How Much Do We Actually Know About Consciousness? - Patrick House

Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer whose research focuses on free will and how mind-control parasites alter their host's behaviour. If it wasn't for us experiencing it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness even exists. The most fundamental part of human experience has many proposed explanations, but just how well-grounded are these, and what are we missing? Expect to learn why removing parts of the brain change some aspects of the self but not all of them, what it's like for animals who can put half of their brain to sleep at once, how the brain is intimately linked with timekeeping, why almost all explanations of consciousness are unsatisfactory, what the future of brain-research looks like and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount & free shipping on the best Ketone Drink at https://ketone-iq.com/ (use code MW10) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Extra Stuff: Follow Patrick on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/patrick__house Buy Patrick's Book - https://amzn.to/3zyGYbF Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #consciousness #neuroscience #freewill - 00:00 Intro 00:18 Do Deep Thinkers Suffer More? 08:38 The Gradient Descent of a Single Cell 18:38 Why is Consciousness Research So Difficult? 29:35 The End Result of Consciousness 34:34 How the Brain is Similar to an iPhone 42:06 Animals Who Sleep While Their Brain is Awake 47:00 Conversations as Health-Checks for the Brain 57:57 The Analogy of the Pinball Machine 1:05:18 Adaptive Functionality of the Brain 1:10:43 Patrick’s Favourite Explanation of Consciousness 1:20:42 Where to Find Patrick - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Basically, we're downstream of a single cell from 3 billion years ago who was too timid to die, and we've inherited all of its self consciousnesses and all of its quirks and foibles. But it's fundamentally just downstream of this one cell that couldn't give up. I think there's a lot of that that is perhaps humorous, but most of it's a tragedy.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote that says, "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." What do you think that means?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Oh, I think it's exactly inverted. I think there's way more tragedy when you zoom in at the chaos and nightmare of what's happening inside an individual, single cell, which is kind of how I got interested in the brain. So yeah, I think that gets it exactly wrong. Who said that? Should I send in a rata?

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, the way that I see it as well is, I would agree that the people that have greater depth of insight are the ones that also have a greater capacity for suffering.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the way that I see the modern brain and all the legacy issues we have to deal with is basically we're downstream of a single cell from 3 billion years ago who was too timid to die, and we've inherited all of its self consciousnesses and all of its quirks and foibles. And we're dealing with these things now, like, for example, what medicine, all of medicine and all of science, all of biological science have to deal with. But it's fundamentally just downstream of this one cell that couldn't give up. And I think there's a lot of that that is perhaps humorous, but most of it's a tragedy. Evolution

• 1:44Speaker 00

  is a long, unbroken line of most things dying off. So.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  That's a good point. And for the most part as well, the ever the more anxious, ever the more concerned neurotic overthinking version of that usually being the adaptive one.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so I've been thinking about this a little bit recently with respect to the way you just described that, the ever anxious, overthinking, etc. I actually believe that there's a variation in the ways that people simulate what happens in their head. So basically, if a single event happens, something happens in your world, you're at a party and a conversation goes around and you, let's say you missed the opportunity for a well-timed precision joke that you know when you simulated in your head would have, would have killed, right? And then some people will not let that go. We'll think about that. There's a whole phrase in French, staircase wit, right?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Which is, which is the idea that if you, if you kind of don't say something at a party, you'll figure out the exact right answer. The wittiest response will come to you on the staircase as you're leaving the party. Which fundamentally, I mean, that's, so, so you could take that as just a kind of side anecdote, or maybe again, one of these cute little aphorisms that, that artists and people throw around, but, but what it fundamentally means is something profound about the brain, which is that we are constantly simulating, we are constantly rehearsing in our mind that which just happened, that which is about to happen in the future. And I would guess that there are some, some people, those that are perhaps neurotically inclined or anxiety inclined, those are people that rehearse and simulate more, more and more and more.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  So whether or not those people end up being better at being comedians, or, you know, more likely to, to kind of throw tragedy onto the world, I don't know, but I, I think it comes from simulation.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I would be tempted to, to agree, and I think there's a, an interesting difference between Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert's two views of happiness. One being based on meaning, almost like a retrospective, a happy life is one which in retrospect, you're glad you lived. And the other one, Dan Gilbert's, is the lying on a Lilo with a cocktail in your hand, 23 hours a day for the remainder of time. And I've come to believe that both of those things, you hear people talk about, well, I want to be the more hedonic side, I want to be the more meaningful side, and... My belief at the moment is that that is very much just a spectrum of temperament. If you're the sort of person who spends a lot more time being introspective and ruminative, then by design, you're going to want to do things now, which are almost an investment

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  for your future self to look back on and bask in their meaningful glow. Whereas if you're a person that's a little bit more in the moment, then you're going to lean more hedonically. And I think that maybe we've got something similar going on here. The staircase wit, for some people, may not even be a thing. Someone may not even consider the conversation that they had earlier on as they're going down the stairs because they're embraced in whatever is coming next. Maybe it's the stairs, maybe it's the party they're going to later on, or the dinner that they're going to have, or whatever.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  That's a good, that's a very good point. That staircase wit is someone living in the past, in some sense, right? They're rehearsing the past. But the interesting thing is that it actually counts as learning for future behavior. So for example, it might not be the case that they end up in exactly the same scenario, but should they, should a conversation at some future party kind of tend toward that same punchline, perhaps they can in fact use it in the future. But I, but I do think you're right, that sometimes there's this kind of misalignment with the temporal priority that someone has, whether or not they live mostly in the past, present, or future. I do not live in the present. I live mostly in the kind of rehearsed planned future that I just kind of try to guide towards

