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Nostalgia: Consciousness: The Case For And Against · Why We Do What We Do

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You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we do
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what we do. I am your seemingly awake host Abraham and I am your
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unfairly aware host Shane. Where a psychology podcast. We talk about all the
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things that happen in psychology. And one of the things that we talk about,
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and we have talked about in the past is consciousness. And actually,
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if you're joining us for the first time, we're going to rerun a previous
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episode that we did in discussing the case for and against consciousness? What is
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it? Does it exist? Is a question you might not have thought that
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we would be asking, but we did because the answer may surprise you.
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This is something that happened before I showed up. This is a why we
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do what we do before my time, why we did what we did.
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Yeah, this is why we did what we did, not why we currently
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do what we currently do. I'm excited to revisit us though, because I
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think that what I had been following the show as a fan, I did
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enjoyed this episode a lot, So I'm glad that we get to revisit it
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a little bit with more current information. Yeah. Thanks, Yeah, So,
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as I said, if you're joining us for the first time for these
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rerun nostalgia episodes is what we've been calling them. We are going to do
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a little bit of an intro here, and then after the episode, we'll
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do some updates on things that have happened since this episode dropped, so you'll
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get to hear the original content plus a new updated sort of research and information
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and takeaways if anything has changed for us, what has sort of happened in
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the world of research now. Something we're doing now that we did not do
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when this episode is first published is we like to recognize on the date that
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our episodes published what holidays also fall on those dates. And today is for
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twenty six, which means it is Alien Day. And this is Alien from
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the franchise Alien by Ridley Scott, originally directed by Ridley Scott, and the
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four twenty six apparently comes from the planet that the Xenomorph is discovered on called
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will Be for two six. Yes, the scariest movie franchise. Yeah,
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hands down. I had nightmares about Aliens for years years understandable specifically after watching
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Aliens. Not alien, yeah, but very scary, very scary, horrific
2:15
creatures. It's also Pretzel Day. Yeah, so make sure like you get
2:19
in line and don't let Michael Scott skip you. No explanation needed. It
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is Pretzel Day. It is also hug an Australian Day, so go find
2:27
a Australian friend. Obviously get consent first, but if they're willing to hug,
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get him, hug yeah. I support that all of Australia hug yourself.
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Yeah, yeah, everybody in Australia hug yourself. And it's also International
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Guide Dog Day, which I think is very wholesome. Yeah, I appreciate
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our guide dogs. We've talked about dogs and guide dogs a little bit on
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this show. Yeah, we love dogs. Okay, So this nostalgia episode,
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it was our twenty eighth episode, if you can believe it. We're
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now at episode three eleven and amber is the color of our energy. That's
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right. If you were to count this episode among our episodes, this is
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three eleven. But the Consciousness episode that we originally published was our twenty eighth
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episode, published on November twenty second, twenty seventeen, back when I was
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hosting with Ryan, so you'll hear his voice instead of Shanes. So back
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then they introduced what to some people will sound like the radical idea that maybe
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consciousness doesn't exist. They lay out some arguments for consciousness and then arguments against
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it, and then they summarize their own thoughts about it. Overall, the
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episode seemed to go pretty well, so, but we'd like to revisit it
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because it is old, it has been a while, and there has been
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a lot of talk about consciousness since then. Somehow our original episode didn't put
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an end to this debate, and the question of consciousness has continued to vex
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many researchers, so worth revisiting. And so what we're gonna do is we're
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gonna reair this and we're gonna share some discussions points about this and kind of
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talk about what's been the most updated discussions around consciousness and what we know about
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it today and what new information we've gained, because we know that research continues
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beyond our episodes, which is again, we should be like the definitive thing,
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but apparently we are not. Somehow, somehow we did not make it
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too to cannon status about this topic. You need the why we do what
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we do seal of approval to continue to talk about something I'm deciding, you
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know, like we're like an alternative universe, Like, we're not the Sacred
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Timeline, which is bogus man. One day I was hoping I was on
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the Sacred Timeline. Oh well, whatever it is, what it is,
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I guess. All right, Well, without further ado, please enjoy this
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past nostalgic episode look at the case for and against consciousness. Hello, this
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is your host Abraham and your co host Ryan. Oh, this is why
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we do what we do. Ooo. All right, So let's go ahead
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and just dive right into this because we have a lot to unpack here.
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And so let's first start by just giving what's the purpose of this episode or
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this discussion today. And the first thing that we're going to try and do
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is define consciousness. But that's actually kind of our secondary goal of what we're
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doing today. Okay, The primary goal is we're going to discuss the fact
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that there are kind of two sides to this argument about whether or not consciousness
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is even really a thing. Yeah, the people who argue that it is,
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there are people who argue that it's not. And we're just going to
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explore those two options, and then we'll sort of wrap it all up at
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the end in a nice little package with a bow. It'll be great now.
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Before we start, though, it's important to know that there is a
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distinction between a couple of concepts. You might hear consciousness and think of conscience.
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Oh all right, Abraham, let's start with just a quick what's conscious
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Give me a definition of some sort you know. Yeah, and well,
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there's a couple. If you look at one of the earliest definitions of psychology
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at all, it used to be and I believe this is the eighteen hundreds
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maybe or may Actually it was earlier than that, because Locke described consciousness and
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I believe the seventeenth century. But it was that psychology was the description and
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explanation of states of consciousness. So it implied that this entire field that we
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now belong to was simply studying consciousness. That was all that we were doing.
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You need to find that one more time. Yeah, So it was
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that the description and explanation of states of consciousness, that was what psychology was.
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Okay, And then if you go back all the way back to our
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episode two, we talked about the definition of psychology and going back to the
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roots in Greek of psyche and oology meaning the study of the spirit. So
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that has sort of a similar feel to it of this idea of studying like
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the essence of life or this consciousness sort of thing. So with conscience,
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we're talking about this like interfeeling or voice, right, yeah, typically,
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and it's like this guide to rightness or wrongness. Yeah. So I tend
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to just sort of succinctly describe them as that consciousness has to do with your
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awareness and your sense of being, and conscience has to do with your morality.
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Okay, Yes, I like that. That's kind of the easiest short
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version of it. Yeah. If you look at any regular dictionary, you're
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going to get some kind of definition of consciousness that's something like the state or
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quality of awareness. Okay. And if you look in a psychology textbook,
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which I did, you're going to see a definition that says something like awareness
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of ourselves and our environment. Now, so both of these entail this idea
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of awareness. The one that I grabbed was from Meyer into Wall in twenty
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fifteen. He cites Paula and Suzuki in twenty fourteen. So these are pretty
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up to date, pretty contemporary versions of this definition that exists out there.
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And as we will discuss later, the nature of consciousness has been the subject
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of books and textbooks and discussions and arguments for centuries. At this point,
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you know, what is it, how do we measure it, what does
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it entail, what are the characteristics of it? All that sort of stuff,
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And even today, this still remains a pretty common topic. And so
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due to this really elusive nature of the subject that how difficult it is to
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understand and measure and do good research on it. It's kind of spun this
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counter group who are looking at this problem and saying like, this has been
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such a problem for so long that maybe you guys are chasing something that's not
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really there, yeah, which has always been a very interesting part of psychology,
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right, Yeah, are we chasing things that are really out there?
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Yeah? Because may argue that we haven't really veloped much at all since the
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early days years ago. There's a lot of that actually goes on. Man,
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it's fun to bring those up. Actually, I'm just thinking about all
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the other episodes we're going to be talking about some more of these things.
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I don't even want to listen them right now. I'm just excited. So
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we got consciousness, but we have subconscious and unconscious things that can happen as
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well too, so do a like spart like part those and this one we're
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gonna be talking about unconsciousness and not necessarily subconscious, and where subconscious refers to
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the part of consciousness that you're not aware of. I guess. And this
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goes back to the episode that we did when we're talking about subliminal messages and
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then just below the threshold of detection, that sort of thing. This is
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a little bit more in line with this unconscious mind, this part of your
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brain that is processing experiences, but where you're not necessarily aware of those experiences.
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Yeah. Cool, very cool. Be clear on that distinction, yeah,
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I hope. So it's kind of fuzzy because it is difficult where they're
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different, but they are referred to in different ways in the psychological community.
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So just reiterate. For today, we're going to present the arguments that are
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for or against the concept of consciousness alone. Yes, that's correct, perfect,
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Okay, So let's start with going into the case for consciousness. Who
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is in favor of this idea? Well, most people. Turns out,
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the majority of people do support this idea that there is consciousness, but they
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don't necessarily agree on what it is, But we'll get into that. And
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one of the very foremost people you're going to find if you look up consciousness,
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if you google it at all, you're going to end up with a
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man named Daniel Dennett. Yes, yeah, I'm sure you're familiar with that
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name. Yeah, Daniel Dennett. I remember him for a TED talk about
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the illusion of consciousness. I remember all the details. They didn't refresh on
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that, but books author, he's kind of everywhere. I believe he even
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influenced some folks like Richard Dawkins, but not positive like to what extent.
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Well, he's also pretty active in the skeptical community, and so I think
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in as far as Richard Dawkins is a part of that community, they probably
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have a lot of common ground on this. And I know Richard Dawkins has
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spoken quite a bit about consciousness as well, and we'll get to him a
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little bit later. But yeah, he's written a lot of books, articles,
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I think he has a blog, all this sort of stuff. I'm
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quoting him here, although I think I may have muddled the quote a little
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bit. He says quote consciousness is wonderful, but not magic. It's a
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bunch of tricks of the brain, and so he's basically saying that consciousness is
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not this thing that exists in a dual universe. It's not something that exists
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outside of our body. It is a part of our brain. It is
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a part of our body, and it's what our brain sort of does.
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Okay, that seems to be where he really lands on this. And there's
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some people other people who argue in favor of this idea of what Daniel Dennett
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calls a Cartesian theater, and this is sort of a derisive term. He
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used this to criticize this notion of consciousness where we have sort of like a
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little inner me sitting on a couch watching a video of what outer me is
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doing and seeing. And so that inner me is the one sort of that's
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pulling the strings on the brain and getting it to do things. And of
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course this goes on of like, well, how does he know what to
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do? He must have an inner me inside of him as well, and
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it's just you, on and on and on, and he sort of says,
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this doesn't work, it isn't useful. He doesn't really fall But some
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people who are favor of consciousness like that model, although they don't call it
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the Cartesian theater, but that's what he gives that name to it. So
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anyway, let's go into some of Daniel Dennett's arguments. He says that one
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of the reasons that consciousness or what it is and how we know it's there,
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is that we are capable of seeing patterns where they don't necessarily exist.
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All right, So you showed me this illusion beforehand, and I guess we'll
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go in the back story. You're just like google this thing where it's there's
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a bunch of circles when the negative space in the image like apparently forms this
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box. Yeah, it looks like a cube where you just see the edges
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of the cube, and that's implied by the negative space of the black circles.
