that's like brain in the bats or they wouldn't have experiences theoretically i think that is possible but empirically i haven't seen one yet that was my point um if we appeal to empiricism we cannot appeal to theoretical future observations that's not empiricism um you have to appeal to something that has been observed and we haven't seen a brain in a vat yet uh do i think it is impossible i don't think uh it is impossible but i think if theoretically let's do the thought experiment if i experience if i close my eyes and i focus on my experiences right now with my whole body and then i would be turned into a brain devout and i would introspect i think my experiences would be different um even if the inputs were kept the same even if um so from an extra from an external source that wasn't the body yes and now i'm i'm running against that very danger i just pointed out to what extent will i be able to introspect into the whole set of my experiences in order to ascertain that it's different because the assumption here is that i would be able to fully introspect in practice we can't fully introspect there are decades of research in psychology showing that we cannot ever fully introspect there are things that remain beyond the boundary of introspection but if i could fully introspect then i would say even if the inputs were identical then the experience would still be different because i think there is a non-introspective experience in my individual mind whose extrinsic appearance is my liver there is another whose extrinsic appearance are my kidneys you see what i mean so even if you could replicate all the inputs to the brain i would still lack that experience that corresponds to the liver and the kidneys and the rest of my body but i don't think those experiences are uh introspectible you you cannot explicitly introspect into them there may be even a hierarchy of dissociation within the organism and that that would prevent that from happening um but again how can we then evaluate that empirically well i have a good friend who is a um liver uh forgot the exact name of um he studies liver tissue he he's so good with words richard by the way he's a um it's not pathologist never never mind a liver pathologist maybe he is he discovered now he discovered the the that uh new organ uh in the in in the human uh body that was discovered two or three years ago the interstitium so he is part of that team who discovered that and and well i don't want to put words on his mouth but there is anecdotal evidence that people who undergo organ transplants including liver transplants report experiences that they couldn't have had not only um more direct things like changes in personality but also memories um experiences in general so is this is this something that we can certify actually happens no because it has not happened under controlled conditions i don't think there has been a prospective study to pin this down but there is a anecdotal evidence some of it quite compelling that an organ transplant that has nothing to do with the nervous system has an impact in what you consider to be your own individual experiences yeah i'm following up on that i wonder why you get to rule out things like hair and the nails then since why don't they count as an experience the extrinsic appearance of which is hair just secreted carotene these are not part of your metabolism um you can look upon them as something that your body has discarded but it sort of remains glued and there has been an evolutionary advantage for it to remain glued to your body because they work as good tools hair is insulation nails literally are tools for you to scratch i understand i see what you're saying but i mean on your view they nonetheless are experiential right they're just taking extrinsic appearance of something that's experiential no they don't metabolize there is no metabolism inside your hair or in your nails just secreted carotene things that are metabolizing that i would consider the extrinsic appearance of an inner experience yeah whether it's metacognitive or not again well i guess i shouldn't have said inner but i thought on your view everything was experiential everything was the extrinsic experience of something experiential true but then maybe not your experience exactly so i'm talking about the inner experience of the altar i think uh secreted keratin in my nails is part is a pixel of the inner life of mind at large the what remains of universal mind after you account for all the alters so yes i think matter all matter under any circumstances is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenal states experiential states the question is within which dissociative boundary are those states are they out there or are they within a discernible altar that's the question i think my nails the tip of my nails are not inside my altar they are just attached to it like my clothes just um on the brain of that thing i don't think bernardo has to worry about actually so peter van immorgan has a good answer to this he thinks a brain nevada is just an organism that's been whittled down to a very small size you know you could cut off an arm you've still got an organism cut off two arms and the limit of that he thinks is you know just cutting it down to the brain but um yeah but that doesn't really answer the problem though philip that doesn't address the issue of whether you should have these so the kinds of experiences would be identical as between you right now and a brain in the vat stimulated artificially to have the sorts of experiences so bernardo was saying the answer is no um whereas i would say well you know it's i agree it's all fictional at this point but uh my intuition suggests that yes you would have exactly identical full-time brains without identical experiences yeah it depends what we're trying to do here i was just saying that bernardo's view doesn't have to say there couldn't be brains in bats it doesn't have to say i concur yeah yeah no i could agree with that but the the question is whether they're experiencing they have the same experience or not yeah and i would say anything and you have to say no yeah they wouldn't yeah even if it's not introspectively accessible uh