• 5:38Speaker 00

  as if I'm steering a dinghy out lost in that kind of open ocean. But there are people that surely live in the present, and I completely and utterly discount it.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  To, to, to an earlier thing, if I can, if I can tangent off an earlier thing you said. You know, so in this, in this book, I kind of offer up a lot of different definitions and kind of modern models and theories of what consciousness is. But I did not include all of them, and I actually did not include my favorite definition, because this book isn't about me. But I, so my PhD work, I studied a parasite, a single cell parasite that gets into mice brains, gets into rodent brains, and makes them not afraid of cats anymore. It makes some percentage of them not afraid of cats anymore. The idea is that it completes the life cycle. It's one of these weird mind control parasite things that evolution figured out,

• 6:32Speaker 00

  where the parasite has to reproduce inside of a cat, inside of a gut of a cat. So in order to get from one to another, it kind of uses the mouse as a little intermediate host, like an Uber, like an Uber to the next cat, right? But along the way, it does like very fancy neurobiology and mind control that we do not even remotely understand how that works. But one thing I realized is you have to years and years of basically like learning the behavior of a mouse and then giving them this parasite and then watching their preferences shift. So like before you give the parasite, some percentage of them, I mean, they're all afraid of the cat. And then after you give them the parasite, it's in their brain, it's mucking around with something.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  And some percentage of them appear to approach the cat or at the very least, don't seem to run away as quickly. And I was thinking like, you know, of course, we scientists study this because we're trying to extrapolate up to human behavior. And it's like, I don't, I, I, I don't actually know something that you could not describe as a preference like that. And I, and one of my favorite definitions of kind of identity of who we are is we're just an accumulation of preferences. Uh, that mouse kind of is shaped from being afraid of a cat toward liking a cat. We as humans, as individuals vary in our preference for past thinking or present thinking or future planning and that kind of thing.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  And the real, the real tragedy to me, um, uh, is that we don't, we don't get like a little dossier when we meet a person about what their priorities are and what their preferences are. I mean, that's some of the beauty of interacting and social life and everything. But I would love to know if a potential romantic partner and I see the time epoch of our preferred choosing similarly such that when I buy a gift for her or she gets one for me, it's like aligned temporally, not just with all the other things, right? Like gift giving is hard and it's mostly because we don't have access to people's true preferences or priorities.

• 8:35Chris Williamson?

  Does that not go back to the single cell organism or the very simple types of organism, where the number of inputs would have been super, super low? Like, the fact that you have, pretty much everything is preferences and pretty much everything has an opportunity cost. By doing a thing, you can't do another thing. Therefore, there is pressure on the decision that you need to make. I seem to remember about one of the super simple creatures that can spin one way and it means it goes forward, or it can spin another way and it means that it turns. So it can turn round and round. It might be something that lives in your gut, maybe now, but previously would have been perhaps part of a lineage. But yeah, it can either, if it goes towards a particular direction and there's more glucose than there was previously, then it continues to spin in that direction.

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  And then if it's less, then it'll continue to turn until it finds it and then it'll turn and turn and turn. Oh, there we go. And it'll go forward. Like, that's just preferences, right? It has a preference to be in an environment that has more glucose. And it has two options. The difference is, we have a multiplicity of preferences, sometimes many of which conflict with each other, and we have a multiplicity of options. But it's basically the same thing.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the interesting overlaps between both the way that, uh, kind of biologists and neuroscientists model some organismal behavior and an overlap with the AI world and the terms of art and artificial intelligence, is this idea of gradient descent. That's what it's called. That's the official term, gradient descent. But it's exactly what you're just describing, which is, for any given resource, there'll be more of it somewhere. It'll be, it'll be diffusely spread around an environment or maybe the air. And you can actually get extraordinarily complex behavior from just following that one simple rule of if more here, go towards, if less, go away from. For example, we've all had the experience of like a fly that we swat away and then it immediately circles back and comes right back to where we are, over and over and over

• 10:26Speaker 00

  in some like, kind of purgatorial hell of this creature. Like, really, it feels personal, right? It feels like it's about you and it's never ending. And, like...

• 10:39Speaker 00

  It's because they're following a gradient descent model of diffusion of olfactory chemicals that they're detecting, right? Like, they're not doing anything that is, it's not about you. It's about you as a source of molecules that are diffusing in the air, kind of the farther away you are. Anyone who wears perfume knows there's kind of a drop-off, right? Like, a one over R squared drop-off of the wake of the perfume. That's all these things are doing. And so you can get, it's really remarkable how complex of a kind of behavior you can get from, like, these extremely simple rules. And yeah, I mean, you know, whatever that single cell was doing three billion years ago, and whatever we're doing now, we're all using the same molecular parts, right? Like, it's bizarre.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  People talk about an individual neurotransmitter as one thing, dopamine is a reward or pleasure. It's like, well, you know, cockroaches use octopamine, which is a very, very similar thing, to control their muscles on their periphery, right? Like, they basically use dopamine, or a very close relative, the exact same chemical, to do something entirely different that is useful for their needs. And so, you know, we think about kind of this very special and exquisite balance of a human brain being some percentage of this part right now, this part neurotransmitter, that part neurotransmitter. But these things are like, kind of evolutionary Lego bricks that we've used for three billion

• 12:03Speaker 00

  years, that are like, so out of their original contexts that they're, I mean, that they're, that they interact in ways that we can't even remotely predict. Look at the side effects on any, go to CVS, Walgreens, I don't know, you're in Britain, I don't know, what do you guys have there?

