In Conversation With... exurb1a! (Episode 1: On the Small Matter of Consciousness)

[Music] thank you for coming on first of all oh not at all no it's a pleasure sir it really means a lot that you can have you on the show well thank you for inviting me man no worries um so we're here to discuss you know the tiny insignificant question of what is consciousness exactly totally irrelevant i would say yeah yeah um you know so the aim is obviously to solve it completely yeah i'd say five ten minutes we should be we should have it yeah it should be sorted um so first of all i guess we should start by listing you know what sort of attributes are there of consciousness what sort of things do people think consciousness is about hmm so i'll fire that one to you yeah uh well i i was talking to a friend a few weeks ago and he brought up this uh he thinks it's a common misconception and i kind of believe him um where i was using the word sentient most of the time when i didn't realize that actually relate relates more to your senses um so perceiving your senses than it is actually being uh conscious of of being a thing right so i think he yeah i'm still not totally clear on this but it was it's a good fact to roll out every now and then i'm waiting for the right um situation at a party uh but weirdly it hasn't come up yet strangely especially pandemic yeah yeah and um but yeah no he was insisting sapient was the right way to go but it definitely got me thinking that um we must all have different ideas i guess about what we actually mean by by being conscious um yeah but yeah i suppose we are homo sapiens not homo sentients yeah right hey that's good that's cool yeah yeah i'm also talking about i'm a human being not a human doing yeah absolutely um yeah but yeah i would say the most like the monad if you like that the most basic um elementary unit would just be awareness of of self and and everything else on top of that as a corollary you know like intelligence or um proprioception you know like uh feeling you're in a physical body i would say they're all just things stacked on top of of actually feeling like a feeling like a self-reflecting thing yeah how about you man um well interestingly that last point you just mentioned i was talking to my lecturer back when we had university before the pandemic and uh he's been doing a lot of work on this field this emerging field in philosophy called ipsity i don't know if you've heard of that no but i like the sound of it what's that it relates to what you were talking about it is this very very fundamental um experience of being embodied like that is even people who are supposedly you know have dementia or things like that where they're not they haven't got the higher level states of awareness yeah they still have this very fundamental feeling of being in a body being a thing in space wow okay so it seems super fundamental then to to being conscious in the first place okay yeah yeah wow ipsity is that the is that the is that the field or the name of the of like proprioception or what does that city mean i think that's that that is the name for the feeling of being okay embodied sounds like a great cat name as well yes yeah oh wow whoa it makes me they uh they forced us to read this book at uni ah it's merlot pontiac do you remember this it was a book i can't remember what it was called it'll come to me in a second it was about um how you probably can't have consciousness without actually being embodied that you wouldn't be able to have if you i guess if you start from like an empirical basis if you don't have any senses coming in then you can't possibly form form new thoughts i suppose and become conscious but he seemed quite obsessed about this but i'm sure that was that would unfold into ip city as well you know being grounded in a body that's a really interesting idea because i suppose like the the massive amount of sense data we have coming in does lend uh massively to the thoughts we have i wonder if we could actually have any thoughts without having having senses you know you do need a body to have senses sure could you could you be a disembodied god or something in a void universe and actually have well sorry just one thinking of it there was um uh i guess it's more like phenomenology but oh i was reading something the other day i was an audiobook i forgot what it was and uh there have been a lot of experiments or enough to to confirm it that um if you if your eyes are intact if essentially if the the apparatus is intact um but there's a problem with the brain actually um interpreting the information i guess if whichever part of the brain deals with that gets damaged uh there are a load of people who have been put in front of lamps who are blind completely blind functionally they can't see anything but they have this ethereal weird esp sense for when a light is turned on or not so even though they can't consciously perceive it um something on the inside knows that light is actually coming in well there are there is similar experiments done um i think it's patience i can't remember i think it's the corpus callosum like the part that joins the two hemispheres of your brain together that gets severed and you show these patients um like a picture of a house on a piece of paper and you ask them to draw what they see and and they'll respond to you that say i can't see anything and yet there they will have drawn a house yeah yeah you know completely unaware of them actually doing it they would have done it sure doesn't the doesn't the body get split in a way as well like the the left hand will be doing stuff that the right hand doesn't know about we'll start yeah like alien hand syndrome is is that the name that's pretty cool i like that okay alien hands yeah damn that's must be terrifying that yeah but i guess if we want to be fancy about it i suppose that that does lead to this massive question of well okay if you and i are the product of two joined hemispheres hopefully working in synchrony and if you separate these and they behave functionally like two different people with two different uh wills you know two different sets of volition or whatever then is that what we are all the time and it's just uh suppressed or what i mean that's that's pretty scary yeah about whether you know one conscious correlates onto the brain exactly or whether we can divide consciousness yeah that's it hey that that's you put that a million times better than like that's exactly it yeah could you divide consciousness yeah definitely because yeah that was the basis of one of um descartes arguments for dualism i believe um was the divisibility argument so you can divide a body but you can't divide the mind therefore mind is separate from the body but maybe these experiments where the corpus callosum has been severed and you're essentially become two different people um maybe that disproves descartes argument yeah maybe and i guess yeah from the inside it feels it feels like there's just this one coherent thing there's just one me i won't go on the buddhist rant just yet i can see it's a bit further down on what we're going to do it's coming it's coming okay yeah it's just bursting out of me but um but i i mean i don't know if you think about it when you're in different if you're in alton states after a few beers or something i or i don't know if one is experimenting with drugs or something i obviously never would but if one if one has yeah i think you can feel different facets of your of your mind going on at one time it's just yeah well so there's this trans transhuman version of um if you stop me if you know this one but you know the the ship of theseus this this yeah yeah yeah so there's kind of the transhuman version of that where if you if you like if you had a mechanical hypothalamus or something so you or something smaller whatever you replace someone's brain with a a mechanical part that's completely um that works just as well functionally and you keep doing that you can see where this is going already yeah how much of the brain do you replace until the person becomes mechanical i mean that presumably you still have the same sense of consciousness you still feel like you might be a bit smarter or something but yeah that's a really interesting point actually hmm well yeah i don't know but i i remember reading about it at uni didn't really go anywhere and um and then transhumanism seems to have disappeared for a bit now for some reason i don't know yeah well hopefully it gets revived because that's a really interesting question yeah that's sort of along the lines of like the ship of theseus idea have you ever heard of um the china brain argument oh is this like is the population of china like conscious is this the something like that yes they're working in unity yeah so it's like the number of neurons in the brain is roughly equivalent to the population of china sure so if everyone in china had a two-way radio yeah like like you know neurons and synapses work in the brain would that be functionally the same as your mind yeah yeah well i so i guess it would be [Music] well yeah it gets into the bigger question of is it is it just neuronal activity is it just material you know is it just a materialist phenomena um phenomenon um i guess it would be the date that the actual speed of communication would be the limiting part there to begin with like how fast all the individual people in china could communicate to make something um coherent in the first place i guess uh yeah yeah i don't yeah okay i like that one yeah that's that it also reminds me of the um again i know this is a bit later on on what we're going to talk about but the the chinese room uh you know sells chinese room and i often wonder what where the difference is between computers and us if uh the computer had the same potential oh i don't know if if it was a neural net that modeled my brain to some degree or someone's brain whatever if it did have understanding if it could demonstrate understanding then what's actually changed then is it just the amount of um uh parts of a system that can talk talk to each other like the population of china or is it something is that you know like a ghost in the machine i guess you know well this is the that's that is literally actually yeah that's the main question i suppose yeah yeah um well we said we saw this in five minutes and i think it's been at least seven this is ridiculous well we better just give up um sorry god but yeah so we've we've sort of come to the conclusion that at least being embodied is some part of what consciousness is um so let's talk about knowledge i mean people would say knowledge intelligence um knowledge of the external world and self-knowledge would you say is part of being conscious ah again i'll try and i'll try to reserve myself from going on the buddhist ramp but i don't know i mean it's i i don't know how you feel about this but with but with infants with babies being conscious i mean we can't really ask them about their internal sensations but i mean so i guess i guess that'll be the perfect opening yeah do you think babies are conscious to some degree yet when they're saying the first few months of them being around yeah i suppose that i suppose then it becomes a question of less of a you know a dichotomy are they conscious or not but more of more of a gradient are they less conscious are they are they you know are they not conscious are they less conscious than us sure yeah well the reason i asked was because they don't really have any knowledge except i mean they definitely don't have language unless they're extremely clever um they don't have language yet which everyone seems to for some reason associate with consciousness which i don't understand at all but or they seem to associate it with thought which i i don't get um but yeah but so they don't have language they have basically no understanding of any of the mechanisms around them they've got just the basic uh built-in kind of responses to their their mum and dad i guess or their mum in particular and yeah i don't know if they're not conscious it's hard to imagine at what point does it mysteriously creep in when they become a toddler or something you know but yeah but this is where i start to disagree because you're you're sort of describing uh correct me if i'm wrong the the blank slate model yeah yeah i guess i guess yeah so we sort of come in our minds are blank we have no apriori ideas and we sort of gather the knowledge from the world from experiencing and sense data and all that sort of stuff but i've been i've been watching some lectures recently and i i used to be quite you know for john locke i used to be a proper john locke fanboy yeah but it is true um that without a sort of a priori structure of understanding a la can't you know we wouldn't be able to experience every because i i saw a statistic once and it was like we take in like trillions and trillions of bits of sense data every second you know our brain has to filter through it all to figure out what's relevant um you know how's it supposed to do that without an apriori sort of yeah structure for experiencing you know sure i couldn't agree more yeah well i i think of really you know i guess um an example from outside philosophy would be i've always thought universal grammar was the best example of that and and i don't know why it's so contentious still but just like almost every infant on planet earth as they get older has this natural capacity to start organizing sounds into language and they pick up on grammar without anyone explaining usually grammatical rules to them so there's clearly some even with language there's some apparel structure on the inside there already if you like yeah um so i don't know you know so for sure it's going to extend to to they're going to apprehend reality with some kind of a priority structure as well so yeah no i completely agree with you there for sure incidentally i know someone who um because babies i think it's been found that the the part of the brain that comprehends language is sort of switched on it's on hyperdrive when you're an infant you know so you can pick up the language of your parents okay and i know someone who's that that part of their brain never really switched off and so they can they can pick up a language in a week and they're fluent wow you know how insane is that damn so i i don't want to pick it but like so did they did they get into an mri machine or they just have this amazing aptitude for for for language that's how how they know about it i don't think they were ever officially diagnosed or anything but such such an amazing aptitude for it like you said wow you know it's crazy that is crazy well yeah and i i they must be extremely fun to hang out with i try to throw them like icelandic at them and see and see what they make but that'll be