Reality Is Not As It Seems

thank you it is great to be back on this unseasonable warm evening and I'm delighted to see all of you here and we are we're gonna have fun tonight if you've been to our previous events in this series on the nature of reality you have heard how difficult it is to pin down what exactly we mean by this word reality because when you start to peel away the layers of what we think is real you will find a lot of misconceptions and it gets pretty weird well this evening it's going to get even weirder because we are about to dive into the human mind and how we perceive the world and that is a strange place let me tell you there are all kinds of questions that continue to swirl around debates over the nature of consciousness can we ever bridge the explanatory gap between the physical stuff of our brains and our immaterial minds can evolutionary theory explain the origins of consciousness and what about quantum physics does that have anything to tell us about how our minds work all these questions are still up for grabs we don't really know where consciousness comes from but we rely on our conscious experience to navigate our surroundings to give us some sense of what's out there in the real world after all this is our window onto reality but what if all of that is wrong what if our brains picture of the world is actually nothing like reality and external reality itself is a kind of fiction or what if we're hearing and seeing things that we know cannot possibly exist in the world it all seems to be in our head but we can't figure out why we're having these experiences or whether there's even an identifiable part of the brain that's generating these perceptions so these are really challenging and counterintuitive ideas which cut against the grain of what we assume is real so buckle your seat belts because I think we're in for a wild ride here and we have two fascinating people to help us make sense of it all let me introduce them Donald Hofmann is a professor in the department of cognitive sciences at the University of California Irvine with joint appointments in the department's of philosophy logic and philosophy of science and the school of computer science is the author of visual intelligence how we create what we see which presents the modern science of visual perception to a general audience he's the co-author of observer mechanics a formal theory of perception which offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics his current work seeks to explain how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us Susanna Sullivan has been a consultant in Neurology since 2004 first working at the Royal London hospital and now as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at the National Hospital for neurology and neurosurgery her focus is on epilepsy and helping people who suffer from functional neurological disorders she's the author of two books it's all in your head true stories of imaginary illness about patients whose symptoms had psychological origins and brainstorm detective stories from the world of neurology about symptoms that are so strange even doctors struggled to know how to solve them welcome both of you thank you so Don let me start with you how accurately do you think our perceptions of the world reflect what's real not at all so they're shaped by natural selection to keep us alive and they do that very well for a few decades and it turns out when you look at what's needed to stay alive in our perceptions truth isn't part of it and you can actually look at the structure of evolution through through tools like evolutionary game theory and ask specific technical questions do organisms that see reality as it is have a greater chance of survival of greater fitness than those that do not see reality as it is and it turns out that organisms that see reality as it is are never more fit then organisms of equal complexity that see none of reality and are just tuned to the relative fitness payoffs okay you're gonna have to give an example of this so what what is one organism maybe us that just really does not see how things really are well one example I like to give is the the jewel beetle this is a a beetle in Western Australia in the outback of Western Australia it's dimpled glossy and brown the male's fly the females are flatness flightless and the male's fly around of course looking for a female and when he finds one he lights and mates and it it turns out that in the outback there are also these beer bottles that are dimpled glossy and brown that get tossed out into the outback and it turns out that they're just the right shade of brown that the male jewel beetles flock all over these bottles and try to mate with them and and the females are of no interest compared to these bottles and the species almost went extinct and and the you know it's the classic thing of the male leaving the female for the bottle it's it's very tragic but here's a species where the male's had found female successfully for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years and you would think that means that they had evolved to truly know what is a female and what's not and what we see is that's not the case they evolved with a simple heuristic a little trick a female is something anything that's dimpled glossy and brown and apparently the bigger the better so so that so that's and that's what evolution does it it does things on the cheap right because every calorie you spend on perception is a calorie you have to go out to kill something and eat it to get that calorie that's dangerous so so there are selection pressures to do things cheaply and yet just enough complexity to get what you need to do like like mating and so so that's the kind of thing we see in evolution is we get what are called satisficing solutions you get just enough to stay alive and it turns out that truth isn't needed to stay alive ok so Suzanne let me turn to you you come at these questions from a very different perspective from your clinical experience in the world of neurology do do we it from a neurological perspective do we have a serve you know what's real out there I think from a neurological perspective that we trust this thing way too much is my perspective and I would very much agree with them what I've just heard and I would even go further to say that when you hear a story about a beetle we think oh well we're a bit more sophisticated than a beetle so I would hope that it's I would make a more logical choice faced with that decision but actually you know it isn't about intelligence our perception is constantly tricking us irrespective of how intelligent or how perceptive we believe ourselves to be or how much we're paying attention I mean where I come to where I come from on this subject is I'm a neurologist so I qualified with the expectation that I would look after people with brain diseases so epilepsy in particular but anything like multiple sclerosis Parkinson's disease these sort of disorders when I took my first consultant job which is our sort of most senior job and running your own service and for the first time in 2004 I was running a unit where I was investigating people who had seizures we admit people to a hospital we video them while they're wearing EEG electrodes that measures their brainwaves and we wait for them to have seizures so that we can explain those seizures to them and these were all people were having very very frequent seizures the worst possible cases and at the end of my first year in this job 70% of the people I saw who were having convulsions and were unconscious were not unconscious according to our tests so these people were having something that neurologist now called dissociative seizures what in the recent past would have been called non-epileptic seizures and a hundred years ago would have been called hysterical seizures or hysteria so these were people who appeared to be convulsing and unconscious but the test said that they were conscious and this was entirely psychologically driven wait so I'm just trying to understand this so they from their perspective they were unconscious but if you actually measure this using the tools of Medicine they were not on so if you measure our brainwaves they're constantly changing and they have a particular pattern during alertness the pattern is changing if your eyes are closed if they're open if you're drowsy if you're hungry these people experienced themselves as being unconscious behaved as if they were unconscious but if you measure the brainwaves it shows a normal waking pattern sort of pattern you would see in someone who was wide awake and paying attention to you and that is only part of the tricks that the brains can play in us leading to illness so now I I see a lot of people of problems like paralysis blindness memory impairment etc which are tricks of perception or belief in fact all the pathways in their nervous system are intact and could function except through some trick of their own belief about their ability to function they're unable to do so so I would say that sort of beetle is the beginning of it and I often think that people think well it wouldn't happen to me because you know I'm intelligent I'm paying attention and I know what's happening in there and sadly it doesn't matter how intelligent you are I'm afraid so I came across a quote from the poet Emily Dickinson who said wrote the brain is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea did she get it right I mean is the brain ultimately unfathomable well I would it's not all Tamera unfathomable its unfathomable I believe in our lifetimes and nothing is unfathomable for ever and but I think what a lot of people don't realize is the degree to which we are in the infancy of understanding it you know when I qualified in medicine in 1991 we only were just beginning to get MRI scanners into hospitals now you've got to think about that that means that you know before the 1980s we had we'd only seen cloudy pictures of the inside of this thing we didn't even have any really good reliable way of saying what bit of our brain did what we relied upon him injuries so you injure the brain you can't move that arm well that bit of brain must move that arm and that's how blunt our understanding of the brain was and that was you know in the very recent past so I believe that everything must be fathomable but I don't believe we're even close on the other hand I don't consider myself a scientist