Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains? The 2023 Holberg Debate, feat. Seth, Luhrman, & Sheldrake.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you the audience here in the University Ola in Bergen Norway as well as viewers around the world to this year's Holberg debate my name is Juran s and I am chair of the Holberg prize board the Holberg prize is one of the largest International prizes awarded to outstanding Scholars within the humanities social sciences Theology and law the prize was established by the Norwegian government in 2003 in h to the 18th century scholar and author Ludwick Holberg in addition to the academic events that are held each year in celebr ation of the Holberg priz laurate the Holberg debate is held annually in December in tribute to the intellectual curiosity and energy of Ludi Holberg the debate aims to engage prominent academics as well as non-academics in public debate on pressing issues of our time the topic of this year's debate is the scientific and philosophical question of Consciousness what is it where is it discussions of Consciousness go back thousands of years and have acquired new urgency with modern scientific and technological advances the title of this year's debate is the question does Consciousness extend beyond brains on the panel we are proud to have Professor Anil set of the University of Sussex Professor Tanya lurman of Stanford University and author and biologist r rert sheldrake we are also very pleased to have David Malone as moderator of this event David Malone is an award-winning science documentary filmmaker who has made films for BBC and channel 4 on topics relevant to this debate his most recent films have been on the promise and threat of artificial intelligence and on the origin of covid in 2012 he wrote a book on the global depth crisis and he is current writing a book on the evolution of life and Consciousness with the working title of from matter to meaning he also finds time for discussing current issues on the podcast hyperland so we are very happy to welcome you here to Berg and please David the floor is now [Applause] yours thank you Professor sered um good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this year's Hallberg debate of 2023 as professor said I um have spent a lifetime Making Science philosophy and history films for BBC Channel 4 in the UK and Universal Pictures and over the years I've made about 10 relevant 10 films relevant to this topic of Consciousness I've also over the year chairs dozens of De so I thought I'd take a moment to explain the structure of this debate there is a formula for how these debates are generally organized usually the organizers will invite one speaker to be what we might call the defender of the faith and their job is to explain to you all the received wisdoms and all of the unquestionable certainties which everyone agrees are true uh then there's the heretic and that person's job is to tell you that nobody agrees on anything and that all of the unquestionable certainties are entirely questionable and then there's often a third who is um a bit like the um Social Democrat Center party and their job is to try and agree with this side and then try to agree with that side uh and in the end no one knows what they think but they're there mainly to stop with the other two falling out um I'm very happy to tell you uh that the organizers of this debate ul sandmo and bjon bson it is entirely their fault in this stroke of what I have to describe as both bravery and Brilliance have decided to utterly ignore everything I just told you um there will be no defender of the faith on the stage neither will there will there be The Social Democrat uh there will in in fact only be Heretics three of them uh now it is true that some of them are more heretical than others uh but they have each in their own way um questioned some of the long-held assumptions of modern science sort of chipped away at the um articles of Faith one might even say the dogmas of conventional science which form the battlements of a established wisdom but our speakers this evening are not here simply to tell you that they disagree with conventional wisdom or even with each other they're here to try and some shed some light on why they disagree because all ideas have a consequence I think people accept or reject an idea based on what they think the collateral damage to the rest of their world viw will be because if you accept an idea sometimes you find that that idea then forces you to give up another idea you're really not happy about giving up and if that's the case then people say oh no that's rubbish if it's not going to do much damage they say oh that's terribly interesting Professor um and that's what we're here to do really is to talk about and explore what are the consequences what's at stake if any of the ideas our speakers put forward are true is this a a good thing to do a scientific thing to do well here's a quote written by one of our panelists and see if you can decide which of the three of them wrote this here's the quote it is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs But Central to science itself at the creative heart of science there sorry creative heart of science is a spirit of openminded inquiry ideally science is a process not a position not a belief system Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories and that is what we are going to do this evening asking questions looking at new perhaps even heretical ideas but ideas that matter which have a consequence Beyond themselves where there are things at stake if any of them turn out to be true consequences for how we understand ourselves how we understand the people we might be able to become for our place in nature and the central question as the professor said is to it revolves around this idea of Consciousness which on the one hand I'm sure you're all familiar with I to think most of you perhaps all of you are conscious but are you sure the person next to you is how do you know is your dog conscious could your computer one day be conscious how about trees heretical silly well maybe um so let me um finish by just introducing our speakers I will introduce each speaker in turn they will have approximately 15 minutes to convince you of their heresy and um our first Speaker this evening is annel Seth he is one of Britain's leading neuroscientists head of cognitive computation neuroscience at University of Sussex which is I can tell you a hot bed of heresy um uh he is the recent winner of the prestigious Faraday award and uh in his book the uh being you a new science of Consciousness he made it very clear that the human brain is not a computer made of meat annel the floor is yours thank you David good afternoon everybody thank you also to the Holberg prize Foundation to BU and Ule Professor there for for inviting me here and for putting on this this wonderful event when I first heard how it was going to be organized I hadn't heard about it before it just struck me what a wonderful thing to be part of so I'm very very happy indeed to be here and also to see the first snow of the year in Bergen beautiful love it right 15 minutes to convince you of my heresy we will let's start at the beginning I want to start 7 years ago 7 years ago I I ceased to exist I was having this small operation and my brain was filling with anesthetic and I remember these sensations of Blackness and Detachment and this falling apart and then I was back you know I was drowsy and disoriented but I was definitely there now when you wake up from a deep sleep you might be confused about the time or but there's always this basic sense of cont continuity of of sometime having passed between then and now but just out of Interest how many people in the audience have had general anesthesia and are willing to admit to it quite a lot okay for those that haven't I highly recommend it really interesting non-experience and that's because when you come around from anesthesia from general anesthesia it's very different I could have been under for 5 minutes 5 hours or even 50 years I just wasn't there under is an understatement it was total Oblivion now anesthesia is a modern kind of magic it takes people turns them to objects and then back again into people and when we come around and open our eyes our brains do much more than merely process information we are not computers made of meat our minds are filled with light and color with shade and shape we experience the world around us and being a self within that world how does this happen what makes us more than merely complex biological objects this is the challenge of understanding Consciousness which in my view is one of the most exciting and vibrant frontiers of modern science now I'm very honored to participate in this year's debate along with uh Dr sheld and professor lman and and David and we'll be discussing two questions I think one is do conscious experiences happen both within and Beyond the brain and also can science solve this hard problem the So-Cal hard problem of consciousness and in the remainder of my opening remarks I'm going to talk more about the solving the hard problem of Consciousness but I'll say a little bit about whether Consciousness extends as well let's start with a couple of definitions what is consciousness well the philosopher Thomas nle defines it this way and it's a good starting point for me he says for a conscious organism there is something it is like to be that organism it feels like something to be me it feels like something to be each one of you probably feels like something to be a bat or an ape or a kangaroo but it doesn't feel like anything to be a table or this lecturn or a blade of grass or a laptop computer probably for these things there's probably no experience going on at all at least this is a reasonable starting assumption now from the standard perspective of Western science and philosophy and there are other options as I'm sure we come to the challenge is to explain how and why this is so now the origins of this challenge go back as far as you like into history but a useful modern land Landmark is with the philosopher David Charmers and his hard problem of Consciousness he puts it like this it is widely agreed that Consciousness arises from a physical basis but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all it seems objectively unreasonable that it should and yet it does now there's an assumption here not made explicitly in this quote but taken on by many researchers in the field including me that the relevant physical basis and physical processing being referred to are about things happening in brains and perhaps in bodies too the question then becomes what is it about the combined activity of the billions of brain cells and Associated other gubbins inside my skull that gives rise to entails or is somehow identical to a conscious experience and this question has been the rallying cry in Consciousness science for at least the last 30 years or so and I say the last 30 years or so because it wasn't always this way despite Consciousness being a central question when neuroscience and psychology first emerged as coherent academic disciplines for a good part of the last century the topic was pushed to or beyond the fringes it was heretical to want to study it at all the suspicion dominated that Consciousness being intrinsically subjective and private as well as mysterious in some way could not be usefully studied with the tools of science at all the psychologist Stuart southernland wrote in the international dictionary of psychology in 1989 just before I started my undergraduate degree that Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon it is impossible to specify what it is what it does or how it evolved nothing worth reading has been written on it it it's a pretty pessimistic Outlook fortunately things have changed and I feel lucky these days to have been part of a Renaissance in the scientific study of Consciousness and it's not just science it brings together scientists of all Stripes mathematicians psychologists neuroscientists psychiatrists computer scientists physicists with philosophers also with anthropologists and other social scientists all trying to tackle this fundamental problem and while no one has yet cracked it exciting progress has been made and continues to be made now the initial strategy in studying Consciousness and still a very popular approach is to look for the so-called neural corelates of Consciousness the Fingerprints of Consciousness in the brain or Footprints these are the parts of the brain or aspects of brain activity that change when Consciousness changes and thanks to the fancy new tools of brain Imaging and other things we have available these days we can look into the brain to find these neural corelates these can be Global changes in Consciousness what happens when we lose it like in general anesthesia or we can ask what changes in the brain when our conscious experience itself changes there are things like binocular rivalry where we show two images one to each eye and our conscious perception will flip from one to the other now this is all great stuff and a lot has been learned but there are fundamental limitations to this established strategy significantly correlations are not explanations and and they don't really tell us much about cause either and this is why we need theories among other things theories can help us move from correlations to explanations and by doing so we can begin to chip away at David charma's hard problem about how and why Consciousness happens and there are plenty of theories which is one reason why now is a particularly exciting time in the field a couple of years ago the philosopher Tim Bane and I wrote a review for for nature reviews neuroscience on neuroscientific brain-based theories of Consciousness and we came up with 22 some of them all of them very different from each other some of them more mature and more backed by evidence uh than others and what's happening now in general in the field is we're getting to the stage of pitting these theories against each other to see which stand up and which fall down now my own preferred Theory which I've been developing in various ways for well over a decade is that the brain is a kind of prediction machine and that what we experience both the world around us and being a self within it are forms of controlled hallucination brain-based best gases that are tied to their causes in the world or in the body not So Much by accuracy but by criteria of how useful they are in the business of staying alive now the idea of the brain is a prediction machine constantly estimating what's going on and calibrating its best guesses against sensory signals this is not a new idea all and it's been developed in different ways by by different people and my own take is to treat it as a way of going Beyond correlations between brain activity and Consciousness and instead explaining why conscious experiences are the way they are and not some other way why an experience of color is different from an experience of emotion or of Free Will and one implication of this is that what we perceive is not simply a readout of the sensory information that comes in through our eyes and our ears it is always and everywhere an active creative act in which the brain is continuously making predictions about the way the world is and the way the body is and updating these predictions using sensory information and in my take on this that is what we experience we experience the predictions not a readout of the sensory information our experiences of the world and the self come from the inside out just as much if not more than from the outside in and this means that we inhabit surprisingly different inner world as I'm sure Tanya lman will explain next even for the same shared objective reality but what this does not mean at least in my view is that Consciousness itself extends Beyond brains or that our vision for example is a force emitted from the eyes another implication is perhaps even more controversial which is that unlike the majority of my colleagues and this is where my heresy takes flight I think that Consciousness is intimately connected to our nature as living creatures so that life may be a necessary condition for Consciousness and this pushes back on the tired old metaphor of the brain as a computer really highlights how different we are from the large language models and other artifacts of AI that increasingly dominate our societies and our lives and I mentioned this in part to underline that even within the constraints of what's often called mainstream neuroscience there is a lot of variety and controversy some other prominent theories um such as there's a a neuroscientist called julot Toni who has a theory called the integrated information Theory Of Consciousness this makes other incredibly counterintuitive predictions such as that Vivid conscious experiences might happen with almost no neural activity at all so lots of controversy will any of these theories solve the hard problem well from where we are now I think it's too early to say but I'm optimistic and there's a lesson here from how our understanding of Life developed it wasn't so long ago maybe 150 years that the challenge of understanding life seemed to be be beyond the reach of science perhaps as mysterious as the challenge of Consciousness seems to us today and according to the dominant at the time philosophy of vitalism there had to be something almost Supernatural a spark of life and Elon vital to explain the difference between the living and the non-living but things didn't turn out that way instead of treating life as one big scary mystery biologists of the day instead started explaining the properties of living systems metabolism homeostasis reproduction in terms of the underlying physics and chemistry and bit by bit our conception of what life is changed and the need to appeal to some special Source began to fade away the hard problem of Life wasn't solved it was dissolved and I think the same May well happen with Consciousness by chipping away at its various properties how conscious we are what we're conscious of