Could Robots Become Conscious? with Annaka Harris (Ep.5)

[Music] welcome to conversations with Coleman today my guest is Annika Harris Annika is an author and editor consultant for science writers the author of the children's book I wonder and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser greenland's mindful games activity cards today we're talking about her book conscious a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of mind thanks for being here thanks for having me so yeah likewise tell me how you got interested in the subject of consciousness hmm it goes back pretty far actually I I really have been interested in it as a phenomenon for as long as I can remember I've been I've been talking more recently a little bit about my firt when I first really realized that there was something interesting and mysterious about the fact that we're having an experience and and this is so this is at a very young age just as I was about 8 or 9 years old and this first came in the context of severe migraines that I was suffering from and there were a couple of times where the the migraine went on for for long enough that I was just kind of stuck in a very still position because any any little movement would cause the migraine to be much more painful for a long stretch of time I actually don't know but it was probably at least an hour if not closer to to and and other people I have now spoken with other people who've had a similar experience in pain and I think especially children there's something I think more flexible about children's minds and brains and when they're experiencing pain I think they're just a variety of ways that they start searching for coping and I discovered I think I just I became curious naturally because I was stuck there about what this experience of pain actually was and I I think I I did just naturally become curious and then I realize that becoming curious about it stopped this stance that I had of resisting it this kind of like psychological stance of resisting it which just gave me the tiniest bit of relief and when you're in that much pain any move in either direction of more pain or less is pretty significant and so that that that realization I feel like for me was the beginning of my getting curious about experience in general and how its how the moment-to-moment experience is different from what we generally assume or there's there's a lot missing in our day-to-day experience so it sounds like you discovered mindfulness meditation on your own as a child yes and I think that's actually not so uncommon but I mean someone had to discover it yeah right yeah presumably people have been discovering it all over the world for thousands of years yes that's very cool yeah and I in my volunteer work I teach meditation to children and that was one of them the main reasons why I wanted to is realizing that I couldn't have possibly been the only one who came across this this type of technique as a child and that children are really available to to learning that skill so I didn't think we were going to talk about this first but when did you it did after having that initial experience of for a moment being mindful realizing that your pain could be attenuated by paying attention to it did you go deeper into that did you did you cut try to replicate that other times you were in pain as a child yes and actually I died was I then realized that it was applicable to psychological pain as well and that's that's the one place I I'm sure there are times I use it that I just don't remember but but my my strong memories are of being in difficult situations where I was very anxious where you know something difficult was happening in my childhood where I realized I could apply that same way of approaching it and even I kind of had my own version of meditation it would have been incredible to have actually been taught it as a skill by an adult which is why I mean I'm such a big proponent of this because it was I was just kind of figuring it out on my own but yes no I quickly realized that that strategy could be applied to any kind of discomfort yeah yeah so we'll get back to how meditation links up with consciousness in general but let's get to some basic definitions yeah yeah consciousness that word is used in a lot of different ways it's used in a political sense sometimes consciousness-raising let's narrow down what we're talking about here what is consciousness so the way I use the term and what I'm talking about in the book is consciousness in the most fundamental sense so I think the best synonym is experience whether there's an experience presence and it can be it doesn't have to be complex thought it doesn't have to be you know if if very simple creatures like worms or flies or bees are conscious we wouldn't we don't expect them to be having thoughts and plans and writing books those are so they're compared to our experience it's very minimal but whether there's an experience presence at all and this connects to what the mystery of consciousness is which is really the focus of the book the under kind of defining consciousness as in this very fundamental sense of just experience and in whatever form its present it's in contrast to the way we see the universe which we assume most of which is non conscious so you know we look out at the Stars and the earth and you know the universes is filled with this non conscious material and these atoms and at some point these atoms get configured in such a way that it becomes there's something that it's like to be that collection of atoms or that system or that brain and so so I was just referencing Thomas Nagle's description of consciousness and and he says in his his famous essay what is it like to be a bat he says a system or sorry an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism and that's that's really what what I'm talking about in the book and how I'm using the word yeah so for many people I think they'll intuitively grasp why it's mysterious that the guitar hanging on the wall over there is not conscious or so we think we'll get there right and that I am conscious and that I assume by analogy that you're conscious hmm many people I think will understand at a gut level why that's somewhat mysterious if we're both made of atoms were made of the same building blocks as the guitar but I think some people won't they'll think well yeah it's something there's something it's like to be me there's nothing it's like to be a rock that's just the way things are how do most people see it as yeah it takes a little bit of work for someone to get to why consciousness is so mysterious that's right yeah in the book you talk about one of the problems with consciousness is that there's no outward signs of consciousness right even we kind of assume there are assume there are we think that well that's one of the things I'm questioning right so you can I imagine the way you set it up in your