I consider myself a doctor who sort of you know is it I practice an art based on a science perhaps you feel closer to the answers Donald I'm not sure but we're working hard on it they're the the cortex of the brain has about 86 billion neurons until a few years ago I would have said a hundred billion so we were even learning how many neurons there are recently and there are trillions of synapses connecting all of these so it's really really complicated but even when we have a complete wiring diagram of some very simple organisms and know all the neurons and all the connections between them we still don't understand what the system is doing so if we're having trouble with a few a few dozens or hundreds trillions is going to be very very hard and so we have to take a systems kind of approach and try to ask what problems is the brain trying to solve and can we try to reverse-engineer how they might be being solved and we can go back and look at the brain connections to see is that what these brain connections are trying to do sometimes we'll use deep learning kinds of algorithms and say well if the maybe the brain is using something like a deep learning kind of algorithm to recognize objects if that's the case can we go back and show how these neurons would all fire so we're we're going at it from all these different angles so it's a it's a very rich field I have great optimism that we will learn a lot about how the brain is wired and what it's computing so and there's great job security ahead as well so when you say you're both saying basically brain science is in its infancy still absolutely so I'm going to ask you to kind of look into your crystal ball a little bit fifty years from now a hundred years from now what's your guess as to like how much further along will would be an understanding how the brain works I'm not sure I know how much further we will be along and I'd like to continue to be depressing about how little progress we've made before I can get that far which is sort of you know what we're in neurology we still cannot make brains better you know we're still at the point of trying to figure out which bit does what we're way better at that than we were when I was in medical school and but that's still the level that we're at and we're still at the point where we're trying to stop people from injuring their brains and protect brain because the minute you lose something we have no way of getting it back either the brain heals itself or we compensate in some way or we don't get better so I think we're really where we really are desperate for improvement is in treatments whereas we're still at the level of just trying to understand the fundamentals of the thing so I think 50 years I'm not terribly hopeful wow that's sorry okay done it's a planet might be dead then more depressing I guess I'm a bit more optimistic I think that we've made some breakthroughs in understanding that I didn't expect so for example I didn't expect us to be able to solve the problem computationally about how to do object recognition for real three-dimensional objects I thought that that was so hard a problem that we would be several decades down the road and it turns out with some of the the new deep learning techniques were able to get computers to do that and by reverse engineering those computer systems we can start to get new ideas about how the brain might be doing this and so my guess is that each new advance that we make gives us exponentially more power as we go forward work we're in the low part of this exponential curve we're really slow and plodding but I think each new step gives us more tools that we can leverage so I'm actually quite optimistic but my guess is that there are some very important concepts that we simply just don't have yet so there's gonna be some new discoveries so I'm interested in what you said I mean using these computer models to understand how the brain works I mean that's not obvious I mean I guess maybe I would have thought it's it's neuroscience you know neuroscientists they were going and they're starting to figure out what's happening it's a cellular level you know mapping you know what happens when this particular neurotransmitter is acting you're saying that's not enough you have to kind of you have to map it out with the computer that's right and that's one place where for example artificial intelligence and computer science are working together with the neuro scientists to try to help reverse engineer what the what the brain is doing so it's we view it like a reverse engineering problem we got this black box and we're trying to figure out how it works and so we know in the case of vision that you know there's an image coming in at the retina of the eye you 120 million photoreceptors and then by the time you get to some higher-level areas in the temporal lobe we know that you're able to recognize faces and so forth and so so we know the inputs we know the outputs of the system so we can try to reverse-engineer how could a system do that what would you have to do and so you can take it as a pure computational problem and the deep learning techniques are the latest kind of technique and I'm not saying it's the end-all and Beall but it's where we are right now and by looking at those we can then get go back and see how the different quote-unquote artificial neurons in the neural network might map on to the neurons in the brain and make maps that way so we're we're like detectives we're taking all the clues we can and and working on it so and who knows we we still may be thinking about it in all the wrong ways but the tools are getting more powerful so I'm hopeful but you may be right I mean correct me if I'm wrong but um I I was reading about an experiment where you ask someone to watch a movie or something over and over again and then you can reverse-engineer that so that you can through some fMRI man measurements see what movie they were watching exactly that's right and and I do find that very interesting but isn't that just can you extrapolate from one person to lots of people in that's in a scenario like that because that's what we've been doing for years is looking at individual people's brains and injuries and then drawing conclusions from them is that going to be different it will probably be different from person to person even between identical twins we know that the wiring of the brain is different even between identical twins but the question will be how how much are the little difference is important so once you when you for example again I'm not saying deep learning is the final answer here but that's that's where we are so I'll use that when you train up the network the exact pattern of connections between the neurons is probably of the artificial neurons it's probably not critical if you train the neuron the artificial net again you might get a slightly different pattern of connections but it would still have the same functional ability so we're gonna have to figure out what of the what part of the connectivity is really critical and what part of it you can it is slop and so so we have a lot of work to do there but the individual differences may be important but in other cases they may not be so I want to step back from them and just sort of try to wrap my head around this notion that what we think is real is not real I mean it's sort of we have almost a fictional representation of reality up there why I mean wouldn't wouldn't it be to our advantage to you know have an accurate perception of the world I mean wouldn't that help us survive I'm going to give my very simplistic view of this before Donald gives the technical scientific view I mean the way we think about it as a neurologist it's practical so I I as I say so don't I I think about things in a more practical way because I have to solve them practically for an actual person and the way we think about our how we perceive things is that we just can't handle all this information that we have that it's just you know it's too much we'd be bombarded with visual and other sensory information all the time so what we have to do really is just have some sort of a way of narrowing that down to pay attention to the thing that will stop us falling down the stairs or the thing that will allow us to learn what we need to learn and that is why we're constantly filtering out things like m sensations you're not feeling the chair underneath you now because it's not important for you to feel the chair but the minute you start thinking about it well now you're feeling it and that these you know if you were constantly aware of everything that was happening around you you wouldn't really be able to function you need to shut down something from my perspective for my patients that's something that can lead to really big problems sometimes you know I meet people who are blind although they have the capacity to see they can't see we don't fully understand how that happens what we wonder if it is a sort of malfunctioning of this ordinary filtering system which we need in order to function on a day-to-day level I think what evolution has done for us is trying to keep us alive and if seeing the truth was critical to keep it keeping us alive it would show us the truth but it turns out it's not critical in fact seeing the truth gets in the way of doing what you need to stay alive and I think a good example is the desktop interface on your computer and that's what I think evolution is actually done for us I think that our perceptions of space and time are like the desktop of a computer interface and physical objects are like icons on that desktop and that's what evolution has really done for us it's given us a user interface and the reason is for example if you're if you're writing an email to a friend and you do icon for that email is blue and rectangular and in the middle of your screen does does that mean that the file in the computer is blue and rectangular and in the middle of the computer of course not anybody would thought that just doesn't understand what an interface is about it's not there to show you the transistors and voltages and magnetic fields it's there to hide all that stuff if you had to toggle voltages to craft an email your friends would never hear from you right the the truth in that example gets in the way if you had to face the truth you couldn't do what you needed to do is you're saying the truth is to actually understand the underlying reality that's