There Is A World Out There, But It Is Mental - Bernardo Kastrup - 5/31/23

all right so hello and welcome everyone to the sixth lecture in the Consciousness and reality colloquium series which seeks to inspire interdisciplinary investigations on topics such as the Mind cognition Consciousness and nature of reality a research scientist in the division of physics math and astronomy at Caltech and also the co-founder of imix which is the institute for mind intelligence and Consciousness studies so today we have a special guest uh Bernardo castrip the executive director of the Essentia Foundation who has double PhD one in philosophy and another in computer engineering where his contributions span ontology the philosophy of Mind reconfigurable Computing and artificial intelligence as a scientist Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for nuclear research which is the CERN and also the Philips Research Laboratories where the Casimir effect if some of you physicists may recall the Casimir effect of quantum field theory was discovered and as a philosopher Bernardo has authored several books academic papers essays and blogs and his work has revived interest in metaphysical idealism which is the notion that reality is essentially a mental one so Bernardo I'd request you to please take it away with a note to all the participants to please submit your questions through the zoom q a box please all right you know thanks for the for the introduction and the kind words um I will share my screen with you um it's easier let me see can can you guys see my Titus light absolutely all right so we talk about analytic idealism um today but first let me briefly introduce myself to you um I have a lot of affinity with the part of the world you are in I worked in computer engineering for quite a while and then same conductors manufacturing working for asml for 15 years today I only do these little things you see on the screen retro Style Open Source computers so I still have a sort of a foot on the side of Computer Engineering but now as a hobby and the reason I am mentioning this to you is twofold one is to highlight to you that I am one of you I have been a techie for for a quarter of a century and two it because in computers lies the origin of my interest in the philosophy of mind I worked at CERN and after that I did work on AI and you always ask yourself the question if I can develop some a computer that is intelligent what does it take to make it conscious as well and of course that question has no no answer because it arises from an eternal contradiction in our way of thinking but asking the question is what forced me to review my assumptions take a few steps back and and come up with a different world view first for myself and then at some point I started publishing it now the background of everything I will be telling you today and I want to keep I want you to keep this in mind um at some point in the early 19th century we have made a a major transition from thinking about the world in terms of things to thinking about the world in terms of fields and field excitations that began with James Maxwell and his electromagnetic field which was extended initially by Feynman and then others to to everything not only electromagnetic electromagnetism but everything and that's Quantum field theory in which things are just Quantum fluctuations of underlying fields in other words there are no things there are only excitations of underlying Quantum Fields so keep this in mind this par academic transition from thinking about reality in terms of things to thinking about reality in terms of extended fields now before we even begin let's acknowledge um a few obvious things all we have is perception that's that's our interface to reality out there we can only perceive reality we don't we do not have direct access to it um nonetheless and even though perception is of course mental there obviously is something outside our individual minds and which is not dependent on our individual thoughts um otherwise I would be able to change the world by doing mental affirmations in the morning that has never worked um so clearly there is something out there if you were sitting next to me in my study right now you would describe my study in a way consistent with my own experience of it so we both inhabit we all inhabit a context a reality beyond our individual Minds but physics describes only our apprehension of that reality the way that reality presents itself to us on the screen of perception if you want to do physics in a completely metaphysic metaphysically agnostic manner in other words in a purely scientific manner then you have to take the approach of a physicist Marcus Miller from The Institute of quantum Optics and Quantum information in Vienna he says that the business of physics is to answer the question what will I see next even if what I will see next is the pattern of clicking in instrumentation we are always restricted to perception even if we use instrumentation because we have to perceive the output of instrumentation as well now to think that the world out there even though clearly Beyond and and distinct from our individual Minds to think that it is necessarily non-mental uh is a gratuitous metaphysical assumption that doesn't have clear motivation um my thoughts are mental but they are external to you if you were not there right now I would still be having my thoughts and you may do your affirmations every morning and my thoughts are still whatever they are they will not change because of your affirmations or your fantasies of your wishes your your your your phobias or whatever so there can be mental stuff outside your individual mind there can be mental stuff that is external to you as an individual mind now that doesn't necessarily mean that this stuff outside is non-mental that you see we acknowledge the external world but we don't need to rush and associate with that the the property of being non-mental that that's a that to make that extra step requires justification and I will argue against uh that uh justification now let's begin from from the start if you are sitting on an airplane and you look out the window and you see the clouds and you see the sun The Horizon storm lightning and all that is what you see the world as it is in itself in other words do we have direct access to the world as it is perception a transparent window into the world and there are good reasons even definitive reasons to conclude that it it is not it cannot be now you don't need to go through any of these equations here I'm just illustrating to you one of the papers but the point here is the following if we were to perceive inside our minds the world as it is that means that the external states of the world would have to be mirrored in our internal States our internal cognitive States would have to mirror the states of the world but there is no upper bound to the dispersion of the states of the world there is no limit to its entropy no a priori limit we cannot arbitrarily Proclaim that it does have an upper bound probably no it doesn't so if we were to mirror the states of the world in our internal cognitive states there would be no uh upper bound to the entropy or the dispersion of our