S03E01 Noam Chomsky on Consciousness

oh hello welcome to mindshot my name is Philip Goff I'm a philosopher who thinks Consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it hello welcome to mind chat my name is Keith Frankish I'm a philosopher who thinks that Consciousness at least there's many philosophers think of it it doesn't really exist and we're Overjoyed today to be joined by Professor Noam Chomsky welcome to mind chat Noam chart Professor Chomsky pleased to be with you well Professor Chomsky needs no introduction uh but I'm going to introduce him anyway uh just perform sake he is a Laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he is a towering figure in the field of linguistics the creator of several major theoretical programs that have shaped the field is also a major figure in cognitive science and analytic philosophy and he was one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and in addition to his scientific work he is also a highly influential social critic and political activist who advocates for libertarian socialism um he's the author of more than 150 books and he's one of the most cited Scholars alive and in addition he is the only mind chat guest who was on Richard Nixon's enemies list so welcome Professor Chomsky fantastic thank you very much so what we're going to do today Professor chomsky's contributed made major contributions in a very wide range of areas so Keith seems to have disappeared hopefully he'll join us again in a moment so Professor chomsky's made a wide range of contributions but on mind chat we're mainly interested in Consciousness so what we're going to do we're going to ask some questions to explore Professor chomsky's unique and distinctive perspective on the philosophical and scientific challenges posed by consciousness and then I'm going to try and persuade Professor Chomsky that Consciousness is everywhere and then Keith's going to try and persuade Professor Chomsky the Consciousness is nowhere and if we have a little bit of time I can't resist maybe asking a little bit about politics towards the end but we'll see if we've got time and maybe we can have some audience one or two audience questions at the end okay as always if you like the content of these videos please do subscribe to the channel and the audio podcast like the video write some comments write us a five star review and so on thank you very much okay let's start the discussion ah right well um Philip and I um in our different ways have dedicated much of our Lives to trying to solve the philosophical problems surrounding Consciousness but if I understand right um You Professor Chomsky think that these problems maybe beyond the capacity of human beings to solve that um their Mysteries rather than problems that are intellectual capacities may be not up to the task now if that's right if that is your view then and that's correct then well that means that Philip and I and many other people have been been wasting our time um is is that a fair characterization of your view that a mysterianism about Consciousness and uh could you tell us a bit more about that please no I think we should step back a little bit and ask which questions we're talking about as far as I'm I mean there is by now a conventional distinction between the easy question and the hard question uh I should say that I'm not convinced that the hard question exists I know there are interrogative statements that seem to formulate a hard question but something in the form of an interrogative may not be a question so if I ask why do things happen as the form of a question but it's not a real question because there's no possible answer to it unless formulated interrogative has possible answers it's not a question and that's my feeling about the so-called hard question so let's take a concrete example suppose suppose you asked me uh what was it like to see the sunset last night I can give a detailed answer then very if I had the talent they could give a very detailed answer but even with my limited talents I could describe it in detail that's a real question on the other hand if you ask me what's it like to see a sunset I have nothing to say at all there's no answer to that question so it's not a it has the form of an interrogative expression but it's like why do things happen it's not a real question my feeling is that the so-called easy and hard questions pretty much divide along that line there are questions that you can formulate that have possible answers you can try to give answers to them there are formulations you can give that look like questions but unless there are at least possible answers they're just Expressions that have the form of interrogatives but not real questions either for science or philosophy and I would I'm inclined to think in reading the literature that that's pretty much the division between easy and hard questions and and writing about this so I'm not convinced that the questions are Mysteries at least the ones that we can formulate that have possible answers they seem to be within the range of human science I think there probably are things that aren't within that range but I'm not convinced that this is one of them another concern I've had about the literature I've discussed it a little here and there is that I think it fails to make a what seems to me a crucial to recognize what seems to me a crucial thing that conscious what's conscious let's say conscious decisions and so on are deeply intermingled with unconscious mental Acts so closely intermingled with him that I don't think he can extract the conscious part and have a coherent picture and I think that's particularly true particularly clear at least in the area of my major concerns use of language like take what we're doing now hmm I made it I'm making a decision to produce a particular sentence I have no awareness of when I decided to make that decision it just happened I don't even know what sentence I'm producing until I hear it so there's I think there was a decision but deep in the realm of the unconscious and inaccessible hypnosis well here there are questions we can ask can we work out the mental acts that are taking place when we choose to select a sentence can we find the areas of the brain that are involved in those activities and those domains we can make make a degree of progress in fact I think there is progress both in working out the nature of the mental act sending the discovery of the brain areas that are implicated