right the underlined underlying reality but that's right yeah in in by the way I'm just using the computer as an example in transistors as the quote metaphorical truth in that example I'm not saying that that's the exact reality once you get the metaphor you can throw that away right but but whatever the reality is evolution doesn't need to show us that reality it needs to give us iCandy it needs to give us a user interface that lets you do what you need to do and ignore it and control reality of course we have to control objective reality but you can control it even if you're completely ignorant about what it is like we do every day with our computers we control all those transistors and voltages and almost all of us are completely ignorant about what we're really controlling that's what evolution has done it's explicitly shaped our perceptions not to show us the truth because that would get in the way okay so I want to I want to step back a little bit and ask how each of you ended up in this particular line of work that you do because you both have these very distinctive ways of looking at the world so just kind of walk me through a little bit of your personal history and how for instances and how did you end up becoming a neurologist to studies imaginary illnesses well I mean I'd love to say that it was amazing story and you know I studied medicine because I went to a school that didn't have a lot of imagination and you sort of if you did well in school you you those were sort of things you did and I'm but I'm really pleased with the choice because I've discovered that it's it opens up this incredible world to you neurology seemed to be the really obvious thing to me as soon as I encountered it because there is nothing as amazing as the stuff that happens when this goes right and the stuff that happens when this goes wrong you know it seemed to me that other organs of the body had a much more limited range of of ways to behave whereas the brain just seemed of infinite interest to me and I thought when I chose it as I've said before that I was choosing to look after people with these kind you know quite straightforward in a sense and diseases so pathological processes of the brain or the nervous system or the muscles and it wasn't until I was a consultant that I realized that that was only the smallest part of what I was seeing now I've been a trainee neurologist for many years I was extensively well trained and yet it it wasn't until I became a consultant that I took an interest in in psychosomatic disorders or physical disabilities that have more psychological cause and the reason that had escaped me for so many years is because we break down medicine now in this way where we say well you're a neurologist so if you can't find a brain disease well then that person isn't your responsibility and so on so it's quite easy now as a doctor to become very focused on on one organ and ignore everything else but once I became a consultant I realized how frequent seizures paralysis headaches memory loss all sorts of different sort of symptoms that are psychologically caused are sort of passing us by even though they are extremely serious even though they're extremely prevalent there aren't a great deal of specialists who look after people with these problems what we do is as doctors now as we say well like your brain scan is normal so you can go away or you I can't find anything wrong with you even if the patient is clearly having problems if in other words if the doctor can't if you can't find it on the machine that says oh here's the cause you just kind of throw up your hands I think there what can happen is is you say well you're not my responsibility so much not so much as you're not there's nothing wrong with you but you know if I can't find a brain disease then I suggest you go to another specialist because I can't find what I'm supposed to find which makes a particular proportion of patients very easily passed between different people without ever getting a satisfactory answer I'm speaking as a neurologist but these sort of symptoms occur in all specialties so people who feel they can't breathe enough shortness of breath there's nothing wrong with their lungs this is more psychologically driven pains in your chest pains and u-joints everything and every specialty is represented in this I discovered when I was became a consultant that if I didn't take more of an interest in this I would spend a considerable amount of my time telling people that their scans were normal and sending them away so I chose to take an interest in it and now I just I find it so and but endlessly fascinating but also imagine yourself in a situation where you're having seizures and then you're all just tells you don't have epilepsy and that your scans are all fine and therefore you can go back to some other doctor to solve it and it's it is the ultimate dismissal and I think that structure of medicine needs to change time let me turn to you how did you end up doing what you do now I was a pretty geeky teenager and I was very interested in the question are we just machines are people just machines I was learning a little computer programming on and getting the idea that that was pretty powerful you could do a lot there and my father was a minister a fundamentalist Christian minister and so I got a different story on the weekends then I got when I was doing technical stuff during the week and so you know as a teenager you you don't know you know you're just listening to the authorities and so I decided I was very interested to try to understand that question are we just machines and I realized that to really understand that I would have to do some hard work and so I I ended up working in the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT working with a guy named David Marr on vision problems trying to actually build working vision systems I figured I needed to take on some really concrete problem and solve it so to really understand what's going on my beer pretty soon my bigger question was the question of consciousness how is consciousness related to the activity in our brains all right is it fundamental or our brains fundamental does it give rise to consciousness and that's an exceedingly hard problem it's in fact it's called the hard problem of consciousness and I sort of understood that it would be foolish to try to take that on without really having gotten a lot of tools you know learning a lot of tools so I spent quite a few years just working on specific problems in computational vision and publishing papers about how vision does this and that so I could really start to understand the neuroscience and so forth and then I started to back away from that and say okay you know at some point you can't just be building up so you have to do it otherwise you get too old to do it so so then I in the last 20 years I've been really trying to focus now on how is consciousness related to brain activity and trying to make some progress on that so are we just machines great question the answer is I don't know but the the theory that I'm pursuing right now says the answer is No so I'm pursuing a theory that says that consciousness itself is fundamental to reality know it so it's so explain how do you even go about answering that question of whether or a machine or not well so there's a field within computer science it's called automata theory and that something called a Turing machine and there it's a whole formal area work so when we talk about what do we mean by a machine are we machines it's actually technical question are we just sort of so-called Turing machines or equivalent to Turing machines are we basically just being programmed by right our brains is that really the question that's that's really that's part of the question it's can we explain everything that we are with unconscious physical systems that just implement circuits that could do Turing machine computations that would be the technical way of putting up the question and in some sense to explain human intelligence problem-solving attention memory and so forth touring machine theories turn out to be as far as we can tell perfectly fine there's no hard problem there we have nice technical problems but to give computational models of attention memory learning problem solving intelligence no problem the real problem comes in the simplest parts of our everyday life smelling coffee feeling the velvet hearing you know a trumpet those raw sensations we have no idea how to give a Turing I got a machine theory that can start with just machines and give us what but these conscious experiences are there's no one has any clue how to do that so the things that you would have thought were hard like intelligence and so forth turn out to be nice technical problems and we're working on them but but they're not mysteries just smelling coffee is a mystery and right now we have no computing machine theories that can start with just unconscious ingredients that compute and give us the smell of coffee as an experience so that that is a showstopper for the field there is not is not only do we not have any theories no scientific theories demand and that's a weird thing we have no scientific theory that can say for any particular sensation like the smell of coffee that this is the kind of activity in the brain that is required to cause or is that experience with the smell of coffee and here's the principled understanding about why that brain activity is the smell of coffee we have nothing close to that in fact we have no remotely plausible ideas it's not just that we don't have any theories there is nothing intelligent that we can say about that right now there's nothing on the table it's that's what we call it the heart of consciousness that there is that the quote/unquote theories that are out there are believed by the person who proposes the theory and their graduate students and that's about it you've just confirmed for me what I always think I'm gonna be unnecessarily flippant which is stop trying to create AI machines to be doctors and fly airplanes and get one that cleans the bathroom and does the ironing then then you'll actually impress me right the stuff that's that we think is really easy the common-sense everyday stuff turns out to be really sophisticated and stuff like playing chess and doing you know solving certain math problems turns out to be relatively easy for the computers even though it's it's hard for us so