Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Everything A Hallucination?" with Anil Seth

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"Is Everything A Hallucination?" with Anil Seth · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and what more dangerous idea
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is there than the idea that you may not actually be you the way that you think of yourself as being.
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I mean, what even are you anyway in a big grand philosophical sense? You're a homo sapien.
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You have a conscious experience of your own life, but do you think of yourself as a spiritual being
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there's that horrid cliché that I rather like that we're not human beings having a spiritual
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experience where spiritual beings having a human experience, which is all very crystal dangling
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and sort of Oprah, but nonetheless touches on something about what it feels like to be alive,
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which is that we don't just feel like meat, but if we're not just meat, what are we? I'm not talking
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about a religious explanation. We're not little fairy angels with wings inhabiting human bodies.
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So how is it that matter comes together and becomes you and are you actually the thing that you
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think you are or is your sense of your own self kind of an illusion that consciousness conjures up
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as increasingly neuroscientists seem to think it is. What the hell does all that mean? Well,
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I wanted to know. So we got a Neil Seth to explain one of the world's leading neuroscientists.
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Neil's book is called Being You, a new science of consciousness. I loved it. It was a Sunday
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times top 10 bestseller in the UK. It was a book of the year from the economist and the new
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statesman and Bloomberg business. It was a book of the week from the Guardian. He's given a
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TED talk on the main stage at the big big TED, not TEDx, and that has had more than 13 million
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views. It's one of TED's most popular science talks. I don't really need to go through a Neil,
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all of the Neil's qualifications. He's basically at the University of Sussex at the moment where he's
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a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience, but he also is a co-director of various
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sort of centers for consciousness science and advanced research on brain mind and consciousness
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scattered all over the world. His new project is in trying to understand whether or not each of
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our experience of subjective things is or is not the same. You know the whole, I'm sure that when
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you're in your teens, you had those stone conversations where you go, but what if when you eat a mango,
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it's not the same as the taste that I taste when I eat a mango. What if when I eat a mango,
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it actually tastes like what to you is lamb, but I just think that it's the same mango. Yeah,
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all of that. He's trying to nut it out, whether or not that's true, and what the difference is
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between how experience of the world are. If you're interested in all that stuff, you will love,
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as I did this chat with the one and only, a Neil tech.
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I mean, I'm sure we just started at the most obvious point, which is what is consciousness.
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What is consciousness? This is a good place to start. It's a difficult place to start because in
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the end, that's where you want to get to in trying to understand consciousness with science and
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philosophy. So we can only start, I think. I mean, we have to start somewhere, and the way I start,
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usually, is with the definition from a philosopher called Thomas Nagel, who said in a very famous
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paper, he said, for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism.
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It feels like something to be a conscious creature. It feels like something to be me. It feels like
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something to be you. And probably for many other animals as well, it feels like something to be
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that creature. It's not just sort of neurons wearing in the subjective dark. Consciousness is
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any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's the difference between being awake and
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aware as we both are now, and being dead or under general anesthesia when your sense of
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self and sense of the world is completely obliterated. That's what consciousness is.
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I like that. And I also like the thought experiment that it leads to, logically,
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of if you could snap your fingers and cease to exist and suddenly pop into existence as me,
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if you and Neil could become me, that would be interesting. I mean, that would be an interesting
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thing to have happen. And it would also probably be, and if you could snap your fingers and you could
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suddenly be a monkey, or if you could snap your fingers even and suddenly become an ant, maybe.
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That would be a psychedelic thing to experience. But if you could snap your fingers and become a mug,
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that wouldn't be interesting at all, presumably. No, I think there would be nothing. Nothing
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would happen. It would be the end of experience. Whereas that, and then there are interesting
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edge cases, like what would it mean to say that you could snap your fingers and become a mollusk,
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for example? Would that be the same as death? I don't know, but it's clearly different from being
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a rock, and it's clearly different from being a monkey. Yes, exactly. I also think you can extend
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that thought experiment a little bit further and say, what if you could snap your fingers and be like
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you in a month or in a year, or a year ago, or five years ago? Because we also have this other
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deep-seated intuition that there's some essence of self, some unchanging, immutable,
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essential self that persists over time and that in some religious traditions might survive death.
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But I think this is probably wrong, excuse me. I think this is probably wrong as well,
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and many traditions point this out too, like Buddhism points us out, that the experience of
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being a self is always changing too, but we don't necessarily experience the change.
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But in that case, the fundamental point remains that there is still something it would be like to be
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me in five years, I hope, or certainly was me five years ago.
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Well, since you raised the self, let's talk about that. I have five-year-old twins, and we
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travel a lot, and occasionally people will hear this and say, oh, you shouldn't, we should be
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waiting until they're old enough. They're not even remembering of this. So what's the point?
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And I will retort with something along the lines of, well, I mean, the point is that they're having
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these experiences, that these are experiences that they are actually having, and I'm having good
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times with them, and they're having good times with me, and they may not remember them, but so what?
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I mean, my father, who's getting Alzheimer's, doesn't remember anything either, but that doesn't
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mean that good experiences are better than worse experiences, and then they scoff and think that's
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all a bit philosophical, and say, you know, you should be waiting until they're Tim to do all this.
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Did I have a point? I don't think so. I think it's perfectly valid to value experience in the moment,
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and also, in your specific example, the fact that they might not remember it later doesn't mean it
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hasn't changed them in some way, that will be a benefit to them later. I think we put too much
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emphasis on this kind of autobiographical memory, the memory of things and events that have happened
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to us, as almost a totality of what being a self is, but it's much more than that. You know, the
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self is this whole bundle of experiences that are related to the body, to emotion, to plans for
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the future and memories of the past for sure, but much more than that. And by having experiences
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of a particular kind, that can change your overall experience of being a self in the future,
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regardless of whether you remember it or not, and you're absolutely right at the other end of
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the lifespan in dementia and Alzheimer's, there's still something essentially there about a person,
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even if they can't remember many episodes from their life anymore. I'm sure you must feel that.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but then that does bring us to the thornea question that you were
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pointing to with the thought experiment about, you know, if I could transplant my experience
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into the mind that I had a year ago, would that be, I mean, you didn't quite phrase it this way,
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but would that be me in any meaningful sense? And what about 10 years ago? What if I could go back to
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being five years old in what sense is that still me? Or like, you know, my earliest concrete memories,
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I suppose, between, you know, the ages of sort of eight and 12, where you really have a, and the
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first memories that are not just grabs, but a coherent biographical stretches, then to what extent
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was that me? It's a very provocative question. I don't think there's a very good answer to it.
