The Magic of Consciousness

consciousness is both the most familiar thing to all of us and one of the most mysterious what could be more familiar to you than your own stream of consciousness and yet how on earth could it fit inside your brain how on earth could what goes on in your brain actually account for what goes on what we see here is the cartoonist it's wonderful convention the thought balloon or thought bubble and I think everybody understands immediately what's going on here what appears in the balloon is the stream of consciousness as it were of the person that you see from whom it is emanating my my favorite example of a thought balloon is this brilliant one from Saul Steinberg this was a New Yorker cover many years ago and what we see is that the gentleman over here on the left is looking at a painting in a museum and he's identifying it as a painting by Georges Braque and the word brach reminds him of the word baroque which reminds him of the word barek and then bark and then poodle and then we're off to the races and we get his stream of consciousness unfolding with all of its associations and it's not just words there's colors and shapes and even the genius of Steinberg wasn't able to represent recalled odours aromas music but we can imagine them being in there too now then what's the problem well the problem is vivid and brilliant as this representation of this man's consciousness is it's metaphorical this is a large systematic metaphor for what's going on in his head so the problem of consciousness I would say is if that's the metaphorical truth about what's going on in the man's head what's the literal truth that makes the metaphor so good what's actually happening between his ears that makes this such a brilliant metaphorical description of what's going on in the world well you might say what's the problem why is there any problem at all well you'll notice that Steinberg has represented the man as a sort of wonderful point aleast collection of dots and that's brilliant because it reminds us that what we are what you are what I am is a huge collection of cells about a hundred trillion at most recent count hundred trillion cells that's what you are not a single one of those is conscious not a single one of those noise knows who Georges Braque is not a single one of those knows what Kilimanjaro is how can a collection of mindless unconscious little robotic cells work together to create human consciousness as revealed in that beautiful metaphor that's the problem of consciousness and it's really quite severely puzzling to see why let's just take a few simple steps now this is a vivid diagram from a textbook on vision by a frisbee of some years ago and what you can see here is just a little account of what happens so that you can become conscious of this woman standing in front of you the light bounces off the woman and is focused by the lens and this these are the eyeballs and an image is formed on the retina and if you look in there with the right tools you can see the image it's a real image it's a upside down of course and then that image with stimulation gets transmitted through the optic nerve and up to the lateral geniculate nucleus and there's the optic chiasma where you get the crossover and a fraction of a second later on occipital cortex right back here at the back of your brain there is an actual pattern of stimulation which looks if you could see it it's not visually visible of course but the pattern actually has the shape of the woman of course it's upside down it's split it's distorted you see that the artist has drawn the lips the as red of course there's nothing red happening there but there is stimulation happening in that area of the brain which has the shape of a pair of lips in fact well but that's clearly not where the consciousness happens well what happens next then what happens well cortical processing here we see the cortex that was the part you were just looking at in fact and here is in fact more particularly the area you were looking at v1 the first visual area and you'll see that there are other of the areas v2 v3 v 7m t v8 and so forth and these are different visual areas in the brain which specialized to some degree some specialize in motion some in locations on the shape some in color and they're all doing different parts of the job but then what happens well then what happens indeed well then the magic of consciousness happens Oh what on earth does that mean this clearly isn't where we stop we have to we have to come to grips with what happens next now I'm a philosopher and I got to tell a little joke about philosophers okay how does a philosopher explain a magic trick so here's how a philosopher explains how the how many of you have seen the magician saw the lady in half good so here's how the philosopher explains that well you see the magician doesn't saw the lady in half he just makes it seem as if he saw a certain half he said well yeah how does he do that oh well that's not my department I'm so handsome it's technicalities that's that's somebody else's job so that's how philosophers explain a magic trick at least that's how many philosophers would explain that magic trick but not all here's a philosopher lee siegel who's also himself an expert magician and he's written a wonderful book about street magic in india he's an expert in indian religions and philosophy he's at the university of hawaii and in this book he follows he lives with the street magicians