the nature of the self the nature of valtion the hard problem of Consciousness too is already seeming less mysterious and less monolithic than once it did and perhaps one day perhaps not so far away it too might vanish in a puff of metaphysical smoke and of course I might be wrong both in my own Theory and in this optimistic view of the future of Consciousness science but that's okay the beauty of science is the ability to be productively wrong so that our Collective understanding always ratchets upwards and even if we don't fully understand the problem of Consciousness what we're learning along the way is already already radically changing how we think about the nature of how we experience the world perception the self and other things and this is having major implications in society something I hope we'll talk about later in ethics in medicine in animal welfare in law in how we deal with AI and in much more besides now the Neuroscience of Consciousness is at a very exciting place now just as astronomy face the challenge of the very far away and quantum physics the challenge of the very small Neuroscience faces the unique challenge of the very complex and we are just now developing the theoretical and experimental tools to get to grips with this Challenge and if it still seems ult to understand or imagine how any kind of physical stuff could give rise to any kind of experience well this could well be because our imaginations are just not yet up to the job of envisaging what such a complex system as an embodied brain might be capable of but when they're empowered with the tools of science and philosophy bootstrapped from the insights of those colleagues now and before us our imaginations can stretch further and just like the apparent Mystery of Life what once seemed inexplicable may not always remain so now I'll finish by very briefly addressing this specific question of whether Consciousness extends beyond the brain the first thing to say is that I'm entirely comfortable with the idea that our minds extend beyond our brains a good chunk of my memory is in this phone probably a lot else too and indeed what part of what it is to be myself is in my perception of how others perceive me and so depends although indirectly on things outside my own brain David Chalmer himself who according the hard problem term together with the philosopher Andy Clark have written convincingly in my mind about the idea of the extended mind but the Mind although the mind can broaden to Encompass many things the mind is not the same thing as conscious experience itself now when I look around me the contents of my Consciousness let's say colors they seem to be out there in the world does this mean that my Consciousness itself is out there in the world too well I don't think so the fact that the contents of my Consciousness sometimes seem to be out there does not mean they actually are now this is a useful exampler is something like an out of Body Experience where people experience being in a position different from their own bodies this is clearly a real experience for many people over history and even now but it does not mean that Consciousness itself has left the body and gone flying around there are often many different more compelling more um empirically useful explanations for these kinds of experiences how things seem is important to pay attention to but it's not always a good guide to how things are now in my view in a line of thinking that goes all the way back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume experiencing something out there in the world is part and parcel of the brain predictions about the the causes of the sensory signals that it gets and the interesting question at least for me is what is going on in the brain that underlies this experential projection of properties like color shape and so on out there into the world and things like emotion in here into the bodies now they claim that Consciousness itself can extend beyond the brain and the body perhaps even to act at a distance as in the case of uh this phenomenon the sense of being stared at which I'm sure Rupert chel will tell us about shortly too this in a in sense is a very ordinary claim it's it's very likely that we've all felt that way at some time or another but scientifically it's an extraordinary claim and it's an extraordinary claim because there are currently no plausible mechanisms by which it might actually happen and extraordinary claims are in need of extraordinary evidence and if we had that evidence that would be very interesting because it would force us not only to have a a different picture of Consciousness but to radically rethink explanations that would be very discontinuous with pretty much the whole of science as we know it so in a situation like this the evidence that we need to me it's sort of the sort of evidence it's much like when physicists propos the existence of a new fundamental particle in a particle accelerator this is a very high bar which is admittedly rarely if ever met in psychology now I don't deny at all that people may well have the experiences that lead them to think that Consciousness is extended whether it's an outof body experience or a sense of being stared at or more generally what what Tanya lurman will probably talk about in terms of the paracity of the mind but how things seem is not a good guide to how things are and in my view the most interesting and empirically justifiable explanations for these experiences likely always lie within the brain itself the embodied brain it's a brain that interacts richly with the body and with the world but not through any spatially extended extra cranial Consciousness I'll leave my last words for the poet Emily Dickinson who in a beautiful 1862 poem wrote the brain is wider than the sky for put them side by side the one the other will contain with ease and you besides thank [Applause] you thank you Anil um our second speaker this evening is Tanya lurman she is the Albert Ray Lang professor of anthropology at Stanford University she teaches both anthropology and psychology and is in my opinion and the opinion of many others one of the most original and challenging anthropologists currently working in her books when God talks back and how God becomes real Tanya has laid down a formidable and nuanced challenge to those who would dismiss so many of the ancient and mysterious aspects of the human mind Tanya the floor is yours [Applause] okay good afternoon I think that Bergen is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen you are all very very lucky so I'm here because as an anthropologist I've seen in my work that humans can come to to experience their own thoughts as not their own and as not inside them so a person person can have a picture in their mind and just feel that is not their own image a person can hear a voice when they're alone and that voice there's a thought likee quality but it feels like it's out there and a person feels as if they can hear it with their ears a a person can feel a sense of presence that no one else can see these experiences matter a voice lies at the heart of many religions Abraham knew that Yahweh existed because Yahweh called out to him Muhammad knew the Quran was divine because the words came to him from outside the disciples knew that Jesus was somehow alive after his death because they saw him and then they heard him speak these experiences matter to people because they're taken as firsters evidence that spirit is there and responds Augustine torn against himself struggled to become a Christian he was unable to convert until he heard God speak jonov Arc heard God command her and that gave her such confidence that she went to the king of France and demanded that he give her an army and he she got the Army and she won a battle and that battle may have saved Kingdom Martin Luther King Jr on the it was in despair in the at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus boycotts people had threatened his family he thought of stopping but when he sat on at his kitchen table and prayed he heard God say that he would be with him and Martin Luther King Jr went forward these experiences happened to ordinary people over the course of my career I've worked with middleclass people on London Lon who understood themselves to follow the ancient gods of pre-christian Europe I worked with zoroastrians in Mumbai and with newly Orthodox Jews and black and black Catholics in Southern California I've spent months in an Anglo Cuban Spirit possession group called santoria and years in churches with charismatic Evangelical Christians both in the United States and abroad I've seen that many people have some some kind of moment which they take to be communication from Spirit and that many people have moments in which that that Spirit felt real to them with their senses I've also seen that in all those different phases people will say that some people are more likely to have these experiences than others that if you pray or do rituals you're more likely to have these experiences and I observed that in some social worlds people had more of these experiences than others to understand this I think we need to get back to an Neil's starting point which is phenomenology and what it is like to feel aware and I want to make two simple observations about what it feels like to have thoughts the first is that humans are aware of their awareness in some way to some extent they Mark that awareness as distinctive you could call it the difference between interiority and physicality or inner or outer or we would say Mind and Body in my own work on a project led by a young psychologist called Cara Weissman we were able to show that in five different countries not only adults but children distinguish between things of the mind and things of the body at the same time people map that distinction in different ways in vanatu people imagined anger as more part of the body and love is more like thinking as more part of the mind they distinguish mind mind and body differently than people in the United States the second observation I want to make is that we have conflicting intuitions about the relationship between the mental and the physical I think all of us have some kind of default model about how thoughts work that thoughts are they're located in the body they're private nobody else can can can read them they're our thoughts we created them and they stay within us they affect us the thinker but they don't slip out on their on their own to do stuff in the world but it's also true that thoughts feel like power at least some thoughts even to Modern Western secular folks when we curse at somebody who doesn't who's not present it feels like an action even if we think of ourselves as letting off steam dreams ordinary dreams sometimes they feel really powerful and they feel as if they have contain information that somehow comes from outside we talk about a poem coming to a poet as if the poet has to kind of capture the poem and write it down before the poem goes away when somebody is in pain even modern Western secular folks will say that they hold them in their thoughts as if that does something so even secular folks have intuitions that thoughts cross the Mind bound mind World boundary even if they don't really believe it different cultural worlds elaborate these conflicting intuitions in different ways sorcery prophecy Clairvoyance prayer the soul these are these are all culturally specific ideas that are really elaborations of an intuition that that can Le that can allow people to believe the thoughts can leave the mind and act on their own accord in the world I want to suggest that all humans imagine a boundary between thoughts and the world but that some humans imagine it the boundary more like a fishnet sometimes the big holes sometimes with little holes but with holes so that thoughts like fishes can kind of cross through and then some social worlds like our our own tend to imagine that as a concrete wall my work shows that the more a person imagines the Mind World boundary to be porous permeable the more they are likely to hear see or feel the presence of a God or a spirit in a recent publication in of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences we reported on a study across a large study across five different cultures the United States Ghana Thailand China and Vanuatu our team did these long open-ended interviews with people of Faith some of them Christian some of them not asking about how they imagined their mind and asking how they experienced God we sent research assistance to stand on lines like in front of a government agency and had people had the the research assistance act ask short versions of those questions we gave a bunch of surveys to undergraduates and had them fill them out no matter how we asked the question or where we did the work the more somebody affirmed that the boundary between the mind and world was porous the more more they said that thought was kind of like WiFi that could pass into the world and act on its own the more that person would say that he or she had heard a voice or seen a vision of a God or a spirit felt a spiritual presence or had another a range of other intense unusual experiences I found two other factors the second factor is absorption the more somebody enjoys being caught up in their inner world the more they Delight in their Daydreams the more they can watch a play and for a moment forget that it's only a play and feel as if as as as if it's really taking place the more that person is likely to say they've heard they've heard Spirit speak they've seen something they've felt a spiritual presence there's something about a person's attitude to their own thoughts that allows them to have the sense that God or spirit is really there the third pra the third factor is practice or what as a Shand you might think of his prayer I saw this particularly clearly among Evangelical Christians who sought an intimate back and forth relationship with their God many people would arrive at these churches and they would feel that God didn't talk to them God wouldn't talk to them he might talk to somebody else but not them they had to learn from the church that the that their mind wasn't completely private that some of the thoughts and images they took to be their own were really God talking to them and they learned that they should be on the Outlook or the lookout for thoughts that seemed more spontaneous or thoughts that seemed louder than other thoughts that seemed to be the kinds of things that God would say they looked for thoughts that would give them an answer to something that puzzled them and maybe give them a a sense of Peace one man told me he had he had to move and he was he was standing in church and the name of a new branch of the church a new church planting kind of came to him and it gave him a sense of peace and he decided that this this wasn't his own thought these were God's words to him and so he picked up and moved across town to be closer to that new church people would look for those kinds of thoughts and images and as they looked certain thoughts would feel as if they stood out a little bit more that they captured your attention a little bit more they would look though for those thoughts particularly when they prayed in a church like this when as in many churches people shut their eyes and they talk to God in a way that uses their imaginations and focuses on their inner imagery so people have told me that they've prayed to God while they've been sitting in Jesus's lap that they as as they pray they they they want to be standing in the throne room so they can feel the heat of God's power on their cheeks they talk about sitting on a park bench and feeling God's arm across their shoulders or going for a walk with God they also talk about talking to God as if he were there even if they don't yet feel him his presence after after several months of doing this kind of prayer the newcomers to a church like this would say to me things like I recognize God's voice the way I recognize my mom's voice on the phone inside their heads in the flow of their awareness they would hear God speaking and every so often they would say that they could hear God speak in a way they could hear with their ears you can find these techniques in many spiritual traditions in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Lola and cabala and Shamanism in tibetan deity yoga but you don't need to believe in Gods and Spirits to make the techniques work in at the corner in a corner of the internet a new form of practice has emerged called tulpamancy the tulpa T L PA a is the name for the invisible friend that the human wants to create and the tancer is the name for the human who wants to create the friend a lot of humans do this one of the internet sites has 30,000 usernames when people come to these sites they have no metaphysical presuppositions and they they don't think that tulpamancy has anything to do with God or anything to do with this Supernatural they think that tulpamancy is a cool psychological technique techque I and my postdoctoral fellow Michael lifshitz have interviewed about 25 tancs at this point we fly them out to California and they arrive they arrive at my front door we have a 4-Hour lunch with a digital recorder running these guys use explicitly use two techniques to create their tulpas first they do mental imagery cultivation so they focused in on their tulpas their ear the nose as vividly as they can using their inner senses if their tulpa is an animal they stroke the fur and try to feel what that feels like they might listen in their mind for the sound of their tpa's voice the second thing they do is they just talk to the TPA as if the TPA was there even if they don't believe the TPA is present and just like the evangelicals over time they develop a distinct sense that an invisible being is present and that the being responds they focus on the tulpa with their mind's inner senses they behave as if the tulpa is there and it feels to them as if their tulpa emerges out of their own awareness and feels more and more outside of them until they also have the sense that the tulpa has a mind of its