Joe Rogan - Mathematician on Trying to Measure Consciousness

I I'm a big fan of your work I've read much of your work I've seen many of your interviews and videos online and uh one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about that I find quite interesting is consciousness and your belief that Consciousness is not simply calculation but that there's something more to it and what what you think this more could possibly be from a scientific perspective which is unusual because a lot of people have some theories about Consciousness but they're usually crazy people like myself well I mean we're all conscious and so we may have theories about it yeah but um no the ideas came by somewhat roundabout route uh I I went to Cambridge to do graduate work it was mathematics I was working on pure mathematical subject algebraic geometry but I thought you know we got three years I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting so I went to three talks particularly which had a big influence on me one was a talk by Hermann Bondi was a on general relativity cosmology wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation he had and then there was a talk by Paul Dirac one of the founders of quantum mechanics and his talk well he's completely wonderful talk too wonderful lectures as well but in a completely different style he was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything anyway in the very first lecture he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics so if you have a particle and it could be in one spot or it could be in another spot then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once and the that's sort of strange but you've got to get used to that idea and he Illustrated with his piece a piece of chalk and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other and my mind sort of wandered at that point I don't know what I was thinking about but I wasn't concentrating and about a few minutes later he'd finished his description his explanation and I had some vague memory of something about energy but I didn't understand what he said and I've been totally mystified by this ever since so I I suppose if I'd heard what he said he would have said something to calm me down and and sort of accept it in one way or another but as it was it seemed to me this was a major issue how enough do you have things that don't behave according to watch quantum mechanics says like Cricket balls and baseballs and things like that anyway that's two of the talks the other course was a course by a man called Steen who talked on mathematical logic and he explained things like girdle's theorem and Turing machines Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based or computers basically and uh the thing about girdle's theorem you see I'd heard I used to have a colleague when I was at undergraduate in Percival who also became a scientist later on and we talked about uh logic and you know how you could make this kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic and I'd heard about this girl's theorem which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove and I didn't like that idea but I when I heard the when I went to this course by Steen and he explained what it really says and what it says I suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics and when I say things I mean things with numbers that one famous example is very much Last Theorem uh there's the Goldberg conjecture which isn't yet proved that every even number bigger than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers that's the sort of example of the thing it's just sort of mathematical things about numbers which you can see what they mean uh but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue but the idea often is in mathematics you've got a system of methods of proof and the key thing about this methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right so you these rules you know they could be adding A and B it's the same as BNA and things like that and you um if you give your you you say to the computer say here is a theorem like gold back injector and you see whether it can be proved and you say maybe I got a proof and this follows these steps and you give it to the computer and it says yup you've done it right it's true or maybe it would say you've done it right and it's not true or it may not say anything let's just go on forever but these are the sort of outcomes and the point about it is that if you believe that these procedures do give you a proof in other words that if the algorithm says yeah it's true then you believe that it is true because you've understood all the rules you looked at the first one you say yeah yeah that's okay you look at the second one said Mom oh yeah I see okay that's great and you go all the way down and as long as you're convinced all those rules work then if it says yes that's something you believe okay now what girl shows as he constructs a very specific sentence a statement which is a number thing like like the very much less theorem or something think about numbers which what he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true but you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure now this was amazing to me because it tells me that okay you cannot formalize your understanding in in a scheme which you could put on a computer the you see this statement which Scuttle comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules that it's true but that it's not actually derivable by the rules it you see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules and this to me was amazing and I thought golly you know what's understanding what does it mean is it something following rules is this an algorithm well this more or less says it's not an algorithm because whatever it was there would be something that you could still see is true even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place so this was a lot of subtleties about this too which people argue about endlessly but it was pretty convincing to me that this shows that we don't think when we understand something that what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm it's not following rules it's something else it's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we're thinking about I'm thinking is a conscious thing and understanding is a conscious activity so I formed the view that conscious activities whatever they are not just that kind of thing but you know playing music or were falling in love or whatever these things might be aren't not computations there's something else going on and then I thought because I you know I like to think myself as a scientist and I think that what's going in on our heads is according to the laws of physics and these laws of physics um pretty good they seem to work well in outside worlds and so I believe that the laws that work in our heads are the same