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It seems obvious until you start thinking about it that the person who was there the five-year-old
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you was you just have a many years ago, but all the cells in your body would have changed by then,
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replaced with new cells, and the experience of being that person is likely to be, to be very,
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very different indeed. I do think that this, there is a thread, you know, there's a thread of
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experience because we typically don't sort of teleport ourselves to completely different environments,
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or suddenly wake up with totally new bodies, though versions of these, both of these things
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happen, right? And people can have life-changing injuries that change their, their body, or can move
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country, but there's still a continuity over time of experience, but the experience of being the
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subject of that experience, the experience of being yourself, I think changes a lot more than
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we typically recognize. And if we were able to go back and meet ourselves at a much earlier age,
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I think we might find ourselves to be more different than we expect now.
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But what do you mean by the experience of being yourself? Because I mean, I think there are two
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things that people are talking about. When we're talking, when we're having these kinds of conversations,
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there's the content of my brain, all the explicit things that I'm thinking, the reactions that I'm
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having as a five-year-old to what my father is telling me, and the thoughts and interpretations and
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all that. And obviously, I think everyone would concede that if you were suddenly teleported into
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yourself at a previous, in a previous part of time of your life, all of that would be different.
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I mean, you would lack all of the memories of anything that's happened in the interim,
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you would have different relationships to objects and ideas and to the people around you.
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But I think most people's common sense idea is that this other thing, which is this sort of
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flickering flame of consciousness, the fact that, as you say, that it is like something at all to
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be me, that that would be the same, that the fact that I'm still in existence, having experiences
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at all, that's the same subjective line that carries through from my earliest moments until my death.
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And spiritual people call that a soul, secular people might not, but I think they're still
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talking about the same thing existing. Is that actually a thing?
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Well, this really is the question at issue. And it may seem as though there is. It may seem as though
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there's this thread of subjectivity that is always the same even though the things around it might
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change. But philosophers going back to, well, in the Western tradition going back to the
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Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out that when you really look for this thing
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in your experience, when you search in your own mind for what this thread is that never changes,
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it's very, very difficult and he thought impossible to actually find. Now, all there is at any moment
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is a perception of something or other, whether it's something from the outside,
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feeling of wind against your face or a rumbling of noise in the distance or something from the inside,
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it's an emotion bubbling up or a sense of your body being in a particular position or a
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fleeting memory. There are just changing perceptions. And however hard you look is very hard and
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perhaps impossible to identify the thing that you think underlies or is invariant as these
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other perceptions come and go. And that, that's the central thesis of many Buddhist traditions as
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well, the impermanence of the self, the ever-changing nature of the self. And here I think there
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really is an interesting convergence between Western philosophy, modern neuroscience and some of
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these Eastern traditions that gets underneath some of the more immediate ways in which we might
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think of the self as this persistent essence. So if there are only subjective experiences that
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still then raises the question of on to what are those, like in what context are those subjective
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experiences happening? What is the canvas on which these experiences are being drawn? And I guess
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that then is the, I mean the common sense subjective experiences that that is the self, that life
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might be a series of experiences projected by a projector onto a canvas, but that blank canvas
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doesn't change. But the Buddhist interpretation as I understand it would be that the canvas itself
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is an illusion that's conjured up by the existence of the experiences that there is no self,
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which is having the experiences. There are just experiences and that we're all in some vast
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cosmic swamp of awareness out of which the pinprick of my individual identity can be constructed as an
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out of us in order to make my life more manageable, but that there's no real kind of ontological
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meaning to me as a discreet like lockers of consciousness in comparison to anybody else or
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anything else in the cosmos. But you're saying that modern neuroscience also points to this
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conclusion, but that doesn't sound like a very modern neuroscientific explanation the way that I
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just articulated it. But I think they do align. So there is indeed this idea that when we experience
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being a self normally, these many different elements of it, this feeling of my body in a particular
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position, this feeling of emotion of maybe things like hunger and thirst, feelings of volition and
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agency that we might typically describe as free will. And my memories of the past and plans for
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the future all seem to be somehow bound up together in what I would describe as me, well that's who I
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am. But we know from medicine from neuroscience that these different aspects of the self can all
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be separated. They can come apart in different ways in different psychiatric and neurological
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illness and we can manipulate them in the lab. The fact that they seem to come together seamlessly
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in normal existence doesn't mean that there is ontologically as you say sort of in objective
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reality, a thing that is the self that has these properties as being necessarily always unified.
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The self can change the experience of self can change. It's just that we don't and I think
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evolution is designed our brains so that we ought not to experience the self as changing, as
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possibly decomposable in all these different ways. It's kind of useful for the organism to experience
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the self as this unified thing. What's the difference? I mean if the self is a subjective
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experience then isn't that kind of total logical to say that or isn't that kind of defining
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away the problem or begging the question in some way to say like we carry this illusion through
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our lives that we have this self, well maybe that's just what selfhood is, the illusion in which
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case I'll take it. I think that's a more reasonable way to think about it actually. The word
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illusion, I always have a bit of a problem with because it almost suggests there's a correct way
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to perceive things other than how you are perceiving things. This is often how we think about
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visual illusions. You look at two lines, they're different lengths but they're really the same
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length and so what you see is an illusion. I prefer to think of something like the self. In fact,
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all of our experience rather than being an illusion, it's kind of a construction. It's not identical
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to something else or just mismatching something else in the case of the illusion. It's something
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that the brain and the body produce that is useful. It's very useful for us to experience
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self because it provides the organism with sort of a unifying architecture and which it can
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organize its behavior, its actions, its goals, its desires. And it's useful in the same way that
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it's useful for us to experience anything at all. We experience colours out there in the world,
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not because colours exist as part of objective, mind, independent reality. You know, they don't.