own and talks back to them in ways that they cannot predict each person we interviewed said that their tulpa was sensient and sometimes they said the tulpa spoke in a way that they could hear with their ears and sometimes the Tula would push them in a way that they could feel on their body so what's happening here there are many specific stories many specific mechanisms many unanswered questions but some things are clear first of all this story is not about Madness that assertion requires more time than I have to defend it but in brief the voices of spirit are not like the voices of Madness the voices of Madness are frequent there are many many words and many of those words are mean and harsh the SP voices of spirit tend to be short brief and positive they feel different they feel richer and less alien than the voices of Madness and the fact the training and practice seem to bring them on suggest that there's something much more basic here about the the relationship that humans have with their own thoughts it suggests that it's possible to learn to experience some thoughts as not me and not inside and if humans do so with the intent of experiencing an invisible other humans can come to experience that invisible other as real and responsive I'm not against the view that there may be something nonhuman involved in this process or that perhaps the practice creates something that is beyond the human but what I can see clearly is that we can have a relationship with our own minds and we can use that relationship to make it feel as if an invisible other is there and I just want to pause to say what a remarkable thing this is the the most moving thing I saw in Evangelical churches was that the God who spoke back felt like a social relationship for these people religion is complicated it is full of politics it's not always a good thing for a society but for for these for the people that I spent time with their God made them feel loved and protected I'm sure that that social relationship is one of the important reasons behind the remarkable finding that religious observance is phys good for the physical body the tulpa mancers said to a person that having a tulpa made them feel less alone the capacity to experience thought as not me and not inside is part of the amazing human capacity to heal ourselves from within thank you very [Applause] much well you're in deep Waters now and they're about to get deeper um our final speaker today is Rupert sheldrick um he studied biochemistry at Cambridge University where he was later director of studies in cell biology and biochemistry at CLA College he also studied the history and philosophy of science at har Harvard so he's more versed in philosophy than most of the scientists I've ever spoken to um in his book a new science of life he proposed a theory of what he called morphic resonance which I think it's fair to say set him almost completely at odds with all of conventional biology so much so that he's the only person I think to have ever had his Ted Talk censored banned and I think reinstated after a vast outcry um and in 2012 he published um his well what is my favorite of his books the science delusion which pricked many of the lon held conceits of what he called the scientific priesthood Rupert the stage is [Applause] yours thank you I'm very grateful and happy to be here in Bergen I've had a wonderful time I've been very well looked after and the organizers have done a fantastic job and this debate is something that's not happened before as far as I know and I'm very glad it is happening well Tanya's talk has taken us into an enormously wide territory and I'm not going to explore it in my talk um I hope we'll explore it further in our subsequent discussion and uh anel's talk has um opened up uh ways of thinking about the mind which I think are very helpful I much enjoyed reading his book being you and I think his idea two of his key ideas that I really find helpful first the idea of controlled hallucination as the basis of perception um this is as he said not a totally original idea it's he it's a very good way of describing it but in traditional Indian philosophy there's always been the idea that we don't see what's really there we experience Maya a kind of veil of magical veil of Illusion which is uh is a kind of controlled hallucination um and Indians are very keen on the metaphor you're walking along a path at night uh in the dusk you see a snake you frightened you you your whole body reacts uh and then you realize it's just a piece of old rope and so it's really that it's not exactly the what's coming into the eye it's the way you interpret it anticipate it and how you project uh these images the great Greek geometer euklid around 300 BC uh pointed out the vision is an active process um if you're looking for a pin and and and suddenly you see the pin um what your experience changes because you've now identified where it is it's an active seeking and now it looks different once you've seen and recognized the pin so I think controlled Hallucination is a good way of putting it um and he also likes to talk about what he calls the real problem of Consciousness which is doing research on things which can actually uh increase our understanding so that it's easier um or should become easier to solve the hard problem of Consciousness and that I completely agree with um where I disagree is that I think that the idea that it's all in the brain is an unnecessary limitation the a lot of these materialists thinking about the brain and and Anil tells us he's a materialist in his book um materialist thinking about the brain is extraordinarily local it localizes all these things actually inside the head but within the Sciences since the 19 century we now have a much broader view of matter and the way that nature is organized and this is broadened through the concept of fields first introduced into science by Michael Faraday uh in relation to electric and magnetic fields then through Einstein's general theory of relativity taken to include the gravitational field um and there are many fields in in science now fields are defined as regions of influence they're usually invisible the gravitational field of the earth is in the Earth but ex extends far beyond it the reason we're not floating in the air at the moment is because it's holding us down to the ground it's invisible this room is full of it um but it's we can't see it it holds the moon in its orbit it stretches far beyond the Earth the gravitational field of the Moon affects the tides on the earth so these are invisible Fields with enormous effects at a distance even though you can't see them gravitational uh electrical and magnetic fields also stretch out Beyond physical objects a magnetic field stretches out far beyond the magnet um you can reveal its lines of force through sprinkling iron filings around it but the field itself is invisible and the electromagnetic fields of your mobile telephone uh within the mobile telephone but stretch invisibly Beyond it this room is full of radio Transmissions from mobile phones from radio and television programs um that the the world is full of invisible Fields this is a revelation of 19th and 20th Century science which I don't think has been taken on board by people thinking about materialist uh theories of the brain and what I'd like to suggest is that our um fields of our mind stretch out far beyond our bodies uh they stretch out invisibly uh and our Consciousness is related to and based on these fields that if we're going to solve the heart problem taking into account fields of the Mind may be a very important ingredient as well as studying processes within the brain the easiest way to see uh what I'm talking about is in indeed through vision what's going on when you see something um well everybody knows that light comes into the eyes ever since Johan Kepler in 16004 worked out that there were inverted images on the retina we know that the lens focuses the light in each eye you have a small inverted image on your retina changes happen in the cone cells and the rod cells impulses travel up the optic nerve changes happen in various regions of the brain all this has been mapped and uh scanned in Greater detail than ever before but the mysterious part is then what happens next how do you create images three-dimensional full color images which anal calls controlled hallucinations um how do you control how does the brain create those they're all supposed to be inside your head um representations of the outer world so I can see you sitting there you can see me here but all of you are supposed to be inside my head uh as lots of faces and and the whole of this room is meant to be and inside your head is supposed to be a little ret um somewhere inside your brain that's not what we actually experience what we actually experience is that our images are out there your image of me I'm imagining is where I'm actually standing right now and my image of you is where you are so this one-way theory of vision which we've all grown up with and which comes from Kepler um the intromission theory of vision sending in intro Mission um is taken to be the standard scientific view but there's a another and older theory of vision the extramission theory that says not only does light come in but the images we see are projected out so my images of you are where they seem to be they're in my mind they're in my consciousness but they're not inside my head they're where you're sitting now this idea is familiar it was familiar to the ancient Greeks um it's familiar to people all over the world the developmental psychologist Jean P showed that young European children um in his book the child's conception of the world um think that they're uh projecting out images that they take it for granted so this is in fact a very deep-seated way of thinking about vision and uclid the great geometer used it to explain in the first really clear way how mirrors work what happens when you look at something in a mirror is the light is reflected from the mirror the angle of incidence the angle of reflection the same but what happens then is you project out the images uh which go straight through the mirror being virtual uh mental projections and you see virtual images behind the mirror and ucl's theory is still there in school textbooks to explain mirrors all of you no doubt have seen these diagrams they involve little dotted lines behind the mirror that go to What's called a virtual image behind the mirror a projection of the Mind behind the mirror and so this extra mission of sending out theory of vision is actually taught to all school children even though within most of science it's regarded as a total heresy um intromission is the only permissible theory in biology and psychology whereas in Optics which comes under physics extramission is the standard Theory but no wonder it's confusing people are taught two completely different theories of vision now um the at Ohio State University Gerald Wier who's a professor of Psychology was shocked to find that most adults and children he interviewed believed in visual extramission something going out of the eyes even his own psychology undergraduates believed it so he recall this a fundamental misunderstanding of visual perception and he decided to re-educate them and he and his colleagues told them forcefully over and over again nothing goes out of the eyes when you look at something and after repeated drilling with this into the students when they were tested immediately after this denial denial of extramission uh teach ing they gave the correct answers but when they tested them 3 to 5 months later almost all of them had reverted to their previous views they were dismayed at this failure of scientific education much more recently in fact just in the last few years Avid gutam uh at working first at Princeton University Now The kolinska Institute in Stockholm has shown that uh by some very ingenious experiments that people uh attribute a gentle Force to the Gaze as it goes out of the eyes and they've even shown using fmri that regions of the brain um involved in tracking movement uh are activated and as he puts it the results this is a quote strongly suggests that when people view a face looking at an object the brain treats that gaze as if a movement were present passing from the face to the object and they found that this occurred even in people who didn't believe in visual extrem it's deep hardwired in in the way we see and they tried to explain this by saying there must be an evolutionary reason for it that in uh it's important to track people's gaze in social situations and this leads to the illusion that something's going out of the eyes when you look at things it would make much better sense uh in evolutionary terms if it's not an illusion but if it's real and so is it real well you're not meant to think it's real because that goes against the Dogma that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain and the perceptions are inside the head but is it testable well I think it is um if when I look at you as a projection from my mind that touches you my mind in a sense reaches out to touch you if I look at you from behind and you don't know I'm there could you feel that I'm looking at you well as soon as you ask that question you realize that the sense of being stared at is very common it's now called scop athesia the scientific name for it scop as in microscope seeing aesthesia feeling as in synesthesia anesthesia Scopes is extremely common most people have experienced it I'm sure most people in this room have experienced it you turn around you find someone's looking at you or you stare at someone and they turn around and look back doesn't happen all the time but it's very common most people have experienced it including most children it's usually directional you turn and look straight at the person you don't just feel uneasy and search around I I have a recent paper just in the last few weeks uh on directional scar athesia showing that on the basis of 960 case studies uh the directionality is just a basic feature of this and the way people experience it um I've investigated the Natural History we've interviewed uh We've qu dealt with through questionnaires we found it typically happens uh most powerfully with strangers often with male strangers in situations that could be vaguely threatening um it's we've done interviews with more than 50 surveillance officers celebrity photographers and private detectives practically all of whom just take this for granted if you've ever trained to be a private detective and I'm guessing that most of you haven't uh you you will have learned that um when you're following someone shadowing somebody you don't stare at their back cuz if you do they'll turn around catch your eyes and your cover's blown you have to look at them a little bit otherwise you lose them but you look at their feet um so in among practical people these things are completely taken for granted in the martial arts it's taken for granted and they have methods of training people to become more sensitive because if you can feel feel when someone's approaching from behind who might attack you you'll survive better than if you didn't feel it they train this ability people get better at it and I think it should be trainable more widely my uh Spanish neuroscientist colleague Dr Alice Alex Gomez Marin and I are currently developing an app that works on mobile phones it should be released within a few weeks we'll announce it on my website um the um app you have both people have a m phone one tells one person when to stare or not to stare and the other person who's got their back to them and who's blindfolded has to guess if they're being looked at or not and they say yes or no they're right or wrong what many experiments have already been done on the sense of being stared at they've been done um in at least 37 different schools and colleges have been replicated in many parts of the world the statistical significance is astronomical um they've um at the science the Nemo um science museum in Amsterdam an experiment on the sense of being stared at was running for more than 20 years more than 20,000 people took part and the uh it was called have you got eyes in the back of your head and people had to guess whether they were being looked at or not in a randomiz sequence of Trials the results were astronomically significant statistically I mean I didn't run this EXP expent myself it was run by the Dutch Museum the results were analyzed by Dutch statisticians and it showed a massively significant effect the most sub sensitive subjects incidentally were children under the age of nine um so here we have something which is extremely well known it's well known all over the world the scientific evidence suggests it really happens um the scient ific teaching of how mirror's work assumes that there's an extem mission of influences uh it seems to be deep receit in biology it happens with animals animals can tell when they're being looked at um and when they're U and people can tell when animals are looking at them so here we have um a very very well-known phenomenon very deep-seated biologically many different species of animals have shown this ability I think it's uh evolved in the context of Predator prey relationships a prey animal that could tell when a predator was looking at it a hidden Predator was looking at it would survive better than one that didn't um and I think it has enormous implications for our understanding of the mind because if our minds are not just about what happens in brains and if our conscious experience is extended through electromagnetic fields uh which is what light is it suggests that Minds have an interface with electromagnetism we know they do in the brain a lot of brain activity that correlates with Consciousness is electromagnetic activity there seems to be an interface between electromagnetism and Consciousness and why it should be confined to the inside of the head is a purely arbitrary assumption it comes from Rene deart originally I suppose um or from the ancient Greek materialists but deart as anel pointed out made a division between extended things rise