internal States in other words to look at the world could lead to your melting into hot meat soup but we never saw anybody melting just by looking at the world so therefore we don't really mirror the states of the world we represent the states of the world internally in an encoded form that limits our internal entropy that's the message here another argument that goes to the same place is based on Game Theory evolution is about Fitness not about presenting the world to us at it as it is to give you an example imagine if you could see the files in your computer as the files really are on your desktop well you would then be exposed to millions of open or closed microscopic switches and you wouldn't begin to be able to operate your computer it would be overloaded with irrelevant information and your perception wouldn't sort of pick out what is Salient about your files so you could work with them so instead of that Windows and Mac OS and Linux they present the files to us in an encoded form in in the form of little rectangles on our computer desktop evolution is the same thing we would not have evoked to see kazillions of open and closed microscopic switches we would not have evolved to see the world as it is we would have evolved and we did evolve to pick out in an encoded form what is Salient about reality around us what is Salient about the states of the world so we have higher Fitness a higher chance to survive and reproduce so we don't really see the world as it is um what appears on the screen of perception is a dashboard representation of the world like the dials on an airplane's dashboard an airplane has sensors that measure the states of the world so do we we have retinas we have eardrums we have the surface of the skin the lining of the nose uh the tongue papilla so we have these sensors that measure the states of the world so does the airplane now how does the airplane then present or represent the results of those measurements in the form of dioindications on a dashboard this limits the dispersion of data Pilots have to contend with that's why flight manuals have a limited number of pages and not infinite pages uh and it picks out and highlights what is Salient about the states of the sky outside the airplane so in exactly the same way what we call colloquially the physical world the stuff we see touch feel smell uh taste these are all dashboard representations of the actual states of the external world now they are very useful because you know the indications in the dials correlate with the states of the world that's why Pilots pay attention to their dashboard and if we don't pay attention to the dashboard we we would die we walk in front of a truck same thing for the airplane if the pilot doesn't pay attention to the dials you crash the plane and by the way a pilot can fly without a transparent windscreen a pilot can fly by by instruments alone only by looking at the dashboard that's us we are pilots in the fight of Life who do not have a transparent window to see the world as it actually is all we have is the dashboard that Evolution has given us we are born inside an airplane cockpit that has no windows only has a dashboard so naturally we must take the dashboard for the sky outside we mistake the physical world for the real world than outside and it's for almost all practical applications this is okay it's a fair mistake to make it it's no problem you still survive but when it comes to the big questions of life and existence and foundations of physics and the Neuroscience of Consciousness now we have to dig deeper and understand that although the dashboard is very useful and correlates with reality it isn't reality in the same sense that the dashboard of an airplane isn't the sky outside even though it conveys important information about the sky outside so we are pilots sorry we are pilots that do not have this transparent windshields all we have is here so we mistake the dashboard for the world and again instrumentation doesn't change this we still have to perceive the output of instrumentation we still have to see uh the image formed through the lens system of a telescope we still have to see the screen of an oscilloscope we still have to perceive uh um the output of instruments so everything still gets filtered through the dashboard and we are still completely constrained by the parameters of the dashboard which we call physical parameters now in foundations of physics there are issues with the assumption that the physical world instead of being a representation of the real world is the real world because when we make this assumption what we are saying is that the physical world physical entities have Standalone existence independent of measurement but if the physical world is just a representation of the real world then of course it's not independent of measurement the dial indications in an airplane's dashboard are not independent of the measurements made by the airplane sensors because they convey and represent those measurements um so a number of experiments in physics and by the way this series of experiments have earned the the Nobel prizing physics last year have shown that contrary to our vulgar assumptions uh physical entities physical quantities physical properties do not have Standalone existence we cannot speak of their existing prior to measurement we can only speak of their existing upon measurement now how is this concluded well I'm going to summarize 45 years of complex experimentation in one little picture so of course this isn't rigorous it's just to give you an intuition suppose you have a light source and you create two photons at the same time so they are entangled they are produced together Photon a and Photon B suppose you transmit them through fiber optics for a little while say a few kilometers and then on one end scientist Alice has a detector and makes a measurement on photon a and scientist Bob on the other side in an opposite direction makes a measurement on photon B for instance the angular momentum of a photon the spin along a certain direction now as it turns out what Alice chooses to measure about Photon a for instance the particular direction of spin determines what Bob sees when when Bob measures Photon B at exactly the same time in other words it appears that Photon B does not have whatever properties it has prior to Alice choosing what it's what Alice is going to measure about Photon a under physicalist assumptions we would expect that Bob's measurement simply reveals what Photon B already was prior to measurement but if that were the case there should be no correlation between what Bob sees and what Alice chooses because regardless of what Alice chooses here far away Photon B was already in flight and it already is whatever it's supposed to be regardless of Alice's choice but that's not how it happens Alice's Choice correlates completely with what Barb sees when he measures Photon B at exactly the same time so photons A and B cannot be said to exist in other words to be determined by their properties prior to measurement because as it turns out their properties are a outcome of measurement so what is measured photons A and B are the outcome of measure measurement what is measured in the first place