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But all that's present is on the paper in this image are black circles
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with some negative space missing. Okay, And so this seems to suggest that
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our brain or our mind is filling in the gaps and perceiving that there is
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a cube there, even though the vast majority of the lines that would indicate
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or that would be the image of a cube aren't even there. Where only
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seeing the cube in the negative space of those circles, and they don't even
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make up the majority of the lines of the cube. So this idea that
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our mind can sort of fill in those blank spaces seems to suggest that we
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have this stream of consciousness that allows us to interpret these bigger you know,
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these bigger picture sort of things, and it's a trick that our brain uses
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to understand the world around us. And that would make sense, I guess
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from his perspective of he's, like you said, tying it back to these
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tricks of the brain, right, yeah, Now also from our other episodes,
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like it could be just a product of evolution, reinforcement learning, right,
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but anything else like that, right, jump in the gun? Yeah,
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maybe maybe I'm jump in the gun. So essentially, this, the
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fact that we can do this pattern recognition of things, entails that that is
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what is special about consciousness is the fact that we can infer and interpret and
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do these sorts of things where those things don't necessarily exist, but we can
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sort of behave as if they do. We can act like they're there,
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all right. And then have you heard of this blind site effect? Blind
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site? Yeah, so the idea here that some alteration happens to where you
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report, So it could be like some an event or often traumatic events,
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right, Yeah, brain injury I think for the most part. Yeah,
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And as a result, you report that you cannot interact or see these sort
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of things, but you can still behave with respect to them. Yeah.
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So that was what I found, was that there was a specific story of
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a woman who had some brain damage to I can remember which part of her
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brain, maybe the acceptital lobe, and she was unable to tell the difference
13:30
between objects that she was seen, I mean basically anything. She couldn't describe
13:33
anything that she was seen. But what was interesting is she could correctly orient
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like a letter to fit inside a slot where the slot was only wide enough
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for the letter to go in vertically. But she didn't even try to put
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it in horizontally. She just put it in and presumably without feeling at first,
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to make sure she had the right orientation. And walking down the hallway,
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they specifically placed these obstacles and she would just walk around them. Although
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she couldn't necessarily say that they were there or what they were, Yeah,
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she would still be able to orient them. And it's important to say in
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here when I say that she couldn't tell the difference between these things. What
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we mean, is that she couldn't verbally label those objects. Yeah, okay,
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and so she even though she could act that they were there, she
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just she couldn't describe them verbally, which I mean, it's important to know
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and it's important to come back. We'll come back to this idea later about
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what that means and how to sort of interpret that, because it might be
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a little bit different talking about how we talk about things versus how we act
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toward things. Yeah, So to get back to our definition of awareness of
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ourselves in our environment, like she's showing that in a situation, right,
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Yeah, but she just can't talk about it. Yeah, awareness in one
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sense, but maybe not in the sense that she maybe knows or can talk
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about it very clearly. So it's like maybe there's like a gray area of
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awareness. Yeah okay. And so another one is this idea called change blindness.
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This is the fact that when something changes right in front of you,
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then you can notice that change, but if you interrupt the flow of what
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you're seeing and then when that she takes place. So to give you an
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example, if you have a picture, and in that picture you have a
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whole bunch of people, and then in part of the picture a group of
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people goes missing. So I'm gonna show you the first picture that has everyone
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there, then there's gonna be a white screen, and then going to show
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you the new picture, which is exactly the same, except three of those
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people are missing. How long would it take you to figure out if those
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people were missing? You'd probably have to scan the whole thing a whole bunch
15:20
of times, And if I just kept flashing it over and over, it
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would take a while for you to go through and figure out everything. This
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is just one of these sort of visual perception tests that they do looking for
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how whether or not you can detect where things are. And so the idea
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here is that if you interrupt the stream of consciousness, then you have a
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difficult time identifying where that change is. But if the change just takes place,
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even if you aren't even oriented to that part of the picture, you'll
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notice the change. But it's when that stream of consciousness is interrupted with that
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white screen, it's difficult for you to find where the change is. I
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don't know if we need to call it consciousness necessarily. When we see this
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other change in the environment happening right out there, it's that they sort of
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went this route, I think, in making that the evidence to sort of
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look at and evaluate consciousness. Yeah, I also have a hard time sort
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of understanding why was that the choice to go after, you know, why
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consciousness versus any other thing that might be occurring them, right, such as
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everything that's happening perception wise, right, Well, yeah, And I think
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the people who do this mostly in perception research, they're very interested in this
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by looking at what's happening in your eye, how is this related to how
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the neurons are connected to these different parts of your brain and that sort of
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And I think they really are just like, what's going on here at this
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physiological level is fine, that's interesting. And none of them go with this
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going, oh, your consciousness, you know, at least not that I've
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heard. You know, there is cognitive neuroscience, and they take a slightly
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different approach, all right. Another reason that people also argue in favor of
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this idea that we have consciousness is that going back to this idea that consciousness
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is our awareness, but we know that our state of awareness can be altered
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by a lot of different things. So, for example, one I can
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think of is sleep. Yes, when someone is sleeping versus being awake,
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they're very different, and how they're interacting with them other around them. It
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seems pretty clear that there is a different kind of consciousness, one where basically
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they're not conscious, they're unconscious, which is to say, they're not aware
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of themselves of their environment, and then one where they are Yeah, similar
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things like I've had some outdoor sports accidents in the past that have led to
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pain medications and such, and those can also seem to alter your awareness.
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Now like the same thing, the degree to which it alters it, Like
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I haven't felt necessarily unconscious right per se, but it definitely alters my awareness
17:32
of myself. But in the general argument of whether or not we have consciousness,
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this idea that yeah, like drugs, any kind of drugs, even
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you know, the illegal drugs or pharmaceuticals, if those can alter how we
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are aware of our world and ourselves, that is an argument that is used
17:45
in favor of this idea that we have consciousness. And then the third one
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is when people meditate. You know, people go into these meditative states,
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and that also changes how aware they are of themselves in their environment. Presumably
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very aware of themselves, but maybe less so of their environment, and so
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that's just you know, a deviation and these different types of awareness that we
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have, these different types of consciousness, and so this seems to suggest that
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our awareness is central to how we experience the world. And this is one
18:14
that most people can respond to, is having had a personal connection to with
18:18
respect to that description of how their awareness is sort of altered and how it
18:22
can change. Everybody has to sleep. If you live longer than one day,
18:26
maybe two days, like you're eventually going to be asleep, and so
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everyone knows what it's like to go in and out of this consciousness, at
18:32
least in the context of sleep. And then a lot of other people have
18:34
experiences using alcohol and drugs and meditation and that sort of thing where they can
18:38
also speak to what their level of consciousness and how it's different. And so
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because people can really relate to this, this one's very compelling. It's very
18:47
personal to be able to say I've had that experience, I know what it's
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like. I agree with you, Like, that must be it. We've
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got it. Yeah, right, the evidence shows that it has to be
18:56
real. Yeah, I've got my own evidence. Yea. I would to
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sleep last night, awake, right, now those are two different things.
19:00
Yeah, we had talked about that in a past episode. I think in
19:03
the first when we're talking about psychology and like what it could be and the
19:06
fact that everybody experiences behavior or whatever it is, Yeah, can cause some
19:11
problems into making you feel as if you're an expert. Yes, and to
19:15
what extent are you an expert just because you experienced something? Right? Yeah?
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Actually so, Daniel Dennett has a whole I think it was in his
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Ted talk he specifically goes over this idea of you know, everyone thinks they're
19:26
an expert in consciousness, and other psychologists have said everyone thinks they're an expert
19:30
in psychology because we're dealing with subject matter that people experience throughout their lives all
19:33
day long, that it kind of makes sense. You get this issue of
19:37
people who really feel like, you know, you're telling me things I already
19:40
know. I already know all this stuff about myself. You don't have to
19:42
tell me psychology is worthless. We already know everything. I don't want to
19:45
discredit the fact that people have these personal experiences. They do and they're important,
19:49
and studying how those things work is a little bit different, And like
19:53
understanding the process and everything. So, but you're absolutely right that people really
19:56
connect to this idea of consciousness and therefore do find themselves to be experiences.
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And I don't want to blanket statement that this the way that Daniel Dennett does.
20:04
There are probably a lot of people who are quite skeptical of this.
20:07
Well we know that there are, we're going to talk about them. Yeah,
20:08
and there are a lot of people who don't necessarily consider them experts.
20:11
And there's probably a lot of people, the majority of them who's just never
20:15
even considered it and don't care. Yeah, if that's you, if that
20:18
describes you, and you're listening in right now, thanks for listening. Yeah,
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I hope you still enjoyed the episode anyway. All Right, So we
20:25
have this idea of intrograde amnesia, so ideas that you can't form new memories
20:30
right right, but you're still learning things. Well, that's what's interesting about
20:34
it. A lot of people didn't think that you could still learn things,
20:37
and it kind of makes sense. So with there's antarograde and retrograde amnesia,
20:41
which we didn't talk about in our memory episode, but that refers to With
20:45
retrograde, is you lose your past memories and and terograde refers to the inability
20:49
to form new memories. And that's from the time of the event, right,
20:52
whatever happened right, exactly like the movie momento. So it's not like
20:56
a continually moving thing, right, Like there's some sort of event that happens,
21:00
Right, that's where they retro or a taro come from. Yeah.
21:04
So to give an example, they had one gentleman and I believe the fifties,
21:07
who they surgically removed part of his hippocampus or maybe the entire thing.
21:11
It was a significant chunk of his hipocampus, which is where memory processing typically
21:15
takes place in the brain. And there after that surgery, he could only
21:22
like describe things in about a two to three minute window. And then after
21:26
that period of time, it was like he was just starting over, and
21:29
it was just every two to three minutes, where am I What's going on?
21:30
It feels like I've died and just sort of woken up because it's been
21:34
an indefinite period of time since the last time I remember something, which was
21:37
prior to a surgery, and up until that point, you know, every
21:41
day is immediately following his surgery, even years and years and years later,
21:45
and so it's like as things change, it becomes more and more of a
21:48
surprise to him. But what was really interesting is that the researchers who were
21:52
able to work with this individual, they found that they could teach him things
21:56
and he would he would learn them, which spoke to the fact that although
22:02
the hippocampus is central to dealing with memory processing, memory does take place in
22:04
a lot of ways in the brain, and that it's not necessarily stored or
22:08
processed in only one way and in only one place. It involves a lot
22:12
of different elements of the brain and how it works, as we said in
22:15
a memory episode, I believe, and what was really interesting about his case
22:19
was that they could teach him something and he wouldn't necessarily be able to say
22:23
that he learned it, or who taught it to him, or when he
22:26
learned it, but he would know it. And they were teaching him facts
22:30
about things, people that had become famous or had died after his surgery,
22:34
about major events that had taken place. He'd be able to remember them.
