Consciousness Live! S3 Ep 20 -Discussion with Evan Thompson

all right we are live joining me today is a superbly special guest um evan thompson uh evan thank you very much for joining me i wonder if you would say a few words about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you yeah so thanks for inviting me to join you today um my name is evan thompson i am a professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy at the university of british columbia in vancouver i am also an associate member in the department of psychology in the cognitive science group and in the department of asian studies and i work um in cognitive science philosophy of mind also in cross-cultural philosophy so i'm interested in philosophical issues about the mind and self and consciousness across different philosophical traditions especially asian philosophy and dialogue with western philosophy and a lot of my work has to do with understanding consciousness and some of it is in collaboration with neuroscientists cognitive neuroscientists who do experimental work and then you know some of it is in a more uh you could say pure philosophical vein so that's in general terms what i do yeah very cool um i i want to say that i greatly admire your work i i think it's not only is do i admire the cross-culture of it which i wish there were more of quite frankly but i greatly admire that the interdisciplinariness of it scientists philosophy cross-cultural philosophy but also i have to say something that i admire about it as well is that how deeply personal it seems to you um and the work that you do you're not just you know exploring ideas for the sake of responding these ideas mean something to you and you're and you seem like you're personally really vested in getting to the the right kinds of answers and i i think that's something that's missing in a lot of philosophical work thank you yeah i think of that way myself and i'm i'm glad that that comes through the work i would say that uh not in all of my writing of course but in some of my writing i try to i try to give you know the the personal context for the kinds of questions that i ask and the reasons i'm interested in particular things like dreaming for example in my book waking dreaming being um you know there's there's personal reasons behind that and i think i mean i don't think that's like special about me i think that's true for anyone who is kind of animated by a question or a topic they have a personal story behind it and i think uh i think philosophers should be more forthright about that or let me put it this way i think philosophers should feel that they can be more forthright about that you know if if they're so inclined um yeah now i i agree and everyone like you said has that story but often they can't sanitize their work and so to speak to make it sort of very very official sounding or something but i like the way you interweave that that frame of that voice but also the personal voice you know made with the antidotes and stuff so it was refreshing i mean that makes it nicer to read you know it's a lot i hope so yeah there's a lot of arguments in there and that's great but also there's some great anecdotes so that's wonderful um so uh you know i personally in my background as you might know is in cognitive science and philosophy as well i have less of a um a history in the asian ideas i had a friend when i was younger who was raised as a harry krishna but uh with a weird mix of hare krishna and um rastafarianism and so because of that i read the bhagavad-gita and um some of these other things but i never really formally started cuss as an undergraduate but so i've learned a tremendous amount about these ideas and i sort of wish that when my when i had my intro to philosophy class that they had had started with those ideas first because that's where all the consciousnesses had you know yeah you get the descartes in western philosophy and then sort of comes up but this was already well established in the upanishads and these other these other writings and so i greatly i learned a tremendous amount um uh thinking through these issues so i wonder if you could if we could start by saying if you could go through the the four kinds of consciousness that you kind of in your book waking dreaming being where you say here's the four kinds that they have laid out and used as a framework for the rest of the book so i wonder if you could say a little bit about that yeah so so what i do in um waking dreaming being is i take um the the classical indian uh map you could say of consciousness and use it to structure the the organization of the book and that map consists of distinguishing originally it's actually just in the earliest versions it's distinguishing three modes or states actually they're called three modes or states of the self really but the self is is identified with awareness and so one is um waking awareness which is uh you know sense perception um uh with the senses key to particular kinds of physical stimuli and it's also described in a way that has to do with the you could say the jumpiness of attention that attention typically sort of jumps from one thing to the next sort of as we would say you know sampling different um perceptual contents um it's also recognized that in the waking state um there's a way in which the mind can wander away from what's given perceptually into its own kind of internally generated as we would call it today spontaneous thought processes or spontaneous cognition so that's the waking state and then there's the dream state which is considered to be subtler than the waking state where suttler means that the materials that make it up um aren't outer sensory physical stimuli immediately but have to do with um memory images memory traces and so the the dream state the mind is is kind of making up its own contents out of its own we would say kind of inner endogenous materials and that's that's the dream state very much linked to memory already in the uh earliest indian descriptions i should say for people who might not be familiar with some of these historical dates that the the text of well the the text of the upanishads um contain a bunch of different texts from different time periods but the earliest the brihada ranyaku punishad which has this model of waking dreaming and dreamless sleep this dates from probably you know sixth seventh eighth century bce you know we don't really know the exact dates but it's very early and to my mind it's like one of the earliest descriptions of what today we would call consciousness and so the three modes that are distinguished are waking dreaming and then the third is dreamless sleep very interesting that this is singled out and described in a way in which there's no um no sensory or mental content in the form of say thoughts and images and no um the text doesn't say this explicitly but we could interpretatively say this no kind of subject object structure there's a there's a kind of um unity to the state but it's described in a way that suggests a kind of sentience or awareness that's described as peaceful as blissful as as restful on the the analogy that's used in the brihadiranyaka upanishad um the dream state is like a fish swimming around um or the alternation between waking and dreaming is like a fish swimming between two banks of a river and then dreamless sleep is like the eagle that just like rests in its nest it's not flying and it's just kind of watching so there's this idea of a kind of awareness that isn't ordinary um you know sensory mental active awareness so those are the three states and then in later texts a fourth state is or a fourth mode is distinguished um and it's just called the fourth and it's described either as just the kind of underlying sheer or pure awareness that characterizes all of these states in the kind of merry-go-round of you know going from waking to dreaming to dream to sleep um or it's it's described as a kind of um state of contemplative realization or meditative realization which is the sort of explicit lucid awareness of the nature of consciousness as just awareness different from the contents that make it up in waking and and dreaming so these are these are very early indian descriptions and what i do in the book in waking dreamy being is i take that idea of waking dreaming dreamless sleep and then also amplify to include different kinds of you know meditative states or or altered states of consciousness as we would call them and i use that structure and i look at these different states from the perspectives of um what we know in neuroscience and cognitive science today and then what we can draw on from a range of different philosophical discussions including indian philosophy and also you know contemporary philosophy of mine and that kind of gives me the framework for that book yeah and i mean i think that's really interesting one question i mean i have a lot of questions that i want to ask you uh but one question that i have sort of off the bat is how we distinguish the fourth from the state in dreamless sleep so i guess i'm having a little bit of trouble seeing what the distinction is supposed to be given the way you describe the the the kind of consciousness that's available there uh kind of just resting in place but i guess it is there it's not reflective or something so that in the dream of sleep it's not sure i'm not aware that it's awareness or something so or i wonder if you're gonna say how we distinguish them right well yeah i mean that's actually a really interesting question and it opens up into a number of different uh perspectives already within the indian way indian ways of thinking but um i suppose a simple way to put it is that when we have this map that explicitly includes the fourth the idea is something like there is awareness as such or consciousness in its kind of like ground state nature um which in the indian metaphor is pure luminosity pure awareness and then dreamless sleep dreaming and waking are um sort of different states of excitation you might say so i'm kind of using an analogy from physics here it's like you have a sort of like ground sort of state zero energy state which is just awareness and then you have different states of activity or excitation where dreamless sleep is sort of the most minimally active but it's still in a way active i mean in neuroscience