i i would say no they don't have the same experiences on the metacognitive point so you know i appreciate that there is that distinction between conscious the possibility of consciousness we don't notice and um and that creates all sorts of possible problems but i sort of think that's the best we've got that's and so i make a sharp distinguish between like consciousness we've got pre-theoretical reason to believe in i think consciousness is everywhere you think bernardo consciences everywhere but that's not the consciousness we've got pre-theoretical reason to believe in the pre-theory you know the consciousness we've got pre-theoretical reason to believe in is what we are aware of and um and that's yeah so you might say well how do we know that's just the stuff we're aware of but i think that's all we've got and all we've got is um in um all we can do is get neuroscientists to try and systematize how that correlates with brain processes however we understand them metaphysic metaphysically and and then and then as philosophers we can try and explain those correlations so yeah so back to the point i suppose that that i think it's an it's it's an empirical question um you know what the correlations are and but whereas you you're assuming on philosophical grounds that seems to me illegitimate that that actually it goes along with you're saying forget that project neuroscientist of neurocorrelated consciousness i've got the answer already from my philosophical reflections that it's that it's life and i don't know i think i think scientists look at at least i try to ground everything i think on empirical data if there is one noticeable characteristic in terms of style from my work it's this is the attempt to always go to empirical data i think your point would be stronger philip if we did not have cases of a retroactive recognition of previously introspectively inaccessible experiences in other words if nobody ever had woken up one day and thought oh my god i was experiencing that but i didn't know that that was such but the annals of clinical psychology are filled to the brim with this kind of insight i accept that but what does that show there is a whole a whole lot of experiences that are yours as an individual as an alter in my terminology which at some point you were not able to introspectively access and this is another though i haven't denied that what what what part of my argument when you said that the best we have is what we can introspectively access at this point i would say no the best we have are all these instances in the annals of clinical psychology in which people retroactively realized that they were having experiences of their own that back then they couldn't introspectively access but but now on the screen of memory they can it's only once they become introspectively access that they become part of the empirical data of consciousness that i'm saying is all we have so yes i'm not i'm not meaning to rule i'm not i i accept the distinction the possibility and the reality of conscious states we we can't attend to but all we can work with empirical data is is those states that we can attend to maybe including states that we previously couldn't and now we can and i think we should we should look to neuroscience to you know that's that to take those states yeah we are aware of because that that's all that's all we've got whether whether we were always aware of them or whether we were previously not as you say and then become whether and then systematize that and it should be the job of scientists to work out the neural correlates to consciousness on that basis i mean yeah i just want to add to that the no report paradigm is is not as new as people think that it has been around for a while actually and there's some question about what it shows actually i'm involved with some work right now we're trying to look into some of these things but uh anyway so let's not get distracted with that i just would say a point don't put too much weight on that i would say well at least it's a sign of recognition in neuroscience that there is a legitimate question to be explored here that we may not be limited to to meta consciousness there may be other things going on underneath and then i would say look if we realized looking back that a host of people after the fact suddenly realized that they were having experiences they did that they were not explicitly aware of back then then chances are that this is happening right now again and to to not take take this into consideration in a sense is to disregard the empirical evidence because the empirical evidence is speaking loudly to us that right now this may be the case again because it has been the case by many other people uh in the past i'm not ruining out the possibility but how did you get from that to consciousnesses in my toe or you know i mean i don't know i wouldn't characterize it in these terms uh i think your toe is part of the image of a conscious process that corresponds to your altar i don't think consciousness consciousness is in your toe because i don't think your toe has existence independent of consciousness but anyway but but look this is precisely what neuroscience is trying to do with the no report paradigms this is precisely what a depth psychology has been trying to do for over a century now in therapy to bring things to awareness that they that are inexperienced but people don't explicitly realize don't acknowledge so this has been going on for quite a while now i'm not denying any of that i'm accepting all of that and um so what that tells us is that the the they're very well likely is that there could be there are states that we're not not immediately attending to and we should be not rule out that possibility but at the same time all we can deal with scientifically are those states we can attend to and beyond no i do i think what else have we got to go on well if you look at the pattern of experiential states that people were not explicitly aware of and became aware of after therapy or what the neuroscience is learning with the no report paradigms we can identify those patterns we can identify the likely areas or the likely types or kinds of experiences that are being experienced