that'll be interesting that'd be the ultimate test i guess um yeah there were i think with a few feral kids i i don't know if that's the correct term that's how that's what i remember reading as years ago feral children had grown up um either in like you know just her basements or horrendous conditions where they weren't brought up properly by loving parents and they hadn't actually been around um people hadn't been speaking to them so they hadn't had time to pick up language i think by the time you get to about 12 you can pick up if you haven't acquired a language by then i think you can still pick up nouns with not too much trouble but you'll never properly understand syntax i don't think you'll ever become a fluent speaker of any language so it does seem to be time dependent like it does go away after around 10 or 11 i think with most people anyway which is pretty weird that's really interesting because yeah i was reading a book and it talked about how humans you know you see the objects around you and and you don't see um you know a table you see a tool first and then you kind of consciously think you know as a table yeah and that that that's really interesting that you said uh feral children if that is the yeah the pc term i can't find a better yeah sorry um if they can recognize you know nouns things yeah that lends a lot of uh credit to the idea that humans perceive things as tools first before they pursue those objects i haven't thought about that that's a great point yeah definitely that's really interesting well that i bet that's another opera structure uh underlying us about that's what makes us so good at tool building is that we just inherently want to not commodify but turn everything into an object that you can use or or exploit or understand or something that's probably part of our well sorry this is a massive segue but just what i think if i i was uh i found this vr like virtual reality um app if you like program whatever um where you could play around with objects in four-dimensional space uh i don't know if you've played around with this yourself no no i don't but uh it was obviously very trippy and i can recommend it with um certain uh recreational pharmaceuticals and i spent a lot of time trying to bend my head around i was i really wanted to become intuitive with because obviously objects don't behave at all how they would in 3d space they just sort of disappear randomly but you can see there is a pattern to it but you can't quite apprehend it with your 3d brain and it got me wondering if you if you were really a sadist and you brought up kids forcing them to they could only perceive um you know the world through a 4d app would they would they pick it up intuitively like i wondered if if uh maybe we've like i guess i'm saying like what's the what's the limit of what humans are i can kind of apprehend as they're growing up um uh if that makes sense like is it just 3d space or if you actually sort of train them on on this early on if they would be able to kind of stretch their consciousness that way if that makes sense yeah when you say 4d space can you just explain what you mean yeah so um maybe you can't i don't yeah yeah if that's that exact i i definitely can't but it's like this this kind of fun um it's it's more a mathematical model or a mathematical trick than anything i think we can grasp intuitively but just if you if you uh ah the way it's always explained it's so cliche but i'm gonna do it like if you had um uh a 2d shape you know trying to imagine a a 3d shape it would basically be impossible to it uh it's quite difficult not to not do this visually but like okay the best example i've heard is if an ant was walking around a branch you know the circumference of a branch or whatever it would end up where it had started because it doesn't understand 3d space and 4d space to us is kind of the same equivalent so an extra dimension of freedom and extra access of movement right that we can't comprehend so things would appear to to what things would seem to appear and disappear to us uh you know just visually in front of us the same way as if you were um poking a 2d shape your finger would just sort of appear as this single 2d balloon passing through its membrane if you like like space-time membrane space-time membrane appearing to its dimension whatever yeah um yeah anyway but so basically the ending of the segue basically the ending interstellar yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah damn i should have just said that that'd be way better yeah sorry yeah anyway that was a massive tangent but um no interesting tangent um well it gets a bit i know it's animal consciousness you've got down here in it i this is something i think about loads and how much they well yeah i'm sorry yeah i'm uh but i wasn't sure if you had a point you wanted to no no no carry on well just yeah i we don't have a good i it's something quite close to my heart where it has been in recent years like whether they are say sapient or sentient in any way or like i think descartes thought they were robots right basically that they yeah automatons i think was his oh tom that was it yeah yeah that's nice and clinical it kind of yeah i like that okay automatons yeah sure but i feel like this is becoming more and more of a problem we can't overlook so much now but um but yeah well yeah where do you reckon they i don't know say higher mammals say bonobos or something like that where do you reckon they they um they rate if we can say they're conscious or whatever i think i think i'll i'll preface this by saying that human beings in my opinion are leagues above even even the highest order animals i don't i don't think that means to say that they're not conscious at all i think they're you know far from it um me personally i i would go along the lines of using thomas nagel's definition like that they're conscious if it's something that it's like to be them sure and i think that definitely higher order animals such as bonobos like they've got a very strong sense of self-identity they know they're a thing in the world maybe they even have that sense of it city you know that they're they're a thing in the world and they know that and uh you know other intelligent animals like dolphins and and crows things like that they can recognize themselves and they've got all these weird ones yeah yeah and magpies weirdly what's that all about like what yeah yeah why yeah well it's a it's a funny one i've been kind of um following the argument for or whatever since i guess i graduated i've been following it with a bit of interest and a lot of it seems to come from as you just said and as i kind of said automatically as well like what animals can do like can they like performatively can they uh if you put an elephant in front of a mirror with the top hat you know does it take the top hat off or some kind of other totally demeaning insane experiment and um yeah but i i've always recently anyway i'm coming around to like is it it's more phenomenologically from the inside do they rather than what they can do to demonstrate intelligence it's more like can they you know like if my cat annoys me i don't beat her or whatever you know the reason i wouldn't hit her or something isn't because i find it distasteful it's because i reckon there's a really small version of me or smaller version of me on the inside of her head you know yeah um even though she she can't she's terrible at arithmetic she sucks at cooking uh but i still it's like she still seems to get she still um demonstrates fear i can see she's clearly trying to problem solve to get up onto the ledge by the window or whatever you know this kind of stuff so it seems like a smaller version of human consciousness and i know i feel like a thing so it's difficult not to impute it not to kind of see it in her you know well that's the kind of that's the traditional way people solve the um the problem of other minds you know because it is yeah it is exactly yeah like it's a private thing to be in mind i i don't know even from talking to you that you have a mind you know i can't i can't peer into your skull and see what's there so all we can all we really can do is look at animals and see how our behavior maps onto them and and use kind of the humans as a yardstick that's it that's and also all the all the apparatus looks almost identical i mean okay the the um in almost every case well i found a weird thing out the other day about i don't know if you knew this um about rel it seems to be relative brain size seems to be the important part with intelligence when it comes to animals so brain whales have i think is it whales i think we have gigantic brains but they're not they know they're smart but they're not us whereas our brains relative to our bodies are enormous in the animal kingdom i think and that seems to be the the important part but um yeah well i was where i was going with this was just yeah it did the fact that animals seem to have such similar setups to us but their central nervous systems i mean mammals anyway their central nervous systems and and you know and their brains it it just seems odd if we're going to grant sapiens should we say to to humans that they they don't at least have a little bit of that but they feel like a bit of a thing maybe yeah but i think this is this is one of the problems with with descartes was that you know if you assume that animals are just automatons they don't have consciousness then that justifies you know animal abuse and things like that i mean he was prolific for you know dissecting animals and i remember reading the meditation for the first time and he said you know have your dissected dog's heart there in front of you you know so you can do it along as i'm as you read it oh my god and i was like oh excellent thanks renee thanks for that i do i don't remember that oh boy oh wow okay but um yeah there's certainly there's certainly similarities but i mean you see the same similarities to an extent in plants as well i thought i thought you're going to say this yeah yeah definitely definitely yeah yeah yeah that's why well i'm quite careful not to go on the the vegetarian in public or whatever because that will often be brought up and i don't have a good they do seem to want to protect themselves they do communicate with each other in large networks like these is it aspirin trees in colorado willow trees whatever that i think it's like the largest organism on the planet and they're clearly communicating with each other telling each other like swapping um fluid swapping water if some of them are low whatever so yeah yeah absolutely if you if you go down this road you don't really stop until you get to atoms basically do you i guess you know no and then obviously at the atomic level everyone's the same anyway yeah sure so uh yeah well we hope so yeah indeed yeah yeah we hope so yeah well i don't know if you want to go there yet but it it seems like that leads naturally onto the ai question yeah definitely yeah if we don't really have a what was this test from blade runner the one where they would show them a picture of a no the oh the um the voigt can't test ah matt that was wow okay i'm gonna gonna have to pick your brains about sci-fi law more clearly okay right yeah um yeah but we don't we don't really have a litmus test even for other humans being conscious so i always wonder when ai gets good enough to start having convincing conversations with us and at least mimicking emotion i mean it would just be too late like how the hell are we supposed to tell whether there's actual activity on the inside there you know i think that's a really interesting question because one of the main points about ai is that we seem to always envision ai you know in science fiction and in real life as taking an anthropomorphic form you know we've got to look like people otherwise we don't want to grant it consciousness yeah this was my this is my i wrote an essay on this actually in university have you ever seen the film uh her with joaquin phoenix yeah yeah i'd love it yeah it's great so that was one of the big questions of that film you know she samantha appeared fully conscious sure she could answer questions she even breathed you know but she was just uh a phone sure so we it it's we we have a reluctance to grant things consciousness when they don't look like people you know yeah or animals i i reckon the reason why i have this theory the reason why we don't do that too much in sci-fi is because it becomes totally impersonable like we can't like what was it there's a really bad johnny dep i thought it was bad johnny that movie years ago transcendence i think it was called uh don't know if you saw this but he as a as a spoiler a bit he becomes uh kind of the main character anyway becomes this kind of super intelligent ai and god at the end and it was completely unrelatable in every way i mean it was just you know you can't it was just him it just i didn't think it worked as like a narrative device same as the lawnmower man because you're like where where is he what is he then you know and i guess it kind of it's almost impossible for for us to wrap our minds around what that would look like but yeah you're quite right we always imagine them as being human and pleasant and often as an american woman for some reason having an american woman's voice for sure but hey i mean samantha the the girl in um her she was like i think she was completely disembodied right she didn't have a no exactly yeah except for that weird scene with the the human standing that came over to the house or whatever yeah yeah so that's a strange one for sure it's it's definitely i think a pressing question um because obviously if we do decide to grant ai consciousness that plays a lot into our ethics you know sure do we do we grant them rights on the back of that yeah do we grant rights to you know a self-driving car you know it's a quantum computer sure um well yeah this was why i was probably being a bit overly vociferous with the the animal the same kind of animal question about them being conscious is something i can't really stop thinking about recently is because it doesn't i know it isn't officially bound in in any any constitution pretty much that i know of that the reason why we don't kill people is because you know the other person is conscious we you know we do it for the we keep these things going for the preservation of society and fair enough okay i think quite a lot of it's based on british common law and that's where it comes from but ultimately the reason why you don't you know you're not supposed to hit people in the face if they annoy you or whatever is because you know there's another version of you on the other side that is going to suffer as a result of that so it's i feel like it's kind of the same problem with animals