Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation? | ENCORE Episode 1804 | Closer To Truth

[Music] [Music] consciousness is odd at once most mundane and most bizarre our astonishing inner sense of awareness and feeling seems so radically alien nothing like the physical fields forces and particles that compose stars and planets and even life consciousness is the most mysterious feature of existence other than the mystery of existence itself we seek the locus of consciousness what or where in the brain causes consciousness as an old neuroscientist that's what i saw sort of but then the realization even if one or more brain regions is needed to be conscious that in no way explains what felt consciousness is or how it happens i'm skeptical too about drilling down to the fundamental physics meaning in the brain seems at the level of neurons and networks so i'm open i'm forced to be i must ask does consciousness require a radical explanation i'm robert lawrence kuhn and closer to truth is my journey to find out [Music] i should start with the neuroscientist who has an innovative indeed radical theory of consciousness and i should hear about it directly from him he is a professor of psychiatry and an expert on sleep giulio tanoni i'd wanted to meet julio for about a decade then i found he was attending the foundations questions institute fqxi conference in vieques puerto rico in 2014. i've been attending fqxi conferences since they began exploring foundations of physics and frontiers of cosmology fqxi looks beyond scientific horizons the theme in vieques was information and julio was a natural extending fqxi's intellectual vision meeting giulio in the vieques jungles seemed to invite entry into the brain's neural networks but i sensed more julia we've just met but we have something in common we've both been obsessed with consciousness our whole lives why is consciousness so baffling because it's everything we have all we are so consciousness is all we experience and of course if you eliminate experience from everything else nothing is left it is important to study the brain but you will never squeeze the essence of conscious out of gray matter this is why philosophers have rightly pointed out for a long time that this is a very hard problem in fact it is so hard that i grant you it is impossible to solve that way you need to take a different approach what is that approach i think the approach is to go exactly the other way around let's try to start from consciousness itself we have to identify what are the essential properties of consciousness what is it like to be a person who has an experience and that applies to every experience you possibly could have so i call this the actions of consciousness the first one is the one that the card pointed out that is that consciousness exists there is no doubt that you are having an experience but there are other fundamental properties of every experience that one can single out a very important one is that every experience is structured when i have an experience like right now i see you i see your black shirt i see your gray hair and i see the canopy of the jungle here when i see all of that these are different aspects of a single experience let's move to a more intriguing one of the properties of consciousness which has been unrecognized even by philosophers and that is the fact that every experience is what it is the experience i'm having now is a very special one i've never been in this jungle before i've never been with you and i've never been in a situation of this sort and what makes this experience that particular one is what i call information information from the intrinsic perspective from inside it is what it is because it differs from trillions and trillions of other possible experience i could have but i'm having this one the next axiom is integration and that is referring to the fact that every experience is always one you cannot decompose it into non-interdependent parts for instance the color of your shirt and the shape of your shirt okay i can't experience the color and the shape separately doesn't even make sense that's integration and then we have one further axiom which is exclusion that says that an experience is only one so it's unique there is not simultaneously a superposition of many different experiences so what's the implication of these axioms the idea here is that if these are essential properties of consciousness such that there cannot be experience that doesn't obey these axioms we have to think of whatever is out there in the world that can actually account for these properties it must explain why this thing that we have exists why it is structured why it is informative why it is integrated and why it is exclusive based on that it says there is a fundamental identity and experience the one you're having now is a maximally reducible conceptual structure which is a long thing to say but it has a precise mathematical meaning in fact it is a structure in a space called qualia space think of it as a shape but it's a shape scene from the inside and the idea is that right now there's a shape that is generated by a particular part of your brain and not by many other parts are you saying that that shape is my feeling of consciousness my sense my inner experience my personal phenomenology or that is a correlator relates to it no it is it is an exact identity shape is to have that experience that can only be had from the inside you must be that thing i cannot be you and you cannot be me being is not describing you cannot be what you describe but you can describe what you are i'm elated not because i've signed on but because a serious scientific initiative recognizes that consciousness is indeed radically bizarre integrated information theory is a bold revolutionary way to explain the qualia or inner feel of consciousness the claim is that each unique integrated conscious experience is a distinct thing a shape-like thing located in an