extensor matter is extended in space whereas mind uh rise conerns was not extended in space it was defined by being unextended so the idea was the mind was unextended but interacted with the brain somewhere inside the head um so I'm suggesting that actually when we let go of that assumption which has been so limiting for so long we can broaden our view of the mind and uh go further than we've gone so far in a way that will help to um get solve the real problems leading towards the hard problem finally I just want to say that I think the extended mind doesn't just extend out into the world it extends throughout the body and um when someone has say a phantom limb after an amputation I think that that Phantom limb is part of the extended mind and people feel the limb uh to be really there and I I think what they're doing is projecting that image of the limb and feeling it from within as to where the limb actually is the official view is it's all inside the brain um but I don't think it is and so I think once we Liberate the Mind from the brain more generally and Consciousness from the brain more more particularly we have a much wider context for discussing this naughty problem the hard problem of the relation between mind and brain there are many other ways minds are extended including the ways that Tanya told us about uh through these experiences of other forms of Consciousness um but those I think are subjects I hope will disc take up further in our discussion but for now I just want to end by saying that I think when we take into account the extended mind instead of just arbitrarily confining to the inside of the head we're much more likely to make progress in understanding how minds are related to our bodies and to the physical Fields through which we see and through which we have our experiences thank [Applause] [Music] you T if you want to well I I hope um you have we have gone somewhere in helping you liberate your mind from your [Laughter] brain um one of the things I thought it' be interesting to start with is this relationship of the me with all the things that our minds do am I right and I feel when I listen to all three of you that we are moving away from this notion that the little person inside does everything and is control of everything and I'm the only person in here is that true is are we moving away from that might there be other people in here that aren't just me I mean two part I think yes to the first but and maybe yes to the second depending on what you mean I I think you're absolutely right that there's a movement away from this homuncular view which he mentioned too in terms of of some views of how Neuroscience materialist Neuroscience might view the problem of vision that that there's you know it comes in from the world and it's somewhere inside my skull there's a little me sort of with a movie screen maybe plastered to the front of my forehead and a little mini me looking at that and pulling some levers and my hands move but of course inside that mini me you need another mini mini me and mini and so on and this is a you know this is the idea of the inner homunculus and I think that is is is totally rejected um within philosophy and Science and there's no need there's no need for it either in a way it's very consonant with a lot of more Eastern philosophical positions in Buddhism and so on the nature of the self is is a process it's not a thing it's it's um the way I think of it it's a collection of perceptions it's it's something the brain is doing and this through exactly the same principles uh that it uses when constructing experiences uh of of the world so but is there a little rupit inside well there R inside my do you have a little there is now yeah yeah there wasn't until um we started planning this debate but in in some sense yeah right I mean in some sense my my you the claim for me is that my brain solves this problem of vision you that is a difficult problem and it's not fully solved but in some sense it's doing it by by having a a predictive Model A generative model of the causes of the sensory signal so in some sense my brain is in en coding a generative model of of ruper sheld and Tanya lurman DAV Malone and and so yes that's that's certainly true T you wanted I think that the more time I've spent in this this domain the more I think of the Mind as full of people the more I think of the mind is full of voices and I mean psychoanalysis has known this for a long time but the more you talk to people I I used to think of myself as just having my own inner voice the more I pay attention to it the more I see little commands little commands you know what I should wear you know what I should eat what I should do and the more I realize that those are actually simil Acra not only of me but of other people that I hear my mom my dad my sisters I I my teachers um now rert and Anil and David and I I I improve on them I change them I whatever but there's a sort of people quality to our awareness that's really pretty striking that we don't really pay attention to the other thing I want to say is that I think all four of us experience our minds differently there is an enormous variation um in the way in the amount of mental imagery and the amount of representation in the sound of our inner voice in the amount of our inner voice in what our in what we remember our inner voice as doing and there's also something I think Anil will see that that there's a there's there's probably a pretty big gap between what actually gen we experience our minds as being and what we remember our minds as experiencing and I think that that and and those two probably interact well I think it's indisputable that we all experience other beings in our dreams and we all dream whether we remember them or not and when my dream I have another body which is not the same as my physical body which is lying as sleep in bed I have a dream body and we all do we have a center of Consciousness that moves around can run around talk sometimes fly um we meet other people in our dreams all the time um and so that even if we don't have them in Waking Life we certainly have them in dreams um so I I don't think there's any question that everybody has other little people in their conscious um now to to where they're located is another question um where are our dreams located I mean normal standard materialist view is they must be inside the head because everything's in the brain but most people in traditional cultures and perhaps in our own for a long time thought that people traveled in their dreams um and so that's why Edward Tyler thought that humans came up with the idea of religion that in because you dream and you feel that you are not in your body during their dream therefore there must be a soul and therefore there must be Spirit Well it I'm I think it's a perfectly persuasive line of thought personally and there you know if you think about life after death which is a way of expanding our view of Consciousness beyond what we've discussed so far maybe we shouldn't go too far but um life after death um um I think is best thought of and and at least if I think about it at all I I think of it as being like dreaming uh from which you can't wake up now aniel doesn't believe in it because on page one of his book he tells us that when you die as total Oblivion he doesn't argue why there's total abbl he takes it for granted well that's not entirely fair I mean you're right this what I argue I mean this what I say but there is a there's a reason for saying that yes well you the all right what is it well the the reason that's what I like open discussion um the re well I want to get back to dreams as well but the the reason for saying that it comes from a little bit the example of general anesthesia which is about as close to death as any of us will get without actually dying and that does seem to entail Oblivion it does seem to lead to the suggestion if there's one thing even though Consciousness is not fully understood if there's one thing that is abundantly clear is this intimate relationship between the brain and conscious experience you can you can accept that with and still have a range of positions about other things that that might influence it or where it might be in some sense uh but it's pretty clear that you change the brain your experience changes and you stop the brain and your experience stops and back to the question of self the interesting thing about the self is we're moving away from this view of it being an single Essence that is doing the perceiving making the decisions thinking the thoughts William James said the thoughts eles are the thinkers uh and it's a process and and the process at some point ceases to be a process so of course I don't know for sure but you know as you probably might all agree that science never gives you directly the truth it just gives you the evidence and the evidence we have suggests extremely strongly that when your brain stops you stop um and on Dreams by the way so I was thinking of this when you were talking because you were saying saying like Okay in some s so I'm seeing we're both looking at this crowd of beautiful people here um and where is that experience is it out there where those people are I don't think so you think so um but if I'm having a dream as I will later have a dream or a nightmare this evening about this uh this conversation um and again I have the experience of the people out there throwing fruit at me or or you I don't know yet um where where is that you know is that not in my hotel room probably not so a simpler explanation seems to be that the mechanisms generating both experiences are are within the brain and that explains why the fact they seem to be out in the world is a property a very understandable property of how the perceptual mechanisms within my my brain work if you have the alternative explanation that oh no in dreams my my soul has gone off somewhere and started traveling around I mean of course you can't 100% rule that out but it seems a very unparsimonious explanation for uh the experience of dreaming and it's similarities and dissimilarities to normal perception although it's also true that if if your s if your evidence was not based on what you see in the lab but based on what happens when you talk to people the evidence would be overwhelming that something like a soul exists there are no it's very hard to find a social world that does not believe in Gods and spirit I do not have a horse in this race but I just want to point out that I mean I was raised in a Unitarian Church in which people believe in at most one God so I find myself very comfortable in settings where people do or don't you know I I don't know what I really believe but I do want to point out that that is an idiosyncratic point of view absolutely and I I'm I think this is really really important thing to dwell on for a second that that scientists can often be too quick to dismiss what people say about their experience um and it's absolutely important to take this data into account as phenomenology you know we we need to understand what people's experiences are like and they are different and they may be different in very fundamental ways but would you expect to necessarily capture God or spirit in the lab uh if if you can make it testable I I will try but but but I mean is it is it conceal so here is one of my puzzles this is why I I'm torn between you and rert I mean because I think that you can make a coherent argument that um there is a insubstantial something an insubstantial substance that escapes characterization with the tools of science and it's that that there is something like an extended mind in your sense and I I think it's possible that you couldn't prove it this may be but it's it's it's my so the way I would see it is that let's if we're going to um appeal to something that that cannot be sort of explained within a scientific framework that should be a last resort and we should do our best to explain it otherwise and that means taking people's reports of their experiences seriously but not taking them literally and I think that is the value that can science Can it can validate people's experiences of that they have a soul and and of course this diff this differs culturally too you know in Hinduism the soul and you'll know this much better than me is associated more with breath rather than with you know rational mind and for me that's much more consonant with the basic experience of being a living creature so there's much to be learned from these descriptions of things that may not be themselves testable but you know people used to believe strongly that the the Earth was at the center of the solar system and of course that is not evidence that the Earth is in fact the center of the solar system in fact it is not absolutely and and and know one of the things that happens to me when and I think might be might be true for you when you listen to what people say it's um even if you as a as as a nonc committed person it it's hard to take everybody literally right so at some point you're making a judgment that this you're coming to some kind of judgment that that this is what you're looking at and this is not what you and because there are many different ideas about God there are many different ideas about spirits people are using words to describe their own experience the words always fail but it is but then I I find myself so I find myself focusing on The Human Side the thing that I can describe the commonalities that I can describe I'm always also though strugg struggling with or aware of there's so much there that I cannot capture see or understand and then you know you're left with with with mystery can I can I pick up on something you said you you talk about Oblivion when when anesthesia makes your brain go to sleep but that's not quite the same thing as proof that the brain therefore is is producing Consciousness because I've had the experience of a component of my radio breaking and there's Oblivion inside my radio but the radio station and the transmission have not stopped so is it I mean you you seem to be advancing the idea of the brain produces Consciousness another and as as you were saying I don't have a dog in this race um it could be that it's more like a radio it Tunes it in and that it hasn't ceased just because one of the components has stopped is that is that would that count as a scientific view or just mumbo jumbo no I well so you have to ask what the so firstly I think you're you're right in the sense that that is an alternative explanation for the Oblivion right that general anesthesia induces um I try to remain a little bit agnostic I I think the the language that the brain produces Consciousness is itself Laden with all kinds of assumptions is almost dualistic in a sense so you know that there's the brain might produce it it might be identical to it in some ways or it might entail it so I think that these are all kind of subtle distinctions important to to to not fall into any one of them without realizing what you're doing it's also possible that the brain is some kind of receiver for some Consciousness that's but that seems again a a relatively unparsimonious um explanation for why Consciousness stops when when the brain stops because you have to then sort of explain how it's receiving Consciousness where where where else it is what the mechanisms are that might lead to this this phenomenon and you have to try and make it testable um somehow so it's not it's not impossible but then what explanatory role is this playing too again if I change if I don't just turn the brain completely off as in anesthesia but just change part of it stimulate part of it damage part of it our conscious experience changes in very predictable ways now you could say it's a very complicated receiver inside here so if you damage a little bit of it you you remove the ability for it to detect Radio 4 but you can still tune into Radio 5 live but then you start you know it starts to become a very strange kind of explanation where all of a sudden your receiver is as complicated as the whole system of radio broadcasting itself and so what's you know what's the point of proposing something something else fair enough I well to take to come back to a much more sort of practical level of normal vision you see taking your idea of controlled hallucinations which you say are projected MH what I can't understand is why the hallucination being a hallucination can't go through the skull why the skull is an insulating barrier that keeps the hallucination inside the head well so actually this this just bring up something you said about about fields and I think you're absolutely right to bring up the point of fields because fields are are non-local and they they do extend and it is indeed true that neural activity generates electromagnetic fields and this is the basis of a lot of our brain Imaging methods um and these electromagnetic fields do extend beyond the skull otherwise these Imaging methods wouldn't wouldn't work but they are they are extremely extremely weak and this is why Imaging doesn't work at at a very long distance at all so em electromagnetic fields do exist but there is not a candidate other kind of field um that we that we know of in physics that could do the kind of projection you're talking about and nor do I think we need one because I think it again comes back to to our conversation the property that our experiences seem to be out there in the world does not mean they actually are but it is a it is a phenomenological observation that deserves to be taken seriously and philosophers since hum have already done that you know evolutionarily it would be very weird if our if our perceptual systems had evolved so that we experienced um things to be in our minds rather than in the world you know and this does sometimes happen in some kinds of visual hallucination so it's no mystery at all to me that mechanism within the brain can create a a perceptual experience that seems as if it is it is out there in the world and that's seeming as if is something that can change in synesthesia it's a condition where people have a mixing of the senses they're often not perceiv to