terms today we would talk about you know ongoing processes of memory consolidation and learning and things that are happening in in the dream the sleep state that are sort of cognitive processing um but when the fourth is signaled explicitly in the model the idea is that that's kind of the fundamental ground state or nature of awareness as such out of which these other three arise so in a way it isn't really different from any of them fundamentally it's that they are different activations of it you might say so what's interesting about it is it's a kind of flip from a rich one very received western way of thinking about it which is you start with you know waking perception is the model the norm and then like dreaming is an anomaly so like originally when rapid eye movement sleep is discovered it's called paradoxical sleep it's like yeah the brain is active in a way that it's active and then waking but the person's like asleep physiologically so what is this about um and then we work from that into you know there are altered states of consciousness and what do we say about you know dreamless people the standard thing neuroscientists say is consciousness just disappears so the indian is almost i'm simplifying a little bit here but it's almost like a flip of that it's like right the base is this kind of like ground state zero energy state of just awareness as such and then it in its different levels of excitation or access activation has to do with the different kinds of contents it can work with whether it through you know waking sense perception or through dreaming and then in dream the sleep it's still you know it's quieted down but it's still active in a more minimal way so that would be the way that one way to distinguish um the fourth from the dream of sleep state another way which you were alluding to and it's it's interesting to ask parenthetically whether these are actually consistent with each other but another way is um is in terms of uh well in terms of lucidity so dreamless sleep is typically not a lucid state you're asleep you don't know you're asleep um there's a kind of ignorance as the indian philosophers would put it that characterizes the state whereas the fourth when it's described as a kind of state of meditative attainment or realization is a kind of lucidity where you're able to witness the mind as it moves from waking into dreaming into dreamless sleep so the dream sleep actually can become lucid and then the question is but wait a minute is is that like what like what kind of meta awareness is that is it like a subject object meta awareness where you're aware of the dream of sleep state as an object that can't be right because it's not supposed to be a subject object structured state so there's some intensification of awareness that makes it lucid but that isn't supposed to be in terms of subject and object and this raises all sorts of philosophical questions but on that way of talking about it um the difference between dreamless sleep and the fourth is that dream of sleep is typically not lucid you're in a kind of like oblivion but through meditative discipline you can actually retrieve that in awareness so that the state becomes lucid and it's that quality of lucidity that lucidity that is the fourth on that way of describing it um yeah i mean because what are the things i was thinking this gets actually to the heart of what i was well my uh i mean obviously i'm extremely ignorant of all this stuff so i'm uh probably stepping on there's by many interpretations of people have thought through this a lot more carefully but anyway so one of the things i was thinking was that on one way of thinking that the fourth it's like what's common between the other three that's always there but in the background or something like that uh and but if it's a kind of meta awareness that is involved with it then it seems like that would be the wrong way of thinking about it because they were often not aware so so do you think it's a mistake to think of it as the thing which is in common between the other three or is this uh because yeah so i'm just curious is that a wrong way to think about no no i mean the way that i'm inclined to think about it so so let me actually back up and say there's the question of how to think about it in terms of the different philosophical and contemplative and interpretative frameworks that we have you know coming down through let's say you know india um south asia um you know tibet in a buddhist context so there's sort of the differences in that terrain on how this gets talked about and conceptualized um and then there's well okay what why we say today given our situation of um working both with these traditions but also now with cognitive science like what what you know would be the would be the thing to say and what i'm inclined to say um given our present state of knowledge i suppose is that there is something very attractive to the idea that there is a um basic character to let's say sentient awareness that's present invariantly across any state of consciousness and that can occur in let's say a minimal form so this has actually recently begun to be talked about uh through the um term or expression that that jennifer vint introduced and that thomas metzinger has taken up the idea of a minimal phenomenal experience so the idea that there's a kind of basic um [Music] uh core character to awareness and that it can manifest or occur in minimal forms where dreamless sleep would be a kind of candidate minimal form and then if we could and so this then becomes a research question from a you could say the neuroscience of consciousness perspective or just the science of consciousness more generally if we could actually characterize that or or identify it more precisely um then we could use it to look at how consciousness becomes complexified um in different you know animal life forms in different states of human consciousness and if we could understand what the the as it were the neuronal signature of that minimal phenomenal awareness or experience is then that might also give us a kind of purchase on um something fundamental about neural processing in relationship to awareness so i think that idea is is quite um from a research perspective is quite attractive it's not to say it doesn't have problems conceptual philosophical neuroscientific of course you know like these are all working ideas right so we work with them we see what we can do but i think there is something to that idea and i think that um that it's strongly articulated uh philosophically in in indian in indian thought and in a way where it gets debated see this is the other thing it's it's it's that in the indian philosophical tradition there are a lot of debates around these notions and so when we work through these debates we can actually come to understand the the pitfalls of thinking uh in in this in this area and i think that's very productive for you know for research yeah i agree um i think that's a very interesting way of thinking about so the notion of the minimal phenomenal um experience is does does that involve a kind of reflexivity on the way you're thinking about it right so so then then there there is a debate which we see um across indian philosophy and of course in you know uh in contemporary philosophy of mind about whether this minimal phenomenal awareness is reflexive where reflexive means that there's a there's a there's a kind of logical um self-relatedness where um in experiencing or in being aware there is an awareness of awareness but it's not a higher order or metacognitive awareness now some um some indian traditions say yes that's the nature of awareness it inherently reflexive and some say no and say no awareness is always of an object and you're only aware of awareness if there's a higher order awareness that takes the first order awareness as its object so they're like higher order thought theorists in our term we see that debate played out and it's not a doctrinal debate which is interesting so some buddhists are reflexive theorists some buddhists or higher order thought theorists some brahminical hindu philosophers are reflexive theorists some are higher or thought there so there's no sort of doctrinal allegiance there and then of course we see this debate in in philosophy today i mean i in my own writing have have argued on behalf of a of a reflexive conception drawing from indian thinking drawing also from phenomenology in the sense of you know historical south those thinkers um so i think i think there's there's something fundamentally important about that idea um if we connect it back to the minimal phenomenal experience discussion uh i would say that that in the way that the concept of minimal phenomenal experience has been presented through my writings through jenny vince through thomas metzinger's um reflectivity is a core characteristic of um of minimal phenomenal experience not like higher order metacognitive reflection but reflexivity sort of one-order reflexivity uh but open to someone to object and say no you know minimal awareness is always of an object and there's only awareness of awareness when you have some higher order process and if i remember mirror in this paper on minimal phenomenal experience i think i'm remembering correctly um if you're out there tomas you can correct me but um i think what he says is that well what might be from the perspective of a phenomenological analysis a kind of uh non-subject object structured reflexivity could from the perspective of a neural architecture be implemented through a kind of um uh higher order monitoring or or yeah and in fact that is his hypothesis now so his hypothesis is that you have the reticular activating system sending a signal to the cortex the cortex is trying to make sense of that signal so that's a kind of higher order like feed forward feedback process and that's the actual architectural instantiation of what phenomenologically is a kind of non-subject object structured awareness so it gets comp it gets complicated quite quickly actually uh yeah these different pieces or relating these different pieces to each other yeah right because i i don't know in the book i thought that you presented a quick argument that you thought it should be one order reflexivity as opposed to the higher order one um and am i right in thinking that that argument