but are not being explicitly recognized in metacognition i think that there's a broad set of data that gives us indications to those patterns i would say that's consistent with what i'm saying that's still yeah it's it's working with the data states that what that have become recognized that were previously not that's consistent what i'm saying i'm just saying so all we have is what we can immediately attend to and i'm saying no that's not oh we have we have no i explicitly said a moment ago you know including states that previously were not attended to yet that's part of the data uh but we should look to neuroscientists working with all of that data to tell us the met our best sciences best guess as to what is necessary in sufficient conditions for local emergent consciousness whereas what you what seems to me you're doing is you're just ignoring that scientist saying on philosophical grounds i think life is necessary and sufficient for consciousness and no so yeah i think that's over philosophy overreaching itself i think this is a case where we should we should be looking to neuroscience to do that job it's the first time anyone ever accused me of not being extremely empirical in how i go about things it's kind of peculiar for neuroscience i think we should go and listen to what neuroscience has to say i think that's two in this two particularly in this if anything i think the no report paradigms uh uh will open a lots of doors if that avenue is pursued consequently uh but at the same time there is an obvious empirical correlation between individual conscious agency and and living organisms and that agency seems to disappear when the living organism disappears and and there seems to be also a direct relation between what happens in the body of that living organism and the experiential states of that living organism and by the way the nervous system and the body are arose from the same single cell the z got after fertilization so i've been throwing on the table today for the past hour uh all kinds of empirical things and then you still turn around and you say i think you're ignoring the empirical data and you're taking a position purely on philosophical grounds that overrules the empirical data i find that peculiar uh phil well this philosophical argument seems to be about integration and a common source this is biology biology does not tell us that the boundaries of the body are the boundaries of consciousness that is not a that is not a biological claim there's no peer-reviewed articles in biology journals telling us that you're what you're doing is giving a kind of philosophical argument based that that consciousness should go along with the integration i think if if anybody here is trying to overrule the biology for a philosophical argument i think it's separating the nervous system from the body because then i have repeated this now i don't know how many times today they both have the same origin they are differentiated from the same stem cells it's very hard to draw a wedge between them on the basis of the empirical data from embryology of anything if if anything so i i think that's the the consequent empirical approach is to recognize that as far as empiricism is concerned brain and anything that can be detected as a correlate of consciousness whether under no report paradigms or not is part of the body and that body is a unity with a single origin it's very hard to to to neglect that so look none of my positions uh are are are motivated and i know this because i'm me i may have a hard time convincing you of it but i know it for myself that none of my positions are based on a priori deliberations of form and elegance all of my positions are ultimately grounded in what i observe in empirical data maybe because my personality is such that i don't have any particular theoretical preference if you know what i mean i i couldn't maybe i had once when i was a teenager i don't know but it's not i noticed over time that other people do have it part of me is jealous of that but i'm kind of bare and kind of sort of you know not very colorful in that regard so everything i've been saying is based on empirical observations including the the most obvious ones which is the nervous system is part of the living metabolizing but nobody's denying that i mean it's i'm not denying that there's a there's a unified integrated system here and that the later parts of the body emerge from the the initial sperm and egg and there's obviously a unified process it's consistent with that to saying it's only later stages of that process or parts of that process that are necessary insufficient for local emergent consciousness that's completely consistent with the empirical facts uh you're suggesting it's sort of it's shown by the biology or you know no it's it's shown by your philosophical intuitions about integration and because it has a common source wait wait phillip i think what he's saying is that it sounds ad hoc to make that distinction that you just made between so well well because they have so they have they come from the same origin so the same cell the same cell differentiates into these two different things so why would one of them have the property that the other one doesn't that's what i'm hearing exactly it sounds like these genetic arguments for pan psychism that like william james made that you know that you know there's a continuous evolutionary process it's crazy to think consciousness emerges okay that's that's an interesting argument but that's a philosophical argument that's about you know that's not a that's not what you get in a biology textbook i i think your argument would be okay under a materialist perspective because then you could say it's not the entire body that generates consciousness it's only particular arrangements or particular patterns of firings in the nervous system that generate consciousness but the moment you concur with me that the body is the appearance of a process in consciousness the moment you take materialism out of the equation then it's very hard to make that distinction between a a process in conscious consciousness that corresponds to the rest of the body and another process in consciousness that corresponds