and machines that if there's no internal suffering if there's no internal activity there it's pretty much carb lunch like same as grand theft auto or something i don't think i'm really killing people you know uh yeah it's it's just uh it's just pixels it doesn't matter but that's yeah when they when ai starts behaving with some semblance of well like he said yeah not even like a human but in a very clever way i don't i don't know demonstrating emotion demonstrating actually what would it be what would it need to how would it need to behave that we would start actually talking about this even if it wasn't i think what the um what the general metric is nowadays is that they call it a gi artificial general intelligence which is at least as good as it as a person yeah but i mean yeah it's a good question like what would it need to show well so with your with your um uh china example earlier i mean i forget where i saw this but this idea that you know google uh how long does it take before google's kind of sentient you know yeah it's just contained if it's just information theory if it's just um a combination of of uh of information in some magical sense then i don't know is google some low-level intelligent and then also if agi is like i don't know building anti-matter drives and taking us off to the galaxy or something even then that could sorry another brief segway but it reminds me of a thing noam chomsky said when someone asked him i might be screwing this up i'm sorry but it's close enough i think um when deep blue beat gary kasparov for the first so the first computer to ever be a human at chess and i think someone asked named chomsky what he thought you know works at mit you know it's quite computation and linguistics and whatnot and he said well yeah it's as impressive as if you'd be impressed by a a bulldozer beating a weight lifter or whatever you know like it's the same kind of it's like a human weightlifter it's not really it's just a it's a function of strength rather than intelligence if you like yeah so back to the chinese room so i just mean even then you could imagine a a highly you know like cosmically intelligent computer if you want but i still it would still be hard to say if that actually if it's if it has its own interests at any point if it has its own internal life or anything you know well it gets to a point where you know especially if we do ever invent uh i think it's called self-recursive ai where it can you know it gets to a point where it's so intelligent that it can design a better version of itself infinitely um well i mean we're not going to stand a chance you know that that that ai could possibly experience emotions that we could never dream of well or i think um in a way the scary side of that might be that it would it could keep um you know exponentially improving whatever and you know maybe it has nasty intentions towards towards humanity or just uses as pointless whatever you know go full terminator yeah but you could still imagine it and it never actually developed consciousness at some point because it doesn't arise naturally so you could have an entire aliens arrive in a thousand years and there's this glittering metropolis all run by this um super advanced ai but this but the lights aren't on on the inside there's no there's no mental activity on the inside you know that's the i feel like that would be the scarier option you know like the consciousness doesn't naturally emerge and i mean if if you had such an intelligent ai to the extent that you know it could rearrange any matter into building more of itself you know and there was an example in a book i was reading um life 3.0 by max tegmark oh yeah i think he said basically remember this yeah it was uh it was a cosmic virus so this ai could send a message to other planets and they'd receive it and they'd get it to build another ai and it would just send on another virus you know and then the whole universe you know could be rearranged into this ai and it would be completely dark there would be nothing alive on the inside sure and then there's then there's nothing left you know yeah like i think max tegmark one of his goals was when writing that book was that uh we've got to be careful with ai definitely um we've got a plan for the future that we want but we've got to want to to wake up as much of the universe as possible and i thought that was really lovely way of putting it yeah it did definitely definitely yeah definitely well i think it's part of the i'm sure he wasn't um going taking it out of the transhumanist kind of law but uh there's definitely been this thing around for at least 15 years uh since was it the singularity is near this ray kurzweil book maybe it's 10 years old or something yeah um where i think his he thought the end result would be that we we kind of do the same version of this we infuse everything with nanobots and we we yeah we wake the entire universe up or whatever which is it sounds great but i do wonder if it's like a bit of a human-centric yeah more of us more more stuff that's uh you know that's that's um like consciousness will be the be-all and end-all you know yeah um yeah it's a good question i mean whether we whether we should uh if we can whether we should wake up the universe or whether or whether it's awake already of course but yeah well whether it's awake already yeah um but i suppose that brings us nicely on to you know if if we want to talk about consciousness and if we want to talk about waking up the universe if it's something we can do um where consciousness actually lies yeah for sure so i mean the common definition that everyone accepts today is that consciousness is found in the brain you know if you ask someone where's your mind they're gonna point vaguely at their head um in some sort of way um but i was reading actually an interesting fact i don't know if you've heard this about the uh the cerebellum in the brain so it's this it's this really really archaic an old part of the brain and it has roughly half the neurons in our brain and twice as many synapses and yet if it's severely damaged or in some cases people can be born without it and they continue to live completely normal lives even though this structure with half of their neurons is just you know out of the question what so it does provide you know a uh a problem for the people that say you know uh well consciousness maps onto these parts of the brain sure sure so do they do you know if they do they uh are they impaired if they if they get it are they impaired to some no from what i've read that they're capable of living completely full lives they experience the full gamut of emotions they they've not got any problems with their experience um and yet you know this massive chunk half of their brain is missing wow that is i did not know about that that is really weird because that's the argument i always use as a as a staunch materialist when anyone brings up this kind of well the brain is a you said it earlier but yeah well the brain is a receiver or something you know for some higher higher form and i i always try to bring up or hang on but we know that if someone is injured if they have a brain injury usually in a particular part will correspond to a particular injury but i think if if what you've just said is true that completely blows out the water then i didn't know that at all that's really interesting wow okay so so you consider yourself as a materialist a reluctant one i am i would love to be shown any proof otherwise and i would uh i would immediately change camps to to whatever i would love to believe would not just meet yeah but i i feel like if there's one thing we should be conservative about it's um um yeah you know scientific materialism essentially and and not uh not allow anything into the pantheon of science until we have you know uncontestable proof as yet but yeah how about yourself um well i've had a difficult relationship with the mind to say the least um i'm i'm sort of on the property duelist camp myself so i believe that while the brain the mind sorry is non-physical it depends on the brain for its existence but it's interesting you should bring this up because i was having a conversation with someone on my server the other day another staunch materialist and you know that they pointed to science and said there's nothing in in science that says that we have a non-physical mind sure and i was researching some articles and i found a really interesting one that says that we can be uh we can have the the scientific world view but not be so reductionist about it yeah yeah so you know it's a pretty common argument but obviously if the mind does turn out to be non-physical then no amount of sciencing is gonna find it yeah sure well i guess that that assumes that whatever the whatever it is based on um you know what okay not material then but whatever the standard for that is if it's some i don't know if it's living in some extra dimension of space or whatever it is presumably you can't imagine it you would still imagine though it would be it would you could apply science to it maybe it would be a in the same way as i'm not i'm not making this as a derisive as a mean example i just mean this thing comes into my head but like in the same way as in in fantasy i was going to say harry potter but i'll say just in fantasy you have magic is sometimes treated as a science and i've also that was really cool because it's usually something we think of as chaotic and obeying no rules but recently especially maybe from harry potter and serious fantasy and stuff it's been treated as another system of rules if you like and i always imagined if um like property dualism or if it hadn't if if the mind turned out to be non-physical if you like that it would be the same situation that it would be a new science that isn't based on um on mata but some you know some exotic matter or something like that yeah um uh but do you mean do you mean it wouldn't be you wouldn't be able to apply scientific principles to it if it was extra material or whatever yeah so uh science as we have it at the minute um obviously requires empirical evidence and falsification so if it does turn out that the mind is something that is you know extra physical or can't be falsified then it's not something that science as we know it could discover but like you said if there is you'll know the official name for this uh but that it was one of the objections to descartes dualism that how you know how a non-physical uh entity or non-physical matter or whatever could interact with with our mata you know yeah it's hard to there must be some bridge there presumably somewhere i feel like yeah the interaction problem yeah okay yeah but that's the the technical name for it um so well descartes response to that was that the the brain interacts with the mind in the pineal gland which which doesn't really help anyone because the pineal gland is a physical thing yeah it doesn't explain anything but that was the gland that was traditionally thought of as the kind of third eye the kind of you know that sort of idea so you can see where he gets it from but it was um i think it was elizabeth of bohemia it was her objection she said well if something's physical it's got a surface and non-physical things can't by definition have a surface so how is something without a surface meant to interact with something with a surface sure and it's a valid it's a valid point uh yeah i i feel like it is for sure as long as you work you know strictly in definitions and with theoretics it's i feel like it's it's almost as though you're trying if the if the gods could be here now and actually explain to us how how it worked if it wasn't on physical i feel like it would be the same question as if we were trying to explain x-rays to someone in the 1500s or something you know they would have the same kind of questions that maybe we we do about about this now but but yeah so what without me being too invasive what makes you think it it might be um non-physical as such um well i don't know if you've gathered from um videos i've posted in the past but i'm i'm quite a defender of qualia yes but i did i did try um but just to describe what qualia are they're the kind of you know the most fundamental units of experience that we have um and i did try in one video just to link it back to what you said actually about you know a new science um a new science of magic shall we say um that plays by different rules but are nonetheless discoverable um i was doing a lot of research for one video i did about the explanatory gap and so we don't have any idea at the moment you know what causes our sensations you know whether it's whether qualia or non-physical whether the mind's non-physical um but in time we will we will hopefully have progressed in our science to be able to give it a physical answer that that's the goal um and the reason i'm a dualist for lack of a better word is that we're not there yet and and qualia is a good description of the phenomenology behind it shall we say definitely um i don't believe we're we're at the point with science to provide uh a fully physical account of uh of mind but i suppose i'm sort of the opposite to you in that sense because you know you're ready to jump across to dualism i'm ready to jump across to physicalism as soon as the evidence is there um yeah but with that that's why i said i'm i'm a reluctant um hard materialist if you like because i i yeah i feel like you you're about to mention the hard problem of consciousness so i didn't want to butt in but that's one thing that really that was kind of my damascus road moment where i haven't managed i still can't imagine how you could match up internal sense experiences the taste of chocolate or whatever with meat i can't see any bridge between this this feels like so far off that it just i'm you know if you could i think i pretty much take any theory over um over materialism right now which which is probably why i've gone down the pan cyclist avenue i suppose but yeah yeah i mean that's the thing about it you know by definition it is a really hard question and it's like there's this there's this massive crevice between two sides where you know it is as it's like you said you know you look at someone's brain and you see a certain amount of neurons firing and you say oh that's the taste of chocolate and it's like is it really no you know it's a really hard thing to imagine sure sure and it it's also you know um the world of you know being being a thing being in me is totally it could not be more different to seeing my if i was to see my brain in real time on an mri scanner or something there's just no association there whatsoever even on some abstract level you know yeah it really confuses me why um i don't know if you're following the um the kind of the hard problem as it