well based on what we discussed it's it's very simple photons A and B are diary indications in the dashboard so if you there if they are playing sensor doesn't measure anything the diodes indicate nothing there are no photons A and B but when the sensors do measure something now as a result of that photons A and B appear on the dashboard photons A and B are not the thing measured photons A and B are the representation of the thing measured upon measurement a representation on dashboard what is actually measured is then by definition not a physical quantity it's not physical because by definition physicality is what appears on the dashboard is what can be described through physical quantities like charge Mass momentum spin geometrical relationships but the thing that is measured isn't physical because all these parameters charge Mass spin spatial relationships they are the parameters of the dashboard they are the scales of the dials not the states measured the states measured are non-physical now the the only way to escape this um this conclusion from all these 45 years of results is to entertain one or another theoretical fantasy such as evaration multiverses for which we have absolutely zero empirical evidence or the fantasy of uh Global hidden variables which aren't even theoretically defined properly let alone evidence for it so if we don't entertain these theoretical fantasies we have forced um to acknowledge that what is out there isn't physical I'm not saying that it's spiritual I'm not saying that it's divine now it states that cannot be exhaustively describable through physical quantities it's very simple they are external States they are really out there they can be measured but what we call physicality is the result of measurement is the representation of of external States in our internal cognitive dashboard now another way to make sense of the correlations between Alice and Bob's measurement which I saw simultaneous and there's no way Alice can communicates to Bob or the detectors can communicate to one another so how can they be correlated it sounds like magic right now how can Alice and Bob's results speak so tightly correlated well to understand this and understand that there is no magic there is no Voodoo involved we just have to keep this in mind suppose that you are a soccer fan and there is a match going on in the stadium but you can't be at the stadium so what you do is you buy two television sets to watch the match at home and each television is transmitting the match through a different broadcaster so imagine that the different broadcasters have different cameras in the stadium so the images in each TV set are different they're not the same image because they are captured through different camera angles and so forth but of course they are entirely correlated because their images of the same underlying reality the screen is a representation of the underlying reality that is measured and that's why the two images are correlated do the televisions need to talk to one another in order for that correlation to be the case of course not the TVs don't need to talk Alice doesn't need to talk to Bob Alice and Bob are looking at the same soccer match and that's why their representations photons A and B are correlated without there needing to be communicating with one another the mistake we make would be similar to a time traveler from the 18th century who comes to your house and watches the match on your couch along along with you and now our time traveler he thinks that there are real little man and a real little ball inside each box if you think that the television image is the thing in itself is the real state of the world that there are real little man inside the box then then you're flabbergasted how do the little man on this box know how to run in perfect synchronicity with the little man on the other box without talking to one another the Box are separate whoa magic voodoo that's the error we make we are like 18th century people looking at 21st century evidence we are still holding on to assumptions that come from the early Enlightenment and which have no place anymore in this day and age if we part with those assumptions suddenly magic and Voodoo disappear and and everything seems to make everything seems to make sense I'm not saying that I solved the measurement problem here but at least this is an Avenue to think about it in a more coherent way so what I'm proposing is the following we are individual Minds how we become individual talk about it in a second and we have internal cognitive states that we can represent as r now there is an external world out there with States Phi represented by by and we interact with the world we make a measurement through States s or sensory States and we act upon the world when we move and perform an action through active States a and if you look at how these things are represented here you will see that what we call the physical world for being a representation mathematically it's a Markov blanket and then all the rationale oh no oh the the luggage we have that has been developed around Mark of blanket are now applicable Mark of blankets are a representation sensory representations and active states that translate between the states R and Phi and the mark of blanket is what we call the physical world a representation of the world in itself the real world which is not physical but is of course correlated with the physical world because that's what evolution would have given us now and now it's the important Point here the world as it is in itself is shared of course the states by we are all immersed in the states fine but the physical world is a personal representation of the state's fine so each one of us has a different physical world does it mean that all is relative that you know it's uh We've deconstructed reality and said goodbye to reality of course not reality is bloodify and we know reality uh through intermediation by proxy through the state's ass and of course because those States s of each individual are modulated by the state's Phi they tend to be mutually consistent you will describe my study in a way consistent with my own description of it if you were sitting here next to me both of our sets s are modulated by the same set Phi now this seems like okay what have I achieved here I just replaced the physical world with something else well that makes an enormous difference for how we think of ourselves of reality of the meaning of life the whole shebang AI the whole thing changes um but before we get there um I don't know whether we have enough time to go through some evidence I think we have some time um some of you might question what I showed here by by in the following way our cognitive states are are clearly correlated with our measurable brain state no different experiences subjective experiences correlates with certain patterns of brain activity so the suggestion is that okay R is a product of physical States s if if our internal cognitive cognitive States in fact are sorry of physical of physical States bye or external States fine if our inner cognition is a product of objective non-mental States then then you're bound to doing this and you contradict this entire rationale so do we