Suzanne does this kind of these this question that I guess what's often called the mind-body problem you know it's sort of trying to reconcile you know what's happening in the brain and sort of you know how does that connect to you know the mind do you think about that kind of stuff in what you do in your your clinical practice in neurology yeah I suppose I do think about it but I think about it with frustration if anything because I think that you know again it's sort of we're desperately trying to map this kind of connect to them understand how everything connects to everything else and but it's you know what we have is a lot of people whose brains aren't working and we to extrapolate from that sort of how we do normal things to how we how we manage a situation when it isn't working just seems like there's miles between those two things so I think that neuroscience it's just been unbelievably exciting in the last you know 20 30 years but I'm at the coalface and I sort of feel slightly and I think that's why I'm a bit more pessimistic is I'm at the coalface and these things are all really fascinating and I think that people sometimes get the impression that well now I can go to my doctor and my doctor will do an MRI scan and then they'll know what's wrong with me but it's just so not like that and and I get so I guess I think it's clearly very exciting and but I personally for my patients I mean feeling the benefit of it yet so I suppose I feel a bit mystic in that so but I guess that I mean the larger question is is there a biological substrate to everything that happens in the mind to those brain disorders that that you are dealing with I mean if we were sophisticated enough you know if we can drill down far enough are we gonna be able to find the underlying physical cause I believe that we can and I believe there is a biological substrate for consciousness I don't want to get into talking about consciousness because I'm terrified of what mistake I'll make but basically I do believe these things will have a biological substrate and I think we're already at the point where we can start demonstrating biological differences in the brains so I've been talking about people or things like paralysis for example there are legs there should be no reason that they can't move their legs the pathways are intact you can demonstrate that they're intact but their perception is that they cannot move their legs and that becomes a reality what we can do now with some of these sort of more high-tech investigations as we can so differences in the ways that these people's brains are connected then people who are perfectly well or very importantly people who are pretending to be paralyzed because if we're talking about reality the big problem for my patients is that people believe that if you if I say that everything is working fine and you can move your legs and you tell me you can't move your legs that's because you're not really paralyzed what we can do now is quite clearly show that there's some substrate in the brain that shows increased connectivity between the emotional part of the brain and say the movement part of the brain and people have these sort of psychosomatic paralysis problems it doesn't it doesn't prove anything at this point it shows the difference it shows that there is a substrate that there's something happening differently in people's brains who have these disorders can you explain that so why would sort of this emotional part of the brain this emotional response trigger this feeling that you are paralyzed well I think why wouldn't it and because you know from I don't want to get Freudian because that's not that my take on it but I still have to think there's some quite interesting quotes in in studies and hysteria where this was discussed and in studies in hysteria they say you know if an idea can trigger a movement then why shouldn't an idea prevent a movement I haven't quoted that exactly correctly but yes if an idea is what makes you move then why is it not possible that if you believe you can't move that you can't move we've all stood on the edge of a diving board or something equivalent and tried to force herself to jump and found herself paralyzed and unable to do so if you start thinking now about walking we walk automatically movements are automatic and we don't think about them at all the minute you start thinking about them they change nothing nothing was as bad for my tennis swing that when someone tried to change my grip you know suddenly my arm I'm aware of everywhere it is in space and you know so the fact that an idea can change your movements or even stop you moving I don't think that's unusual at all it's unusual obviously for it to get to the extreme that you can't move at all not as that as unusual as you would think but it's so interesting because I mean our operating assumption is that the brain is what generates our our mental experience right you're saying it works the other way too well the problem is that the brain cannot be trusted and that's the thing we you know we are we do not have control over everything as much control over everything that's happening in here as we think we do and you know there's much more kind of top-down processing happening then you know 50 years ago or mid 20th century we thought everything was just you know we're recording like a video recorder or taking pictures like a camera and we now know that's completely wrong things are coming in and then they're being processed from up here so that we're constantly altering our experience of the world and we're all doing that slightly differently and so I think that that's what people kind of don't realize how much impact I have on my experience of the world but the minute you start thinking about it it's so obvious you know what do you know if you're in a room and you're sort of ex-boyfriend comes in with his new girlfriend over there that's all you can hear no one else can hear that because that's not the thing that's interesting them so we're you know in I think physiologically there's examples of these sort of ways that we're altering our own experience of the world or around us all the time and we only become aware of them when we really think about them so done from a from a scientists perspective how do you how do you put that in your model I mean this idea that the mind can can actually cause I have all these fits of physical manifestations well I agree with Suzanne that we've found a lot of so-called top-down influences that what you you're building models in in case of visual perception for example you're not just simply taking a picture of what's out there you're actually building models and you're using the data that's coming in through your senses to refine your models but the in neural terms the pathways that just feed forward the data from the eyes up to the brain are actually smaller than the top-down feedback pathways they're even there even bigger so so there's the whole field of predictive coding where we're actually we're making these models we're predicting what we should see and then we're just checking against the little date of this coming in and there's another level of this though and that is we do have clean evidence except in some of the case you're talking about that there are clean correlations between neural activity and our conscious experiences all those in some of these cases you're showing that the neurobiology says one thing in the conscious experience is something else but but there are all these correlations and in the researchers in my field look at those correlations we call them the neural correlates of consciousness we're trying to look it for the neural correlates of various kinds of conscious experiences and there's lots of them but the the old addage correlation doesn't imply causation definitely applies here you know just because a bunch of people show up at a bus station and a bus shows up doesn't mean that the people cause the bus to show up there there was something deeper namely a bus schedule that caused both to show up there and so when we have these correlation between brain activity and conscious experiences we definitely have two most of my colleagues think that the brain activity causes the conscious experiences and the reason why I've been looking at this evolutionary stuff and showing that we don't that we haven't evolved to see reality as it is because it has an important implication it means that the very predicates the very language of space and time and physical objects is the wrong language to describe whatever the true cause and effect of reality might be it's the wrong language so we have in everyday life the fiction of causality it's a if seems like my right hand caused my left hand to move and that's a useful fiction within our user interface but it's just a fiction just like if you drag your icon to the trashcan you might say well the movement of the icon to the trashcan caused the file to be deleted and that's fine that's a nice fiction for the user interface but it's strictly speaking false the icon moving on the on the desktop did nothing there's no feedback from that end of the computer so we have all these correlations between neural activity and conscious experiences and I've concluded the reason we can't figure out how brain activity causes conscious experience is because it doesn't it doesn't there have to be something that causes conscious something deeper has to to cause both our experience of the brain and the experience of the other conscious experiences that we have what whit's then something that's deeper well what I'm working on is an idea that consciousness itself along the lines you were talking about the consciousness itself is fundamental and to make that a scientific theory I've had to develop and I've published a couple papers with some colleagues on a mathematically precise theory of consciousness and it's mathematically precise not because I think I'm right I'm probably wrong but the point is to be absolutely precise so that we can figure out where we're wrong and that's sort of the spirit of science is absolute precision in what you're claiming so that you you or others can figure out where you're wrong and that's how you get the things going so when you say your theory isn't it consciousness is fundamental in others I can't be reduced to something it can't be reduced to I suppose the stuff of physics right that's right you're saying it's so it's