is today with you know dan dennett yeah uh and how he i still don't get how he tries to explain it away i've really tried to grapple with like he doesn't think it's a real problem and i still don't really understand why no i haven't been uh keeping up with it enough to realize oh fair enough um it was mentioned in that book life 3.0 and it was in relation particularly this was this blew my mind when i read it so max tag mark he was talking about ai consciousness and in particular free will so we had discussion of uh determinism and how you know atoms are abide by the laws of physics everything is made of atoms so everything seems you know at least a surface level to be deterministic um we won't go into quantum theory so just you know just leave that for now yeah um but but he said and this was the thing that really blew my mind um the quickest way to see whether a computer program is going to work or not is to run it you know you can run uh however many tests you want you know in in theory or this might happen and map it out but the quickest way to see if it's going to work or not is just to run it sure and he said well if that's what free will is you know the quickest way to see if we're going to do something is to do it then you know where's where's the where's the problem there that's as close as free will as we're going to get in even in a deterministic frame view freight yeah i've never i've never heard the argument before i really like that yeah and it also it gets rid of any you know if you imagine some cartesian evil demon above you who knew the position of every attack that was the name for this the demon someone's demon uh the demon that knew every position of every atom in the universe you know and or the velocities and trajectories or whatever so it could predict everything that was going to happen but that like i guess tegmark's example get around that because it still couldn't compute fast enough compared to actually just living it you know yeah exactly and you know even if you could theoretically predict that the the motion and velocity of every atom you'd never arrive at the point to realize what's going to happen until it actually happened yeah and you know that's damn that's weird how is this not more famous that's really uplifting i've never come across that before that's great so that really blew my mind because even in the the strictest deterministic framework you you still have room for free will yeah damn i really like that that's wow you've just wiped away 10 years of of uh of existential misery that's brilliant that's great and you know that plays into you know our ethics our responsibility um all of those things we can still have even if we go full matrix reloaded and everything's deterministic you know we can still have all those things and i thought that was really wonderful yeah definitely yeah it reminded me slightly of um you know with um private keys like with encryption online and how it's it's usually just a um a huge prime number you know like i don't know a 20 digit prime number or something gigantic and that's the that's the security code and you've got to work out what the two um you know what's been multiplied together essentially to make this prime number and the reason why it's so effective is because i think these are numbers that are so large it would take it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to to solve if you would look if you were trying to brute force it so you have to have the private key and also that was weird that our phones were running on that principle that even with billions of years you couldn't crack it with just brute forcing the thing you know yeah but um anyway yeah no that's that's a great example man i like that that's that's awesome um that is awesome so we've had a bit of discussion of materialism and dualism um i'm going to turn to you for this one because i assume you've you've researched it more than i have but pan psychism seems like a third way um yeah well i i'm only going to be proselytizing um from the the arguments that were given to me and and like i said it i got really into it because it seemed like such a a novel way out of the forest so i don't i'm not behind it because of its efficacy and explaining anything i just think it's a really cool idea but the the way it was explained to me anyway was um by watching um a bunch of talks reading some papers by david chalmers uh who's quite a strong proponent of this and the guy who coined the hard problem of consciousness as well i think and his argument was that you know just like you said um the neural correlates of consciousness scanning someone in a brain scanner still doesn't match up with there's still there's still no obvious data to tell you how that produces the taste of anything or the feel of anything essentially so we're missing something huge when it comes to actual experience we still can't explain this in terms of meat and there's quite a nice corollary there with um electromagnetism which just didn't fit into any models back in the day essentially when this was faraday faraday maxwell i think it was maxwell originally came up with the the the original um equations for describing electromagnetism and he i really hope it's maxwell he postulated electromagnetism as a fundamental force in the universe which was a really radical idea um so alongside gravity and you know later the strong and weak nuclear forces and that worked really well now it was a fundamental constituent of the universe rather than something that didn't fit into the model and uh so the suggestion is that maybe that's what consciousness is now that's why we're having such a hard problem with trying to integrate it into um my you know silly uh conservative materialistic view or whatever uh materialist view because it's not gonna fit because it's a it's a fundamental constituent of the universe so to wrap this ridiculous rant up essentially what you get out of that is that necessarily atoms must be a little bit conscious if it's a fundamental force the same way as atoms have spin and charge and particles of spin and charge and then molecules must be slightly more conscious and then up and up until you get to us but i must say that the hard part about that is imagining why do you need the brain then like what is the brain collecting these weird um blobs of consciousness like some kind of uh you know this kind of gray goo or whatever what's going on there but yeah how about you man it's um it's something that i've i've looked into in the past and actually when i was at uni um i attended a fantastic talk actually by one of the postgraduate students who was doing his thesis on uh pan psychism and idealism so idealism obviously being the view that there's no such thing as matter everything is mind and one of the main criticisms of idealism especially barclays idealism is that um he uses god to kind of fill in the gaps you know because if if you know if we're not looking at something then it doesn't exist you know the room behind us doesn't exist but you can solve that if god is watching everything all the time um you know there's various various problems with that um obviously there's no evidence that god actually has that role that berkeley places him in um and you can have the atheistic arguments as well so this postgraduate student he said that we can patch up idealism the theory that everything is mind using pan psychism so there's no need for god in this instance because everything's watching itself all the time and that sort of blew my mind as well wow that's wow that's a great combination of two insane ideas to make something brilliant but then i don't know how well that fits in with with your description of it as kind of a fundamental constituent of the universe if um if if consciousness is a thing such as spin on a particle how that would work if everything was mined you know if everything was if everything was consciousness so i always have a heart oh it also reminds me of you probably know this story in more detail than i do but who's the guy who's trying to who's really annoyed with berkeley was he a bishop or something and he was really annoyed with berkeley's idealism and apparently he just he was on a beach in front of a load of people and he just went up and kicked a rock and said i refute berkeley thus like everything can't be yeah like what what a power move you know like what a dick um and so i never understood what quite what they meant by everything being mind like as in being ethereal or being a product or something conscious or the um the the technical term is idea so there there are various arguments for it um there's a lot of philosophy behind it um mainly to do with john locke and his primary secondary quality distinction uh it's a bit complicated and to go into here but his basic argument his master argument he called it was uh he said try and imagine a tree that no one else is thinking of and you say okay yeah i can do that obviously bartley and then he says well you're thinking of it it's it has to exist in someone's mind and so his argument was that all that exists are ideas and the way he traditionally formulated was that you know god is the kind of source of all these ideas and our minds each partake a bit in god okay which is you know it's trippy it gives it gives everything this really non-physical quality as well like yeah i feel like there's a bit of a yeah i feel like there's a bit of a relation there to modern physics now we're kind of we we don't really believe in in solidity anymore we know it's true like we don't really believe you can't really touch anything you know it's just um electrons repelling another other electrons so like yeah a whole example of solid a whole idea of solidity is just a total total illusion and i always wondered like so what is behind anything then and i and ideas is a great answer to that that's awesome and that was barclay's point cause someone said you know well why can't you just be simple why can't it all be mata and barkley said well why does it have to be mata why not ideas it's equally absurd either way it is it is you know it's crazy to think what the universe might be made of either way so why not be ideas at all you know why not sure i'll tell you what some um i've been watching some some old debates between william lake craig the christian and dawkins and some people yeah from back in the day and uh that would get raised a lot by william lane craig and even though i don't agree with him on most things it is hard to get around that when you when you actually think of what the current picture of mata is there's nothing or normal about that it's totally bizarre and if you were you know if you were just um if you had no access to any scientific equipment whatsoever you would never come up with that model it's not there's nothing common sense about it so yeah why not why not ideas exactly because we're all just sort of you know we get taught it in school and we get raised up on on uh atomism we just say yeah everything's made out of atoms we just accept it but when you think for just two seconds it's like actually that's mad yeah yeah so so this this uh the guys talk you're watching his idea was that the so the universe is kind of watching itself and that's how the idea is being uh contained and stay consistent yeah because in in in barclays original formulation if you didn't have god things only existed if you were experiencing them so you know the stuff behind you if you if you left an apple in the draw for instance and it would cease to exist because it's not being observed but with with this guy's talk you know if everything in the universe is watching itself and everything else all the time then everything would be the what sustains everything else that is very trippy it is that is very i wonder what did berkeley think consciousness was made of then because it can't just be a did you think it's just a massively complicated like matrix of ideas producing sentience or something then well um i think yes and his answer to what would that matrix be would be god okay okay fair enough so god is kind of the source of all ideas that's that's a that's a cool card to paul yeah okay that that works and i i would say because you know looking at occam's razor in that obviously the the simplest answer is is often the best one if you you put idealism to a do a dualist say and it is a lot more simple yeah it's a lot more simple it's maybe as simple as materialism so there's no reason to favor one or the other but there's no reason to deny one over the other either yeah well you could imagine if i know it's a really cliche example to use but you can imagine if you woke up as a very if if you were a sentient character in a computer game and you woke up the material world would seem completely consistent to you if as long as the program was working properly or whatever yeah you would have no concept that what you're actually based in is i mean that's about as close to to not ideas but i suppose you know something immaterial as it gets and it's just code and you know you'd have no idea that the bedrock of your reality was just basically pure idealism so it's kind of the same situation i guess yeah i mean that's assuming we're not in a simulation anyway yes indeed that's true that is true you just go down a rabbit hole don't you get trippy but um yeah yeah yeah i can't believe i came to this conversation sober what was i thinking yes exactly so we've talked a bit about um what consciousness is um which beings we might consider conscious and where consciousness could be located um in the body or in some non-physical realm um so let's take a brief detour talk about when consciousness is um whether we you know exist in the present um or whether there's other factors at play or you know if time is a is a construct of of our consciousness i suppose so what do you what do you think about that well yeah this was the the um debate we always used to have in uni with cancer categories of experience was it uh whether whether time is one of them or whether you whether you could be conscious without time so whether you could be a deity outside of time and still actually have conscious experience it's hard to imagine how you could have thoughts without the passage of time and how you could change um yeah but yeah i don't actually do you know where christian theology or anything stands on that how they think god could like god seems in the older new testament he does seem to have changed his mind in a few points so presumably he does have um days when he's feeling a bit more or a bit less angry or whatever so there must be there must be a change there with with gods in theology i guess well the the there's a debate in the christian standpoint whether god is eternal or everlasting uh because it says both in the bible one