book it's it's almost as if there's sort of four categories right there's behaviors that seem conscious behaviors that don't seem conscious and then there's the reality of consciousness and the reality of not being conscious so you can have locked-in syndrome where you are having a full experience but you can't move any part of your body so you don't seem to be conscious on the and things that we assume are not conscious Kendu perform basically all of the behaviors that we can write Computers can speak now I heard an AI simulation of Jordan Peterson's voice recently on Twitter that was absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing and I don't presume that there was a consciousness behind the program that made that audio so every permutation of behavior and consciousness is possible MA and once you admit that it seems like we actually have to find a theory that tells us which objects are conscious and which objects aren't because we can't just trust our intuitions right yeah so do you have a candidate for that theory how do you how do you think about you know if if we were to build a robot made of silicon yeah that behaved in many ways like a human ya know I mean we how would you how do you think about our way yeah yeah how do you think about determining whether the short answer to whether I have a theory is is no and I think it's it's it's possible we won't be able to ever know the answer to this question however I think there are many questions that we haven't been asking enough and I think we haven't been creative enough in our exploration of what consciousness is and at what level in the universe and information processing it arises and so the main goal of my book is really as you're pointing to shaking up our intuitions and shaking up assumptions and so one of the most important processes in science one of the most important scientific part of the scientific process is challenging intuitions especially when we are getting evidence that is counterintuitive and so you know I have often mentioned this large range of categories where we've had to do this and we often forget because our intuitions shift as we gain new information and then we're able to kind of absorb something that's counterintuitive and then it actually changes our intuition so we have some ingrained intuitions that human beings have evolved and but our intuitions are also shaped by ideas and by culture and so understanding that the earth is a sphere is basically the first moment we were encountered with evidence that was extremely counterintuitive where we had to grapple with these facts that didn't seem that didn't feel right to us for some period of time before we could really absorb the new information and realize this was in fact true the germ theory of disease the theory of evolution or anything that happens at a significant time scale or our intuitions don't guide us well in those areas and so there there seems to often be a period of time this happens very often now in physics or we're in in terms of understanding space-time and and the fundamental features of reality physicists are just continually in the business of encountering counterintuitive facts then they then kind of have to have to check and see which intuitions are leading us towards truth and with which intuitions are are misleading us and we're and I think we're in a similar place with regard to consciousness studies right now so I think we clearly have some intuitions that are misleading us I think there's there's already some neuroscience that is conclusive enough that we know certain intuitions are in fact misleading us and and those intuitions have to do with primarily conscious will and the feeling of being a self and these intuitions largely inform our intuitions about consciousness but we also just specifically about consciousness we have some very deep intuitions and assumptions that I think we haven't spent enough time challenging and I really see that as the first step so I think if we're going to be able to make progress if we're going to be able to get to a point where we can start to have a working theory of consciousness and understand where we're in the universe we we will find it I think it will begin with this process of challenging intuitions and I think we're really and in some ways at the beginning of that process a lot of the intuitions that I'm asking people to to challenge in the book or still they're still very controversial and they're hard for many scientists and neuroscientists it yeah to grapple with but I really think that's the first step I think that's I I don't yet have answers I think it's possible we may never have answers but I'm actually optimistic that we can understand a lot better I think it's just going to entail challenging intuitions and thinking much more creatively than we have yeah yeah I also tend to think that and we'll I think we'll get here that the problem the deep mystery is unsolvable at least by minds like ours but I do you know you described in the book in the beginning sort of as an analogy for what it feels like to think about consciousness I think lying on on the earth as a young girl yeah and looking up into space and realizing you weren't looking up right really right bad no the intuition of up and down yeah yeah and it's easy to know that intellectually once you learn about the solar system and you realize there's no such thing as up and down except relative to where we are on the globe yeah but to feel that is a different thing yeah actually feel viscerally then what you're looking at is an up but rather into space right outward yeah that is very much what it's like and then you can have the experience of really feeling it at a gut level and then a second later going back to just feeling like it's up because we're built I remember that's the experience I had when I read Daniel Dennett's book intuition pumps and other tools for thinking which is the first place I ever encountered in my life the claim that there was not a little Coleman inside my head looking at looking out at the movie my life and making decisions right he just said that's scientifically wrong right there's no place in the brain that it could be right and I realized that without knowing it I had this belief my whole life yeah that was completely unsupported yeah and it it shook everything up for me yeah that's one of the central intuitions that I that I talk about in the book because it's so related to consciousness yeah but yeah I know that example that I give of this this trick I used to play on my brain I was a kid is all about challenging intuitions almost more than it is specifically about consciousness and I think this is what's so exciting about science and for me it's what's so fun about it's the fun part of science is realizing that there's truth out there that we can find and seek and better understand the universe that is different from what we assumed