22:37
He would even be able to supplant specific details about them, but he wouldn't
22:41
be able to tell you the person he was working with at the time,
22:42
and he wouldn't be able to tell you what day it was, and even
22:45
other skills that were not necessarily verbal where they would teach him. Oh,
22:49
and this is actually really cool. They did this with Alzheimer's patients as well.
22:52
Is they would teach them these skills and they would say, hey,
22:55
do you know how to do this? And they'd say, no, I've
22:56
never learned how to do that, and then they'd be able to perform whatever
22:59
it was afterward. Yeah, super interesting. Yeah, it's crazy. So
23:03
you know when you're like walking and you stub your toe and it's just the
23:06
most infuriating thing and it just hurts so bad in the moment that is ads,
23:21
Okay, we're back. So this idea here suggests that there's this unconscious
23:25
process, right that's like guiding this new learning is occurring, and like this
23:29
performance, I guess it suggests that there's an unconscious process that guides learning and
23:33
subsequent performance that's part of the reciprocal sort of conscious process. And so even
23:38
though people who will not be necessarily aware, they can still do things that
23:42
they're not aware of. And if there is a reciprocal side of unconscious,
23:47
that means that there also must be a side of conscious the sort of correspond
23:49
to that. I think that's sort of how that argument goes. All Right,
23:52
Okay, so you said he had two more. Yeah, so,
23:53
and actually I kind of just sort of tease the other one, which was
23:56
that unconsciousness is a reciprocal process us to consciousness. So I guess in this
24:02
one, the argument sort of goes that if we have consciousness and we have
24:06
unconsciousness, like we know that there's unconsciousness, then that really seems to suggest
24:08
there has to be something that is the opposite of that. Like we can
24:11
look at someone who's sleeping, someone who's been knocked out, or someone who
24:15
otherwise is how their consciousness altered, and we can point to that and say
24:18
that, like, look, there's unconsciousness. What is not That thing has
24:22
to be something else, and what that thing is is consciousness. And some
24:26
examples that I've seen quite a bit are, you know, we're not aware
24:29
of what it feels like, or the process of our stomach's digesting food and
24:33
our intestines processing food and all of that. If just sitting here, if
24:37
I were to say, what do your pants feel like on your skin?
24:40
You really didn't notice until I said something, and then you might be paying
24:42
attention to it. But where a clothing is touching us, there's air flowing
24:45
around us, and there's all of these experiences that we're having and we don't
24:49
really identify any of them unless it sort of is brought to your attention.
24:53
And so even though those processes are there and they're engaged, they're not necessarily
24:57
conscious. And idea and so again this idea that there's conscious unconscious, and
25:04
there are also times when people will react to things before they've been realized quote
25:08
unquote realized that they have to react to something, and that this sort of
25:14
indicates, okay, so something was going on unconsciously, so we were able
25:18
to react to things consciously. You know how we're able to do that if
25:22
we weren't having some unconscious process going on. And another one is that there
25:25
are times that people they'll sort of be able to guess at something and they
25:26
really it's not even really an educated guess. They'll just sort of make a
25:30
guess and they'll arrive at the correct conclusion and really not have any idea how
25:33
they could have possibly guessed that. And it's like they might have had some
25:37
of the information that they needed, but not necessarily have the answer right on
25:41
hands, and so they just sort of venture a guess and they get it
25:42
correct. Then it's sort of they're they're thinking, oh, my consciousness,
25:45
that my unconscious was what guided me on. This could have been anything else
25:48
that also happened around that time period, and virtually anything. Yeah, and
25:52
the last one, and this is kind of related to what I was saying
25:55
already, is just that our bodies experienced an enormous amount of stimulation and things
26:00
that happen to it throughout the day for which we seemingly have no awareness,
26:03
Like I don't think. We wake up and go to the day, and
26:07
every time one of our hair follicles grows a little longer, we think about
26:10
it. And every time we blink, we are able to go, oh,
26:11
I just blinked, you know. Yeah, this stuff happens kind of
26:15
automatically. And so this is sort of this level of unconscious of things that
26:18
we're not necessarily aware of, but of things that are always sort of going
26:21
on and being processed, and we can objectively look at them and say,
26:22
again, if there's an unconscious, then what is the things that we are
26:26
aware of that we are deliberately doing. And so most people tend to agree
26:30
on this idea of consciousness having intentionality to it. Yea, So it's the
26:33
things that we do because they have a purpose and we're sort of oriented to
26:37
some goal or something like that seems just at a lot of unnecessary things.
26:41
It kind of almost feels like a net of just sort of like, what
26:44
are all the things that we can catch in here that we're going to fit
26:45
with this definition we're trying to find evidence for. Yeah, but just I
26:49
want to end on that last one real quick. Is this this idea that
26:52
we constantly have this conscious and unconscious going on is called the two track mind.
26:57
Okay, And so one things, although most people don't necessarily agree with
27:02
Freud anymore, and I know there are some people who really really do agree
27:07
with a lot of Freud. Most people out there, most psychologists aren't really
27:11
practicing psychoanalysis anymore, the argument that this idea of this dual track mind,
27:15
some people are saying, well, maybe Freud didn't get a lot of things
27:18
right, but he definitely got this fact that so much of what we experience
27:22
as unconscious, we got that correct, or he got that correct. And
27:26
so this is kind of similar to what I was saying earlier about this idea
27:30
that sometimes well, learn some skill or some piece of information, and then
27:33
another time we'll learn a different skill or another piece of information, and then
27:37
at some critical moment we're able to sort of intuitively combine those two things.
27:41
And it could be multiple, doesn't have to be too it could be a
27:44
dozen things. Yeah, we're able to combine them to react to something without
27:48
having really explicitly learned how to combine them or knowing that we combine them at
27:52
all. You might be able to combine these things, these skills that you
27:55
have in this knowledge that you have to solve a problem in the moment,
27:57
but not even know how you did it. And that sort of ledges the
28:00
one that said before, which yeah, that's still like we're always in this
28:03
novel new environment necessarily like going throughout this point in time, which new things
28:08
are combining always. Yeah, so that still seems to be kind of adding
28:14
more than we need to just because that's always happening already. Why do we
28:18
need to add in that it's our conscious this that allows us to do that.
28:22
Well, you're basically chomping in the bit. So let's go ahead and
28:25
just jump into the case against consciousness. Yeah, I don't know if from
28:27
four against it right now? Okay, figuring it out, I think I
28:30
knew where I sit. But all right, well, well we'll get through
28:33
this last section and then we can we can sort of declare where we are,
28:37
and then we'll pull our listeners to jump in and say what they think
28:41
about this whole argument. So again, and before we go into any of
28:44
this, consciousness and conscience are different things. I had, you know,
28:48
some papers from students who when I wrote on this, I didn't think to
28:51
make that distinction. Didn't realize that was going to be a confusion, even
28:53
though they sound almost identical. Just didn't occur to me. And a lot
28:56
of people are saying, of course we have morality. Everyone's got, you
28:59
know, an that's how we make good decisions in life. Yeah, yeah,
29:02
Mike, that is totally not what I meant. But that's okay,
29:04
It didn't make that clear. Anyway, Let's go ahead and go into these
29:07
the case against consciousness. One of the widest criticisms against this idea of consciousness
29:14
is that it is one hundred percent subjective. Yes, so we've talked about
29:18
a lot of this, like everyone thinks, feels, perceives from this different
29:22
perspective with a different learning history, right, Yeah, and so at what
29:26
point can we really draw the lines on like I guess, like being able
29:30
to objectively measure these sort of things and understand these things. Yeah, the
29:33
experience that everyone has is unique to each person, and so we can't even
29:37
know what it feels like or looks like to another person. Even when we're
29:41
experiencing the same event, That doesn't mean that the person next to you is
29:44
experiencing that event in the same way that you are. And even if we
29:47
could somehow peek into that biology, peel back the layers and get out our
29:51
best machinery, and even like, even if we could download their thoughts,
29:55
our interpretation of that experience would still be colored by our own history and our
29:59
own understand ending, and our interpretation of that experience that'll be different from the
30:02
one that they would get out of that. Yeah, So it's not just
30:04
the experience itself, it is also like what kind of what you've learned up
30:08
to that point? You know, why it's so hard to get to know
30:11
another person any sort of personal or intimate level. It's why it's so hard
30:15
to not get into arguments on forums or social media platforms, like there's just
30:21
so much uniqueness, right, and the fact that you bring that in even
30:26
when it does appear to be objective, it's still there. We see the
30:29
world through our lens and it's very difficult to put on another person's glasses.
30:33
A matter of fact, it is virtually impossible to be able to totally experience
30:37
the world from someone else's perspective. I mean, you can get some good
30:40
ideas about it, and there are things that you can do to change your
30:42
experience so that it'll be similar to someone else's, but it'll always be a
30:45
little bit different, yeah, if not a lot different. What about this
30:48
idea that like, well, if we look at and measure it like the
30:51
average, will still tell us something like we can still glean some sort of
30:53
information from there. Yeah, And even when you do that, and going
30:57
back to this idea of perception test and how long it takes people when you
31:00
interrupt their flow of consciousness to identify changes in pictures. That doesn't necessarily tell
31:04
you anything about consciousness. That will tell you about how well they do it
31:08
identifying change when it's interrupted by things, So they might tell you something about
31:12
how their vision is processed. Those are indirect ways of trying to get at
31:17
this question, and they're very average. So again you get sort of what
31:19
do people tend to do? Okay, that's great, Now, how do
31:22
I know what someone what they're experiencing in terms of their consciousness? Is that
31:26
their consciousness? What role does their consciousness have? These are questions that that
31:30
kind of test isn't going to answer. It sort of tells you how will
31:33
people do on average on these simple tests. But these aren't consciousness tests.
31:37
They're just perception and performance tests. And so the level of subjectivity in this
31:41
understanding might suggest that consciousness isn't a thing at all. You know, we
31:45
all have this personal subjective experience and that is not a unique event. It's
31:51
just a part of being alive. It's the nature of being alive and being
31:55
a person in this case, but I think even being an animal, you
31:57
could argue that they have consciousness, But I don't know if you need to
32:00
we can. Again, we're talking about is this a thing that even needs
32:02
to exist? Okay? Cool, that's the first one. Yeah, second
32:07
one, So when I asked you before we even started, what might be
32:10
an argument against for or against consciousness, and we were talking about against.
32:15
One of the very first things you said was the definition. Yes, so
32:20
there is no consistent definition anywhere that's agreed upon. Yeah, not even close.
32:24
No, Like it's kind of all over the place. Yeah, you
32:28
know. Sometimes consciousness refers only to being awake versus being asleep. Sometimes that's
32:31
included with other things. Sometimes it's agency versus being inanimate, So agency meaning
32:37
that it has its own will, its own goals and drive to do something,
32:40
and nanimate being just something that has no life, like a rocker cup.
32:45
Sometimes, Like we've highlighted this a lot, and I've kind of responded
32:47
this, like is it perception based or is it some sort of interpretational thing?