as those laws so I began to think about it well what about Newton's mechanics well you could put that on a computer what about Einstein's special relativity you could do that what about Maxwell's wonderful equations which tell you how electricity and magnetism operate and light and radio waves and all these things that's all follows this beautiful set of equations that Maxwell produced you can put that on a computer okay you may have to worry about approximations and these depend on continuous numbers rather discrete things but I don't think that's the answer then I thought what about general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that we we're familiar now with ligo this detector which is detected black hole spiraling into each other from distant Galaxy and how do we know that those signals are black holes but well because of calculations people have put this thing on an algorithm and you know what those signals look like so Einstein's general relativity sure you can put that in a group on a computer what about quantum mechanics well there's the famous equation of Schrodinger which tells you how a Quantum State evolves we put that on a computer too it's difficult in many ways there's many more parameters you've got to worry about but it's just as computable as these other things well you see I then remember dirac's lecture you see and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work at the level of classical big things and it all depends on this process of what's called measurements in quantum mechanics and the measurement process is something you learn how to do but it's not the Schrodinger equation it's something else and schroding himself was very intrigued by this fact that his own equation gives you nonsense and you you the famous Schrodinger's cat where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time he produced that an example simply to demonstrate that roughly speaking his equation gives you nonsense under these circumstances so there's something else and there's something else goes beyond our current Quantum Mechanics and it tells you what happens when the quantum State makes a decision between well it doesn't follow the schroding crystal one thing or the other no everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics but they think oh it's what's called making a measurement and you're allowed to do something different but that didn't make sense to me and so I had the view that okay there is a big gap in our understanding and if there's something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer that's where it is so the view I've held that for a long time and uh that there's something non-computable something Beyond computation involved in our understandings of things so that's a view of hell for ages I didn't do much with it I just held the view until I think there was a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and Edward fredkin and they were explaining about what computers can do and they were talking about okay you have a computer two computers talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've walked up the room to the computers they have compute Community communicated with each other more thoughts than the human race ever has done you see and I thought well I see where you're coming from but I don't think that's what's happening in in human communication human understanding is something different from what computers do and Consciousness is the key thing Consciousness is something different from computation so I've held that view but then when I heard this talk by Minsky and um and fredkin I thought well I had ideas of writing a book sometime you know a long time in the future when I'm retired this is some while back I say and I thought well this gives it a focus and so I wrote this book called The Emperor's New mind which is supposed to be saying well you know we everybody seems to be thinking one thing but the little kid notices that that the emperor doesn't have any clothes so it was the uh that theme of that story which was the basis of the book so I say okay maybe lots of people think that what we're doing is Computing but if you stand back and you say well no there's something else going on so that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness but I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book you see it was it was a lot mostly about physics and Mathematics and things like that but I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on in conscious thinking and I thought well I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on and by the time I get to the end of the book I'll know pretty well what it could be I didn't but at the end of the book and I just sort of tapered off rather with something a little bit unbelievable and that was the end now you see I'd hoped that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing that mathematics and that was fine and when the book was published I didn't get letters from young kids I got letters from old retired people who were the ones who'd had the time to read my book okay well that was a little disappointing but okay I'm glad the old retired people liked my book but the other thing was I got a letter from Stuart hammeroff and this letter said more or less I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on not neurons I mean the neurons I could see you couldn't isolate the quantum effects and they you get the what's called environmental decoherence would happen and you get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture so I really didn't have it but Stuart hammeroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules and he'd built up a theory that microtubules were absolutely fundamental to Consciousness he had his own reasons for believing that I'd never heard of them at that time but then I checked up yeah I get lots of letters from people who Maybe don't make sense sometimes the letters and this one I thought well this is another one but then I realized these microtubules are there and they look like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics up to a level where you you could expect the the quantum state to sort of collapse that's the terminology people use in Quantum and microtubules they are inside brain neurons they are indeed and this is a recent discovery they're actually in lots of cells you see people often complain oh they're in your liver too not just your brain so why isn't your liver conscious and all that but this has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them the particular kind of microtubules how they're how they're arranged which is different in the brain how does it vary in the brain compared to other cells I think one big difference so they're not Stewart emphasizes it so much there are two kinds of microtubules they're the ones called a lattice and the B lattice and the a lattice ones are the very symmetrical ones