who that's a cast in India and you learn a lot about how magic arose out of Indian Street magic it's a lovely book and in it there's a passage which has become a sort of talisman for me a sort of the passage that I you love to quote he says I'm writing a book on magic I explained and I'm asked real magic by real magic people mean miracles thaumaturgic act supernatural powers no I answered conjuring tricks not real magic in other words real magic in other words refers to the magic that's not real while the magic that's real that can actually be done is not real magic I think bingo this is the story of my life because the same thing is very is true of consciousness for many people real consciousness in the eyes of some people isn't something you could possibly explain there are even scientists who think almost by definition consciousness defies explanation it is beyond human explanation if you've explained anything what you haven't explained is consciousness because I think consciousness is real magic well now it's this problem that I want to face today and give you some help in thinking about how we might address and circumvent this problem so now I'm going to launch into the world of magic and I'm going to tell you about the Indian rope trick now I learned all this from lee siegel and a few other books that i've read on the subject many of you probably think you know what the Indian rope trick is the magician throws a rope into the air where it hangs somehow suspended and in fact here is a very low-quality newspaper article about a magician throwing a rope into the air and it hangs suspended and his assistant climbs the rope so far so good there's lots of magicians around the world who do one version or another this but that is not the Indian rope trick that's just the beginning of the Indian rope trick what's the Indian rope trick well a young assistant climbs the rope and disappears into thin air disappears into thin air but then is heard to taunt the magician who takes a huge knife in his teeth and climbs the rope himself disappearing in turn a fight is heard to ensue screams you can't see any of this little arms and legs bloody a severed head a torso fall out of the sky and land at the foot of the rope and then the magician appears out of nowhere climbing down the rope with tears in his eyes and the bloody knife in his teeth and he takes all the body parts and puts them in his basket and with tears in his eyes he begs the audience to pray for the soul of his little boy whereupon he opens up the basket and the boy jumps out hole all as well now hands up those of you who've seen the trick performed aah this knot on one of you but what a trick that would be if it could be done in fact although you probably share my view that nobody has ever done the Indian rope trick and nobody ever could millions of people believe that the trick has been performed for over a hundred years there have been urban legends strong convictions held by people all over India and the rest of the world that the Indian rope trick has been performed and you know how it goes well I didn't see it myself but I have an uncle who lives in a Lahore and it was his next-door neighbor who saw the trick performed in one day something like that and you might think well now doesn't that show in a certain sense that the Indian rope trick has been performed because after all what isn't in what is a what is a magic trick it's getting people to believe that you've done this amazing thing you've got somebody to believe you saw the lady in half when you didn't well now now that you know what the Indian rope trick is I'm going to tell you how to do it all right so here's a philosophers gonna explain the Indian rope trick how to do the Indian rope trick are you ready and here's method one first gather an audience and claim that you're going to perform the Indian rope trick this first step is actually very important as you will see second well this is a step by muscle thereabouts not my department third the audience many of them anyway exit claiming to have seen the Indian rope trick okay you're probably not satisfied with that explanation so I'm gonna give you another one one Kathryn audience and claim that you're going to perform the Indian rope trick it's very important first step to drug them all or hypnotize them three plant the post hypnotic suggestion that you've done the trick complete with lots of details of what it looked like and let them wake up now this is in fact the method that has been surmised by many people including many magicians who have tried to explain house and many people in India can be so sure the Indian rope trick has been done by the way in the wake of its first wave of publicity a large reward was offered to anybody who could perform the trick I mean it would have been a fortune in his time I think five hundred pounds sterling something like this nobody has ever claimed the reward they've been several such rewards offered but still there are many people who believe the trick has never performed well you probably don't like this method I'll give you another method alternative method number three claim that you're going to do the Indian rope trick bribe some newspaper reporters to report in the next day's paper that they witnessed you performing the Indian rope trick creates a nice paper trail seems to be evidence I'm sure you don't like it I'm gonna give you one more method alternative method number four you notice they all