32:52
Right, Yeah, exactly. And so there's all these different definitions.
32:57
Even in the top players in the philosophy of coosness, they disagree on what
33:00
the characteristics are and what the definition should be, and they've been arguing about
33:05
it for decades now. And part of this we sort of mentioned at the
33:07
beginning is this idea of having awareness and the definition brings a whole host of
33:12
problems. Right. Dennett specifically rejects the awareness as a part of that definition,
33:16
although a lot of people don't. We'll get back to him. But
33:19
what does it mean to be aware? Well, that's the tricky part,
33:22
if hard to say, Like are you aware what color your computer is?
33:25
Would you tell me, yeah, it's black? All right? So then
33:29
do I know that you're aware of it? Well, I mean yes,
33:32
we would assume that, I guess. So, I mean you labeled it
33:35
right? Yeah? Are you aware of the weather outside right now? Ish?
33:38
Like I can tell you exactly, but yeah, okay, So all
33:42
of these things that you're reporting to me, these are just sort of your
33:44
statements. That's just your language about how you label things. And so when
33:49
we think about are you aware of the mark that's on your forehead right now?
33:52
You don't have one. I'm just saying that, like if someone had
33:54
something on their face, are you aware there's something in your teeth? What
33:58
you're really asking them is do you know that it's there? Which is to
34:00
say, could you tell me that it was there? If I hadn't said
34:04
anything, If you looked in a mirror, would you be surprised? What
34:06
about that old article awareness in the pigeon, Oh, self awareness in the
34:09
pigeon? Self awareness? So yeah, and that was the one where if
34:13
they put a dot on a pigeon. Yeahs made me think of it.
34:16
Yeah, First they taught the pigeon if it pecked the dot, then they
34:19
would get food. And then they moved the dot around so wherever the dot
34:22
was or they pecked, it would get food. And then they put it
34:23
on the pigeon. Yes, and it wasn't pecking the dot. But then
34:27
they put up a mirror and the pigeon pecked the dot in the mirror.
34:30
And the reason that they started doing this is because there are these like self
34:34
perception tests that they did with kids in a mirror and if they put like
34:37
a little a little dot on the kid's forehead, then if would the kid
34:40
look in the mirror, see the dot and touch it. And then psychologists
34:44
are looking at this going, look, they have a concept of self,
34:47
And Skinner's like, okay, well pigeons have a concept of self then,
34:51
And so he just showed that if he taught them to peck at a dot
34:54
and then put a dot on them and showed them a mirror, they would
34:57
peck at the dot on their chest where they would even have a blinder where
35:00
they couldn't see it if they just look down, you know, they'd have
35:01
to be able to look in the mirror and see it so that they could
35:04
peck at it and be able to get food. So we're saying, yeah,
35:07
sorry for this side, thanks for that. So when we say that
35:09
we have to like verbally be able to label it, are we saying then
35:13
that animals don't have a consciousness or like where does that kind of fall?
35:17
Like? You know, that is kind of implied by this, And I
35:21
think it's important to say, okay when you said, when we're talking about
35:23
the fact that you have to be able to label it verbally, and that's
35:27
what we sort of mean by aware. I like that only because that is
35:30
how most people talk about awareness. Are you aware of the way your pants
35:35
feel on your clothes? Like, oh I wasn't but now I am?
35:37
Or you know, are you aware of X, Y or Z these other
35:39
things where you don't necessarily know about them? And it's really when people talk
35:44
about are you where are these things? It really seem to be referring to
35:46
whether or not someone can label it, whether whether they can describe it verbally,
35:51
Although they oftentimes mean just do you know about this? But then of
35:54
course we have to get into okay, what does no mean you know?
35:59
Say are you where? Well? By I wear, I mean do you
36:00
know? And so this goes again to how do I know? If you
36:05
know well, you can label it. The other way is that you can
36:07
act towards it as efficiently and effectively as possible. So it's like, you
36:12
know, given some level of contact with whatever that thing is, which I
36:15
guess could also say do you remember? And maybe this is getting more into
36:19
like memory, which would imply that there's some history with a particular cue that
36:22
is signaling this going back to that episode on memory. But this idea of
36:28
if you know it, then you can act toward it in a particular way.
36:30
But okay, so if I put something in front of you and you're
36:34
able to do it right away, then if I say that you know it,
36:37
does that somehow change the fact that you did it? Does that make
36:39
it better? In the case of consciousness, if I lay consciousness on top
36:43
of that, does that explain it better that you're able to do it?
36:45
Or if I say that you know it, does that explain it better that
36:47
you were able to do it? Or if I just look at Okay,
36:51
here are the steps it took for you to get to this part where you're
36:52
able to do this puzzle or this task that I set in front of you,
36:55
whatever it is. If I have those steps, then I don't like
36:59
I don't. I don't know why adding no or consciousness on top of that
37:01
tells me anything new about what you just did. The question I have about
37:06
this is like, Okay, we're going in this definition. This definition tends
37:08
to use the word aware, although some people don't. But let's say that
37:12
we're using the one that does say your awareness of your environment. Why is
37:15
awareness special? And as you said, doesn't mean animals have no awareness because
37:20
they can't label their environment. But we know that they know some things.
37:22
So if we just go with knowing, is knowing good enough? But if
37:24
then is there important to say that they know it? And is that evidence
37:28
for consciousness? Like this just raises a whole host of questions for which I
37:31
don't think that there's really an answer because they're all sort of conceptual, right,
37:36
And this idea of if we can learn something going back to these people
37:39
who have some sort of brain damage, they have difficulty forming new memories or
37:44
something else that has affected their memory or whatever. If they learn it but
37:46
they can't label it. That seems to almost speak more to some kind of
37:51
deficit in their language processing, right, or how they understand or create their
37:54
language about things, or maybe there's some other trouble with the network of connections
37:59
that are to sort of identify things, both in terms of the cues and
38:02
the neurology and everything else and the history the learning history. Why is consciousness
38:07
and explanation? Yeah, yeah, it adds this, like why do we
38:09
need to add this other thing in there? Yeah? And if the only
38:13
evidence for consciousness is the fact that it happens at all, well, it
38:15
sounds like we're back into circular reasoning again for how many times? Yeah?
38:21
Right? And it seems to be like not to discredit, but like a
38:23
less admirable sort of question than like is it just you know, we're getting
38:28
back into like our ability to name things as opposed to this illusionary kind of
38:31
like subconscious, conscious, like you know all these other terms, right completely.
38:37
Yeah, so that was just on the awareness part of it. Another
38:39
problem with those definition is this term called reification. Have you heard that term?
38:45
Yes? So what does that mean? So it's simply just treating this
38:49
thing as if it's real when it's not. Yeah, the idea that's something
38:52
that's abstract, and then we talk about it as if it's real. And
38:55
so I kind of had an analogy for that. So just starting with first,
38:59
we're just gonna observe that people are doing things and we're not going to
39:00
have a name for it. We observe that we have similar experiences to these
39:05
things, and then we describe that observation of people doing things and then sometimes
39:09
naming those things. We call that consciousness. Okay, so the fact that
39:14
we can observe that we're doing things and we can name things, we're gonna
39:16
call that consciousness. And so now we're off to hunt for consciousness as its
39:20
own event. Even though we just came up with a name for that observation
39:23
that we had that people are doing things. We're now off to go hunt
39:27
for that thing that we just came up with a name for as it's it's
39:30
on its own. It's its own thing now and we need to go find
39:31
it. And to this end, a guy named Schlinger in two thousand and
39:36
eight wrote an article called Consciousness is nothing but a word, And so I'm
39:39
gonna quote him directly. He says, quote, consciousness is not a thing,
39:44
a place, or a cognitive process whatever that is. It's only a
39:47
word that we use in a variety of ways. And then it goes on
39:50
to list some of what those ways are and some other characteristics of consciousness.
39:53
Basically, what Schlinger is arguing is that this idea of consciousness, that's just
39:58
that description. It's just a word that we use to label these like a
40:01
whole host of characteristics of things, and it doesn't actually refer to anything that's
40:06
sort of really out there. I like it cool, Okay. I'm a
40:10
little biased to his position and psychology and how he views it, though,
40:15
I will say that that's fair. Yeah, So until the day that we
40:17
can actually just implant ads into your subconscious so they just kind of play behind
40:22
the back of your eyelids, We're just going to play these out loud into
40:25
your auditory canal. So here's another ad and we're back. Okay. Now,
40:37
another very common argument against this idea of consciousness is that a lot of
40:44
times, and with understandable reason, it gets sort of reduced to the fact
40:47
that it's just these neurological processes, okay, which is to say, that
40:52
it's not subjective experience, it's not a learned history, it's not part of
40:55
your environment. It's just just your biology that's playing our owns are doing.
40:59
That's it. So I'm going to quote someone specifically on this. This was
41:02
actually Francis Crick in nineteen ninety four, the late Francis Crick. So quote
41:07
you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your
41:10
sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior
41:15
of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Okay, and
41:20
again, so he's just saying that this idea of everything about you, it's
41:23
just your biology. That's it. That's all there is to you. And
41:28
I mean you can infer from this that all there is to you is your
41:30
brain and what your brain is doing. If that's the case, do we
41:32
need anything else, no, to study or learn from or work with or
41:37
you know, like, presumably if you do enough research on the biology of
41:40
the organism, you completely and totally understand all behavior all the time. So
41:45
we'd understand why architects build buildings and design things certain ways. Yep, understand
41:51
why we do everything that we do everything, every single thing that you do.
41:54
Could you could look at a brain and you could know exactly every action
41:59
that person would take for the rest of their lives. It surprised me that
42:02
this is like a thing that people are kind of like into in the first
42:05
place. It is I agree, why like, I'm going to discredit everything
42:08
else in the world as my argument as to why this thing is a thing?
42:12
Yeah, and I think to be fair, So hold on, I
42:15
guess I should take a step back and say, I don't actually know if
42:16
that's the position that these people would take on this necessarily, But that is
42:21
sort of a if you extend this argument out to the point of, like
42:24
where does this break down, it doesn't go very far before you reach the
42:28
level of absurdity, right, Yeah, yeah, that it's just sort of
42:30
nobody's going to take that position that presumably, if we study a brain,
42:35
we will know everything about a person. Maybe they just mean we'll study a
42:37
brain and we'll understand everything about them right now, which is fine. I
42:40
guess that is what it is. Yeah, but there's still a lot more
42:43
of understand asking how did it get this way? It could be a spin
42:45
off of the podcast it is what it is. It is what it is,
42:50
brought to you by the way we do what we do. Crew that
42:52
struck me in just the right way, struck some listeners as well, Yeah,
42:58
what's the next quote? We need to look the next one. This
43:00
comes from a guy named Chalmers. He's a big researcher in this field.
