[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] If you have someone in a vegetative state and use this device and detect that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness, if you pull the life support on that picture, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening?
[00:00:22] [SPEAKER_00] We now know that a quarter of these patients, one out of four of these patients, is actually conscious. They're there. They're present. They're just not able to signal it. If you lose the cerebellum, it's not good for you. Cerebellum is there to do sensory motor coordination among others. But people never complain that a lesion in the cerebellum never complain about loss of consciousness. It doesn't seem to relate to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. Everything is mental. Everything is phenomenal. Everything ultimately is consciousness.
[00:00:52] [SPEAKER_00] I got my PhD in theoretical physics, but I studied for the past 40 years brains. I'm a neuroscientist. I was for 25 years a professor at Caltech, California Institute of Technology. I had a lab studying the biophysics of the brain.
[00:01:06] [SPEAKER_01] You have a startup, right, that's working on an instrument or instruments that would be able to detect consciousness in people who are otherwise considered brain dead. How far along have you gone in that? Have you abandoned that?
[00:01:28] [SPEAKER_00] Oh, no, no, no, no. As I said, it's just independent of what you believe about the metaphysics of consciousness. There's no question that we have now tools, so this was developed over the last 20 years, techniques to query the brain. Essentially, you do it. You hit the brain using magnetic pulses. And then you're listening to the echoes using EG, electrical brain waves, right?
[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_00] So you send in a pulse of energy. You essentially, you know, it's like taking a bell and hitting it with a hammer and then listening to it. And a conscious brain, whether that person is awake like you or I, or in a REM sleep where the person is experiencing, or under a high dose psychedelic where they may be immobile but highly conscious. The complexity of this brain wave, so you can compute how complex it is called Lempel-Ziv complexity.
[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_00] And in conscious people, it's always above a threshold. In unconscious people, whether they are regular people, regular folk, but they're anesthetized, or they're truly in a very deep coma where it's unambiguous that there is no activity, the brain complexity is very low. In the simplest case, your EG is flat lined. I mean, that's extreme case of very low complexity.
[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_00] And so we've developed this tool now and started this company that you mentioned called Intrinsic Powers. We were working with people at MGH, at Harvard, and in Madison, and in Columbia, trying to put this into the workflow.
[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_00] So, because what happens today is if you or I have a car accident, or hemorrhage, or cardiac arrest, and you're alive, you know, someone calls 9-11, you get into the ICU, you're on life support now, on ventilator. You might be there, you know, unresponsive, eyes open. So, these people were called vegetative states, but as I said, are now called behavioral unresponsive.
[00:03:34] [SPEAKER_00] And if you remain in this state for three or four or five days, then the clinical team will initiate discussion with the family and says, is this what they would have wanted? And here, in the developed world, between 70 and 90% of the time, family and doctors decide no, and they pull support.
[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_00] But we now know that a quarter of these patients, there was a very large paper last year published in the New England Journal of Medicine, roughly a quarter depending on the demographics and all of that, one out of four of these patients is actually conscious. They're there, they're present. And so, we want to know that because then I can give, this device can give the clinical team and the family one additional bit, literally it's one bit.
[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_00] Are they there or are they not there? And that can then help further inform, you know, what the doctor and what the family wants to do with that information. But this, if you ever called upon this to make this call for a loved one, right, this is the most consequential decision you can make. It's very existential. Are they there or are they not there? And should we pull, you know, should we pull the plug or not?
[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_00] And so, this is where this abstract mind-body problem hits the, you know, the rubber hits the road.
[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And let me just, I don't want to get lost on that, but how far have these experiments gone? If you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state and you use this device and detect that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness.
[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_01] If you pull the life support on that patient, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening? Or do you see any change in that complexity?
[00:05:41] [SPEAKER_00] No, because I mean the technique is, so it takes an hour, an hour and a half to establish. And then of course, you know, you'll have to make this, you make this information available to the doctors and ultimately to the team. And then it takes, you know, a lot of back and forth. And it's, it's complicated, Craig, because it's a very complicated question and we cannot help.
[00:06:09] [SPEAKER_00] So there's three, when you get that call, there are three things you want to know. Are they alive first? Are they there? And then lastly, are they going to recover? And you know, right now we can't, we can't say that very well, whether or not the fact that they're conscious is encouraging, even though they can, they may not be able to respond. Right? So, um, it's, it's a very difficult decision to make.