was largely phenomenological yeah that's the way it seems so it sounds like what you're saying right now is that sort of puts pressure on your own argument yeah so the arguments that i've given for a kind of one-order view um they they do appeal to i would say phenomenological slash conceptual considerations um some of them come from western phenomenology in terms of analyses of time consciousness say in glycerol some of them come from analyses of bodily awareness and merlot ponte some of them come from indian analyses of of the nature of consciousness but you could say they're all phenomenological in the sense that they're all analytically descriptive of how experience presents to experience um right and so i i i then think that it's entirely an open possibility to come in from the angle of cognitive neuroscience and say okay so that's the characterization and phenomenological terms but now here's a model that is generative of that phenomenon um and it is a model that consists in a number of uh interrelated processes that uh sort of feed forward and feedback on each other to put it you know crudely um the rub there though is that you immediately in putting forward a model like that are in the terrain of the explanatory gap right so you always run up against the question of okay so here's the phenomenon here's the model and i'm saying the model is generative of the phenomenon but in order to say that i basically am ignoring the explanatory gap because the explanatory gap is not being closed in giving this model so it's it's not actually generative in a fundamental way i mean so i mean since i raised raised him earlier and because our thinking is so close on this i'll mention you know tomas messinger again you know in his paper minimal phenomenal experience which i think is just a fantastic paper um he presents this idea of of the minimal phenomenal experience having to do with a kind of reticular activating signal of um tonic alertness and arousal that isn't really contentful that then the cortex is um is trying to map and predict and make sense of yeah and you know in terms of a neural architecture that actually makes a fair bit of sense um but then he immediately confronts the explanatory gap problem and tries to deal with it at the end of the paper under the heading of you know this is a physicalist theory so how am i going to deal with the explanatory gap he recognizes the problem but as i see it he just dances around it and restates the problem and when and he he'll give a candidate answer and then he'll restate the problem and say but there's still the explanatory gap and then he'll give something that like purports rhetorically to be an answer then he says but yes there's still the explanatory gap so i mean this is not a criticism this is like this is the state of affairs for for the science of consciousness right um but i think that's indicative of yeah you can give a model but at the end of the day um it it's actually not truly explanatory do you think i mean i think that's interesting but do you think that criticism applies to the one order reflexivity view or do you think it evades that i think the one order reflexivity view as a phenomenological analysis is not in and of itself trying to close the explanatory it's just trying to characterize the phenomenon so it's not immediately subject to explanatory gap considerations until you raise the question okay and now how am i supposed to relate experience to um one or another scientific model of you know the brain or the body um and that's when the explanatory gap happens the explanatory gap happens when you're trying to relate you know models and terms to a characterization of of the phenomenon right so in and of itself no i don't think it does but if you try to give an implementation of it so if you're someone like uriah krieger or someone who thinks that there's you want to explain in neural terms how this happens yeah then you get the same sort and immediately that's right the immediate immediately when you move from let's say descriptively or characterization of the phenomenon to explanatory modeling then you're immediately in the in the terrain of the explanatory gap um another thing i would say here and and this differentiates me from or puts me in a camp that's different from let's say thomas metzinger and puts me you know in the terrain of phenomenological philosophers like dan zahavi for example is that from the phenomenological perspective that descriptive elucidating mode has a kind of epistemological primacy that can never be game set or superseded by the explanatory modeling because in the case of the phenomenon of consciousness consciousness to put it let's say in the way of transcendental like kantian husserlian philosopher would put it consciousness is is the sort of antecedent condition of possibility for anything being intelligible as a model in the first place you know for for for doing science for there being observations so the idea that you could sort of somehow step outside of that get around behind it and capture it in a model um doesn't make sense um the the the phenomenon has a kind of primacy and so the descriptive characterization of it then is not something less than or secondary to the modeling it's something that's actually on on not just equal footing but in a way i would argue has a kind of primacy epistemological primacy yeah yeah and you make this argument in the book too i think and this is i mean i guess i was going to ask something else before but since you brought this up i'll ask i'll ask about this now because i think so if if one is interested in metaphysics and the metaphysics of the mind and when we're trying to characterize your view you say things that well you could say okay you're not an idealist because you explicitly i think disavow this idea that consciousness is everything is consciousness um you seem like you're not a pan psychist because you don't want to say there's you know consciousness at the fundamental level or something like that you you argue against physicalism for the reasons that you just gave um that uh you know we can't reduce consciousness to any any kind of neural activity because we understand neural activity from inside consciousness so we can't step outside of it um so what does that leave where does that leave you i mean so what are you doing yeah yeah that's a that's a good question so um so so what i would say about that is that those alternatives that that we just you know went through like idealism or one way of thinking about what idealism is pan psychism physicalism um for me they're all moves or or positions on a board that's fundamentally structured by a kind of cartesian uh conception of the physical and of the mental conceptually where that means the fundamentally physical is um exclusive by nature of the mental the fundamental physical um you know the fundamentally mental conceptually presents or phenomenologically presents as exclusive of the physical so so when you have a board set up like that um i don't i don't really think you're gonna find anything satisfactory so so that's a native point to put it more positively um i i don't really think any progress on these questions is possible without a rethinking of the nature of nature so the way that we that we think about nature is we think of it in terms of um the physical as being fundamentally non-mental now if we step back and say well wait a minute um nature is you know is what is is the cosmos investigating it where in that direction um then i think the metaphysical terrain starts to look differently so this is this is what you know a number of thinkers in the 20th century tried to do like white had tried to do this yeah worsterol tried to do this you know in different ways and so i don't really think um there's any like forward movement on that question possible without really rethinking the terms within which we're working so i mean i i think of myself in a naturalist in the sense that um i'm not uh i'm not someone who would appeal to something outside this the the system of nature if we wanted to put it that way but i think we have to come to understand nature in a way where we don't think of it as fundamentally non-mental and then try to generate mentality from it so that's where i actually think the pan cyclists do have a really important insight what i think they do is that then they sprinkle a kind of cartesian mentality over like i mean the crude panzerkiss sprinkle a sort of pixie dust mentality mental particles and think you know okay you know the intrinsic nature of the fundamental particles is itself phenomenal in this cartesian conception of the phenomenal um and that doesn't really work for me though i think they do have a basic insight which is that um we have to rethink what it what it is for for something to be to be natural um so that's kind of that i guess that's how i i mean that's in a way not satisfactory but that's how i see the landscape yeah i mean so yeah because what it's it's hard because what you're saying like for me it sounds a lot like what galen strawson says it's close to galen in some ways yeah and galen's a panda psychist though right yeah yeah so i mean of course galen is a pan psychist um galen thinks that pan psychism is also uh the right way to be a physicalist so i mean galen's use of these terms is uh it's particular right he has a particular way of rendering them um my view is is is is close to galen's except i suppose where i would maybe differ is that it seems to me that what he does is he thinks so he he works with with the following ideas um that you know that we see in say eddington you know authors that he that he that he quotes that he cites and that is the idea that um that science gives us only uh relational functional properties right and consciousness we know from our own experience is intrinsic given that radical emergence doesn't work on his argument that is you can't go from um fundamental fundamentally physical non-mental to mental where that means going to something that's intrinsically qualitative or phenomenal given that you can't do that that we know there are intrinsic properties in the form of consciousness that science only gives us relational functional ones the way to solve the problem is to make the intrinsic uh kind of categorical base of those dispositional relational functional