they're tubes and and they look the same all the way around they've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called tubulin and they make a very nice arrangement which is connected with Fibonacci numbers and things like that so they look a bit like fur cones but they're all parallel they're not they don't taper off but um the thing is in the brain I think most microtubules are probably what are called B lattice ones and they don't have so much symmetry they've got a sort of seam down the one side and they're very important in transporting substances around cells and so on and microtubules all sorts of things they don't just do what what Stuart and I think they may be doing in the brain so the idea is that in the brain they're organized differently and the probably the ones that are important are the a lightest ones which are the very symmetrical ones and for a long time people couldn't see the difference because they look very similar um and they may well be the ones that happen to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell so you know one of the things interested me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect you see you've got the cerebrum this is the part at the top and you know divided down the middle and that when you see brains that's what you normally see with a convolutions in in it but right underneath and at the back there's a thing called the cerebellum which looks more like a like a ball of wool or something and the cerebellum I don't I may still be argument about this but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious and it has comparable number of neurons far more connections between neurons than the cerebrum and it's what takes control and maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else and you you don't you're not thinking what you're doing because it's unconscious and the unconscious control you know pianist who's very expert and moves the fingers around and plays it up with a little finger that pianist doesn't think well I've got to move that muscle this way and this bone that way and so on and it's it's all controlled unconsciously and a lot of this unconscious control has done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you when you get really skilled so uh it seemed to me okay you've got different kinds of structures different and it could well be that these pyramidal cells which have a particular organization of microtubules are the ones that where the Consciousness is really coming coming to light mainly I don't know there's a lot which is which is not known about this controversial and all sorts of things but the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently so it's not just how many neurons how many connections are there because there are more in the cerebellum so it's not that it's something else do they know this from observing the brain through fmri or something like that during particular activities I don't know I would imagine partly just examining it when from dead people and looking at brains and trying to estimate how many neurons there are in it right but how would they know what which part partial which is conscious during this particularly I I don't know that they do know about well I guess but the cerebellum there is a bit of an argument about that I think whether it's completely unconscious or not but it seems that actions that that are carried out by the cerebellum you you don't you're not aware of what you're doing but I mean it's you know if you're the tennis player who has to think very carefully about whether you know where to tilt the ball now the control of what you're doing so overall control is probably done with the cerebrum but the cerebellum is controlling the detailed motions how the fingers move and all that kind of thing and then you make sure that if you the player thinks gonna hit the ball down down the line there and then the rest is done under the control of an unconscious procedure I mean I may be simplifying but I understand what you're saying so you're saying that there's we don't totally understand but we know that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities and some activities don't seem to be conscious yes yes I mean I think it's probably the case no I'm maybe I don't know I shouldn't make a statement where I don't really know but certainly there are lots of different parts of the cerebrum which maybe which maybe not conscious too so I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious they seem to be differences in different parts but are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for Consciousness or it's a primary Theory I think they're the one of the best candidates are you see I don't think it's only micro two I don't know I'm not sure what Stuart hamroth's view on this is he certainly thinks the micro tube was exceedingly important in Consciousness and I think he's right that's the feeling I get and he's done a lot of work on trying to find uh what anesthetic gas is it's an important one of the important ways you can tell things about consciously most of it you can't it's just here in whatever it is but one of the important ways you can tell something about Consciousness is what turns it off in a reversible way in Stewart's job is to you know he's an anesthesiologist he puts people to sleep well I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different from sleep but you make them unconscious in a reversible way you want to make sure that you can wake them up again and uh it's obviously a very skills thing but I guess a lot of his colleagues might be skilled at doing it but don't they asked the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on so Stuart was really interested in that question partly I think things like mitosis cell division and he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes all line up and that this is this microtubules which pulling them and they're a really big part in in in the structure of cells and how they how they behave and so on but why their Consciousness well I guess it was an experience with with putting people under anesthetics and the fact that the gases which put you to sleep and there again I shouldn't say to sleep but right put you on an aesthetic a very unconnected chemically they're different kinds of things be yet they still seem to have the same effect and to understand what it is that the effect is you know that's a lot of his interest is to do with that so just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are no longer active this is what they're using to sort of reverse engineer by turning those parts on that's what enables Consciousness is this the well I think it's probably a simplification of what's going on but that's that's a good uh first first step yes

Channel: JRE Clips

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Id: GX10mR_N0Vs

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018