utterly unknown kind of dimensional space called qualius space if explaining consciousness is truly a hard problem it follows that theories of consciousness should be rejected not when they're too radical but when they're not radical enough julio's theory aces this first test it is radical enough i'm intrigued i want more [Music] two years later i get the chance it's the next fqxi conference this time in banff canada buffeted by the crisp winds of the rocky mountains i meet the philosopher of mind who famously disrupted the field by coining the hard problem of consciousness dave chalmers dave has his own radical ideas there are a whole lot of at least potentially intriguing connections between physics and consciousness and especially quantum mechanics traditional formulations of quantum mechanics seem to give a role to measurement or observation and well what is that and it's like well the natural hypothesis is that measurement or observation is conscious perception it's somehow a role of a conscious observer so that's extremely suggestive for connecting the two we can connect them in a lot of ways some people might try to reductionistically explain consciousness in terms of quantum mechanical processes on my view that works no better than explaining it in terms of classical processes but another thing you might do is not try to reduce consciousness but find roles for consciousness in quantum mechanics afterwards one of the big questions about consciousness is what does it do what is it here for how can that affect the physical world all the harder a question if you think consciousness is irreducible and fundamental so i'm at least taking seriously the idea that maybe consciousness plays a potential role in quantum mechanics it's a version of the traditional idea that consciousness collapses the wave function one thing that's happened in the last 20 years is people have started to develop rigorous non-reductionist theories of consciousness like janoni's integrated information theory lately i've been thinking about the idea maybe we can combine that with the quantum mechanical theory of consciousness collapsing the wave function integrated information theory would give us a theory of when a certain physical state gives rise to consciousness when it integrates enough information for example quantum mechanics would then tell us when that happens consciousness will collapse the wave function in a certain way and if we combine a mathematical theory of consciousness with the traditional collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics we might be able to get a mathematically rigorous quantum mechanical approach to consciousness if you do that though are you undermining the fundamental assertion that consciousness is an irreducible fundamental part of reality because integrated information theory seems to be coming up with a mechanism of creating consciousness when you have certain things together then you have consciousness but in your view you don't need to bring things together to have the consciousness because you have consciousness at its most fundamental level yeah i see these as two different approaches there's the panzerkist approach where consciousness exists at the fundamental level of physics and all that comes together right to yield me and there's the dualist approach where consciousness is separate from the physics but interacts with it and i see this quantum mechanical idea we've been talking about just now as a dualist idea rather than a pan cyclist idea we've got a wave function and we've got consciousness there's distinctive properties right now here are the laws that connect them so this view won't work with pan psychism right think of this as an updated version of descartes the body affects the mind the mind affects the body integrated information theory tells us how physics affects consciousness collapse tells us how consciousness affects physics i'd love deep structural ties between consciousness and quantum mechanics but not according to dave quantum mechanics explaining consciousness rather consciousness being fundamental empowering quantum mechanics i like dave distinguishing pan psychism where consciousness somehow resides in or below physics from a kind of dualism where consciousness and physics are equal and interact i'm hooked but hooked to pursue not to believe because most neuroscientists still consider consciousness not as a special entity to discover but as a biological problem to solve i need a physicalist one of the more fearsome whose engaging style masks a relentless logic is also attending the f2xi conference theoretical physicist sean carroll i think that consciousness is a way of talking about the physical world just like many other ways of talking it's an one of these emergent phenomena that we find is a useful way of packaging reality so we say that someone is conscious of something that corresponds to certain physical actions in the real world i don't think that there is anything special about mental properties i don't think there's any special mental realm of existence i think it's all the physical world in all the manifold ways we have of describing it i would believe uh that consciousness is a qualitatively different and you must disagree with that i do disagree there's an irreducibility but it's not in the reality it's in how people talk to each other about it there's something that you see it you live it you feel it that's right and i can describe it in physical terms perfectly well when you say like i now have experienced the uh redness of red i think that that is a set of words that can be mapped on in a very direct way to certain physical things happening in my brain do you believe that the phenomenology of what we see is in an identical theory sense two descriptions like uh the morning star and the evening star is is the same yes that's right venus absolutely and the difference between me and someone who thinks that there is something phenomenologically