be out there in the world so it's it's something that can be manipulated in a way that tracks again to different differences in the brain but you know one of the things that I I think I'm hearing is that different kinds of methods different ways of gathering data change the way in which you relate one one relates to what one takes to be true because one of the things that I find is is and I think rert this is true for you is that when I sit with people if I don't allow myself if I'm not able to be in a point of view in which I can recognize that it's possible for the universe to be far bigger than I might expect people talk differently people don't and I actually hear what they say differently I need to be in a position of like ontological neutrality in order to hear clearly what the people that I'm talking to are trying to tell me and then I'm like Dam dancing back and forth between okay what do I think is true what what I think is this person saying but there somehow has to be this openness and I think that's different from the kind of work that you do and that's just kind of interesting one of the things in your work is is is you you make the point quite lat on in your your book that how people think about their own mind changes who they are and what they are and how that mind works if does that include this the sort of the materialistic reductionistic worldview and if you think that your mind is just reducible to electrical currents do you become a different kind of human being I've been wondering about that so one so one of the things that I find so moving when people talk to me about beings that talk back is that they um I see a richness in their experience I see an aliveness in their world and I um there's a piece to me that envies some of the intense commitments of my Evangelical Christians the world somehow is you know to be an Evangelical Christian is to be committed to the view that you are happy and sometimes I listen to this and I think why are these people telling me that they're so happy but then they also kind of look pretty happy and so there's a way in which trying to manage and I see people managing their own awareness of themselves and um and I I I I think there may be some truth to what you've said well I'd like to ask you Tanya when in your book how Gods becomes real you point out that for people who are religious in various different cultures it's it's they they have to do a lot of things to have these experiences rituals singing prayers and so on um does the opposite apply for those for whom God becomes unreal because as you point out it's a historical anomaly modern Western post-christian Europe and lots of North America where a large number of people are secular and if not atheist agnostic at least um where God has become real which is very unusual in the whole history of humanity do you think that requires a conscious effort I mean for example to maintain a materialist belief usually for materialist I know involves filtering out all experiences of the sense of being stared at it's just a coincidence telepathy oh you just remember when you're right you forget when you're wrong that's a coincidence too it involves quite a lot of effort denying phenomena which occur to their in their lives and um avoiding things that would make God more real so I have a colleague Justin Barrett who makes exactly that argument he says look in the in the course of world history and Global the diversity of societies that we know of is such a tiny number of people who are truly atheists there are lots of semi- Believers over the course of I me I think people always Mark Supernatural spiritual things as different in kind emically different in kind than tables and chairs but I think that it it's relatively unusual to have people who are have very particularly materialistic beliefs so I think you can make that argument what I also see is that people who developed a very intimate relationship with an invisible being particularly when that invisible being is very very powerful and they decide they don't believe in that being any anymore that can be devastating it can be really hard so that um particularly if somebody is a is the kind of Christian in which they grew up in a church in which that church well they grew up in a kind of church in which they feel that their God has a particular view about their sexuality or about their political beliefs and they decide that those those are wrong beliefs they they disagree with their God it can feel for a while as if they're being suffocated from within it's so hard to manage that that um there people talk about the need to deconstruct their life and reconstruct their sense of who they are it's almost I mean most things in technology have like a dual use right so it's almost as if religion is a dual use social technology it can provide people with a lot of comfort and and enchantment and enrichment but of course it can it can go the other way too absolutely that's why you have to be in effect I am very impressed by when when people choose a God that works for them how amazing that can be for them I can I also see that there people can be unlucky in what creeps into their concept of God and the kinds of rules that that God expects them to follow is is there a difference between truth with the capital T which science in the west tends to feel that it owns um it owns the way to truth MH and things that are important the what I'm thinking of is if you took the view that you should only believe those things that are true and that that's what then you would have to say well don't read Shakespeare because none of it is true but would it be important to read things which aren't true but but have an importance and it sort of in other words do do we impoverish ourselves by saying we should really just concentrate on the things which we can prove to be objective ly true oh sure yeah yeah I mean I think I think that I mean there's been a long a long rolling discussion in philosophy about whether you can derive ought from is whether knowing what is the case can motivate moral principles and and this this just rumbles on and on uh as to whether it's demonstrable or not but I think in practice you know science and a scientific worldview which which isn't by the way it isn't purely reductionistic I think there just just as a slight sidebar it's important to distinguish the SC the general SCI ofic commitment that things are explicable that that thing causes basically run down you're not imputing weird stuff that suddenly appears at different levels ultimately it's all quarks and the void or whatever whatever our fundamental level might be and a more uh methodological broader perspective which is that okay if I want to explain human psychology I'm not going to do it in terms of you know individual quarks I'm going to do it at some you know at the level of psychological constructs and perhaps the adjacent levels neurons on one side other people the other and emergence in this sense I think is real and true we can talk about different levels that's fine so reductionism often gets a bit of a a bad RP I think unnecessarily so um but yes I think the what we find out about the nature of the world um in terms of well Justified beliefs terms of evidence can inform what is important and what is not important but it doesn't exhaustively describe that that realm and your example of shakesp makes the point very well of course Reading literature even though it's not objectively true is of course important and useful because it and demonstrably so because it can shape our you know our understanding of how people act and behave and and lead to a a better world in that way so there can be things which are important for us which aren't true but that's that's not the point we shouldn't get sidetracked saying well was McBeth truly the way that shakesp wrote him and and so some things as I said they were important not necessarily true but is that enough for you it because I suspect for someone to say well look yes what you're talking about are things that are important but and then in parenthesis but they're probably not true but let's not talk about that I think you think they are also true in this more objective sense is that right well I think that the extended mind the I think things like the sense of being stared at are true I think they happen most important but true not just important but true true okay and I think that other forms of the extended mind which are taboo from the point of view of materialism like telepathy which most people have experienced about 85% of people have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings on the phone and they say funny I was just thinking about you or know who it is when they call I've done a lot of search on this it's not just coincidence it's not just forgetting when you're wrong you can do controlled experiments you have four callers you pick the caller at random the experiment picks the caller at random they call the subject who's being filmed and they have to guess before they pick up the phone who's calling and they're right much more than chance it's been replicated and so on I think that's true I think the evidence is quite strong that our minds extend through attention which literally means stretching towards add tender and intention into the world and affect others at a distance that's one reason I think that it's not just a construct or a way of thinking of how things are happening inside the head not just limited to the brain um I think it's also the case that consciences I don't know if this is true or not but um the idea that Consciousness is confined to brains is an assumption as well I call it the cereb Centric view of Consciousness it only exists in the whole universe is unconscious according to the normal materialist view galaxies Stars the whole planets the whole things unconscious except for human brains on this planet where they it's emerged and possibly animal brains as well um that Consciousness is somehow confined this very tiny part of the universe we happen to be lucky enough to be part where it is the alternative view is a pans psychist view that there a levels of consciousness even in atoms and molecules and I would say not not just in atoms and molecules and animals and plants but in the sun in the galaxy in the whole Galactic system and maybe the whole Cosmos Consciousness may not be confined to brains at all and our whole discussion so far has really been revolving around the idea well not the whole discussion but a lot of it that it's all about the brain well I was relying on you to get to panm well so I think you know there's a serious debate within philosophy and science at the moment about Pan psychism part of it is motivated by the hard problem because some conservative materialists who radically conservative let's say um think well you can solve the hard problem not by lots of research on the brain as annel believes uh but just by saying well a little bit of Consciousness in an electron a little bit more in an atom bit more in a molecule and so by the time you get to the brain it's a difference of degree not of kind and and once they've got to the human brain they stop uh because they've solved the hard Problem by attributing tiny Bits Of Consciousness to atoms I myself think that if you're going to argue that kind of way why stop at the brain which is why I wrote a paper called is the sun conscious published in the Journal of Consciousness studies exploring the idea that the sun may be conscious and the interface between its activity and its Consciousness maybe its electromagnetic field um and the Sun May indeed have have actions it controls consciously the whole galaxy might be conscious and the different solar systems within it may be like cells in the body of the Galaxy of a greater Consciousness there may be many levels of consciousness in the universe and so therefore it's not all about the brain and now I don't know if that's true or not um but it seems to me very plausible and it also fits with many traditional views of nature um so I take seriously the idea of pan psychism without necessarily believing is true whereas I do think telepathy in the sense of being stared at are probably true T you wanted so what I'm struck by is that I'm not sure I I don't know where I sit on the belief that the sun is conscious but I do think that it is an ethically more effective way to be in the world to treat the entire world as alive and so one one of my one of um the arguments that's emerging out of out of my field is that if we did if humans did accept a more animistic pan psychic vision of the world as being alive we wouldn't have gotten ourselves into the mess of climate change in the first place we would have had more respect for the Earth yeah this is kind of interesting whether it's back to your point about this whether um you know this between truth and importance and it is kind of tricky if there are some things that are that we kind of know to be not true but are still nonetheless useful if we if we still believe them because we might do things a bit a bit differently um but I did want to DW because I think this is really critical and I mean I know I know we're not going to resolve this here but no but this um well I don't maybe we will but there'll be a refund later but the when it comes to these things like telepathy and and the sense of being stared at there is on the one hand I think it's absolutely right to say that people have these experiences I think it's also absolutely right to say there are probably good evolutionary reasons why people have these experiences because uh it's important certainly for creatures like us to be sensitive to to gaze direction to what what people are looking at and in your some of your examples about private detectives that's also it's it's fairly clear and I think very plausible to me that you really don't want to be staring at the back of someone not because not necessarily because the staring at the back will make them turn around but in case they do turn around you don't want to be looking at them when they do because then they will get you so it's very easy to I think understand these strategies without an appeal to the reality of this you know as something that is empirically um the case so I totally with you on these points of it it's a phenomenon worth understanding and being very deep-seated biologically and very ordinary in in in everyday life but the key question for me here is does it actually exist or is it something that you know we can account for its presence as an experience but it's not a real force and you have claimed that there's astronomically significant statistical evidence for this yes and I am not yet convinced by that and I know we don't want to necessarily spend the next hours detailing evence but it's the kind of I mean in psychology as as I think many people might know there has been something of a replication crisis anyway a lot of things do you want to explain by that so you know there's there's um well there's just a lot of results in the psychological literature that when people have tried to repeat the experiments the results aren't there anymore in fact there's a there's a pretty reliable effect that the more maybe it's the opposite of morphic resonance actually the more often you try to replicate something the the less replicable it becomes um over time and this has been very well well documented and there are various you know reasons why this might be the case because people realize more problems the more often you try to do something so things in general are not standing up which should I think give us pause and uh greater motivation to be skeptical of results in general and I include in those those from my own lab to which I now would want to go back and replicate again because there are all kinds of influ es like and I know you you you written about these things like experiment bias the the level of Randomness when you're trying to randomize things uh and so on and so forth and the goal standard now is to is to really set out well in advance what your predictions are have things done by totally independent labs and fix all the problems in one go so in my view having one extremely convincing experiment is is much more convincing than having a lot of experiments that all point the same way but but Each of which is is individually flawed and I'm totally open to that kind of evidence because if this is true and not and not just um if it's more than just a well understood experience well motivated experience that people have for all sorts of other reasons then this does change an awful lot so I would say bring it on but but we need to do it in a way that is going to be immune to the kind of replication crisis that we've observed in the rest of the behavioral sciences well I completely agree I mean the the it's a scientific question do these things happen or not and the um it's also true that the replication crisis affects not only psychology but biom medicine and many other branches of science this happened around 2015 when it was discovered that about 90% of papers in prestigious biomedical journals couldn't be replicated incident gently I mean well it it by contrast you see parapsychologists have been accused by Skeptics for years and years and years of having non-replicable results only publishing positive results and not negative results and so forth and the result is that in if you do a survey of blind methodologies in parapsychology about 85% of published experiments involve blind methodologies to protect against bias compared with about 30% in Psychology 25% in medicine less than 1% in the so-called hard Sciences which are unprotected science um now in in in so parapsychologists for years have published negative results as well as positive results and it's actually the Gant felt telepathy experiments nothing to do with me it's a a whole lot of people in many Labs through the world have done this work have been replicated at least 38 different labs and experiments and meta analyses show powerful effects so I think we agree it's a scientific question we disagree about the value of the results so far um but I personally and