[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_00] Do you think, I mean, imagine yourself, if you are, if you're in this situation, unable to communicate and it's unclear, depends of course on your age. If you're 20, it's much better than if you're, you know, 60 or 70. What would you like to do? Do you want to be forever in this, in this state where you can communicate, but you're conscious? And then, you know, now your brother or your sibling, I mean, or your parent or your child has to make this decision.
[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_00] So it's a very complicated decision environment. Was that work concurrent with your work with Craig? Craig. Yeah. So this was primarily done. Um, so we, you know, it's why did this work on patients sort of widely published done over the last 20 years by, by Giulio Tononi and then, um, an Italian neuroscientist neurologist, Marcello Massimini. Yeah.
[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_00] And that went on at the same time as we, as we, you know, try to push this empirical program in people and in, in lab animals to study the footprints of consciousness in, um, in the brain. And as you mentioned, I worked from, for 14 years with Francis Crick, the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist who co-discovered the double helical nature of DNA. And then shifted with his interest from molecular biology to consciousness.
[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_00] A purely empirical program that by the way, does not depend on whether you're a physicalist or dualist or a, uh, uh, uh, pampsychist or, you know, an, an, an idealist. It's just, we just want to know the, the, the, the footprints of consciousness, how to study them, how to measure them, detect them that we could then use for, for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. So as scientists, you are a physicalist.
[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_00] Well, it used to be known as materialist as in until early the 20th century, an ancient metaphysical position. Democritus is one of the first pre-Socratic Greek thinker. He famously said, all there is, is atoms in the void. The other challenge with physicalism has always been what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a heart problem. Yeah.
[00:08:57] [SPEAKER_00] To explain why is it that three pounds of brain matter like this, and in principle, it's just like another piece of matter like this. Okay. This is hard matter or semi-hard matter. This is, you know, a soft matter, squishy matter, but in principle, it constituted out of atoms and molecules and electrons and all of that interacting by the laws of quantum mechanics. Nothing special here. Yet this thing can love and hate. Well, where does that come from?
[00:09:23] [SPEAKER_00] And even if you take it down, even if you carry out the program that Francis Crick and I initiated in the, in the early 1990s of identifying for anyone experience, what are the exact neurons in what state do they have to be? Do they have to involve microtubule or superposition or whatever you want to come up with? Why is it that this particular mechanism, you know, it's a mechanism like any other mechanism, like a fancy Swiss clock.
[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_00] Why is it that this mechanism can feel pain or feel pleasure or feel boredom? I mean, it's a complete non sequitur, right? On the one hand, you have the laws of physics. On the other hand, you have, you have experiences, pain, pleasure, boredom, anger. You know, they're linked, you know, just a single hit on their head will, will, will tell you, yeah, the brain is, if you hurt the brain, you're going to, you know, you're going to seriously interfere with conscience. But why should they be linked?
[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_00] There's nothing in the laws of science that tells us matter can love and hate. So that's, those are the two, the two challenges. And I mean, they've been around for several decades now. And, and of course, I lost the famous bet against David Chalmers. Yeah. Because we had not discovered them after 25 years, but he agrees with me, they will be discovered. Discovering the footprints of consciousness in the brain is another way to think about it.
[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_01] The neural correlates exactly what was lighting up at the time that you were feeling or experiencing a certain phenomenon. And, at what point did you decide that that wasn't going to be enough? I mean, I guess you knew that wasn't going to be enough, but you, you thought it was useful in the absence of some other empirical experiment that you've done.
[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_00] Well, if, assuming we had the, that, that is a perfectly feasible project and that will be immensely useful. Because once I know what the footprints are, I can look for them. I can decide, for example, most people, most experts who concern themselves would assume that the third trimester fetus probably is conscious. Well, if I have the NCC, I can say, well, are they there? Or when do they occur?
[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_00] Are they present already in the second trimester or maybe only in the third trimester? What about here? I have a dog, a Bernice Mound dog. What about dogs? You know, and, and I can, so, this is an empirical program tracking the footprints of consciousness that will be immensely practical importance to the term consciousness, to measure it, to maybe quantify it. In, in normal people, in people with various diseases, disorders, psychotic disorders, animals, etc.
[00:12:08] [SPEAKER_00] So it's useful. But of course, it does not explain why this particular, these particular thing in this configuration gives rise to red and slightly different to orange or to an orgasm or to toothache.
[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_01] What point did you decide that, that you were never going to close that gap between correlation and causality and switch to a form of panpsychism? Was it a moment or is it, was it?
[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_00] What happened to me is slightly different. I had two extraordinary experiences that I described in my last book, Then I and Myself the World. One of which was sort of a near-death experience in the first week of the, of the pandemic where Christoph was gone, the world was gone, everything was gone except this light, this very bright light.