one being god is timeless he exists outside of time uh the classic example is you know he's he's on a hill and he's looking at all the all the traffic you can see it he can see everything below you know sure and the other example is that god exists uh within time but for the whole of time and i don't know where you stand on that personally yeah well i i only it's probably only my bias of uh you know whatever 11 years of church of england i don't want to say brainwashing because everyone was super polite they're always lovely but um it definitely hammered in this idea that god is outside of time and i also that was the the standard um the kind of orthodoxy but i i hadn't heard about that distinction that he might not be outside of time he might just be immortal basically is that what you're getting at yeah that's those are the two general views okay i mean i i would side with you that god is exist outside of time and can kind of see all of it at once because i always imagine if god is let's say immortal for lack of a better term um within time then that sort of means he's subject to change you know he changes throughout time and that doesn't seem to gel with what uh christians think god is well it kind of it kind of makes him a very powerful super being but not the kind of perfect supreme being that i feel like most of us have been raised with anyway yeah and also it makes it really hard to imagine how he would have created the universe from outside time as well in a way yeah i mean these are all these questions where our kind of our way of grasping it sort of breaks down yeah for sure yeah for sure you know yeah look like you're like your 4d game but sort of just extrapolated outwards to infinity you know it just becomes impossible to imagine i've i've often had this with um again bring it back to my cat like i i will always continue to do but i i always sometimes she'll be watching me i don't know cook wanting a blue moon or doing something particularly human and she's clearly interested but i know she can never conceptually wrap her mind around it and i'm i i'm often wondering if we're having the same problem they'll just you know trying to grapple with i don't know an immortal being or something an eternal being i guess you just ne is something we're not cognitively capable of actually wrapping our minds around yet you know yeah um because i mean uh to return to the question um you know does time exist without consciousness i mean we can talk about god but um we can talk about people as well i mean if we imagine a universe in which there are no people or there are no sentient beings let's say or sapient beings um which whichever is the correct term um can there be any sense of time passing if there's nothing there to experience it you know it's you know when einstein was poking fun at the um the quantum theorists and yeah he said um well is the moon there if we're not looking at it you know does it does it carry on carry on staying in the sky i guess it's the same kind of question with with time yeah well i as you were saying i was just thinking what how what would even be a halfway clever answer to that i got nothing clever but um the fact that before we were here the universe appears to have undergone so many changes at least seems to imply even if it doesn't happen experientially even if the universe is dead and it's not conscious of itself and there's no one watching blah blah blah it does seem to have had change over time over 14 billion years you know just started as a quark soup or whatever and eventually turned into matter and planets and stars so something happened you know there was actual um like material change but if there's no one to experience it yeah does it all just happen at once like uh in the bulk i suppose yeah i mean i suppose that depends on whether you're defining time as being dependent on events that are happening within it sure or being completely independent because you know if time is dependent on the events then the events the changes the universe went through in the early stages would sort of lend some credit to the fact that there was time because things were changing but there's there's a do you know color revelli the physicist no never i i think you really digging me uh so i think i can't remember what his area is specifically they see the cosmology or quantum mechanics i can't remember but anyway he writes popular science books basically and one of them i read last year i can't remember what the name was apparently i totally suck at titles but he was trying to hammer home that time is a not a thing spread like a sheet invisibly across the universe that's just there independently it's a fundamental principle of objects undergoing change so it kind of carries with the object itself and if there were no objects if there was no material it would be impossible to conceive of time which is kind of an obvious point i guess but it never occurred to me that it's like a product of things actually check it it's all it is is a measure of change right that's the only thing it can be subjective or not it's just the measure of change um with reference to nothing else and i don't know that blew my mind when he uh when he put it like that anyway but then again i suppose if we're talking about with reference to change um the universe isn't capable per se of experiencing its own change so is that again dependent on something being there to observe it yeah i guess this is like a really cosmic version of if a tree falls in the forest right like it's yeah let's say the same as you know some distant galaxy where there aren't eyes or conscious minds or something uh is starlight still white or is it just a really uh is it just a wavelength of the the electromagnetic spectrum you know like um yeah i don't know i guess i suppose what we're asking is like do does something need to be observed to actually be said to be happening objectively in the world i guess you know yeah but the fact that you can uh i don't know leave a kettle boiling walk out the kitchen come back in and it appears to have carried on being a cattle for as long as you've been away it seems like evidence that the universe doesn't need you know um eyes to to experience it to be there i suppose this is one of the benefits of pan psychism again yeah yeah because if everything's if everything's watching itself if everything is then capable of generating its own time sure well can i can i use this opportunity to inject the the small buddhist rant then because i think it's kind of yeah of course you can but the reason why i got quite taken with it a few years ago was getting bored with i don't know materialist narratives and stuff uh there's there's one i should put a meme warning here like i saw this on them lesswrong.com or something where they would have like memetic warnings where an idea was so i don't know they thought an idea was so deadly that you just need to be damn careful that you're in the right state of mind and i always feel like someone should put a warning between the before what i'm about to say because i was never able to recover from it maybe you won't think it's that deep and that's a good thing but um it in buddhism at least and i think in hinduism to a degree uh there's the doctrine the doctrine of emptiness essentially in buddhism anyway which is that if you i i think i've done this before but if you look on the inside of yourself hume said something similar about objects in the mind but if you look at if you look inside of yourself there isn't actually a central you anywhere you can't look for one you can't find one um there isn't a center to your consciousness that's actually having sensations you know there's just there's just sensations awareness of those sensations something something for sure doing the you know something feels pain but it's not a centralized point that scared the shit out of me when i first first kind of came upon it and uh i've never really been able to get over it since so often when i'm i don't know in in pain or doing something pleasurable eating something nice or whatever i'm often watching quite closely for what where is this actually being experienced who is actually experiencing this you know what's actually taking the sensation in um so it it kind of flies in the face of of all the if there is a western tradition anyway of of like there being you know the homunculus or whatever on the inside that's that's watching everything and noting everything down on the inside of your brain and i i buddhist for sure and especially i'd say to be honest like taoists and and lots of that lots of that crowd yeah because that's not demeaning i mean lots of religions aren't lots of religions that aren't judo christian uh um you know based um i feel like that's that's just taken as read that there isn't really a centralized self which completely blew me away that anyone had this idea at all and i've been unable to get it out of my head since you know yeah and i suppose that then um plays into how you know their meditation and and being aware of things sure not not being you i suppose but just being aware of what's happening as sort of a passive recipient sure well that that's what freaked me out with when i first started meditating was it was exactly the ex one of the first exercises uh uh buddhism never gave me was to actually try and find you when they you know actually look for what what is experiencing the sensations and uh i i couldn't find one then and i still can't find one now um then i suppose my question would be um to you i suppose as well as the buddhists um you know just in general the buddhists so that'd be a great sitcom obviously yes um i i i get that it is something i think hume stole it from the buddhists to be fair i think he went viciously close it is suspiciously close yeah he did go traveling in like um the east right i'm pretty sure he just he just stole it as aristotle did as well yeah yeah i think that's just the tradition in the west he's just stealing various ideas from the east wait is there a segment who's who's aristotle nicking stuff from um i can't remember exactly okay but they were i think it was i think it is a buddhist idea that excellence comes from habit and there's certainly very steeps in it yeah for sure yeah so you know anyway um but my question would be well you know everyone can look into themselves and and see that there's no self you know just sense experiences sense data sure nothing really unifying it but then you don't have any sort of qualms about saying that like it's not me that's having your sense data it is it is you yeah it's not you know multiple people you know that it's you you don't necessarily know uh you know what it is but you know it is you i would say the same as if i if i trod on your foot or something you said oh that hurt i would say yeah but who did it hurt i mean what's up yeah obviously i just i just take it as read that like i'm not going to do it again sorry you know that yeah sure i know funk functionally it doesn't really change anything yeah true yeah i know that reminds me if i'm like i think richard feynman used to get really annoyed when he would have to go for dinner with philosophers and he i noticed in loads of his books he rant about how irritating they were but he really hated philosophers of mind and he said that he really doubted when uh highfalutin philosophers of mind were eating dinner they were really you know looking at this piece of steak on their fork and thinking am i seeing the steak or am i seeing the light that's bouncing off the stuff you know you know it's just not you just you just think it's delicious and that's it and shut up you know yeah you know you're perceiving the stakeness yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah i only mentioned it segway because i just it never occurred to me before that there was a different uh a different way to think about consciousness that it's very once you get to that not that point but once that idea embeds itself in you like it did in me anyway i suddenly found this new dimension i guess not i don't mean better or more enlightened or anything like that probably the other way but i don't know a new place to come from when it when it was debates about uh getting into debates about consciousness because it's yeah without the homunculus there at the middle without the the the capital i watching in the middle it is quite difficult to to imagine what's going on in that but again it like said sorry functionally yeah if you if you uh came at me with a blowtorch or something i would get out of the way i wouldn't think well it's not gonna hurt anyone so it'll be fine you know yeah um interestingly i've been doing some research for a new video on um new atheism and that's actually really interesting um i don't know if you know much about sam harris yeah sure you know um neuroscientist yeah um and and his response to how we find meaning in a universe with no religion or know god was that we should try meditation and erase our sense of self well that was his response uh really okay uh yeah so i've read i read a few of his books i was i was a fan of this for a few years and i i didn't come across that specifically as advice that's interesting okay so he did he went on lots of meditation retreats and i think he describes himself as kind of a a secular buddhist so i can see where it's coming from but so he thought we should just realize that that that's that that's how essentially we'll become better people is is by dissolving ourselves whatever yeah um and that struck me as quite odd for someone who is uh you know a staunch scientist materialist you know um yeah but i think i think his position on he he said it quite explicitly and and not not indelicately but uh it was yeah with he certainly wasn't mincing words that basically we should just we should take the teachings of buddhism take away the metaphysical side you know teach them some rebirth or whatever and just actually practice a secular version of this which yeah i can kind of see where he's coming from i mean has it brought you greater um you know sense of meaning fulfillment purpose no no no no no no no none whatsoever in terms i'm more confused uh um in terms of a purpose than i've ever been it just gets weirder as the game goes on but i would say on a human level there was one thing i got out of it which is um you can't do it this will sound really kind of um primitive i guess but you can't do it if you're super pissed off or super upset but you it definitely taught me like meditating and sitting through a lot of buddhist lectures anyway when i was a bit younger it certainly gave me some ability to watch your own emotions from the outside so that if you're experiencing something unpleasant you don't actually have to associate it with it associate with it directly as