we also agree that if they're true they're very important because they actually mean that the mind is more extensive than the brain if my thoughts can influence someone on the other side of the world but I also think we disagree slightly on on the the the need for that kind of explanation because I you know I tend to think that the more valuable compelling explanations are those that we already have the resources to come up with in terms of things happening happening within Brains it's it's not as if there's there's something for which we we really need a new way of explaining in order to account for in order to understand people's phenomenology which is to Tan's Point people have this interesting phenomenology and I think that's that's easy to account for with the resources that we already have but I totally age I don't think I don't think it's to do with phenomenology saying these telephone sfy test you can do tests with people in Australia you have four people in Britain they have you pick one of the four as a corner randomly experimental they phone up the person in Australia before they guess before they pick the phone up they have to guess who it is one in four 25% chance of getting it right by pure guessing with success rates that come in around 45 to 50% over hundreds of Trials highly significant it's not just phenomenology in the brain um it's some there's some way which they do actually know who's calling in a way that any amount of brain scanning is never going to reveal I actually think that this is not necessarily a scientific question I see that you're having a scientific disagreement and I can see that this scientific disagreement could go on into the night but I think that the Deep question here is actually an ethical and an existential one the question of how you imagine I mean I I think you're both right in your own way I think but I think there's something deep about and and existential about the way that you choose to understand the nature of Consciousness for yourself because we know that the way that you understand it changes your own experience and changes who you become and that that's a powerful important question I don't I mean in some sense that's why I don't think it matter matters whether God exists I think it matters how you understand yourself in relationship to what you what you see as the ultimate good well I don't take such a relativistic position as you do um um you know I think if something like telephone telepathy does exist and most people think it exists because they've experienced it and most people think that they sense it being stared at exist because they've experienced it not because they've studied statistical evidence in scientific journals but but a Neil does have a point I mean you can make sense of those phenomenological experiences by looking at the human dimension of how people come to have these these events well no I don't think so if people have these experiences it may because they're really happening not just because it's they prefer a worldview in which these things can I mean that yeah people have the experiences that they say they have you know the other example you gave is the Phantom limb case which again I think is very interesting that people have this experience of of a limb still being there or still hurting after amputation and and that again that that's a really important experience for the people in question because it's usually very aversive yes and it would be great to try to understand um what's going on there to try to ameliorate it and there's a very natural materialist explanation for why people have Phantom limbs that the body encodes a model of the brain sorry encodes a model of of the body and amputating a limb just doesn't update that that model sufficiently so the the sensory information that the brain is getting or not getting doesn't match the model and and pain results in some some sort of very broad brush way and then you can find ways to fix it by by giving people virtual reality limbs the right kind of feedback and you find that okay now there's a way to treat this and reduce the phantom pain the fact they feel the pain in the limb doesn't mean that's where the pain actually is that's where the brain is attributing the pain the pain to be and taking that view independently of whether it's true or not although I think it's closer to being the true picture is also the more helpful view to take when you're trying to treat it I'm not denying it's helpful to have these mirror things and treating pain that way but for me it's a really interesting scientific question a scientific question as to whether the Phantom limb is really where it seems to be or not and whether it's just projected by the brain or whether there's a field of the limb there or what evidence is that that there's a field of the limb there well I some experiments I've done myself I wouldn't claim this is conclusive because it's only preliminary but I'll I'll tell you the experiment because it's to illustrate you canest it what we have is a barrier like a door MH I recruit amputees with arms missing arms which I did through the British Limas ex serviceman's Association um so I have an ampute on one side of the door I've six panels one two 3 four five six on the door um my assistant throws a dice to get a random number between one and six and we ask the empy to push their hand through panel two for example on the other side of the door I have people who claim to do subtle energy healing raiki or other SE things so they're in this room I don't know which it's blind I don't know which has got the Phantom Loom Phantom looms being Phantoms go through solid objects people experience them as going through solid objects so I say to these people look here's six areas one of them's got a phantom limb sticking through it and the others haven't which one's got the Phantom limb and they feel in these different places and they say and they if it was just guessing it would be one and six and the hit rate is very much significantly above that now you might say well this is it's not just guessing because otherwise they would be at the trans level you could say it's subtle cues they feel heat from the other side or small noises and stuff but um and it needs rep replicating and so on it's a cheap experiment it cost or Miss nothing it's really hard to persuade people to do it because even though it's cheap and simple it's for amputees it's not hard to persuade them it's hard to persuade scientists to do it uh because it goes against the standard materialist view can I move all I'm saying is it's a testable possibility it's not just brain mechanisms and you've got to take it at that as a matter of theory you can test it I just wanted to move this on if you don't mind because a lot of the discussion is often what is the evidence that we should believe claims such as ruperts let's just for a moment go the other way and my question to you would be do we have any theories at all which tell us how you can take the same atoms that are in my shoes you know bit of sulfur a bit of phosphorus some iron some carbon and mix them up in such a way way why them up that in a particular kind of way they go oh hello there you are do we have any theory that bridges that Gap at all the reason I ask is because I could sense with my psychic abilities that when we were talking about pan psychism large proportion of people out there were going that cannot be true MH but the other alternative is the one that I put you there's brute matter but somehow by some magical business there's a certain way of wiring up and it does go hello well we hope not magical in the end and not magical I use the term to be provoc that's the beautiful thing I think about the scientific method that but do we have anything after we have things that are that are making progress I think I I was tried to be very uh sort of modest and clear about this in the talk that um and many of my colleagues might differ in terms of this so some think we do we have we have the explanation most people I think would be more modest that we're work that there's progress towards it that demystifies it to to some extent there's one Theory which is this alluded to it very briefly the Julio Ton's integrated information Theory I want to get into that too much now but it does it does claim to have solved the heart problem headon and it's it's a very weird counterintuitive theory that that sort of actually entails a kind of pans cism which is well that's the thing I mean I've read that theory yeah and it assumes something but it hasn't prove it no no but it makes makes very makes very testable counterintuitive predictions um that that are being that are being tested which if they turn up doesn't prove the theory but it increases the Credence we should have in that in that theory so many theories can't be proved or disproved by a single experiment that's quite rare you know what you do is you you you gradually increase or decrease your your Credence in different theories according to the the relative weight evidence for that theory and how that distinguishes it from others now when it comes to Consciousness I don't think personally I don't think there is yet a theory which completely bridges that Gap that gives us this intuitive sense of aha of course now I understand how how this electrified Pate in my skull is also you know at the same time generating or identical to the redness of red but what's interesting I think is that there are a lot several theories which explain aspects of that and change our view of the problem at the same time from being one big scary mystery to being a bunch of related Mysteries that lead us to un to already think of some Central concept differently like for instance the concept of free will you people have often asked does Free Will exist or not does it it depends it depends on whether you're you're still cleaving to a view of Free Will as some kind of uncaused cause that swoops in and makes things that happen that otherwise wouldn't happen now that's a view of Free Will that's very very hard to defend um it's very hard to know what it would even mean for that to be to be the case there's a recent book by Robert sapolsky which sort of says well that doesn't exist therefore um a whole bunch of moral and ethical things follow I think that's that's missing the point slightly we have experiences of Free Will and this is back to the you I think a core emerging theme of this discussion take people's experiences serious seriously but not necessarily take them literally how else can we understand the experience of voluntarily doing something having the intention to do something turns out to be much more complex and interesting and ethically important in this case in things like the law when you hold people responsible for their actions and when you don't than trying to resolve the brute question does Free Will exist or not so that I think is the promise and potential of you know I feel I am being CER like the Defender Of The Establishment view here but there are there are many branches of this materialistic view but they are you know they do change our view of the problem too and eventually I think it's quite possible that we will come to a an established theoretical view about Consciousness which we get comfortable with but I I think that might take a while and I think part of the reason it might take a while is because we ourselves are conscious and you mentioned this Tanya that our beliefs about consciousness impact our everyday lives and what would it feel like to fully believe and understand the what it is to be me yeah how that emerges from a biochemical soup inside my head what would that no I don't think so I do not think so I think this is another big mistake people often caricature about science that it's the understanding things as as having this basis in physics chemistry whatever in might be somehow denudes these phenomena of their meaning power and beauty and I think this is almost never the case you know the universe became much grander when we discovered that we were not at the center of it our picture of life became much more beautiful and enriched when we discovered that we're related to all other creatures and I I'm optimistic that a scientific view about that that grounds Consciousness in physics in chemistry doesn't Denude of its beauty and its meaning but it enriches it and we'll see ourselves more as part of Nature and less apart from it and in that I think you know we probably all agree well no it doesn't it's not saying that Consciousness is everywhere it's just saying there's nothing special that sets us apart from the rest of the universe and the whole history of the scientific worldview can be thought of as a sequence of recognition that we are continuous with nature and not separate somehow above it but that it does sound like pant pism that's the description of panm that grou gra which I love but it isn't panm I mean panm is literally the claim that Consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous now to see ourselves as continuous with with nature doesn't mean that it's the same way as like life is a property of the world no it's not life is a property of the of the of physics and chemistry it doesn't mean everything is alive so I think it's an important distinction I don't know I still think it sounds like details I love the image but but I I I do think that and I'm not opposed to you know I I think that our ideas about who we are will change continuously over the next how many of years we have left to us but there is you know to arrive at the puzzle that spolski tries to to wrestle with it's it's easy to remove from that that struggle the sense of the the moral importance of who we are as choosers and actors and movers in the universe and so I you know no I'm sorry I'm not I'm not sure what I'm I'm following well I mean I thought that you were saying that the um the idea that Free Will could didn't exist brought us into trouble when we tried to think about breaking the law that we needed to think differently there were different levels of understanding I mean that's its own metaphor but I I I'm not against the the idea of of a of a reductive explanation but it did sound as if the description that you gave was a was to kind of extend aliveness to the world and to create a kind of sense of ethical responsibility to the world well I think we should cultivate that anyway I think that that's and there are very good reasons to do that without and you can do that without having to believe that everything is alive or or that everything is conscious you just recognize that we depend directly or indirect irly on the on how our planet is working and how our world is working I think that's that's reasonable but on the Free Will thing I guess just yeah it's having a more ramified view where we get away from the opposition that Free Will in some canonical pre-existing sense of an uncaused cause does or does not exist getting away from that opposition to understanding that you know we we are complex biological systems some of the things we do are relatively automatic if I somebody kicks me in the leg I'll have a reflex some of them are relatively internally generated you know I like to drink tea rather than coffee why because I'm English um did I choose to be English no um but but it feels voluntary nonetheless and so there's a whole spectrum of more or less voluntary things that are experienced as more or less voluntary and of course that's individually different in different cultures and in cases of mental and psychiatric disease so the picture we get is I think more interesting more rich and its implications become more complex too when do we hold should we ever hold people responsible for their actions I think it all tilts the the dials towards you know Rehabilitation rather than retribution um but there are already cases of people who have successfully uh defend been defended on the basis of a brain tumor let's say because it well they wouldn't have done the crime without the brain tumor but then as we understand more about the brain it's basically brain tumors all the way down so which is a very depressing that's not the most beautiful picture I was going to paint but it it just makes it you it it becomes more than a philosophical discussion it becomes something that has moral empirical and legal grip yeah I wanted to ask about that that level of because we could get stuck at the level of well does it really exist or doesn't it but in your work and to some extent in yours as well is it true that human beings can make things and then once we've made them they exist in the world I mean we're used to the idea we can make a brro and then it exists if we make a God does that God exist in an in a way which is important and defensible the same way that I've made the brro and now that exists or that I make writing and it exists that is a deep question I don't have an answer to that question I do I know I know I this not ontologically can you give well I can say that the god changes people yeah so there's a fundamentally or just on the surface oh I think fundamentally okay so it's not like fashion I mean it's something changes no when people I mean at least that's what I see as an anthropologist as an observer when I I see people using these practices I can say something about the practices that they that they practice to help them to experience an external being as real to them that's not the same as belief but to experience an external being that's that's invisible that they call Spirit that I call and they actually experience it well I mean so I myself keep settling on this ontologically neutral point which I know going have to explain what you mean by that well it means that that means that I don't know so another way of running the kind of argument that that rert is running is to say that somehow energy the there is a there is a large mind and we filter pieces of that mind that that that mind is somehow alive in the world and that we filter pieces of that that mind into our own awareness so that's an alternative to view the view that there is a a particular God or a set of gods that are that are