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  I'm in Austin now, so there's a CVS just down the street, yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Okay, CVS. Go to a drugstore or a pharmacy, and just look, like, if you, if you, if you ever wonder why it is the case that neuroscience is behind the times, if you ever wonder why we're in, like, the Babylonian era and we haven't cured a single thing, and, you know, like, suicides are on the rise all over the world, and we literally, like, haven't eradicated, like, they did over in the smallpox world or infectious disease world, we haven't, we haven't cured or made understood a single disease. Just, all you need to do is look at the side effects on any bottle in any, pick a, pick a random one as you walk down the pharmacy, and you realize that there is, it's... Input into a biological system does not give you one thing.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  It gives you a whole host of a range of different consequences. So it's not as easy as like a, you know, the physicists, you know, bless their hearts, do have it a bit easier where like if you kind of input something, the same output can come out reliably, but in biology, that's, that's a non-starter. We don't have that.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  How much do we actually know about conscious then? Consciousness in your opinion?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Um, I think we're in the Babylonian era of understanding the brain and therefore understanding consciousness. So the, the way that I kind of modeled my book is imagining that it was like 1,000 AD and people, you know, people spent every night looking up at the stars, right? And they had exquisite models. So again, 1,000 AD, you look up at the stars, they move, they're different every night. Some of them move one way. There's a few that appear to like circle back on each other. Those are the planets. But these things are moving and, you know, there were, there were star, like not in the LA way, there were star charts, like act like real useful star charts that sailors used

• 14:11Speaker 00

  to, you know, navigate at night across the oceans. And they were very good at predicting where the stars would be next in the sky, but they had no idea why, right? They didn't have the model to explain why, but they could, they could say, hey, look, that star will be at this point in seven days with decent accuracy. And, you know, I, I kind of see neurosciences at a similar inflection point, which is we know where in the brain activity is. We know if you show someone a face, there will be activity in the fusiform face area. Like, ah, wow, what a coincidence. Um, it's, you know, not as if we named that after the fact or anything, but we don't know why. We don't know why it's there and not anywhere else.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  We don't know why stimulating with an electrode, that part of the brain creates the perception or the kind of warping of faces subjectively to a person, whereas if you activate somewhere else in the brain, it'll create the sound of music, or if you somewhere else, it'll create a visual experience. We, you know, we know where, but we don't know why. So the I kind of wrote this book from that vantage point of if we were Babylonian era astronomers and someone was to say, you know, what are 19 ways of looking at the sky, for example, you'd have 19 different theories, most of them wrong, but but there are observations in there and those observations, someone, some future scientist, some Galileo

• 15:37Speaker 00

  hundreds of years later, is going to look back and have to explain all of them, right? There's no conscious experience that a theory should not be able to explain. Everything that's happened in your head.

• 15:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's very interesting that no matter what your view of consciousness right now, the ultimate completed theory of consciousness needs to be able to encapsulate all of the experiences that everybody's had from

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Every single person.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  seizures to maladaptive, whatever, to people in comas, to lucid dreaming, to sleepwalking, to da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So there is, yeah, there's no phenomenological experience that your brain can create, which is invalid

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  in service of the ultimately correct theory of consciousness. That's interesting.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so it's a it's which with each passing moment, I don't know how to kind of like quantitatively summate all of the experiences happening every second around the world across humans and animals and every conscious creature, but every, you know, in terms of what a theory or model of consciousness has to explain, we are growing that the amount of data we must explain is growing exponentially with every second, right, orders of magnitude more, every passing second, it's getting harder and harder. But, you know, if you and it's not to say that science will repeat itself, but if you look at the history of how like electricity and magnetism and the theory of gravity were kind of all wrapped into each other, you know, it took hundreds and hundreds of years

• 17:07Speaker 00

  and the brightest, some of the brightest people that have ever lived in order to make incremental progress in some of these things. And people had observations about electricity and people had observations about magnetism and people had observations about how things fall, you know, at some rate and there's a bowling ball and there's an owl and somehow the owl goes the other way, but if you drop the bowling ball, it goes straight down, which, by the way, can be, if you could describe the difference between a bowling ball and an owl, if you try to drop them from the top of the tower, you've just, that's your Nobel Prize. But especially if they weigh exactly the same, because then they're, you know, that's the control condition, the mass is the control condition. Anyway, these theories over the

• 17:49Speaker 00

  centuries were thought to be disparate. People tried to like bottle electricity for a while, you know, they thought they could like capture it and it would just like somehow be contained. And it took a very long time for people to realize that these observations were actually about the same thing. They were actually flip sides of the same coin, that you can make a one-to-one mapping between electromagnetism. And, you know, an interesting question is whether or not in biology, we will have a similar kind of moment, whether or not all of these weird explanations for what it's like in a brain and our subjective experience for what we're experiencing on a daily, second by second level, all of that will have to be