have good reason to think that our experiences in fact are just brain States objective non-mental brain State because if we have reason to think that then my story may not have legs so do we ordinarily of course there are tight correlations between experience and and patterns of brain activity um that however can have multiple explanations at least two one is experiential states are caused by brain States and the other is exp BR brain states are merely the appearance the representation on a dashboard of experiential States and they would still correlate but now instead of being the cause of experiential States brain states are the appearance they are what experiential States look like when observed from the outside I'll specify all this more carefully in a moment but even without going there we can question whether there is always this tight correlation between experiential States and brain States for instance under psychedelics which we always thought you know induce the the mind-boggling psychedelic trunks by lighting up the brain like a Christmas tree psychedelics only reduce brain activity there is a decrease in cerebral cerebral blood flow all across the brain and there is no increase in cerebral cerebral blood flow and this has been studied for a number of different psychedelics with a number of neural Imaging techniques for instance this is fmri and psilocybin which is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms this is LSD and the measurements are done via Meg instead of fmri but you can still see here that under LSD the power spectrum is consistently below uh the placebo Baseline except perhaps here but this is well within the error margin so it's consistent below for the entire uh uh for for all bands Delta Data Alpha Beta and so on and so forth psychedelics only reduce the brain activity and I just flash many of some of the many papers studies done by different groups using different neural Imaging techniques techniques different psychedelics all leading to the same conclusions now of course there is an attempt to sort of rescue physicalism the notion that experiential states are caused by objective non-mental brain states to rescue physicalism out of the clutches of this kind of results and the most popular alternative so far is the so-called entropic brain hypothesis and what people have seen is that if you study drug and Placebo pairs the level of noise or random brain activity that doesn't fit into any discernible pattern increases a tiny little bit for the drug compared to Placebo so if you have this scale of complexity here at the top one um it's it's TV static you know purely random brain activity uncompressible and zero would be only discernible patterns no Randomness at all then you see that the drug increases a little bit the level of brain noise but by how much well by 0.005 percent 0.005 in a scale from zero to one hundred in other words it's to say that it's tiny is is the overstatement of the century and by the way for some of the drug Placebo pairs the correlation went the other way around uh brain noise decreased and those people still had the reasonable psychedelic trance nonetheless so this borders on the ludicrous I think researchers defend this by saying it's statistically significant well let's forget for a moment that statistical significance is an entirely arbitrary thing P factor is entirely arbitrary even if it is statistically significant it only means that the effect observed is not an artifact of measurement or methodology that it's a real effect but it's a tiny real effect and it's Preposterous is to try to account for the mind-boggling richness and intensity of the Psychedelic drugs based on a percent increase in of all things unstructured brain activity brain noise but anyway this is what is being attempted now and it's not only psychedelics people were studied people with tumors were studied for um what research is called an index of self-transcendence in other words to what degree these people identify themselves not only with their body but with something larger than themselves and it's turned out that if you have patience score in a form at their level of self Transcendence before and after surgery for the removal of tumors in the brain which always causes some collateral damage to surrounding tissue soft Transcendence increases after brain damage so again you have an impairment or a reduction of brain activity correlating with an experience of transcendence like the Psychedelic trance or like this this way of identifying with something bigger than oneself and that's not what one would expect under physicalist assumptions Vietnam War era veterans were also studied for their propensity to having a religious experience which is also a kind of experience of self Transcendence and people with damage to specific regions of their brain show a much higher propensity to this kind of religious experience so again enriched in tensor broader experience correlating with reduction or an impairment of regular brain activity which is the opposite of what physicalism would expect um trans mediums in Brazil I reserve judgment about these mediumship stuff but the result here is nonetheless interesting they were studied uh under an fmri and they were asked to write down information on a piece of paper that allegedly comes from some Transcendent Source or whatever and and they divided two groups of mediums what the researchers called less experienced mediums which is their code for people who aren't really the thing they they just say they are this is the control these are not mediums and what they called experienced mediums and what you see is that in key areas of the brain associated with Grammar with linguistic work with a rational thinking um for the controls brain activity increased when these people were writing down this information from Transcendent sources it consistently increased no surprise here they needed to engage these areas of the brain in order to write text but for the experienced ones it only decreased it consistently decreased did they write less complex text no the text was scored automatically with an algorithm for a level of complexity a measure of complexity and in fact the X group wrote more complex text than the than the controls so I could go on and on I mean syncope when you pass out when you hyperventilate It's associated with Transcendent experience as well so what all of this leads to is is the following and I and I don't have slides for this so I'll go I'll stop sharing and I'll go back to just talking to you my hypothesis is the following out there there is only a field of subjectivity a field of mentation mental stuff we are dissociated aspects of that field that's what life is life is what dissociation in this underlying field of meditation in nature looks like it looks like metabolism it looks like biology in the same way that a patient with dissociative identity disorder if you put that patient under fmri and this has been done in the Netherlands in 2014 by Yolanda shlomp and her team um you get a pattern of measured brain activity that is identifiable as dissociated Alters um so there is something dissociation looks like even in the minds of people with dissociative identity