out there I don't know what I think about that but I know that once when you exper if you make this sense of a being or a presence or an energy that which demands of you and to which you are responsible you change your behavior and you relate to that being um in a way that is I don't know and then you do things you wouldn't have done before and then you do means there a physical real effect which biologists psychologists and physicists could measure so somehow you've conjured into being some effect in material reality we do that with money I money exists too it doesn't but it only exists because of the beliefs we have about it doesn't it well it depends what you mean by exist it's an idea that can have real causal effects in the world so if having a real causal effect in the world is what it takes to exist then yes but if ideas exist then they have real causal effects in the world they exist so this is a William James perspective if because of changes I'm pushing it towards it yeah if if a ideas exist where do they exist well so they exist depends on what the kind of idea is like again an idea like money has to exist in multiple people's minds if I suddenly decide that my you know my10 note is worth six6 Grand it doesn't make it worth six grand at least one other person has to believe that for it for that to work uh so that kind of belief needs to be a collective belief in order for it to have the kind of causal power we ascribe to it but perhaps other beliefs don't perhaps an individual belief in in God can change you independently of what other people believe of course in practice it tends to be much more of a collective for you we attribute power because other people do too what I'm struck by is that people seem to follow God's advice more than they follow their own advice that if they make this being external they um they are able to feel compelled by it in a way they are not compelled by their own sense of of an inner should why is that I mean this brings us to a question from one of our a question we got from a um someone who's watching um who raises Julian James's idea that in the past people took ideas which they said this is not my idea it's from God and they acted upon it and so it had a reality for them is that the sort of thing that you mean that that that we can we're imagining something but then it has real agency because we in somehow give it agency it certainly has agency with respect to us and so I think that it does so I think more and more about this I think that the as if that we commit to is really pretty important for organizing our our own lives I also think there's a scientific point about Julian Jan so Julian Jane said that the way that you thought about your mind differently you would experience some so he said they didn't have that the archaic Greeks didn't have an elaborated sense of an inner World um and so they they they experience their powerful thoughts as God speaking to them that's what I see in my work I see that if you imagine the mind as not bounded they actually have more hallucination like experiences I did not expect to prove Julian James correct but that it was kind of cool well there's a whole bunch of teen teers who were deployed because they all read Julian James when they're 18 and go this is mar there's a lot of Julian James that a little he say something so wonderful he says something a bit more dramatic than that doesn't sort of says that Consciousness itself came into being halfway through the ilad I know which is but it's still very cool to see that there's some element of that that the way that you think about the Mind actually changes the texture and shape and the quality of your but but Julian James's point is that it it came into Consciousness and he he puts it at that point in history but presumably you would also have to point to a moment in history where it comes into Consciousness like wandering around the zoo you know you have to get to the point where you say everything to the right you can't torture because they're conscious everything to the left you can pull its legs off it's no different than pulling the taking the the wheel off your car so you also have to say Consciousness comes into existence a certain point what would be wrong with J Julian Jones saying it happened then in a certain sense you're right that there's there's there's a point so in this is where this comes back to something Rupert said earlier that in in the view that Consciousness is a property of or entail by the brain somewhere yes there were times in the history of the universe and history of our planet where it was just all in the subjective dark there was nothing going on Julian James I think this a 1980s 1970s book called the origin of Consciousness and the breakdown of the B mind bought it it's um it's it's batshit crazy but it's really interesting and I think he's really talking about self-consciousness rather than perceptual awareness of the world but you I don't know for sure that's a good um when it comes to any kind of experience you whether it's elaborated sense of self or something else yes you know at some point at least if you commit to the idea that Consciousness is a biological property intimately related to brains then then yes and this is a really challenging question and to it's very hard to know a where to draw the line and is it indeed meaningful to draw a line some things can just sort of gray out when does a you start you when does a a pile of sand become a pile rather than just a few grains there are things that don't have a sharp boundary when does night become day it's not just when the sun sets when it's the last Photon in the sky it's some so you might not need to appeal to a sharp distinction but nonetheless we will have an intuition that will cause us to make distinctions like okay you know monkeys OB L you're right bacteria on that side um and I think as we get a little bit away we have to walk the line between anthropocentrism thinking of ourselves as special and Consciousness being this thing that aders to more humanly human distinctive kinds of things like language and rational thought like they can't try try to do um this is in a sense unavoidable because we know we're conscious so it's a starting point but as we begin to to figure out why and how that is the case we can begin to generalize further and further out but there is no consensus about where that line ought to be and it's changing you know so recently a law was changed not that recently now about 10 years ago in the EU that that meant spilop pods like octopuses were now to be treated differently because of the weight of evidence that they they may well experience things and and not just actively respond to things I think a really important current ethical issue is is about how we treat fish um we generally don't treat them as if they're conscious in fishing industry perhaps we should re-evaluate that that position personally that's that's the gray area where I just don't know I don't know what to say about a salmon is that to do with the number of neurons the size of brains I mean this is an easy it's an easy thing to fall back on but but I think it's an unreliable thing to fall back on one of the astonishing facts about how Consciousness is related to the human brain is that 34s of the neurons we have don't seem to matter at all we have about 86 billion neurons in our brains roughly and 3/4s of them are in the cerebellum which is this mini brain the back of your head that's very very important for how we move around the world for sequencing our language all these kinds of things but damage to the cerebella or there's some people born without a cerebellum or have had cerebellum completely destroyed through through um brain tumors and so on perfectly conscious so it's not a matter of number of neurons having lots of neurons might help us have lots of different kinds of conscious experiences and at some point it probably matters to some extent one euron probably isn't enough but how many is enough nobody knows oh another um question from a um someone listening was about Hydro andany MH so there's a famous C that's people who the the fluid in their head continues to be produced and it squeezes out the amount of gray matter they can have and there was a a lot of people who have that are severely brain damage but there's a very famous case I think the chap is still alive and he was getting a PhD I think it was at UCL and they were studying hydril and for a laugh they said let's have a look at you and his his PhD advisor was utterly astonished because he only had 15% of the brain matter of a brain normal person and was getting his PhD and was a very nice chap MH and had none of the cerebral structures which people who then put people's heads in machines say well look that bit lights up so it's to do with that he hadn't any of them but did all of these things how how does that does that rock your world or not it's it's incredibly interesting and it's it's um but that is rare you know most people with it only Tak one case it doesn't matter that it's rare you got someone without the brain and they're normal then the brain was nothing to do with being normal no but it does kind of matter because it tells you in most cases that that kind of disturbance of brain development does have consequences but the fact that it's not always the case I don't know about this particular case study it is it is fascinating the difficulty in interpreting that in the way of saying like oh he doesn't have the I don't know uh the parietal lobe so therefore the parietal lobe is not involved in Consciousness that's that doesn't follow because it's a developmental thing and one thing we know about the brain is that it's incredibly um malleable so it's it can it can during development it can deal with a lot of disturbance and rewire itself in ways that that are very different and still preserve the functionality I was really struck I went the I've only ever been to see one Neurosurgical operation uh it's a weird thing where neurosurgeons and neuroscientists almost never meet um but I I was friends with a am friends with a neurosurgeon who did a very very extensive operation on a six-year-old child who had brain damage during birth and had tractable epilepsy epileptic seizures many times a day the S exhausted all medicine the last the operation was to remove his whole right hemisphere of the actually to leave it in the brain but disconnect it from everything this took eight hours and what's astonishing is that um you know that he was fine and fine very quickly the damage to the right hemisphere had been accommodated by the development of the left hemisphere very very easily and if you do it early enough M it's totally fine if you did that to to me I would not be totally fine don't try it right rert the kind of things that we're that that annel's talking about and do they strike you as important or do you have that feeling that we're still stuck in a worldview which is ignoring what you're trying to get at well basically I think brains are overrated and um I think the um the hydro cases to show us that normal structure of the brain in some of them it's only 5% of the normal amount that Consciousness obviously is related to the brain in all sorts of ways but not in the way it's usually assumed um and so my own view is that Consciousness is because I have a kind of pan psychist view or put it more technically I my view is what's sometimes called panentheism the idea that God is in nature and nature in God that pansus Pew is that there's a kind of Consciousness in the whole universe and in all self-organizing systems within it it does exclude CH tables chairs socks and computers because they're not self-organizing they're made in factories and it's really about things that have a wholeness that's more than the sum of the parts which is true of self-organizing systems so I think all of them have some level of of of mind and mind is a lot of mind is unconscious I mean the cerebella function may be habitual and unconscious for the most part and as Freud and others showed a lot of our mental activity is unconscious in fact as soon as something becomes habitual it becomes almost unconscious Consciousness is concerned with making choices among possible actions I think that's its main role and therefore it's to do with the realm of possibility and choice and I think choice is real I'm I I won't get back to the Free Will argument but um habit is terribly important and I think most of nature is Habitual and that at every level of organization atoms molecules cells tissues organs plants animals planets solar systems galaxies and so on there's a wholeness that's more than the Su of the parts that organizes them has some degree of choice um organizing power wholeness um integration as in IIT at information Theory it emphasizes the wholeness of all these different levels of organization that they integrate so I think that the when it comes to our own Consciousness is part of this bigger picture as I'd see it and now tan would no doubt think well I must put in an awful lot of effort to arrive at this world viiew um I do I mean I actually I've written two whole books about spiritual practices and how they can change the way we experience things but I think this is from from a scientific point of view it's a a a perfectly valid way of looking at things and more helpful way but I think it's also um a way in which one can actually experience it you see for I'm not as agnostic as you about God becoming real I mean I I believe in God and I believe in God because I experience a divine presence and a purpose in my life and so for me it's a matter of experience so you could call it mystical experience or but it's it sometimes spontaneous sometimes the result of spiritual practices um and no doubt there are brain mechanisms involved and so on but for me it's not just you know one way of looking at things it's real because I experience it as real and you could easily argue others would experience different things as real but I think for people who've had a mystical experience of God of a kind of ultimate unity or Divine Pres presence it one of the things about it is that it does feel very very real it feels more real than anything else people who have near- death experiences which sometimes only last a few minutes um have their lives changed by this what feels to them a direct insight into Ultimate Reality um and then I come when I have these experiences myself like don't claim to be anything special lots of people do um then the question is is this just self- delusion is this just persuading myself of something that I'd like to believe is true should I take the objective scientific view then what then I come to view the so-called objective scientific view is actually just a theory um and in so far as it would deny these experiences or say they're nothing but the brain that's just a theory too and for me experience is more important than Theory and partly because um if we believe in empiricism which I do experience is empirical that's what exper empirical means it means experience so I think that experience is actually in the end for most of us something that is probably the the ultimate Arbiter um and if someone comes along and says oh it doesn't fit with 19th century physics or 21st century physics or something like that it doesn't necessarily mean it's untrue it may mean that these scientific views are temporary um views which change and I think our present scientific world view is in the process of evolution partly through taking on the very challenge of trying to understand Consciousness and I think we'll have a very different scientific worldview not only about Consciousness but also about life because although annel youd say well life's being solved and this is a model for how to solve Consciousness but you know that you people used to believe in vitalism we now know that it's so on that we've tripped away at it and I don't think the problem of life is solved and I I think we need to have a whole new way of thinking about life as well so my own view is that the scientific world view is in the process of growing and expanding as it always has and when it does it will give us a very different basis for thinking about Consciousness and for interpreting the kinds of experiences that that people have and which you rightly study because I mean we wouldn't know about them unless someone studies them the fact there's a huge diversity is really important but there are certain common factors as well I should imagine I was just going to if you wanted to say something I was just going to move this on to give Anil a chance to flourish his heretical credentials because I do feel that we have you have had to defend things and one of the places where you are quite heretical is you say quite clearly you don't think that the brain is computational the Consciousness is not computational and therefore the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that claim to be making an artificial Consciousness are doomed why do you think that right and actually this this is I think listening to you this is an area where for different reasons we might end up agreeing with each other to to some extent that I I think life is important I think there's something distinctive and special about systems that self-organize um and I think that may be one of the keys to understanding the biological basis of ious so I think this this is broadly in line with what you're saying I also by the way don't think that we've solved life entirely what I mean is that there's no longer a sense of conceptual mystery that life is is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry um well I think there is so we don't agree about that we don't agree about that okay fine can I just is everyone happy with the idea of self organized or do you want them to explain it so no you're happy with it good fine I just wanted to check think yeah things that self organize organize themselves to Define it other syst organize themselves um so there is this prevailing so this is where yeah where I'm probably the the heretic in my community a little bit is that there's a prevailing view that's