to the nervous system even though they had the same origin and they were differentiated from the same original process which was had the image of the zigot you see what i mean so if i think under a materialist paradigm and they wonder what you're saying i'm not sure i said i i don't see the difference actually even if you're a materialist you could make the same argument that you know and these are arguments that people made starting from materialism to a kind of pan psychism saying you know look at this continuous process i've kind of got i've got a paper making this kind of it's getting back to vagueness arguments in a way there's a continuous process why think that earlier parts of it involve later parts of it above consciousness but early parts that i mean you could why can't you say that as a materialist okay as a materialist only certain things might generate consciousness in the body and other things not but what you're saying is that there is a process in universal consciousness that does not lead to individual awareness and that corresponds to most of the body and then in parallel to that there is another process in consciousness that does correspond to individual awareness and you try to put the boundary around the nervous system or the brain there's there's an argument for vagueness in that as well but you you don't have the elegance of the materialist in this regard by saying that okay only certain things generate consciousness for you and me everything is in consciousness and then if there is one process in consciousness that corresponds to birth how do you make it how do you drive a wedge between what is then a universal experience and what is an individual experience even though there is an obvious common origin an obvious chain of derivation from the same origin in there because i think it's an empirical scientific question what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness and it could be that there is um to put it in your terms you know there's univ birth is a process within universal consciousness the emergence of the body is within universal consciousness or in my terms it's just physical um and at some point you get the necessary and sufficient conditions that are suitable for for emergent local consciousness i just i just don't want to be deciding that on empiric on philosophical grounds i think we should ask neuroscience you know we should we should decide on neuroscientific grounds we should there is a project to find the neural correlates of consciousness which it seems to me you you you must be you must concede you're ignoring that because you're you're just saying no i think it's how do you not see that richard because he's just saying no i know that it's that it's uh by uh but life is necessary and sufficient for consciousness yeah okay but but it's not it's not a hypothesis where it makes the the search for the neural correlative consciousness redundant right that's attempted to find nes i don't know i'm surprised you disagree with that richard sure if the the project of china if you reason from bernardo's position then i i so you know obviously i'm on the other side of the fence i mean i have an open mind i'm a materialist with uh with an open mind so obviously uh i'm not i'm not a die-hard staunch whatever so the most i've ever defended is that it hasn't been refuted um not that it's true but anyway um so if you start from a position like bernardo so they're both so the zygote is is is a it's a metabolizing thing so it's the extrinsic appearance of something that's experiential so it differentiates into these two different sorts of processes so why is one experiential and the other night there's no explanation for that but philip what phillips philip is going beyond that what he's saying is okay i have to be empirically based when it comes to the range of my individual experiences and that i should leave to neuroscience and then he's saying that i'm making a choice for the body as a whole purely on philosophical grounds but you see philosophy is here to try to make sense at the level of essence of the processes and the behaviors of nature i think there is some elegance that can be attributed to the idea that what life is is the image of a process of dissociation because living organisms insofar as we can tell from first person experience have private in their life which is then dissociated from whatever is going on out there if there is conscious and consciousness out there which philips grants and then i make sense of that process that we call life fertilization embryonic development birth that then gets an account at the metaphysical level i can account for that at the metaphysical level what philip is saying is that okay there is a process in consciousness uh that whose extrinsic appearance is birth life and then there is a separate thing there is a separate thing that corresponds to what neuroscience can attest to be our individual experiences and the parts of the brain and nervous systems the nervous system that are involved in that so you have two processes that are in one way correlated to life but most of life is still a universal process or physical as philip calls it and then there is a subset of some some patterns of organization in life that are actually individual and the individual inhabits that sort of island that's not really an island we call the body it's a process in universal consciousness i find that inelegant because it seems to me you're trying to you're trying to drive a sort of artificial wedge into the metaphysical nature of life in here you're basically saying that a universal consciousness develops known dissociated individual perspectives and then on top of that non-dissociating individual perspective there is a dissociated little inner life there that corresponds to the neural correlates of consciousness i don't think this is an elegant metaphysical account for everything not only consciousness but the life itself i mean that's where i think phillip gets some purchase on you relying on philosophy and non-empirical consideration ultimately we are doing philosophy he is doing philosophy so ultimately what i'm doing but i do i look to scientists to do this but you're doing