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There's just electromagnetic radiation in different wavelengths. But we experience colours
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because evolution has latched on to this way of making sense of electromagnetic radiation as
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useful for guiding the behaviour of organisms. And when organisms get sufficiently complex,
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this experience of self may be doing something similar. It's giving the organism a kind of way
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of planning its future actions that that is just that makes sense for the survival prospects of
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the organism. What is the scientific evidence for this rather than the philosophical speculation?
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There's only so far a scientific evidence can go for something like this. I think it starts with
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observations of people following brain injuries where they might lose certain aspects of
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selfhood while retaining others. And this is a clue that then the self is not necessarily unified
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in the way we normally experience it, that it can come apart. So, for instance, there are people
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who will lose the ability to lay down new memories in a way that's even more dramatic than happens
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in Alzheimer's. There are some cases of people with such severe amnesia that they live in a kind
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of permanent present of a few seconds. And so every new moment is a new reality for them.
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Yeah, can you tell the story, Neil, with a mastery in composer who had incredibly severe brain injury
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and amnesia and his wife wrote a book about his condition? Yeah, it was actually an English
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composer. He's still alive. His name is Clive Wearing. And in the 1980s, he suffered a brain
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infection, an encephalitis, which destroyed almost completely his temporal lobes. These are parts
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of the brain that are absolutely necessary for laying down new memories. And the virus just wiped
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these parts of the brain out, but not much more. And so he survives. And he enters the state where
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indeed he cannot remember more than a few seconds at a time. And how this is manifest is that,
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for many years, he seems to be eternally in a state of surprise about his condition. He keeps
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a diary. And in his diary, you can just see repeated entries that say, I am awake. I am finally awake
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for the first time I'm awake now. And he will cross out all the preceding entries. And this goes on
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for page after page after page. And his wife is there all the time. And he remembers his wife.
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He remembers that he's married her because it happened much longer ago. Actually,
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didn't happen that much before his illness, but they knew each other for much longer ago.
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And he still feels his love for his wife. That's undiminished. But he is in this constant state of
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confusion about where she's been. What's going on? He's just woken up and he doesn't know how long
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he's been away for, but he hasn't been away at all. He just can't remember. And then at one
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point, his wife has the idea of taking him back to his choir. So he was a composer. He was an
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organist. And he actually, I think, was responsible for a lot of the music on BBC Radio 3 classical
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music at the time in the 80s. And he was taken back to his choir. And he was able to conduct his
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choir in a piece of music. And he's seen so the reports go. He's seen like himself again. He was
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fully in the moment during that time. But of course afterwards, he couldn't remember it at all.
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So this case is just one example of how something that we might think on the surface
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is absolutely necessary for the presence of a recognizable self. Just isn't.
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And then you can go through all the other aspects that we might think are fundamental and
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necessary for selfhood. And we can usually find examples of people who, through illness or
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injury, have lost that specific thing. Yet in other ways, perhaps in all other ways, they
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are still the people they were. And Neil, am I misremembering his anecdote that in his journal,
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when he would scribble things out, he would then also write, ignore the last bit that wasn't
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really me. This is the real me now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of that would be like,
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no, no, no, no, this is me. This is me right now. This is the real me. And then that would be
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scribbled out as well. I mean, that sounds like a hell. I mean, that sounds like it's like the
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reminds me of the movie Memento, you know, where you're constantly waking up into a new existence
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untethered from everything, finding yourself a new and inheriting the baggage of all of these
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imposter views who came before you, who have no relationship to you. And so your biography is not
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stitched together as a narrative behind you the way that it is for the rest of us. You're just
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sort of springing into existence as this like spirit in the world. And then you're gone.
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So is that is that him like is he the same person in that sense or is he lots of new people puncturing
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into existence all the time? You could even make the argument that he's more the same person than
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the rest of us because he isn't laying down these new memories. So maybe he's changing less
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than than an equivalent him would be who still had this ability to to remember things. But you're
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absolutely right about how tormenting it must be. I do think trying to remember the the case
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history of him that this very, very short window did lengthen over time. And so there was some adaptation
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I think in his in his life to this to being in this condition that it wasn't it wasn't so dramatic.
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It became less dramatic. So I think the journal entries with the crossing out did sort of
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taper off after a while. But you're right. I think you describe it beautifully that it's
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the stitching that's missing. It's not the experiences themselves. It's the stitching between them
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that is lost in taste like Clives. But that's fascinating the point that you just made about
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could it be that he's actually more himself because the fact that those stitches are constantly
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being severed means that he is being preserved in Aspik in a way and he is not being contaminated by
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recent experience. So unlike the rest of us we're all evolving and morphing and changing constantly.
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But he's more the person he was a month ago than I am because the months intervening events
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are unknown to him. Could that mean I mean does that have implications for people who are living with
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dementia that they could in some way be a preserved version of themselves? I wonder I mean one thing
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that you see with people in in dementia is that they often revert to the memories that become
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more present to them. Revert to older memories. And whether this means they're becoming more
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their true self I don't know that doesn't seem right to me to put it that way. I think these
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examples whether it's dementia or clive wearing or in fact you can think of these cases as just
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an extreme version of what happens with all of us. I don't remember everything that happened in
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my life. Now I've got a fairly bad autogragraphical memory. Sometimes it requires my friends to tell
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me what happened in such and such a time. And that's I think that the philosophical value of these
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cases you can just see them as endpoints of a spectrum that we all live on. It's not that we're
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fundamentally different whether you have an episodic autobiographical memory that lasts 30 seconds
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or or a couple of weeks. Fundamentally doesn't really matter for any claims about what the self
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really is. Hmm. And that's what the self really is sounds to me like you're slipping into the
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what word did you object to last time? Illusion. Like yes to this binary of what is and what is not.
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Like I know that as my memory gets worse as I enter middle age and I look at a photo
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from 20 years ago and go where was that I don't remember that. I look at the photo and I feel like
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Michael J. Fox in back to the future looking at himself disappear from a photo of himself in the
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parallel timeline of the universe. And I feel a little piece of me dissolve. So the subjective
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experience of selfhood for me is contingent on a maximally large bag of memories and experiences.
