Latest / Luke's English Podcast / Science Looked for You Inside the Brain... and Found No One

Transcript

Science Looked for You Inside the Brain... and Found No One · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The surgeon's gloved hand is perfectly still. The patient is awake,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: reclining under a soft theater light, a drape separating her
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: face from the open window in her skull. The surgeon
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: touches a small silver electrode to a patch of exposed cortex,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: no larger than a fingernail, and delivers a gentle pulse
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: of current. The patient says, quietly and with complete clarity,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: that she felt something move behind her left eye. The
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: surgeon knows the anatomy. There is no pathway there, no
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: structure that could carry that signal to that location. Nothing
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: behind the left eye should have received that message. And yet,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: something did. Something reported back. We will travel tonight through
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: every serious attempt science has made to find that something.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: We will visit a laboratory where researchers discovered that the
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: brain commits to a movement a full third of a
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: second before the person using that brain believes they have
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: chosen anything. We will follow a paper printout of three
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: billion letters unrolling across a cold laboratory floor, letters that
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: contain every recipe the human body knows how to follow,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: and find that not one of them spells out a
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: continuous person. We will sit beside a monk in a
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: scanning machine in a monastery in Bhutan and watch his
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: brain do something that no standard model of consciousness had
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: a prepared box for. We will descend into a quantum
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: biology laboratory where the boundary between classical and quantum behavior
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: inside living neurons turned out to be stranger than either
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: the physicists or the biologists had predicted. we will spend
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: a night in the sleep laboratory at the University of Wisconsin,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: where researchers tracked consciousness as it dissolved each evening and
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: could not locate the precise moment it ended. We will
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: meet a theorem published in Vienna in 1931 by a
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: mathematician who proved, using mathematics as his instrument, that any
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: sufficiently complex formal system contains true statements it cannot reach
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: from within its own walls, and we will ask what
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: that means for a brain trying to find itself. The
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: spine of the whole night is one question. If every
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: search for a fixed, locatable self in the brain, in
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: the genome, in quantum fields, in time, comes back without
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: a captive, What exactly is the thing that is reading
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: these words right now? That question will not be dismissed.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: It will not be answered quickly. It will be followed
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: honestly through neuroscience and genetics and quantum physics and philosophy
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: and mathematics all the way to whatever the evidence actually
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: allows at the end. Before we begin, if you enjoy
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: these topics as much as we do, make sure to
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: like the video and subscribe. It is a simple action,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: but it helps this channel reach more curious minds like yours. Now,
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: let us begin. A laboratory in San Francisco, 1983. A
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: volunteer sits in a chair with electrodes taped to the
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: skin of their forearm, watching a small oscilloscope screen mounted
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: in front of them. On the screen, a bright dot
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: sweeps around a circular clock face at high speed, completing
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: a full revolution roughly every two and a half seconds.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: The instruction is simple. Move your wrist whenever you feel
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: like it, and when you do, note where the dot
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: was on the clock face at the exact moment you
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: first felt the urge to move. The researcher watching from
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: across the room is Benjamin Liebet, and what he is
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: about to find will trouble every subsequent conversation about the
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: nature of the choosing self. Liebit was a neurophysiologist at
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: the University of California, San Francisco, soft-spoken and methodical in
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: a field that had long preferred to avoid the word
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: consciousness as though it were slightly embarrassing. He did not
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: share that preference. For decades, he had been quietly insisting
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: that consciousness was not too vague to measure, that it
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: had timing, that it had edges, that if you built
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: the right clock, you could catch it arriving. His colleagues
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: were not always convinced. The questions he asked were considered
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: either too simple or too dangerous, depending on who was
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: being asked. He asked them anyway. The experiment he ran
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: in 1983 produced a finding that still does not fully
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: sit still. When Liebit's volunteers flicked their wrists and reported
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the clock position at which they first felt the urge
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: to move, he compared those reports to the electrical signal
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: recorded at their scalps, a slow building wave in the
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: brain known as the readiness potential. That wave had been
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: discovered in the 1960s by Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Luder Diecke,
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: who found that it preceded voluntary movements by somewhere between
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: half a second and a full second. What Libe found
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: was the precise relationship between this wave and the felt
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: moment of decision. The readiness potential began building, on average,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: 550 milliseconds before the movement actually occurred. Conscious awareness of
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the urge, as reported by the volunteers using the clock face,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: arrived approximately 200 milliseconds before the movement. That means the
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: brain was already preparing the act for roughly 350 milliseconds
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: before the person believed they had decided to do it.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Not a few milliseconds, not a rounding error in the measurement.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: 350 milliseconds is roughly the time it takes sound to
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: travel the length of an ordinary room. It is long
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: enough to feel. The brain had started a meeting and
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: sent no invitation to the self that believed it was
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: running the meeting. Critics raised reasonable objections almost immediately. Reporting
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: a clock position while simultaneously noticing an internal urge is
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: itself a complicated task. Memory is involved. Attention is divided.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: The reported moment might drift from the actual moment. Libet
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: acknowledged all of this and refined his methods accordingly. The
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: core result held across multiple versions of the experiment, across
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: different laboratories, across different cultures and ages of participant. The
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: 350-millisecond gap refused to close. Then in 2008, John Dylan
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: extended the finding into territory that made it considerably stranger.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Haynes used functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: changes across the whole brain, rather than electrical signals at
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: the scalp. And he asked volunteers to press one of
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: two buttons whenever they felt like it, a left button
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: or a right button. The choice was theirs. But Haynes
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: and his team were watching the activity in the frontopolar
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: cortex and in the parietal cortex while the volunteers waited.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: And they found that the pattern of activity in those
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: regions predicted which button the volunteer would press up to
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: 10 full seconds before the person reported making the decision.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: 10 seconds is not a rounding error. 10 seconds before
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: a volunteer reports choosing, the brain has already tilted toward
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: a particular outcome. Haynes' decoding accuracy reached between 56 and 60%. which,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: in a simple two-choice situation, is well above chance, not
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: perfectly predictive, but far from random. He wrote in his
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: published findings that the decision appeared to be made before
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: the subject was aware of it. That sentence, measured and careful,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: disturbed many readers far more than a more dramatic phrasing
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: would have. It was precise enough to be taken seriously
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: and large enough to be deeply unsettling. But here is
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the place where the picture becomes more complex rather than simpler.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: In 2019, Heron Scherger at Johns Hopkins University returned to
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the readiness potential itself and asked whether it was really
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: a deliberate preparatory signal at all. Scherger and his colleagues
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: proposed that what Libet had measured might partly be spontaneous
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: neural noise the random fluctuating activity of the brain at rest,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: occasionally crossing a threshold at which a movement is initiated.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: In other words, the brain might not be preparing the
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: movement in the sense of planning it and then launching it.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: The decision might instead emerge when background neural activity happens
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: to crest above a trigger level. The readiness potential, on
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: this account, is partly the shape of the wave that
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: was already present when the decision crystallized, not evidence of
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: secret deliberate planning by some executor process operating behind the
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: scenes of consciousness. This refinement complicates the original story without
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: dissolving it. If Shurger is right, the situation is in
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: some ways even stranger than Libet's original framing. It would
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: mean that what feels like a deliberate choice is the
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: conscious registration of a threshold crossing that nobody planned, neural
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: noise becoming action and the self arriving to claim authorship afterward.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: The will is present, but it may be reading a
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: script that was already being typed by processes with no
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: author at all. Libet himself was not comfortable leaving the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: self entirely passive. He proposed what he called a veto window,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: a period of approximately 150 to 200 milliseconds between conscious
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: awareness of the urge and the actual movement, during which
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: consciousness could intervene and cancel the action. You cannot initiate,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: he suggested, but you can refuse. The brain loads the
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: gun and consciousness can choose not to pull the trigger.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: This compromise satisfied almost nobody philosophically and fascinated almost everybody scientifically.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: It preserves a role for conscious experience without claiming that
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: the experience starts the process. It is a strange kind
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: of agency, the agency of a last-second editor who cannot
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: write but can strike through. Think about what this means
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: in the texture of an ordinary day. You reach for
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: your coffee cup. You change lanes. You laugh at something
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: before you have consciously processed why it is funny. You
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: pull your hand back from a hot surface before the
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: pain has fully registered as pain. In every one of
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: these moments, the version of you that believes it is
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: in charge arrives at the scene slightly after the action
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: has been initiated. The felt self is not the absent party.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: it is very much there. But it is there the
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: way a reader is there, at a performance, present, engaged,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: even moved, but not the one who wrote the lines.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: The temporal gap between neural event and felt authorship is
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: not evidence that you do not exist. It is evidence
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: about what kind of thing you might be. The self
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: that feels it is deciding appears, at minimum, to be
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: reading from a process already underway, like a conductor who
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: lifts the baton and notices that the orchestra has already
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: quietly begun. Whether the conductor matters, whether that moment of
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: noticing and potentially stopping is enough to constitute genuine choice,
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: is a question that 1983 opened and that the decades
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: since have not closed. What is clear is that the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: question cannot be waved away. 350 milliseconds is real. 10
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: seconds is real. The gap between neural preparation and felt
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: authorship is a measured, replicated, independently confirmed feature of the
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: human brain. The self that feels it is in charge
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: arrives after the meeting has already started. That is not
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: a metaphor. That is a timing result from an oscilloscope
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: in San Francisco, confirmed by an fMRI machine in Berlin,
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: refined by a computational model in Baltimore, and still unresolved
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: in any laboratory currently running. But if the decision-making self
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: is downstream of the brain's own preparation, perhaps the self
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: is not a question of timing at all. Perhaps it
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: lives not in when things happen, but in where, encoded
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the hundred billion neurons and their trillions of connections,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: residing in some structure or region that has not yet
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: been properly examined. Perhaps the person reading these words is
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: not early or late, but simply located somewhere inside the
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: architecture of the brain, waiting to be found in the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: right kind of scan, That is where the search goes next,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: into the anatomy of the brain itself, beginning with the
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: image of a preserved human brain sitting in a glass
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: jar in a university hallway, smaller and more ordinary-looking than
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: anyone who sees it for the first time expects. There
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: is a preserved human brain in a glass jar on
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: a shelf in a university hallway, and almost everyone who
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: sees it for the first time says the same thing.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: They say it looks small. They say it looks ordinary.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: They expected something that announces itself, something whose surfaces are
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: visibly lit by the weight of everything it once contained. Instead,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: it is gray and dense and quiet, about the size
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: of two fists pressed together, floating in its fixative with
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: no visible indication of where, inside all that folded tissue,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: the person used to be. In the 1990s, the Portuguese-American