properties scientific ones is to make that categorical base the intrinsic you know mentality or consciousness um so that kind of argument i don't like um i don't like it because i don't think that when we i don't think the right phenomenological characterization of consciousness is to make it into an intrinsic property qualia you know quailly type property that is fundamentally different in nature from the relational configuration in which it's in in which it's embedded so that's that's a cartesian intuition that's the cartesian that's the cartesian intuition so he takes that cartesian intuition then he inserts it into the core of nature at the ground floor right and so i don't if i don't accept the cartesian intuition and i think that science um i mean one might raise a question whether that's sort of structural realist way of reading physics is the right way to read physics you could question that too if you're doubtful about both of those things then you're going to be doubtful about putting them together in the way that he puts them together that said i do fundamentally agree with him on the kind of guiding intuition that you can't start with a physicalist conception of reality and think that you're going to be able to get uh lived experience out of it in a way that you know solves the explanatory gap i mean i i do think that's right a way that differentiates me from say like dennit who was one of my mentors who thinks ah there's no problem look you're just functional a little bit and if you have a deep i mean dennis is not crude like dennis understanding of what functionalization is is very sophisticated yeah you know his idea is if you really understand the functions um you'll see there's not a problem so i actually don't accept that um and that puts me you know in sympathy with galen but i don't like the way galen you know i don't like the furniture he works with so i don't like then the way the way he arranges it isn't gonna isn't gonna work for me either so i mean is it fair to say that uh well and maybe this so maybe i misunderstand you but i want to check so it's fair to say that uh the the insight you agree with them that you got to have consciousness you got to rethink this term so that consciousness is part of the physical world in some natural sense but that whatever consciousness it doesn't have an intrinsic nature is that the way to think of it it's it's kind of is this the two sticks propping each other up kind of metaphor that we're supposed to be thinking about here that um or is this something else that's that's going on uh that you want to get rid of intrinsicality altogether you don't think you have that even in deep meditative stage or like that the forest is not a kind of intrinsic state things of this nature so right okay so here here we we we get into what we mean by intrinsic um what i what i was objecting to was a cartesian conception of the intrinsic character of consciousness now whether um so so that conception is that you know that there is an intrinsic pure phenomenal character to say the the quality blue that can be um attended to isolated from its context of um lived embodiment and environmental embeddedness so so that's what i'm objecting to now there's a much bigger metaphysical question about you know are there intrinsic natures or is everything relational or are there intrinsic natures but the intrinsic natures are a function of the relationality right i mean that's like a huge metaphysical question that you know we see you know like in leibniz and we see in buddhism and um i don't really have a stand on that question though i would say my my gut feeling is has always been a kind of uh how do i want to put this um i've always been by disposition i suppose this is not an argument this is just like a statement of personal uh autobiography i've always been dispositionally inclined toward views that see um a kind of interrelational monism or oneness as as bedrock um you know we see this in thinkers like in different ways we see this in thinkers like leibniz we see it in east asian forms of buddhism like tientai huayn we see it in taoism so that that kind of um [Music] the relevance of that here is just that the idea that you could extract something as an intrinsic nature that would be what it is independent of any relational work i'm very yeah i appreciate that but but what it does means two things sorry you broke up there for a second oh i just said i i i i asked whether that made sense where what i meant was i tried to separate two things the sort of cartesian conception of the intrinsic nature of consciousness versus um these bigger questions about you know relationality and and intrinsic natures or intrinsic properties yeah yeah i think that does make sense um and it's it's useful because i think you know this is one of the things that that maybe galen and definitely some of us uh um more prominence and pan psychiatrists like philip goff maybe and these kinds of people that's what they do is they say well introspection reveals the nature of consciousness there's blueness i just have access to it but i think one of the ways in which this maybe um uh comes into tension with some of the some of the ideas from the asian tradition is that well that's a superficial level of awareness of consciousness and there are there are deeper levels and so if you really practice meditation and you attend to those things then you see maybe they they have you know they come apart that's not the simplest thing so there's a kind of maybe a mistake that's possibly made by simply taking kind of naive introspection that seems to be the way you're objecting to what they're doing that's certainly part of it so so uh i would say that you know especially in goff um you know his idea that um that uh i'm forgetting the exact terminology he uses i think it's phenomenal transparency yeah the idea that that the state in having the state and attending to it its nature its qualitative phenomenal nature is fully revealed to you um that that just seems to me fully revealed to you as just you know somebody sitting in an armchair reflecting in the moment on it i mean i i see absolutely no reason to accept that um um i think and and here i think this is a thought that we see in the certainly in thin tradition but also we see it in in western phenomenological thinkers it's like no that's just the bare beginning you have to actually explore the phenomena and when you do you see that they actually have open you know horizons use the husserlian term of of interconnections and that they're saturated with different kinds of intentionalities and the idea that you're just given in the moment something as a a pure instance of what it is uh i mean that that that that seems to me to be i mean i'm gonna be tendentious now that just seems to me to be philosophically actually very sloppy um and and not properly aware of a lot of hard work that philosophers have done to say no you need to do a lot more than that um yeah i do wonder though and i take that i think that's a fair point actually but i do wonder if there's not a um a version of this that you can recover once you've done the work so is there no you know maybe i'm thinking of things like mind moments and these other things is there's no like once you've really seriously meditated maybe even done dream yoga once you've you know some people claim to experience the pure light of the fourth once you get to these higher levels so to speak of of awareness isn't there a kind of similar claim that can be made there that now you're seeing what it really is i mean isn't that the way it's often put yes it is often put that way um in in a number of different indian traditions the idea is that if you have the right conceptual philosophical system and you have adequate proper meditative training that the phenomena um in their nature will be in their intrinsic natures will be revealed or disclosed and then there are other systems and traditions that reject that and say no you're actually when you think that way you're in the grip of a kind of to use the seller's expression of a kind of myth of the given that you think you've got hold of a kind of non-conceptual content that is that's epistemically and metaphysically for for these thinkers foundational um and that is uh mistaken because you are you're only able to make any kind of knowledge claim when you're in the you know in the ambit of a or you're within the workings of a kind of you know conceptual linguistic system so um it's just to say that you know the terrain over there is as complicated as the terrain over here and you know it depends it depends it's oddly comforting to know that actually yeah yeah and you know we see the interesting thing to me is we see this reflected in contemporary debates among people who work with these traditions so someone like jay garfield you know jay is a sellarzian and his reading of of buddhist philosophy fastens on to the uh traditions that are to speak in a weird anachronistic way very you know very celasian um and so you know his illusionism when he's arguing against say somebody like like goff or strassen is coming out of that you know asian heritage whereas other people um will argue you know for something that gives primacy to um ex you know direct experience but now it's meditative direct experience so my my own you know my own position on that is well i mean my own position is it's complicated but but um i would say uh i do think that working with a much richer spectrum of human experience is really fundamentally important when we're trying to understand consciousness so things like you know meditative practices then become very important but the idea that meditative practice gives you a kind of observation that would directly determine theory uh i don't accept that because i mean observation never directly determines theory right and the minute you start talking and characterizing what the experiences and observations are you're already in the land of theoretical interpretation so then it becomes back and forth between the two um and and you know what's most productive yeah i'm glad you said that because i was having the same kind of reaction when i was uh um you know talking to bryce hubner a lot and uh thinking about um yogachara is that how you say it's uh yoga chara okay so think about their ideas and i mean one of