and there there's something I think intrinsically interesting about letting new information in and actually having it it shift our perspective because often our perspective is this very small minded you know human dealing with our everyday experiences and kind of closed off from the larger reality which I think for the most part really does give us joy in in contemplating and understanding that that we're kind of connected to something much bigger and more mysterious than than we realize one obstacle I I've had talking to people about this subject is the idea of consciousness being vulnerable to scientific explanation hmm doesn't sit well with many people even many people who are very science minded in most domains consciousness is this sacred area that they don't want science to impinge on and I found I think it has something to do with life after death and wanting to maintain some mystery my perspective on this has been I don't expect science to ever right figure out why what it is that makes certain collections of atoms yeah conscious and others not so I'm I'm sympathetic in the sense that I also like there being some mystery in life yeah but I just I don't think this one I think we are not gonna figure everything out yeah I think that that's okay but I think we do have some resistance I mean I think I often when I encounter resistance like that I I noticed that in myself I think the words science can mean different things to different people and it can for some people conjure up something invasive and sterile and kind of the opposite of what it means to me which is simply seeking the truth and better understanding and I think I'm probably not everyone feels this way but for me the idea that I could be living in ignorance of some some deeper truth that is interesting or fundamentally shifts the way I think things are or they seem to me now I wouldn't want to be in the dark I I want to understand it and and I think science not you know in in terms of life after death I mean there you if someone has a very specific conception of how that works and they're attached to that idea science is very likely to get in the way of that but science ultimately is seeking the truth and so if consciousness exists in plants or other forms of life that we haven't yet thought it does if there's some way in which it you know continues on after death I think the idea that you know in a more traditional religious sense that there's some there's some me that's that's that's essentially me that's like a soul that goes on I think you know science is very unlikely to discover something like that is happening but the truth is it could discover that consciousness does actually move beyond the brain or come from some other source I came away from your book very very uh let's let's how do I put it very open to the idea that consciousness could be pervading everyday objects yeah yeah and that sounds like a crazy thing to say when you say it I face value it really it sounds crazy to me yeah it still sounds crazy yeah but if you actually trace the logical intuitions that you would use to try to refute that yeah they're they're not as solid as they seem yeah and much of the you talked about in the book if that view is caricatured as like oh so rocks are thinking right it's like well no right we we conflate thinking yes consciousness which is a point that you make in the book and that many people I think don't totally understand because partly because it just so happens that humans think constantly right so that's in our consciousness right yeah so we assume that thinking is intrinsic intrinsic to consciousness yes but consciousness is a completely different thing from thinking certainly then linguistic thought yes absolutely so you could imagine a sort of pure stream of consciousness just experience almost like just a white light with no other sensory dimension just cite for example yeah something very rudimentary yeah you can imagine that pervading the universe or that being what it's like to be an atom how did you say yeah well yeah so we're kind of getting into this this category of theories that is termed pan psychism and they all in in some form or another postulate that consciousness is is a fundamental force fundamental elements of matter either you know all you know down to the level of atoms and electrons or existing in some field the permeations of which give all matter this intrinsic properties so it you know it has all of the physical properties that we know it has and then it under these theories the idea is that that all matter everywhere in the universe has this intrinsic property as well and that it's something more fundamental and it yes as you said it's it's it's a very important that we don't confuse consciousness with complex thought and one reason we do that and it's very interesting to think about I think that's why it's so important to kind of break down these intuitions that are misleading us but consciousness is the one thing that we can't have really any direct proof or experience of but for our own so we assume that only things that are like us have this thing because there's no way for us to measure it or see it or even detect it like you know it's I assume that your consciousness because you're enough like me and I think that assumption makes sense and it's correct but if someone were to tell me that you are actually this new advanced AI and there's there's nothing that it's like to be you and the lights are off you know there's there's nothing there's no experience being had on the inside I wouldn't expect necessarily expect anything to be different on the outside and as the the examples you mentioned that that I bring up in my book of locked-in syndrome and anesthesia awareness it is another one we know that it's possible to have as a rich a conscious experience as we're having right now without any exterior behavior at all and so we we do always assume that consciousness only exists in similar organisms or structures to our own and the further away you get from a human being the less likely it seems just because we can't have we can't have any knowledge or evidence from it yeah of it from the outside it it when I was reading your book it struck me that the the link between consciousness on the one hand which is to say experience first-person experience the fact of experience and any behavior is kind of the the biggest correlation without causation problem that humanity has ever experienced because we assumed until we learned about locked-in syndrome and anesthesia awareness that there's a direct link between the two my consciousness is what is causing my hand to move there's a causal link there it's not just that my hand is moving just the way a silicon robot would move right and I am aware that that's happening right we assume there's a causal link that I'm the cause of the thing yeah but that could turn out to be just a correlation yes