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: neurologist Antonio Damasio was doing something that sounds straightforward, but
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: turned out to be one of the most philosophically consequential
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: programs in modern medicine. He was mapping the wreckage. Damasio,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: who grew up in Lisbon, watching the quality of Atlantic
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: light change across the estuary in the late afternoons, had
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: developed a deep interest in patients whose brains had been
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: damaged in specific and localized ways. Not because he was
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: indifferent to their suffering, but because each one represented a
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: kind of natural experiment that no ethics committee would ever
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: allow by design. Lose a precise patch of tissue here,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: and something specific disappears. The question he was circling, patient
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: by patient, scan by scan, was deceptively simple. If you
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: damage enough rooms in the house, the owner eventually vanishes.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: But which room is the owner actually in? Where does
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: personhood live? What he kept finding was that it did
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: not live anywhere in particular. The patient he called Elliot
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: had been a successful businessman, organized and warm, before a
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: tumor was discovered pressing against his frontal lobe. The surgery
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: removed the tumor and also removed a portion of the
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: tissue connecting his frontal cortex to deeper emotional structures. When
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Damasio tested Elliot afterward, everything appeared intact. His IQ was unchanged.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: His memory was functioning. His knowledge of the world was complete.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: He could discuss the news, recall his childhood, solve abstract problems,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: and yet Eliot could not make a lunch reservation, not
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: because he forgot to call or could not operate a telephone,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: but because the process of choosing between two restaurants became
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: an infinite deliberation without resolution. He could generate reasons for
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: and against each option in perfect logical sequence, and he
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: could continue doing so indefinitely because nothing inside him rose
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: to say, This one, now, the felt sense of preference
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: had been severed from the machinery of reasoning, and without it,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: the rational self spun in place. Damasio spent the following
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: years developing what he called the somatic marker hypothesis, published
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: in careful detail in his 1994 book Descartes' Error. The
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: central proposal was this. The self is not a fixed
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: structure somewhere in the brain. It is a repeated process,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: moment by moment, in which the body signals its current
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: state upward to the brain, and the brain assembles a
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: provisional narrator from those signals. The warm contraction in the
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: chest when a decision feels right, the subtle aversion when
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: something feels dangerous, the flicker of discomfort when a social
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: boundary is crossed— These are not decorations on top of
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: rational thought. They are the actual substrate of the person
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: doing the thinking. Remove them, and what remains is technically
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: functional but existentially paralyzed. By 2001, neuroimaging technology had advanced
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: far enough that researchers could observe the whole brain at rest,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: not during any particular task, just existing, Marcus Reichli at
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Washington University in St. Sevigny, Louis noticed something that everyone
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: had been inadvertently filtering out. When subjects were told to
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: relax and do nothing, a consistent set of brain regions
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: became more active, not less. The medial prefrontal cortex, located
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: roughly behind the center of the forehead. The posterior cingulate cortex,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: deeper toward the back of the brain. the angular gyrus
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: tucked near the junction of the temporal and parietal lobes.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: These regions formed a web and Reichle named it the
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: default mode network. Subsequent research revealed what this network actually does.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: It activates when people remember the past, when they imagine
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: the future, when they think about other people's mental states,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: and when they think about themselves. It is the brain's
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: self-referential baseline, the tissue that hums with narrative when nothing
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: external demands attention. For a decade after its discovery, researchers
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: hoped that this might be it. This might be the
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: anatomical address of the person. But the default mode network
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: is not a point. It is not a room. It
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: is a distributed web spanning several centimeters of cortex across
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: multiple lobes with no obvious center and no identifiable location
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: where the integration finally happens. The closest anatomical candidate for
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: the self turned out to be a conversation happening across
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: a very large room with no obvious speaker. And then
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: the split brain findings added a dimension that made the
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: question stranger still. Beginning in the 1960s, surgeon Joseph Bogan
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: and neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum, the
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: thick bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, had
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: been severed to control severe epilepsy. With the connection cut,
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Gazzaniga could present different information to each hemisphere separately by
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: controlling which visual field received the image, and the results
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: were remarkable in their implications. The left hemisphere, which controls speech,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: would explain behavior initiated by the right hemisphere in ways
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: that were fluent, confident, and completely fabricated. Show the right
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: hemisphere a snow scene. prompt the left hand to pick
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: up a shovel and ask the left hemisphere why the
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: hand picked it up, and it would say, without hesitation,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: because I was going to clean the garage. It did
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: not know. It invented. Gazzaniga called this mechanism the interpreter,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: a left hemisphere system whose sole function appeared to be
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: constructing a coherent narrative about why the whole person did
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: what it did. regardless of whether the narrative was accurate.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: The interpreter does not report the self. It generates it
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: after the fact in real time from whatever evidence is available.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: There are neurological conditions that demonstrate this from the opposite direction.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: In Cotard syndrome, a rare condition associated with severe depression
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: and certain types of brain damage, patients sincerely believe they
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: do not exist. They will tell a clinician, calmly and
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: without distress, that they are dead, that their organs have
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: rotted away, that they are hollow. They are not hallucinating
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: in the conventional sense. Their perceptual systems are largely intact.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: What has failed is the layer of processing that generates
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: the felt conviction of being present. The experience of existence,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: which most people treat as the most self-evident thing there is,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: has simply stopped being produced. Depersonalization disorder moves in a
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: related but distinct direction. People experiencing it describe watching themselves
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: from outside, performing their own actions as though from a
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: slight distance, with full cognitive function intact. The thinking happens,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: the words come out, the body moves correctly, but the
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: sense of being the one doing it has dimmed or vanished.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: And critically, the brain scans of depersonalization patients show specific
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: changes in limbic and prefrontal processing, not global damage, not
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: widespread failure, just a targeted alteration in one layer of
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: the process, and the self goes transparent. The search for
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: a homunculus That old idea of a small central observer
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: sitting somewhere inside the brain and watching the show was
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: formally abandoned by mainstream neuroscience in the closing decades of
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: the 20th century. It had never been found because there
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: was nothing to find. The brain does not work that way.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: There is no final screen where all the information is
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: gathered and presented to an inner audience. There is processing.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: and more processing, and more processing, with each layer feeding
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: the next, and somewhere in that cascade, in circumstances that
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: no current model can fully specify, the impression of a
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: unified observer arises. The brain does not contain a self,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: the way a jar contains a firefly. It generates the
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: impression of one. The way weather generates the impression of
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: a face in clouds. The face is real enough that
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: you see it. It follows recognizable shapes. It has features
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: you can describe. And it dissolves the moment the wind changes.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Damasio came to describe selfhood as the brain's most persistent
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: fiction and most practical tool. Those two qualities go together.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: The fiction is useful precisely because it is stable enough
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: to plan with. It gives the organism a consistent address
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: from which to act. But call it a fiction, and
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: the obvious question surfaces. If the self is generated by
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: the brain rather than housed in it, perhaps the script
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: it is generated from is written somewhere else, somewhere more
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: permanent and more fundamental than the shifting electrical weather of
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: a living cortex. Perhaps the source is smaller than a neuron,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: older than the brain, encoded in the molecule from which
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: the whole organism was assembled in the first place. That
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: is where the search goes now, away from the scan
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: and toward the sequence, following a long paper printout of
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: base pairs as it unrolls across a cold laboratory floor
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: in the early light of the year 2000. The morning
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: of June 26, 2000, began with a ceremony that felt,
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: to the scientists gathered in Washington, like the opening of
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: a sealed room that humanity had been circling for decades.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: Researchers who had spent years bent over sequencing machines in
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: cold rooms, arguing about funding and base pair error rates,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: filed into the East Room of the White House and
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: and stood still while the President of the United States
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: described what they had done as the most important, most
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: wondrous map ever produced by humankind. The expectation in the
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: room was enormous and specific. The scientific community had been
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: quietly operating on the assumption that a creature as complex
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: and inward as a human being would require somewhere in
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: the neighborhood of 100,000 genes to encode all of it,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: the personality, the capacity for language, the grief at three
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: in the morning, the recognition of a face not seen
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: in 30 years. What the draft genome actually contained was
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: closer to 25,000. Francis Collins, geneticist and then director of
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: the National Human Genome Research Institute, stood beside Bill Clinton
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: at the podium and described the genome as the language
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: in which God wrote life. The phrase was genuine. Collins
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: was a man of deep faith and genuine scientific rigor
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: and saw no contradiction between them. He had led the
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: public consortium through years of competition with the private effort
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: run by Craig Venter, and the joint announcement that day
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: was a diplomatic achievement as much as a scientific one.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: What Collins did not say at the podium, and what
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: he spent much of the following decade quietly working out,
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: was how little the sequence actually explained about the thing
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: he was most interested in explaining. The three billion letters
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: were all there. The instructions for building a human being
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: were present and readable. And yet the reader, the specific
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: private self that Collins or any other person experiences as
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: simply being themselves, was nowhere in the text. The number
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: that stopped biologists cold in the months after the announcement
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: was not 3 billion. It was 25,000. The nematode worm
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Canerhabditis elegans, a creature 959 cells in its entirety, a
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: worm transparent enough to see through under a basic microscope,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: with a nervous system of exactly 302 neurons, possesses roughly
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: the same number of protein-coding genes as a human being.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: The worm has no detectable inner life by any measure
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: anyone has yet devised. It navigates toward food and away
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: from heat, and that is broadly the extent of it.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: The genes that build a philosopher and the genes that
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: build a worm are not a different order of magnitude apart.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: They are nearly the same number. Whatever the difference between
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: a philosopher and a worm is, it is not written
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: primarily in the number of genes. Part of the answer
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: seemed to arrive in 2012 when the ENCODE project published
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: a sweeping set of findings after a decade of work
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: by hundreds of laboratories. The earlier picture of the genome
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: had described most of it as junk, non-coding sequences with
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: no apparent function, evolutionary debris from ancient viral insertions and
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: discarded experiments. ENCODE overturned that picture substantially. Roughly 80% of
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: the genome the project found showed some form of biochemical activity.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: The genome was far busier than anyone had thought. Regions
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: previously dismissed as silent were switching other genes on and off.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: responding to signals from the cell's environment, operating as a
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: vast regulatory network rather than a simple list of protein recipes.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: This was genuinely important. It changed how biologists think about disease,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: about development, about the relationship between the sequence and the organism.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: But it did not locate the self. The activity that