begin the same way claim that you're going to do the no trick higher computer graphics experts to create an ultra realistic videotape of the feet good enough to fool the experts at CNN and then send it to CNN as a so-called live feed from the place you claimed to be doing the trick and I bet you don't like that one either why well I think you probably think it's cheating well but come on we're talking about stage magic what's cheating and stage magic it's okay to use accomplices it's okay to use wires and mirrors and smoke and distraction what are the the limits on cheating in stage magic well it's an interesting topic but who cares it's just show business when the topic is consciousness however people often feel a little bit differently and what's the same issue arises there as we're gonna see now I want to turn to consciousness itself and some of the more magical phenomena of consciousness I'm the first one I want to consider is DejaVu how many of you have had a date have you experienced just about everybody yes it's it's it's quite remarkable but it's quite normal you don't have to go seek a psychiatrist because you've had a day job experience but many people think of data of your experiences as a sign of something pretty special pretty amazing perhaps it's a glimpse the time is cyclical you go round and round and relive our lives or maybe it's transmigration of the soul or maybe it's precognition these are varyingly plausible or implausible quite dramatic hypotheses about the nature of deja vu we might call these days w as magic hypotheses and now I want to suggest to you a much simpler explanation which will probably disappoint you it's actually based on a passage by the French psychiatrist Pierre Jean a and I don't know for sure what he meant but doesn't matter because I'm not using his account I'm just using the inspiration of it and this is what Johnny said he said deja view results from an interruption of a perceptual process so then it splits into a past as well as another current experience now here's a little model of just such a phenomenon okay so very simplified of course here's the eye and we imagine that the signal from the eye in the optic nerve and later parts of the brain just suppose that it was split into two channels channel a and channel B and suppose that they were completely redundant they're exactly the same channel a and channel B or just channel B is just a duplicate of what's in channel a and then suppose that they arrive at a part of the brain that we're going to call the familiarity detector well in fact some people Geoffrey Gray and his colleagues have hypothesized that this is a role that the hippocampus plays but I that says maybe we simply want there to be a place in the brain which has the following properties as new material comes in it checks the material for novelty or familiarity and if it's novel it lets it through and if it's familiar its has been there done that marks of this familiar it sends a signal so now all we have to suppose this is the the janay inspired hypothesis suppose that the signal in channel B got in its passage from the eye to the detector by a few milliseconds just long enough for channel a to go through and set up its signature its footprint it's been there and it goes through a novel event and just a fraction of a second later in comes the signal from channel B and the system says hey I've seen it before sure enough 10 milliseconds before you saw it but that's enough to send the I've seen it before signal on into the system and how that then elaborates well that's anybody's guess it might depend very much on what else the person believes somebody who's had lots of day job experiences main to say how there goes that day job you experience again other people may get really tripping out on how Wow cyclical time been there before kismet and so forth yeah so there's a somewhat disappointing mechanical if you like hypothesis that it could explain day job you but if that could explain days I mean here's a simpler hypothesis that will also explain deja vu we don't need channel a and channel B channel a is all we need all we have to suppose is that the familiarity detector on occasion for who knows what reason is spontaneously triggered it just does a false positive it just suddenly it sends the I've seen it before signal spurious Li up the line and the rest of course is going to unfold just as it did in the first case now here's the amazing thing you there's a it's a different hypothesis you when you have a day to have new experience you can't tell the difference between those two hypotheses either one of them could be the truth and your own conscious experience of deja boo' doesn't give you any clue as to whether either of them might be the truth this is something for third person science empirical investigation to explore notice that in this second case this is a philosopher telling you this it's not that you see the thing before it's that it makes you think it you seem to have seen the thing before that's all it has to happen for days I've you to happen now I want to give you another experience and now if you concentrate on one of the little black irises in the middle of one of the circles and just look at that you may find motion around the peripheries do any of you see the motion oh yeah and if you see it up close it's very striking so that there seems to be sort of cog wheels turning against each other and rotating now there's nothing rotating up on