the ideas that struck me was how do you know which is the illusion the ordinary conscious experience or the meditative experience that you have because you're it just seems like in both cases you're applying concepts and and and the theory that you have pre theoretically is gonna or before that's gonna influence the way you come to it so it it's nice to know that these ideas are debated and that's one of the nice things about um about all these guys is they're very serious about it and but i do appreciate that a wider range of experience is important so i wonder if we could sum this up by saying maybe what the moral from all this is is that you know phenomenology is important but you're not it's not going to lead you to any kind of metaphysics it's hard to see how it could um it's it's not going to lead you to the kind of metaphysics that um i mean i would say phenomenology is already you know metaphysics of a kind but it's not gonna it's not as if you're gonna do phenomenology and then you are going to um extract a metaphysical system from it um i mean to you know to do phenomenology you're already working with ideas of of being say um you know very core metaphysical ideas uh the very idea in in say if we if we want to use sort of certainly in phenomenology that you shift your way of looking at things from sort of positive objects that you take to be independent of you instead you're going to look at them in terms of their you know modes of appearance and givenness um that's already a shift that's a metaphysical shift it's an attitudinal shift but it's metaphysical because you're changing the idea of being from you know positive objective being to you know being within the sphere of you know uh lived experience or something like that so i don't want to say that like phenomenology is is this area off cordoned off from metaphysics it's it's you know it's it's saturated with metaphysical concepts but the idea that you would do it and get it clean and clear and then you would read off some other phenomenology especially i mean other metaphysics especially a kind of speculative constructive one um in the way that people say pursue physicalism and and pan psychicism today that's that's not the right way to think about the relationship between the two yeah right yeah um yeah i could follow up on this forever but i'm mindful of the time because i i know you have another meeting so i want to make sure that we can talk about some other things here but so one of the i think the core idea i guess of waking dreamy being and maybe some of your other work too is to argue for a distinctive notion of the self and and really all the exploration of consciousness in this various states really is is serving to bolster your conception of that so as as i read it and as i think you've said pretty clearly your idea is that the self is not an illusion it's kind of a mistake to think that it's something that we enact something we do i guess is what that means um a process of eye making um and so i wonder if you could just say a little bit about why uh why it's well so i guess i'm more on the neural nihilist side of things um and i and i really have a hard time uh sort of seeing what the difference is between that kind of view and the view that you present because to put it kind of briefly it seems like well you're what you're saying is um it's a mistake to think there's this existing thing through time uh but there's still a process of that makes you think that and so we should identify the self with that as opposed to the thing uh the entity but isn't that really just granting everything that the other side wants there i mean so i'm a little bit confused about why you think this is uh is it a semantic point that you're making or do you think that this is a more than a semantic point guess the way right right um okay so so what i think is that um the term self or the concept itself uh is is rich and multifaceted and and can be used in a number of different ways in philosophy in psychology and to think that its proper philosophical sense is an abiding essential purely mental singular eye is all ready to accept that the cartesian conception of the self is the one that should be you know dictating the terms of the discussion so if you if you start with that idea of self and then you know you find that well there is no such thing that corresponds to it there's rather this you know complex set of interrelated you know constructive processes then what you're going to say is well the self is an illusion but it looks like there's a self and at least under certain conditions it looks like there is that kind of self but then there isn't and there are these just sort of processes that make up the illusion so my objection to that is well that's one way of thinking what the self is but if we look at the history of philosophy and the use of the term self um that's just a very very limited and already actually in certain ways tendentious use of the term and so why should we you know why should we give the term self over to the cartesians in that way that's actually going to force us to say that there is another self if on the other hand we you know use the word self in a much um richer to my mind way that acknowledges the different well that's fundamentally experiential so that self has to do with how we experience you know being a person having an identity being related to others and then we look at all the different forms that that takes and the different processes that make it up then what we're going to be inclined to say is that there are these processes of self-making as i put it and a self is not separate from them the analogy i use is you know like the dance is not a thing separate from the dancing so we're going to look at it in a process to a way and we can then acknowledge that some things in the in the processes are going on can uh involve you know different kinds of uh illusions we might say um cognitive affective perceptual but the process itself isn't illusory and moreover the process is functionally important um [Music] and so is that a terminological difference well in some ways it's terminological i would say it's conceptual and that it's um i think does more justice to the phenomenology than than starting from the the cartesian the cartesian starting point i guess i would also say so this is related to the phenomenology that if if you're if you're a philosopher um or someone who studied philosophy and you've internalized a cartesian way of thinking about the self then you may think of self-experience as fundamentally a matter of you know i'm located here at the zero zero point of coordinate space in my head looking out through my eyes you know that zero zero you know coordinate phenomenal uh you know convergence point doesn't change regardless of everything else that's changing i mean if you already are sort of in the grip of that idea then um when you start to look for that thing and it turns out wait a minute you know i can't grab hold of it then you're gonna swing to some kind of um denial of it but if you're actually uh i would say more um attentive to the different kinds of self-experience and you're thinking along with you know philosophers like merlot ponte who emphasize you know the importance of the body and the way the body is geared into the environment and caught up in you know networks of meaning that involve you know the contours of the landscape and interactions other people and you don't think of the self in this kind of intellectualized mental way then um then you're not gonna you know swing into the sort of okay what's what's philosophically important is the denial of self and then and then what then we have to cope with the illusion how do we cope with the how do we cope with the illusion um so so that's that's kind of what's going on there for me so yeah you know from some people's perspectives it doesn't look like a big difference from other perspectives you know that there is an important difference in terms of um you know where we start from and the things we wind up saying yeah i mean i understand that and i like that and i i mean the thing i i reacted to with the way i reacted when i was reading this i was like i agree with all this but i think he's arguing that there's no self but right so because that's i think that's just to interrupt you i think that's actually in i mean that's interesting and i think it's indicative i think it's that because we're so in the grip of a certain way of thinking about yourself a very like to simplify a kind of like intellectualized cartesian way of thinking about itself because we're so in the grip of that um we take that other narrative as showing what's most important is if there is no self but if we weren't starting with that particular conception wouldn't present that way to us yeah and i get that and i have to admit that as an undergraduate i was influenced a lot by descartes i think i thought i outgrew a lot of it but it's probably pretty deep but i i mean i sort of remember not being a philosopher um i think you know uh before i went to college and was corrupted um and i always felt like i mean if anyone were to ask me what the self was i would say it's the thing which is the same i mean it's the same what makes it the case that i was the same when i was five and now um now is that an overly intellectualized way i'm thinking i think it's just sort of giving ground for personal identity and saying you know when i say things like i was the one in that picture um i want that to come out true um and i i think that in uh we both agree i think that in neuroscience there's we've haven't discovered any such thing and in physical sciences well the body is not a good candidate for that the brain is not a good candidate for that so is that do you think falling into the same trap but because certainly you agree that uh or let me ask you that do you agree that there is no this process is not going to get that kind of personal identity is it if i upload to a computer or go into the transporter or whatever for these philosophical thought experiments is is it the same person that comes out the other side that's kind of a question that this process in activeview is going to say no to right right right right so so they're um yes i mean when we think that way you know spontaneously as as kids um we we think in terms of