well and so so there are a couple of places we can we can go here but I shouldn't say and I begin the books in the first or second chapter that I that I posed these two questions that that are the big beginning of the interrogation of these intuitions that we have about consciousness and the first question is is there any behavior we can point to that is conclusive evidence that consciousness is present in that system and our reflexive answers to both of these questions is yes and this is the thing that that I'm that I'm trying to undermine a bit and the second question is related but it's different and the second question is is consciousness having an effect is it doing something this consciousness necessary for certain behaviors to take place and and we have a very strong intuition that the answer to that is yes which is what you are what you're addressing there and let's see where was I going with this well there's actually neuroscience that absolutely brings this into question on many levels so there have now been study so so I in the book I distinguish conscious will from free will because I think you can talk about them separately I think free will as a phenomenon of a brain or any system interacting with its environment processing new ideas having different options and through complex processing making a decision I think there's some way in which we can talk about that as being free well although ultimately I would argue that there's not much freedom there but with that that's still intact and we can still kind of have the free will that that everyone is interested in and drop this illusion of conscious will which i think is conclusively false and a false intuition so there have been these studies that started a long time ago with with famous studies that were slightly controversial labbett it's did these motor movement studies you're talking about moving your hand we so we feel that whether or not we are brains ultimately how free will we have this feeling that consciousness itself is the will the consciousness is the will so we have to have this conscious experience of willing the action or the decision or or whatever it is that consciousness is behind many of our behaviors all the behaviors we think are important really and that's something that we can begin to question because neuroscience is starting to break that down a little bit for us and there there are a lot of different studies you can look at but specifically so Labette did these studies using EEG having participants move a finger i think usually or a hand so he was looking at motor movement and they were to turn it the subject were determining when they consciously had the impulse or the made the decision - to move that finger and they mark on this it's it's a special clock that he used but it's kind of like a second hand on a clock and they could kind of mark it in their minds you know this hand was on the one when I decided to move my finger it turns out he could detect that decision at the through EEG some milliseconds before the person was consciously aware of making that decision since then there have been more recent studies there's one in 2011 where they're actually reading from individual neurons and replicated his findings at the level of individual neurons when they were doing neuro surgery for epilepsy patients and other patients who needed brain surgery while they were getting that surgery they agreed to be a part of a study where they they were studying conscious willed consciously willed motor movements yeah and then there was a more recent one in 2013 they used fMRI to study something more complex which i think is very interesting and the participants rather than studying motor movement which was slightly controversial because it seems like very different processing than making a more complex decision so in 2013 there was a study in Berlin where in an fMRI machine the subjects were given two numbers and they had to choose whether to add or subtract these numbers and they were it's a similar type of clock when they made the decision they would decide whether to add or subtract and then they would they would do the math and through the fMRI they were able up to four seconds in advance know whether the subjects were going to choose to add or subtract and know the moment when they were going to make that decision so when I hear all of these experiments I I feel as if I am in West world just discovering that in fact I've been a robot the whole time right there's a look there's an element of how how is this not that it kind of just is that the idea that you couldn't predict in the--in principle we can only do this with very simple verses decisions now left or right add or subtract but in principle you could tell me what I'm going to do not only before I do it but before I've decided you do it yeah you can tell me what I'm going to do some sense we really don't need studies like this right over the point and I think we actually there's so much we understand about the brain and there's so much we don't I mean there were at the very beginning stages this is you know neuroscience is a very young science but just with the little we know we understand means the same thing you were talking about with you know there's no Coleman self in there somewhere we know our experience is a product of the processing in our brains our braids there it's it's processing its dynamic not a single solid you know free self that's making decisions we are not only is it dynamic in it and it's all brain processing the brain our brain is not in a vacuum and so we are connected to the outside world in all of these ways all the things we hear all the things we see the you know things that are getting in subconsciously even the air we breathe you know there there's this interaction with the brain in its environment in a way that is slightly counterintuitive to us even though we understand it and the fact that our experience is all based on brain processing is something that most of it us at this point understand and intellectually accept but it's still not intuitive to us at all you there's a great Joseph Goldstein it was a meditation teacher you quote him in the book on the topic of free will yeah and I think he says something like what would it even mean to have free will what would it mean to have a will that stands outside of the cause-and-effect relationship that governs the world yeah I loved that answer yeah I found that this is a this I've had debates with people hmm in my private life where this was not compelling to them but yeah either the laws of physics are laws or they're not right and if they are and if we're in the universe governed by those laws yeah then our brains are every bit as bound by those laws as a clock and so you're right that we actually don't need the Labette experiment right you can prove it just by the conceptual point but as long as you believe that the brain