disorder so in this for lack of a better expression in this mind of nature that underlies reality dissociation also looks like something and it looks like us it looks like biology metabolism and it is this dissociation that creates the division between the inside and the outside creates the skin of the airplane and leads to the emergence of a dashboard inside so our internal dissociated cognitive State then represent external States because external States impinge on our dissociative boundary and we've evolved to pick out on that impingement and represent the respective information to ourselves in the form of what we colloquially call the physical world the stuff that appears on the screen of perception this stuff we touch taste smell see here um and therefore we are essentially mental beings um our bodies are what our dissociated internal mental in our life looks like when it's observed from across a dissociative boundary physicality in general is what experiential processes look like when they are measured or observed from across at least one dissociative boundary and that's why the world around us is physical because we always observe the world around us through a dissociative boundary our own dissociative boundary and therefore the states of the world upon measurement become represented within the dissociative boundary on our internal dashboard as physicality and that's why when a brain scientist cracks my head open and and looks at me he sees a brain or he sees brain activity because that brain activity too is a dashboard representation of my mental inner life when it's observed from across one or more dissociative boundaries our brain activity is what our inner conscious conscious life looks like from a perspective it is not its cause it is its appearance its dashboard representation and of course death the end of life is the end of life is the end of the dissociation and that's all there is to it and if we see the world this way even the Psychedelic story I told you makes sense why do we experience we have much richer and Intense or experience during psychedelic Trends even though our brain activity reduces well because what is being reduced is the dissociation itself the brain activity that that gets reduced is what the dissociative boundary itself the dissociative process itself looks like if you reduce or weaken that the boundary becomes porous permeable and of course you experience things from across the boundary because that's what reduced the association means it means that there is more Commerce of information across the boundary and we call that a psychedelic trip um and again foundations of physics starts making sense as well because physicality is just representation it's the result of measurement across a dissociative boundary the thing itself the thing in itself the thing measured is not physical what is it then well it is mental mental states are not amenable to description through physical quantities what is the length in yards of your thought what is the weight in pounds of your emotion what is the angular momentum of your fantasies now these are natural states that we know exist because we have firsthand acquaintance with them and we know that they are not physical in the sense of not being amenable to description through physical quantities so it's obvious what the answer to the conundrum is the world as it is in itself is also made of mental States not my mental state not your mental state transpersonal impersonal mental States out there which impinge on our dissociative boundary we will pick up on that impingement and translate that that impingement is a measurement we pick up on it and translate that into an internal representation that in turn is physical and can be described in terms of physical quantities physical quantities are descriptions of what appears on the dials of our dashboard the thing measured and represented on the dashboard is qualitative it is experiential it is mental and I'll stop here thanks for your time thank you very much for that fascinating talk Bernardo um while the questions are trickling in I'd like to take the opportunity to ask a couple of questions myself actually uh one being uh when you refer to a reality being mental what is the mind really does it have a substrate can it be mathematically studied is it another piece of equipment that we can use in order to study that uh these other parameters that you were mentioning is r or PSI or things like that the underlying reality right is it a common substrate between physical world and the mind or is something else going on what exactly can we study and what can we not study can we study it can we model it can we predict it well obviously yes we have been successful for the past 500 years well at least 400 in science and what science does is to study the patterns and regularities of Nature's behavior and we have been very successful in modeling and predicting those and that's why we can develop technology we know what nature will do next and therefore we we can leverage that in our own favor so of course the mind of nature is predictable um remember they're falling when we talk about a mind out of there we tended to project anthropomorphically the higher level mental functions that we evolved as animals fighting for survival in a planetary ecosystem but mind at large the mind out there didn't evolve in a planetary ecosystem it didn't he didn't have to react to environmental challenges it didn't have to develop higher level mental functions such as reflection introspection self-awareness all this stuff why would it have evolved that it's it's not fighting for survival in a planetary ecosystem only it's dissociative altars are us so we developed this higher level mental functions but it stands to reason that the mental States out there Beyond life are very simple and predictable and that's why science is so successfully modeling them and technology so successful in leveraging our ability to predict what nature would do next you could think of the mind of nature at large as a instinctive mind is purely spontaneous non-reflective non-self-aware mind um now does is that mind then something extra is it an extra metaphysical or ontological substrate that I'm postulating no what I'm saying is that that mind is what there is and everything else is a representation thereof a cognitive representation of ours the physical world is our representation of this mind and this mind is the only thing that is out there it's not a layer underneath it's the only thing that is out there it's the physicality that that is a sort of it's not a metaphysical extra because physicality has a cognitive representation is itself mental as well but it's in here it's not out there so everything is mental but in the dance of mental processes in nature some mental processes represent others the mental processes we call the physical world what appears on the screen of perception represents the states of the mental processes beyond our dissociative boundaries and that's all there is to it there is only this mind everything else are patterns of excitation of this mind you can think of it as an excitable multi-dimensional substrate like in Quantum field Theory where you have the 17 Quantum