this bit with philosophy i mean i'm not saying there's no force to that philosophical argument it's it's reminiscent of william james genetic argument for pan psychism that you know is more elegant to think consciousness was there all along and it evolved i see what he's saying it's more elegant to think you know there's just this unified process of life and um um but i i don't really think that philip because i think we have to account for more than just individual consciousness if you're if you're doing anthology we have to account for nature and nature includes life you have how does this life help us account for life life is the extrinsic appearance of a dissociative process but how does that help us with our biology i mean you you you could have a version of your view that's exactly the same except the dissociation happens within some brain processes it doesn't happen how does how does supposing that dissociation happens with with life how does that help us understand life or understanding around i turn it around with a question how do you account for life if life is not the appearance of a dissociative process related to individual for life i i think what is the job i think it's the job of biologists to account for life i mean then it's the job of neuroscientists to account for individual experience and you're out of a job but the difference with no because there's there's a well i could i i could say very clearly why consciousness is is a very different to other scientific problems because the main source of data is not publicly observable right as i'm sure you'd agree so it's a it's radically different to any other scientific problems so all we can do with neuroscientists is is look at what is publicly observable the neural correlates ask people about their private experiences and correlate the two so because consciousness is not publicly observable that's a very special reason why this is a unique scientific problem i don't see that in biology what's that i mean look there are mysteries in biology there are mysteries about how life began i don't see why those mysteries can't be addressed straightforward scientifically and i don't see why those mysteries are helped by supposing that this is a process of cause of cosmic dissociation those mysteries have a physical basis as well they necessarily have a metaphysical basis uh those mysteries all mysteries have and i think can you give an example of how your helps with the mystery of life what is life metaphysically do you do you agree that life has a metaphysical basis otherwise it wouldn't exist i guess i'm not convinced why there couldn't just be you know a mechanistic account of life i mean no one no one even knows what life life is so that i mean that's sort of what i wanted to ask bernardo is so supposed that we built an artificial system that responded to the environment like a really advanced roomba robot i love roombas they're pretty but a really sophisticated roomba it doesn't metabolize though so does it have experience on your view is it alive on your view so it's not clear to me how how wide the net of life has been cast on your view in my view the important question is not to say yes does it it has in their life or it doesn't because we don't know we only know about ourselves but that's not the important question the important question is do we have good reasons to infer that it would also have in their life that is the important question to make to to ask and i think we we don't have good reasons to think that a silicon computer would have in their life and i tell you why by the way you're talking with somebody who also has a doctor doctorate in computer engineering and has worked on artificial intelligence so this is close to my heart i can tell you this with authority everything every absolutely every computation performed by the world's most sophisticated artificially intelligent computer can be done in principle with a network of pipes taps and water everything instead of copper wires it's pipes instead of electricity it's water instead of micro switches it stamps now it would require a circuit of water pipes and taps maybe the size of a moon but there would be nothing more to it than taps water and pipes now do we have any reason to think that an enormous construction of pipes water and taps would be would be conscious in and of itself i would say no more reason than to think that my glass of water is conscious in and of itself that it has private inner life because ultimately it is pipe stops and water there is nothing more to that now because we put it in a silicon chip that then is covered by a layer of epoxy in a package and most people don't know what's going on inside it's a mystery and because it's a mystery anything becomes plausible people don't know what's going on inside it's some kind of magic so for all i know it may have a conscious in their life in and of itself but then when you talk to somebody like me who not only designed computers but for the past 15 years i worked in the manufacturing of the most advanced silicon chips i bloody know what's in there i saw it every day for 15 years and i can tell you it's just like five steps in the water well why should that matter though because i mean suppose you had just a so suppose there was on the moon a system of pipes and all this kind of stuff it was by some kind of radio connected to a um an android body here on earth and it was walking around and it said i love chocolate i feel pain don't turn me off wouldn't that give us reason to think that it's conscious no matter what its internal mechanisms were ultimately it's a subjective call so it would phrase the question therefore in the following way do you in in your heart of hearts see a good reason to think that a huge construction consisting solely of pipe steps and flowing water could have a conscious in their life of its own that's the right question and the right way to formulate it the answer is your own the answer to me is obviously not if i grant that then then i then i grant animism i don't have any i don't have more reason to think that a big system of pipe stops and water is conscious then i have to think that the system of pipe stops and water