the screen nothing at all but the shape seem to be rotating right nothing is rotating in your brain if we were to look at the various visual areas where those where those parts are represented we wouldn't see any rotation of any image we would however see that regions in which motion detection occurs would be active no rotation just signals like I've seen it before like it's something's moving those signals are being sent on up into the system it just seems to you that the shapes are rotating now another one I want you now to stare at the white cross and don't move your eyes and I'm just gonna give you a few seconds to stare at the white cross without moving your eyes and keep staring because I'm going to make the flag go away and just keep staring straight ahead and you'll see what happens are you ready set go everybody got the American flag all right so now there is no red stripes up on the screen there's no red stripes on your retinal image there's no red stripes in your visual cortex and yet if sure did seem as if there was a red stripe somewhere didn't you were having a flag after image and you might be willing to say I've gathered reports from people and they say things like well the lowest short red stripe is intersecting the black cross what the lowest short red stripe is intersecting the black cross so I want to know what are you talking about what thing are you talking about well you might say something real something red you can refer to it you can recall it that red stripe where is it hmm it's not in your brain no red stripe in your brain there's nothing red happening in your brain when you see that image there just seems to be something red happening in your brain hmm there's that philosophers explanation again well how does it happen how does it really happen well I can't tell you that's not my department but I can give you some small clues I want to describe a framework in which we could explain things like this and I'm going to call it maximally bland computationalism so we have a brain and we want to understand that the brain is a computational system consisting of billions or let's say who's counting trillions of registers register is a term from computer science and a register is simply a memory location where you can store a number really a value there might be zero or it might be one or it might be 375 or it might be a million in three a register is simply an address with a content and the content is always a number that is to say it's always a magnitude of something so maximally bland computationalism says what the brain is is a massively parallel indeed 3d parallel collection of registers in this slide we see maybe 50 or 100 of them little green registers but we're really to understand that those stand in for literally trillions of registers in your brain and each one of them has or can have a value stored in it and we're going to suppose that the values and the registers can change as a function of the value and other registers some of them right nearby right next door and some of them perhaps it's some distance if there is a axonal connection from some distance connecting a bunch of registers together then the value at some distance away may affect the value here and we just suppose that the values are constantly shifting as a function of the values of other registers and we explain all this just in terms of physics just just garden-variety causal transactions between registers now I call this maximally bland computationalism because it makes no claims about the nature of the architecture it's not a serial architecture well it's massively parallel is it asynchronous or synchronous well presumably it's asynchronous and the registers can be a neuron you could consider that a register or you could consider it as made up of hundreds or thousands of registers subcellular activity can be captured in this picture neuromodulator activity can be captured in this picture thus if neuromodulators are being diffused through a part of the brain there's a computational account of that in fact it's called diffusive computation and there are models which look at that so the fact that we're talking about a wet brains with diffusion doesn't mean it's not computational we can even countenance field effects if they matter that can all be modelled as more interactions where perhaps distance is really important but the effects of one register on another can be calculated even quantum effects if you think that matters I don't but there are those that do so maximally bland computationalism is a is a framework which can incorporate just about every any serious view I think that anybody holds anywhere in the world today about how the brain works just cast into the mould of computations because the basic underlying idea is that the brains job is to get the body that it resides in through by computing the best thing to do next given the information that it's taking in from the world that's what brains are for they're not for cooling the blood they're not for for purifying the blood they're not a ventilation system they're they're a control system and hence they're amenable to a computational analysis as long as we're suitably bland about what we mean by computational well then now we can go back to our red stripe and say what's going on here how can it seem to you that there's something red when there isn't well some of the computational events that would happen if you were seeing a real external red stripe are