43:02
This quote was from two thousand, I believe, and so he says,
43:07
quote, the search for neural corelates of consciousness, or what he calls nccs
43:10
is arguably the cornerstone and the recent resurgence of the science of consciousness. And
43:15
so he's sort of just stating in this case what's going on currently in sort
43:20
of common psychological neurological research. But he is accurate in saying that this idea
43:24
of neural corelates is very popular at the time that this occurred. But that
43:29
again speaks to this idea that what we're really looking for we can't seem to
43:32
define consciousness in a way that anybody can agree on. We can't seem to
43:36
figure out what it is. So we're just going to try and find out
43:38
where it is. And the only thing, the only evidence we're going to
43:40
have for it lies in the what's going on in the brain. So to
43:45
quote Slinger in response to this, he says, before we search for the
43:49
neural correlates of consciousness, we need to know what consciousness is. Yeah,
43:52
which seems pretty important. You know, if we're going to go hunting around
43:54
in the brain looking for it, we have to know what it is we're
43:57
looking for. It's like, imagine, I tell you, here's a million
44:00
dollars, Go find me a snark. He might say, but I don't
44:05
know where snark is. Yeah, he might say, great, that's awesome.
44:07
What is a snark? YEA, Yeah, I'm gonna say no one
44:09
knows, but here's a million dollars in it for you if you can find
44:13
one, right, And it's sort of you know, everyone spending tons and
44:15
tons of money going out looking for this consciousness and they have no idea what
44:19
it is they're even looking for, hoping. I guess that if they throw
44:22
enough things against the wall, something's going to stick. There's been a lot
44:24
of that shown in various different areas too, including educational research. Yeah.
44:29
Absolutely, And this goes back to something we've brought up many times on this
44:32
podcast before, which is that the brain is part of our behavior. But
44:36
behavior is not found there. Right. The brain is very critically important and
44:39
everything that we do, but you weren't going to find the explanations of behavior
44:43
just by looking at what the brain is currently doing. That's just part of
44:45
it. Yep. Yeah, it's solely not found there. And sort of
44:49
just a logical argument here. If consciousness is literally just these brain processes,
44:53
then why not just refer to consciousness as those brain processes. We already have
44:59
a term for that, you know, we already have names and understandings of
45:01
what those processes are and how they work. We don't need two different names
45:05
that mean virtually exactly the same thing. But where one name sort of implies
45:08
this metaphysical agency thing and the other one doesn't, but the other one doesn't
45:13
mean the metaphysical agency. It only refers to those brain processes. Like,
45:16
if it's just brain processes, just call them that. That's what they are.
45:19
They are no logical events that take place, and that is that's what's
45:22
happening. Yeah, I think it could be a hard thing because you feel
45:24
like you got to kind of make your own thing right and kind of have
45:28
your own five steps or do you mean, like make a name for yourself.
45:31
Yeah, okay, you know, I mean, I guess, yeah,
45:36
exactly, all right, another one another argument against this. So I
45:39
kind of like this one, So Noel Smith, right comes from this even
45:44
in the backgrounds that you and I have like an area that not even a
45:49
lot of behroo folks like are super in tune with this sort of area,
45:52
right, Yeah, this is this is not that well known. So it's
45:54
this idea that there's a difference between events and constructs. Right, So is
46:00
consciousness an event or a construct? We need to kind of drop that right,
46:05
all right. So a construct, he explained, is this representation of
46:08
a thing, either in words, math, symbols, etc. And consciousness
46:13
is certainly a construct because it has no clear event that is composed of.
46:16
Yeah. I think that he sort of says that well in terms of like
46:20
if this is what a construct is just a representation. This is why consciousness
46:23
is a construct because it also is just a representation. It doesn't have a
46:29
thing that we know what it is. Yeah, Now an event would actually
46:30
be a thing, right, Yeah, So describe an event, Well,
46:34
it doesn't even have to be tangible. An event is just anything that takes
46:37
place or happens or is right something it could be tangible, but it doesn't
46:39
have to be. And to that point, so just to make the argument
46:43
of we're not saying that our subjective experience isn't real, but what we're making
46:47
the case is that the experience of consciousness is a construct because things like imagining
46:53
and feeling, those are events, because those are things that people do,
46:57
people think, people feel, people guess. There's all these things that we
47:00
can do that we don't even necessarily see. But there are things that we
47:04
do that are definite actions, and those would be called events. But consciousness,
47:07
it doesn't have an event. I can't look at you and say,
47:09
are you conscious seen right now? You know, we can't identify what they
47:14
are. We don't even know when it's happening in ourselves. And so that's
47:16
why he argues that it is not an event. It has to be a
47:19
construct. And so if we sort of deconstruct this idea of is this an
47:23
event that's out in the world or is this just an idea and sort of
47:27
an abstract idea, that then that will help us, I think understand what
47:30
we're talking about when we refer to this cool. So you're saying consciousness has
47:34
no correlation with anything either observable within ourselves or with others you're watching them.
47:39
Basically, Yeah, I can get behind that. Yeah, And you know,
47:43
it's therefore an idea that's not improved by reducing it to biology or assigning
47:47
a whole bunch of characteristics to it, because it doesn't even really refer to
47:51
anything. It doesn't refer to any real process. It seems to be made
47:54
up of processes that are real. But those processes we already have names for,
47:59
we already understand and what they are, so consciousness sort of this sort
48:01
of global, bigger picture name for it. I also wanted to come back
48:05
to the one where we were talking about intuition, this insight where we sort
48:08
of come up with on the spot the correct answer or a solution to something,
48:13
or we will react without even knowing. I think that this is important
48:17
too. As you said before, we actually do this a lot throughout the
48:21
day, throughout our everyday lives. And these aren't like these big aha moments
48:24
every single time. It's just that things change and we change, and it
48:29
makes intuitive, evolutionary logical all the sense in the world. It makes all
48:34
the sense that we can sort of generalize and extend and apply our skills immediately
48:37
to situations where they're needed without having to sit and ponder and like try and
48:43
wrap our brains around, our minds around the nature of the knowledge beforehand.
48:46
This type of event isn't really special. We actually do it a lot,
48:50
and sometimes the magnitude of it is larger or the implications of it are larger,
48:54
but that's not improved at all by this idea of consciousness wrapped around it.
48:59
All day we go around having to behave effectively with things that might shift
49:02
a little bit. Thinking about driving in traffic, any two days are as
49:06
driving in traffic exactly the same as it was the day before. Never never,
49:09
never, absolutely never. I mean, you can maybe arrange it that
49:13
way if you wanted to coordinate with a bunch of people, But even then
49:15
you have to account for differences and like the time, yeah, the weather,
49:19
what time you start, how dark it is, the temperature, all
49:21
of those things are going to be a little bit different, and so we
49:23
are able to sort of adapt to these situations. And sometimes it takes a
49:29
little bit larger adaptation. Sometimes the circumstances are a little bit more dire,
49:32
but all of it is just stuff that we do and we kind of just
49:36
do all the time. And so to say that we do that and now
49:38
that's consciousness, well, haven't explained it any better. I've just later a
49:42
knew thing on top of it, yea, or not a thing, I
49:45
guess, a construct on top of it. All right, cool, last
49:49
one, Yeah, let's hear it all right. So the last argument against
49:52
this idea of consciousness is is this of any practical importance? Even if we
49:58
give drugs that alter the state of consciousness, do we care that it was
50:00
the consciousness that was altered or are we more concerned with the effects that those
50:05
drugs had on that person? Like, look, they are currently out of
50:07
it, and like if I say that those conscious are unconscious, well that
50:10
doesn't that doesn't change anything about my understanding of the fact that they're currently not
50:15
responding to things. You know, if we add going back to neurology,
50:19
if we're looking at what the neurons are doing, we're learning something new about
50:22
how the brain works and how the brain processes information. To layer the consciousness
50:27
on top of it, again, that tells us nothing more about what we're
50:30
observing. It's just giving this this layer of confusing terms that have no correlate
50:35
to any real event and just saying, oh, that's consciousness, and you
50:37
know, going back to some of those arguments for it that we're looking at
50:40
now. It had a hard time when I was researching this, looking at
50:45
the argument and being like, well, why does that mean that's conscious?
50:47
Like how are you drawing the parallels here between these two ideas, And it
50:52
just seems to me that it it gives no added benefit to this idea at
50:57
all, this similar idea for the drugs. If someone is asleep, it's
51:00
not the quality of consciousness we're concerned with per se. We're interested in if
51:05
and how they'll respond to us or some other external stimulation or you know,
51:08
notification or event that takes place. You know, is this person going to
51:13
react if someone kicks in the door and walks in here, or if someone
51:15
slowly walks past them? You know, those are the things that we're concerned
51:19
with, and calling that conscious or unconscious doesn't tell us anything more about that
51:22
situation, especially because we'll only know if they react in that particular way.
51:27
We won't actually, we won't predict anything. So if we take consciousness from
51:30
all the discussions, so I was talking about if we add it on top
51:32
of them and all that thing, if we take it away, do we
51:35
lose something No, outside of like we don't have this special thing that we
51:39
can kind of talk about now. Yeah, we don't have that thing that
51:42
we feel is so special, his idea of consciousness. It's like we try
51:45
and remove this sort of metaphysical idea of consciousness out of these experiences. That
51:51
doesn't make those experiences any less valid or any less interesting to try and study.
51:54
In fact, it makes it a little bit clearer, I think,
51:57
and what we could try and learn about them. Yeah, we're no longer
52:00
hunting for something that doesn't exist. We're just looking at what's actually taking place.
52:05
And I think that's great. Yeah, And just be clearly, we've
52:07
been hunting for this for at least twenty five hundred years, Yeah, very
52:10
long time, and we've yet to really find anything, yeah, at all.
52:15
And I think that, honestly, the most damning argument about consciousness is
52:19
not that it's wrong or even harmful. It's that it's just completely unnecessary.
52:23
We gain nothing by having it as a concept, we lose nothing by taking
52:27
it away. It seems simply to exist for the sole purpose of sort of
52:30
confusing the events that are actually taking place by providing no explanatory value to them
52:36
whatsoever. That is pretty damning, I'll give you that. So this was
52:42
kind of interesting to me. I've seen this happen in a few different interviews,
52:45
and so I'm paraphrasing a little bit. But when asked what the greatest
52:49
questions science could solve might be, the very well known Richard Dawkins proclaimed at
52:54
that point that understanding consciousness, to him, would be the greatest thing he'd
53:00
like to see achieved by science in his lifetime. And I remember hearing that
53:04
and just thinking, what why, It's so unnecessary and it seems to not
53:08
even really exist. You know. At the time, I had done a
53:12
little bit of reading, not as much as I've done up until this point.