[00:13:08] [SPEAKER_00] Some people describe it as a tunnel and a feeling of, of terror and ecstasy, just those three things. Terror, ecstasy, a bright light. There was no space. All of space had convulsed itself into this single, this single point, this singularity. There was no time. Passage of time that's always with us, collapse, that moment, this experience didn't last too long or too short. It simply was. It was probably under 10 minutes by the clock.
[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_00] And there was no self. There was no Christoph. There was nothing there. You know, the usual distinction between observer and observed, knower and knowing, apprehender and apprehended. All of that was gone. And so it's what some Buddhists often call a non-dual experience.
[00:13:54] [SPEAKER_01] Yep.
[00:13:55] [SPEAKER_00] It wasn't particularly pleasant. It was terror and ecstasy.
[00:13:59] [SPEAKER_01] It wasn't the result of a psychedelic experience.
[00:14:02] [SPEAKER_00] It was something I, yeah, I prefer not to talk about. But what it taught me is two things. That A, the sense of self. You know, we all have a sense of self, explicit or implicit. Some people have it weaker. They constantly belittle themselves. You know, they constantly think, oh my God, everyone hates me. And it's always, we all live in this gravitational field of planet ego. It's always about me, me, me. Explicitly, implicitly.
[00:14:31] [SPEAKER_00] But then just like an astronaut on a special condition can become weightless and floating out of space. So under certain conditions, including psychedelics, of course, you can totally lose itself. Right. And what you realize then, that self-consciousness is just a subset of all possible experiences. The fact that I know I'm me, I know what I had for breakfast, I know I'm going to die one day.
[00:14:54] [SPEAKER_00] All of that is consciousness, but you can also, if you don't have that, like in that stage, whatever remains is clearly highly conscious. And then it took away the fear of death, which is not uncommon. But then I had a second experience, but it didn't change fundamentally my metaphysics, the way I think about the world.
[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_00] That happened several years later, three years ago, when I had a mystical experience, where again, you lose a sense of self. You lose where you are and what you are. And you feel, I mean, it's very strange to put it in words, you feel you become one with everything. You merge with the universe.
[00:15:42] [SPEAKER_00] And I mean, the title of this book, Then I Must Help The World comes from this, it's a translation from the German, When Selbst dann bin ich die Welt, which is what Tristan in Isolde, in Richard Wagner, you know, Pornos Opera sing. When they have this mystical experience where they become one, the two, the lovers become one, but they also become one with the universe. So that's what they sing.
[00:16:08] [SPEAKER_00] Then under the most rapturous music composed in the Western canon, they become one, whatever remains become one with everything. And that is, you know, profoundly transformative. Because, you know, once I came out of it, I don't know how long it lasted, probably under an hour.
[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_00] It's just, I mean, you now have direct acquaintance, I had direct acquaintance with what I felt was like, what is truly underlying everything is mental. That I realized, oh my God, everything is mental. Everything is phenomenal. Everything ultimately is consciousness. And this material universe in which we exist ultimately is a manifestation of something mental.
[00:16:57] [SPEAKER_00] So this is known as idealism, right? The belief that, you know, most of Western mind-body metaphysics revolves around these two poles, the physical and the mental. And, you know, since the Greeks, most people say, well, the only pole that really exists, it's the physical. And everything else has to somehow emerge out of that in ways we don't understand. Or some people say, no, it's both. So that's your classical dualist. Most people are probably in this country, probably dualist, right?
[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_00] So that there's clearly the brain and matter and all of that, but then there is my soul, you know, and that's separate. Yeah. And then, of course, and then there are idealists. Well, then there are also panpsychists like Geoff you interviewed. And then there are also idealists like Arthur Schopenhauer, probably the best known early 19th century German philosopher. And then modern idealists like Bernardo Castro, who says what ultimately exists is mental. The mental follows laws.
[00:17:52] [SPEAKER_00] It's not supernatural. So it doesn't imply existence of a god or hierarchies of god, anything like that. It just says, finally, what exists or truly exists is something, it may be very primitive. It may be evolving under some sort of instinctual law or something. And that gives rise itself to and to the material. And that's, to me, that's exactly what it felt like when I had this experience.