• 18:31Speaker 00

  explained in the kind of unified theory of gravity of consciousness, which who knows when we'll get there.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that consciousness research is so difficult?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  I think ultimately, I think ultimately it has to do with data, the low fidelity of data collection. So basically, the best we have for subjective experience is language. Language is a highly, highly compressed, kind of sideshow, almost anecdotal, it's a highly compressed version of what's happening on the inside of your head, right? Like imagine a JPEG, or like a perfect image, a raw photon count, and over time you compress it and compress it to put it on the internet and a phone and back and forth, until you end up with

• 19:29Speaker 00

  something, at some point, if you compress too far, you end up with something indecipherable, right? And I feel like language is like a extremely low-resolution JPEG of what is effectively the richest image. A richer image than we've ever seen digitally. So like the compression algorithm that, you know, you could probably quantify that somehow in terms of, you know, language is attempting to get at what's on the inside of your head. But it has evolved, I think it is subject to the same pressures as you might say natural selection is. And so, language has survived because of its utility, not necessarily because of its accuracy. It gets, it gets by.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  It does a good enough job that we can do things like society and have arguments and compliment each other. You know, like it's done a good enough job in the same way that natural selection and evolution by natural selection, it's not about optimization, it's about doing a good enough job. We have all kinds of horrific inefficiencies. And similarly with language, I think, you know, you try, but like you, you know, try asking someone why they do something and just sit and listen and be, you know, entertain yourself with the answers. It's almost certainly the case that those, the answer that you get back is not going to be the full and complete picture and, and is inaccessible to you what is missing.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  So, so for example, so this, my book actually, what a lovely segue. It's the same story told over and over. It's, it's, it's one thing told 19 different ways. So it's called 19 Ways of Looking at Consciousness, specifically because it's one moment told 19 different, 19 different explanations, as if you believed in that modern theory of consciousness. And the moment has exactly to do with your question, which is, there was a teenage girl, she had epilepsy. And when you have epilepsy, they'll try to give you a bunch of drugs, they'll try to treat it, they'll try to find the source of it. But sometimes the epilepsy is a bit mysterious and they don't know exactly where it is in the brain. And so the surgeon will have to go in and they'll drill a bunch of holes.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  They'll drill about like 12 to 20 holes in the brain. They'll insert electrodes and those electrodes will, will...

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Basically be almost like seismic monitoring stations. So these electrodes will, when the seizure doesn't end up happening, they will be able to tell the surgeon exactly where it is. And so this girl who's awake while these electrodes are implanted in her, mostly because the brain does not feel pain. So the surgeons are probing around and stimulating, and they have these electrodes inside, and some of them can stimulate. They can shoot out electricity, and then that stimulates that part of the brain. And she ends up laughing. And they end up asking her, "Why did you laugh?" And she says, "Because you guys are just so funny standing around." And then they go around, they do more stimulation and recording, and they poke the exact same spot again, and she laughs. And they say, "Why did you laugh?"

• 22:33Speaker 00

  And she said, "Oh, because the horse is so funny. The picture of the horse you showed me is so funny." Of course, none of these things were funny. They weren't just funnily standing around. The horse was not a funny picture of a horse. It was a very normal picture of a horse. And so what's interesting there is that she kind of confabulated. There's a specific term for that, "confabulated the explanation of why." So when you confabulate, she's making up a highly plausible, but ultimately incorrect story. But there's such nuance in that moment, because first of all, who are we to deny her answer, right? I mean, we know that there's electrodes sticking out of her head, and the surgeon is pushing a button on a computer with a very specific stimulation protocol

• 23:17Speaker 00

  that is poking her supplementary motor area, which is causing neurons in her brain to output to the kind of muscles in her throat to fire them in a stereotyped and repeated pattern that bounces air around the room, which we call laughter, right? Like, that's the answer. That's the actual answer. But like, maybe she found the horse funny. You know, like, it's this funny thing where like, in order to interrogate this question, we have to deny. If we, in order to interrogate something, you want to disprove it. In science, you want to disprove things. You've never proven anything, you want to disprove it as well and strongly as you can. We can't ever disprove someone's self-report. As far as I know, currently, we cannot.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  And so ultimately, we end up with this kind of highly compressed JPEG version of the world.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  You know, how good, how good would these, these new self-driving cars or these, these vision model, computational vision models be if they only had to train on highly compressed, like bitmap images of the world? That's effectively what we're doing when we study consciousness. We're getting highly compressed bitmap images of the world through someone's language.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  Subject to biases, subject to incomplete information, their own knowledge about what happened, their own knowledge about themselves, their priors coming in, the social pressures of the people that they're speaking to and not wanting to look silly or stupid, the limitations of their language in terms of breadth, their awakeness, whether they've had the right amount of caffeine that day, all the way down, all the, just limit, limit, limit, limit, limit.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Whether or not they have a mind control parasite.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Whether or not they've got electrodes sticking out to the top of their head in a room with a funny horse on the, on the wall. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's interesting that you've got this situation where something happens, which is arguably involuntary, as in not self, I don't really know what involuntary would mean in the, the version of reality we're talking about here, but it wasn't self-generated in terms of the first mover of that particular stimulus.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  And then there has retrospectively been a story told by the girl about why she did the thing. And there's other situations like this as well, I think, where, when you show, is it people that have maybe had, what's this center of the brain called when they open that up?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Corpus callosum?