happening in you and these events caused by this computational group some of the events that would happen when you have the conviction that you're seeing a red stripe and that's all that's all that has to happen it's like deja vu you don't have to show the event twice as long as the conviction that you've seen it before is created and as long as that conviction has some computational embodiment your home that's what the days are view experience consists in you don't have to saw the lady in half you just have to make it seem that you do you don't have to make the event happen twice you just have to make it seem you don't have to make the red stripe appear in the brain it just has to seem to the person whose brain it is that there's been a red stripe another example now this is a painting by Bill octo and on the screen here that's actually about the size that it is it's a large painting that's probably a little larger than it actually is and it hangs in the North Carolina Museum of Art and I remember vividly the first time I saw it because I looked at the bridge there is a view of Dresden and balata by the way was a student of Canaletto if you've ever seen those wonderful canaletto as of Venice where there's lots of gondolas and gondoliers and and ships in the background 18th century ships and if you get up real close you can see oh the buckles on the shoes and the and every bit of the rigging is just represented beautifully and I'd love to do that I'd love to get right up close to the painting and look at all the detail that the artist has put in so I thinking that this was probably a kind of Leto or like it and noticing that there's a there's on this bridge in the sunlight there's a whole lot of people moving across the bridge and I wanted to see them up close and so I began to get closer and closer and closer and closer and when I got up close I actually yelled I I screamed not a terrific scream but I really up because what somewhat farther away had seemed wonderfully detailed as I got closer there was less detail than I thought there was it was bizarre the closer I got the less detail there was know what was going on here it's a wonderful trick but it's one that you're probably familiar with from other more recently people have done similar things with computer graphics but balata was just doing it with his trusty paintbrush very clever the spots the blobs of paint that he put so artfully on the canvas suggest people with arms and legs and clothes and belt buckles and hats and plumes and carriages and all the rest and the brain takes the suggestion well what does that mean what does the brain really do when the brain takes the suggestion the brain is forming a set of expectations that's clear after all my expectation was violated so stunningly that I yelled out and surprised as I got closer because I was expecting as I move closer this the details really clearly that weren't there well now how did the brain do this well I don't know you know it's not my department but let's we can close in on it a little bit did the brain for instance paint lots of little arms and legs and plumes and hats and buckles and so forth somewhere in one of those cortical areas where there's a sort of an image of the scene and then and then look at them I'm almost certain that's not the case the brain didn't have to do that well then how did it do it well you know that's not my department but I think we can close him again a little bit on that I think it's a little bit like the post hypnotic suggestion or the reporter taking a bribe all the brain has to do is create the judgment in a little part of the brain that is responsible for making judgments of that sort and then that judgment gets fed up into the system much like the deja of your judgment where it can elaborate other judgments and play a causal role in causing other judgments and so forth you don't have to do any painting in the brain for this to happen well now I'm going to give you one more example how many of you see a cube the Necker cube good everybody sees the cube and can you see that it's ambiguous that there's two different ways that you can see the cube you can see this as nearest you or you can see that this is the side that's nearest you everybody can see two ways okay how many of you have noticed that in fact it is four ways ambiguous how many of you see the cube has floating in front of a bunch of black circles right how many of you can see the cube as behind a white curtain with some round holes in it it's a little bit hard for people to see this so how many of you still can't see it that way I'm going to help you now can you see it as behind the screen behind the piece of Swiss cheese now I want you to see it as in front of the disks the way you've probably saw it the first time and you may notice you could swear there was a boundary there there was a line you might even think that I'm cheating by having two shades of white there see how it looks sort of whiter than white and even just about see that line there how many of you can have can sort of feel that effect well you know it's very interesting yes in fact what we know is that in this case the part the relevant parts of the brain actually are forming that line that the neurons that are responsible for representing this edge and the neurons that are responsible for representing this edge are recruiting their neighbors across the gap and making them active that's one of the things that we can we can we