53:15
Yeah, and I was thinking, like, this seems like one of
53:17
the least interesting things we could possibly learn a whole lot about, because I
53:21
think what we're going to have to conclude is that there is no such thing
53:24
as consciousness. We have nothing to learn about it. And I mean,
53:28
that's my opinion. I could be totally wrong, and if I am,
53:30
then Dawkins is right, and that's great, and regardless of how you feel
53:32
about him politically or religiously or otherwise, you have to admit he's a pretty
53:36
smart guy. So I was just surprised that, like that was the thing
53:38
he was so intrigued by, and even something that might have these really profound
53:42
implications. The fact that it's so on the fence whether or not it's even
53:45
real to me is sort of like that that seems like that shouldn't have been
53:49
a target at all if it had that much question about it even existing in
53:52
the first place. Yeah, I can see where he's coming from, though,
53:53
I guess like in the sense that it's supposedly alters everything, Right,
53:59
that's in the degree to which you're aware of something, So we could be
54:02
missing out on everything else that's being learned if you don't first understand this.
54:07
That's a great Devil's advocate position to take. Yeah, I'm not sure.
54:10
Being a person I want to like see some evidence of something and making progress
54:15
and not really seeing that anywhere. Like I'm not going to stand behind that,
54:17
but I get the perspective. I guess, Yeah, that's fair.
54:21
Okay, you shut me down. Well, no, I just like I
54:24
understand the perspective, but it's not. Okay, this is a good segue,
54:29
like where do we fall? You and I. I love it,
54:30
So I would say that kind of go with that, like I get the
54:32
perspective. I don't think we gain anything. I'm going to stick with that.
54:37
Yeah, that's where I fall, Like, I don't think we get
54:38
anything from labeling anything and talking about this stuff like we haven't found any evidence
54:44
yet. Yeah, I'm all right with the risk of maybe it's out there
54:47
and not having found it yet. I mean, there's a lot other people
54:51
who are gonna keep studying this anyways. It's not like me having that point
54:53
ends all the research and whatnot. Very very true. Probably nobody's doing that
54:58
research is listening to us anyway. Absolutely nobody altered the research lines because that
55:00
statement. Yeah, at least at this point in my career, I would
55:04
say that it's like useful for me too, in the sense of, like,
55:08
so's this concept like mid level terms, right, like it kind of
55:12
I don't know if it really it doesn't really fall in this mid level term
55:15
of like between scientific and like these lay terms that we use all the time
55:19
in our language supposed to be sort of communicative. Yeah, like it kind
55:22
of like I do use in that sense, if someone talks about conscious and
55:25
unconscious and subconscious and conscience, it definitely gives me an idea of where they're
55:31
kind of to start to talk about. Maybe ish kind of that's very fair,
55:36
Like I guess we're getting down awareness. But then I kind of question,
55:38
like, why don't we just talk about awareness? Like maybe you know,
55:40
but I guess like that's the only practical use for me, Like I
55:45
kind of get an idea that they're not talking about a lot of other things,
55:46
but then I still don't know what they're talking about, right per se,
55:50
So it just seems like, yeah, we still don't gain a lot
55:54
or anything. Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you said when teaching
56:00
sort of thing and talking about Okay, so we're not aware of our stomach
56:02
that's digesting food, and I'm like, okay, so, yeah, I
56:07
don't understand why that's so amazing to you. Our bodies do a lot of
56:12
processes that help us stay alive. And the fact that I'm not spending one
56:15
hundred percent of my time going through and labeling each and one of them because
56:17
I know I can tell you exactly what it feels like the whole time,
56:21
like, that's that's pretty cool that we don't have to do that. I
56:23
can spend our time doing things like podcasting, right, Yeah, so the
56:28
I can orient my attention. If I had to devote such a proportion of
56:31
my attention to just keeping my body doing all of these processes constantly, yeah,
56:37
that would be really difficult. Like I would have a hard time getting
56:39
anything else done. You know, I'd have to have I would have to
56:42
increase my ability to orient to multiple things simultaneously by an enormous degree. And
56:46
we haven't talked about this at all, but people are terrible at multitasking,
56:50
no matter how good they think they are. Most people, almost everyone is
56:53
terrible at multitasking, really multitasking. People can kind of coordinate some things where
56:59
they're doing a few things at once, but mostly people suck at it.
57:00
Yeah. But anyway, so you know, if I had to devote my
57:04
time and attention to focused on keeping my body running and also trying to find
57:08
food and stay alive, that alone would take up all of my time and
57:12
then some you know, that'd be worth losing sleepover. There's some things that'd
57:15
be nice. It's sort of like and I'm gonna go to sleep now,
57:17
you know, and just yeah, yeah, completely, and I'm gonna wake
57:21
up now, and you know, it'd be nice if I had a little
57:23
bit more control over those But the fact that we don't, I think,
57:25
again, this just makes very clear evolutionary sense how difficult it would be to
57:30
survive and be successful in the world where you have people whose bodies are in
57:34
an automatic sort of mechanical process that they just go through these steps that they
57:37
need to go through in order to survive every day, versus those who have
57:42
to voluntarily, like consciously control every part of what they do. I don't
57:45
know, I never thought that that was particularly compelling, and honestly it was
57:49
a little frustrating to try and teach that and be like, look, how
57:51
cool and amazing it is that our bodies do things. Okay, I'll probably
57:54
do things great. Yeah. I think that at best, consciousness is unnecessary
58:00
okay, and at worst it is really distracting away from better research that could
58:05
be done. I would say, yes, it very much could be.
58:08
With the fact that we haven't found much of anything at all. Yeah,
58:12
like read or listened to as like we haven't found it yet. Yeah,
58:16
Well, Okay, I'm gonna I was gonna say that best consciousness could lead
58:20
to really good things, but that's not what it is doing. Ye best
58:22
right now, it's it's it's nothing, you know, it's it's it's unimportant,
58:25
it's unnecessary. It's very possible that it could be a really important line
58:30
of research down the road, and we just don't know yet. Yeah,
58:34
it's been a very long time under the microscope producing very little results. I
58:37
would hope so, given the amount of money that is put into it in
58:40
time, right, given all the other world's problems. But yeah, I'm
58:45
skeptical at best. Most of the things that have been under investigation for as
58:51
long as consciousness have have continued to produce things, a lot of useful things.
58:55
Yeah, we've advanced, we've learned, we've created all these new technology,
59:00
technology or travel sector. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so those are things
59:05
that continue to be researched. But things that have as long a history as
59:07
consciousness, with as little products as consciousness, most of those it seems like
59:12
they've gone away. It makes me wonder if like Aristotle showed up, if
59:15
you'd just be like, oh my god, yeah, you guys made no
59:19
progress. It's like oh dear, or like little progress. You're right,
59:24
yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm digging a little hard right now.
59:29
Yeah, into that I should step back. Okay, So I'm gonna
59:30
play this quote that I found from Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube. It's just
59:36
him sort of talking about consciousness. I really liked what he had to say,
59:38
and I found myself agreeing with him basically. So anyway, here it
59:43
is, but you, but you can say something about the question which you
59:45
really would wish to know the answer to. And I mean, for me,
59:50
it would be what what's consciousness? Because because that's that's totally baffling.
59:58
But Richard, you know what I think. I agree, not that you
1:00:00
ask, but what I think on this is consciousness has kind of baffled us
1:00:07
for a while. Okay. And evidence that we haven't a clue about what
1:00:13
consciousness is is drawn from the from the fact of how many books are published
1:00:19
on the topic. Right, We're not really continuing to publish books, not
1:00:22
really on like Newtonian physics. It's done, all right, So the fact
1:00:30
that people keep publishing books on consciousness is the evidence we don't know anything about
1:00:34
it, because if we knew all about it, you wouldn't have to keep
1:00:36
publishing. So so what I wonder. What I wonder Richard, is whether
1:00:47
there really is no such thing as consciousness at all and that there's some other
1:00:52
understanding of the functioning of the human brain that renders that question obsolete. Okay,
1:00:58
so generally agree with it. Yeah, Like his reference to Newtonian physics,
1:01:02
like we also saw that like a more field theory approach, like we
1:01:06
kind of talked about on like everything influences this stuff kind of replace that.
1:01:09
So it's not like we'd like it was like learned enough. Fact, as
1:01:14
he kind of implied, it was kind of like something better came along,
1:01:15
which we kind of implied this with today of like there's a lot of things
1:01:22
going on right all the time with our behavior and what's being influenced, right,
1:01:25
So yeah, the fact that there's no evidence of it, Like,
1:01:29
yeah, I agree with him, but I don't know if he kind of
1:01:31
wraps it up succingfuly enough for me that's fair. And I think you know,
1:01:35
there's it's accurate to say or to criticize that in terms of saying just
1:01:39
because there's a lot of books published about it doesn't mean that it's not real.
1:01:44
It does imply that, as he said, there's a lot that we
1:01:47
don't really know yet. And I also don't think that it necessarily means that
1:01:51
we have more to learn about the brain, because he emplayed that at the
1:01:52
end, right, like he said, like we have more to learn in
1:01:55
the brain. Well, yeah, I think he was. What he was
1:01:58
arguing there is that what we are calling consciousness could be better explained by other
1:02:02
concepts that we already have or will learn about the about the things. So
1:02:07
where people refer to consciousness as a biological process, I think the argument he
1:02:10
was making is if we learn more about the biological process, we don't need
1:02:14
to call it consciousness anymore. Yeah, And so you know, those are
1:02:15
concepts that we have or that we could develop that are events not constructs,
1:02:20
you know, because they relate to things that are really happening. That that
1:02:22
was where how I understood him anyway, Cool, There's another thing in here
1:02:27
I just wanted to say, is it was just kind of funny because in
1:02:30
nineteen ninety one Daniel Dennett published this very very long book titled Consciousness Explained,
1:02:36
and then in two thousand and one he wrote an article called are we explaining
1:02:39
consciousness yet? And so, quoting Schlinger, he said, if he had
1:02:43
to ask the question, the answer seems obvious, you know if after you
1:02:47
know, he wrote consciousness explained in ten years later, are we explaining?
1:02:50
And I think that implies that, you know, again, this idea that
1:02:53
Neili grasse Tyson was alluding to is seems like we don't really know a lot
1:02:57
about this topic at all. Yeah, we do, plan, don't all?
1:03:06
Right? Before we get to our updated content, here's one more ad
1:03:08
break. In listening to this episode and revisiting this, I hope that that
1:03:20
was interesting for you, But as I said, some things have happened since
1:03:22
then. Now that being the case, we played this clip from Neil de
1:03:27
grass Tyson in the episode, and one of the points we made in the
1:03:30
original episode and in most episodes is that a critical part of applying a scientific
1:03:36
and philosophical lens to anything is that we have to describe and define our topic
1:03:42
in such a way that we can agree on what the topic is that we
1:03:45
are studying. Some researchers at the Center for Consciousness Science, which appears to
1:03:50
be housed at the University of Michigan, couldn't find a date this was founded,
1:03:52
but earliest publications listed their website around the start of twenty twenty, making
1:03:58
us think that it was founded some time in twenty twenty or possibly twenty nineteen.
1:04:01
But anyway, that's beside the point. Researchers there have attempted to define
1:04:06
consciousness more specifically, which is better than most people have done so far.