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. When people have had the corpus callosums removed, so that the brain is genuinely in two separate halves.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  They can do things where they show one half of the brain, an image of something, and then the other hand goes and picks out of a pot. And if they show them a nut, a lot of the time, they'll pick a nut out. But then, when they say, why did you pick the nut? It's like, oh, I'm a massive fan of nuts, or yesterday, my mom was talking about nuts, or earlier on today, I saw a billboard that was showing an image of a nut, or whatever it might be. What do you think's going on there? And is that anything indicative about consciousness, or its usefulness, or its reason for being here? That there is this narrative sense to things? There's this sort of desire to be explanatory?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think those split-brain procedures, which I think are still done, but only in extraordinary cases, maybe like one a year now, or one a decade.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, think about, it's the profound implication of the fact that, okay, let's take a physical feature, let's take a mountain and cut it in half. Now you have two halves of a mountain. Let's take like a cake and cut it in half. Now you have two halves of a cake that are completely, you know, there's nothing different about that, nothing emerged, or nothing, nothing de-emerged, I don't know what the word, right word would be, like when you cut it in half. If you cut the earth in half, I had a whole chapter in this is, why is it, why is there a difference between if you cut the earth in half versus if you cut a brain in half? In the earth case, you'd get like geotectonic forces and the world would spin out of control

• 27:24Speaker 00

  and basically all, all, all life would die as we know it, as like the ozone got stripped and gravity got all wonky. But if you cut a brain in half, you just get, you resolve to two independent thinking things, right? That's utterly remarkable, because it means, it means a few things, just like from first principles, it means that we have more neurons than we need to be basically conscious, right? Which means all of this stuff about, oh, animals are, are conscious because they have so many fewer neurons than us, it proves as a sufficiency condition that you do not need, you know, a human amount of neurons in order to be conscious. And not even conscious like a human, right? You could have half and you can still be mostly kind of, nobody can really figure

• 28:09Speaker 00

  out what the difference is. There's in the neurology, kind of the history of neurology, there's all these cases of people having Large brain disorders or traumas and themselves not even necessarily noticing, but also the doctors and people in the room and their friends and partners not even noticing something is wrong, or not even noticing that they're different, right? And so there's a few ways of thinking about that. One, it's saying, wow, what a remarkable piece of machinery or biological kind of goo the brain is, like the fact that it can be so malleable, you can, you can kind of live without half a brain and you can still be a functional human, you can still think and love and write poetry and speak and all these things.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  I see tragedy in those, in those moments, because what it means to me is that we have such a deficient set of tools to access what's going on in someone else's mind. It should be the case that if someone has their mind split into two hemispheres, we should be able to know right away, like, you know, imagine some sort of like futuristic device that just goes up and says, oh yeah, well, your cognition has changed in exactly this way, you are now this different, here's what we predict would be different. As it is, we kind of, like, literally, our language is such a poor proxy for what's going on on the inside of a head, that doctors sometimes don't even notice.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, if it's, if it's not something that's noticed by the person, the brain owner, then presumably the, for all of the wondrous stuff that's going on inside of the brain mechanically, the phenomenological experience of having a brain and of being conscious is really all that's happening. It's how does this cash out in terms of the experience of the experience having it? And if that person is able to continue through life with the Charles Whitman brain tumor or with the railway sleeper sticking up through the top of the head and it happened to not notice or whatever, if it doesn't change functionally or phenomenologically how it

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  feels to be that person, I do, what, would that matter? Like surely the, the end result of consciousness is the experience of consciousness itself, that, that is the end cash out result of it. I, I don't know if there is anything more than that, so. Yeah, maybe the alien could come around and say, well, actually, you seem to be missing a little bit of your hippocampus, or whatever it might be.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  But if to that person, their experience hasn't changed, would that even matter?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Right, so that then would give validity and priority to

• 31:01Speaker 00

  the subjective report, right? To be like, okay, well, that is what matters the most, which is the difficulty, because we want to be, we want to do that. But it seems also to be clearly the case that whatever's going on underneath, there's a lot of different ways to create consciousness. You can, you can miss a few, you can have a few neurons die, you can get a concussion. You know, hypothetically, you're a different person, you should be a different person if you have a few neurons die out on you, right? Hypothetically, something is different. Then, you know, it's like the old ship of Theseus, the planks on the ship. Do you know this identity? Like, you take a ship and it crosses the ocean and you replace one plank at a time. Is it the same ship at the end of the day, even though none of the planks of wood are the same?