of my house has a conscious in their life in and of its own but the only conscious in their life i know is my own and i am a metabolizing organism and when something goes wrong with my metabolism something very drastic seems to happen in my conscious inner life so on an empirical basis i don't see a reason to think that things other than metabolizing organisms and and even that i attribute that by analogy i don't think anything that is not a metabolizing organism i don't think i have good reasons to infer that it has a conscious in their life of its own certainly not silicon computers don't doesn't matter how sophisticated they are again it's you deciding these things on philosophical intuitions you're saying no well don't just let me finish a point do we think you know things with pipes and no i've got and you said it's a subjective call i don't think we should be deciding in that way we should be looking we've got well-developed neuro neuroscientific project of finding the nccs we should they should do that job and forget the philosophical intuitions although there are philosophical difficulties and then as philosophers we you know explain why those correlations obtained but but i think this is an eminently philosophical project in this specific case otherwise what you get is the following and by the way what i'm about to describe actually happens people will find out what the abstract patterns of information flow are in the human brain when the human subject reports to be explicitly aware of certain experiences and then we make a little model of that and we call it iit and then we abstract that from its substrate and we start saying well maybe the internet will be conscious because the same patterns of information flow are there now that's a philosophical step already it is not a scientific step because once you re you replace the substrate the only reasons you have left to continue to attribute the same property for the same pattern in another substrate are philosophical reasons they are not scientific reasons we did we do not have scientific reasons to think that the internet is conscious even if it has closed loops of information integration because the substrate of the internet is totally different from the substrate where we observed the correlations in the first place based on subjective reports of experience namely the metabolizing substrate of the human brain look i i like to use this analogy i can do a an incredibly accurate simulation of kidney function on my on my computer down to the molecular levels but that will not make my computer urinate on my desk because a simulation of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon it's a simulation phenomenon in some cases a simulation is a phenomenon like a computer for a simulation of a computer is a computer so maybe the mind is more like a computer than urination but then i would say if the simulation of a computer is a computer yes but then it's a computer before it is a simulation of a computer even if it's not simulated on a computer a simulation of a computer is still a computer no you you're starting from the identity and then you're attributing an extra fact that it's also a simulation of itself i can attribute that fact to everything i am a simulation of you because i'm also person you know what i mean but the identity starts first we have an identity we're both human biological metabolizing human beings if you say a computer is a simulation of a computer well there is a semantic sense in which this is true but there is an identity first it is a computer before it's a simulation of a computer it is a computer see what i mean it could be done with water and pipes though by the way just for the record i'm i defend the view i mean obviously i'm an identity theorist i defend the view that uh the biology is important substrate is important so i'm uh more on bernardo's side on this debate than maybe it's coming across but that's not the can i just say that's not the debate so i don't know i think the debates got a bit sidetracked that's not that i'm not taking a side on functionalist versus substrate you know i'm just saying it's a scientific question and i appreciate there are philosophical issues there but we should decide this should be philosophically informed neuroscientists trying to answer that question rather than philosophers um i'm i'm really gonna have to go in a few minutes i just looked at the time and we've carried away with this such fun discussion just to conclude i agree with what you said it's just that my position is such that i think we cannot cherry-pick the science we have to look at the entire broad context of science because ultimately you're trying to explain nature you cannot explain consciousness without finding a place for it in nature what is its place in nature how do you make sense of the ontological essence of everything else including biology including the inanimate universe so it seems to me that what you're trying to do is to isolate the problem in an artificial way and say i will only look for the neuro correlates of experience why i'm saying no you have to look at the whole of science what the whole of science is telling us one about the nature of matter through foundations of physics two about the nature of life what is life we haven't been able to get it started from non-life yet what the hell is that what is the ontological essence of that what does the process of birth correspond to at a metaphysical level and three individual awareness how does it fit with the rest so i i i'm totally with you i am as pro science as one as one can be i was a scientist before i was a philosopher i have worked in the great cathedral of science called cern in switzerland but i i don't think we can cherry-pick and isolate the problem artificially we may have a focus of research but you have to be aware of the entire context yeah i guess i mean of course i agree with that in principle i'm just not seeing reasons in biology or to to think that con life is necessary and sufficient for consciousness just just one other thing i want to throw in um so just you said a long long time ago you know well the brain is vague as well but um i mean not necessarily um