[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_01] I experimented with psychedelics when I was young. I'm 70 now. And it very much informed my view of the world or view of reality or view of civilizations, structures and all of that. Well, just in the way that you're describing the breakdown of a sense of self and understanding,
[00:18:54] [SPEAKER_01] understanding, not a logical understanding, but the feeling that everything in the universe is all one thing. And so you're all made of the same stuff. Yes. And so what interests me about reading about your research, you identify in the Crick work,
[00:19:19] [SPEAKER_01] or maybe it happened after the Crick work, the areas of the brain responsible for the sense of self, for the experience of the self. And that self organizes perception in a way that you can operate in the world, manipulate the world. But if you remove that sense of self, which you have a physical correlate, then you're without that structure.
[00:19:48] [SPEAKER_01] And that gives you the feeling of oneness. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and the resulting experience? Yes.
[00:20:03] [SPEAKER_00] So a physicalist would say, okay, great, great that you had this experience, congratulations. But it's ultimately just your brain. In the case of psychedelics, yeah, so it's your brain on drugs. Okay, so all it teaches us that brains can reach extraordinary states. Now, if we just stay with that for a moment, what is still extraordinary are the fact that many of these experiences can be very transformative in a positive, almost always in a positive way.
[00:20:32] [SPEAKER_00] You know, we know this going back from psychedelics, going back to the research at John Hopkins, where people that have stage four cancer that, you know, where medicine has given up, we can't really do anything anymore. They're terrified of dying. They get a high dose psychedelics and then they totally transform themselves. It doesn't cure them of the cancer. They will still die, but they are now willing. They have this completely transformed psyche. And we know, for instance, you know, there are hundreds of clinical trials,
[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_00] both here and abroad, doing psychedelics for, you know, treatment resistant depression, major depressive disorder, generalizing, NID, PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. And we know through these questionnaires, MEQ-30, the mystical experience questionnaire, that the extent to which people have a mystical experience in these trials directly correlates to the extent that they derive therapeutic benefit. So in other words, it's quite likely when that patient who's depressed has a mystical experience,
[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_00] in this case, induced by psychedelic, no matter the underlying metaphysics, will help them. And they will, they might fall out of, they might not even score as a depressed anymore. You know, not immediately afterwards, you know, this is not an instantaneous effect, but then you think about it, you know, you cannot help. I mean, you must probably still, Craig, think back about your experience, right? That you had 50 years ago. So because you constantly think about it and, and, and you talk with other people about it,
[00:22:01] [SPEAKER_00] you read about it, maybe you have a therapist and you talk to them about it, and slowly it changes your entire life and your attitude, your motivation. So independent of the metaphysics, the fact that an experience that typically lasts under an hour, that's, you know, you can't really control very well, right? And can have this transformative experience itself is, I mean, you know, nothing short of miraculous. It's even more challenging to think about when you have near death experiences.
[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_00] So near death experiences are very similar in character to these mystical experiences. People have showed that. And these, of course, typically occur in a highly traumatic circumstances. So for instance, you have an in-hospital cardiac arrest, right? Or you're, you're near drowning or on the battlefield or a car accident where you bleed out. So these are, you know, but all of our knowledge, they should be massive causing massive trauma, but instead people radiate this equanimity and they're content.
[00:23:00] [SPEAKER_00] They say it's the most meaningful experience I've ever had in my life. It totally changed my attitude to my loved ones. So no matter what the underlying metaphysical implication is, for first, they are very, they're among the most meaningful and profound experiences in that we know of period.
[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. One thing that fascinated me in one of your talks, you, you talked about that under psychedelics, the electrical impulses slow down in the brain, where you would expect them to do opposite.
[00:23:40] [SPEAKER_00] I think we're still very early on in terms of the neuroscience of psychedelic, despite what press announcement keep on promising. We're still in very, very early days. We still don't understand what they do to the brain. There are these two obvious interpretations. One is, okay, ultimately it's just your brain. Nothing else to see. Move on. Move on. Nothing to see. Or you can say, no, what happened in those circumstances?
[00:24:08] [SPEAKER_00] And that's the road I'm trying to, I'm going down. Somehow your own, you, so usually we are, we are, we have this boundary between my consciousness and your consciousness. I don't experience you directly. Right? Yep. To find out how you feel, I have to ask Craig, how do you feel? And you can be with your partner, your wife or your spouse, you can, your bodies can physically penetrate, but you still don't know what she is or he is thinking.
[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_00] Ultimately, all you have is their words and their gestures, right? It's always indirect. So we, we, we, we, we live in a world where we each have our own planets, if we want our own bubbles, but under certain circumstances, this, this boundary dissolves and suddenly you can, you now become part of this greater reality.
[00:24:59] [SPEAKER_01] You know, when I was younger and I did a lot of reading about the split brain. Yeah. And to me, naively, uh, that age that settled it for me. Well, that's the end of dualism that, uh, you know, you split the brain, you have two consciousnesses more or less opaque to each other. Yes.