• 31:43Speaker 00

  You could do the same, you could imagine a hypothetically similar case for, for neurons. So again, one of the chapters in the book is actually a kind of direct verbatim interview between myself, Christoph Koch, a prominent neuroscientist, and a friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Jonathan, who ended up passing away from a glioblastoma tumor. So he had a glioblastoma in his cerebellum. And he was a MD PhD, so I did my PhD at Stanford. He was an MD PhD at Stanford and in neuroscience and a radiologist and was working at, I think, doing his residency in radiology at Harvard when he passed away from this tumor.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  But before he passed away, he got a surgery to try, to try their best to kind of carve out as much of the tumor as they could. And they removed about 20 billion neurons, 20 billion. So we have about 80, let's say we have 80 total. That's the, the new estimate as of 2022, 86 billion.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  About a quarter of his brain by count, right? Twenty billion. So to imagine this with a ship of these, you know, one plank at a time thing, you've just taken out a fourth of the ship. And he doesn't really notice a difference. He wakes up, you know, he's like, yeah, some things are different. Like it's harder for him to walk in a straight line. It's harder for him to play piano, uh, which he used to do as a kid. But mostly he's like, I can't tell everything. He, I think an exact quote is he said, every, the me part of me is still there. Like everything is still there. And what, what, what are we supposed to do with this information as neuroscientists? Right? Like this is the, the crux of the reason I included it in the, in the book is because it's,

• 33:27Speaker 00

  it's, it's equal parts maddening and fascinating, which is like, how the hell is it the case that you could take? If you take any computer chip, if I ripped a quarter of my iPhone off, it doesn't work anymore. Right? You could, there's not even a quarter of it that I could rip off that would not fundamentally alter it. But for some reason, the brain has this, either, either it's doing so much more than we realize. And the conscious part is just such a small kind of screen that gets displayed that like you can take out so much of it and, and you know, very little of it actually gets kind of uploaded to the, the screen part of things. Or the screen just does its best with what it has. And it just takes that as the whole thing, no matter what it gets,

• 34:10Speaker 00

  no matter what kind of gets pushed into it, no matter what input, no matter if you're a cricket or a frog or a cat or a human or a human who's missing a quarter of their brain. It gets pushed in and you have a conscious experience and it does its best. And that's all you get and you from the inside will never know. And I think that's probably where we're at.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating to think what the difference is between a brain and an iPhone. And it seems to me that the iPhone has. Individual discrete components that are individually completely relied upon in order for any part of the whole to be able to work. If you break the battery, then there is no power. If you break the screen, then there is no image. If you break the processor, then there's no processing. If you break the antenna, there is no signal, so on and so forth. But it seems like, I don't know, like consciousness in the brain is maybe distributed a little bit more decentralized in some way that if you get rid of a part of it, that maybe bits can compensate, or maybe they didn't need to compensate because it's sufficiently distributed that consciousness is everywhere in the brain.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Or maybe we're not a brain at all, maybe we're an antenna that is receiving broadcast signals from something else. The, I think that you talk about that as well. That's a quite a popular theory that it might not be self-generated from within the brain at all. It might be receiving consciousness somehow from the ether. I don't know.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so there are ways where it's similar and there are ways where it's different, right? So it's diffuse, it's diffuse in the sense that if you, if you are young, if you are a kid and you get an injury, or if you're born with some part of your brain missing, the brain will do its damnedest to try to kind of like co-opt other parts of the brain to serve that function. So a kid born with, you know, with, maybe has a stroke, a neonatal stroke or something like that, that, whatever, whatever function was supposed to be there will kind of get reintegrated into other parts. But, but similar to the iPhone, if you have a stroke in your visual cortex as an adult, you're done, like you don't see. If you have a stroke in the language area, you're done.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  You don't, you don't do certain parts of language. You might, you might be able to, there's some totally bizarre ones where like some people can still sing, even though they can't speak, or they can, you know, there's some weird kind of Oliver Sacksian kind of anomalies. But in general.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  It is true that like this functional specialization which in the adult which is more like the kind of set and printed iPhone where it's like if you break anything you might not you might not be able to make it back. It's just not true in the beginning and and and it's it's so remarkable how malleable things are in the in the kind of early pre-critical period brain. Yeah, the the so each of each of these chapters, right? So I'm telling this story of this teenage girl who, by the way, when she laughs also experiences the subjective feeling of joy and mirth, which is part of also this interesting kind of the hard problem of consciousness.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  I believe that like, you know, these physicists are over there like thousands of them under like LHC and CERN being like, oh, we're going to study one particle because within this particle is the origin and secrets of all the universe if we just split it up in the right ways or if we carefully watch with the right theories. I kind of think this this girl's story has the same multitudes contained within it. Like if you want, you can unpack it into a lot of different really interesting things about the brain. But so one of them, and so but in some sense, of course, I can't I can't simultaneously believe all of these 19 things. So I'm kind of ghostwriting each of the chapters from I kind of put on my journalist hat and

• 37:58Speaker 00

  and was like, OK, if I'm a journalist writing a piece about this theory, how would I tell this story? It's not necessarily mine. So one one thing I try to do is try to make my best case for that antenna. The I'm using quotes if you're anyone's listening on the radio. They're air quotes. The kind of antenna theory of consciousness, which is which which was so funny because so I got invited to a to kind of witness as a journalist, a debate that was happening in India with the Dalai Lama and at their kind of outcast monastery that India had given them because they were kicked out of Tibet. And the Dalai Lama did this thing where I guess he does this every year.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  He invites scientists from the West and scientists from the East to debate about the origins of the universe, like what is morality? What is, you know, he'll invite physicists and biologists and mathematicians and they'll have like a East first West, you know, yin yang kind of debate. And I get there and the first night.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  The kind of Team West, and this is a friendly debate, right? But Team West is sitting around a table and there's two questions that are dominating everyone. As you know, we've just flown across the world and arrived at this monastery in the middle of like India's Oklahoma. And the questions were, is there Wi-Fi? And are we allowed to kill the mosquitoes in front of the monks? And what I thought was so funny about that