not what the brain areas are doing that's beyond what we understand but at least what areas are involved well all of that is the easy question if you like but it's one that intermingles conscious and unconscious in such a way that you really can't extricate the conscious fact in fact if you try to introspect about what we call I mean most of your use of language almost 100 99 of it is just internal and it's uh psychologically impossible to empty your mind and not think about something maybe you know Buddhists can do it but I can't uh the uh and when you think about what your what you what we call Inner speech thinking to yourself we discover very quickly it's not inner it's not internals it's not the internal workings of the language it's external speech where you're not using the articulatory system so it's a peripheral system what's going on inside there's good evidence we can speak it to ourselves it's beyond consciousness and if we look more closely you can do the introspection yourself it seems to me we don't really uh in our speech is not actually sentences it's little bits of fragments that come to our mind and it's all done instantaneously so quickly can't imagine how it's done this way beyond the speech the speed of neural transmission group example so all kinds of things are happening unconsciously little bits and fragments come to Consciousness we can study in the usual way of the Sciences indirectly what the mental acts are that are underlying all of this and to an extent how the brain is implicated but beyond that I just don't see what we can say I don't know how to formulate questions that have answers it's roughly the way it looks to me well that's a perspective that I myself very sympathetic to indeed I maybe say a little bit more about my perspective later but um well maybe this will be a point that would Philip like to come in there to I mean you you you definitely think there are that there are uh problem real problems Beyond these the easy ones um well yeah maybe when I try and persuade you to be a pan psychist maybe I could in line with trying to do that maybe right suggest um positive answers to the questions but what I wanted to ask first actually was about dualism so for those who don't know dualism is the view that Consciousness is non-physical outside of the workings of the body and the Brain maybe in the soul and the philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked dualism as belief in a ghost in the machine but I really loved Professor Chomsky your Twist on this so you reject dualism if I understand but not because you're worried by machines being haunted by ghosts as such but more and I quote your worry is that Newton exercised the machine but left the ghost completely intact so it's a it's a really cool quote could you maybe explain a little bit about what what you intended here and I should say this is quite a heterodox position so it's my view if you look at the history of this topic uh we're not talking History of Science there was the Galilee what we call the Galilean Revolution was based on a fairly clear conception of what physical is that had a conception of the physical no distinction between physical material body it's all the same thing it wasn't precise but it was reasonably clear called the mechanical philosophy philosophy of course meant science in those things so mechanical science and the picture was that an intelligible explanation would have to be within the framework of mechanical science mechanical science meant something like these artifacts that were being developed all over Europe at the time skilled Artisans were constructing amazing things that looked cute looked real you know Gardens at Versailles and mechanical clocks and plays and so on it's kind of a little bit like what you hear from Silicon Valley today are these things really alive sentience and so on but about at the same level but they we now have a couple hundred years of understanding why this doesn't make any sense but that was the picture of matter it was held by just about every serious scientist go there the founders of the Royal Society Hawkins and leibnized Newton all took this for granted Descartes of course and Descartes dualism in my opinion is kind of misunderstood seems to me Descartes dualism was ordinary science simple normal science he thought he could show that just about everything in the world including most of human behavior and Sensibility could be accounted for within mechanical science but he notices there were things that couldn't be accounted for this ring and it was basically correct one of them which interests me particularly is what's come to be called the creative aspect of language use affected ordinary normal language use is unbounded and Innovative creative you may be in Cartesian terms incited and inclined to speak in certain ways but you're not compelled it's uh he thought this was essential to humans and the most dramatic case of it was language this was followed up by the what we call the minor cartesians people don't read them but I think they're very interesting now people like Jack the court of Juan who developed a pretty sophisticated version of what's nowadays called the touring test is that if some creature that looks like us can respond appropriately to any question we can put to him uh it would only be reasonable to assume that he has this property that goes beyond mechanism well if you have something that goes outside the framework of the set of assumptions you have have to postulate a new principle that's race kogi times so he says yes there's another principle in addition to the mechanical principle then you ask how are they connected in a into this business the pituitary plan and so on and so forth but that's all straight science perfectly reasonable science then Newton came along and if you take a look at the principia a lot of it is physical explanations don't work Newton regarded this as in his words absurd and he said the conclusions he's reaching are totally absurd but they seem to be true it's generally assumed by historians of science that Newton called his work principia mathematically not principles of philosophy for the reasons he explained he said he has no explanation he has no scientific explanation that's the fit context for who's being famous I I make no hypotheses coming it is I can describe I have a mathematical theory that describes the things but I have no scientific theory in fact he spent the rest of his life