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But can we come back to the illusion word and say that that's an illusion?
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Yeah I think you're right. It's cool me out there. I think this question about what the self really is
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is not the right question because it presupposes that there's some kind of answer to that.
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And I think the best way to approach it is to understand the self as a collection of related
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experiences that are useful for the organism and that are important for each of us. No the matter
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it's not it's not that it's not illusion in the sense that there would be some more ideal situation
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where we didn't experience being a self at all. But it's that this experience does not pick out
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any unchanging in essence. Now the memory case is actually just one other thing about the memory
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case is that it sort of gets even more perplexing because when you recall an autobiographical memory
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you often change the memory and memory in a human brain is not like memory in a computer
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every time you remember something you alter it which is why I witness testimony can be so
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unreliable one reason why it can be so unreliable. And this has a consequence of course that
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the more often you go back into your past and recall these episodes then your memories that
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seem to be part of yourself actually become less authentic to what actually happened at the time.
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So by actively remembering your past you're changing the story of yourself.
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Fascinating. The objection to all of this philosophizing let me take a materialist
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version of it would be I mean you can talk until the cows come home about self and selfness
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and experiences and the self being an illusion and whatever but all of this is taking place inside
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the neurons of my own grey matter and so that's the backdrop against all what you're all of this
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is happening. I mean my experience my experience machine if you're not religious is located between my
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ears somewhere and therefore all of those experiences are taking place in there that is what the
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self is and just because it experiences things in different ways when it's five years old versus
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when it's 70 years old and just because it can get impaired or enhanced by dementia or drugs or
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whatever it doesn't change the fact that that is the location of all of my experiences and therefore
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that is what I am. Isn't that enough? Well I don't think so I think that's I don't want to deny.
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I mean I agree with you I'm a materialist as well when it comes to consciousness that
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all our experiences depend or at the very least intimately related to what happens within this
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bony vault of a skull this massively complex as you nicely put at this experience machine inside
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our skulls but that's true of all of our experiences our our experience of there being a world
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out there is also dependent on what happens in the neurons inside our brains so this is it's true
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it's an observation but I don't think it it goes very far in itself to
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developing an understanding of what the self is now we know it depends on all these neurons and in
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fact that's that's what the neuroscientific perspective is based on and we try to understand
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the details of how and the why what are these dependencies which parts of the brain what patterns
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of activity underlie this experience versus that experience and that will help us refine and
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understand better how experiences of the world and of the self come about but that you can't I
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don't think get away with just saying that your your brain is necessary and sufficient for
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consciousness so therefore your brain is yourself now I think that the experience of self the
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experience of the world the mind in general isn't identical to the brain it's what the brain does
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in conjunction with the body and the world right so before we dig into that and I want to get to
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the big the big doozy of a question which is how is it the case that atoms and materials can
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conjure up a sense of what it's like to be anything at all let's just address the non-material
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spiritual case so I mean the vast majority of people in the world and almost everyone throughout
32:37
history has not believed this materialist vision of the brain but has thought that we're plugged
32:43
into something you know you'll often hear people say you know my I can try to look for the people
32:48
inside my television by taking the television apart but the television is just tuned in to a
32:53
frequency well used to be now it comes through a cable but used to be tuned in to a frequency that
32:58
putting pictures together and my brain is like a radio or a TV it's it's not the location of all of
33:05
my thoughts if I'm a Buddhist then I might think that I'm swimming in a soup of a sort of a universal
33:14
consciousness that I can access through things like meditation and oneness and gratitude if I'm
33:22
one of the big monotheisms the big Western monotheisms then I probably have a more dualistic idea
33:26
about my soul being something that can outlive my body and have a personal relationship with the
33:31
creator of the universe and therefore these ways of thinking can sort of align some of the problems
33:39
or sidestep them neatly by just saying well you don't have to locate self in the brain self may be
33:47
some sort of an illusion but ultimately there's something precious and there's you know there's
33:51
a soul that each human has that is in relationship with the universe in a profound
33:58
way is there a way to how do you address that with great difficulty yeah I think I mean there's
34:05
a number of different perspectives that you suggest which reflects the the variety of different
34:10
religious and spiritual perspectives on this issue some of them as you say have more to do with
34:15
consciousness in general than with the self specifically you know that consciousness
34:20
may be a fundamental property of the universe and our brains are somehow
34:25
happening in two very different ideas there aren't I because the biggest one as I
34:30
think I realized is the vision of self in the Buddhist one is actually the opposite of the vision
34:34
of self in for example the Christian one right in the Christian tradition has has a much more sorry
34:42
yeah the Christian tradition has has a much more definite aspect of of a an essence of self
34:49