though it's a part of you i know that sounds very pseudo spiritual and uh it sounds quite pseudospiritual to me but it never occurred to me before that you can actually distance yourself from your own that you're that you're not your emotions essentially you're not your own sensations of the sensations inside your mind if that makes sense yeah and i suppose that um that plays a lot into um the stoic attitude you know you can't change what you experience you can change how you react to it well you know i think it's still pretty applicable today like the stoics still seem to live on do you think yeah definitely it's like i said a bit of a revival stoicism yeah well it fits so comfortably with with this kind of modernism thing we've got going on now i think like it's uh there isn't much for an answer to this except well we're all kind of screwed so we better just try and you know accept that it's going to be nasty or whatever you know but um yeah did you did you have any dabblings with uh well so i was a bit curious about the the the jewelers leanings that you mentioned earlier um but did you ever have any dabblings with something a bit more immaterial did any of the the doctrinal faiths or whatever draw you in if it's not too invasive a question um as in you mean the buddhist view yeah well no i mean anything any of the any of the um sort of religious doctrines or any of the immaterial stuff spiritually like did this ever did this ever appeal um that's a good question i i'm definitely um just speaking from personal experience um more more open to uh the spiritual and and supernatural than um than you know modern science would suggest yeah and interestingly enough um through my gcses i was um you know i was a i was a science student my favorite subjects were physics chemistry biology you know and you know all the humanity stuff could be left aside and then by the time a levels came around i was with the a levels i did i did biology for a level but i did philosophy and biology uh philosophy and english okay yeah and i started through deeper kind of research into it i suppose i became more open to the idea of there being something else and and and from that very scientific uh start that i had i was very staunchly scientific um i've made myself more aware now of uh the limits of science and avoiding the dogma of scientism particularly yeah yeah yeah definitely because i think scientism is something that you'll see a lot of nowadays and i think personally it's equally as bad as religious fanaticism sure couldn't agree more yeah so you know i think we need to be i think just to be humble is is my opinion um we need to you know we we know we know a lot about the world through through science it's in you know um a massively powerful tool that we have and have cultivated over hundreds of years and we're a good place now um but there's still so much more to know and the stuff that we don't know is massively outweighs the stuff that we know couldn't agree more yeah you know so i think you know to remain humble don't you don't necessarily have to agree that there are supernatural things that exist um but don't don't close your mind off to it yeah it's it's a really easy one to do um if you are i didn't i only bumped into the word scientism a few years ago when a friend accused me of it and it's almost like when you when you're given this when you're given a new word you can suddenly see it everywhere and i saw it definitely in myself a lot and it really i really had to draw back from this kind of obsessive reductionism you know i don't know if you fell into this one as well if that's what you're getting at but i've i realized i've been like that for i was like that for at least 25 years of everything had to be reduceable down to natural laws down to um you know there must be some scientific component otherwise it's rubbish and i can't believe i spent a quarter of a century like that like i you know it's so strange but the pro the problem is the fanaticism from the other side which i've sometimes bumped into as well where you know um massive haters of scientism and i completely get it you know maybe that's more where i am now um but the the the view is also just as ridiculous and maybe it's fundamentalism that's the problem in any respect just like you were saying to stay humble actually except that the gulf of what we don't between what we know and what we don't know is just so gigantic right now yeah and i mean you know this this goes back to our our discussion of uh physicalism and non-physicalism you know whether qualia exists whether the mind is ultimately physical or non-physical um there is you know that there's meaning in the pursuit you know um there's there's this song lyric that's been stuck in my head recently um there is no growing in knowing where you're going and you know half of half of the magic and the the purpose we get from it is is finding things out sure and if you're you know apriori closed off from any supernatural explanations i don't want to say supernatural because that's got a stigma around it but not anything yeah anything just outside the realms of science sure sure then then you then you're shutting yourself off from that um that's striving for it and that that's half the magic yeah i couldn't agree more i do well so would if we if it was possible to have a completely materialist framework for consciousness do you think that would um do you think that would kind of would devalue humans in a way would you value human consciousness um that's a good question i think well i think it would it wouldn't devalue consciousness per se even even if the answer was you know or the mind is completely physical or the mind is completely non-physical um there would there would be some element of kind of oh well we've done it now yeah yeah yeah that's it yeah you know either way even if it was non-physical um it's kind of like yeah you know you know next thing um bring it along yeah but well on that note then let me uh let me ask you something i think about uh quite a bit while i'm washing the dishes these days which is why evolution why do you think if it was evolution that um gave gave it to us gave us consciousness what the hell was the evolutionary benefit of creatures being conscious over creatures which aren't because like the max tegmark um consciousness virus from planet to planet whatever it's a really cool metaphor i'm stealing that uh yeah it's why couldn't you just have a whole planet of creatures that behave as cleverly as we do um but you know but there's no there's no light on the inside essentially like i mean that does seem that does seem easier yeah it does right yeah not not to put myself knowing better than evolution um it does seem easier if there was like a a planet of completely you know animals but they're just automatons they're they're philosophical zombies um i think it's it's a mistake to think um not trying to be accusatory or anything no no that there was necessarily a reason for it because obviously evolution is a blind watchmaker it doesn't matter it doesn't it doesn't go towards anything per se it didn't build up to us being conscious it could just be that it happened randomly and that was massively beneficial for us because now we're the with a top dog on the planet you know definitely and um yeah it could have been something like that yeah yeah that never that doesn't get brought up much does it that evolution there are there's a like junk dna they're not necessarily junk dna but there's loads of examples of just erroneous stuff that's been thrown into biology that doesn't actually serve any evolutionary benefit it's just there is some weird accident or some some throwback that was never taken out of the you know um of the evolutionary design or whatever yeah it's i always think of it as this teleological process trying to build the smartest thing but it isn't like that of course yeah you're quite right i mean there was something i read i think it was a richard dawkins book uh i think it might have been the blind watchmaker actually yeah where he said you know there's there's conceivably it could have been completely different evolution and we could have been rearranged in a completely different way and we would have been so much better off but yeah but you know yeah it didn't it happened this way and this is where we are sure sure and uh yeah it could have just been that oh consciousness happened to come about maybe it's dependent on the mind maybe it's maybe it's a you know direct result of the physical organizing of the brain but it just happened the way it did and where where we are now yeah it just it just seems so i guess because it's the only thing i know and it's the only thing we all know from the inside it just seems so fundamental to being alive that it's hard not to imagine there's some kind of that it confers some advantage against a version of me or you that's not conscious that could still you know make podcasts and and uh play with the cat or whatever but what like i there are lots of um versions of the theory floating around at the moment that it may have begun you know the same ways like the eye began as a single photoreceptor that conferred an advantage over you know whatever so you can see where this is going already that maybe maybe it began from some mode network that's me trying to sound clever like whatever it's called something the source information whatever it may have started very simply sorting trying to integrate senses um and then it just consciousness got bit you know more and more complex and built up and built up and built up and maybe came out of this or something yeah definitely i mean that definitely plays into um i don't know if you've read um sapiens by ivan yeah yeah so so his big idea obviously in that was that um we developed kind of consciousness and most importantly the ability to gossip you know that's what separated humans out from everything else is that we could talk about things that weren't directly in front of us you know we could imagine scenarios and and chat about you know things going on that weren't directly um about and that gave us an advantage because then we could have group ideologies you know religions can come about uh businesses can can come about we can use this funny you know paper that we could we can use to pay for things and we'll get things in return and so i like that because it it does give a a proper description of how the society that we have now is kind of founded upon the ability to be conscious to be sure yeah definitely but it is i i also like these explanations where you take something as noble as intelligence and something we see as such the crowning achievement of our species that we have so much more of it than any other animal and uh i know that gossip is one theory the other theory i've heard for you know just us having such radical intelligence compared to animals is essentially to get laid that we use this for either humor for impressing our our sexual partners or whatever and whatever but i really like these knock down theories where some noble quality was actually for some completely stupid purpose you know it was to yeah to gossip about each other or to you know whatever make each other laugh so we could take over other tribes or whatever else you know and it's it wasn't actually to conquer the universe it was just for some ridiculous purpose in our past or something you know and that's how we ended up with this i can confirm being a philosophy student that intelligence doesn't necessarily guarantee you a shag you should you should probably put that on a t-shirt and make millions sex but that's yeah yeah yeah right but yeah is this these things remember those undergrads being the like team being socialized generally yeah i don't remember that at uni but um yeah but it could just be that it's for one of these random reasons i suppose the other explanation is that it is um our consciousness is a bit of the divine that we have within us you know it's a spark of reason sure um yeah i hate but that that yeah for sure millions of people would would um would go along with that one it made that that's way more noble isn't it that kind of makes us some like part almost part of god's mind the visit the logos the yeah logos okay what actually what what's the root of that is that the what is it what is the logos when christians say this is this the the is this the original word that god spoke or what was the logos i think um let me say logos that's just greek for reason okay i mean i suppose the bible was in greek wasn't it so it would have been logos um and then i suppose that gets traced back to uh the story of adam and eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil sure but we gained we were you know people always say our eyes were opened yeah yeah yeah we started seeing uh we rose to intelligence uh things you know metaphors like that sure yeah and then we're horribly cursed afterwards yeah yeah yeah lovely metaphor yeah yeah and then it's easy to see from there why we take such a human-centric view because you know if we're if we have that spark of the divine in us you know we're made in god's image um then we are special yeah exactly it's nice to think like that exactly i i always suspected that was why animals were kind of forbade from ever becoming part of the the kingdom of conscious things it was always humans because it would have it would have made them slightly godlike as well you know like in the bible i know it would have made them slightly holy or divine and i always imagined that humans couldn't we would have found this unconscionable you know yeah historically speaking but yeah i i'm also i'm just uh just looking at the the notes we had this is totally off topic but just just thinking about it with them with dreaming uh this is just a again the complete segue apologies if you were going to say something oh yeah no worries just as something someone said to me months ago that stuck with me since it never occurred to me but just with dreaming with consciousness uh i've only ever dreamt from the first person of you like have you ever had a dream that was in the third person no i think i've only ever dreamed as me what what is that all about like why because i'm sure like me you have plenty of daydreams where you're looking at something as a disembodied thing you know you're not from the first persons why do we only dream in the first person what's that all about i mean i suppose it's got something to do with uh the first person is all we have experience of sure maybe there's something in the categories of the understanding that says we can only see things from a first person perspective yeah i mean it's it's hard to imagine um like just right now looking at yourself from the third person yeah sure yeah but i mean you will so for example