trying to find some physical basis but he would call physical basis within mechanical philosophy well where do we end up from this uh what happened I think is significant Newton's Newton Enlightenment it's the hoygens the rest regarded Newton's theory is ridiculous not just as he himself did he argued that they argued he's reinstating occult ideas the hated ideas of the neoscholastics Newton agreed that he said that his occult ideas are different because he had a mathematical Theory and the mathematical theory was intelligible like leibniz understood the theory just both he and Newton regarded it as observed but they understood it but I think what happened in the history of science is that the goals were restricted instead of trying to find an intelligible World whatever that is you look for intelligible theories look Newton's or the plus the developments the gym leader and anything is acceptable as long as it's part of the mathematical Theory uh forces and Fields later more exotic things when you get to quantum mechanics and so on whatever you postulate and the best theory that that's all we can say about the body well John Locke understood this very quickly immediately after principia appeared in a couple of years he came out with what uh called Lux hypothesis extracting it from its theological framework it comes down to me and essentially that thinking anything mental it's just some aspect of organized properties in the brain I think that's where we are now uh that exercised the machine that had left the ghost intact then you go through the 18th century there's a lot of serious work on this uh culminating in Joseph priestley's work into the century were he tries to develop this and fair amount of detail it was then forgotten literally and it was revised in the late 20th century with the idea that this radical new idea and philosophy of mind maybe a philosophy of students maybe your mind is just some property of the brain and if you look at the late 20th century the pronouncements they are almost identical with late 18th century I mean there's a Hiatus there which is something to learn from so going back to Gilbert Ryle who of course I studied when I was a student felt right away that there was something wrong as I learned more about the history of science I think you can see what it is it's the opposite of what he said there's not a ghost in the machine there's a ghost and there's no machine the machine is whatever exists in the world I mean if it turns out that say John Wheeler that the Institute of advanced studies suggests the theory that's called it from bit the only thing that exists are the answers to questions we posed To Nature that's it everything else that's mattered there's nothing else to say about it well I'm not confident this that's right or wrong but physicists take it seriously so I presume it's at least possible I suppose it turns out to be true okay that's what matter is uh because we know nothing and this comes up in the car as government as you both know better than I do in the Consciousness literature Century the Arthur Readington Russell and so on and see we don't know anything about matter so we have no reason to say that matter isn't conscious that's actually a extension of what Newton himself said and since we know nothing about matter maybe matters all matters of Life see we can't show that it isn't it didn't accept it but he said you can't show that it isn't because we don't know what matter is so contrary to Royal matter was exercised it just is whatever the best theory tells us it is what you can do it's uh at this point you do enter the domain where you can distinguish possible problems for humans versus mysteries for humans this is considered an exotic idea but it's called mysterianism to me is what we call truism uh if we're part of the organic world not Angels then we'll be like every other organism or cognitive capacities will have scope and limits in effect they're closely related it's the intrinsic properties there are built-in properties innate properties that determine the scope but they immediately give limits as soon as you look at them you see this in the language area of my area I find impossible languages as soon as you begin to understand what language that's fascinating so so for you the problem of Consciousness the hard problem of Consciousness is is a non-problem because there are no conceivable positive answers so let me try and persuade you of a positive answer and I think it's one that connects with a lot of what you've just been talking about Bertrand Russell Arthur Eddington so I I think we have a lot in common I I agree with you that we can't articulate the question in the language of physical science the way I put it I don't think you can articulate the qualities of our experience what it's like to see red for example those qualities in the purely quantitative language of physical science uh and for those for that reason I don't think you can give an intelligible explanation of Consciousness in the terms of physical science if you can't even articulate the phenomenon then you can't explain it however I don't think that's the only option right so yes I so I think we can't explain Consciousness in terms of matter but I'm optimistic that maybe we can explain matter in terms of Consciousness so the thought would be if we just postulate at the fundamental level of reality uh very s networks of very simple conscious entities behaving in simple predictable ways because they have very simple forms of experience through their interactions realizing certain mathematical structures and then the next move would be to identify those mathematical structures with the mathematical structures of physics so in this way we get physics out of Consciousness so maybe we can't get Consciousness out of physics but maybe we can get physics out of Consciousness and this links nicely to what you were saying because I think the reason this is possible is because as Bertrand Russell pointed out we don't know what the hell Mata is all we have is this mathematical description so as long as there's something at the fundamental level of reality that realizes that mathematical structure may be networks of conscious entities we can get physics out of it so why isn't that a positive answer to the question a positive solution to the hard problem of consciousness well that's surfing following you correctly that's basically Russell a century ago analysis of matter which to me is