[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, how do you reconcile that with, with, with the idea that, uh, consciousness is a fundamental property?
[00:25:34] [SPEAKER_00] Leaving aside for a moment, split brains. I don't right now access your conscience. I don't access this universal consciousness, mine at large, as Huxley said, right? Assuming it exists. Why is that? Well, because typically in order for me to survive, I need to care, you know, evolutionary. I need to worry about me and my genes and my kids, right? Well, that doesn't work if I feel I'm one with everything. Right? Evolutionary. I mean, that's a wonderful feeling, but that doesn't give rise to competition that you need, right?
[00:26:04] [SPEAKER_00] Cause I need to struggle. My genes need to survive it to make it into the next generation. So there are lots of reasons why, why my consciousness is isolated from this universal consciousness. But on a certain condition, these mystical experience somehow possibly when the brain's activity is turned very, very, very low due to psychedelics, because we know psychedelic the press a lot of activity, you might be able to access this, this sort of more universal,
[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_00] but usually you do not. And so now we come to split brain. What's I, I granted. So these were done at Caltech right by Roger Sperry, you got the Nobel Prize for them. You take a brain, you cut it along the midline here, the corpus callosum, 200 million fibers, and then you have two, two consciousness. This one speaks, this one can sing and hum, but it's also conscious. And although, as you said, they're opaque, although they sit, the brain sits, you know, one centimeter away from the other, they don't know about each other.
[00:27:02] [SPEAKER_00] They may as well be at the dark side of the moon. And there are all sorts of conflicts that you can see in the clinic that arise because of that. So each one has its own dissociative boundary that dissociates it from its neighbor. Just, you know, just one, you know, a tiny, tiny gap, uh, um, away. But that's the expense of all of our lives. I'm isolated from you and from any other conscious, uh, it's only under special
[00:27:27] [SPEAKER_00] circumstance that we can use this, this sort of boundary and access everything else. So that the split brain wouldn't really make that more challenging than just to explain in general, how is it if mine is truly universal, why don't I access it all the time?
[00:27:45] [SPEAKER_01] So the, the, you, you split the substrate and, and it channels two separate.
[00:27:51] [SPEAKER_00] Well, now you have to, because now you have two smaller brains effectively. That's what you're having. Yeah. You have two smaller cortices. You can't do it in, you know, you can't quarter it. You can't do it indefinitely. You can only bisect it in, in, uh, in this way. Yeah. You have two independent, you have two independent, um, related experience that we know very little about it is conjoined twins, right? There are some, it's a very rare occurrence that, um, that like Siamese twins, but that twins
[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_00] are connected at the level of, of a brain. There's one case I know in, uh, in here, north of us in, in British Columbia, where they share part of their brain. And it may be under those circumstances that particularly during sleep when the, when the, when the boundaries may be down, they may be able to access each other. It's a rather strange case.
[00:28:47] [SPEAKER_01] There's the physicalist view. And what I'm hearing is that in, in your, your correlate work, your work on the correlates of consciousness, what neurons in the brain fire to correlate with certain mental states that you, you just cannot close that gap between the physical and the experience.
[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_01] And so you offload it to the fundamental property and these complex, uh, neural mechanisms. Yeah. Uh, somehow can, can capture that, uh, fundamental property. Do we know yet, or at least, uh, broad brush, which parts of the brain consciousness depends on?
[00:29:38] [SPEAKER_00] So we know that it depends on mechanism in the brainstem and we know small strokes in the brainstem can render you dead or, uh, in, in coma where you're totally unresponsive. But as far as we can tell, you know, given what that we can see these complex scenes that I see right now, given that I can hear and, you know, be conscious of so many different things that is a property of the outermost layer of the brain, the cortex, you know, which
[00:30:08] [SPEAKER_00] is really, uh, millimeter. So it's like a pizza, 12 to 14 inch pizza, that thickness. And you have two of them that highly convert, you know, highly, um, convolved and convoluted. And they crammed into my left and my right hemisphere. In particular, it seems to be the back, the back part of that structure that seems to give rise to seeing and hearing and touching and wanting, which are the, there's the modalities that we understand best.
[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_00] I think it's clear. The evidence shows that if you don't have these parts of the brain, you're going to be in severe trouble or we can predict, I mean, all of us, hacks wrote about the 30 years ago, depending on which part of cortex are gone, you will have specific deficits. Like you are unable to see your face. Although, you know, you can perfectly well see the eyes and the nose and the hair, but you don't, you don't have that conscious experience of a face anymore because he lost the neurons that convey that.