you could you know i can imagine my my mum's face or the house i grew up in or something and i'm just a disembodied eye in the sky i can i can imagine it from the the top or whatever but whenever i dream i'm always me i'm always doing something inside my body which is oh right i see that's me yeah but but it's you're completely capable of everyone's capable i think of daydreaming in the third person you can imagine just abstract objects but you never i've never done that anyway um when i've been dreaming you're always put in your body in your in some weird life okay maybe you have to go and build a go-kart with your ex landlord or something whatever it is but i stole that from mitch hadberg but you know it's yeah i don't know it's just always struck me it's really strange that everyone seems to dream like that i mean i think we can answer that quickly now is that we have no idea what the hell dreaming is yeah right okay yeah you know it's one of those things that we don't understand i mean uh carl jung talked a lot about dreaming as kind of when we dream things we dream up you know often things we've seen during the day they'll be somewhat relevant and it'll be sort of um stories or imagine fictions and things that are representative of human archetypes so these these things that are absolutely foundational to what we are and uh i was watching a jordan peterson lecture actually um jordan peterson being a clinical psychologist and he said that one of his clients his patients uh had the ability to lucid dream it was a woman um because women have the ability to lucid dream more i'm not sure why that is yeah apparently that's just a fact um and in her dream she she could she was fully aware she was fully in control of everything she was doing and she could ask the characters in her dream what they represented and they would tell her wow how mental is that ultimate dream i think like he would love to do that that's amazing yeah but so you're literally kind of questioning your subconscious you know directly yeah that is really weird because it's one of those things like we um it would be you know off the back of carl jung and freud it would be impossible to say that we're not in some way affected by the subconscious sure um you know our our desires we can't really desire what we desire um we can't choose how we react to things necessarily maybe it can be controlled but only to a certain extent and it could be that we're vastly more um more of us exist in the subconscious than it does in the conscious you know maybe it's just surface level what we experience that's that's the scary one is that because yeah you can't you can't delineate it's not like a watermark or anything i can't say okay this is me and and everything else all this childhood stuff or whatever that's just clearly marked out it just bubbles up i tell you what the as a vague example yesterday it was quite i think it was past midnight or something i was sat at the computer doing whatever and i was listening to something in the background and in the whatever was playing it was a talk or something there was a knock on the door and uh i guess for a second i thought it was my door and it just scared the crap out of me because it came from nowhere you know and even though i just i briefly had the thought no no this is clearly this is something and what you're listening to chill out is fine there's no one here whatever uh you know my heart jumped to a million beats you know per minute and i was just sweating you know you get this this slight freaked out feeling and i was just watching myself there was the conscious mind that knows this this is absolutely fine and even if someone did knock at the door what's the worst that's going to happen i just don't say hello or something it's fine but it was just an entire mechanism i couldn't control i thought that was so yeah this it just impedes on your life every now and then and uh takes control of the reigns it's so strange i mean that sort of leans into um you've probably heard of it they i don't know much about it but they call it system one and system two type thinking i vaguely remember yeah vaguely um and then there are these things you know i think it's in in one of them i can't remember which we just get used to patterns you know because our brain's lazy it likes to do stuff as efficiently as it can so you know you see something and and you predict how the situation is going to go and it does and and you don't need to kind of consciously focus on it how it happens every time because you just if you make a rough template of it then you don't have to worry about it but then you know your example um you're listening you're zoning out it's night time you're not expecting someone to knock at the door then you hear that and it kind of sends you into like oh what's happening this isn't normal you know sure and you're not really prepared for it yeah i guess the the visceral the bit that disturbed me a bit was that there was an entire mechanism going on in my brain that i had no conscious control over and it was it had already taken full control you know um bodily wise of of you know speeding your heart rate up and and trying to get you ready to go and fight someone or whatever you know and it's just these occasional reminders daily reminders that you're not actually at the helm here you're just uh you know you're in a way you're more a passenger and it's some yeah so just like you said like with choosing your own desires for example which you you definitely don't do at all you know you can choose whether to follow them or not but you don't really seem to have any what was the schopenhauer quote about a man can choose what he he will oh man he put it so well he can choose he could oh damn it you can choose what to do essentially but you can't choose what you want to do yeah you know it was put in a far more poetic way i forget but yeah indeed well i i wonder where you where you draw the line with this yeah i mean it's definitely difficult being being a thing yourself um and and being under those subconscious influences that it becomes difficult to draw the line because you are you and you can't step out of you and and see what's what and sort it all out it's also very tempting to think of yourself as this coherent you know i'm awake and i've got full control over my body and i've got complete sovereignty over everything that's going on here yeah apparently not apparently no it's just a tip of the iceberg and there's the massively deep dark sea beneath you exactly and i think that one of the scariest things i've ever read was or one of the scariest ideas i've come across was the fact that um you know anything that's humanly possible it's within your power to do it and that can be a massively freeing thing because if you know you've got goals and ambitions and um and you're free to follow them if they're humanly possible if someone's done it then you can but um you know the flip side of that coin the hitlers and stalins of the world you know everyone has the capacity for that as well yeah and that's terrifying so there was a do you know radio lab this um this podcast yeah okay yeah but i i can't recommend it enough um they're all great and there was one particular episode about a guy it's a it's not an uncommon story a guy who had a some kind of gigantic horrendous uh tumor somewhere but anyway he didn't know about this for about a year was behaving in really dark ways that let's just not go into um really deviant ways that he'd never behaved in that manner before it turned out he had this gigantic tumor pressing on some particular parts of the brain that deals with um impulse control yada yada had this thing removed more or less went back to normal and it's kind of the question of how culpable then was he for a what he was doing and b any of us like the entire legal system the entire cause and effects uh even socially of blaming each other for things or praising each other for things whatever is on us all being conscious agents and there was i can't remember which which behavioral scientist it was i forgot the name but someone was trying to make out that in a few hundred years it will seem just as insane that we all thought we were free agents and putting each other in prison or whatever for having deviant brains as it seems for us oh i don't know as barbers being surgeons a hundred years ago whenever you know 150 years ago or something but this will seem completely completely primitive by by their standards you know yeah definitely i mean it's something that we can't predict um yeah you know you can't even begin to imagine what discoveries we'll make in the future what will what we'll um discover about the brain um and unconsciousness but um i think it's important that um now we at least pretend like like we do have responsibility you know because you can go down a very um you know yeah it's okay so super dart is the ultimate nihilism isn't that yeah yeah ultimate nihilism nothing matters nothing has any purpose i'll do whatever i want well that's the thing of course it's it i guess it comes down and then it isn't what you want you're not even doing what you want to do because you couldn't have determined it and then god where do you go from there like that no that's worse than nihilism no no i didn't think we could get there yeah but man you're i must say you're this uh this this idea about the only way to to you know the only way the fastest way to actually run the pro to find the result of the program is to run the program this is like the ultimate freedom i have uh from from that kind of deterministic thinking i really like that i've never heard that before that was awesome yeah yeah that does seem like a bit of an antidote it does yeah definitely i don't again i don't know why this isn't more popular that's i think loads of people benefit from hearing that because as you know it's quite easy to go to the the deterministic place and just feel like you know you don't have any control over any of your well your life essentially you know yeah it's it's it's very easy to go to the dark yeah but i think just a final note before we um perform this little podcast um why is consciousness a good thing um do you have any thoughts on that uh it's certainly the most remarkable thing in the universe that we found i would say um yeah i would say that because i am conscious so uh yeah but it's i um at least in my view anyway there are two if if if we all got to a star trek feature where we're all wearing white and what's it called fully automated luxury communism has taken over and everything is uh you know no everything's perfect and we're all just sitting by pineapple trees having a great time or whatever and we had to find a goal for humanity to work together for something i would say the two fundamental questions would be a uh what is the origin of matter how did mata come around why how the hell does this work and the second one will be what the hell is consciousness those are the two to me anyway the two fundamental mysteries of of being of all of it cosmologically everything um yeah so it's i would say it's quite a privilege to live on the inside of the the greatest mystery that there ever was but yeah how about you yeah i mean it definitely says something that throughout centuries millennia of philosophy and science consciousness is still one of the things that we can you know validly discuss and have disagreements about you know there is no consensus over what consciousness is how it works we're not actually really any closer are we to i mean we've got a lot more words for it and we've certainly looked a lot deeper into it than the ancients but we're still not really any closer to a mechanistic explanation of it no but just to relate back to the final point that um the final point that you said um yeah it's it's wonderful that we get to be on the inside of it you know even if even if we never figure it out we got to experience it and this is one of the things why i can't stand people saying you know oh the universe won't care if humanity gets wiped out you know we could be wiped out by a meteor you know the the sun could expand into a red giant and engulf the earth you know the universe won't bat an eyelid but the universe doesn't have the the capacity to care you know sure we we do and that makes us sort of really special well and uh in terms of our if we had a cosmic destiny i mean it's unlikely that there aren't aliens but as far as we're aware we are the only conscious creatures uh in the night at the moment we haven't found any evidence for anything else otherwise uh so we kind of have a moral imperative to not snuff out the candle like not to you know not to go south with this one we might be the only this might be the only other instance of conscious creatures anywhere you know yeah and i think i agree with uh the thesis of max tex mark's max tegmark's book um we should seek to wake up as much of the universe as we can yeah wonderful yeah that's an awesome note to leave it on like that's yeah that's it yeah well yeah i think we solved it definitely yeah yeah cracked crap right completely um just before you go may i ask you uh a question about your book how's your new book coming along oh thank god cheers man thanks no one asks this in my real life in fact now um thank you uh yeah it's it's um it's not far from um from being finished and i won't pretend that some of the things we've talked about today won't be in there um and i think i'm just going to plagiarize quite a lot of what you came out with and try and subtly hide it in there that'd be oh yeah definitely take it cheers uh but no it i about a month and it should it should all be done but it's some mostly what i'm spending all my all my time with do you can ask do you write yourself do you write fiction or anything else um i used to write fiction um and poetry i used to write a lot of poetry yeah i've i've turned my attention more towards youtube recently yeah i was just gonna say i saw you you're yeah i think your most uh recent video the narrative about uh i'm sorry this was that's something i played was this about dogs yeah the man and the dog yeah yeah okay this was this is very uh very um very nicely done i thought it's lovely yeah thank you very much yeah well thank you very much for coming on thank you very much for having me man yeah it was a pleasure it's been a wonderful conversation cheers man yeah same to you yeah thoroughly enjoyed thank you i hope our listeners at home have something to think about anyway well quite a lot to think about this has been going on for nearly two hours oh damn really yeah i'm really impressed we did this sober or at least i know i did and we we're in some strange places somehow still yeah well yeah uh well thank you very much yeah thanks a lot man yeah all the best [Music] you