sounds like the very plausible approach but I'd interpret it a little differently first of all just a qualification on seeing bread I don't think we can describe answer the question what's it like to see red I can answer the question what's it like to see this red spot in front of me that I can answer but if you say what it's like to see red I have no idea what the answer could be it doesn't it seems to me like one of these non-questions in an interrogative form and as I said before I have the suspicion that the easy hard problem distinction probably lies right there permeable questions through which there are possible answers things that look like questions but have no answers so they're not really questions let's hear it back to Wittgenstein and the Fly bottle I think but the um as for Russell the way I understood what he was saying is this maybe it's the same as what you're saying he said the thing where most confident about is our immediate consciousness the rest of our intellectual activities are an effort to make some sense out of it as inquiring individuals so yes in that sense physics comes from consciousness uh we try to construct some conception to the world best theory we can of the world which will yield answers to the questions that we can ask about Consciousness not to those that we can't ask that's where the distinction comes but then we're down to the so-called easy questions and in fact one of the things we discover right away that our Consciousness is misleading us about the world so you look at the bent stick and the in the water and glass of water okay your Consciousness is misleading you about the world so they were confident about our Consciousness it's not telling us what the world is go back to my favorite Century again 17th century uh experience conforms to the modes of cognition rough code words I think an underappreciated philosophy this is uh so we we are very confident about it but we discover in our inquiries that we're confident about the wrong thing uh not of course there's wrong we do see the bent state but it's not what's happening the actual world is something different there but theory is telling us but then I I don't think it leads us to the conclusion the pen second conclusion uh ill instrucson reaches that conclusion by an argument against uh radically emergence but I never found that argument very convincing that I I take the simple-minded view that I'm conscious maybe my dog is but the table in front of me isn't I can't prove that but I don't see any argument against yeah I actually agree with you about Galen strawson's argument gaydenstrassen was actually my PhD supervisor but I I I'm actually my first publication was rejecting his argument for pan psychism so Galen justifies pan psychism from this intuition that you can't get Consciousness out of non-consciousness and so we just need Consciousness there from the start I agree with you that I I don't buy that intuition um I don't see why there couldn't be strange properties the armed Consciousness but somehow make Consciousness so I don't by the the strawson argument but I think that my argument for pan psychism again is closely connected to things you've just said I would make more of a Simplicity argument as you said the the only thing we really can be confident of the existence of is consciousness through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences so if we can account for everything we want to account for just with Consciousness then that's the most simple elegant parsimonious Theory that's the one we should go for and I think we can because physics is purely mathematical we can simply postulate networks of conscious entities that realize the structures of physics we can account for physics um and so there's never a need to postulate anything beyond Consciousness so finally I I think I agree with you that maybe the normal way of putting the problem of Consciousness is maybe a non-question where we're trying to explain away consciousness but to my mind the Bertrand Russell approach turns the hard problem of Consciousness on its head so instead of trying to explain away Consciousness in terms of matter we try to explain away matter in terms of Consciousness and that looks to me the most simple parsimonious way of accounting for all the data and so the theory that's most likely to be true we can never know for sure we can't look inside a particle and and see whether it's conscious or not just as I can't look inside your brain and see whether you're conscious or not but we should give highest Credence to the to the simplest Theory that accounts for all the data and that seems to me pansychism well I agree with you that we should look for the sentence Theory but it should be the ory that accounts for the whole range of evidence and it seems to me when you look at the whole range of evidence it's a different picture we I'm confident that I'm conscious the easy quit so-called easy question you can study it and find out what's going on in my brain when I'm conscious okay and what's going on in it you know what's not happening in the table let's say well that's evidence too now we want the simplest theory for all of this and the simplest theory for all of this I think comes down to saying I'm conscious my table isn't not so sure about my when you say fish or something else maybe but that's going to be answered by the theory of what's going on when you actually have Consciousness so if I think if we extend the range of the evidence to all that the scientific work that gives us some indication of what the neural basis is for Consciousness we want the simplest theory that accounts for all of this and it does distinguish me from the table then we want so I think we end up with a picture that we can work on the easy question which is of course very hard and get pretty good answers to lots of aspects of it then we can try to develop the simplest theory of all of this it seems to me it does make distinctions between me and the table let me have one more try at this um it almost starts you know it's almost sounding like now you're saying we do know what matter is and we know some of it doesn't involve Consciousness but what I take from uh Bertrand Russell the analysis of matter is we have no idea what matter is all we know is what it does it's abstract mathematical structure so therefore the alternative to pansychism is just to postulate that the matter outside of brains has some completely unknown nature that