of soul that can persist after death and so on but so did many other religions too I mean that
34:55
that aspect of ever of a self that survives the death of the body and and can be reborn I mean
35:01
that you see this in Hinduism as well you see it many many other traditions and I think that's
35:07
the aspect of religious traditions that's incredibly hard to reconcile with a scientific viewpoint
35:15
it's it's harder to reconcile that than this this more general idea that we don't really know
35:22
what consciousness is and maybe it's something that's everywhere maybe it's something that the
35:26
brain generates and is tuned into that's something that's it's it's hard to make progress on that
35:32
question but it's at least compatible with a lot of what science has discovered and a materialistic
35:38
philosophy has suggested but the idea that there is a self that can survive the what's the
35:47
death of the brain rather than the body and that can potentially reappear and is plugged into
35:52
something else that's extremely hard to reconcile and from my perspective that something
35:58
I have to let go of right all right let's stick with the more plausible of the spiritual claims
36:04
then that now that our brain is tuned into some universal consciousness each of us are instantiations
36:16
of that consciousness where like I suppose the vines of a grape tree or something I'm not a very good
36:23
botanist so I don't know what the analogy would be but you know maybe it's a coral reef with
36:27
individual spores on the coral and it you know but it's we're part of some some meta organism
36:32
that's invisible to us and so we think of ourselves as being discrete individuals but we're all
36:36
actually having experiences within the one vast conscious matrix yeah what do you make of that
36:45
and does it make it easier or less easy to explain how where how it's like something to be me
36:52
I think it's distracting I don't think it really adds anything or helps us explain anything it's
36:58
sort of sweeps the problem away and says okay it's difficult to explain how consciousness can be a
37:06
property of physical systems of biological systems of brains and bodies so therefore it's
37:12
something that pre-exists and is just there and we tap into it unless we happen to find in the
37:19
brain there's some sort of mechanism that can only be explained as an antenna for this whatever
37:26
it is then it doesn't really help us it just pumps the problem down the metaphysical road
37:35
it's very very difficult the fact that it is very difficult to understand how a physical system
37:42
could be identical to or give rise to a subjective experience doesn't mean that it's inconceivable
37:50
that this happens or that there will be an explanation for how this happens and you can either
37:58
put your money and your effort on that prospect that there is an explanation in materialistic terms
38:06
and get on with a job of trying to figure out what that might be or I think you just you kind of
38:11
give up and and say well you know this is something we can't explain so we give it its own
38:17
independent reality and that would be okay if it helped us understand things about the self
38:25
about conscious experience in general but I don't think it really does because everything that we
38:33
want to understand so far that makes a difference to us in practical terms like how does our
38:38
experience change what affects it why is one experience different from another
38:44
we can make progress on these kinds of questions by studying the brain by thinking about the material
38:53
basis of experience and we can get a long way even if we don't close the gap completely even if
39:00
there is still some sense of residual mystery about why there should be consciousness at all
39:05
well I'm glad you want that optim about the ability of science because I mean it sounds like
39:12
you're being optimistic about the ability of science to explain sort of proximate causes of
39:20
conscious phenomena as they take place in the brain but what would a good explanation of the
39:25
hard in fact we should probably can you explain what the hard problem of consciousness is because
39:31
you know we're going to what we're going to bump up against I think this is what we're talking
39:35
about already really so the hard problem of consciousness is a formulation of this challenge
39:42
of explaining consciousness that that was put forward by David Chandler's philosopher quite a
39:48
quite a while ago now in the 90s but the idea has been around for thousands of years
39:54
it's just David crystallized it very nicely and how he puts it is something like the following he
39:58
said it's widely accepted that conscious experiences depend on physical systems like brains but it's
40:08
just unclear how and why this should be why should physical processing physical interactions
40:15
give rise to experience at all it seems objectively unreasonable that this should happen
40:20
and yet it happens this is the hard problem a materialist view of nature consists of material
40:30
things and interactions whether they're atoms in the void or quarks or some more deeper level of
40:38
physical reality such as some foundation of quantum mechanics whether it's interactions or whatever
40:45
it might be there's some description of the universe and consciousness is not built into that
40:53
description at the most fundamental level challenges given a description of reality that doesn't at
41:01
one level include consciousness how do you then get consciousness how do you get it out of putting
41:07
the pieces together and so that's the hard part of consciousness what's the what's the easy problem
41:14
the easy problems for David Chandler's are all the problems that you can address as a neuroscientist
41:20
as a physicist as as whoever you are without worrying about consciousness at all because there is
41:26
a very simple level at which the brain is just a machine it's a very complicated machine
41:33
but it's a machine it's it signals come in through the eyes in the years
41:38
neurons fire other neurons fire chemicals swish about and the body does something sometimes words
41:44
are emitted actions happen so you can study you can in principle figure out how the brain works in
41:50
all its detail and those are all the easy problems of consciousness of course they're not
41:58
easier at all it's incredibly challenging to figure out how the brain does anything
42:02
but they're conceptually easy in the sense that you're just dealing with a complex machine
42:07
and the intuition driving this distinction between the easy problem and the hard problem
42:12
is that even if we solved all the easy problems at the end of neuroscience 100 years 200 years a
42:18
thousand years away the hard problem of why and how any of this should be associated with or
42:26
generate consciousness would seem just as mysterious and be just as mysterious then as now
42:32
that we would make no progress and it would be still this apparently irreducible mystery
42:39
so Neil coming back to your optimism about you know not wanting to just sort of wave away the
42:45
the hard problem of consciousness by saying well there's some mystical force that the undergoods
42:51
the entire universe and we are all little examples of the same cosmic conscious experience but
42:56
you know really getting your hands dirty as a scientist and trying to understand what's going on
43:01
I mean I would have two responses to that one is I don't know enough about the frontiers of
43:07
neuroscience to understand how the kinds of explanations that you could provide about how
43:13
consciousness functions inside my head will actually lead to any meaningful explanation or
43:18
resolution of the hard problem or what that would even look like what shape that would have
43:24
and secondly I think it's a little bit dismissive of the sort of secular version of the Buddhist
43:30
claim to say that it just explains away the problem because although it's not scientific evidence
43:36
there's a lot of subjective evidence from people's experience of turning down the volume of their own
43:43
ego and it feeling to them like they're tuning into some conscious experience that's bigger than
43:51
themselves so whether this is from yogis and you know lifelong meditators or whether this is from
43:58
people on acid trips or you know in end of life psilocybin trials or whatever it might be there's a lot
44:04