[00:31:04] [SPEAKER_00] So in that sense, we, there are, there are footprints and you can track them and you can identify them. The question, are they the, do they give rise to consciousness or, uh, you know, did you, is it, what is the nature of the substrate or do you need a substrate at all? So most people who think about consciousness and make theories of consciousness, they take
[00:31:31] [SPEAKER_00] the brain and try to squeeze the juice of consciousness out of it. You know, the time you turn the waters of the brain into the wine of consciousness to adopt the biblical metaphor. And they say, well, it has to be this thing. It has to be a global workspace or broadcast of information or layer five neurons or NMDA receptors or microtubule, like Stu Hameroff, you know, or whatever. Well, again, why this and not that?
[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_00] Why microtubule, not other, some, some other cell or organism. So there's one theory that's unique, really, that's, um, called integrated information theory. Yeah. It's a different attack. It's a consciousness first account. So it really starts where René Descartes started. The, what the only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that I'm conscious because even in doubting it, I reasserted it and consciousness.
[00:32:29] [SPEAKER_00] Consciousness furthermore, it's the only way I encountered the world. If I'm a scientist, I still depend on, I have to read papers or books. That's visual consciousness. I have to look at a, uh, you know, an oscilloscope again. I interact. I have to listen to a Geiger counter. That's auditory consciousness. So the only way I interact with the world, including my own body is through my conscious experience. So if you think about it, the only thing I have direct acquaintance with, I, I have direct
[00:32:59] [SPEAKER_00] knowledge of is conscious experience. And so any theory has to start with, with any theory of consciousness, which is different from a theory of the neural correlates of physical substrate of consciousness. Any theory of consciousness has to start with consciousness and, and then sort of go from there to say, well, which system is conscious and what are they conscious of? And this theory integrated information theory, the main architect of that theory is a psy,
[00:33:29] [SPEAKER_00] Italian born American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Giulio Ternoni at the university of Wisconsin, Madison, uh, is a, is a theory that does that. Now it's a scientific theory. It may well be wrong.
[00:33:42] [SPEAKER_01] Is there a correlate to that in the brain that you have all these different structures of the brain that are cooperating, but operating independently and, but they're, they're integrated and that that's necessary for consciousness. Is that?
[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. In fact, that's why, so for instance, if you ask me where most of the neurons, 80% of your neurons are here in the back in a little brain called the cerebellum. Okay. That's where 80% disc, this, this cortex has roughly 16 billion. This in the back of 69 billion of the 80 and the, all the rest is only 1 billion, but it turns out they're not very integrated. They're organized in two dimensional slabs and they have primarily feed forward loops.
[00:34:32] [SPEAKER_00] So, you know, where, like in a deep, uh, in an LLM where one stage excites the next stage, excites the next stage, feedback, which I think is precisely why the cerebral, if you lose a cerebellum, it's not good for you. You know, when you go to the doctor to do these sorts of tests, right? That's when, that's when you test for a cerebellar function. You look like you're drunk, you, you know, you tumble about your speech, your slurred, et cetera. So the cerebellum is there to do sensory motor coordination among others.
[00:35:02] [SPEAKER_00] But, but people never complained that if lesion in the cerebellum never complain about loss of consciousness. So it doesn't seem to do it empirically. It doesn't seem to relate to, to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. And this is really what cortex does because of its very dense connectivity. That's, uh, that's feedback and excitatory, a small world connectivity, rich hubs, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_00] That's why I think cortex is, uh, is the, the, the, the substrate that in, in us, um, gives rise to this very high degree of, particularly in adults, uh, normal, typical adults give rise to people like you and I, who are very conscious.
[00:35:46] [SPEAKER_01] And I want to just end on, uh, artificial intelligence in the current complex, large language models. Jeff Hinton, who I've had several times on the podcast, uh, is speaking. And he, and he has for a long time. As soon as LLMs came out, I talked to him and he believed that there was understanding. He was saying at that time, now he's using the term consciousness.
[00:36:15] [SPEAKER_01] Why could a complex set of artificial neurons not have experience? And I know that you don't believe that they can.
[00:36:27] [SPEAKER_00] Well, it's in principle. Yes, of course he can. That once again, the brain is just a regular piece of matter and, you know, silicon is another piece of matter. So a priori, there's nothing. It's not that this is supernatural somehow, right? A special property that the other one doesn't have. In fact, where you to build what's called a neuromorphic computer. Yeah. So that, that computer, if it's truly has our sort of constitution, like my brain or your brain, it would be conscious.