um an idea of identity or sameness but then i think we also very quickly realize um well but what exactly is that because you know i say it's the same river but you know as kids many of us realize well but it's also not the same river like you know so what's going on there and immediately yeah right yeah exactly so immediately we're then in the zone of you know of philosophical thinking and what i would say is that um [Music] you know through philosophy through you know other disciplines anthropology cognitive science um we can learn to see for example that well maybe taking the pronoun i as a referring expression in that way is actually not the right you know not the best way to look at it so you know in the chapter on self and waking your human being i use um an idea that gen arden canary uh develops out of philosophy of language and also out of some some of the indian materials i think of the self as performative that you know when you use the pronoun i um you're you know you're individuating yourself as a speaker you're individuating yourself as a subject in relationship to others and that process of individuation is part of the self-making process so of course you know you've got to learn you know some stuff about semantics and philosophy language and um and cognitive psychology to you know sort of describe it intellectually that way um but when you do that you get a perspective that in a way makes sense of that perplexing experience you have as a kid where it's like well i'm the same but but i'm not the same it's like the river it's the same but it's not the same because it just is the flow and then like well what is the identity of the flow and you know so like that that's how i how i see that unfolding um right actually so actually i mean but so i guess uh do do we agree that phenomenologically represented as though there is a continuing self do you agree that's something that that phenomenologically present or do you think that's already over intellectualizing it um i think that sometimes yes uh that is how it presents and then i think sometimes it doesn't present that way and then if you want to ask well does it present more that way um then i would say maybe but we need to study that more so i mean in the buddhist context the idea or not just buddhist actually you know in in indian context across the board right it's a it's a very fundamental thought that we are all of us habitually attached to or invested in the idea of a continuous continuously existent permanent eye right that is not how things are and so so that's an illusion um so now is it the case but but it's important to realize that that's that statement so of course it's a philosophical statement but it's also fundamentally um you could say it's an ethical or soteriological that is it's a statement concerned with a conception of freedom and liberation where it's axiological it's the idea that don't identify with anything in the mind or in the body as self in the sense of a permanent abiding eye because whenever you do that you will you will chain yourself you will be unfree you will suffer you will experience dissatisfaction you will be miserable and true freedom or liberation comes from freeing yourself from that so that's a fundamentally like axiological frame a normative frame right yeah so if we if we then say okay well descriptively is it true that we human beings we let's even particularize it we modern western you know western industrialized rich democratic individuals weird yeah do we habitually experience ourselves as having that kind of a self in say autobiographical memory um i think in some ways yes and in other ways uh no that is i think many of us already as kids find ourselves in experiences where it's it's obvious that that's not actually how it is it's like well the eye that i remember is a different eye from the eye that's remembering now and the eye that remembers now has to bring something back from the past but it no longer exists but i have to bring it back from the past given how i am now and so it can't be that there's like a a constant core that it's more it's more complicated than that i think i think that you know presents itself to many of us in in many experiences that that might then induce us into philosophy or induce us into meditation or induce us yeah psychoanalysis or you know like whatever it might be so um i agree but i mean i guess i wonder if i wonder if in this instance you know uh hard cases make bad law so in the typical case you know we have this experience and then i agree there are these other kinds of they seem like outliers though in a sense um and if i mean so whatever you think about that though the way you're presenting it is that this whatever you do have that feeling it's incorrect there is no continuous thing so there's an illusion there so so what i want to distinguish is um the axiological normative statement that there is a habitual self-identification and it's a problem and we're not free as long as we're subject to it i want to distinguish that from a descriptive psychological statement that purports to be like empirically or descriptively true that that way of ident that that mode of self-identification is the norm now maybe it is but i don't want to conflate the two the two ways of talking because they typically are are conflated totally yeah if it's descriptively true so so if if it's descriptively true the axiological framework doesn't follow it's still a further question and if the axiological framework is the one that we uh accept the descriptive statement isn't entailed by it as a matter of empirical fact right they're two separate things that we have to that we have to distinguish so what i object to this is actually what i talk about more in my most recent book why i'm not a buddhist is that i object to the conflation of those two things right um yeah in that book actually you argue that it's a mistake to say that buddhism is sort of somehow uh value-free or sociologically free and but that that is what buddhism is that those those judgments and normative dispositions are the core of the religious aspect of it right exactly exactly yeah so but but but it but so you do agree i mean you do agree though that that sense is an illusion and that it's a mistake to do that but then you want to say i mean you say this at the end of the waking dream being booked sorry go ahead sorry you said two things there right one that it's an illusion and two that it's a mistake so there there i want to make a further distinction which is um there may be an illusion in the sense that if we accept for purposes of argument that there is a phenomenal presentation of a self that has no existence independent of that phenomenal presentation that has no existence in the way that it's presented independent of the presentation if you see that it's a further statement to say that it's a mistake because the minute we say it's a mistake we have to invoke you know what the criteria of correctness are um you know is is is it uh correctness um i mean it's a bit like colors right it's like we see color so the physics of wavelength doesn't give us statements about color does it follow that color perception is a mistake no it doesn't that doesn't follow at all color perception is actually you know from an evolutionary ecological perspective extremely robust and and important um so if we if but it's a mistake to think that it tracks some some property in the world which is like the color experience uh i'm not even sure that that's true actually um so i mean we reliably track environmental properties that we perceive uh as colors and so we're you know we're very well attuned and geared into our environment and having color perception um the physics of light and surface reflectance doesn't give us statements about perceived hue in any you know simple derivational or one-to-one way does it follow then that color perception is a mistake no yeah so similarly i know and you have a whole book defending this idea too right exactly so i mean similarly for the self you know it could be that um the self is like color you're not going to get statements about the self if you talk in the language of neurophysiology um or you know cognitive neuroscience um does it follow that it's an illusion or a mistake well yes if we if we're if we accept the axiological frame yes of course but then we've got to be clear that that's because we're working within that axiological frame right yeah so i guess because what i what i meant by a mistake was it's mistaken to think that it refers correctly so i take the color experience point but but i you know if you're familiar with this david chalmers worked like eden so it's a mistake to think that we live in eden so the color properties as they present to us are not like that out there there's wavelengths of light that are out there but and you may call you know objects red but they don't have the property of redness the way it's presented to us so it would be a mistake to think that that's the way the world is the world is like colored in the way our experiences are so to speak yeah but they agree with me no i actually don't because because there you're making a split between um a kind of metaphysical realist conception of how the world is in itself independent of experience and then um the the domain of subjective experience and um for me because just because colors don't show up in the descriptions of um fundamental or you know or macro you know macro physical descriptions it doesn't it doesn't follow to me that the world is not colored i mean the world is colored at the right level of description for the world which is the world of ecology of yeah of biology evolution and ecology i in my own view on color i think of colors as relational properties that have to do with um how the environment presents given the presence of certain living beings who actually contribute to configuring the environment to be that way so there's a kind of evolutionary you know co-evolution co-determination so i don't think of color i don't make i don't accept that split between eden color first of all i don't think eden colors are phenomenologically accurate descriptions of color experientially and i don't think that that's the right description for the world to capture what what color perception is um so i would make analogous kinds of points for