can tell about how this is done but now when you see the cube as behind the Swiss cheese that's actually a different phenomenon some it's it's operating differently and I'll give you an example that will make this clear notice you have no trouble seeing the cube as a cube but now where does the where does the color change happen where does the purple turn to green where does the blue turn to yellow and you notice that the brain doesn't have to go into that at all now you might imagine the behind the scenes in your brain there's a little fight going on you know the the little the those with the red with the yellow paintbrushes and those were the blue paint brushes they're having a little fight about who gets to do the last bit of the intervening part but in fact you don't have to have that in there at all because because that's not how the brain has to do it well I've been using this example for a number of years and I thought I understood the mechanisms of the brain responsible for these are two different phenomenon this is called a modal complete and the case where it's in front is an example of a modal completion or lose recontour two different well study phenomena and then I saw this by Rob Van Leer in perception the Journal of perception and I'm going to show you now a little video now what you want to do what I'm going to make happens is the yellow and the blue vertical bar are going to go left to right left to right and you're going to see the bar moving here and here and of course this is opaque but I want you to look in these opaque regions and see if you see what seems to be the shadow moving in the grey any of you see what looks like a sort of shadow see motion in the grey and I would have bet good money that that effect wouldn't have been there but there it is we learn something more by running another clever experiment so what do we learn from this we learn not to trust our own conscious introspective experience for how these things really work if you want to know how to explain the magic trick you have to go backstage and see what's really going on something less than a cube or a picture of a cue convinces you that you're seeing a cube in the case of the Necker cube and you may dwell but in other words the brain cheats and I find that when I say this some people have the following reaction they say not my brain my brain doesn't she but the point I want to make you is you don't know that you don't know that you're not entitled to that this is precisely what you don't know from personal first-hand experience this is something for science to discover the extent to which and how and when the brain actually cheats now some of you may be thinking that whoa wait a minute this is all very interesting but there's something fundamentally wrong with it what I'm saying is that cognitive neuroscience can be seen as in effect reverse engineering the magic show going to the stage magic show and showing you how the tricks are actually done going backstage just said that what needs to be explained I've said is that what is what the audience thinks happened on stage and this is in fact what I've called hetero phenomenology this is phenomenology of the third person point of view you gather lots of evidence about what the audience thinks is happening and then you have to explain why they think that and you can do it in your own case - now what's wrong with this well here's what seems to be wrong with it what about the audience and especially what am i doing talking about the audience because one of the main themes in my work ever since 1991 and consciousness explained is that there's no such thing as the Cartesian theater the Cartesian theater is my derisive negative term for the imaginary place in the brain where the inner witness sits the audience citizen enjoys the show of consciousness and I've said there is no such place now here's a nice spoof painting of the Cartesian theatre and you see the light comes in and exposes the film which then this is a wonderful old picture old-fashioned picture the film gets developed then the fan drives the film it's a nice touch then it goes through the Camerons projected on a screen where not one but two a monkey League little people in white coats look at the screen now this is a terrible in fact a preposterous view of consciousness and what's preposterous about it isn't that it's film as opposed to videotape or something or that they're wearing white coats and have arms and legs what's wrong with this is something much more fundamental what's wrong with this is that if anything remotely like were true then we wouldn't have even started to explain consciousness because we would still have a conscious observer sitting there in the theater looking at the screen we have to get away from that image there is in fact no place in your brain where it all comes together for consciousness now there might have been this is an empirical fact there might have been it might have been that when neuroscientists finally got around to looking in the brain they found they went upstream upstream from the lateral geniculate nucleus to v1 to v2 to v3 and then they went a little farther and then they found a little place in there where the Cartesian theater was and in fact you've seen this in films if you've seen men in black you've seen the scene where Will Smith opens up the drawer in the morgue and there's the corpse of the tall bald man and Will Smith reaches out and clicks a little button and