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: ENCODE documented was regulatory, contextual, and tissue-specific. It explained how
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: a liver cell becomes a liver cell and not a neuron.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: It did not explain why the person containing both experiences
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: anything at all, or why that experience feels continuous and owned.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: Researchers pursuing personality through genetics have spent the decades since
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: the genome's publication conducting what are called genome-wide association studies,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: scanning hundreds of thousands of individuals, and looking for genetic
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: variants that correlate with measured personality traits. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: to experience. What they have found is that these traits
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: are genuinely heritable in the statistical sense. meaning they run
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: in families in ways that cannot be explained by shared
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: environment alone. But the genetic architecture underlying them is not
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: a small number of powerful genes. It is thousands of variants,
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: each contributing a fraction of a percent to the overall
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: variance in a trait. No single location in the genome,
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: no cluster of locations, encodes anything resembling a recognizable human character.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: The signal is real, and it is vanishingly distributed. Robert
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Plomin at King's College London followed this thread for 40 years,
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: one of the most determined and careful behavioral geneticists of
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: his generation. He believed, and his data supported the belief,
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: that virtually everything psychological is substantially heritable. Intelligence, personality, mental
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: health risk, even political orientation show heritability estimates that surprised
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: many people when the studies were first published. But Plomin arrived,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: after four decades, at a conclusion that felt almost paradoxical.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: In his 2018 book, Blueprint, He wrote that everything psychological
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: is heritable, but nothing useful is determined by identifiable genes
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: in any individual sense. The heritability is real. The specific
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: genetic address is nowhere to be found. The genome predicts
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: in aggregate across populations and tells you almost nothing about
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: the particular person standing in front of you. And then
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: there are the twins. Identical twins share 100% of their
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: protein-coding genome. They develop in the same womb, often in
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: the same household, exposed to the same diet, the same schools,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: the same early experiences, and they diverge. In personality, sometimes considerably.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: In disease risk, sometimes dramatically. One twin develops schizophrenia and
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: the other does not. One becomes deeply religious and the
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: other becomes indifferent to the question. One spends a lifetime
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: turning toward people and the other turns away. The genome
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: they share does not prevent this. It sets a range
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: of possibilities, and within that range, something else. Experience, chance,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: the precise sequencing of early attachments, the particular teacher in
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: a particular year moves each person to a different location.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: The genome is not a script. It is more like
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: the dimensions of a stage on which an unrepeatable performance
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: takes place. But here is something that complicates even that
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: picture in a quiet and genuinely strange way. The genome
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: is not static across a lifetime. Epigenetic modifications, chemical changes
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: to the DNA molecule itself and to the proteins around
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: which it is wound, alter which genes are expressed without
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: changing the underlying sequence. DNA methylation, one of the best
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: studied of these modifications, can silence a gene or amplify it,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: and these changes happen in response to experience. Chronic stress
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: alters methylation patterns. So does early childhood care and malnutrition
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: and meditation. The genome is being annotated by lived life
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: in real time, written on while being read. And some
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: of these marks pass to the next generation. Not the sequence,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: but the annotation. A parent's experiences can alter the gene
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: expression of their children through mechanisms that are still being
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: worked out. the lived life leaving a mark that outlasts
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: the life. This is the genome as it actually exists,
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: not a fixed instruction manual, but a dynamic, experience-sensitive, environmentally
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: responsive system that is different in meaningful ways in every
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: cell of your body and changes across your lifetime. It
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: is vastly more interesting than the static blueprint people imagined
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: in the year 2000, and it still does not contain
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: a self. The three billion letters contain recipes for proteins.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: They contain regulatory switches. They contain the ancient sequences of
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: viruses that once infected our ancestors and were absorbed into
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: the genome over millions of years, now repurposed in ways
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: evolution had not planned. They contain the instructions for building
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: the eye and the hand and the structure of the hippocampus.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: But the self that walks into a room carrying its
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: private history, that fears its own ending, that finds certain
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: music unbearable because of something that happened in a specific year,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: that reads these words and knows it is reading them,
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: that self is not transcribed anywhere in the sequence. The
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: genome is the instrument. The musician is not inside it.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: That is not a small result. It means the most
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: complete physical description of a human being available to molecular science.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: The full sequence of every nucleotide in every chromosome does
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: not account for the thing that makes a human being
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: feel like a particular someone. If the information is not there,
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: it is not because the genome is incomplete. It is
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: because the self is not the kind of thing that
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: gets written into a molecule, which pushes the search deeper,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: past the molecule, past the cell, past the scale at
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: which biology operates, into the question of whether the physics
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: underlying biology might carry something that biology alone cannot. And
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: that search begins very small, inside a single neuron, with
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: a hollow cylinder so thin that a human hair beside
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: it would look like a fallen tree. That cylinder has
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: a name. It is called a microtubule, and in the mid-1990s,
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: it became the center of one of the most derided
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: and most discussed proposals in the entire history of consciousness research.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: The proposal came from two directions at once. Roger Penrose,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: a mathematical physicist at Oxford whose work on the geometry
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: of spacetime had earned him a reputation as one of
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: the most original minds in theoretical physics, had become convinced
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: through the 1980s that human mathematical insight was doing something
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: no classic computer could do. He laid that argument out
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: in his 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, and the
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: conclusion he reached was uncomfortable and unavoidable by his own reasoning.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: Whatever the brain was doing when it understood mathematics, it
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: was not running an algorithm. He suspected quantum mechanics and
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: specifically a yet-unformulated theory of quantum gravity was involved. What
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: he lacked was a biological mechanism. The mechanism found him
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: in the form of Stuart Hameroff. Hameroff was an anesthesiologist
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a city of
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: dry heat and long shadows, a man who by his
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: own account had been chasing the same thread since medical
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: school in the early 1970s. As a student, he had
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: noticed something that struck him as strange and stayed strange.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: The drugs that put people under, the anesthetic agents that
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: switch consciousness off with reliable precision, were known to bind
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: to protein structures inside cells, not to synaptic receptors in
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: the obvious way. to the internal scaffolding of the cell itself,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: to microtubules. The observation sat with him. If these drubs
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: found their target inside the structural skeleton of the neuron,
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: and if their effect was the extinguishing of experience, then
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: perhaps the structural skeleton was involved in generating experience. He
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: spent the following decades following that thread through cell biology, biophysics,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: and eventually quantum mechanics, arriving at a theory that needed
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: Penrose's mathematics to complete it. Together they developed what they
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: called orchestrated objective reduction, shortened to ORSH-OR. The proposal is
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: precise enough to be worth stating carefully. Microtubules are hollow
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: protein cylinders found in enormous numbers inside neurons, as in
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: all cells, built from repeating units of a protein called tubulin.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: Each tubulin unit can flex between two slightly different physical shapes,
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: two conformational states. Hameroff and Penrose proposed that these tubulin
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: units could enter quantum superposition, existing in both states simultaneously
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: in the way a quantum particle can occupy multiple states
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: before measurement. The orchestrated part of the name referred to
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: the idea that synaptic inputs and cellular signals would coordinate
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: or orchestrate which microtubules participated and when. The objective reduction
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: part came from Penrose's hypothesis that quantum superpositions do not
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: simply decohere into randomness but collapse in a specific way
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: governed by quantum gravity. and that each such collapse is
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: a moment of proto-conscious experience, not a thought, not a memory,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: but a primitive flicker of experience at the quantum level
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: from which the richer textures of conscious life are built.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: The neuroscience community's response was swift and consistent. It was dismissal,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: and the dismissal was so thorough and so unanimous that
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: it generated its own momentum. The theory became famous partly
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: because of how completely the mainstream rejected it. The central
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: objection came in the year 2000 from Max Tegmark, a
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: physicist then at the University of Pennsylvania and later at MIT,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: who published a calculation in the journal Physical Review. E.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: Tegmark estimated the time scale over which quantum coherence in
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: a microtubule would survive at body temperature before thermal noise
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: from the warm, wet, chemically busy interior of a cell
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: destroyed it. His figure was 10 to the power of
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: negative 13 seconds. That is one-tenth of a trillionth of
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: a second. Neural computation operates on time scales of milliseconds,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: which are 10 orders of magnitude slower. The gap between
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: those two numbers seemed to close the door entirely. A
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: quantum state that vanishes in a fraction of a trillionth
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: of a second cannot do the work that takes a
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: millisecond to complete. Hameroff did not concede. He and colleagues
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: argued that Tegmark's model used simplified assumptions. that anesthetic binding
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: to tubulin dimers might stabilize coherence, and that topological features
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: of the microtubule's internal structure might provide a degree of
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: protection against decoherence. The debate settled into a stalemate that
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: lasted years, with the mainstream treating ORSH-OR as a curiosity
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: and Hameroff, and a small cluster of collaborators continuing to
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: develop it, Then something happened that changed the terms of
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: the debate, though not in a way that settled it.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: In 2007, Graham Fleming's group at the University of California, Berkeley,
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: published results from experiments on photosynthetic light harvesting complexes in
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: green sulfur bacteria. They were studying how plants and bacteria
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: capture photons and transfer that energy to the reaction center
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: where photosynthesis actually occurs. The transfer is remarkably efficient, far
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: more efficient than any classical model predicted. What Fleming's team
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: found was that the energy was not hopping randomly from
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: molecule to molecule, but moving through multiple pathways simultaneously in
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: a quantum superposition, a phenomenon called quantum coherence. and that
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: this coherence lasted for timescales of hundreds of femtoseconds at
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: room temperature in a warm biological system. The finding was
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: unexpected enough that it launched quantum biology as a recognized discipline.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: If quantum coherence could survive in a photosynthetic complex at
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: body temperature, the blanket dismissal of quantum effects in biology
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: needed at minimum to be reconsidered. Around the same time,
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: evidence began accumulating that migratory birds use a quantum mechanical
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: process to navigate. The leading model involves cryptochrome proteins in
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: the bird's retina, where light creates pairs of electrons whose
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: quantum spins remain entangled, long enough to be influenced by
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: the Earth's magnetic field, providing directional information. This is quantum
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: entanglement operating inside a biological organism at body temperature. These
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: findings did not prove ORCHOR. They proved that quantum biology
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: was real. that the warm, wet interior of a living
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: cell was not necessarily the enemy of quantum coherence, that
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Tegmark's calculation had implied in its simplest form. In 2015,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: Matthew Fisher, a physicist at UC Santa Barbara, proposed a
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: completely distinct mechanism for quantum effects in the brain. Fisher
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: focused on phosphorus atoms. which are abundant in the brain
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: in the form of molecules called Posner clusters, calcium phosphate
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: structures that can form naturally in biological fluids. He argued
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms in these clusters
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: could maintain quantum entanglement for timescales long enough to influence
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: neural firing, possibly hours or longer under the right conditions.