different about consciousness is that that is all there is [Music] sean admits nothing special about consciousness and if consciousness seems irreducible the reason is human language and culture not any separate spooky kind of non-physical reality i revel in the sharp disagreement i hear that some physicists are taking a fresh look at consciousness i meet my old friend a physicist who envisions reality as a mathematical object the scientific director of fqxi cosmologist max tegmark a large fraction of the things we're stuck on in physics of the unsolved mysteries actually have to do with what it means to be an observer and if you take for example the biggest embarrassment of all that we can't unify general relativity the theory of the big with quantum mechanics the theory of the small these two theories have the exact opposite definition of observer general relativity says that an observer is this infinitesimally tiny thing with no mass and having no effect on its environment a point yeah yeah whereas quantum mechanics says that the observer has an effect on that which is observed so no wonder we can't unify them where the rub lies it's in the fact that we've tried to avoid talking about what an observer is even though physics is supposed to be the subject of observation which is ridiculous there's been this kind of prejudice that consciousness is just a bunch of flaky who we the physicists shouldn't talk about and that we could somehow get away with not talking about it and i think we have to face up to the fact now that no especially if you believe that i am made of quarks and electrons and physical things i can't sweep under the rug the fact that i am an observer and if i want to know what observers see i have to understand the relationship between quarks and electrons and this subjective if you take the famous hard problem of consciousness namely why is it that this quark blob has a subjective experience that feels very hard but if you take as a starting point that some quirk blobs like this one have a subjective experience and other ones like this table don't then this transforms the hard problem into this hard fact that some cork blobs are conscious some aren't so there must be some physical principle some equation which tells you which things are conscious and which aren't and this becomes now an experimental question my guess is that the subjective experience that we call consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways and i feel i'm kind of forced into guessing this from the starting point that i think it's all physics i'm not allowed to have any extra secret sauce to add to it and that makes much harder for me but at the same time it limits it down to this very concrete problem that i have to ask there is clearly some additional principle about information processing in nature that distinguishes between the conscious kind and the unconscious kind and would love to find it who wouldn't love to find it the information processing it that distinguishes the conscious from the non-conscious whatever it is the choice seems stark either some new mathematical description of how the world works or some radically new feature of reality but hold on am i being swayed by a self-selected subset of physicists and philosophers who mystify consciousness i should check the more mainstream physicists and philosophers who demystify consciousness i meet philosopher of physics david wallace some of the smartest people i know and some pretty good friends take these approaches very seriously i find it very difficult to take it seriously at all it seems that we don't think we need a fundamental physics of digestion or fundamental physics of respiration even though these are difficult biological processes that we're really lacking in root for consciousness people seem to think is different and the reasons they think it's different i think are intuitions and hunches which can feel very plausible but when you really interrogate them are hard to sustain i think you're still left with the primary problem which is the phenomenology of what we feel and see being a step function different from everything else we know in the universe we have a really deep intuition that these are radically different and i share that intuition what i don't think we have is anything that goes beyond an intuition we don't have an argument we don't have um a deduction that says these are not the same things and attempts to get it just mean more intuitions come up and i just don't think intuitions are a good route to truth in science lots of things are really counterintuitive it's really really counterintuitive that the that your pain literally is a whole bunch of electrical structural functional goings on in the brain but um the fact that it's counterintuitive doesn't make it so what what the conclusion of what you would say is is that that we live in a universe where it is possible for electrical activities to literally be the the feeling of consciousness don't think we live in a universe where it's possible i think we live in a universe where it's actual david's robust physicalism provides philosophical support for neuroscience's claim that it can and ultimately will explain consciousness that the electrical activity of the brain just is consciousness it's called identity theory and though it feels counter-intuitive it's just how the world works in fact any sort of theory of consciousness is in essence a kind of identity theory something is consciousness that's why i resist the mainstream view that neurons and neural networks alone are sufficient to account for consciousness here's my intuition since i must have some identity i want my identity entity to be an exotic one i've seen candidates but there is still another what many think is the obvious explanation that consciousness goes beyond the physical world i find a physicist who may agree bernard carr so there's no doubt whatsoever that our experience of the world is