the face opens up and inside there's a little man a little green man in there and he's sitting there looking at the screens and pushing the buttons and he's got the speaker's on each side of his use that's the Cartesian theater and it turned out that the great big man was just a sort of puppet being controlled by this little man and son so it's not logically impossible that there should be a Cartesian theater it's just empirically the fact that there isn't now in the men in black situation we wouldn't have a theory of consciousness we'd have a good theory of puppetry and we'd have to look inside the little green man's head to see what kind of a theory of consciousness we are going to have the moral of this story is that we're going to have to break up the Cartesian theater into parts that are not themselves conscious so the moral of the Cartesian theater is that all the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian theater must be distributed around the various lesser agencies in the brain and that means agencies that are not themselves conscious because if there are really conscious then we've just recreated the homunculus problem and we will not have made any progress at all this can be done I've given you a few examples of little parts of this well now this creates a dilemma though because a lot of people are very unhappy with this and I call this the dilemma of the subject what I've just said is if you leave the subject meaning I ego wha the subject of experience if you leave the subject in your theory then you've not yet begun your theory of consciousness you've just postponed the theory on the other hand if you don't leave the subject in your theory then some people say you're evading the main issue the philosopher David Chalmers has called this the hard problem if you don't leave the subject in the theory then you're just evading the hard problem hmm what are we going to do well I've told you what I think we have to do we have to we have to agree with the first point here we have to agree that if you leave the subject in your theory you have not yet begun so you have to get rid of the subject and when you do this the result has a certain scary even disgusting feature it's as if you entered a factory and there's all this humming machinery and there's nobody home there's no watchman there's no supervisor there's no boss it's all just machinery and I'm saying that's got to be the case if your theory does not have that feature it's got to be wrong if you still have the watchman there if you still have the audience there you haven't begun your theory and a lot of people really don't like that idea let me give you a few examples Goodall Jerry Fodor my friend and colleague and opponent for many years you can always count on Jerry to say what is exactly false with great gusto for instance if been short there's a community of computers living in my head then they're also better be somebody who's in charge and by god it had better be me that is as evocative an expression of Cartesian materialism as I think I've ever seen or how about this from Bob Wright of course the problem here is with the claim that consciousness is identical to physical brain States the more Dennett and others try to explain to me what they mean by this the more convinced I become that what they really mean is that consciousness doesn't exist does that sound familiar I hope so what right is saying is what people say about real magic real magic in other words refers the magic that's not real while the magic that's real that can actually be done is not real magic what right thinks is that if I'm saying that consciousness is a bunch of tricks in the brain then what I'm really saying is that consciousness doesn't exist there isn't any real magic but there's others who hate the idea even more here's my favorite of all Daniel Dennett is the devil there is no to internal witness no central recognizer of meaning and no self other than an abstract center of narrative gravity which is itself nothing but a convenient fiction for Dennett it is not a case of an emperor having no clothes it's rather the clothes have no emperor yeah that's right bingo you got to get rid of the emperor if you still have the emperor in there you don't have a theory of consciousness now that's a hard idea for people to get their heads around but then we knew didn't we that if you're going to explain consciousness the result is going to have to be uncomfortable in some ways it's going to have to be as philosophers like to say counterintuitive why because if there was an intuitive solution to the problems of conscious and we would have found it long ago working on this for several thousand years clearly something that people think is just plain obvious not worth talking about it's just false counterintuitive I've just given you a few examples of what I think the counterintuitive claims should be that we should make and if you find them counterintuitive good now try to swallow them that's the hard part I can't prove that my way is right but I can at least tease your imagination some and give you an example which might at least get you to suspend judgment about the way that I am going with this and it is another magic trick and this is a trick called the tuned deck now there was a time when I could actually do this trick it's a card trick I can't do it anymore so I'm just gonna fake it just so you get an idea of what it looks like now I learned about this trick from