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: Fisher's proposal is careful and testable, and it is entirely
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: separate from ORC-OR, sharing only the premise that quantum effects
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: might matter for cognition. Then in 2023, a research group
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: led by Anirban Bandiopadhyay at the National Institute for Materials
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: Science in Japan published experimental results reporting quantum vibration signatures
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: in microtubules consistent with predictions made by ORC-OR. The measurements
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: used a technique sensitive to mechanical oscillations at extremely small scales,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: and the frequencies detected matched those the ORSH-OR framework had forecast.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: The result drew attention. It has not yet been independently
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: replicated in full, which is the step that would move
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: it from a reported finding to an established one, and
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: the scientific community is appropriately cautious until that happens. Where
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: does this leave the question? The honest answer, as of
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: the middle of the 2020s, is that quantum effects in
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: biology are confirmed and real. They occur in photosynthesis. They
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: very likely occur in bird navigation. Whether they occur in
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: neurons in a way that is causally relevant to consciousness
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: remains genuinely open, not answered in either direction. Open. The
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: tools to test it precisely are only now becoming available,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: and the experiments being designed to probe microtubule coherence in
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: functioning neurons are among the most technically demanding in all
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: of biology. Hameroff, now well into his 70s, continues publishing
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: and speaking with the patience of someone who has spent
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: 50 years being certain the thread leads somewhere, even if
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: the destination keeps receding. What is strange about all of
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: this is what it would mean if ORSH-OR or something
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: like it turned out to be correct. It would mean
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: that the place to look for the self is not
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: in the large-scale patterns of neural activity, not in the
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: connections between regions, not in the genome, but in the
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: physics occurring inside the internal skeleton of individual cells at
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: a scale so small that a human hair beside a
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: microtubule looks like a fallen tree. And even then, what
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: would be found is not a self but a process,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: a quantum collapse, a moment of proto-experience without memory, without continuity,
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: without a name. The quantum door is genuinely not closed,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: but walking through it does not reveal a self waiting
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: on the other side. It reveals another set of processes,
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: smaller and stranger than the ones above them, requiring an
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: observer just as much as everything else does, and offering
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: no more explanation of where that observer came from. Perhaps
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: the problem is not where to look, but when. Some
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: researchers have proposed that the self is not a place
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: or a structure, but a pattern distributed through time, assembled
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: each moment and dissolved each night. And that question leads
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: to one of the strangest laboratories in modern neuroscience, a
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: sleep lab where consciousness is turned off and on like
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: a tide, and researchers sit in the small hours watching
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: for the exact moment it vanishes. Every night, you lose
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: consciousness so completely that if the same thing happened to
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: you in the middle of the afternoon, someone would call
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: an ambulance. Your eyes close. Your body goes still, and
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the continuous stream of experience that has been running since
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: you woke this morning simply stops. And yet the brain
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: does not go dark. Metabolic activity during deep sleep drops
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: by only about 15 to 20% compared to wakefulness. The
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: neurons are still firing. The blood is still moving. The
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: electrical patterns are still complex. Whatever sleep removes from you,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: it is not the brain's activity. It is something far
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: more specific and far more strange than that. Giulio Tononi
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: grew up in Trento, in northern Italy, reading philosophy in
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: the mornings and medicine in the afternoons, not as separate
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: disciplines but as two angles on the same question. He
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: moved to the United States, eventually to the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: and spent the better part of three decades trying to
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: do something that most of his colleagues considered either heroic
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: or foolhardy, which was to give consciousness a number. Not
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: a metaphor, not a description, not a framework, but an
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: actual quantity that could be measured, compared, and tracked as
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: it rose and fell. The quantity he settled on he
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: called phi, the Greek letter, representing integrated information, and the
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: theory built around it is called integrated information theory, first
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: proposed in a 2004 paper and revised through multiple subsequent
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: versions as the data came in and the mathematics tightened.
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: The central claim of the theory is precise enough to
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: be worth stating carefully. Consciousness, in Tononi's framework, corresponds to
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: the amount of information a system generates as a unified
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: whole above and beyond the information generated by its parts
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: taken separately. A system with high phi is one where
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: the parts are so deeply interdependent that you cannot understand
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: what any one part is doing without knowing what all
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: the others are doing. A system with low phi is
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: one where the parts are largely independent each doing its
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: own thing, the whole being nothing more than the sum
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: of the pieces. The theory predicts that high phi means
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: high consciousness, and low phi means low consciousness, or none
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: at all. And here is what the theory says about sleep.
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: In dreamless, slow-wave sleep, phi does not drop because the
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: brain becomes less active. It drops because the brain fragments.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: The regions that were deeply, continuously talking to each other
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: during wakefulness go quiet in relation to one another. The
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: frontal cortex stops integrating signals from the parietal cortex. The
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: thalamus stops broadcasting to wide cortical networks. The brain becomes,
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: in Tononi's description, a set of isolated modules, each processing locally,
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: none sharing its results with the others. The whole collapses
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: into parts. And according to the theory, that is precisely
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: what the disappearance of consciousness is. The most vivid experimental
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: demonstration of this came not from Tononi's laboratory directly, but
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: from Marcello Massimini's group at the University of Milan, working
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: in close collaboration. Massimini's team used a technique called transcranial
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: magnetic stimulation combined with electroencephalography. The idea was to send
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: a pulse of magnetic energy into a small patch of
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: cortex and then watch with EEG electrodes placed across the
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: scalp to see how the signal traveled. In wakefulness, the
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: pulse sends a complex branching ripple across the entire cortex.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: Different regions pick it up, respond, pass it on, integrate
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: it with their own activity. The signal travels far and
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: produces a rich, differentiated pattern that lasts for several hundred milliseconds.
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: The cortex is, in this sense, a single resonant chamber.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: But that is not the strange part. In deep, slow-wave sleep,
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: the same pulse, the same cortex, the same brain... produces
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: a completely different result. The stimulated region responds, but the
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: response stays local. It dies within half a second. It
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: does not propagate. It does not ripple. The surrounding regions
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: simply do not pick it up and carry it forward.
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: The brain has become, as Massimini described it in a
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: 2005 paper in Science, a collection of separate rooms with
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: the doors shut. The structure is all there. The furniture
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: is all there. No one is moving between the rooms.
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: This fragmentation pattern appears in other conditions where consciousness is
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: absent or reduced. General anesthesia produces a remarkably similar signature.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: When propofol or ketamine is administered and the patient loses awareness,
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: The transcranial magnetic stimulation pulse again stays local, again fails
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: to propagate, again finds the door shut. The level of
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: anesthetic required to produce this fragmentation correlates well with the
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: depth of unconsciousness reported when patients recover. What matters, according
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: to this line of evidence, is not how much the
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: brain is doing, but how much of what it is
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: doing is being shared across its full extent. The default
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: mode network, that distributed web of medial prefrontal cortex, posterior
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: cingulate and angular gyrus that Marcus Reichli identified at Washington
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: University in 2001 as the brain's baseline self-referential system, shows
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: a consistent pattern across the sleep cycle. In dreamless deep sleep,
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: it suppresses dramatically, consistent with the loss of self-referential narrative.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: In REM sleep, when dreaming returns, it partially reactivates. The
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: sleeping brain generates stories again, projects a self into those stories,
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: experiences time and agency in other people, though without anchoring
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: any of it to the actual body lying in the bed.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: The dreaming self is is as vivid and as real
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: feeling as the waking self, and it is being generated
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: by many of the same networks, reassembled into something that
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: resembles but is not quite identical to the daytime version.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: What the research has made clear is that falling asleep
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: is not one event. The moment of losing consciousness is
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: not a switch being thrown. Studies tracking slow wave activity
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: across the cortex in high-density EEG recordings have shown that
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: different regions of the cortex descend into slow wave sleep
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: at different times. The frontal regions often lead. Parietal regions follow.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: Occipital regions may hold on to faster rhythms somewhat longer.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: The process takes between 5 and 20 minutes on average
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: and proceeds unevenly. like a city going dark, not all
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: at once but district by district, the lights in one
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: neighborhood going out while another is still fully lit. Consciousness
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: does not end, it frays, it thins, it withdraws from
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: the regions that integrate most broadly first, and the last
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: scraps of awareness are narrow, local, dim, and then gone.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: This matters for the question this entire night is following.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: Because if the self is built from the integration of
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: information across the whole cortex, and that integration dissolves gradually
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: and incompletely each night, then the self does not have
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: a clear moment of ending. It has a process of disassembly.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: And in the morning, the process runs in reverse. The
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: slow wave activity recedes, the regions reconnect. The default mode
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: network reactivates, narrative resumes, and the person in the bed
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: opens their eyes, recognizes the room, and claims continuous identity
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: with the person who fell asleep. That claim deserves more
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: attention than it usually gets. The claim of continuity across
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: sleep depends entirely on memory. The waking brain reaches back
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: through a gap it cannot observe from within and declares
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: that the person before the gap and the person after
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: it are the same. The brain that was fragmented through
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: the night, that was in no position to witness its
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: own fragmentation, in no position to verify or deny that
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: anything persisted through it, simply resumes and asserts continuity. And
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: because the assertion is never contradicted by experience, because there
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: is no felt gap, no sensation of interruption, the claim
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: seems obvious. Of course you are the same person. You
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: remember being that person. But that memory is being generated
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: now by a brain that was not present for the
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: interval it is bridging. Tononi, when asked what he thinks
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: survives sleep, tends to give an answer that is careful
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: almost to the point of being unsettling. He does not
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: say that you survive. He says that the system reassembles
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: into a configuration that has access to the memories and
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: dispositions of the previous configuration, and that this is what
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: we mean by personal continuity. It is not that the
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: self persists through sleep the way a stone persists through
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: the night. It is that the self is remade each
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: morning from the materials the sleeping brain preserved, the memories,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: the motor habits, the emotional tone, the sense of name
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: and body and history, and the remade self, finding all
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: those materials in order, concludes without hesitation that it never left.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: A flame extinguished and relit is not the same flame.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: The matter is different, the energy is different, the photons
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: are different. It is a new flame that began where
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: the old one ended, in the same wick, with the
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: same fuel, shaped by the same conditions. Whether it is
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: the same flame is a question about what you think
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: flames are, not a question about physics. Whether you are
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: the same person who fell asleep last night is a
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: question of exactly the same kind. If the self is
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: remade each morning rather than maintained through the night, then
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: perhaps what we call the self is at its core,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: a memory system, a story assembled about a past that
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: is already gone. told by a narrator who was not