processing is what's creating your experience you kind of that you have to kind of have that yeah as your base understanding then then yes your brain processing is is based on its environment and genes and your history and every interaction that's ever had I think the upshot of Westworld is that it's not just the robots that are robots mm-hmm it's it's everyone yeah well no in some sense I sure although that's a very dark version of it I mean yeah I mean it's funny because it I think you're right that ultimately then it's it's a very close description to the one I would give of the situation where actually in I see that reality as actually being a source of awe and Wonder and I always hesitate to use the word spirituality but there's I think there's actually something it in the end it actually gives me some peace of mind and I feel like for me it's a source of well-being and not just because it's a source of awe but it actually I think gives us a sense of a deeper truth of our connection to the rest of the universe which i think is something that is part of spirituality I think further than another word it's worse than consciousness people use this to you know to mean anything they want it to mean but I should say when I when I use the word I'm speaking about a a stance of staring into the unknown while seeking truth and seeking a source of well-being within truth in some some kind of connection and relationship to the universe at large yeah so let's talk about evolution okay we are evolved creatures and we all of the parts of us are evolved for something right my hand is for grasping we have these opposable thumbs they were useful to our ancestors the ones that had them had an advantage over the ones who didn't etc etc most people know the basics mm-hmm every part of us was built by evolution even the parts that we don't think have functions like the appendix once had a function what is consciousness for right in the context of evolution right so this is one of the the avenues I take again to to challenge our intuitions a bit and this is something I was thinking about more recently just in the last few days actually I was taking notes on the plane I'm glad you brought it up too so the this is one one thing in support of these this this umbrella term of Pan psychism if we can't find what conscious what function consciousness serves then it's it's we cannot assume it's something that has evolved um so we can kind of talk walk down that path if it's something that's a fundamental feature of the universe that there is consciousness present in all matter everywhere in the universe then the brain processing that exists our experience of it is is simply what it's like to be this brain processing and there would be an experience associated with all matter in every configuration whether it's doing information processing or not but there'd be some level however minimal and the most minimal systems it's some that's just a fundamental feature of matter and therefore it's not something that evolved it's something that is just present in every structure the thing that's interesting is so this really goes against my intuition and I always assumed that I think like like everyone that somehow it intuitively makes sense that because it feels we feel so strongly the consciousness is behind certain behaviors and behind behind behaviors that have evolved right so we think you know I need to feel scared to run from the lion that there there's part of the processing that gets me to stay safe is the experience of feeling the fear and I think they're good reasons reasons to question whether the feeling of it actually matters because we could easily program a robot to you know react in certain situations where it could be caused harm and we wouldn't expect it to need to feel anything to just run that program in that circumstance and so if it happened to feel like something that's kind of just something that that comes along for the ride and this is what one of the chapter titles in my book is along for the ride which is at this point largely how I how I see consciousness but what though this thing that I've been thinking about recently is let's say we go with that intuition that consciousness somehow is useful and somehow makes our behavior that more suited for survival right this this this awareness of the behavior helps us survive I was thinking where where would we place that moment that that change happen I mean separate from the fact that you you kind of encounter the hard problem and wonder how an awareness how consciousness ever comes into a physical system but let's say that you know that just magically happened at some point so that the way evolution works is there there's a gene mutation that just happens and it's either useful or not and most of them are not and the routine mutations happening all the time and the ones that are incredibly success will get passed on and then you know more and more creatures take it on so if there's a gene mutation you have to imagine there's some creature or cell you know you have to find where where you imagine this comes in right if it comes in at the level of a cell already we're talking about something very counterintuitive and something science does not support that cells individual cells are conscious but so you either have to go very deep to you know a moment like that and in a cell or you go to a simple creature like a worm or wherever you place it we're talking about a system that exists already and then there's a mutation that happens that may that brings a level of experience to that system so there's some point in time and I thought an evolutionary biologist and I would love to you know to talk to one about about this now and now I've gotten very curious just about the details how this would work and so I may be missing something but it seems that at some point you have two systems that are almost identical or very similar one there's no experience there's nothing it's like to be that system and was one that has some level of awareness even if it's very very minimal even if you know it's experience of heat or light as you said you need something very minimal and so we're still wherever we place that we're still at a point where consciousness is not necessary before that behavior for that system because it already existed we just suddenly I mean if you're just adding consciousness it's just an it's just an awareness an experience of being that system and so I think it poses two problems for us one is it seems that that would have happened much earlier than we assumed consciousness Balt right most people think consciousness of most scientists even think consciousness evolved I mean you get debate on whether it you know it's at the level of insects if you you know go to mammals if you have to if you know fish or not you know it depends on where you put it but then suddenly it seems very strange that we're talking