John Hilliard in his book card magic this is not a book you find in your library this is one of those privately printed books for magicians only and Hilliard writes as follows for many years mr. Ralph Hall the famous card wizard from Brooksville Ohio has completely bewildered not only the general public but also amateur conjurer's card connoisseurs and professional magicians with a series of card tricks which he is pleased to call the tuned deck okay now I'm going to fake the toon deck it goes sort of like this boys I have a new trick now this is to his fellow magicians right boys I have a new trick it's called the tomb deck here is my toon deck it is tuned I listen to the vibrations buzzbuzz buzzbuzz and by those vibrations I can tell exactly which card is here is there because of the different tuning of the vibrations here pick a card any card the card is picked goes back into the deck through some more shenanigans some more buzz-buzz and then the cards that's it now Paul did this trick hundreds of times nobody ever got it he would sit with his sleeves rolled up and perform the trick for fellow magicians 20 30 times nobody ever got it they tried to buy the trick from him he wouldn't sell it magicians do sell tricks late in his life he gave the trick and his account of it to Hilliard his friend Hilliard and Hilliard published it in his book and here's a little bit of what what hull says he says for years I've performed this effect and have shown it to magicians and amateurs by the hundred and to the very best of my knowledge not one of them ever figured out the secret the boys have all looked for something too hard oh thank you for saying too hard now I'm going to tell you the secret of the toon deck are you ready the toon deck like many great magic tricks the trick is over before you think it's even begun in this case the trick consists in its entirety in the name of the trick the toons deck moreover in one of the words in the title of the trick which word no not deck toons no da I told you the trick is over before you even think it's begun here is what hall was doing remember how it starts boys I have a new trick it's called the tubes deck the trick is now over all the palavra wood buzz buzz and vibrations we know that's not the trick what does he do he does a standard card presentation trick that everybody there knows the cards come back and his fellow magicians think you know couldn't he be doing a type a trick I'm not going to give them away any more magic so they are good magicians they know how to prevent a type a trick so they're obstreperous in the right way and they'll they prevent him from doing their testing their hypotheses emits a Type A trick he still does the trick hmm could you be doing a type B trick we could prevent that by doing so they do what what they could do to prevent a Type B trick he still does a trick she could it be a Type C trick maybe they test that hypothesis he still does the trick what's left gonna be a tight Dietrich they test that no matter what hypothesis they test he always does the tricky they can't prevent it from doing the trick what's happened is it was a type a trick then when they test that he does a Type B tricked when he tests B he does a Type C trick when he when they test that he goes back and he does a type a trick he realized he could always do one trick or another and he just did whichever trick they let him do and the reason they didn't tumble for it was word though the tomb deck they were looking as he said for something too hard they were looking for a hard problem not a bunch of cheap tricks in fact all the tricks that they were doing were tricks that were quite familiar and in a certain way disappointing and he hid all this with an elegant title now I do want to suggest but I don't claim to prove that when David Chalmers talks about the hard problem he is innocently playing a trick on himself and others of exactly this sort he's giving a name to a problem that doesn't even really exist the problems of consciousness are how all of the various effects work and once you've got an account of all those effects that's what Chalmers calls the easy problems your home you've explained consciousness because there isn't any further problem the hard problem that just seems to be so here's again what hull says about the tune Vicki says each time it's performed the routine is such that one or more ideas in the back of the spectators head is exploded sooner or later he will invariably give up any further attempt to solve the mystery like many scientists and philosophers today they just say it's mysterious give up it's hopeless you can't do it some of us think no we can explain consciousness but we have to we have to be alert to the fact that many people want consciousness to be mysterious they don't want it explained they don't want it to be like stage magic they want it to be like real magic in other words the kind of magic that isn't real so my conclusion is this that the magic of consciousness like stage magic defies explanation only so long as we take it at face value once we appreciate all the non mysterious ways in which the brain can create benign user illusions we can begin to imagine how the brain creates consciousness thanks very much for your attention

Channel: Molurus73

Views: 128,930

Rating: 4.7042513 out of 5

Keywords: Consciousness, Daniel Dennett

Id: dFTTn-Co5F8

Length: 56min 23sec (3383 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2016