fields and and we've been working now for four decades trying to unify that in in one field you know Grand unification theories now pretend we succeed my contention would be that that one Quantum field left at the end that's our theoretical model of a field of subjectivity in that field of subjectivity is all there is in nature we are dissociated segments of it the the phenomena of nature are our cognitive representations of the excitatory Dynamics of this field in exactly the same way that every electron every Photon every move on every glue on there every Neutron uh are patterns of excitations of underlying Quantum fields in exactly the same way all nature are patterns of excitation of one field of subjectivity that that's the contention interesting thank you another very quick question because we have a few questions from the participants as well so related to the theme of this colloquium series about Consciousness reality what exactly is consciousness in your picture is it part of the Mind or mental phenomena and as we've been dealing with in physics does the conscious Observer have any role to play in determining the outcome of everything that is there in the physical world so I use the words mind and Consciousness interchangeably and I mean the same thing by them what I mean by them is phenomenal Consciousness not meta Consciousness not metacognition not self-reflection none of these higher level mental functions pure phenomenal Consciousness and I use the word mind in that sense because in the western tradition we have tended to do that since the cards and before him um now what is it no when we asked when we ask the question what is it we are asking for a reduction we are asking for an explanation of something in terms of another that's what we are asking when we ask what is it what's a body well it's a set of biological systems what's a biological system why it's something made of tissues what is a tissue why it's made of cells cells made of molecules those of atoms those are Elementary subatomic particles and those of an underlying field so that's what we are asking we're asking for a reduction my contention is that at the very bottom bottom of that chain of reduction there is a field of phenomenal Consciousness that is spatially Unbound now you cannot answer the question what it is because since it is at the end of the chain of reduction it is what there is you cannot explain anything in terms you cannot explain it in terms of anything else you cannot keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever wherever your metaphysical beliefs you cannot play that game Forever at one point you hit rock bottom and you get to what philosophers call an ontological primitive which is the thing that cannot be explained in terms of anything else for me phenomenal Consciousness especially Unbound feel the phenomenal Consciousness is that rock bottom level now what we can do is explain everything else in terms of the Dynamics of phenomenal consciousness that is entirely possible and I submit to you so analytic idealism is parsimonious in the sense that it puts only one element in in in in in in the in the in the reduction in the reductive set there is only one thing in terms of which we can explain everything else but of course that one thing we cannot say what it is it is it is what is everything else are its patterns of excitation but the thing that is excited it's like asking what is a Quantum field no physicist can tell you what a Quantum field is because it's defined in terms of its effects Quantum field a Quantum field is that whose excitations are Elementary subatomic particles in exactly the same way I would I could say and I will say phenomenal Consciousness is that whose excitations are the entire dynamics of nature thank you and I assume that it is possible to develop a mathematics for this underlying fundamental field so we all await this Grand Theory at some point but we have some interesting questions by the participants the first one is by akandadidas and he asks that we first conjectures that I'm I'm with you on uh your key key thesis points of the nature of reality could you please clarify what you mean uh that we are the dissociative aspect so is this the cause of our sense of ourselves as a subjective experience experiencer how does that arise and in the representation of the world where do Collier reside qualia are the excitations of of an underlying field of phenomenal Consciousness that's what quality are different excitations lead to different quality um you could regard my my talking about excitations as a model of qualia there are immensely varied quality are probably infinite an infinite number of qualia out there well you can still reduce that to one field of Consciousness because one field can have infinite different patterns of excitation so playing this this game of reducing complexity to to ontological Primitives this is what physics has been doing all along so uh I'm not doing anything different quality are just the different patterns of excitation of a field of subjectivity now our sense of pure highness which philosopher in philosophy is called core subjectivity um I think that's inherent to the field core um subjectivity is inherent to the field but our sense of personal identity of our sense of being a mental agent separate from the rest of nature that is cultural that is that's a narrative it's a story of self that we tell ourselves in other words it's a pattern of excitation of our dissociated minds now what is dissociation um dissociation is a process that we know empirically to Exist by means of which one mind seemingly breaks up into separate disjoint centers of awareness there was a very interesting study in 2015 done in Germany a woman claimed to have suffered from the associative identity disorder severe one and claimed to have two altars that were blind even though the woman could perfect could see perfectly there was nothing wrong with her and her clinicians had the wonderful idea that to instrument her with an EEG cap to measure her brain activity when one of the Alters that claimed to be blind was in control and lo and behold they couldn't measure any brain activity in her visual cortex even though the woman's eyes were wide open she really could not see as soon as the host personality would be back in executive control normal reactivity would return to the visual cortex the association fragments mine seemingly in a way so strong that it literally makes you blind to what is right in front of your open well-functioning eyes so it's no surprise that I can't read your thoughts and you can't read mine if dissociation can make you blind what's in front of your eyes let alone to what's happening in China in the galaxy of Andromeda or in the mind of another person which is across two with dissociative boundaries not only one um there was a study done in Harvard by red about 20 years ago they had a wonderful idea they started to start decided to study the dreams of patients with severe dissociative identity disorder turns out that one quarter of those patients have dreams and those dreams are experienced by different altars concurrently different altars of the patient partake in the same dream at the same time