about some fish didn't have consciousness but you know there's this mutation any conclusion you come to is extremely strange right even the the non-pants psychist ones yes so you talk in the book about this mystery yeah you talk about the ways in which trees communicate underground these were facts that I didn't really know but it really just had the character of human communication and slow motion and not even in that slow motion right in terms of you know trees alerting their children trees to potential threats you know like in real time through the underground networks yeah I don't know all the details but like all consciousness if it has an evolutionary rationale if it if it helps us survive and reproduce in the same way that our eyes or our brains do mm-hmm would seem equally useful to a tree I mean it yeah if it's useful it would be useful kind of across the board yeah and you're right I think you're you're very right to say that it is it is a very it's very favorable for the theory of pants ike ism that it's not clear that that that consciousness would have a evolutionary purpose for us right I brought up this plant behavior in my book actually not because I think it's likely that plants are conscious although you can go down that path as well but I brought it up actually because the behavior is so complex I think it's very interesting when we're looking at human and animal and mammalian behavior that we assume requires consciousness we look at these plant behaviors which we assume are not conscious and there's so much more complex than we you know understood previously and they actually are very similar in in relevant ways to human and and an other animal behavior that it gets you to question whether those behaviors are actually evidence of consciousness so that was kind of why I was using those behaviors but yeah so so Susan Simard has done this work and there there are other people who've done work David Shama thet's has also done work on on plant behavior and the mechanisms behind plant behavior but the the work you were referring to which i think is so fascinating and I didn't know much about until I did research for this book are underground michael Raizel networks which are networks that are facilitated by fungi they're these vast elaborate in forests underground networks that that help different tree species coexist that show that they're actually interdependent on each other that they share Carbon Underground through these vast networks with different species of trees depending on what time of year it is and which species need more carbon at that time they're they're constantly kind of sharing it in this regulated way but the the thing you mentioned I think is kind of the most interesting and the most closely related to human behavior which is that the trees that dropped seedlings Susan and her work talks about she calls them the mother trees the trees that dropped the seedlings they could recognize their kin in the forest when they were you know planted amongst other trees that that were not directly related in this way and they treat their kin they send more carbon to their kin they make more room for their roots underground they send more defense signals there's this way in which they're behaving and treating their kin so similarly to the way we do when we assume we need consciousness role that we assume we need love and fear and all of these driving conscious experiences and if we assume plants are not conscious it really does get us to question whether consciousness is the thing that's making those behaviors possible right yeah so let's talk about split brain ok patients these are patients who get their corpus callosum cut they're fully or partially so they're left hemispheres no longer connected with their right atmosphere yes can you describe to me what are some of the findings in patients like that so this is mostly the go work the work of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry they they were the first to do research on split brain patients so yes there were these patients for who underwent these surgeries for epilepsy and then Mike Gazzaniga and and Roger Sperry did research on them after the fact see you know what what was different about their behavior of anything after after this surgery and it was interesting that for the most part there wasn't much of a change noticed at all in the patients friends and family and the doctors you know in in day-to-day life and interactions there was very little to notice they seemed very normal and acting very much the way they had prior to the surgery but when they started studying them they noticed that because the communication wasn't being shared they could actually ask questions of the right hemisphere or left hemisphere separately there were a variety of ways this was done but in our visual field for example the the right visual field gets projected to the left hemisphere and vice versa and that information gets shared via the course of corpus callosum and so when that is severed the information doesn't get shared so they were able to ask split brain patients different questions through writing by projecting to one hemisphere or the other also the hand each hand is controlled by the opposite hemisphere and language for the most part is controlled by the left hemisphere and they could decipher this ahead of time there every once in a while there's a patient that has a communication Language Center in the right hemisphere but for the most part it's in the left so they could ask a patient a question they would give an answer and they're spoken answer would be the answer from the left hemisphere because that's the speaking hemisphere but if they would ask have the question answered by the right hemisphere so that often this is done by the left hand either through writing through grabbing an object through pointing pointing to an answer on a screen they would get a very different answer to question that entail are our conscious experience so I don't know if you want me to give an example it's yeah that's hard to describe yeah please give an example and if you have show notes I can I can actually give some visuals to tender with this but the example I give in the book they flash the word he to sorry on the right the right visual field which goes no I'm sorry it's the other way around they flash the word key the left visual field which goes to your right host for the right hemisphere so the right hemisphere is aware that it has seen the word key but a cancel left right on the left hemisphere has seen nothing and that that information has not been shared so when they ask the subject what word did you just see they will say I didn't see anything I didn't see word and then when they say will you reach out with your right hand sorry left hand and grab the object of the word you just saw in there a variety of objects they are coin a key a rubber band different things