outside the whole world of matter of particles it's it's something else that's right so it's it's every scientific theory has makes certain assumptions it says please if you're a physical Askew might say grant me space and time and you know neutrons and protons and electrons and if you grant me that then I'll explain chemistry and biology and even psychology and consciousness and what I'm saying is those are the wrong things to start with space-time and physical stuff are the wrong starting point let's start with conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate the smell of garlic and so forth start with consciousness have a mathematically precise theory of that and then show from that foundation how space-time and physics comes out as a user interface that certain consciousness is used as they interact with other consciousness so it's it's a very different kind of approach and do many people agree with you on this oh very brief you just my graduate students it well you might ask how how do how would physicists think about this because surely physics knows that space time and matter is fundamental and is some cognitive scientist is saying that space time isn't fundamental the physicist can come back and just you know put me in line well it turns out that physicists for example Nima or Connie Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton Ed Witten who won the Fields Medal David gross who won the Nobel Prize these guys are all saying this phrase space time is doomed what does that even mean well yeah it's it's pretty profound what they're what they're realizing is that in the attempts to get general relativity and quantum field theory to come together into a unified quantum gravity they're going to have to let go of space-time it they what we thought was the foundation we all think of space-time as the stage on which the drama of life plays out it wasn't that Einstein's great discovery that was his feeling he assumed this space-time was was fundamental and he had the space-time loaf and so forth and so the stage has been there for almost 14 billion years and and you know life wasn't even on that stage for who knows how many hundreds of millions of years and consciousness didn't get on the stage until much much later that's the standard story and now we're realizing that the space-time has to be emergent from something deeper it cannot be fundamental we just can't see this is from the visit the physicists like again Nima our Connie hi Matt and they don't know it's more fundamental Seth Lloyd at MIT has proposed that maybe quantum bits and quantum gates so not in space and time these are now bits and gates in outer space at but not in space and each each of those gates its action gives you a little bit of space-time in the curvature of the space-time is proportional to action anyway they're trying to start with something that's not physical it's abstract and then show how you could get space-time emerging from it I'm up to the same thing I'm saying let's get a mathematical model of consciousness on its own terms not inside space and time but rather as the author of space and time where you're saying consciousness precedes space time consciousness precedes space time is not so the space-time that you're perceiving right now is not a stage that you're in it's a data structure that you're creating right now you create space and time you create all the stuff that you're seeing when you close your eyes you make it go away okay you're cut you're kind of blowing my mind yeah right right are you saying consciousness was there before the Big Bang yes this is a big one I'm sober I'm saying consciousness is fundamental in that deep sense and the to make this thing work out what I have is so the idea is that's the ultimate reality then is a big vast social network of what I call conscious agents so we have this an infinite network of interacting conscious agents like I'm interacting with you you're conscious agents we're interacting we're having a discussion where I'm saying that's this huge social network is the fundamental reality and it turns out that's really nasty because dynamics on graphs is really fairly recent math it's really really hard math so that's we're working on is dynamics on graphs is down and then if you look at big data right now like big data for social networks Facebook Twitter connections and so forth and you try to visualize hundreds of millions of people interacting and so forth how do you visualize all those social connections it turns out it's overwhelming you need visualization tools that's what evolution gave us what we call physical world is a visualization tool space is a really dumbed down visualization tool and physical objects are visualization tools that we use to inspect this vast infinite network of social interactions within conscious agents but aren't there actual real objects out there independent of our subjective experience of that I mean you know if there's a bus barreling down the street if I step in the middle of the street it it's you know I'm gonna get knocked over if there's a mosquito buzzing around me it you know and decides to bite I mean are you saying that mosquito is not really there right i I'm I'm saying that the bus exists only when you perceive it but but I have to be very careful if something exists independent of your perceptions namely this vast social network of conscious agents but you when you interact with that vast social network of conscious Asians what you see is this dumb down description that we call buses and so forth so we we have to take our perceptions seriously I don't want to step in front of a bus for the same reason I wouldn't take that little icon am i trashing it on my my screen and drag it to the trash can carelessly suppose it's you know as a book you've been working on for three years if you if you drag that to me to the trash can carelessly you could lose three years of work so I take that icon very seriously but I don't take it literally same thing with the bus I take it very very seriously but it don't take it literally and from an evolutionary point of view this makes sense evolution shaped us with symbols designed to keep you alive you have to take them seriously they're there to keep you alive but that doesn't allow us or doesn't entitle us to also take them literally so we have to take them seriously but not literally and that's what evolution is done so we and so this whole thing is not the truth it's a dumbed down graphical interface that allows us to inspect this vast social network which is the reality and so for this whole thing to work out as a scientific theory what I have to show is all the dynamics on the graph of interacting conscious agents and then show when I project that back into a three-dimensional interface I get back general activity quantum theory evolution by natural selection I have to get back all of current physics as the limiting bounding case of this more general dynamics when I project it on to our simple little interface so our our science has been on the interface we haven't stepped into reality on ok so Suzanne I have to have you join way out of my death I'm not going to ask you to comment on the nature of what my mind finally started thinking about which is ok so when we're born our brains basically have a sort of they're very very plastic so you know that's why sort of we could learn any language at all that we want when we're born and but if I'm born in Japan I've very rapidly our brains lose certain sort of abilities so you you can't say certain fee gnomes if you're if if you hear Japanese all the time because they're not necessary for you and then it becomes harder to learn Japanese as you get older and so forth so we're born with these brains that are infinitely plastic and are influenced by our immediate environments so why then you know if I took someone from an island who'd never seen a bus and asked them to draw it they'd draw it the same you know why if these aren't you know if these are constructs why are all the constructs the same well as members of the same species we share a very similar interface and so we're going to do things in a very similar way but evolution is actually playing with our interface there are people with synesthesia so for example there was a guy named Michael Watson everything that he tasted with his tongue he felt an object in three-dimensional space with his hands so mint was tall cold smooth columns of glass and he could fill it Angostura bitters was a basket of i-beam he could fill all the leaves put his hands in the basket and so forth for every single taste he would create a three-dimensional object with a surface texture and a and a temperature so he was using physical objects as an abstract data structure for something that doesn't resemble physical but that's just the connect that's just how your brain is connected so you know most of us won't have those two bits of brain talking to each other so freely and people with synesthesia have connections between bits of the brain that associate different sensations so that's sort of you know that's easier to explain but I recently went on a holiday to a weird place where I saw an animal called a Cusco I'm probably even calling it the wrong name but you know I saw it the same as everyone else there now you might say evolution has has has creators all the same but it didn't tell me what that animal looked like you know I believe that there is a hard unchanging I don't believe I see I don't trust my brain I know my memory is not reliable I know my perceptions of reality aren't reliable but I trust that certain hard objects are a certain shape a bit different think you don't have to have seen a bus I show it to you and ask you to draw it bring it find it there must be someone's never seen a bus somewhere and find them and ask them to draw show them the bus they don't know the name of the bus they don't know what the bus is for ask them to draw the bus I believe they will draw the same bus that I I draw right and I would explain that by saying that we all share roughly the same interface so we have the same graphical user interface and because we share the same user interface we whatever the objective reality is I'm proposing as conscious agents but whatever it is we project that reality into the scene to a similar interface and that's why we will all agree and then what we do is we say well because we all agree therefore over all