1:04:11
So, as I was saying, we talked about and we play this clip
1:04:15
from Neili grasse Tyson about how like we just keep talking about this thing,
1:04:17
we keep talking about consciousness. I'm gonna come back to that in a moment.
1:04:20
But in these people that they're defining consciousness, and one of the problems
1:04:25
we had was this lack of definition. Well, they decided they were going
1:04:27
to apply one. They decided that they were going to try and find consciousness
1:04:30
in the brain as a brain process by mapping regions according to their function and
1:04:36
look for brain patterns across people who are in different states, either someone who
1:04:41
is awake or someone who is aware and experiencing things such as qualitia if you
1:04:45
will, and we're three using all of the sensory inputs to engage with the
1:04:50
stimuli and sort of natural world stimulation around them. Interesting stuff. So what
1:04:56
they did was they looked at the brains of people who were anesthetized similar are
1:05:00
to the brain of accummipation, people who were awake, and people with schizophrenia.
1:05:03
From four hundred brain regions, they identified three, primarily cortical regions that
1:05:09
seem to be associated with arousibility their word, yeah, awareness and sensory organization,
1:05:15
the dimensions often associated with consciousness. So yeah, if they define consciousness
1:05:20
as these processes, and they define it as a brain process in the regions
1:05:26
associated with those processes, then they will have basically said, this is where
1:05:30
consciousness exists in the brain and what it is. Now, what does this
1:05:33
mean? So you might be listening to that and think, great, that
1:05:36
sounds like they've solved it, Like they basically found where consciousness is in the
1:05:41
brain. Okay, conceding that point for the time being, I would actually
1:05:45
argue with that. But for the time being, we set that aside.
1:05:47
What does that mean their discovery? What does that mean with respect to understanding
1:05:53
consciousness? It's kind of difficult to tell, right. If anything, if
1:05:58
we're extractly anything from the fact that they've isolated it to these brain regions and
1:06:00
defined it in such a way it seems to suggest that brain activity is the
1:06:05
thing people are calling consciousness, right, And although many of you might hear
1:06:10
that and think, well, of course that's what consciousness is. That is
1:06:13
part of the debate is to say, like, well, if it's just
1:06:15
brain activity, why don't we just call it brain activity, or we call
1:06:17
it this particular network, like the consciousness network of the brain or something.
1:06:23
But point being, they define it as this brain activity as the thing that
1:06:27
people call consciousness. It's just those regions of the brain. And this might
1:06:30
be useful in terms of setting parameters of where this kind of activity takes place
1:06:35
in the brain, if we're going to define it that way, right.
1:06:38
So, for instance, this mapping of cortical regions is consciousness implies that anything
1:06:43
with the brain has activity in those regions and is conscious. Animals would likely
1:06:46
have consciousness, not all humans would have consciousness, and AI implants and other
1:06:51
non brain possessing creatures could not have consciousness. So by this definition they kind
1:06:57
of eliminate certain organisms that could or could not have consciousness. Yeah, and
1:07:00
so just to make sure you heard all that very clearly, is if we
1:07:06
were to look at a human brain, and we don't know that this is
1:07:09
the case. But if we were to look at a human brain of someone
1:07:12
who seems to be behaving normally that did not have the process in those and
1:07:15
again that's solo hypothetical, may not exist, then we would essentially have to
1:07:18
argue they are not conscious if their brain does not look like that model.
1:07:24
Right, that's a consideration. And then things that do things that look like
1:07:27
consciousness, we'd have to say they're not conscious because they don't have a brain.
1:07:30
Is this helpful, I mean it depends. It depends on what you
1:07:33
mean by helpful. What does that mean in terms of clearing up the ambiguity
1:07:39
of the term consciousness. Sure, that could be helpful if everyone agrees that's
1:07:43
what it is in terms of understanding behavior, particularly among non brained animals that
1:07:49
nevertheless demonstrate agency and learning, such as jellyfish, flatworms, slime molds.
1:07:56
Then no, this is not particularly helpful to define it this way. So
1:08:00
that's just one part of this. Another new theory posits quote that consciousness developed
1:08:04
as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly
1:08:10
and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly end quote and quote, it suggests
1:08:15
we don't perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead,
1:08:19
we do all these things unconsciously and then about half a second later consciously
1:08:25
remember doing them end quote. And that's from buds In Kensinger and Rickman or
1:08:29
Richmond twenty two. Yeah, so fairly recent, and as I said,
1:08:34
we were trying to sort of pull in the more recent research. So they
1:08:38
go on to explain that our behavior is too fast and reactive, and we
1:08:43
often do it without even thinking or like deliberately choosing an action. They also
1:08:46
give the example of our racing thoughts that we can't seem to control. They're
1:08:50
outside of our conscious control. Are all reasons why their definition is better is
1:08:57
because it's sort of saying that consciousness is not the things that we're actively doing
1:09:01
because we realize we've done them as we're doing them or after we do them
1:09:05
right and so thus, according to them, and if we're understanding this correctly,
1:09:09
consciousness is thinking about our actions as or immediately after they take place and
1:09:14
make sense of our own behavior. And they further add that many many mental
1:09:18
health disorders are diseases of consciousness. Yes, many who including Alzheimer's, including
1:09:25
autism. They list like a whole bunch that They're like, these are just
1:09:29
diseases of consciousness. Feel that sounds q and on. Well, I'm also
1:09:32
like what does that mean? Like is the treatment for these then to address
1:09:36
their consciousness? Like what do you mean that? Like it's a disease of
1:09:40
consciousness? The way that that reads to me is like, okay, so
1:09:43
they don't. They're not really like accounting for what a reflex does, like
1:09:46
in like a really meaningful way. They're kind of like blowing that off,
1:09:49
be like reflexes whatever. But they're also just like kind of trying to repackage
1:09:55
awareness, right, like so I am recognizing I am observing my own behavior
1:10:00
in this moment, right, So like it's kind of like they're just like
1:10:02
kind of going, that's not what that is. Yeah, And I feel
1:10:06
like I feel like that's consciousness doesn't capture what that is. I can't tell
1:10:11
it because like the way they describe it, where like on the one hand,
1:10:14
consciousness is everything, and the other hand, consciousness is like an afterthought
1:10:19
to everything. I'm not sure totally how to square that. You know,
1:10:23
It's sort of like consciousness is not really a thing. It's just sort of
1:10:27
the fact that we become aware of our own own behavior as it happens or
1:10:30
immediately after it happens. That's and we just sort of remember, and then
1:10:32
we maybe will then use that to make plans about what we'll do next time
1:10:36
or something like that that may have an effect. And alternatively, every problem
1:10:42
we have is both consciousness driven and consciousness solved. And so that seems I
1:10:48
don't know how else to read their sort of statement about this, but that
1:10:51
sort of seems like that's kind of where they're coming from. Anyway. In
1:10:55
the previous episode, we talked about how a lack of consensus of a definition
1:11:00
of consciousness, or even a single definition that just doesn't allude to these vague,
1:11:04
intangible, ill defined measures, might by itself be an indication that consciousness
1:11:11
isn't really a thing, and that instead, if it does exist, it's
1:11:15
better explained by some other process that we don't call consciousness, that we call
1:11:20
whatever that process is, we refer to it that way. Right, So
1:11:26
these couple of examples that that we're not cherry picked, they were pulled from
1:11:29
the examples of the updated research. They do not help the case for consciousness
1:11:32
because it continues to show a lack of reference to anything measurable except for brain
1:11:38
mapping, which seems to exclude several phenomenons that look like consciousness, but also
1:11:44
that is explained through you know, you're talking about brain activity, you're talking
1:11:47
about neurology, You're talking about these things that are still like better explained as
1:11:51
Like, I feel like consciousness is that next level that of trying to like
1:11:56
over explain something. It's like it's kind of like the idea of God's will,
1:12:00
right, God works in mysterious ways, or the universe is chaos,
1:12:03
and this was a moment that was just like bad timing, you know,
1:12:05
like I kind of like I feel like there's simpler explanations for things. Yeah,
1:12:09
I mean Atlantis Morrissett said, isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
1:12:14
And there's a conversation to be had that I think would be really interesting about
1:12:17
consciousness or learning slash memory and behavior in things such as plants. Plants learn
1:12:25
but they don't have a brain. They react to things even though they don't
1:12:29
have a brain, right, And there are these processes by which this takes
1:12:30
place. Jellyfish famously don't have brains. Slime molds don't have brains, flat
1:12:35
worms don't have brains, And so there's a conversation to be had about what
1:12:40
learning, memory, behavior, and consciousness all have to do with what they
1:12:45
do in a sort of in a what I think a very interesting and often
1:12:48
surprising way, right. And there's also a conversation about artificial intelligence and consciousness
1:12:55
or sentience or whatever the process that might look like behavior might we have to
1:13:00
account for it within that space. And we have this on the list as
1:13:03
as a future dive like kind of talking about those things. But I think
1:13:06
it is important to understand that like these models of what we understand or what
1:13:12
we think we understand, if consciousness or occurring in places where there's no there's
1:13:15
not even biology let alone, right, not no brain right, Like I
1:13:20
mean like there's like there's literally not a living organism, and you've got chat
1:13:25
GBT that's threatening the universe. I'm just kidding. Chat GBT hasn't gotten that
1:13:29
far yet as far as I know. No, we're still having fun with
1:13:31
chat GBT. Yes, So I think suffice it to say for now that
1:13:34
we continue to find ourselves in the position that this idea of consciousness. It
1:13:40
just doesn't seem to offer anything useful practically, clinically, philosophically, whether consciousness
1:13:47
is a thing or not seems to mean relatively little, except for these thought
1:13:51
experiments about applicability to other organisms or maybe pontification about existential inquiries. So like
1:14:00
what does it mean to be human? For example, for whatever that's worth,
1:14:03
and there's a lot of these, it's a what's it like to be
1:14:06
a bat? What is the experience of flavor? I'm like, the thing
1:14:11
is like, in my mind, that question doesn't mean anything. It's not
1:14:15
like you're not asking anything actually substantial. What's it like to be in anything?
1:14:20
Doesn't have any meaning because it's not like anything. It's just you know
1:14:24
what I mean? And so it sounds like it's asking this profound question,
1:14:29
but it's not. It's not asking anything. And so like if we stop
1:14:31
to think, like, what do you mean what does it mean to be
1:14:34
human? Right? Then that it starts to fall apart again, like you
1:14:36
then have to define that part of it. And so it's like, if
1:14:40
we need to ask questions and find a way to define our terms in such
1:14:45
a way that we can agree on what the premise is what's our foundation,
1:14:47
what's our starting place? Like, stop asking vague existential questions and ask meaningful
1:14:53
ones that we can answer, right. And that's not to say that we
1:14:56
shouldn't spend any time researching this or studying it or trying to understand it.