of evidence that there are compounds and habits and practices that can elevate our experience of
44:10
consciousness into some well you know it's hard to take this as evidence but it's a kind of
44:16
noetic sort of observation of what what feels like a truth about the nature of our own self awareness
44:26
that let's take that yeah yeah so jumping on let's take that second point first that
44:33
that I've made been a little unfair on this this secular Buddhist view and that there's lots of
44:38
interesting subjective experiences that people can have in these religious spiritual traditions or
44:44
indeed on psychedelics and other things that seem to be evidence but I think as you said but
44:50
what kind of evidence evidence for what firstly I think you're you're right that there's a lot of
44:57
value to be had in widening our experiential lens to think about take seriously the experiences
45:06
that that people have in altered states whether it's meditations psychedelics whatever it might be
45:14
and these are valid states of consciousness and I think considering these states can help remove some
45:20
of our assumptions about what expression of consciousness in humans must necessarily be like
45:28
and here again the self comes to mind straight away because where sometimes in deep meditation
45:35
sometimes on psychedelic compounds people's experience of the self can can be radically different
45:41
and in some reports even go away entirely now this is I think really interesting for a science of
45:48
consciousness because it tells us that the self the experience of self is not necessary for
45:56
consciousness per se it's not necessary for consciousness to happen and we can so we can learn
46:04
an awful lot and break a lot of our assumptions but the mistake at least I think the mistake
46:12
would be to take the content of these experiences as evidence for ontologically what is the case
46:20
so the fact that somebody that say on a large basis of the sivine might feel very strongly that
46:27
they're plugged into universal consciousness is not evidence for there being a universal
46:32
consciousness it's evidence for the possibility of that kind of subjective experience for happening
46:39
and I think this is a critical distinction let me illustrate it with another example I think
46:46
perhaps a bit easier to use which is out of body experiences so people have had out of body
46:53
experiences for thousands of years they've been reported in different cultures for the ages
47:00
they're clearly extremely significant to the people that have them and a typical out of body
47:05
experience might be the experience of suddenly leaving your body seeing it from the outside usually
47:11
from above and then maybe floating away moving through space leaving your body behind extremely meaningful
47:20
now what is that evidence of you might say well this is clearly evidence that there is a soul and
47:27
it's not dependent on the body because it's left the body and and off it goes flying around
47:33
you could say that but I think you'd be wrong to draw that conclusion and the reason you'd be
47:38
wrong is because it's a confusion of how things seem with how they are and we already know that in
47:46
our normal experience the fact that I see a color out there in the world doesn't mean that
47:52
there really is redness out in the world you know the redness is in my head it's not in the world
47:57
and so an out of body experience to me reveals that something we normally take for granted about
48:04
the self that there's a first person perspective that is usually located somewhere behind in between
48:11
the eyes that that is actually something that is generated on the fly by the brain all the time
48:20
and so it's a part of our experience rather than something that is receiving the experience
48:28
and the evidence for that is that we can generate out of body experiences artificially
48:36
you know there are reports of people having out of body experiences when parts of their brain
48:41
are stimulated in particular ways and you can even get versions of out of body experiences with
48:46
clever combinations of virtual reality in the lab so these different kinds of experiences it
48:55
really depends how you look at them and I think the most productive way to look at them is to
48:59
challenge our assumptions about what you know what what what what are we trying to explain when we're
49:05
trying to explain consciousness rather than taking these things at face value yeah it's a fair enough
49:11
analogy and it's it's true that you cannot take subjective experiences as being primacy evidence
49:16
of something out there in the physical universe I mean the distinction that I would make there is
49:24
that the things that would have to be true about the physical world for out of body experiences to be
49:31
real are fantastical we'd have to completely overhaul our understanding of physics and biology
49:40
the things that would have to be true for consciousness to be something that we are all living
49:47
inside some grand experience of are also fantastical but to me no more fantastical than what we are
49:55
required to believe with in the alternative explanation which is that particles of exploding
50:04
stars have aggregated together and these impurities of the cosmos have gathered together on this
50:09
rock and formed in such a way that they are creating experiences of their own existence that are
50:14
self-aware and conscious and capable of love and innovation like that so I suppose it's just whether
50:23
or not the two sides of the of the scales have more or less plausible scenarios and if you are
50:30
going to tell me as a neuroscientist that we are close to being able to solve the hard problem
50:35
of consciousness and give me a satisfactory explanation for how those bits of stars have come
50:41
together and produce the experience of what it's like to be me then I will happily jettison the
50:46
secular Buddhist idea of us all being in a conscious soup but can you do that that's fair enough
50:53
and I don't I can't do that I don't think anybody can do that just yet but it's for me it's more
51:02
a case of what is the most useful pragmatically useful strategy to follow I think it's it's quite
51:10
true that the idea that consciousness might suffuse the universe and be fundamental and ubiquitous
51:18
in some way I mean there's a modern school of philosophical pan-psychism which argues exactly this
51:23
and a lot of contemporary philosophers and neuroscientists choose to buy into that framework
51:28
it's it's as compatible with what we know as the materialistic perspective is and I don't think
51:37
there's going to be a decisive experiment that's going to separate those two views the question for
51:44
me is what is going to help us make the most progress in the face of of this persisting mystery
51:52
and believing that consciousness is somehow everywhere suffusing everything and we tune into it
52:00
doesn't in practice lead to the kinds of theoretical advances in experiments that help us
52:07
understand more about the intimate relations that everybody agrees exist between the brain the
52:14
body and consciousness right right it's a bit of a it's a bit of a dead end but it might be
52:20
true and here so I think as well as optimism this is I have to you know give you some optimism
52:27
but it's it's it's sort of sprinkled over seasoned with a fair dose of humility as well because we
52:34
just don't know and I react myself a little bit badly against people who might over claim and say
52:41
we know or we're there or it's just around the corner it might be but it's very hard to tell
52:46
from where we are now but what I've seen over the last 20-30 years and that I've been involved in the
52:53
field is a lot more is known about how the brain might construct different kinds of experiences why
53:01
one experiences one way and another experiences the other way what we might mean by freewill what we
53:07
might mean by the self are the questions that we ask about these things have changed as much as
53:13
the answers and the driver for these changes in the questions and the answers have been experiments
53:20
that take pragmatically in materialist perspective so I think it's it's it's a it's a productive
53:28
view to take and then the optimism there's a historical motivation for the optimism which is
53:35
go back 150 years and people were very very pessimistic that life could be explained in terms
53:42