see ourselves entirely I'd say it's entirely outside of space and time now you can ask the physicists about this do they actually think that physical objects exist and have specific properties like position momentum and spin when they're not observed and the the technical question is just asked is local realism true realism means that these properties like position momentum and spin exist even when they're not observed they have definite values and locality means that they have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light and we have tested whether local realism is true over and over again and it turns out it's false so this is independent of whether quantum mechanics and general relativity are right or not or not local realism is false and something else called non contextual realism the idea do particles have their positions women tend spending definite values and do the value that the values they have not depend on how we measure them that's the non contextual and it turns out non contextual realism the claim that they have their values and the values are definite and don't depend on how we measure them that's also false now I know that most people who study consciousness neuroscientist philosopher's philosophers of mind I think you don't need quantum physics to explain any of this stuff that's the wrong level of analysis I mean what matters is you know what's happening at the level of neurons neurotransmitters synaptic connections all of that stuff the other stuff is irrelevant basically to our understanding of consciousness you obviously disagree right right I would you're right that I would say 99% of the of my colleagues in this field think that we don't need to look at quantum effects there's one of one big exemption Penrose and Hameroff have a theory in which the quantum states of certain microtubules and in neurons of the brain are critical to their theory of consciousness and most people think that neurosis is my colleague there as well well they're not willing to say Penrose and crackpot is not a correct way man Penrose is so much smarter than me I have no idea how much smarter than he is he's brilliant and and and Stuart Hameroff is you know I mean he's a an anesthesiologist and he's working with Penrose and I'm glad that they have that theory I mean it's it's but I don't think it's true but the rest of my colleagues who are just looking at the classical physics of neural activity of course they can't explain this heart problem of consciousness so they're they're dismissing quantum effects and but they don't have a theory that works so I mean all bets are off from the physicists point of view the idea that there's a distinction between the classical world and the quantum world which was so called part of the Copenhagen interpretation that's really fallen to dis favor recently most what physicists are now finding is that they can get quantum effects from billions of atoms so you can these are like we're getting almost like visible stuff here you certainly look through they're almost the size of blood cells and so forth you can get quantum superpositions and so forth and and it seems like it's just we haven't been clever enough to figure out how to show the stuff on macroscopic levels in other words the real physics from the physics point of view is quantum physics and the idea of classical mechanics being something separate from that is that was an old Copenhagen interpretation which I think not too many people hold anymore so I want to come back to the question that's at hand here what is real what is reality if so much of how we perceive is not real is a fiction Suzanne how do you start to answer that question what is real I think that it's it's not about necessarily on a day-to-day basis saying what is real it's it's being aware that not everything is real is a very mentally healthy place to be basically is that you can't completely trust yourself and you can't completely trust your perceptions and I think once you kind of realize that but even for your mental health you know all of the things we believe about our interactions and our relationships and everything that's happening around us and if we could appreciate that that's a sort of fluctuating thing that it isn't completely trustworthy I find that very very comforting I'd have to say is is reality overrated I think you were just generally better to have be a little bit skeptical about what's going on around you because so if I think a lot of people put a great deal of trust in in paying attention to certain physical sensations or paying attention to believing that their point of view is right and and being aware that their point of view is actually subject to all this processing that's out of their control is actually quite a nice thought you think okay maybe I'm wrong about that done is should we care that much about what is real I care about it a whole lot and I can understand people who would rather not but that's yeah I think everybody has their own thing I mean maybe my fictional universe is actually kind of a nice place to be yeah it could be very comforting I I know I'm an admitted geeks and so that's maybe that's why I'm interested in it but I think that reality the position on reality is maybe seen by a concrete example if you if you look at your face in the mirror all you see is skin hair and eyes but you know firsthand that what you can't see your love of music your hopes your fears your aspirations all of your conscious experience is that huge rich world that's that's the real you you can't see that it's hidden behind this simple interface symbol that we call a face when I see your face and you smile I can infer that in that rich conscious realm you're possibly happy but that happiness as an experience does not resemble a smile there's just no resemblance miles and Happiness are two utterly different things when I look at my cat I my interface gives me less information about the consciousness I know if it doesn't like this cat food or not if I petted it too much I I believe that there really is a consciousness I'm interacting with and all I can see is this furry cute face whereas my dog is pretty transparent that's right that's right when we get down to a rat it's even worse and what an ant now my interface has given me very little insight but for all I know the the consciousness I'm interacting with there is very very rich but in some in some sense my interface has to give up I have a finite number of resources in my interface this is an infinite realm of consciousness out there so I have to do things like simplifying and so I simplify simplify and then I simplify things to the point where I seen nothing in conscious there at all and then I say that's the fundamental reality so what we do is we mistake the limits of our interface for an insight into the fundamental nature of reality that's a fundamental mistake mistake so so the idea is that the reality is our conscious experiences when you look at yourself in the mirror you see the interface and the consciousness behind I'm saying that it's true everywhere every physical symbol is there's a consciousness behind it's not that your face is conscious right in your face is your face the consciousness is just being pointed to by that face so if I'm curious about how these ideas apply it to your own lives your day-to-day lives if you step away from what you do professionally and I don't know if you think about these kinds of things just as you go about normal business but Suzanne is this I mean do you have any takeaways just from how you apply this to how you go about you know very much just a repetition of what I have said which is that it's it's quite useful to know that you know when you're you know creating memories that they're fluid and they're changing and every time you remember them they're changing again and what you're seeing is not it's just your your version of what you're seeing and that you have much more influence on that and I I find all of that just really makes me feel better to think about it it just makes me feel better to know that there's no point in torturing myself with the you know the reality I'm faced with wouldn't it make you feel worse well you have such a lousy memory no basically it it makes me feel like I have a chance to positively influence it you know you are what you believe you are and I actually have a chance you know I don't believe in in the reality around us I think anymore than you although I have a different different take on it and you know how I when I see people whose physical well-being is directly you know they have serious disabilities that are a direct result of the way they perceive changes in their body and the way they think about their bodies and the way they react to changes in their bodies you know it's really devastating and then I've got to remember that you know if you can influence your your general well-being in that way for the negative then perhaps I'm not saying that we we're all going to get sick bad things are going to happen but um you know I like the fact that I have this influence and I also like to then disbelieve things that don't suit me so in other words if we believe the world is a sunny place and that I have a happy life more like I'd still take I'd still take my coat with me in the winter like I believed on when he steps out in front of the bus but so done what about you I mean does this any of this have any practical value to you in terms of what you do day to day I think it does is taken a while it hasn't changed my perceptions until recently but but there's another aspect of that in terms of the idea that we're consciousnesses it turns out that there's split brain operations that have been done on some people with you you have two hemispheres and with a knife they can cut the corpus callosum to help with epilepsy and so forth and it turns out you can do experiments that show that the contents of consciousness associated with the left hemisphere are can be utterly different from the contents of consciousness for the other hemisphere and when you do careful experiments with those two different hemispheres you find they have different personalities the left hemisphere tends to make up lots of baloney the right hemisphere doesn't the the left hemisphere tends to be happier the right hemisphere tends to be less happy they like different things and in one case that a friend of mine vs Roma Condren studied the left hemisphere