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: present for part of it, believed without question because there
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: is no competing version available. And that thought leads somewhere
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: very specific to a small windowless room in a hospital
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: in Hartford, Connecticut in 1953, where a surgeon named William
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: Beecher Scoville removed a structure from a young man's brain
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: to stop his seizures. and in doing so created the
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: most studied and most quietly devastating memory case in the
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: history of neuroscience. The seizures had been coming since Henri
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: Molaison was a boy. Small electrical storms moving through his
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: brain without warning. And by the time he was 27,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: they had grown severe enough that he could no longer
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: work or live with any ordinary continuity. Scoville's solution was
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: radical and, in the understanding of 1953, not unreasonable. He
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: removed the hippocampus from both sides of Henry's brain, along
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: with surrounding tissue in the medial temporal lobes, a region
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: whose precise function was still poorly mapped. The seizures stopped
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: almost immediately, and Henry Molaison lost his future. Not his
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: future in any metaphorical sense, He lost the ability to
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: build it day by day in the way that every
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: other person does without noticing. Each morning he woke and
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: the world was still approximately 1953. He could hold a
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: conversation for a minute, sometimes two, before the thread dissolved.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: He could read the same magazine article and find it
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: fresh every time. He could meet a researcher, speak with
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: her warmly for an hour, and greet her as a
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: total stranger the next day. This was not confusion. His
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: intelligence was intact. His language was intact. His personality was intact.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: The mechanism that should have been transferring the day's events
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: into lasting memory had simply been removed, and without it,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: today could not reach tomorrow. The woman who spent the
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: most time with this extraordinary fact was Suzanne Corkin, a
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who began working
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: with Henry in 1962 and continued for 46 years until
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: his death in 2008. She wrote later that knowing him
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: was the strangest intimacy she had ever experienced because he
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: greeted her as a stranger every single time. Every visit
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: began the same way. She would introduce herself He would
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: extend his hand. He was unfailingly polite, easy to be with,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: quietly cheerful, and none of it accumulated. There was warmth
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: without history, connection without continuity. Corkin described the experience as
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: if the relationship existed entirely on her side. What Henry's
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: case established, confirmed now by thousands of subsequent neuroimaging and
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: lesion studies, is that the hippocampus, a curved structure tucked
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: into the inner surface of the temporal lobe, roughly the
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: size and shape of a seahorse, is the critical structure
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: for episodic memory consolidation, the transfer of new autobiographical experience
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: from temporary holding into lasting storage. Without it, new episodes
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: simply do not arrive in the library. the books already
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: on the shelves before the surgery remained accessible, Henry could
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: remember his childhood, his family, general facts about the world
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: as it stood before 1953. But nothing published after that
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: date was added. What is stranger, and what bears most
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: directly on the question of where the self lives, is
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: that Henry retained a coherent self throughout. He had opinions.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: He had preferences. He had a characteristic gentleness that everyone
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: who met him remarked upon. He recognized himself in photographs
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: up to a point in his past. When shown a
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: photograph taken after his surgery, a face that had aged
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: past the version he knew, he could not identify it
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: as himself. The self he inhabited stopped updating its own
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: image at 1953. and yet the self continued. It was present, consistent, warm,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: and entirely without a narrative of recent events. The continuous
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: story of daily life had been severed from the experience
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: of being someone, and the experience of being someone had survived.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: The Estonian-Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tolving, at the University of Toronto,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: spent the 1980s and 1990s drawing the boundary more precisely.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: His distinction between episodic memory, which is autobiographical and time-stamped,
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: the memory of what happened to you on a specific
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: occasion in a specific place, and semantic memory, which is
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: general factual knowledge decoupled from personal experience, turned out to
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: be not merely a conceptual distinction but a neurological one.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: These systems dissociate. Patients exist who have lost one while
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: retaining the other. A person can know that Paris is
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: the capital of France without remembering ever learning that fact.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: A person can remember vividly walking into a specific room
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: while being unable to retrieve any factual knowledge associated with it.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: Henry had lost episodic memory almost completely. His semantic memory
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: remained largely functional. He knew words. He knew how the
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: world worked in a general sense. He could reason. What
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: he could not do was place himself in time, could
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: not say what he had done yesterday or an hour ago,
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: could not locate the self in a sequence of personal events.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: But that distinction became more philosophically pointed when the philosopher
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: Derek Parfit examined it from the outside. Parfit, writing at
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: Oxford and publishing his major work, Reasons and Persons in 1984,
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: asked what exactly we mean when we say that the
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: person who wakes tomorrow is the same person who fell
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: asleep tonight. His approach was to construct thought experiments that
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: pushed the intuition until it broke. Suppose your brain were
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: gradually replaced, neuron by neuron, with functionally identical artificial components.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: At what point do you stop? Suppose you were teleported
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: by a process that destroyed your original body and assembled
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: an exact copy elsewhere. Is the copy you? Parfit's conclusion,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: argued with great care and genuine mathematical precision, was that
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: personal identity over time is not a deep fact about
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: the world, but a conventional description applied to something that
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: is actually a matter of degree. What matters in survival,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: he argued, is psychological continuity and connectedness, the overlapping chains
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: of memory, intention, belief, and character that link one moment
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: to the next, not some further metaphysical fact of identity itself.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: And crucially, these connections can be more or less strong,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: can hold between multiple successors, and can fade without any
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: sharp boundary marking the end of the person. Henri Molaison was,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: in Parfit's terms, a person whose chain of psychological continuity
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: had been severed at a point and then continued on
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: the near side of the cut, unchanging, consistent, and in
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: some important sense, permanently present in a single moment. He
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: was not less of a person for the absence of
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: the chain. He was rather a demonstration that the chain
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: and the person are not the same thing. Alzheimer's disease
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: makes the same point from a different direction. The disease
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: dissolves autobiographical memory in roughly reverse chronological order. The most
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: recent memories going first, the oldest persisting longest. A person
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: with advanced Alzheimer's may not know what year it is,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: may not recognize their adult children, but may recall with
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: sharp emotion their parents, their childhood home, a summer decades past.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: The narrative self, in other words, is not stored as
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: one unified structure. It is layered. the most recent strata,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: the most vulnerable, the oldest, the most consolidated. What this
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: means is that the self is not an object stored somewhere,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: but a structure continuously constructed outward from its oldest core,
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: and when the construction stops being maintained from the outside in,
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: it retreats toward the foundation. And then there is Korsakoff's Syndrome.
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: which arises from severe thiamine deficiency, often associated with chronic
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: alcohol dependence, and which produces a form of amnesia, where
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: the brain does not simply fail to store new memories,
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: but actively generates false ones to fill the gap. Patients
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: with severe Korsakoff's confabulate, meaning they produce detailed, confident, entirely
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: fabricated accounts of recent events, not as lies, but as
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: genuine memories felt from inside as real as anything. A
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: patient asked what they did that morning will describe a walk,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: a conversation, a meal, none of which occurred with the
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: serene confidence of someone reporting plain fact. The brain, confronted
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: with an absence where memory should be, does not leave silence.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: It constructs a plausible narrative from whatever materials are available,
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: and presents it as recollection. The narrator does not know
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: it is confabulating. It simply narrates. That is, perhaps, the
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: most revealing fact in this entire chapter. The brain's story-making
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: function is not a luxury added on top of memory.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: It is the default operation. It runs even when it
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: has nothing to work with. It will produce a self-narrative
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: from noise, from fragments, from inference, from habit, and it
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: will produce it with full conviction and no disclaimer. Henry
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: Molaison greeted each morning as a stranger to his own
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: recent past and remained entirely himself. The person with Korsakoff's
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: remembers a morning that never happened and is equally entirely themselves.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: The self is not the sum of its memories, but
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: the habit of treating whatever is available as a continuous story.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: And that habit is so deep and so automatic that
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: it persists even when the memories are gone and even
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: when they are invented. If the self is a story
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: the brain tells about itself, then perhaps the most radical
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: way to examine the story is to look at what
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: happens when someone trains for years to stop telling it.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: not through injury or disease, but through deliberate practice. And
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: that takes us somewhere very different from the hospital corridors
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: of 1953, across an ocean and up into the mountains
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: of Bhutan, where a monk is sitting very still inside
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: a brain scanner. In the middle of a state that
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: researchers arrived with their instruments to measure and left, hours later,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: not entirely sure what they had witnessed. Between 2002 and 2010,
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: a group of long-term meditation practitioners were brought into brain
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: imaging facilities in the United States and asked to do
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: something that sounded, on the surface, almost embarrassingly simple. They
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: were asked to sit quietly and be aware. No visualization,
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: no mantra, no objective focus. Just open, unrestricted attention to
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: whatever arose in experience from moment to moment. The researchers
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: had EEG electrodes, fMRI machines, clipboards full of standardized scales.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: They were prepared to measure. What came back from the
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: data did not fit cleanly into any model of consciousness
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: that mainstream neuroscience had constructed up to that point. The
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: man most responsible for bringing these two worlds into the
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: same room was Richard Davidson. a neuroscientist at the University
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: of Wisconsin-Madison who had been carrying a quiet double life
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: for decades. As a graduate student in the 1970s, Davidson
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: had traveled to India and begun meditating. When he returned
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: and told his thesis supervisor, the advice was direct and unambiguous.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Keep that hidden or watch your career narrow. Davidson kept
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: it hidden for years, publishing on emotion, attention, and the
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: brain's asymmetric activity patterns, building a reputation careful enough to
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: protect what he was actually working toward. By the late 1990s,
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: he had enough standing to do what he had always intended.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: He began bringing contemplative practitioners into his laboratory at Wisconsin
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: and measuring what happened to their brains. The collaboration that
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: followed was organized largely through the Mind and Life Institute,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: a body founded in 1987 after a meeting between the
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: Dalai Lama and the cognitive scientist Francisco Varela, designed specifically
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: to create dialogue between Buddhist scholarship and modern science. Through
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: this connection, Davidson gained access to practitioners with extraordinary training histories.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: Among them was Mathieu Ricard, a French-born molecular biologist who
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: had left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: Buddhist monk and had accumulated, by the time he entered
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: Davidson's laboratory, tens of thousands of hours of formal meditation practice.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: When Ricard and other long-term practitioners performed certain meditation practices
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: inside the brain scanner, the data arriving on Davidson's screens
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: was unexpected in a very specific way. During a form
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: of practice called open monitoring meditation, sometimes called choiceless awareness,
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: in which the practitioner sustains broad, non-selective attention without focusing
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: on any particular object, the default mode network showed a
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: dramatic drop in activity. This is the network, spread across
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, and the angular gyrus,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: that earlier chapters of this night have identified as the