we know not which as John Locke said he's just got some completely unknown nature whereas surely if if the only thing we know about Mata is that some of it the stuff in brains has a Consciousness involving nature matter outside of brains who are completely in the dark about surely that the simplest hypothesis is to suppose the stuff outside of brains has a as a nature continuous with the stuff inside of brains well I think that taking too literally the general statements by Locke and Newton and others yes we don't know what matter is but then when we investigate we can develop theories of what the world is like those are our best theories okay the matter is whatever best theories tell us it is can't be certain about it it's an empirical inquiry so you never gonna have certainty that's science but we can have theories that look better than others and when we look into the neural correlates of Consciousness what happens when you're asleep under drugs all this kind of stuff then we can develop the best theory and of what's going on when we have the experience of Consciousness then that tells us distinguishes me from the table you know when you say we don't know have any idea that means well we can't be certain there could be other things that we don't know about but that's true of science generally I don't think it's has any special um the grasp and this particular branch of science it's just you do the best you can get the best theory you can that accounts for whatever is around well there is evidence about what's going on in the brain when some creature is or is not conscious so let's take that to be our best guess for now as to what matter is you can still say well I really don't know in fact friend of mine Quantum theorist and send me a article in a quantum theory Journal a couple months ago which was a discussion among Hotshot on zeros about where a particle is and they can't agree and they don't know what a particle is but that doesn't mean we know nothing they agree on a lot of the properties are part of this just don't know maybe it's right it's good deep enough to end up with kind of like what Richard Feynman said about Quantum Theory because we know how to use it but nobody understands it and so you go deep enough you get to a point where you don't understand anyone but that doesn't mean you know nothing the path that Russell suggests is from Consciousness to what he called a causal Theory of the world well he as you know he was criticized for that mathematician Newman I think Russell gave it up much too quickly because it assumed that there was no uh phenomenon that was no perceptual evidence and he doesn't have to assume that he could say well it's at least what Eddington called meter reading so yes you don't have some basis in perception but then the counter arguments so I think he could maintain the conception of science giving as a basically causal theory of the world but that's something it's not nothing it's our best guess as to what matters what satisfies this causal theory of the world and then when we include that in the book of evidence for which we're trying to develop the simplest Theory seems to me it does make a distinction between me and the table or the brain you can see the brain is whatever matter is thinking is some aspect of whatever matter is is located and we don't have any notion of physical anymore it's just whatever there is okay but that includes the mind with Foods Consciousness some Arabesque theories Aid the properties of it show up in some areas not other areas like in my behavior but not what the table does I'd love to talk about Newman's critique of Russell but we're going on I think I've had my go at trying to persuade you to be a Panasonic is Keith can you can you do any better um okay let me have a shot let me see if I can I convert to be in it what I call an Illusionist uh don't build too much into the term the general idea is that we're confused about what Consciousness is or at least a lot of philosophers are confused about what Consciousness is um the introspection misleads us I I think introspection is as fallible as perception it's a psychological faculty it's not got any uh wonderful magical powers uh to acquainters with a a a a a a a special Realm Of Consciousness it's just another site another thing the brain does and uh I think we we it gives us a confused idea of Consciousness we think of Consciousness we we talk about what experience is like with this is a common way of talking is that that pain was horrible that that taste is delicious we talk about what experiences like and that induces us to think that we're referring to private mental qualities what it what it is like this is whatever that are sort of presented to us in a mental realm so there's there's the the they say the coffee we're tasting but that has some properties but then that creates taste quietly out in our minds and we're we're aware of the taste of the coffee via our awareness or uh uh uh of these taste qualia or these taste quality are accompany our awareness of the of the coffee and so it's like a show in a in a private theater where where these properties are presented to the self and that's consciousness and uh and these these qualities are really strange ones they're supposed to be intrinsic they're they're distinct from all psychological reactions and responses you could have all the reactions and responses without that particular intrinsic fee or the feels an added extra and they're supposed to be radically private they exist only for for the the observing self in the theater no one else can can detect them and they're ineffable can't describe them they have this unique epistemic status that reveal themselves directly to the self and so on and once you think of Consciousness in that way then then you really have created a hard problem for yourself an insoluble problem uh and you've you've put Consciousness outside the reach of experimental science there's there's no way you can do science on private ineffable intrinsic properties like that it's like conceiving of life as some vital spark in addition to all the organic processes people used to think of life like that and maybe there are reasons uh natural reasons why they thought of life in that way but no no it's a bad way to think of it it's life's just a collection of Highly complex organic processes and the illusionists say stop thinking of Consciousness in that way stop creating an insoluble problem for yourself um they