believed in God and the right hemisphere was an atheist so so these are so one thing that this realizing that it's consciousness all the way down I'm not just one consciousness but I'm a whole network of conscious agents interacting and that those different agents can have different personalities can begin to explain sort of some of the times when I'm having inner debates about what I want to do and they could actually have interesting clinical applications to realize we're not just one single conscious agent that we're a whole network of interacting different conscious agents with their personalities could actually need lead to a whole new way of thinking about clinto places your consciousness back in your brain again which you know I've just been convinced it's not it's over there somewhere right you know because yeah we shut down you show pictures to two sides of the brain you can only see one at a time and you can actually train your brain you know monks and people who are very good at what am I trying to think of yeah I usually yes meditation are able to sort of train their brain so they can use the two sides simultaneously to perceive things but all of that just places everything back in consciousness is a substrate of my brain which is right and I think it doesn't so in the following sense once I have a graphical tool to look at a network I can use that tool to play with the network so when so I actually knew Joe bogan the guy that actually did these surgeries when when Joe cut with a knife what from my point of view he's doing is he's using the tools of his interface to do a surgery on this social network he's actually dividing the social network into two week the best we can do because of our interfaces see it as two different brains but that's just because we're projecting this back down into our visualization tool but we what Joe really did with his knife was to cut a social network in half and we see that as two separate hemispheres so once again I don't think the hemispheres create our conscious experiences they're just what our species can do to represent that really complicated social network my own brain keeps trying to remember the name of that movie with Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne matrix yes the matrix does anyone ever see behind the curtain you know you say or we should be we be listening to people who believe in an alternative reality because they're the people are seeing behind the curtain well I'm offering you the red pill so I want to go to our audience in just a minute but before I do that Suzanne you have written two books that are just tell these amazing stories of just things that it would be hard to believe that certain people have certain have experiences that you know what we would call psychosomatic can you just tell us what give us a case study just to give you an example of somebody that I met when I was quite a junior doctor and and sort of how how much I misunderstood her at the time and how much I'm sort of learning to understand better so this woman was perfectly well well before no particular medical history she was working in a supermarket and she got some spray in her eyes and she got immediate first aid people wash out her eyes she went home her eyes were very red very inflamed she went to bed she was a little distressed by this incident and when she woke up the next day she was completely unable to see so she had completely lost her sight now medically that doesn't really make a huge amount of sense in the first instance but obviously if someone says they can't see they can't see and therefore you go through the usual range of investigations which is you know testing the integrity of the eyes with different tests you know measuring their brains reaction to visual stimuli and so forth and what the test said was that her eyes were working absolutely fine and she couldn't see anything that was her perception rather than this actually being a reality and but what was most troubling for me when I was a junior doctor still kind of learning about these disorders was this concept of how much insight she had into this you know she couldn't see but she could see and lots of things really sort of worried me in her behavior so for example she's being wheeled down the corridor in a wheelchair I'm passing her by and she says hello to me by name well you know and I don't believe my odor is so distinctive that a person can spot me from 10 paces you know so she's reacting to me as if she can see me and the thing that happened which absolutely blew my mind was I might be looking after her for a while and then when she was going home and she gave me a card and she'd drawn the picture on the card herself and she had drawn you know flower as a tree and it was perfect you know the colors were right the you know the it looked like a picture drawn by a sighted person and I asked I said you know I did say to her because I was so kind of shocked at the time and she said that you know she was able to draw by using the feel of the pen on the paper but it still didn't make any sense now you know doctors meet those sort of situations quite regularly and what we struggle with in that is well if she said hello to me and if she drew a picture she must really be able to see and while I still believe she has a serious problem you wouldn't be in hospital saying you can't see unless there is something significant wrong with you I don't necessarily think that the thing that's wrong with her is the thing I think that she thinks that's wrong with it and and that would be it this is not an unusual scenario people who experience being unable to see when they're in fact able to see and these are things that neurologists we have a great deal of difficulty explaining I'd love if Don could provide me with an explanation but we could we tend to kind of consider them as potentially exaggerations of physiological mechanisms that are they're filtering out these things that are changing our reality can sometimes go so wrong that they change our reality way too much and and I see these kind of people very very often now and I've come to realize that I've misunderstood everything from the start you know that the reason she was able to say hello to me in the corridor and the reason she was able to draw those pictures is because there is an absolute dissociation an absolute split between her ability to see and her knowledge of her half how much she can see so if let's say for example you were deciding you're going to see the supermarket and you're gonna pretend you went blind because of an accident you would walk around bumping into things with your white stick bashing it on the floor and you know this woman had a massive separation between what she could actually do and her experience of what she could actually do so I don't continue to see people with these sort of disorders and many of whom have seizures and paralysis and so forth and I've come to realize that sort of they are they are absolutely profound and they are absolutely real and even though sometimes they are very very difficult to explain and and in many ways they're you know we tend to judge disease in a way that's become very frustrating to me which is that you know we we stratify diseases you know cancer is the worst disease and this is the not so bad disease to get and on that kind of way of stratifying diseases you know someone who's blind but has completely normal tests comes quite low down on the you know a list of how serious things are whereas I would say if you see you can't see and therefore that is a pretty serious problem we need to start taking these kind of problems significantly more seriously than we do okay with that note of mystery let us go to the audience here right so the goal is to have a falsifiable theory and a couple of the predictions that this whole approach make are quite strong if any physical object has a definite value of any of its physical parameters when it's not observed I'm wrong that's that's I'm false if any physical object like a proton has a definite value of any physical dynamical property like position or momentum when it's not observed then I'm wrong so if we can show definitely that any physical object has a definite value of a physical property when it's not observed I'm wrong if we can show that anything within space and time has genuine causal properties I'm wrong so those are two clear predictions that fall out of this that are falsifiable but but further you know I have to give a I'm working on a mathematical model of consciousness I have to have a precise dynamics I'm working on what the precise dynamics is and a precise mapping that gives back space-time and I have to show that I get general relativity in quantum field theory and hopefully they're Union so there's a lot of precise work that has to be done to do with this stuff so so there are falsifiable predictions right now and then there's a lot of work ahead to make even deeper falsifiable predictions in my response to that is is that all then we'll have lunch I consider a hallucination to be something that one sees that isn't isn't really there as hard to say so I see for example you know our brain can create hallucinations I would see a lot of patients with epilepsy for example so that's when your brain kind of fires autonomously outside of your control and if you get a big burst of electrical activity in a part of your brain that control certain aspects of vision etc then you will see very faithfully things that aren't there so I believe that hallucinations are manifested by reactivating connections in the brain that produce this this feeling that you are seeing something or smelling something or hearing something that isn't there I'm not sure that that certainly explains hallucinations in the electrical sense in people with epilepsy I don't know that I I fully understand how all hallucinations are generated I or rather I'm a hundred percent sure I don't fully understand how old hallucinations are generated but you think that perhaps someone's flicking a switch over in the interface right so I'd have misunderstood some of what you said it actually brings up a really important point because I'm saying that nothing that we see is accurate to objective reality so that this is all just an interface and so but there is a useful distinction to be made between things that we call illusory or hallucinations and things that we call real I mean there is we are putting