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: brain's self-referential processing system. It is the web, that activates
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: when we think about ourselves, plan for our future, remember
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: our past, and weave those strands into the sense of
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: being a continuous person with a narrative running through time.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: In the meditators, that web was going quiet. But that
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: is not the strange part. In most conditions, where the
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: default mode network falls quiet, something else falls with it.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: In dreamless sleep, overall awareness collapses. Under anesthesia, experience is
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: suspended entirely. In the unfocused resting state, quieting the default
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: mode tends to correlate with reduced alertness or mind wandering.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: In the experienced meditators, none of that happened. While the
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: self-referential network dimmed, overall alertness held steady or increased. the
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: practitioners were not becoming less aware. They were becoming aware
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: in a way that no longer seemed to require the
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: usual machinery of self-referential narration. The electrical measurements added a
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: further layer. Gamma band synchrony, high frequency oscillations in the
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: brain running at around 40 cycles per second, is associated
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: with binding together information across distant brain regions into unified
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: conscious moments. In Ricard, and in several other long-term practitioners
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: tested at the time, gamma amplitude during certain meditation states
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: reached levels that Davidson's laboratory had not previously recorded in
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: any subject under any condition. Ricard's gamma readings were the
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: highest ever documented at the time of testing. This was
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: not a brain doing less. It was a brain doing
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: something differently organized, something characterized simultaneously by reduced self-referential narrative
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: and by unusually high integration of information across its regions.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: A 2011 study by Judson Brewer, then at Yale, added
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: a further piece. Brewer's team found that expert meditators showed
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: decreased activity specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex during meditation.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: This region had been identified as central to the sense
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: of being a located, bounded self, the feeling that experience
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: is happening to someone in particular, here at this address.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: Its quieting in experienced meditators was consistent with what the
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: practitioners themselves were reporting. Those reports deserve attention because they
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: are precise. Practitioners did not describe the absence of experience.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: They described the absence of a located experiencer. The experience,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: they said, was clear, often clearer than ordinary waking awareness.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: What was absent was the sense of something looking out
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: from behind the eyes of a particular body, from a
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: particular position, with a particular biography attached. Words used in
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: recorded interviews with practitioners include awareness without edges, consciousness without
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: a center, and knowing that is not owned by anyone.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: These are not descriptions of nothing. They are descriptions of something,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: something that turned out to be difficult to map onto
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: any existing category in consciousness science. The states documented in
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: these studies are not pathological by any standard clinical measure.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: They are not dissociative episodes in which people feel detached
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: from their body or thoughts in a distressing way. They
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: are not hallucinatory. The practitioners remain oriented, responsive, and capable
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: of precise retrospective report. Standard psychiatric instruments do not flag
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: anything abnormal. Yet what is being reported from inside these
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: states is precisely what the neuroscience of self has been
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: trying to locate and cannot find, experience running without the
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: narrative machinery that normally claims it. Davidson spent years trying
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: to place these states within existing frameworks. They are not
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: wakefulness in the ordinary sense because the default mode is
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: too quiet. They are not sleep because awareness and gamma
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: synchrony are too high. They are not anesthesia because experience
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: is not suppressed. They are not the resting state because
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: the brain is doing something far more organized. The working
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: description that emerged, slowly and reluctantly, was that advanced meditation
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: states constitute something like a fourth category, one that does
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: not map cleanly onto the framework built from studying ordinary
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: waking and sleeping brains. That framework, it turned out, had
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: been constructed from a relatively narrow slice of the states
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: a human brain can produce. There is a moment in
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: Davidson's book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, written with
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: Sharon Begley and published in 2012, where he describes a
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: conversation with the Dalai Lama during one of the Mind
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: and Life meetings. The Dalai Lama had listened carefully to
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: everything that Davidson and his colleagues could measure. The EEG readings,
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: the fMRI patterns, the gamma amplitudes, the default mode suppressions.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: He acknowledged all of it. And then he said something
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: that Davidson recorded without fully answering. Science, the Dalai Lama said,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: could measure everything about the container. But the nature of
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: what the container holds was a different kind of question.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: Davidson did not dismiss this. He has written since that
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: the phenomenological reports from practitioners, the careful first-person descriptions of
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: experience without a located center, are data. They are not
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: anecdotes to be explained away by pointing at the neural correlates.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: The neural correlates are real. The reports are also real.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: And the gap between them is the same gap that
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: has been widening throughout this entire night. Because when someone
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: with documented tens of thousands of hours of training, monitored
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: in controlled laboratory conditions, with electrodes on their scalp and
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: a magnetic field measuring blood flow through their brain, reports
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: that experience is fully present but that no one seems
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: to be home at the usual address, that report cannot
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: simply be filed under poor introspective accuracy. It is either true,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: in which case experience and the self that claims ownership
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: of experience are genuinely separable, or it is systematically mistaken
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: in a way that requires explanation. Either answer is remarkable.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: What the meditator's brain seems to show is that the
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: default mode network, the self-referential narrative engine, and the gamma-integrated
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: awareness that characterizes open conscious experience can be partially decoupled.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: The storyteller and the experiencer can, it seems, be pulled apart.
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: When that happens, experience remains. What falls away is the
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: feeling of being a particular someone having it. That possibility,
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: quiet and carefully documented in university laboratories across two decades,
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: points towards something that falls outside the reach of neuroscience alone.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: If experience can persist in the absence of the usual
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: self-referential processing, then the question of what experience actually is
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: becomes pressing in a new way. And that question leads
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: away from brain scans and into a domain where the
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: tools are not electrodes but logic. And the finding was
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: published not in a neuroscience journal, but in a mathematics
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: journal in 1931 by a 25-year-old Austrian who proved, using
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: the structure of formal systems themselves, that any sufficiently complex
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: system contains truths it cannot establish from inside its own boundaries,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: a result so strange and so durable that it has
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: never stopped being strange. His name was Kurt Gödel. and
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: in 1931 he was 25 years old, working in Vienna,
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: and he proved something about mathematics that mathematics itself could
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: not refute. The proof was not a conjecture or an approximation.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: It was a demonstration, carried out inside the formal language
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: of arithmetic, that any system powerful enough to express basic
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: arithmetic must contain true statements that the system cannot prove.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: not statements that are difficult to prove or that require
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: more time or that await a cleverer mathematician. Statements that
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: are genuinely, structurally beyond the reach of the system's own rules,
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: no matter how long the system runs or how carefully
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: it reasons. The paper was titled On Formally Undecidable Propositions
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, and it ended a
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: dream that had occupied the greatest mathematical minds of the
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: previous three decades. That dream belonged largely to David Hilbert,
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: the German mathematician who had proposed at the turn of
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: the 20th century that all of mathematics could be placed
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: on a complete and consistent formal foundation. Complete, meaning every
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: true statement could eventually be proved. Consistent. meaning the system
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: would never prove a contradiction. Hilbert called this program his
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: formalist vision, and by the 1920s, some of the most
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: brilliant people alive were working to achieve it. Gödel' s paper
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: did not merely complicate the program. It proved that what
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: Hilbert wanted was impossible. Any system strong enough to be
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: useful would be either incomplete, containing unprovable truths, or inconsistent
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: capable of proving its own contradictions. The two could not
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: coexist with the power Hilbert needed. The technique Goodell used
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: to prove this was itself one of the most elegant
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: moves in the history of thought. He developed a method
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: of encoding statements about mathematics as numbers within mathematics itself.
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: Every symbol, every formula, every proof could be assigned a
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: unique numerical code, now called a Godel number, in such
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: a way that the system could make arithmetical statements about
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: its own statements. Using this encoding, he constructed a sentence
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: that said, in effect, this statement cannot be proved within
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: this system. If the system is consistent and the statement
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: is false, then it can be proved. which contradicts consistency.
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: If the statement is true, then it cannot be proved,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: which means the system is incomplete. Either way, the system
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: cannot win. The self-referential move was not a trick or
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: a sleight of hand. It was a rigorous arithmetical argument.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: The system had been turned to face itself, and the
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: face it saw was a limit. The second incompleteness theorem
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: followed directly. Not only does every sufficiently powerful formal system
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: contain unprovable truths, it also cannot prove its own consistency
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: without stepping outside its own rules. A system powerful enough
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: to ask whether it is reliable cannot answer that question
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: using only its own resources. It must borrow premises from
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: somewhere beyond itself. For several decades, after 1931, these results
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: lived primarily in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics. Then,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: in 1979, a young cognitive scientist named Douglas Hofstadter published
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: a book called Gödel, Escher, and the theorems escaped their
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: original habitat entirely. Hofstadter argued that the strange loop of
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: self-reference at the heart of Gödel' s proof was not merely
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: a feature of formal systems. It was the very structure
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: of consciousness. The self, he proposed, is the loop a
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: brain makes when it models its own modeling. Just as
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: Gödel' s sentence referred to itself by encoding all sentences numerically,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: the brain refers to itself by building a model of
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: the organism that is doing the building. And just as
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: the self-referential sentence reveals a gap that cannot be closed
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: from within the system, the brain's self-model reveals a gap
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: between the system and any complete account of itself. The
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: self is not a ghost in the machine and not
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: an illusion in the dismissive sense. It is a strange loop,
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: real in its effects, irreducible to any simpler description, and
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: constitutively unable to see its own foundations. Hofstadter wrote with
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: warmth and musical playfulness, weaving the theorems through Bach fubes
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: and Escher prints and Zen koans, and the book won
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: the Pulitzer Prize and sold millions of copies. But the
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: underlying claim was precise. A brain complex enough to model
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: itself will inevitably produce a self-model. that is, from the inside,
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: coherent and felt as real, but that cannot, from any
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: position inside the system, be fully verified or fully explained.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: The searcher and the searched for are entangled in exactly
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: the way Goedel's sentence entangles proof and provability. Roger Penrose
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: took the theorem in a different direction in his 1989 book,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: The Emperor's New Mind. Penrose argued that the human mathematician
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: who recognizes Gödel' s unprovable statement as true is doing something
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: no algorithm can do. Any computer program is itself a
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: formal system, and by Gödel' s theorem, it has its own
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: unprovable truths. But the human mathematician, Penrose argued, can step
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: outside and see them. This capacity to transcend any given
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: formal system suggests that Penrose, that mathematical insight is not
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: computational in the standard sense, and that the brain must
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: therefore be doing something. Physics does not yet fully describe.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: A conclusion that led him back toward quantum mechanics and
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: toward his collaboration with Stuart Hameroff on orchestrated objective reduction.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: The hypothesis explored in the previous chapter of this documentary.