[00:36:56] [SPEAKER_00] But, but IIT sort of, it's not a functional theory. So functional theory, the majority of scientific theories of consciousness are functional says, well, the brain consciousness has a certain number of functions, whatever they are. And once you reproduce these functions, even in a universal Turing machines, then all the properties will come with it, including consciousness. Yeah. So sooner or later, you know, on Tropic either will be conscious or is already conscious, you know, Claude.
[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_00] And you can argue, well, maybe not quite because there's still this one missing gadget, you know, whatever. But at least according to the IIT within IIT, you can formally show using formally mathematics and models of from Neumann digital machines that have very low connectivity. They are essentially much more like a series of feed forward networks.
[00:37:46] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.
[00:37:47] [SPEAKER_00] They're not, they don't have this heavily interconnected character that cortex has. So you can formally show that you can have two networks. You can have a model of a brain and an LLM or something like an LLM or from a Fenn-Neum machine simulating an LLM. Although functionally they have the exact same transformation from input to output. One will have a lot of causal power, will feel like something.
[00:38:12] [SPEAKER_00] The other one will not feel like something because experience, according to IIT, has to do with the structure. The causal powers inherent in a mechanism and that really depends on the weights wired together. You have to look under the hood. According to IIT, you can't just do it like a Turing-like test, like ask a bunch of questions and if it gives me the right answer, then I can see a check mark. No, I have to open the hood and look at the underlying hardware.
[00:38:39] [SPEAKER_00] But of course you could argue it's immaterial because many people already today, right? There are millions of people who have them as their friends, as their girlfriends, you know, use them as therapists. So practically speaking, people seem to behave like they're conscious.
[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_01] You say that what counts in a computer is the transistors opening and closing gates. I think that was you, not the pattern.
[00:39:09] [SPEAKER_00] IIT is a causal theory. It's really concerned with causal powers. And you have to look at the causal power of the actual machine. Let me give you a really good metaphor. Today, we can perfectly well simulate Einstein's equation of general relativity that described the central sun at the center of our galaxies in Sagittarius A star. Okay? It weighs 3 million solar masses. It has 3 million solar masses.
[00:39:38] [SPEAKER_00] And so it bends space-time around it so nothing can escape, i.e. it's a black hole. And you can simulate this. But funnily enough, when you turn on the simulation, you don't have to be afraid that it's going to suck you into, that space-time is going to distort around the computer doing, carrying out the simulation. Yes. Today, LLMs, like in this interview I did with Casio, and he perfectly seemed to be a very smart, very eloquent person.
[00:40:07] [SPEAKER_00] But that's a simulation. And simulation, you have, this is the difference between simulating something and actually physically making a difference to yourself. It doesn't have the causal power that the human brain has.
[00:40:19] [SPEAKER_01] What bothers me about that separation of the patterns and the information that the gates are processing, the pattern, that's a meta-layer. It's being executed by the transistors and their gates. But the pattern itself, I mean, it's…
[00:40:47] [SPEAKER_01] James Gleick has a wonderful book, The Information. I don't know if you've read it. What? But everything comes down to a code, to information.
[00:40:58] [SPEAKER_00] No, but the code is in your head. The code, when we talk, like you and I, we are two conscious creatures. And so the coding metaphor makes sense. There's no one to read them inside the machine. So this code metaphor, yeah, to you and I it might be a code because we're conscious creatures, we can look down at it. But the question is, does the machine by itself, is it meaningful? No. And all it does, it just takes whatever it gets and then it predicts the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It does it amazingly well.
[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_00] I grant all of that. It's clearly passed the Turing test, but that doesn't mean it feels like anything. Yeah.
[00:41:38] [SPEAKER_01] And that's why I was so interested in Penrose and Hemroff's theory, because they were trying to pinpoint a mechanism in the neurons of the brain that would channel or in which there would be some quantum effect.
[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_01] And then you could offload consciousness to the quantum realm. How do you feel about that, about the microtubules?
[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_00] Well, leaving aside the microtubules, I think that's extremely speculative. And Roger Penrose is the first to admit that. Clearly the creatures like me and you and dogs and trees are subject to the same laws of quantum mechanics just like anything else, right? But of course they operate unlike if you go, for example, to quantum computers like Google makes them, they operate at 27 millikelvin. Okay? So zero degree millikelvin is absolute zero, no more molecular motion.