they'll immediately go out and grab the key with their left hand which is being controlled by the right hemisphere so there's obviously a way in which their consciousness has actually been split it's almost like there are now two people it's more like conjoined twins yeah then like a single person I mean the way I picture this is almost like the human body is a Pacific Rim styled robot mm-hm and there are two people in the robot each controlling different parts only one of them can make the robot speak and they can't talk to each other these two people so you show but only one of them can see out of half the visual field so if you show person one key they'll want to tell person two we're seeing a key right now but they can't talk and so but that is a pretty freaky picture of what's happening there because yes it does suggest that in some deep sense there are two consciousnesses that are separate yeah that just happened to be inhabiting the same body yes and there are you described in the book as well they're experiments where are there situations in which a split brain patient is actually working at cross-purposes with him or herself yes what a mess I'm aspheric rivalry yeah sorry that's a great that's a great way to put it good turn port but you have you know like one hand buttoning up a shirt and the other hand unbuttoning a shirt they have different desires they have different they have different wills and intentions and yeah kind different conscious experiences that raises the question you know so if you got your corpus callosum cut right now who would I be talking to who do you become in that situation so I actually think that question doesn't really make sense yeah but of course it's a fascinating question so in my thinking as I've gone down more of a path of consciousness being something that is probably more pervasive than we have assumed but even separate from that knowing that the idea that we are a single unified self that's doing the experiencing knowing that that's an illusion that is a very deep and strong intuition is actually an illusion I think we it's more correct to talk about consciousness as having content and content can come and go I mean even in our normal experience content comes and goes so if I go to sleep and start dreaming you know that I can fly that's a very different experience from the one I'm having now and so the content can actually change pretty dramatically even at a normal healthy brain and I think it's similar to what would happen I mean even just being asleep and awake right we go through these very different states and so I think there is no who would you be talking to because there's no who to begin with it's there's brain processing and there's experience and there's consciousness and there whatever contents come into consciousness in that area of space-time and that collection of matter and so I'm trying to wrap my head around this though because you know I have and and I I'm sure that this is this is kind of you know the same as realizing that there is no up but then forgetting a second later I think that's perpetually happening to me when I think about split brain operations split split brain patients yeah so my my mind is telling me once the corpus callosum gets cut yeah it's almost as if you were watching one movie and now there are two movies that the screen is yes is there at the experiential level there's an experience of a seamless experience in the same way that your experience is seamless when a new sound comes in the room or when you go to sleep and wake up right it's just your experience is kind of it just the stream of experience but there's no there's no you to it right there's literally just a stream of experience so there'd be an experience associated with the right hemisphere and there'd be an experience associated with the left hemisphere and there it's not like there's one person who has to go one place or the other that that's that's the illusion right and so experience there could be this continuous experience in branching in both directions so if you were to take a split split brain patient and you asked them to do two things one is you asked them to tell you what it was like before and after mmm the experiment mmm before and after the surgery you asked them to tell you verbally so there you're talking to the left hand the left hemisphere and then you ask them to also write with their left hand a narrative what how did you know what was it like to go from before the surgery to after the surgery what do you think would happen yeah would it be the same I mean I could be wrong but I actually think this is not a possible experiment because I think communication through language even written language I don't think that can be done by the hemisphere that is that is not controlling and I know you can give options to choose from and you're not sure that the right hemisphere alone could write a narrative in that way and it's I mean I've thought about this it's possible and I actually I should find out for sure whether someone has done something like that I am pretty sure there that's not that wasn't part of the any experiment that was done but I thought about whether the right hemisphere actually has an experience of self associated with it I think it's possible that but it does that illusion of self kind of resides in the left hemisphere because of language yeah yeah well no not necessarily because of language I mean I think they're they're related but not necessarily I think you can absolutely have an experience of self without without language but yes so I so also when you spoke about the right hemisphere having an experience of wanting to give the answer but you know not being able to communicate with the left hemisphere I don't know that that's a good representation of what the experience is it I don't know I mean this is not something we know but think we can't assume that that that's the experience it could be um it could even be a more accurate representation of the processing that's going on so it's simply just an experience of coming up with the answer you know key and not having further contemplations about you know being able to control or communicate with but I don't know yeah so we all sometimes have the experience of conflicting feelings on the one hand I feel X on the other hand I feel Y hmm even to the point where I might feel one way for 10 seconds and then I feel the other way yeah like just just in the context of the split brain patient this becomes stark because one feeling is originating in a part of the brain that can't talk to the other part so there's no even attempt at integrating really you get the buttoning up and buttoning down at the same time but when we can communicate with each other in some sense it's it might still be valid to picture us as picture it as really two different desires like almost two different not two different people but kind of two