Channel: mystiverse

Views: 582,504

Rating: 4.9447989 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, ethics, morality, science, emotion, happy, happiness, lonely, loneliness, mind, God, free will, nihilism, existence, existential crisis, western, eastern, lecture, crash course, life, universe, space, future, technology, artificial intelligence, AI, tube, exurb1a, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Nietzsche, essay, debate, discussion, university, degree, television, TV, film, consciousness, unknown, death, mystery, class, literature, basics, story, fiction, paradox, existentialism, human

Id: NwPDJz-GIdY

Length: 100min 55sec (6055 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/commander_tealc]

Yeah I'll go for my weekend hike, got stoned and listen to this. Nope 29 hours to wait.

[u/small_town_girl-]

Did you have his permission to upload this?

[u/Dexterthisside]

Man just gonna rickroll us

[u/Octoid_]

You really got to do is like that, gotta wait until noon saturday

[u/BigMarocc]

There isn't much Exurb1a out there besides his own channels, so this is very cool, I know that he's a smart bloke besides but it will be nice to hear him without a tight script. Appreciative and jealous that you did this.

[u/janhetjoch]

Will it be available as a podcast instead of on YouTube? If yes, what will it be called?

[u/Schrodingers-Katt]

So happy that you and Ex are finally having a collab; definitely looking forward to this.

[u/Iamfrompluto]

Dude!!!!!! This is so amazing. I can't wait. That's amazing news. Thanks for making my day(s).

[u/DeanNovak]

I bet the tuetle boi a fiver over a rocket launch once