say Consciousness doesn't involve awareness of private mental qualities it involves awareness of features of the world and our own reactions to those features of the world our awareness of the world is colored by our reactions to it our psychological reactions to it and the reason we think there's this private in a show is because of the Limited introspective access we have to all those complex psychological reactions stimuli uh impact upon us and they create a host of psychological reactions and we have a vague sense of this of there being a sort of internal richness um a richness of a psychological richness a richness of processes but we we can't articulate this and so we just gesture at it by talking about what experiences is like and then the mistake is to reify that notion of what it's like into what it is likenesses and where do these what is what are these what it is likenesses and how does the brain produce them and maybe their fundamental features of all reality and and so on as pancitis say so uh it's a kind of Illusion this this this this this this the notion of Consciousness that pancitis and dualists are working with it is is is a a bad one based on that arises from the limitations of introspection and we should discard it and as you said simply focus on the easy problems the problems of explaining what the processes that occur during episodes of experience so that's that's roughly the picture uh do you think it misses anything out I think is the question well I am partially sympathetic that for reasons I mentioned so in the areas where I mainly work say language as I said I think there are there's inner penetration of what we're aware of and things we can't be aware of which play a major role in what we call experience but it doesn't seem to me that that gives us a reason to cast out one element of this psychological reactions that we have namely I see that the color red in the upper left of my visual field and here's what it looks like that seems to be one of the psychological reactions whatever one wants to call it I could call it Consciousness call it something else but it's part of the network of psychological reactions which we constantly had a good name for it is consciousness but I don't see how to extricate it from all the others with that in that regard I agree with you but it doesn't I I don't see what we have to I don't see any reason and I think you agree and not to accept it as part of the general network of reactions then comes what amounts to a terminological question are we going to call it consciousness well there's so much weight that's been cast upon the concept of Consciousness and the philosophical discussion of mostly this Century that maybe we need better terms actually I think it's mostly this century until the 20th century there was very little talk about conscious conscious except self-consciousness it was a lot about that but not and as I mentioned in one of the papers they sent around was always struck by the fact that this contemporary debate seems to exclude the one serious effort to develop a a real theory of appearance Nelson Goodman's actually I was his student so um I was an undergrad studying with him at the time he was working on the book structure of appearance and couldn't I don't think it reaches a James but it is a serious constructive effort to develop a theory of what appearance is from elementary quality so I think in order to enter into discussion somewhere but the general point I think is yes we have lots of psychological reactions going on all the time some of them fall into what has been called Consciousness like my seeing you know people in front of me as Descartes pointed out you're not seeing people in Trinity you've seen spots and lines and so on we now know a lot more about that but my Consciousness in his people something my mind constructs from data that's coming in uh Arabesque theories tell us something about what the data might be soon I think the picture is attractive but I don't it doesn't seem to me to lead to the conclusion that we have to excise consciousness and cast it out from the network of psychological reactions and it's always a conception of Consciousness tend to agree with Russell that it's the part that we're most confident about even though when we look at it we find that it's not telling us what the world is can I press you on that point about the thing we're most certain of I mean in a sense we can say yes this is happening now whatever it is and I'm certain this is happening without having any uh assurance and the way we conceptualize what is happening now and would you say that our introspective reports and judgments that they too are constructed by the brain by the similar sort of processes to the ones in which are perceptual reports and judgments are constructed and if so doesn't that mean they've had the same possibility of being fallible distorting caricatured uh I mean access to our own minds to our own Consciousness and that's not magically assured well I think what our Consciousness tells us about the world is fallible and in fact wrong but that's different from saying that the Consciousness is failable so when I see the bent stick I see the Bend State happens it isn't bent but that's going back to Russell when you try to create the best theory you can for what seems to you not valuable you just discovered that your own experiences failable it's not conforming to the World As for the fact that it's first person not third person mind I don't know how significant that is I mean from a third person point of view you can get plenty of evidence about when I'm conscious and what I'm conscious about if we knew enough about the easy question which we don't it might be possible by looking at the brain to say he's seeing the red spot in the upper part of the visual field then from a third person point of view you wouldn't have the same you wouldn't be seeing it but you'd understand what it means to be seen so that would answer all the what it's like questions that can be answered a lot I can't be answered so they're not real questions no I I yeah that I yes I'm totally important that we can we can be sure of Consciousness as a process that something is happening that is constructing a certain picture of the world for us I think the the question is whether we have some insight into the nature of that process and what it involves and that it involves as dualism and psychics think some the presence of some strange