affected by the brain and most people would assume that if there was no brain there would be no consciousness however to say that the consciousness is actually generated by the brain is a completely extra step which isn't implied though by that and there is a different view which says that actually consciousness is in some sense more fundamental and that the brain is merely a mechanism through which the consciousness can observe the universe the standard view is is the reductionist sort of materialist view which says that consciousness is just an epic phenomena generated by the brain phenomenon an inversion phenomena this is saying no actually consciousness is more fundamental and the brain's role is actually almost to limit your experience on the face of it that might seem a completely bizarre thing to say but that at least is the is the alternative view and indeed it seems to me that it's almost impossible in principle that anything physical would be able to explain the experience of consciousness because by its very nature consciousness is a unitary phenomenon and i've always found it very hard to understand how that could be generated by a physical system so how do you do it the only way i can see this is is by as having a picture in which consciousness is a fundamental element of the universe [Music] as a fundamental element of the universe would require a radical restructuring of reality what could that mean for human awareness for the universe itself but can we ever know what could constitute refutation or corroboration i speak with a polymath physicist who says he takes consciousness seriously paul davies i don't believe i don't think many of my colleagues would believe that say an atom is individually conscious and that it's a matter of adding up all lots of little bits of consciousness to get a lot of it it's got something to do with the the system and the complexity of the system and the way it hangs together as a whole that if this system is the brain there is a particular uh point of view which has been put forward by giulio tanoni that somehow uh we can characterize the uh the wholeness of the system like a brain say in terms of a particular mathematical quantity which he he calls integrated information i think everybody would agree that one of the things that brains do is process information we get sense data comes in and this information swells around in the brain and then sometimes leads to agency or action but where is the information processing taking place no neuron in my brain is conscious yet the brain as a whole has consciousness how do we capture that notion the whole being greater than the sum of the parts well tanoni has a candidate measurement and i'm very much drawn to that because for the first time we've got a mathematical quantity which is defined on the whole system which captures the two aspects one is its complexity but the other is its inability to be decomposed into the parts without losing the essential thing that you're looking for and i'd like to import that particular quantity into quantum physics to tackle the the measurement and observer problem uh of quantum physics that i can follow what i'd have difficulty was is going to the next step and saying that that is consciousness because it gets back to the old so-called identity theory right because whatever that structure is how does that create the phenomenal experience right and that's a entirely justified because what this is is a quantitative measure of the degree of consciousness it doesn't in my view address what you're describing which david chalmers calls the hard problem for consciousness these so-called qualia which attach to these conscious experiences is something which is outside of the scope of what i've just been saying and that that remains a mystery what's the implication of that does that mean that your so-called substance duelist is some other thing that exists in reality that has to somehow somehow work with the physical world i think there is something else that exists yes where i will park company with some people is to suppose that this other thing could have an independent existence floating around sort of free of the system in which it's instantiated but i think to fully explain the world as we experience it which includes the qualia then there has to be something in addition to the particles and the forces yes here's the first big question in explaining consciousness can a complete and final neuroscience and ultimate understanding of how the brain works account for the phenomenology of felt experience if yes full stop no more questions if no go on many more questions here are three current contenders for explaining consciousness one integrated information theory consciousness is real structured informational integrated and exclusive consciousness is literally a succession of unique shapes existing in their own special dimension or qualius space two consciousness is a fundamental irreducible part of physical reality it's the bedrock of reality if so could there be deep connections between consciousness and quantum physics because of the special need for observers or because physics structures consciousness and consciousness actualizes physics three consciousness transcends the physical world most scientists despise a non-physical explanation but to explain consciousness i cannot reject it perhaps only consciousness takes us closest to truth for complete interviews and for further information please visit closer to truth dot com [Music] you

Channel: Closer To Truth

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Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, closer to truth full episodes, Giulio Tononi, David Chalmers, Sean Carroll, Max Tegmark, David Wallace, Bernard Carr, Paul Davies, Consciousness, understanding consciousness, What causes consciousness, reason for consciousness, why consciousness

Id: 8kdV0kaKy_w

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022