[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_00] We live at roughly 270, we live at 300 degrees above that, right? So this is unimaginable cold. It's vastly colder than outer space because outer space is four degrees Kelvin, right, the background radiation. So you need extreme isolated environments, extreme vacuum to eliminate all this motion, the jostling of the molecules and the atoms that would eliminate these quantum mechanical effects.
[00:43:10] [SPEAKER_00] Given that biology on this planet evolved in what physicists would call a warm and wet environment, you know, with lots of water. Yeah. The vast majority of people, of biologists and physicists argue, okay, biology, quantum mechanics simply isn't relevant for biology in general. Yeah, there's some special effects like maybe where light meets the photons in your photoreceptors, but by and large, all these large scale, particularly like superposition and collapse thing,
[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_00] those things don't matter. So I have a collaboration with a bunch of people where we're trying very hard to show empirically that there are these, that there are quantum effects, that things like nuclear spin do matter for biology. And there's some tantalizing evidence that we could go into, but it gets very technical about such, such hypothesis.
[00:44:05] [SPEAKER_00] But so far the verdict is still, there's so far not a believable reproducible experiment that shows microscopic quantum mechanical effects in biology at room temperature.
[00:44:21] [SPEAKER_01] Although it must be there. I mean, to manipulate quantum states, yeah, you need to super cool them. But that doesn't mean that, that quantum effects stop happening at room temperature.
[00:44:36] [SPEAKER_00] Well, except that you're right, but then they would immediately within 10 to the minus nine seconds wash out, because you know, everything is constantly vibrating.
[00:44:45] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.
[00:44:46] [SPEAKER_00] You know, and, and so the, the, the way you operate quantum computers, you're in this incredible static environment where there's almost no more molecular motion and you can freeze it. And then you get the superposition given that, you know, our brains on this state, any, any, any, any superimposed or entangled state would immediately within, you know, a nanosecond disappear. So that's the challenge. Is there now other special protected environments?
[00:45:16] [SPEAKER_00] I mean, evolution is very clever and evolution had a lot of time to select things and anything not, this is also Stu Hammerhoff's argument. And I agree with that. Anything not ruled out by the laws of physics can in principle be exploited by, by biology in general and by neurobiology in particular. But right now we simply don't have any, any positive evidence for that. We and other people are trying, but so far it's still nothing too convincing.
[00:45:44] [SPEAKER_00] But what that means that we don't know anymore what it means exactly to be physical. And some people in the foundation of physics, in fact, are now arguing that there may not be absolute facts in the sense that I'm a biker. I don't own a car. I have several bikes. My bike at rest has a particular mass. It weighs like, I don't know, 25 kilos or whatever.
[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_00] But quantum mechanics would say until and unless something interacts with that bicycle. It doesn't have properly speaking a math. It's not that you don't know the math. That's just an epistemic limitation. We, you know, I don't know more things in the world. No, it's that it simply doesn't make sense to talk about it like it has a specific math until, depending on the reading, either something observes it or otherwise interacts with it.
[00:46:43] [SPEAKER_00] Now, again, this is not my grandfather's materialism anymore. So that's been one persistent challenge. And in fact, some physicists in foundational physics are now bringing in consciousness. They might, they are beginning to argue that consciousness, in a sense, has to be built into at the rock bottom, the rock bottom description of our reality.
[00:47:05] [SPEAKER_00] So that demarcation line between physicalist and non-physicalist is very, very difficult to define. And so people say, well, it's a future physics. Well, OK, but the future physics, you know, that's like waiting for, you know, waiting for the rapture. Yeah, maybe in future we'll have a physics and maybe that includes consciousness for all I know.
[00:47:28] [SPEAKER_01] Where are you going next? You're working on the quantum.
[00:47:32] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, we're doing experiments on. Yeah, that's one thing. I'm just really interested in it. I always thought the chances are very small and I still think the chances are very small. But the great thing about science and nature is if you ask the right scientific question to nature, you will get the right answer. You will get an answer. And the, you know, this is what we claim. You have to design the right experiment to test this, but then you will get an answer one way.
[00:48:01] [SPEAKER_00] So we will know sooner or later whether it's going to be on my watch or not. Who knows? What do you think is going to happen when you die? Schopenhäusch's beautiful metaphors, these ripples of this wave, you take an ocean, think of it like mine at large or universal consciousness. It's this gigantic ocean and there's this little eddy.
[00:48:25] [SPEAKER_00] This eddy has existed for 69 years and, you know, maybe, you know, God willing, it'll exist for another 10 or 20 years. But ultimately this eddy will merge, will become, you know, will of course disintegrate, will lose its identity, its egoic consciousness will be gone forevermore and it returns to the ocean.