• 39:31Speaker 00

  was this idea that actually, according to some theories of how the brain works, those two questions are the same question, or rather, they're the same moral question. So think about what Wi-Fi is. Like, Wi-Fi is you have a chip inside your computer, inside your router. And it is basically like specifically designed to collect a very specific kind of energy. Again, not in the LA way, real, real talk. Sorry, I live in LA, so I have to constantly be making caveats to when I say things like piezoelectric crystals and energy and consciousness. I mean it in my way.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  So, I mean, we have these chips which are specially designed to pick up a very, very thin frequency band in the electromagnetic spectrum. That is Wi-Fi. You can have, you have it for all kinds of things, right? You have different, different chips that can pick up different pieces of the invisible world that is permeating around us. And there's a very interesting theory of consciousness, which is, it's, it's, it's, tends to be eastern, or you know, it's, it's related to panpsychism in the sense that the idea is that consciousness permeates the world. Permeates the universe. It's all around us, it's in our subatomic particles, it's everywhere. In the same way, gravity is infused and all these fundamental forces of nature are infused in particles around us and the world around us and the universe around us.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And that maybe what consciousness is, what a brain is, is just kind of a little like Wi-Fi chip, but for the consciousness, right? It's like a physical, structured...

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Piece of reality, you organize matter in a certain way. And once you do that, it can pick up a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum of things floating around us, right? And so I just thought it was really hilarious that the answer was no, we were not allowed to kill the flies, the mosquitoes. But what's funny is nobody cares if you like smash a router, right? But like, I don't see them as any different. I see the mosquito, like, you know, the mosquitoes running around like an immune cell to me. Like, I don't think it's conscious. I don't, I don't, I don't know, but some people there do, right? Like, like very prominent neuroscientists, you know, I just disagree with them. And that, though, is again, if it's a thousand AD, I don't know if I'm right.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I could be one of the astronomers looking up at the sky, just totally wrong, right? Like, but we're all like kind of pitting our theories against each other in a way. But we're still all pre Copernicus, pre Galileo. We don't even have a telescope yet, is the problem.

• 42:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it's like for animals that can go to sleep with one half of their brain at a time? I'm pretty sure flamingos can do this.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  I think you're confusing. Do they stand on their?

• 42:21Chris Williamson?

  One leg?

• 42:22Speaker 00

  They stand on their leg, is that the same thing? I don't know.

• 42:24Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, someone, someone is going to correct us. Don't worry, the internet will correct us on this, but.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  So, so many migrating birds can do it because they have to sometimes sleep while they're still in the air. They don't, they don't land for a while. I don't know if flamingos migrate, I don't know enough about them.

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay. But what do you think it's like? What do you think the experience of having half of your brain asleep is like?

• 42:43Speaker 00

  I have experienced this. I have chronic insomnia and I feel like sometimes when I walk around the world like a zombie, that I'm half asleep. When I, when I, so what I find very interesting that even, um,

• 42:56Speaker 00

  so, okay, so an interesting tangent would be why, why is it different? Or is it different than what we were talking about earlier of the splitting the brain down the, down the line, right? Like, like, is it actually very similar to those split brain patients? In terms of phenomenology, in terms of what they're experiencing? In which case, you know, it doesn't really feel like anything. It just kind of feels like you're.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  I can't explain. I'm using stupid JPEG compression to try to explain this whole thing is JPEG compression of thoughts, right?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  So, so one thing, though, that any theory of consciousness should have to explain is

• 43:40Speaker 00

  like the few moments as you wake up from sleep, which are sometimes confusing and jarring. The way that I think about it is kind of like, my brain is like a town and during sleep it's like all the electricity goes out, even though that's a terrible analogy, but just imagine it like consciousness, you know, the electricity goes out, but that it's slowly powered up like one house at a time and one neighborhood at a time. And it takes me like four hours to basically like turn the lights on again. But the question, which I think is analogous, or maybe similar to yours, is kind of like, how is it the case that a brain can just do that? Can like slowly wake up like one

• 44:23Speaker 00

  neighborhood at a time, one brain region at a time? And, you know, I feel it kind of like I'm less there. I feel like a little bit less capable of maybe some kinds of thought or thinking, but I'm still conscious the entire time as each of my little houses and neighborhoods power themselves back up. And so I imagine like if you're one of these whales, I know whales can definitely sleep with with one hemisphere, certain migratory birds, I think the sea lion, or it might be the sea lion or the sea otter, otter, some mammal that goes back and forth between land and water. When when they sleep on land, they sleep in both hemispheres. And when they sleep in the water, they use only one, which I think is a totally unexplained bizarre.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Someone should figure that out. But so, I don't know. It's probably like all of these neurological case reports we're reporting where the person just doesn't know the difference. You know, we have a lot of variation throughout the day. We can be hungry. We can be tired. We can be under caffeinated. We can be over caffeinated. We can be cranky. All of these things are totally different.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Subjective states and they are, it's very normal for us to describe them in terms of underlying metabolism or biology. For example, people get cranky when they're hungry. This is a thing. It's a common phenomenon. What that means is like, that means that consciousness is so fragile and our sense of self and our sense of priority and preferences and is so fragile that something so silly can completely change what we pay attention to. So now we're going to start to pay attention to food signals and signs in the world. We're gonna like our sense of smell will coordinate and rearrange to be about food. You know, like we desire these things and our entire perceptual apparatus kind of shifts to make it more likely to extract