been there certainly since I started out that uh the the brain is some kind of computer that the mind is some kind of mindwar running on the wet wear of our brains and that Consciousness is is some form of information processing and these terms are used almost without giving them any thought as if it's obvious that what the brain does is process information and that Consciousness is a property of of of getting that right and that assumption I mean that's what licenses all kinds of claims that AI might at some point become not only smart but also conscious also aware and these are assumptions that having again real practical and ethical consequence now as people are scared of AI for all sorts of reasons some of which are Justified and some of which probably aren't if you think that your next language model is suddenly going to experience things and then you you're you're probably not correct about that and you're not going to see the real risks clearly so there is this this prevailing view I think it's still a bit of a hangover from this old idea of the brain as a computer which people say they no longer buy into but if you look at the language that is used it reveals a trace of that and you can certainly describe the brain that way but doesn't mean that's what the brain actually is other other ways of thinking are are um are possible so yes I think there are many reasons to push back on that assumption um firstly just to recognize that it is a big assumption and in the brain there's no sharp divide between what we might call the wet wear and and the mind wear in a computer there is by definition that's what computers do you can run different programs on them and the the brain doesn't if where is it the neurons no each neuron is very complex one neuron fires the whole structure of the brain changes there are chemicals washing around where do you draw the line again it's not clear and on the other hand the more that you pull on the thread of this idea of the brain as a prediction machine and ask well why is it doing that what's it for what's it predicting why you realize at least I am drawn to the view and I didn't expect to get there you were drawn to the the idea I'm drawn to the idea that the mechanisms this predictive mechanisms that underly our experiences of the world and the self have their roots evolutionarily and developmentally and in the day-to-day business of living in this biological imperative to stay alive we prediction enables control it enables regulation when you can predict you can you can keep things within bounds and that is fundamentally what the brain is for it's for keeping the body in itself alive that means keeping things within bounds that goes that go that drives down right into our biochemistry right into the level of individual sell so that you start to see this is where the self organizing thing comes in that systems that create their own components that don't just run on components like things made in factories you that self-produce there becomes this this this this sort of porous boundary between what we might call the Dynamics or the information processing and the metabolism the energetics of of the same system to me this grounds what brains are doing and what the nature of Consciousness in something that is deeply biological the embodied brain not just the brain in a V but the brain the brain um inner body and the phenomenal the last Point here is the phenomenology of Consciousness seems to speak to this too again it's not evidence this is not knock down evidence that is the case but if you if you if you look deeply as people with many hours of meditation do into what the experience of self really is at its core you know it's not a thought it's not um it's not this being my body arguably it's a fundamental experience of being a living organism and this might this is what to me and this does get a this is definitely speculative now but this gets to some descriptions of what people think about when they think about Soul know something more to do with breath something more to do with an experience of being alive and I think that phenomenology is a clue to the mechanisms that underly all our experience that become grounded in our Nature's living systems now I don't know if this is the case um but I I think it's a position that is worth articulating because it is different from what seems to me to be an unjust UNS weakly supported set of assumptions that Consciousness is something that a computer could have if you programmed it in the right way m what do you think T so so I guess what what I am struck by is your last last set of comments about feeling alive and I'm not opposed to to that that perspective I think that your the experience of meditation captures some of that what I find so moving is that people feel a sense of an other they feel a sense of being communicated to it is so much more common than we imagine and that's not the feeling of aliveness that's the sense of a of a universe sort of pulsating back and some of these experiences are are silly so I remember um a woman and and talking to me about her a Christian talking to me about her her new relationship with God and she gets onto a bus in Chicago and she thanks God for you know it's it's no longer sleeing it's winter in Chicago and she's going on and on about how lovely how much worse the winter could be in Chicago than it is now and she sits on the bus and she's reading her book and God says out loud to her get off the bus you're going to miss your stop it's like a silly a silly little thing and it meant so much to her there are other experiences that people have that are um that are more profound I remember a woman who who was who was um working in a 7-Eleven it was the best job she could get out of college she didn't want to have the job somebody came in um you know with uh wanted some beer and some cigarettes and this woman was like oh my God I'm doing this with my life and she heard God say out loud I have loved this woman I have created her in my image change This Woman's life and so that I I what I hear from here from people is this Rich variety of Senses of being spoken to communicated to felt to I think that's also part of the story of Consciousness being in community with with with others um you can I don't know how whether to call that God myself um I do know that the the making of that as a real phenomenon in the world for somebody changes the way they Orient themselves to the Future changes the way they Orient them themselves to the good um and profoundly matters if we could make an artificial Consciousness do you think that it would believe in God or some of them would believe in God would come up to you one day and say I'm an artificial conscious but I've experienced God and would would they perhaps also say I've experienced people looking at me well it I it's hard to know whether experience I mean we can look at non-living systems to see if any any of them respond to being looked at um I think it's quite possible that some might um so but that's that's an empirical question I think if we made an artificial Consciousness it wouldn't necessarily um I mean if we think of the Consciousness that may exist already of other animal species um would they believe in God no I don't think so because belief in God would require you know being able to formulate ideas and so on but do they have mystical experiences I think they may I think you know lizard basking in the sun may be in a blissful state of samadi you know we assume that these higher mystical states are available only to humans I think they're probably what motivate all life um and so I think that there's um they may even as cell may have experiences I mean maybe for an egg cell it may be orgasmic when a sperm penetrates it it may have a s of at cellular level a sense of Destiny or Unity or achievement or amazing key moment so I myself think that these kind of mystical type experiences are being part of something larger than oneself may be available to all sorts of organisms at least some of the time not available to us all the time only some of the time but I think they may be a key part of all life what do you think Al no I certainly don't I agree with actually a lot of that I don't think being conscious inevitably means that we that the conscious system develops a belief in in God or I think that requires a certain amount of cognitive corruption where we seek explanations for things that that um that don't necessarily have explanations in that sense uh but I really don't think we should try to build artificial Consciousness in fact in the sense of like building an AI that has that experience there's this sort of again I think Silicon Valley Tech bro Rapture attitude that this would be a great thing to do like you know let's let's do this let's build a conscious machine because maybe that's the Breakthrough we need I think it's very unlikely for the reasons that I was just explaining that that you probably have to have a living machine first but I might be wrong of course probably I'm wrong maybe maybe it is possible but it would be a terrible thing to do because as soon as you make something that has conscious experiences you you have a moral responsibility towards it you don't even know whether it would be suffering or not maybe it would be suffering in a way you wouldn't even recognize because it wouldn't exhibit it in a way that we would naturally understand and of course these things could then exist at industrial scale and the touch of a button they flicker into existence in a billion server Farms this is not a cool thing to do so don't build things just because you think you can yeah um so I I'm very against that kind of Narrative of of let's try to let's let's try to do that and even AI systems that merely seem conscious already wreaking havoc in the world language models that are powered by Deep fakes people can't help projecting Consciousness into them you know we are anthropomorphic like that we project mind into our fridges sometimes so no wonder we do it into gp4 uh and that can be very psychologically destabilizing for us because either we care about these things and we know they're not conscious in which case we sacrifice human and other animals interests in the service of unfeeling hunks of silicon and code or we learn to not care about them even though we still feel they are conscious and that brutalizes our minds so there's there's even aside from the philosophical contention of its possibility it again becomes an issue that matters ethically and and morally so I think that in fact I realize that I that I've I realize that I I now realize I think that the experience of Consciousness does create something like a sense of God whether or not the God exists that the the feeling of thought as power and the sense that there is an action in the world um I think be starts to carry with it the sense that there is there is an other responding to you and and responding to even that mystical experience if when the the world breaks open we don't know why people have these experiences but they have these moments in which something suddenly time stops their sense of self dissolves into the universe they have a sense that they know something that they've never understood before that they have a a feeling of knowing and it is beyond a feeling of anything that they couldn't explain often that comes with come what comes with that is the sense of an other who come who directs who guides who manages and so I think that I I would bet on the machine developing a sense of God um ladies and gentlemen I I I it falls to me to be the baddy on the stage and tell you that we can't just carry on um I would like to but I suspect someone back there would get very annoyed um so we have arrived at the point where if I could ask each of you to just give us some closing remarks in a couple of minutes it's stated three minutes actually um and T would you oh sure I mean I sort of feel like I've said everything that I that I intended to say but I think that there's um I but has anything changed for you because of these two her well I mean this this observation that that that an a conscious machine would have a God is a novel thought to me and so I'm going to go away and think about it but I think that the the point that I would want to make to the audience is that these remarkable experiences in which people hear something hear a person no one no one else can see they feel the sense of a presence they they feel the the universe break open and they have a sort of saw on the road to Damas Damascus experience those experiences are relatively common they're relatively powerful they're they are deeply moving sometimes they're irrelevant sometimes they're profounding profoundly moving um there's an anthropologist called Godfree leanhart that that described Faith as he said that there were the dam man the Dinka Aras are a a pastoral Community pastoral people or they were a pastoral people in southern Sudan he said that when a Dinka man is late going home to dinner he'll tie a knot in a in in in a in a in a in a tuft of grass and he doesn't believe that this this this knot is going to keep the Sun from going down but he believes that this is a way of externalizing his intention and that this and that the externalizing the intention is what changes him and causes him to believe to act differently and I think that that's what um I think that that's what the experience of an external other does for people thank you thank you rer have you well I I've I love the fact that I'm sitting between as it were two extremes of you know the brain brain a neuroscientist and an anthropologist with such different takes on Consciousness and but which are very much part of the um any deeper understanding we come to I think has to include both and I love the fact that you're able to look at the way that different people experience these things differently and they're not just experiences that happened to me but experiences make a huge difference in their lives so they take them seriously and they have have serious effects and any understanding of Consciousness has to take into account these experiences not only people's own Consciousness but their experiences of other kinds of Consciousness and you know I I like the fact that annel's approach to um the brain and Consciousness is to try and explain or connect conscious experiences with what's happening in the brain and look at them scientifically and because I I also like his idea of the real problem of looking at what we can look at scientifically and I look at things which a lot of other scientists don't look at but um which I think are important ingredients in this because I think we need to cast The Net much wider but I genuinely believe that through open-mindedly exploring these things we can actually come to a deeper understanding of Consciousness and we're in a position That's Unique really in the history of the world because never before before have we had access to all these different philosophical and religious Traditions that we now have we now know about all these different kinds of religion theories of mind and Consciousness and experience we have this much more detailed experience of uh knowledge of brain structure and function of physical processes um and so although we're far off uh an agreed and deeper understanding of Consciousness I'm hopeful that we're moving closer to one and so in that sense um I think this debate's helpful because it's how I think it's made me realize that that there's more hope than I might have thought when I started on when we came together of actually moving forward to a deeper understanding thank you which could be useful and helpful to usel thank you thanks both for a lovely discussion and thanks for moderating it as well to beautifully I I think there are fasc in commonalities and disagreements and I've learned a lot in in recognizing this so I I'm very much on board with the importance of taking people's experiences seriously and I've learned you know the the variation in individual experiences of how people experience thoughts that's something I hadn't thought about too much before so that's that's something I I'll I'll take away and um and yeah there's a also a surprising to me commonality with Rupert in sense of the importance of of self-organizing systems that I think is a common ground for understanding the connection between life mind and perhaps Consciousness too uh but I also think there are interesting divergences and and there's a Divergence perhaps in the Primacy we give to the content of people's experiences in sort of evidentiary terms they these experiences can be massively important for people's lives this is this is absolutely the case but when it comes to trying to understand understand what gives rise to these experiences I I will come back to this important distinction between uh taking them seriously but not taking them literally and when it comes and this I think is is clear in these examples of the sense of being stared at we should take those experiences seriously but to take them literally uh you know I think is a very different claim and here's where I think a disagreement persists because to take them literally would need overturning almost 400 years of accumulated uh worldview about how our our universe works and one doesn't want to do that without extremely good reason but if it is necessary one ought to do that because at the core of science is a humility and a recognition that we will never have the full picture will never have direct direct access to truth you know all we will have is is evidence and it's up to us to judge the importance of that evidence we'll just have a better controlled hallucination we will um then all it remains um for me to do is to thank you for being such a lovely audience and turning up and if you would join me in thanking our three panelists Tanya ruper and anel [Applause] than great conversation [Music]

Channel: Holberg Prize

Views: 81,475

Keywords: Humanities, Social Sciences, Holberg Prize, Award, Research, Lecture, University

Id: ofSUaZOW9h8

Length: 166min 55sec (10015 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023