1:15:00
I think that's I think those are fair and reasonable questions to ask in the
1:15:04
research realm. But I think we need to start with a definition that's going
1:15:08
to allow us to ask those meaningful questions. And we haven't really gotten there,
1:15:12
right, because we can't do the research without and lead to meaningful outcomes
1:15:15
if we don't even know what the phenomena is that we study it that we're
1:15:18
studying. Now. This this happens in other places, and the difference is
1:15:23
that like they might understand how something works, they just know that it does
1:15:26
work, right, Like you see that in some places, like kind of
1:15:29
that's that's what's going on with Google, right, Like nobody, like the
1:15:31
people at Google don't understand how their Google Search works. Like it's kind of
1:15:35
gotten to a point where they don't really understand it anymore the way they used
1:15:39
to, but it works, but they can still define what it is to
1:15:43
start. Yeah, And I think that's a core missing element here that we've
1:15:46
got to get to. And it makes me think of like there were often
1:15:49
some of the engineering that was done thousands of years ago to build buildings where
1:15:54
they sort of discovered certain laws and properties of how to build things so that
1:15:58
they would be structurally sound, and they didn't understand necessarily the physics or engineering
1:16:02
behind why it worked, but they did know that when they did it that
1:16:05
way, it did work. Right. In that case, you have a
1:16:08
tangible outcome, Right, you have a thing that stays standing and works and
1:16:11
people can use it or you don't. When it comes to consciousness, there's
1:16:15
just no analog. If we were to purge that idea from our vocabulary forever
1:16:20
and never talk about it again, we would never know it was missing.
1:16:26
Ya. It doesn't add anything to our conversation ever. Right, That is
1:16:30
my hypothesis. Obviously that's not based on it. That's my suggestion because we've
1:16:34
we've spent so much time arguing about what they're not even arguing just I mean,
1:16:38
there has been arguing, but just not defining it. So let me
1:16:42
put it this way. If we want to define consciousness as brain activity,
1:16:45
fine, but that just taken consideration that does exclude anything without a brain as
1:16:51
being able to be conscious, even when it demonstrates learning and memory and other
1:16:57
behaviors. And maybe that's okay. It might things as being conscious and they
1:17:00
don't show that that brain activity, and maybe that just doesn't exist for them.
1:17:04
Right. If we want to define it as something else other than brain
1:17:08
activity, that's fine. But I think what we need to do is avoid
1:17:11
the what is it like or the experience of being type definitions because they don't
1:17:16
lead us any further toward any kind of fruitful outcome, right, And so
1:17:21
like, I'm not I'm not We're not anti consciousness. I'm just saying,
1:17:25
like the scientific merit of this thing seems woefully lacking right now, right,
1:17:30
And until we're going to try and use terms that allow us to haven't mean
1:17:34
anything, I think we're just going to keep chasing our tails. And every
1:17:38
year or two there's going to be a new center that pops up that looks
1:17:41
at brain mapping, or a new center that pops up that looks at whatever,
1:17:44
and nobody's landing unconsciousness. I think were I to define it, I
1:17:46
wouldn't use the word consciousness, right, because I think what I would do
1:17:49
is rely on existing terms that a processes that we understand that exists that have
1:17:54
to do with things like learning and memory and behavior and an initiation of action
1:18:00
and that sort of thing. Right that those are all things that we have
1:18:03
a better understanding of and we can study. And it seems like whenever we
1:18:06
talk about consciousness, those are the things we're talking about anyway, Right,
1:18:11
So those seem like useful places to go. But very few people are probably
1:18:15
going to agree with me. There's probably be a lot of disagreement with that,
1:18:17
but that's you know, I'm trying to bring this sort of skeptical critical
1:18:21
lens to this concept that has been given just this incredible free pass among many
1:18:28
scientists and skeptics in the world. They're just like, the great mystery of
1:18:31
consciousness. I'm like, what is that thing? And they're like, who
1:18:36
I think you hit it on the head, right, Like, it's sure,
1:18:39
it might be fun to study, it might be interesting to study,
1:18:42
but there were better ways to explain it. On the surface, what we
1:18:45
understand of it and know of it is not useful. Yeah, Like it's
1:18:47
not useful in any practical way, Like it does not help with it doesn't
1:18:51
improve therapy. It doesn't improve treatment because like, if you have somebody who
1:18:56
wakes up from a coma, you're not going they're conscious. Their consciousness isn't
1:18:59
what and you're going they're awake, they're responding the stimula in the environment,
1:19:02
They're doing all these things like let's go look and see X, Y and
1:19:05
Z, right, Like, you're not measuring their level of consciousness, not
1:19:09
in any sort of meaningful way. Yeah, And to be fair, I
1:19:12
think people would colloquially use that term to say they're conscious, to say that
1:19:15
they're awake. And again, if we wanted to find consciousness, is awake,
1:19:18
fine, I don't. I have no problem with that. Let's you
1:19:20
know, we can just call it being awake and have another synonym for awake.
1:19:24
Sure. Sure, that seems as fruitful an avenue to go as any
1:19:27
other. Right That works for me. But anyway, anything else that we
1:19:30
can say about consciousness before we wrap this up, No, I think that
1:19:33
covers it all. Right. If you'd like to agree or disagree with us,
1:19:36
you should reach out to us directly at info at WWDWWD podcast dot com,
1:19:42
or any of the social media platforms not Twitter. Let's do some recommendations.
1:19:46
Let's do it recommendations. I am recommending a TV series. This was
1:19:59
recommended me a few years back and I never watched it, and now I
1:20:02
finally have and it is on Netflix. It's called Love, Death and Robots.
1:20:06
I love this. If you're a fan of Black Mirror, I think
1:20:11
this is right up your alley. These are all these vignettes and different animation
1:20:15
styles, different stories. A lot of them are sort of sci fi e
1:20:19
themes. Many are sort of horror themes. Some of them are just kind
1:20:23
of fun and goofy. There's some that are stop motion. There's drawn animation,
1:20:28
there's this sort of comic book animation, there's a live action one.
1:20:30
Most of them are the sort of three D animation that you'd find in like
1:20:33
a lot of them kind of look almost like video game cut scenes, and
1:20:36
there are graphics and different ways, but they all explore these these topics.
1:20:41
I will say pretty much every episode has some amount of violence and swearing,
1:20:45
and those often some amount of nudity or sex depicted. So if that's something
1:20:50
you have a problem with, then this probably isn't your bag. But if
1:20:54
you are into the very thought provoking short form Vignett style storytelling. I could
1:21:00
not recommend it highly enough. I wish there were more episodes because I loved
1:21:03
it, Love Death and Robots. I'm so excited to check this out.
1:21:06
The way you're describing it before was like, yeah, I need, I
1:21:10
need to add this to my list. Cool, all right, So I
1:21:13
am lating the game on this thing. Since there are now four movies out.
1:21:15
I don't know why I never saw it. I just one of those
1:21:17
things that maybe just never came up in my time. Sure you know,
1:21:20
I just did in my spare time. But that is a movie called John
1:21:25
Wick. I first of all, love and adore Keanu Reeves. Sure,
1:21:29
who doesn't. Yeah, And hopefully that does age well, like hopefully it's
1:21:31
never like that doesn't become a problem later. But right now, at this
1:21:34
time and the day that I'm recording this, he is a gym and he
1:21:38
is wonderful and I love him. So John Wick. You're probably familiar with
1:21:41
it, but if you don't know, he is a retired assassin that comes
1:21:44
out of retirement because some people kill his dog. And obviously the story is
1:21:47
more complicated than that. But what I really liked about the series so far,
1:21:51
so I'm in. I've watched one. I started watching too, and
1:21:56
I really love this world they build where it's kind of like there are rules,
1:21:59
I mean agement there are specific guidelines for how to kill somebody, when
1:22:03
you kill somebody, what that looks like. But I also really appreciate that
1:22:06
everybody is just deathly afraid of him, Like everybody's like, oh, like
1:22:12
they're like, oh, you stole a dog, okay, whatever, Oh
1:22:14
you stole his dog. Okay, well you are clearly dead now. Yeah,
1:22:18
and like you know, they start off like both movies the same way.
1:22:20
They're like, you know, he's a man of focus, he is
1:22:24
sheer Will, and you're like, okay, all right, this is good.
1:22:27
So one thing I really like is the stunt work on it. I
1:22:30
mean, yeah, it's impressive. Got it reads really trained. He trained
1:22:32
a lot on this, and you can see videos of him training with like
1:22:35
the weaponry and stuff. Yeah, it's really really impressive. It's worth a
1:22:39
watch. So I'm excited to finish the series this week hopefully. I love
1:22:43
that. Yeah, I've very much enjoyed those movies. I'm not seeing the
1:22:45
newest one, but yeah, that's great. I appreciate that. Yeah,
1:22:48
it's good, Okay. We are running a little campaign that if we get
1:22:51
up to fifteen picture On supporters, then we're gonna do a little virtual hangout.
1:22:56
You can spend time with us and one sort of chat and do something
1:23:00
probably a Q and A or maybe just talk. We like to talk.
1:23:02
If you ever, if you are a Patreon supporter already, then you'll hear
1:23:05
you have access to episodes where there's a lot of us just talking before and
1:23:09
after episodes. But anyway, we're running that campaign. If we get to
1:23:13
fifteen by June, we'll do that virtual hangout, So come over and join
1:23:15
us. And the people who have already joined us who made that commitment because
1:23:18
they would like to hang out with us maybe is Mike, m Meghan,
1:23:21
Laila, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, the Daily BA,
1:23:26
Brad, Stephanie, Kelly, and Olivia. Thank you all so much for
1:23:30
your support and the show and we look forward to meeting you all in person
1:23:32
soon yay or like virtually in person I guess yeah. And also, of
1:23:38
course thank you to my team of people that is Jess, Justin and Shane
1:23:43
for all of your work and helping me do this recording the podcast that we
1:23:45
do. Yeah, so good, so fun. And if you'd like to
1:23:48
reach out to us, as I said, we're on all the social media
1:23:50
platforms. We'd like to hear your thoughts on consciousness. You can tell us
1:23:53
about movies or TV shows that you recommend, or tell us what we got
1:23:57
wrong, what we got right. We love the sort of praise things.
1:23:59
You can also support us by leaving a rating and review on our website.
1:24:02
You can pick up some merch at our web store. You could do a
1:24:05
giant sidewalk chalk art mural to why we do what we do in a busy
1:24:11
public area and take a picture in tag us on in social media. There's
1:24:15
all these, all these different ways you can support us that we appreciate.
1:24:17
But I think that that is all that I have. Is there anything you'd
1:24:19
like to add or anything I'm forgetting Shane, nothing on' I in all right
1:24:23
perfect. Thank you all for listening. This is Abraham and this is a
1:24:26
Shane. We're out. See ya. You've been listening to Why we Do
1:24:30
what we do. You can learn more about this and other episodes by going
1:24:33
to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have
1:24:39
an awesome day,