of physics and chemistry now you had this whole philosophy of the time of vitalism this idea that
53:49
the difference between the living and the non-living required something extra it would
53:54
required some spark of life some elongate style vital spirit because materialist stuff just
54:03
wasn't up to the job there was a sort of hard problem of life then as there's a hard problem of
54:09
consciousness now but the hard problem of life wasn't solved and it wasn't sort of explained
54:16
away by people saying life is just everywhere and certain things tune into it now what happened
54:21
with life is that biologists of the day instead of focusing on that single big scary question
54:28
of the difference between the living and the non-living what they did was they said okay what is
54:34
about living systems that we need to explain well they they have metabolism they have
54:40
self-regulation homeostasis they keep themselves alive or they keep themselves in a in a steady
54:45
physiological state they reproduce they do all sorts of things can we begin to explain those properties
54:53
and as they did that and they found out that they could do that the hard problem of life began to
55:02
dissolve and now we don't understand everything about life there's there's no nobody would say that
55:09
life is somehow beyond physics and chemistry life is a property of physics and chemistry
55:14
organized in particular ways and so we now you know that the problem is now a different kind of problem
55:20
and we ask different kinds of questions we ask interesting questions about whether viruses are
55:24
alive whether we can create synthetic life and I think my hope is that consciousness research will
55:32
follow a similar trajectory that even though it might seem mysterious now as we try to explain the
55:38
different aspects of consciousness like the experience of self like the experience of free will
55:44
wise emotion different from vision then little by little the hard problem of consciousness will
55:51
seem less hard and less hard and maybe eventually disappear in a puff of philosophical smoke but
55:58
even if it doesn't will have learned a lot more along the way by just by following this avenue
56:04
than by trying to figure out how the brain tunes into a universal consciousness which I think
56:10
we follow that avenue my best is we're not really going to get anywhere right that makes a lot
56:16
of sense that sort of answers my question about what the contours of a resolution to the hard
56:21
problem would look like you're not expecting a eureka moment where a you know an Einstein of the
56:28
future comes running outside to mix my Archimedes metaphors and the screams equals mc squared I've
56:34
got it and you know all of a sudden we've got an explanation of how the universe produces
56:40
awareness and you can put on a t-shirt you're speculating that the easy problems of consciousness
56:46
will will get so well resolved that the whole question of how consciousness arises will become
56:53
moot that's correct and in fact this is why in my in my writings I've rejected this easy hard
57:01
problem distinction because the easy problems basically just try to ignore consciousness altogether
57:07
and say what can we say about the brain without even using that word and the hard problem is this
57:11
single big scary mystery so I've talked about the real problem of consciousness which is which is
57:18
what you do when you accept that consciousness exists and that it depends on the brain in internet
57:24
but still unclear ways and you take this strategy that people took for understanding life you say
57:30
what are the problems of consciousness the individual properties of consciousness how do we
57:36
explain those predict when they happen control them by intervening and as we do that then
57:44
we will we stand a chance of dissolving the hard problem but I cannot guarantee that the
57:52
resolution will be as complete as it has been from life now we may get most of the way
57:58
yet there might still be some residue of mystery remaining and if that's the case that
58:06
I also wonder we might ask more of a science of consciousness than we ask of scientific
58:12
explanations for other things and this might be because consciousness is art you know that that's
58:16
that's all we are is this ongoing flow of stream of conscious experiences so I think that
58:23
provides a psychological pressure that we want a scientific explanation of consciousness
58:29
to really make sense to us to be intuitive and to perhaps reach a higher bar because it has to
58:35
not only explain something it has to sort of almost constitute us because we are conscious
58:41
but this is a yeah it's a misunderstanding of what scientific explanations generally do I mean
58:47
they're very good at or they're considered successful typically when they explain properties
58:54
of something and when they can predict when it happens and when they can allow use intervene
59:00
and control things and we don't we don't have the same psychological criteria for other things
59:08
in science that we do for consciousness this is a suspicion I'm not sure it's true yeah I'm not
59:14
sure I mean I think the big glaring elephant in the room in biology and the study of life for
59:19
example that still motivates a huge amount of religious faith in people is how did life get started
59:26
in the first place how did you go from you know material inert things to replicating organisms
59:33
and because we don't have a fully satisfactory explanation of that first initial trigger of life
59:41
um that remains the sort of god of the gaps whole that people will fill with faith and until that's
59:49
filled I think all of I think people will be mildly dissatisfied with all of our explanations of
59:55
life no matter how accomplished we are at explaining the details of photosynthesis or you know the
1:00:02
vascular system of mammals or whatever and that may that may also be true with consciousness we
1:00:07
may get better and better and better at explaining how it works and ultimately people may remain
1:00:13
the layperson may remain mildly dissatisfied by all of that because it doesn't really touch on how
1:00:19
well why this all exists in the first place you might be right but I actually think the origin of
1:00:25
life is it's an extremely good example because it's this interesting point in scientific understanding
1:00:33
where indeed there's no there's still a gap right we still not clear and convincing
1:00:40
how we got from the non-living to the living over over history um but what's interesting there is
1:00:46
there are there are some emerging ideas which seem to be promising it was it clays self-organizing
1:00:53
in a particular way about what about oil droplets that seem to spontaneously form membranes
1:00:59
what about the conditions in these undersea vents that generate the kind of organic compounds
1:01:06
that might be necessary and the more that these these clues come about the less total the mystery
1:01:13
seems to be and from my perspective not being involved in this area it doesn't seem to me that
1:01:20
there's a massive gap anymore it seems that it's it's an incompletely understood phenomenon
1:01:28
but not and not something that's totally resistant to being understood it's just very very difficult
1:01:36
right and I think that's that I'd be very happy if we get to that kind of position with with
1:01:41
consciousness yeah it's it's still very difficult but it's it's not no longer something that seems
1:01:47
to be totally mysterious and in need of some massive metaphysical or supernatural explanation
1:01:55
yeah yeah that's right I mean in which case I suspect that you you are feeling unfeeling
1:02:01
maligned about people's skepticism towards consciousness research I think we're just so much
1:02:05
earlier in a long you know understanding of of how materials come together to to generate
1:02:14
a sense of what of that it's like something to be me then we are in other fields of science that
1:02:21
people feel that it's more fantastical but before I need to go and do a radio show I want
1:02:26
us to touch on the the classic 15 year old stone kids gazing at the night sky talking philosophically
1:02:34
about what would it be like if our experience of the color red is actually completely different
1:02:41
from each others and that when I bite into an apple what I taste is not what you taste but we both
1:02:46