qualities the what it is likenesses that are distinctively mental and that are mental versions of the colors and other qualities we ascribe to things around us in the world and I think that is a is going Way Beyond what we're certain I think that's a theoretical interpretation of the process of conscious awareness that leads us down a dead end so we certainly sure that we're being we're aware of stuff valibly aware and stuff but I don't think that fallible awareness of the world is rooted in an infallible awareness of a private inner world I think that's just multiplying entities Beyond necessity I don't think we have to postulate an inner world we don't need a Cartesian theater or we don't like any of that stuff all we need is here's one of my psychological reactions there's a spotter right up there and here's what it looks like that I can describe it in detail that's part of my whole psychology usual name for that it's Consciousness you want a different name yeah and it doesn't tell us about the I mean we the following Russells program the study of the causal structure of the world tells us the actual world the one that our best theories tell us about doesn't conform to my experience but worth experienced constructed by paramus's cognition they enter into what the outside world is telling us and they yield experience which is it's there but it's not telling us about the telling us only indirectly about the world I think if we sort these things out we don't have to go into the dead end that you're describing it's my feeling right well I'm I'm on board with all that I think as you say there's a terminological issues but um and presentational issues but picture of sketch there seems pretty congenial to me um so who do you think's more right or less wrong Professor Chomsky or are we both totally wrong do you think me or Keith is your book written interest in the article I think there are ways of reframing them so that they're consistent all right there you go Philip we've been arguing all this time Keith and maybe our views are consistent uh but it's been fascinating discussion do we have time maybe for a quick question about politics and maybe one or two audience questions yeah so so we're supposed to be a Consciousness podcast but I'm very much a political animal so I can't resist taking the opportunity um you're actually almost exactly 50 years older than me Professor Chomsky I I was born in the winter of discontent at the end of the 70s that swept Margaret Thatcher into power so I I always think of my lifetime as the time when everything went because you know in the post-war years we had relatively well regulated capitalism uh in the U.S Western Europe high taxes of 80 or 90 percent on the wealthy in the U.S and the UK and you know this made at least in in uh this part of the world uh Society is more equal and uh also very high levels of growth and then from my birth onwards we've got uh you know the regulation and the taxes slashed and we've got massive inequality 2008 meltdown and it was all your fault I know the decade of brexit and Trump and all the rest of it so so I tend to get quite miserable and thinking there's no hope probably because my existence is co-extensive with this terrible neoliberal period so I wanted to ask given your um broader perspective living over twice as long as me whether you have hope that we are perhaps coming to the end of the neoliberal era and that um perhaps there is can be some hope that we'll move on to to some better economic model do you see any any up any grounds for optimism at all here yeah I have one of the advantages of being in my mid-90s so I actually experienced this before in childhood you go back to the 1920s pretty similar to today Thatcher and Reagan have succeeded in driving countries that spread over the world started in the U.S and Britain driving them back to the worst of the 1920s extreme inequality uh destruction of the labor move and notice that both Reagan and Thatcher understood where their advisors understood that if you're going to carry out uh harsh class Ward you've got to eliminate the defenses people can't be allowed to defend themselves so their First Act was to destroy labor unions opened the door to the corporate sector to go ahead and then comes highway robbery on an extraordinary scale I mean in the United States it's actually been studied I don't know about Britain so the Brand Corporation very respectable Corporation about a year ago came out with a detailed study of what they call the transfer of wealth from the general population to the top one percent during these 40 Years of class war roughly 50 trillion dollars that's pretty impressive Highway Robert now Thatcher's line was as you recall there's no Society just individuals in the market maybe she believed it I don't know but it's total nonsense there's a very rich Society for the wealthy and privilege Chambers of Commerce trade associations Business Roundtable even the government which they mostly run so they have enormous support system and which end up with is what's sometimes being called a bailout economy the very rich and Powerful are protected by a huge network of associations the rest of the population is tossed out in the market to survive some now well what do you end up with 50 trillion dollars of robbery destruction of democracy elimination of benefits I mean what's going on in England this is almost surreal England had the best Health Service in the world NHS was the ideal for the world I've been trying to turn it into the worst system in the world the U.S system twice the cost of comparable countries uh some of the worst outcomes in fact the United States the only country outside of War where mortalities increasing to especially the Tory government but labor wasn't much different are saying let's take the best system dismantle it turn it into the worst distance well that's class war in a very effective way let's go back to the 20s that's what had happened in the United States Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare had destroyed the pretty vibrant effective labor movement silenced critical thought it was a brutal repression you get the 20s a lot of euphoria I mean even spread down to the lower middle class like my father an immigrant you know he bought some he got caught up in his real estate speculation when there was all the story about him become rich by buying real estate they bought a particle of land which turned out to be in the Mid-Atlantic