the self yeah yeah okay so i'll retract the mistake part so there's an illusion there at least right yes okay you're not in good um if yeah so okay go ahead go ahead yeah no you go ahead i mean illusion illusion um illusion is a tricky word but if if we describe the situation as for purposes of argument there's a phenomenal presentation of an abiding self and there is no abiding self independent of the phenomenal presentation so were we to take the phenomenal presentation as a presentation of an independently existing self that would then be an illusion yes okay okay um and so i yeah this is uh i see we're running out of time here i mean uh unfortunately there's so many things we haven't even gonna talk about the discrete nature of conscious experience near death dying um deep sleep experiences so i mean i could hopefully maybe i could get you to come back someday and spend another hour with me but just to finish up this this topic um so you end you kind of end the book by saying look i would sort of if it were up to me i guess my view would be that it's it's we shouldn't think of as enlightenment or awakening or whatever you want to call it as realizing there is no self and therefore uh that way but to realize that there's this process that there is a self but not to identify with any of its contents or any of any aspects of it in an overly particular way is that the right way of putting what you say at the end yeah you could put that out put it that way i guess that's the way i would be inclined to put it now would be to say something like um you know there is an ongoing process of of self-making and it's like a dance um so there's no self separate from the process there's no dance separate from the dancing and then the question is um are we doing it in a you know attuned sensitive harmonious way that's you know geared into our environment and the world and others in in um in uh i mean and this is axiological now of course in a you know in a harmonious um way conducive to our and others uh flourishing or are we doing it in a way that causes harm um suffering pain you know things like that that's how i would be inclined to put it so i mean in that way i'm a little bit more taken with um with ideas from well this is what comes to mind right now you know certain ideas from chinese philosophy from from taoism especially you know ideas of of way of effortless action of being geared into our world our environment um and other people you know in in harmonious ways that that would be how i'd inclined to think of it so it then you'd say you you wouldn't put less effort emphasis on uh desire as a kind of source of suffering um i mean desire is unquestionably a source of suffering but but i wouldn't i'm not myself drawn to those versions of you could say philosophical ascetic thinking that think that what we need to do is to extinguish desire or to um yeah to eliminate desire that i think is in the indian context that's an idea that's very much classically tied to asceticism and ascetic practices and that's not a perspective that i find i mean historically of course i understand uh the power of that way of thinking and where it comes from but i don't find that particularly attractive for for for me or for or for us here and now with the problems that you know that we human beings face i mean i don't i don't think that path is is particularly yeah helpful uh for dealing with our challenges right now yeah okay and uh i have a million other things i would like to talk with you about as i said already but i know sorry go ahead i mean i can go till about noon so that's like another what 20 15 minutes yeah oh okay i thought you had to leave at a quarter till uh i i can go till noon noon should be fine uh noon i guess you're on the east coast right yeah whatever yeah almost three um okay well thank you very much i appreciate that because i really am enjoying this discussion um okay so i wonder if we could kind of backtrack to um to talking about waking awareness um and the idea that there's discrete moments mind moments um so you you give i i i'm a fan of this in fact when i was doing my master's work i actually i tried to investigate this and i was presenting you know two triangles that would make a square if you time it right it looks like a square if you time it differently it looks like two triangles and it turns out that there's a kind of framework there a time uh order on which people will perceive it as one unitary square and if you adjust that then they see that they're two separate triangles um so i'm a big fan of this idea that there's discrete uh moments but you trace this back all the way to the indian uh way of thinking to this uh earlier way of thinking so one of the things that kind of was i mean puzzling to me was that you say that there's this idea that you can be aware of the edges so to speak in meditation and also aware of the gaps so this is probably a very novice question but i was really trying to struggle to understand how there could be gaps and that you could be aware of them and i know you say some things about it in your book but i just was i i have some questions so i wonder if you could tell us about it and then i'll yeah yeah no i mean that's not a novice question that's like a deep question that raises all sorts of issues about about awareness um so uh on one way of thinking about what's going on there's a kind of serial process of discrete uh mind moments as they would be called in abhidharma indian buddhist philosophy discrete moments of awareness and to a casual look it looks like it's a smooth continuity but to a closer analytical inspection um with the right philosophical framework um what you have is is a series of of discrete moments it's a digital you could say rather than an analog process and then what would it mean to be aware of the gaps well on on that way of thinking you're never aware of a gap as such a currently you're only retrospectively aware that there was a gap so in other words you make you make in effect what's an inference um um you you notice you notice the discontinuity retrospectively and so you conclude you infer um that that the process is is gappy so that would be a kind of classical gap model on some other models there's at one level a kind of serial digital gap process and then there's a sort of deeper architectural level that is able to notice those gaps and so at that deeper architectural level it could actually be gappy too but it's moments of noticing if they line up with the gaps of the other can notice the gaps as such so that's another model um and i mean what's interesting about this is that you know these are these are theoretical models right so what's going on is that you have the buddha's words because the buddhists are the discontinuous gappy theorists you have the buddha's words and how do we make sense of them and interpret them well he talks in terms of you know a collection of intermittent processes that arise and subside so under philosophical pressure um the way to articulate that is as a gappy process that raises problems you know so how do we deal with the problems well you know there's a deeper level or we say it's retrospective so it's to say that there's there's like a kind of complicated discussion happening involving you know sort of textual hermeneutical interpretation of the buddha's words philosophical analysis under pressure of outside systems innovation within the systems and and they come up with different models to try to make sense of things um so it's not like it's a direct readout of meditative experience it's rather you've got some experiences you've got some texts you've got some philosophy and they're in the mix trying to make trying to make sense of things i see okay yeah so in this in this other model where there's a kind of awareness of the gappiness or the gaps i'm sorry um which what kind of awareness on the model are we talking is it going to be fitting into one of our four things that we already talked about um is it luminosity is it is it are you it's is it the gaps revealed in that sense or is it another you know kind of awareness there um so the the the system of the four is a is a brahminical let's say hindu system the gappy theorists are buddhists so they don't use that model of the four but what they would say is that deeper level is is a distinctly mental form of awareness so it's like a kind of um it's a mental cognitive level of processing in the system that's that's able to uh to detect these gaps at uh at a sensory level say so you've got kind of like sensory perceptual processing and then you've got a level of mental processing and the mental processing is able to register oh you know no perceptual signal no sensory perceptual signal a kind of a gap so so that's how they would think about it and that description then makes the mental processing kind of like a higher order monitoring as it were of the of the first order sensory level yeah is there a kind of regress threatening here because aren't they also aware that they're aware of the gaps um yes so i mean then you get the then you get the question recapitulated at the mental level you know um is this a retrospective inferential process um i mean if the mental process itself is gappy how do you conclude that well if you invoke another level then you've got a looming you know sort of regress so then this is basically takes you into the question how is the mind aware of itself and some people will say well there's this inherent reflexivity and other people will say no it's this you know higher it's this like retrospective cognition that mental awareness of mind is always actually retrospective so introspection is a kind of like retrospection that's right that's the answer those guys would give those people folks i think uh like william james said something like that too right or someone yeah that's right um yeah so i wonder so if you take this into the cognitive science realm um i i know you talked about i read this blog post that you wrote that's sort of citing some up updated evidence for this um i i wonder so i want to ask you about that but i also wonder if you think there's any continuous processes in terms of the brain that is sort of abstracting away from conscious experience for a second and yeah i don't know if you saw this recent trends in cognitive science paper uh where they were