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: The theorem in Penrose's reading, is not just a limit
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: on mathematics, it is a clue about the nature of mind.
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: The objections were immediate and durable. Solomon Pfefferman, one of
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: the leading logicians of the late 20th century, argued carefully
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: and at length that Penrose's reading of the theorem was flawed.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: Human mathematicians are also embedded in systems with limits. They
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: make errors. They disagree. They cannot, in practice, step cleanly
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: outside any formal system any more than a computer can.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: The fact that a person feels they are grasping a
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: truth beyond proof does not mean they actually are. Pfeffermann's position,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: shared by many logicians, is that Gödel' s theorem does not
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: privilege human insight over computation. It shows that both humans
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: and machines are subject to structural limits, and that claiming
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: one can always transcend those limits from outside is precisely
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: the kind of move Gödel' s proof makes impossible. Both arguments
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: have force. Neither has settled the question. And that unresolved
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: tension is itself instructive, because what the debate circles is
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: the same question this documentary has been circling since its
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: opening image. whether there is something about the first-person perspective,
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: the felt sense of understanding, the experience of recognizing a
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: truth that cannot be captured in any third-person description of
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: a system processing information. Applied directly to the question of
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: the self, Gödel' s theorems suggest something specific and strange. Any
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: brain complex enough to model itself and the human brain
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: is vastly more complex than any formal system so far formalized,
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: will generate a self-model that is true from the inside.
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: The person feels like someone. The feeling is coherent and
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: consistent and persistent. But that self-model cannot be fully verified
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: from outside the system, and the system cannot establish the
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: grounds of its own reliability without appealing to premises that
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: are not themselves inside the system. The self, in this reading,
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: is the brain's incompleteness made personal. It is the point
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: where the system runs out of floor. There is a
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: further thought here that arrives quietly but does not leave easily.
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: The self that is looking for itself is using the
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: same apparatus that it is looking for. The tools of
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: introspection are part of the system being introspected. This is
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: not a procedural problem that better instruments could solve. It
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: is a structural feature of any self-referential system. A sentence
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: cannot fully describe its own meaning using only the words
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: it contains. A camera cannot photograph the inside of its
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: own lens while operating. A brain cannot stand outside itself
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: to observe what it is that is doing, the observing,
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: not because there is nothing there, but because the observer
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: and the observed are the same process, running simultaneously, and
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: the process cannot step outside its own running. This is
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: where Gödel' s ghost becomes relevant to everything that came before
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: in this night. the timing gap Libet found between neural
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: preparation and felt authorship, the distributed anatomy Damasio mapped with
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: no central address for the self, the genome with no
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: locus for the person, the quantum vibrations in microtubules that
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: may or may not carry something deeper, the sleeping brain
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: that fragments and reassembles, Henry Molaison waking each morning into
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: a self without a story, The meditator whose experience widens
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: as the self-referential narrator goes quiet. Every one of these
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: findings is an observation made by a system looking at itself.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: And Gödel' s theorem gives a name to the condition that
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: makes the search come back without a captive. The system
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: is complete enough to ask the question and incomplete enough
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: to be unable to answer it from within its own walls.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: The monk in the scanner, the preserved brain in the jar,
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: the oscilloscope clock face, all of them are faces of
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: the same logical situation. A system complex enough to wonder
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: what it is cannot find itself by looking harder. It
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: can only find more of its own looking. This logical
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: limit on self-knowledge is not only a feature of the brain.
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: It may be a feature of any system trying to
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: account for experience from the inside. And that possibility converges
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: with the hardest question in all of philosophy, a question
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: so resistant to every standard scientific method that it has
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: earned its own name and generated its own dense history
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: of careful, earnest, failed solutions. The question of why any
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: physical process feels like anything at all why there is
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: something it is like to be you in this moment,
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: hearing these words in whatever darkness surrounds you tonight. That
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: question has a name, and the room where it was
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: named is the next place this night will take you.
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: In the spring of 1994, a 30-year-old Australian philosopher named
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: David Chalmers walked to a microphone at a conference on
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: consciousness held in Tucson, Arizona, and said something so simple
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: that half the audience thought he had not said anything
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: at all, and the other half felt the floor shift
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: beneath them. He said, in effect, that there are two
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: kinds of problems in the science of consciousness. The first
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: kind is hard in the ordinary way, difficult, requiring careful
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: research and precise measurement, but solvable in principle by the
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: usual methods. How does the brain integrate information from different
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: senses into a single perception? How does attention select some
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: signals over others? How do we recognize a face, retrieve
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: a word, navigate a room in the dark? These are
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: hard problems in the way that cracking a safe is hard. Tedious, demanding,
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: but ultimately a matter of finding the right combination. Chalmers
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: called these the easy problems, not to be dismissive, but
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: to distinguish them from the other kind. The other kind
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: he named the hard problem. And the hard problem is this.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: Even if you solved every easy problem completely, even if
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: you had a perfect map of every neuron, every firing pattern,
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: every information pathway in the brain, you would still not
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: have answered the most obvious question of all. Why does
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: any of it feel like anything? Chalmers grew up wanting
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: to be a mathematician, drawn to the clean certainty of proof,
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: the way a theorem either holds or it does not.
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: When he turned to philosophy of mind as a graduate
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: student in the 1980s, he expected consciousness to yield the
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: same way. He was wrong. And that wrongness became his
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: life's work. His 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, laid out
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: the distinction with the care of someone who had tried
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: every exit from the problem and found each one blocked.
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: The book made him, in the small world of philosophy
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: of mind, something between a celebrity and a provocation. The
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: explanatory gap that Chalmers was naming had actually been glimpsed
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: a decade earlier by a philosopher named Joseph Levine, who
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: in 1983 described the felt impossibility of bridging neural descriptions
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: and subjective experience. Levine pointed out that no matter how
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: precisely you describe the wavelengths of light that stimulate certain receptors,
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: no matter how completely you trace the cascade of signals
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: from the eye through the thalamus to the visual cortex,
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: you would still not have derived the redness of red.
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: The redness is not in the description. It is in
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: the having of the experience. And the gap between those
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: two things does not shrink as the description gets better.
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: It stays exactly as wide. This is where a thought
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: experiment published in 1982 by philosopher Frank Jackson becomes useful.
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: Jackson asked his readers to imagine a scientist named Mary
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: Mary knows everything there is to know about color vision.
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: She knows the exact wavelengths, the photoreceptor sensitivities, the neural pathways,
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: the computational transformations that produce the experience of seeing red.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: She has spent her entire life in a room where
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: everything is black and white, and she has learned all
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: this color science from black and white textbooks on a
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: black and white screen. Then one day, Mary leaves the
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: room and sees a red tomato for the first time.
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: Does she learn something new? Most people, when they sit
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: with this question honestly, feel that she does, that the
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: redness arrives as something she did not have before, something
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: no amount of physical description had handed her. If that
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: intuition is right, then physical facts do not capture everything
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: about experience. There is something left over. And that something
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: left over is what the hard problem is about. Francis
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: Crick and Christoph Koch spent much of the 1990s and
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: 2000s pursuing what they called the neural correlates of consciousness,
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: specific patterns of neural activity that correspond reliably to specific
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: conscious experiences. The program made real and careful progress. Researchers
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: found that certain neurons in the visual cortex fire selectively
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: when a person reports seeing a specific image during binocular rivalry,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: the state in which the two eyes receive different images
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: and the brain alternates between them. They found that awareness
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: of a stimulus correlates with a late, distributed wave of
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: neural activity rather than early sensory processing. This was genuine science,
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: genuine discovery. But critics, including philosophers sympathetic to the whole enterprise,
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: noted a persistent gap in the logic. Finding that a
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: certain brain state correlates with a certain experience tells you
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: which brain states go with which experiences. It does not
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: tell you why those brain states are experienced at all.
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: Rather than simply processed and responded to in the dark,
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: With no inner light, no witness, no felt quality, a
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: thermometer correlated precisely with temperature. That correlation does not give
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: the thermometer the sensation of warmth. Daniel Dennett, the American
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: philosopher who has spent decades as the most articulate opponent
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: of what he calls consciousness mysterianism, argues that Chalmers has
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: simply confused himself and his audiences. Dennett's 1991 book Consciousness Explained,
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: which critics sometimes called Consciousness Explained Away, takes the position
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: that there is no extra fact about experience beyond the
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: functional facts. When you fully explain what the brain does
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: with the light that enters the eye, the wavelength processing,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: the category assignment, the behavioral guidance, You have explained everything
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: there is to explain about seeing red. The sense that
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: something has been left out is itself a cognitive illusion,
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: a trick our minds play on us because introspection is
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: a bad instrument. Dennett's position is bracing, consistent, and defended
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: with great intelligence. It is also, for most people who
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: sit with it carefully, deeply unsatisfying in a specific way.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: The unsatisfaction is not itself an argument against him. But
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: it is notable that the unsatisfaction does not seem to
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: be the product of confusion. It seems to track something real.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: Integrated information theory, developed by Giulio Tononi, the neuroscientist we
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: met in the sleep laboratory, offers a partial answer by
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: making integrated information the thing that consciousness is, rather than
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: merely its correlate. But IIT does not explain why integrated
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: information should feel like anything. It replaces one version of
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: the hard problem with another. Global Workspace Theory, developed by
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: Bernard Bars and extended by Stanislas Dehain, proposes that consciousness
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: arises when information is broadcast widely across the brain in
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: a kind of neural theater. It explains why some information
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: is accessible and reportable while other processing remains unconscious. It
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: says almost nothing about why the information in the spotlight
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: feels like something to the actor standing in it. Predictive
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: processing theories, which frame the brain as a machine constantly
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: generating and updating predictions about sensory input, offer elegant accounts
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: of perception, action, and attention. and sit largely silent on
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: the felt quality of the predictions. Each framework advances the science.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: None of them closes the gap. In 2023, the results
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: of a formal, adversarial collaboration between integrated information theory and
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: global workspace theory were published. The collaboration was designed to
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: identify experiments whose outcomes would count as evidence for one
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: theory over the other. The results were complex. Neither theory
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: won cleanly. The hard problem was not among the things
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: the experiment could test, because the hard problem is not,
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: at its core, an empirical question about which brain areas
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: light up. It is a question about why... Lighting up
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: is accompanied by anything at all. What this night has tracked,
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: from Liebe's oscilloscope clock face to the monk's open awareness,
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: is a consistent pattern. Every time science reaches for the experiencer,
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: it finds experience. Every time it reaches for the observer,
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: it finds observations. The methodology that has given us vaccines,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: space telescopes, and quantum computers is a methodology built on
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: measuring the effects of things on other things. It is
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: exceptionally good at describing relations between objects. It is structurally
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: silent about what it is like to be one of them.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: The hard problem may be hard not because the brain
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: is too complicated to map or because the right theory
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: has not yet been invented. but because the question is
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: asking something that physical description cannot address by design. To
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: describe is to stand outside and report. Experience is what
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: it is like to be inside. Those two orientations may
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: not share a common language, not because language is inadequate,
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: but because there is a real asymmetry in the structure
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: of the question itself. Whether that asymmetry is a temporary embarrassment,
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: something future physics will dissolve the way it dissolved the
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: mystery of heat, or a permanent feature of the universe,
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: something that will remain after every theory is in place,
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: is a question that nobody knows how to answer. The
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: most honest scientists and philosophers in this field say so openly.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: Every failed attempt to dissolve the hard problem points toward
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: one remaining possibility that is both the oldest idea in
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: this conversation and the strangest thing the Knight has yet encountered.