and report on the dream later from its own unique perspective within it and the other authors are also perceived in the dream one altar can see another actually there is a one of the reports from one of the patients is such that five altars are taking part in a story not only can they see and talk to one another one author clubs another over the head you can Club an altar over the head and all of this is happening within the same mind and you can transport that to one level in the hierarchy of nature up and you get us Alters of a dissociated universal mind and we can see and talk to one another and Club each other over the head just like it happens in the mind of a patient with did now beyond that we do not have a satisfying conceptual account of exactly how the association works we know that it works we have known that now for sure for 20 years since the Advent of neural Imaging clinically we have known it for centuries but for sure for 20 years but we do not have a satisfactory conceptual account of exactly how it works unfortunately thank you we have time for maybe one or two questions uh here's one from a special guest actually Edwin Bryant uh who says You seem to be heading in a direction of certain non-dual systems in India is the phenomenal mentalism self-aware and he goes on to say that I'm not sure that question that question can be answered can it but we are self-aware so what is this dissociative boundary that separates us is it to mental is it also mental and what prevents an ontology of absolute mental Buddhism with no forms or qualities and what are the individuators or boundaries in your model so few things actually uh here if uh you could please address this so is the dissociative boundary mental of course you can think of the dissociative boundary as inferential isolation so in graph Theory you can think of the dissociative boundary as what defines a segment of your graph that is not connected to anything beyond itself it is internally connected but uh not connected to anything around it that's how you can think of dissociation in other words the association is not an extra it is the absence of cognitive associations and when that absence is coherent enough that it isolates um inferentially isolates internal mental activity from mental activity surrounding it then we talk of a boundary but the boundary is not a thing it's the absence of cognitive associations um and and therefore it's of course mental because all there is are cognitive associations um these analytic idealism consistent with Eastern non-dualism I have come to conclude that that it is I didn't come to it from meditation I'm I'm I'm I'm spiritually I'm terrible I'm I I don't have a good mind um for that stuff I only have Transcendent experiences with high dose psychedelics which are legal in my country so I experimented with that but I commented from Pure reasoning and empirical evidence but um I feel reassured that it's dovetails so well with people who arrive at the same conclusions through introspection because if all there is is one mind of nature it stands to reason that introspect introspection too is a valid path to knowledge about the whole and all because there is only one mind in nature beyond the dissociation now what I don't understand is talk of a monistic mental ontology without qualities um because qualities are mental and implementation without qualities is only the potential for qualities it's the field when it's not excited it's like speaking of the quantum field when it's not excited at all when there is no Quantum phone or well we know that in nature it doesn't work like that Quantum fields are always self-exciting there is always a quantum foam they are never at rest I think mind is the same thing because I think mind is the Quantum Fields it's never completely at rest it's always self-exciting so there is no ontology of purementation without qualities you would need to have only the potential for qualities and other qualities themselves you know you're not talking then about anything that is measurable now self-awareness is mind inherently aware of itself it depends on what we mean by the word but by the expression self-awareness I have a friend Rupert Spira who is a spiritual teacher and he's he talks about Consciousness being and inherently knowing itself it's in the very nature of Consciousness to know itself what he means by that is that Consciousness knows Itself by direct acquaintance by being itself since its Consciousness there is a sense in which it whatever it's conscious of it is itself because it's the only thing that there is but there is another technical sense for the expression self-awareness which entails what psychologists call re-representation and that's something else that that's metacognition that's when you take a step away from your own mental Consciousness and you re-represent your own mental activity to yourself in order to evaluate or inspect the contents of your own mind now the latter is a high level mental function the letter is conscious metacognition I don't think it's inherent to mind I think it's something that has evolved over four billion years on planet Earth at the cost of a lot of blood than suffering it was not there from the beginning I don't think nature is self-reflective or metacognitive or it has premeditated this whole thing I think nature is spontaneous I'm a naturalist and therefore self-awareness technically speaking and tailing re-representation or metacognition I don't think it's inherent at all we evolved that at Great cost over the Millennia if there are uh I just like to uh maybe bring out uh two very quick questions okay there are plenty of questions which we might get into later after the colloquium but uh I particularly like these two ones one the first one is how would you classify artificial intelligence would uh it ever have mental States and the second question is what experiments would you suggest to demonstrate mind as a Quantum field okay the first question first everything is mental States so a computer is also made of mental States transpersonal mental states which appear to us as silicon chips and copper and wires and chips and all that um but when we ask about sentient AI conscious AI we are not asking just whether it's made of mental States we are asking something more what we are asking is does it have private conscious in their life analogously to how I have private conscious in their life Bound by the boundaries of my body can an AI also have private conscious in their life of its own Bound by the boundaries of the computer and my answer to that is no we have absolutely no reason to think that because what you're asking is is an intelligent computer also what an altar of universal Consciousness looks like that's what you're asking when you ask does it have private conscious in their life of its own what you're asking is is this also the appearance of a dissociative process in the mind of nature and I think we have no reason to think that any more than we have reason to think that the thermostat or an abacus has private conscious in their life of its own computer Engineers know what is happening in that black box of a CPU or a GPU computer scientists may not know and therefore