um uh arguing that you know unconscious processes are probably continuous but consciousness is discrete um and so i wonder what just you know and they use uh post-diction as an example that shows this so i wonder what you think about that generally um whether you think yeah that's no that's great i i have downloaded that paper and skimmed it but i haven't read it carefully so i probably shouldn't comment on that paper yet um but but it looked directly i mean i immediately downloaded it because it was directly relevant to this topic right um i mean so continuous discontinuous those terms aren't really meaningful unless we specify exactly in what way or sense we mean i mean there's evidence there's definitely evidence for um i guess the way i would put it is that there's there's lots of evidence that the brain is inherently rhythmic and that it has different you know different neural different cells and different populations of cells have their own uh endogenous rhythms and frequencies and so they have you know complex you know uh complex oscillatory activities whether that translates into a perceptual process that's truly discrete that is that actually processes in terms of you know frame one frame to frame three um or whether there aren't temporal perceptual frames but there's some it's rhythmic but there's some you know more continuous activity or whether it's perceptual frames and then there's a deeper level of a kind of more continuous rhythmicity i mean these i think are like these are open big questions in in neuroscience um [Music] i think there's good evidence for uh certain kinds of perceptual temporal framing but it's not it's not it's not as if there's experimental evidence there's there's very it seems to me there's very little experimental evidence that definitively shows discrete temporal framing that is that can't be interpreted in terms of another model because there are very few experiments that are explicitly designed to test that so i mean that's a long-winded way of saying i think the jury is out on that in terms of the nitty gritty of what's going on um at any level of processing in the brain but i haven't read the latest trends in cognitive science articles so you know that maybe that will change how we think about this but but i need to read that one yeah okay cool yeah um all right so we got just a few minutes here i guess uh i i spent the last six minutes talking about death um here uh because i i really enjoyed the way you approached it so first of all i really like the reframing of the issues like near-death experiences the process of dying let's take a phenomenological approach let's let's understand that these may not be true but they actually are just reflections of what's happening to the person let's take that seriously and then i read your more recent paper as well where you talk about this in terms of transformative experiences um so i wonder if i could just get you to say a little bit about what you mean by death because i know that's a complicated question already and so you have a lot to say about it but can you just tell us a little bit about what what is death on this view right um that's a big question um yes six minutes six minutes right it's actually the subject of the book i'm just starting to work on now um so i'm working on a new book on that's tentatively called dying our ultimate transformation um so it's it's on this topic um [Music] i i mean what what interests me in in this whole area is the the juxtaposition or the dichotomy between our increasingly uh detailed specialized biomedical knowledge of the biology of dying and the comparable lack of attention to and understanding of the phenomenology of dying and i mean i think this is symptomatic of big things in our in our culture um and so what i'm really trying to do is to try to articulate a framework where we can you know integrate these two things put these two things into you know a kind of mutually informing dialogue with each other and so one of the fundamental points for me there is that science actually can't tell us what death it is i mean this is not news to some people and what i mean by that is that what we human beings call death in the whole kind of cascade of complex processes that make up um that make up dying and and then the state of you know dissolution and decay what we mark as death um depends fundamentally on considerations that are philosophical ethical social um and that science doesn't you know dictate how we do that it provides relevant information but it doesn't tell us how to do that so the so the the more that we try to as we learn more about the biology of dying think that that's gonna as it were tell us what death is you know more that actually increases our alienation in relationship to death and dying because science can't actually do that we have to right we have to think about it philosophically we have to think about it ethically and then different you know philosophical traditions that are especially concerned with the idea that you know if you want to lead a fully meaningful life you have to do so in a way that acknowledges the the reality of dying and death those traditions become i think especially important so you know those are traditions like buddhism um contemplative tradition stoicism you know they their their ancient philosophy let's say the ancient world of philosophy was all concerned with this and modern philosophy for the most part with exceptions here and there you know turned away from that so so what's at issue for me is really trying to integrate you know the the the the knowledge we have of of dying as a biological process with a phenomenologically much richer understanding of what actually happens to people when they die what happens to consciousness what happens to their sense of self um i mean there's many different ways that people die i'm thinking especially of people in our society who you know die at home or die in hospice um right that's that's sort of what's going on for me in the terrain of the new book so it's not as if there's you know the question isn't so much like what is death here's the answer it's it's more how do we understand this fundamental transformation that that we all are going to undergo in one way or another yeah i mean so one of the targets that you have is the traditional you know annihilationist view of that so you know death was nothing to me um right so i shouldn't be afraid of it but but i think one of the nice points that comes out is a lot more complicated than that it's really over simplification there's a whole process leading up to that point in time and maybe even continuing after slightly i mean i know you're you're very carefully impacted the evidence for near-death experiment i think you're right on about that but there's also this you know it's brain activity persists after cardiac arrest for you know sometimes several minutes we haven't really investigated that so there's just a whole realm of things that we're not really clear about i think that's yeah no that's exactly right so i mean um from a biological perspective you know there are many many different processes that make up a living being they they decay at different rates um we don't know uh what you know happens over different time courses in the brain in the dying moments there's you know starting to be a little bit of evidence on that there was a study that was just done by my colleagues here at the university of british columbia that found in unresponsive hospice patients that they're still you know quite complex sophisticated auditory perception going on um which confirms you know sort of what hospice workers and family members say which is you know hearing is the last sense to go from you know a tibetan buddhist perspective there's actually a complex inner cognitive dimension to the dissolution of the sense of self in dying um so that's exactly i think something that that is really fundamentally important for me is that this this sort of inner life of the dying person we we really don't understand that and it's it's very important to understand that in relationship to the you know the different time courses of things biologically in terms of like the metaphysical issues about you know um annihilation versus like transition to another life um it's not as if integrating the biology and the phenomenology of dying is going to be sufficient to answer those questions though you know those questions remain as philosophical questions religious questions for some people i'm very you know attracted to an idea that comes from juansa which is to think of death as transformation rather than as annihilation or as transition um you know annihilation is the sort of epicurean idea that you know um where death is i am not end of story and the transition idea is you know where there's a continuity of consciousness and afterlife however characterized and the juanxian idea is more you know it's part of a kind of cosmic turnover a transformational turnover of elements um and that annihilation is a biased way of looking at it it sort of cuts things from a kind of artificial human perspective so i i like that idea a lot in thinking about this but this is all sort of new work new new writing i'm doing now yeah well i can't wait till it comes out to get a peek at it i know you have to go and i can't keep you any longer so let me just say thank you very much for taking this time and talking to me i can't recommend your work enough if forever reason no one's checked out they should it's thoughtful thought-provoking challenging in the best way i think it represents philosophy edits at its absolute best and so uh yeah i could not agree more um that the way you approach these topics is a model for how people have to approach these topics not that they should agree with you or not but that's just the right way to do philosophy i think oh thank you thank you very much i really appreciate that and thanks for inviting me it's great to no problem yeah all right so i'll let you go i'll end the stream i'll say bye off the air but uh all right thank you very much okay um and we are clear

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 716

Rating: 4.8947368 out of 5

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Id: qZ9pNmEZR6g

Length: 93min 40sec (5620 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020