call it the flavor of apple and how do we know that any of our experiences are actually commensurate
1:02:51
and in some ways we know that they must not be because we have different tastes I mean if I
1:02:55
like the taste of caviar and you don't then what does it even mean to say that we're tasting the
1:03:00
same thing when we taste caviar because we're having a different experience about it and this is your
1:03:05
latest sort of field of interest and you've got this census which you're putting together
1:03:10
about how people perceive the world I logged on and I tried to do it but I only had a mobile
1:03:14
device and you need a desktop to do it but I'm terribly excited to get involved what motivates
1:03:19
this and what is it? It is a new project and it follows from a basic idea about perception that
1:03:29
the what we experience is really the result of the brain's interpretation of a world that is
1:03:36
essentially unknowable in all its detail and all the brain gets at these sensory signals which
1:03:42
are only indirectly related to what's actually there and the brain at least in my view many others
1:03:48
is making predictions about the causes of these sensory signals and that's what we experience and
1:03:53
because we all have different brains we're all going to have slightly or maybe quite significantly
1:03:59
different experiences even for the same shared objective reality so this is this is your example
1:04:06
if we both if we were in the same city we walk outside we look up at the blue sky we both say
1:04:11
there's a sky is blue today but are we having the same experience of blue and philosophers have
1:04:18
sort of debated this for for a long time but there's been surprisingly little evidence about it
1:04:26
and so what we wanted to do and this is a project with with colleagues genomic first and
1:04:30
and Glasgow and others to actually measure how different we are on the inside and
1:04:38
it's it's the one way to think about it is that it's clear we differ on the outside in small
1:04:44
weights we're all different heights and skin colors and body shapes and so on and we can see
1:04:49
these differences because they're just visible externally it's not clear whether to see the
1:04:55
makes us behave the way we should but at least they're visible but differences on the inside
1:05:04
are by their nature subjective and private and they're not visible until they're large enough
1:05:10
that they surface into behavior and language and if somebody is really hallucinating
1:05:16
and they say they see a gorilla and somebody else doesn't we know they're having a different
1:05:20
experience but if you and I say yeah it's a blue sky how would we ever know plus our experience
1:05:26
seems to directly reflect the world as it is if I look outside it seems as though I'm seeing the
1:05:32
world just as it is it doesn't seem like it's a construction of my brain so that's another reason
1:05:39
it's hard for us to appreciate that other people might have different experiences so this
1:05:43
perception census is a is an online citizen science project where we're trying to map out the diversity
1:05:51
of people's inner experiences whether it's vision or sound music emotion the passing of time we
1:05:59
all experienced the passing of time differently we want to understand how our inner lives differ
1:06:07
from each other and the ways in which they're similar and so people can can get involved
1:06:14
and by signing up to the perception census and we've made it we try to make it fun at least as fun
1:06:20
as a psychology experiment can be which is not amazing amount of fun but it's it's engaging and
1:06:26
hopefully informative and it doesn't say it's not amazing amount of fun it's the best fun
1:06:30
of one. It's a huge amount of fun it's definitely definitely at the top of that scale but I think
1:06:43
it is I think it is a lot of people have said it's very illuminating because you learn about
1:06:48
perception to you learn about how the way you see things hear things relates to other people
1:06:54
and by doing this we'll really get a map of something that's remained completely hidden or
1:07:00
largely hidden up until now and this is scientifically just a very interesting open question but I
1:07:06
think there's a really important sociological implication here too because having this understanding
1:07:16
that the way we see things is partly dependent on the particular conditions of our own brains
1:07:23
and bodies gives us a certain humility about our perception and I think that humility
1:07:31
recognizing that other people can literally experience the same thing differently can be a very
1:07:36
useful platform for building empathy and understanding and communication among people now that's
1:07:42
a larger hope but I think there's something to it you remember when that image of a dress went
1:07:46
around the world a few years ago that half the world saw as blue and black and half the world
1:07:51
was white and gold yeah yeah I mean that that was an excellent example because that was a sort of
1:07:56
flash in the pan thing right it was there took off it went viral and then it disappeared but what
1:08:00
was fascinating about that was how it made people realize exactly this individuality about
1:08:10
perception that people could look at the same thing and see it in different ways and I thought
1:08:15
there's something really powerful about that psychologically we're very used to the echo chambers
1:08:20
of social media and the fact that if we listen to certain news channels we'll more likely to
1:08:24
believe certain things but beneath these social media echo chambers I think we also live in
1:08:31
perceptual echo chambers you know we inhabit distinct worlds perceptually but we just don't realize
1:08:37
that we do and exposing these mapping them and just engendering this recognition that they exist
1:08:46
I think we'll be very helpful for us in in how we how we interact with other people
1:08:54
at least that's what I mean yes yes so that from the subtle empathy of realizing that we don't
1:09:01
see exactly the same image of the world we could engender a broader empathy towards each
1:09:08
others what maybe even political and cultural perspectives I mean that might be a stretch but
1:09:14
I think it's not impossible and certainly I think a more immediate
1:09:18
girl would be there's the term I'm sure you and your listeners will have heard the term neurodiversity
1:09:24
just typically implied to people with conditions like autism and ADHD but really was intended to
1:09:32
indicate this fundamental idea that we all differ and that differences are not deficits but
1:09:38
somewhat ironically the association of neurodiversity as a term with these particular conditions
1:09:47
has reinforced the idea that if you don't have one of these conditions then you perceive
1:09:52
the world as it is that there is a single neurotypical way of perceiving this was never the
1:09:58
intention of the concept but that's how often I think it's come to be understood and so
1:10:05
I've been talking more recently about perceptual diversity which is what we try to measure with
1:10:12
this perception census as a way to recover this original intuition that it's not just differences
1:10:19
at the extreme that matter we're all different and most of the differences in any statistical
1:10:24
distribution you have this kind of bell curve thing most of the variants most of the stuff happening
1:10:31
is in the middle and only a little bit of is happening at the edges and by focusing only on the edges
1:10:37
you miss all the stuff in the middle but then by recognizing what's going on in the middle you can
1:10:42
relate more easily to what's going on in the edges too that would be a first first domain of social
1:10:50
implication but fundamentally we just want to go out and measure this stuff because that's where
1:10:55
science often starts it's like yeah well you know let's find out let's find out what's there
1:11:01
amazing a great experiment I can't wait to be part of it and it's wonderful to talk to you if
1:11:06
people want to find that that that study perception census is the name which you can google
1:11:12
perception census and anneals book is called being you a new science of consciousness a great
1:11:17
talk to you anneal thank you thank you very much George
1:11:24
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1:11:36
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