well obviously the brain but you know what is necessary and sufficient in the brain for consciousness might not be vague so one advantage of iit and look i'm not here to sell iat we've all got problems of iot i've got a review of christophe cock's book where i raise bombs iot and um but one benefit of it is that it does potentially give a totally non-vague account of when local emergent consciousness happens uh you know it's when you get more integrated information in the whole rather than the paths that could be utterly precise so this is my big if you're into these elegance worries then i think you know there's a real worry about vagueness here with any biological system that there's going to be vagueness at the boundaries and that just looks inconsistent with the idea that it's it's not it's very it's a non-vague matter what's in my experience but if for example we could have theory light and maybe not iit but some kind of theory that can give a precise answer to what what in the system in the brain is necessary a non-vague answer necessarily insufficient for consciousness and that seems yeah that that would seem to be a more theoretically attractive option i think i think meta consciousness is not vague by definition it is that which you can explicitly introspect into and report meta consciousness is not vague the contents of metacognitive awareness are not vague if you can't report then by definition it's not in your metacognitive awareness and i think iit gives an account of meta consciousness because it has been developed based on subjective reports of experience and then iit is also known vague because it's modeling a non-vague process but that process is not phenomenal consciousness it's metacognitive awareness i didn't want to get in the dispute that's why i said i'm not here to sell it you're getting into you're trying to drag me into a dispute about something i'm not trying to argue about i'm just saying you could in principle have a neuroscientific theory which gives you non-vague necessary and sufficient conditions for local emergent consciousness whereas if you go for the biology you're never going to get that it seems to me it's always the key word is in principle and then i agree with you maybe that's a good place i mean at least one way to put pressure on on some of this is to try to empirically verify some of the things that bernardo was talking about like with organ transplants and uh having whether they make a difference to experience that that can't be identified with the chains in the brain or something like that so there is an empiric so even though i think what he's saying is that maybe considerations of elegance and overall uh explanatory unity or something like that are what make them think that this is something that's that's worth investigating there are empirical predictions and claims yes um which which can be tested and so it's it's not like he's saying by fiat this is it so it's it's in it's just a different research program than the one looking just for the correlates in the brain but it's still good we should look at the empirical stuff not the sort of pre-theoretic philosophical intuition but yeah the same thing is true for you phillip though right so you have pre-theoretical intuitions and then you say well okay so neuroscience is going to help me look but look at those no i'm just saying we should look at i'm saying let the neuroscientists do it i'm saying let you and do it but the history of your work is the history of uh philosophical predilections and considerations of elegance and of course about the way you explained the the fine tuning was totally based on purely philosophical considerations and nothing remotely related to anything empirical but look i'm not saying they're not pure well what's that got to do with empanadas i'm not saying there aren't pure philosophical tasks i'm saying the job of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness is is an empirical task and i don't really engage with that it's not right you're trying to get across as a complete empiricist and that's not your history but why are you making this into like a personal go i'm not trying to say anything all i'm saying is my personal view that um it's an empirical job not a philosophical test to find the necessary division i don't really do your suggestion was great here is a dream research program a prospective study of organ transplant patients and then study them with everything we have learned so far from no report paradigms and the methods of clinical depth psychology which have a much longer history than than the no report paradigms and then we study them based on those premises because they might they may have different experiences that they cannot easily introspectively access so we need clinical psychologists depth psychologists involved in there to try to bring those things up and the methods of no report paradigms and then see does their phenomena in their life not only the metacognitive in their life does this their phenomena in their life change significantly after an organ transplant that's a way to empirically frame the question and test it the anecdotal evidence indicates that this is the case and the anecdotal evidence is extraordinarily extraordinarily compelling in some cases and we have the philosophical considerations as well to to to justify this into a logical framework to motivate the research i would like this to happen yeah well we can agree on that that sounds like a really interesting project i'm definitely gonna have to go and parent um thanks thanks bernardo thanks richard thanks bernard well i'm glad i got everything ticked off my list i wanted to talk about that brain or body stuff on the first meeting of the second meeting so i'm glad i've got it checked off my list but yeah but it's been it's thank you very much i'm really going to have to dash sorry thanks for watching yeah no problem all right guys i'll talk to you soon hopefully thanks guys take care bye-bye uh

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 5,644

Keywords: consciousness, idealism, neuroscience, brain, body

Id: vaj44T9M-wM

Length: 81min 40sec (4900 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020