our finger on an important distinction there so what what am I going to say about that when I'm saying that all of this is just our interface is not faithful to the true reality and from an evolutionary point of view I think that there's an easy switch to make instead of saying our perception of perceptions that are illusory are ones that aren't true to the world I'll just say perceptions that are illusory are the ones that do not guide adaptive behavior right that's the evolutionary point of view it does this perception guide adaptive behavior when I am on a drug that makes me think I can fly can I jump out a window that turns out not to be adaptive whereas when I'm sober and I realize I can't fly that is adaptive oh I see what we call a Necker cube this is a line drawing on a flat sheet of paper that when you look at it you see a cube floating out of the paper I'd call that illusory because it's suggesting that you could grab and do certain things with a three-dimensional object and when you try to do that it doesn't happen so it doesn't guide adaptive behavior so if we just instead of talking hallucinations and illusions being about truth or not talk about them being adaptive or not then we can then we get actually what what we evolved for in it and we get a nice theory I think that this approach where one saying reality is this vast network of interacting conscious agents duh and ends not space and time it does break down a barrier that has been there between science and religion in terms of things that people in religious fields have been talking about I'm saying we could actually get mathematically rigorous models of what we mean by consciousnesses even it turns out in this theory when consciousness is when conscious agents interact they create new more complicated consciousnesses and so you can take very simple consciousness as have them interact and mathematically new more complicated consciousness is emerge and this can go up to infinity that means I have mathematical model in which I can actually talk with precision about infinite conscious agents when we're talking about infinite consciousnesses now we're talking about the kinds of things that some spiritual traditions are interested in but for the first time I can actually have mathematical precision on this so what I would like consciousness I mean that another word for god right yeah yeah for in some traditions that would be but but I can now have theorems and proofs about God and by the way I'm not saying that my theory of God is right it's just the first precise theory we've ever had so and that's the point of course I'm probably wrong but the goal is to be absolutely precise so we can now launch a science the science of infinite consciousness is and start to study their properties how many of them are there are the omniscient or the omnipotent or the omnipresent these are not things we have to wave our hands about we can prove theorems and if and then we can actually as we do that study this and then find out maybe where my theory is wrong and then fix it so the goal is to take these questions which are the deepest and most important to us who are we why are we here what happens after we die all these things that are very very important to us we've been struggling with these for thousands of years and we haven't made much progress partly because we haven't been able to figure out how to turn these into precise theories that we can then try to falsify and that's the whole point is to get theories that finally are good enough to be wrong that's what we want so that's what I'm so I'm hoping to have a kind of spirituality where we can actually be wrong and make false predictions so we can figure it out and fix it and then move on first I would say that it's only as a figure of speech that I would say that Brit that we're using the brain as it as a tool that that the brain is just our visualization that the brain actually has no causal powers so it's not like for example some people think that the brain is a receiver for consciousness or so that the brain you know maybe doesn't cause consciousness but it's a receiver for consciousness but that's giving the brain some independent existence and some real causal abilities and I'm not saying that's the case but but the idea then is that if there are the this infinite network of conscious agents we have to study how they interact in various ways some of them we see it as micro biomes we see those agents we represent them as what we call the microbiome within our interface well so what's going to be required is a far more sophisticated biology and neuroscience right now we look inside brains we see neurons and synapses we say oh that means there's neurons and synapses now I'm saying no okay that's what we're seeing in our interface we have to figure out what that is really referring to in this vast social network of conscious ages we have to reverse-engineer our interface and figure out what so there's lots of job security for neuroscience in this I've just opened up if this is right we have a lot of job security for neurosciences and then also for a while just trying to understand the microbiome because we have to understand go backwards from the interface to what this is saying in terms of this network of social agents and then figure out what that interaction is I'm very interested in the psychology of your career to be honest well you know it's so easy to be a doctor you know you know what you're gonna do at the end of the day and you know what you have to solve and you know you've got you can do it in a reasonable space of time but you're facing a career where you know possibly you will just after many many years say well that's wrong but that's good so now I know one wrong thing and then many many years later you know another wrong thing it's it I would struggle with that I think my I need my rewards to me a bit more insulin well that's that that is the case with all of our sciences hmm none of our theories are right I don't believe a single scientific theory is correct and I think that the most advanced scientists in general relativity they would say no general relativity it's beautiful you should study it there's something deeper quantum field theory it's beautiful great insights you should study it it's not quite right there's something deeper evolution by natural selection it's beautiful it's deep it's the best tool we've got we should study it we should use it there's probably something deeper and I think every scientist who's at the forefront of their field and really thinking about it would say yes our scientists are our to our science our theories are the best tools that humanity has ever come up so far and and they're still not there yet we're not there and there's a humility that comes with this whole approach the the humility is be precise so that we can figure out where we're wrong and be willing to be shown wrong and then to realize that probably we haven't yet got a true theory yet it seems to be that there are communications happening between conscious agents that that so part of the dynamics that we're going to be studying is how in agencies actually interact with each other and how they learn to communicate with each other and so part of it may be the conscious agents within you talking back and forth when we cut the corpus callosum two hemispheres that used to be an intimate connection no longer can talk back and forth and you get different kinds of behaviors that that come out of that so that's that's one aspect of it and and I would say another aspect the evolutionary arguments that I gave to say that we don't see reality as it is turn out not to apply to logic and reason aspects of thought the arguments that that I should that I have published that that actually prove with with my colleague John Prakash and others that that selection pressures are uniformly against seeing the truth or it turns out that they do not apply to logic and reason to thought there the selection pressures are actually not to make us geniuses most of us aren't geniuses at logic and reason but from a fitness point of view someone who doesn't recognize that two bites of an apple give you roughly twice the fitness payoffs of one bite of an apple isn't going to survive very long so you have to be able to reason about Fitness payoffs not about truth and and so so our thinking can be more or less accurate it can be more or less a useful tool even though our perceptions in some sense are an interface that hides the truth but there's a lot more to be I mean you put your finger on a big research project I don't work with those things specifically but yes I think that these are all related things if we come back to hallucinations I mean some people believe that hallucinations are and you know I'm not of I was talking about hallucinations that happen as a positive phenomenon in epilepsy but if you think of hallucinations or rather as a result of electrical activity if you think of them more in something like M schizophrenia that this is all again about this sort of filtering is that we learn to recognize our own voice as our own voice and that if that all starts going wrong then suddenly our own voice becomes somebody else's voice and that's how people can potentially believe that they're hallucinating and hearing voices they're actually hearing their own voice but that this sort of mechanism of altered perception in the brain that allows us make sense of to live with the world that we live in has changed in some way I think all of these different malfunctions have different mechanisms so you know one you know that the physiology that stops me seeing the world exactly as it is is completely different to the physiology that produces mental illness or hallucinations and mental illness but I think these are all related phenomena these are tricks that our brains are playing on us and I guess that's where I find some of it positive if you can if I brains can play those tricks on us in a negative direction perhaps we can learn somehow to influence that in a more positive way there are many more questions out there we probably could go for another hour here but we have no more time thank you for being a fabulous audience thank you

Channel: NourFoundation

Views: 100,299

Rating: 4.7406726 out of 5

Keywords: perception, mind, consciousness, physics

Id: 3MvGGjcTEpQ

Length: 84min 35sec (5075 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019