somewhere okay that was the 1920s 1930s it all changed revised they remove and Rewind and Industrial actions militant actions a lot of political activism by now we're up to the period I remembered he got the New Deal in the United States which forged the way to social democracy in the western world okay the question did happen again in fact we have a not bad models where you mentioned the regulated capitalism of the 50s and the 60s it's pretty economists called the Golden Age of capitalism far from perfect kind of things that were wrong but his comparison with the class war of the last 40 years it was pretty successful well at the very least you can go back to that but then you can go Way Beyond then so much more just much more free societies it's a battle but it's always been a battle it was a battle in the 1930s okay it is today that's great that's given me lots of grounds for for Hope and and you know in many ways I think you know what gives me hope is I think I feel in the 2008 crisis the but the left was was was too weak to sort of take take advantage of that crisis as it were and explain and give us a way forward but I think I feel in the decade or so since then the sort of intellectual infrastructure has um built up a lot more there are a lot of um independent news channels and magazines and there's a lot more going on it feels like hopefully we can start to articulate A Better Way Forward but anyway sorry I'm I said that would be one question but that's that's given me some grounds for help for Hope and help um maybe just uh one or two audience questions um if I scroll back a little bit sorry we're using new software now um okay digital gnosis got in first to Friend of the show another philosophy podcast asks would linguistic reform around consciousness this rarefied thing help us do away these mysterious problems of mind if so what linguistic uses in discourse on mind should we encourage did you get that Professor Chomsky pretty none hey as some of you don't know I'm not hearing anything I'm reading the transcript and sometimes um maybe I what I could do is put the question in the chat can you see the chat can you see that okay there we go there's the question foreign around Consciousness reified thing help us do anyway with these mysterious problems of mind if so what linguistic uses in discourse online should we encourage well I think there's something to that as we were discussing the there's been a lot of baggage associated with Consciousness in the last covered and I think we can my feeling is we can take it apart reformulate it in simple terms and eliminate a good deal of what seems to be mysterious so I think we can say we have all kinds of we live in a complex domain of psychological reactions all sorts of things are going on a lot of them were not conscious of critical to what we do something as simple as deciding to produce this sentence and not some other one totally beyond the level of Consciousness that's true of what we're doing all our lives we can learn something about it following the path of the so-called easy question Brussels past trying to construct the best theory to deal with whatever data we have some of it in this network of psychological reactions there are some that have special properties like I see a red spot what I take to be I have the experience to read up in that corner of my visual field okay what's actually happening when you look is they're psychatic eye movements and a little bit of stimuli are being picked up here and there my mind is doing all kind of complicated things including uh interpreting the signals to say and they're making up they want to see a red spot well all of that's going on we can study all of it doesn't change the fact that there are some things that have this property of infallibility it just puts them in a broader context as for the dualism I my own feeling is that that was cast out centuries ago we just don't know uh we know there are mental we assume that actually even this is a hypothesis we assume there are mental processes we're remember descendi's critique of Descartes which get to the center of it and criticize the kogito by saying it doesn't tell you anything about anybody existing just as thinking's going on well deciding's going on thinking is going on in our efforts to make some sense of it we may postulate a self but it doesn't mean it's there it's just all these things going on we built up our best conception of them but the Human Condition we can carry out experimental or we can find what we take to be neural correlates of the things we're looking at I think we end up with a system that's kind of if you like sort of complicated it's just the way science is it's the way all the rest of science is okay maybe one more question this the next question on Consciousness came from scrutova who's a friend of the show who says do you think that language is one of the requirements for consciousness I think the language is one of the requirements for Consciousness well yeah as you may have noticed I'm a kind of an old-fashioned conservative and I believe what was basically proposed by Classical Greece Aristotle most explicitly classical India yet there's no way of distinguishing language and thought they're basically the same thing the language is what constructs thought in any sense in which we understand the term is what's constructed by language so I don't think languages one of the requirements for Consciousness only in the sense the thought is if we're not an organism that can propose questions reflect on them propose answers there's nothing there's no questions that there's nothing to say about the consciousness you can't even close a pose a question about him well thank you very much we've taken over an hour of your time it's been absolutely stimulating discussion we're very grateful to taking some time to spend discussing these crucial issues with us thank you thank you very much um thank you well we'll end the stream and if you want to hang around for 30 seconds we could say goodbye Upstream but how we know how we normally finish is to eat just your attention that even though Keith and I and yourself Professor Johnson disagree on many things one thing we can certainly agree on is that Consciousness is wherever it is and nowhere else

Channel: Mind Chat

Views: 56,251

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Id: g2Vx5Ze_p8s

Length: 72min 24sec (4344 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022