they think that some kind of magic happens there and therefore might as well be conscious but there are people on this planet who have built that stuff and we know exactly what's going on there and I can assure you that it doesn't matter how modern the GPU or the CPU whatever it is doing can in principle be done with PVC pipes water and pressure valves you can build the most advanced CPU in the universe with PVC pipes water and pressure valves it would be the size of a planet maybe a star but it is in principle possible now a system of PVC pipes water and pressure valves is known to you that's your houses sanitation system It's Your Home Sanitation system do you think it has a private conscious in a life of its own if you don't then you have you have to ask yourself will my opinion change if I keep adding more pipes and more pressure Valves and more liters of water to it of course not adding more of the same stuff doesn't lead to the magical step from uh not being a dissociative segment of the mind of nature to being a dissociative segment with a mentor inner life of its own I think we will be able to create artificially beings with private conscious in their life but they will not look like computers they will look like biology I think sentient AI the challenge to do that is the same challenge as abiogenesis the creation of life from non-life because nature is telling us that what the association looks like is metabolism it's biology not silicon substrates and dielectrics and metals that's not what it looks like it's arbitrary to think that that too would be what a dissociated alter looks like so I think sentient AI is just nonsense it's something peddled by people who do not understand computers they are power users of computers but they do not understand computers we're running out of time but the other small question seemingly small question was what experiments would you suggest uh to demonstrate mind as a Quantum field so making this a testable hypothesis of course it sounds like a very exciting hypothesis but can we really test it out as the real question and develop a mathematics and theory for it but there are a great number of things that can that you could imagine as a good test for this hypothesis and by the way they have been tested um you see idealism is a notion that the only type of state that there is in nature is a mental state now mental states are the only given of nature they are pre-theoretical we have mental States before we start theorizing about mental States or non-mental States it's what we have when we start thinking it's a mental state so mental States absolutely exist and you can have debate about whether they are reducible or not whether you need something that is not mental or not whether it makes sense to talk of the non-mental but mental States exist they are pre-theoretical they are the soul given of nature now what we then have to test is do we need more than mental states to make sense of nature I would argue no all we need is external mental states to account for the world-wing Habit we don't need to make them non-mental so the burden of proof belong rests with those who postulate the extra ontological type called the non-mental purely quantitative States if you don't need that then it's like the Flying Spaghetti Monster I cannot refute to the hypothesis but we don't need the hypothesis now if we open that gate and in all kinds of not a disprovable nonsensical stuff will get people asking you well what experiment can you propose to disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster why can't I can't disprove it but my question is do we need that no we don't in exactly the same way we don't need non-mental States we only need external mental States the internal and the external being defined by a mental process we know to exist and that is dissociation we know empirically it exists now what are these experiments then what can this can can they show us well let's look at the alternative hypothesis under physicalism the real states of nature are non-mental and therefore no mental stuff should have standard on reality and therefore measurements should only disclose their properties not create their properties can we come up with experiments that check this yes and we have been running those experiments for 45 years and they have won the Nobel Prize last year and the result is no no non-mental States or physical states do not have Standalone existence unless you entertain science fiction for which we have absolutely no empirical evidence short of that no physical states do not have Standalone reality that's 45 years of experimentation for you another experiment you can devise if if physical brain states are the cause of mental States then there can be nothing to mental states that can't be traced back to to to to to physical States if physical States cause mental States then everything about mental States has to be traceable back to physical States yeah now if physical States in instead are what mental States look like when observed from across a dissociative boundary now you don't have that constraint anymore because the appearance of a phenomenon does not need to convey all there is to know about the phenomenon I'm seeing your face right now that's your appearance represented on my computer screen but I I can't see your lungs I can't see your back I can't see your blood flow your appearance correlates with your mental inner life if you get very sad I will see you crying but the appearance doesn't convey everything there is to know about the thing it's an appearance of so if under certain non-ordinary circumstances there are things about felt experience that cannot be traced back to patterns of brain activity then you have your answer brain activities now the image of experience and therefore it doesn't need to be complete but if brain activity is the cause then there can be nothing to experience that you can't find back in in patterns of brain activity the results are out psychedelic research trans narrow Imaging of trans States studies of brain damage acquired Savon syndrome all these things show us that there are a great many number of non-ordinary circumstances in which that appearance is indeed incomplete you cannot find stuff about our mental inner life back in patterns of brain activity and that shows you that the correlation between the two is the correlation between the thing in itself and an appearance as opposed to a cause and an effect those experiments have been done as well thank you again Bernardo uh so this concludes the Consciousness and reality colloquia for the current Academic Year and stay tuned for more in the next academic year with this I'd like to thank again our speaker Bernardo Castro for his excellent presentation and uh very nice engagement with the questions and answers I'm not sure we resolved all of them satisfactorily but uh hopefully we can have you back at some point in the near future and like to thank all the participants and everyone who made this event happen please have a great rest of your day thanks everybody take care

Channel: caltech

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Length: 69min 12sec (4152 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023