different people almost two different wills two different wills that's right that's the best way to say it two different wills that are both operating at the same time and the reason you feel conflicted it's not because you're one will is deciding it's because there are two completely confident wills that know what they want that are battling yeah I think that makes sense although I think you're still imagining the wills as selves yeah I can't I can't enjoy impulses and desire to go one direction over another don't necessarily feel like a self in the way that you feel like a self that make sense yeah so it's all very hard it's very hard to think about it we can do split brain yes and we have we can't do merged brain no but we can think about merge brain in light of what we know about split brain right what do you think it would be like to merge brains with someone yeah so I give an example of this in my book and I think this is kind of endlessly interesting to contemplate I think it's similar to the examples that I've given so far in that I think there would be a seamless I I think the I the illusion we have of being separate selves gets in the way of our being able to contemplate questions like this and I think if we to the best of our ability drop that illusion again it's it's consciousness and content so it truly is an experience of more information coming into this island or sphere of consciousness right so if you just brought a new sound into the room that would be the same as being connected to someone else's brain who you know with headphones on where a sound was delivered to that person's ear and that information could be shared with my brain right so it's just suddenly that there's new content that is in this experience of consciousness that is coming from the other person's brain and so I think they're kind of be this seamless on both sides experience of more and more content yeah and do they become the same stream or is that the wrong question am I still have I still smuggling in the assumption of I mean I think they're no they're we just get to the limit of knowing how that would function as a system so I mean I think that they're all the answers are possible so it could depending on how truly integrated the systems where I mean I think if there were a way to integrate them as well as our two hemispheres are integrated I think they're likely would be an experience of self but it could be more like a sprit split brain yeah experience where the the input there's information shared but there's still separate experiences themselves yeah I think I think there's kind of a wide range of possibilities I also think it's possible that there are many of their conscious experiences happening already in my brain that are separate from this experience that I'm having what I think in the book you talk about the cerebellum I think at one point which is not the locus of consciousness as we normally conceive of it right but kind of talked about that yeah so I think part of this I was actually just gonna mention him Ian McGill McGilchrist he wrote a book called the master in his emissary which is fantastic book and he talks about the possibility that he actually I think feels strongly that the two hemispheres of the brain are are have very different personalities and that there's some sense in which the phenomenon the phenomena we see in split brain patients is actually present to some degree in in healthy brains yeah and I'm forgetting your last question but it was related to that okay that's right so yeah so there are parts of the brain so there's there's a lot of subconscious processing that happens in the brain most of it is subconscious and then some of it rises to the level of consciousness which right away is very perplexing yes why why some of it conscious but not all yeah and so I I obviously don't know the answer but I attend more to now think that these processes are not non-conscious they're not integrated into the system that I'm experiencing right now the part of me that's communicating with you this is this is a very specific system in the brain that has this experience but that there it's possible there are like overlapping experiences even within a single brain and so the systems that we assume are non conscious because they don't rise to the level of this experience could have consciousness associated with you yeah you I think you say in the book something like if it's possible to imagine a worm that let's posit is conscious yes inside of you right in principle it's no harder to imagine that your body parts right could be conscious I mean even other body parts in principle but it's easier to imagine brain parts of your brain yes working synergistically there's there's it's just that but even without an experience of self or wills right you know very very much more basic level experience just there's something it's like to be that processing there's some experience associated with it it's not that it's completely lights out on the inside that there's a totally dead you know process in terms of consciousness so not that it's like there's all these different people yeah yeah this connects and we'll end on this note but this connects to pan psychism yeah because if it is true that consciousness goes all the way down to atoms or below mm-hmm to say which is to say that it's an intrinsic property of matter yes which the more and more you think about it the more and more it would make frankly more sense than the alternative is so strange which is we have to admit that we're choosing among only strange alternative that's all that's on the menu and the question is to choose the the one that's most plausible yeah yeah and it could turn out that pant psychism is that but then that would imply that we have you know every atom in your brain in your body could itself have a very rudimentary form of consciousness yes yet what quote-unquote you feel like is something like the whole system you might be similar where of the other points of view so to speak in your own body just like you're unaware of my point of view right as distant right which is a very I don't know if that's alienating it's there's something alienating about even simple facts that we know like I always forget the ratio but you know whatever human cells - yeah you know other truth there already are others I mean that idea every time I think of it is creepy but it is it is a fact and if you're not thinking about it it doesn't really it's not relevant right but ya know it's similar to that yeah yeah well Monica Harris on that note thanks for coming on the podcast yeah thanks for having me all right [Music]

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 18,609

Keywords: consciousness, robots, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Science, elon musk, sam harris

Id: 6iByGbYPNLo

Length: 67min 49sec (4069 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020