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: The possibility that experience is not something matter produces, but
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: something matter has always had, at every level, all the
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: way down. That possibility has recently moved from the edges
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: of philosophy into the offices of serious physicists and neuroscientists
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: who would have been reluctant to discuss it 30 years ago.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: And that is where this night is going next. Between
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: 2016 and 2024, a small but serious group of physicists
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: and philosophers published papers and books arguing that the most
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: parsimonious solution to the hard problem is also the most
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: vertiginous one. Not that consciousness is produced by a special
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: arrangement of matter, not that it emerges from sufficient complexity,
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: but that experience is not something brains manufacture at all,
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: that it is something matter has always had at every scale,
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: in every particle, all the way down to whatever the
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: bottom of things actually is. Philip Goff grew up in
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: Britain reading popular science books with the quiet expectation that
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: that consciousness would be the next thing to fall to
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: a clean physical explanation, the way life fell to molecular
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: biology and heat fell to the motion of particles. He
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: was a curious and careful student, drawn eventually to philosophy
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: of mind, and it was in graduate school that he
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: began to notice something that he could not argue away.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: Every serious attempt to explain why neural processes are accompanied
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: by experience simply assumed what it needed to prove. The
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: explanations were circular at their core. They described more and
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: more detailed mechanisms and then quietly moved on, as though
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: description at sufficient resolution had somehow answered the question of
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: what it is like to be the thing being described.
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: Goff's 2019 book Galileo's Error makes a specific historical argument.
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: When Galileo laid the foundations of modern science in the
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: early 17th century, he made a methodological decision that was
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: enormously productive and also permanently costly. He proposed, that science
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: should concern itself only with measurable quantities, size, shape, number, motion,
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: and should set aside all qualities, color, taste, warmth, the
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: felt texture of things. That move made physics powerful. It
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: also exiled experience from the scientific picture of the world
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: by design, not by discovery. Goff's argument, is that we
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: have been trying to recover experience from a description that
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: was deliberately built without it, and that the failure is structural,
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: not accidental. The view that Goff defends, and that a
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: growing number of researchers are taking seriously, goes by the
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: name panpsychism. Though the academic literature distinguishes several versions, constitutive
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: panpsychism holds that micro-level experiential properties combine to produce the
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: experience of larger systems. Pan-proto-psychism holds that the fundamental properties
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: are not quite experience but proto-experiential, something that becomes experience
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: when organized in the right way. What both versions share
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: is the claim that some form of inner nature is
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: present in physical reality at every level, not added by brains,
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: not produced by biology, but there from the beginning, the
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: way mass is there, the way charge is there. The
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: objection that arrives immediately, and it is a fair one,
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: is that this sounds like the very thing Galileo was
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: trying to escape— a inner properties to matter, without being able
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: to measure them, looks like a return to the pre-scientific
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: world of spirits and animism, where rivers had moods and
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: stones had intentions. Philip Goffe is aware of this, and
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: the answer he and others give is precise. Panpsychism in
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: its current form does not say that a rock feels
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: boredom or that an electron has opinions. It says that
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: the same physical reality that has mass and charge and
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: spin may also have, at its most fundamental level, some
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: form of intrinsic nature that is proto-experiential. something that does
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: not yet constitute experience, but that, when organized into the
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: staggering complexity of a nervous system, becomes it. The difference
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: between animism and panpsychism is the difference between saying everything
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: has a rich inner life and saying everything has some
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: inner nature, the way a seed has some nature that becomes,
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: under the right conditions, a forest. The hardest internal problem
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: for panpsychism is what philosophers call the combination problem, and
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: the theory's defenders acknowledge it openly. If electrons and protons
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: have some vanishingly small proto-experiential property, how do those micro-level
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: properties combine into the unified, rich, single-perspectived experience of a
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: human mind reading a sentence on a quiet night. Microexperiences
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: do not obviously add up the way micromasses add up.
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: You can weigh a pile of sand by weighing each grain,
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: but it is not clear that you can produce the
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: experience of hearing music by summing the protoexperiences of every
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: atom in an auditory cortex. The combination problem is as
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: genuinely difficult as the original hard problem, and nobody has
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: solved it. What panpsychists say is that the combination problem,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: while hard, is at least a different shape of hard
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: than the hard problem itself. The hard problem asks how
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: you get experience from something that has no experiential properties
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: at all. The combination problem asks how you get complex
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: experience from something that has simple experiential properties. The second question,
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: while still formidable, does not contain the same absolute explanatory gap.
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: And then the adversarial collaboration results of 2023 arrived, and
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: the room got quieter. Integrated information theory and global workspace theory,
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: the two dominant scientific frameworks for consciousness, had agreed to
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: a formal test. Neither won cleanly. The data fit neither
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: theory fully, and the scientific community was left in a
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: position it rarely occupies so publicly, genuinely uncertain at the
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: level of the experiment itself. The universe may never have
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: been without experience. The self that cannot be found inside
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: the brain may not be in the brain alone because
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: it was never only in the brain which would make
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: the long search not a failure but a correct result.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 1: The question was always too small for the place being searched.
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: All of these threads now need to be gathered. The
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: night has moved from the oscilloscope clock face to the
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: anatomy of the brain to the genome's three billion silent letters,
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: from the hollow cylinder inside a single neuron to the
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 1: sleeping city fragmenting at different hours, from the man who
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: woke each morning without yesterday to the monk whose gamma
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: waves climbed off the chart, from the logician who proved
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: that no system can see its own floor to the
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: philosopher who named the gap that no mechanism has closed.
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: It is time to bring every image back into one
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: room and offer whatever answer the evidence honestly allows. The
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: destination is the final chapter, and it carries a single
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: question that has been patient all night. If every search
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: returned without a captive, what does that tell us about
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: the nature of the thing being searched for? That question
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: does not dissolve in the dark. It opens wider. and
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: the opening is where the next chapter begins. That question
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: does not dissolve in the dark. It opens wider, and
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: the opening is where the next chapter begins. Philip Goff,
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: sitting in his office at Durham University, described the founding
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: error of modern science this way. When Galileo and Descartes
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: built the framework that became physics, they made a deliberate
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: choice to strip qualities from nature and leave only quantities. Color, warmth,
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: the ache of a minor key. These were moved from
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: the world into the mind. declared secondary, subjective, not the
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: business of science. Physics would deal with mass, charge, position, spin,
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: everything measurable, everything that could be written as a number.
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: That move was spectacularly productive. It gave us Newton and
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: Maxwell and Einstein. It gave us the transistor and the
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: genome sequencer and the radio telescope. But Goff's argument developed
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: quietly over 20 years and then stated plainly in his
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: 2019 book Galileo's Error, is that the move also made
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: consciousness permanently mysterious, because consciousness is precisely the thing that
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: was put outside the door at the beginning, and science
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: has been searching for it inside a room it was
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: never allowed to enter. What panpsychism in its careful modern
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: form suggests is not that stones dream or that rivers grieve,
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: It suggests something narrower and stranger, that some form of
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: proto-experiential property, something that is not yet human feeling, but
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: is the precondition of it, is as fundamental to physical
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: reality as charge or spin. That experience is not late arriving,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: not the crown of biological complexities. but a basic feature
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: of the world that complexity organizes into the particular richness
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: of a human mind. The way complexity organizes hydrogen and
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: oxygen into weather. The combination problem remains. How proto-experiential flickers
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: at the quantum or molecular scale combine into the unified
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: warmth of a conscious afternoon is not solved and anyone
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: who says otherwise is moving too fast. But the direction
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: is worth holding. If experience is fundamental rather than emergent,
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: then the long failure to locate the self inside the
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: brain is not a failure at all. It is a
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: correct experimental result. The search returned empty because the self
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: was never stored in one place, any more than Tuesday
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: is stored in one place. It is a pattern. a relation,
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: a loop that the universe runs when matter becomes complex
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: enough to turn back on itself and ask where it is.
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: The answer, as every chapter of this night has suggested
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: in its own language, is everywhere it looks. So here
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 1: is where the night brings everything it has carried. Picture
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: the oscilloscope clock face from 1983. The hand is sweeping.
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: a bright point tracing its circle. And somewhere in that room,
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: Benjamin Libet's volunteer is watching it, waiting for the urge
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: to move, noting the position of the hand at the
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: moment the decision feels like theirs. 350 milliseconds before that moment,
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: the brain had already begun. That gap, small enough to miss,
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: large enough to hold the entire question, turned out to
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: be the size of the mystery this night has been measuring.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: moved to the university hallway and the glass jar sitting
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: on a shelf, the preserved brain inside it smaller than
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: anyone expects, gray and ordinary in the fluorescent light, with
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: no room marked, no chamber set apart, no address where
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: the person who owned it could be said to have lived.
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: Antonio Damasio spent years looking for that room and found
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: instead a process, a signal moving between body and cortex,
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: a narrator assembled fresh each moment from the body's own
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: report of itself, not a firefly in a jar, weather
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: in the shape of a face. Then the cold light
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: of the year 2000 and the paper printout of base
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: pairs unrolling across a laboratory floor. three billion letters. Francis
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: Collins stood in the East Room and named it the
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: Language of Life, and the decade that followed showed that
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: the language contained no sentence that read, This is a person.
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: No signature on the cover of the score. The genome
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: encodes the instrument. It has never encoded the musician.