• 46:11Speaker 00

  that thing from the world we desire. That means that consciousness is this like really dynamic and really fragile thing. And you know, people, people, there's this whole trend these days to talk about psychedelics and what they do and how they're the window into the seat of the soul and they're going to change everything. But it's like, I don't understand why actually just being tired isn't just as subject as interesting of a question about the phenomenology of consciousness as, you know, seeing skulls in the ivy because you took too many mushrooms. Like it's the same, like things are being perturbed and they're being perturbed in a matter of degree, not kind. And so like, I think there's clues

• 46:54Speaker 00

  everywhere. We just have to kind of catalog them.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think one of the reasons that people are more interested in the mushrooms is that it's significantly more enjoyable than permanently being tired, which I imagine if you've ever taken mushrooms, it sounds like you're tired quite a bit. So you'll probably be able to compare the two. But yeah, there's, I always think about this to do with the show because this will be episode 550 something on this podcast.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Congratulations.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Very illustrious few years.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  What I get to do every single time that I sit down and have a conversation with someone is I get to stress test the capacity of my verbal agility, right? Now, there's other ways, other types of knowing, other ways that I might be, yesterday, played a fantastic game of pickleball, can't really tell you why, but on other days, I play a bad game of pickleball. Is that still IQ? Well, yeah, it's also body, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, as far as I can see it, doing the podcast is as close to a health check, fitness test type scenario for where's my brain at at the moment? How did I sleep? How hydrated am I? What was my nutrition like? All of the contributing factors, how stressed, how blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  And observing that really, really closely over the last five years of doing this has been super fascinating to me, seeing just what can change the different capacities. Can I increase the engine size? Can I press down harder on the accelerator? Like, can I apply more cognitive effort in order to be better? If I apply too much effort, does that make me worse? Are there things that I can do in terms of skills that I can acquire that can actually raise the ceiling of the maximum of where I can get to? Are there things I can do acutely to be able to give me boosts over the short term? Well, caffeine dosage and sleep, all that stuff. And that has been a really enjoyable and insightful experience, just going through

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  the varying mental states of what happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? How does my verbal agility, my dexterity, my recall, my vocabulary, all of that stuff change based on what I do? If I warm up before, if I speak to my housemate for 30 minutes before I begin, what does that do? Why is there this sort of momentum thing that seems to happen when I'm speaking that you actually seem to get better over time? And when does that start to drop off? And is that because of fatigue? Is that because of boredom? What happens if you change the subject? All of these different things. Not exclusively due to consciousness because you're saying words hopefully that represents something cogent about a topic. So you actually need to have some degree of expertise or insight about whatever it is you're talking about. But then there's a base

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  layer below that of like the nuts and bolts of having a conversation and of being there and of talking in a manner that is like well timed and resonates with brevity and precision and stuff. And that's been really interesting. That's been my little laboratory that I've been playing about in.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  And did you do the preparatory speaking with someone? So what's funny is I haven't spoken to someone like used words in 24 hours or so, definitely not this morning, right? I live, I'm a bachelor alone in my little LA apartment. And I actually thought to myself, oh, shoot, I have an interview today. I literally haven't spoken at all. So what I did was actually, I have to give a talk tomorrow and I recorded my talk over and over, not because I needed to, but it actually just to get in kind of the cadence and rhythm of speech and speaking. And I have no idea why. Is that the equivalent of stretching? You know, is it the equivalent of before a match? Like, I don't, I don't really understand why, but I have found similarly

• 50:35Speaker 00

  that if I don't speak for a while, I just lose the ability so quickly.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Like so remarkably quickly that it actually bothers. It kind of bothers.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  My speech and diction coach, Miles, will be able to give us an answer, I'm sure. He's got me doing a vocal warm up that my housemate is very familiar with as I go through different tongue twisters and stuff like that. So there is something functional that you're doing to the physiology of the voice box, of the tongue, the tongue unbelievably complex little bit of kit that you need to actually genuinely get going. There is kind of a warm up procedure. But there's something else as well. I noticed this over the weekend. I went to one of the strangest bachelor parties I've ever been to in my entire life this weekend. We went to Houston and we ate only Asian food for an entire weekend. Nobody went out. There was no nightclubs, no nothing else. We observed Shabbat on the Friday night. We

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  went to an Asian spa and a bunch of the guys got Asian scrub, completely naked Asian scrubs. And then on the Saturday night, we did a Jeffersonian dinner with 26 dudes.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  A non-typical bachelor party, to say the least. But what I noticed, because there was less debauchery than I might be used to at these events, I was talking an awful lot. And after you get into a rhythm after a while, your brain is just firing on all cylinders. What's going on there?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  What? If you told me to, if you told me to run, if you told me to run for three hours, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to continue running. I would, I would be dead. If you tell me to speak for three hours, hour four, I'm like, bring it on. I got this, I got this in the tank and everything's firing and all of the ideas are big and oh, very strange.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it immediately makes me think, I wonder what would happen with those, these language robots, the language models that are now all popular, right? GPT and, and Google's one where they're able to produce text like, you know, to all this debate and question about whether or not they're like us at all. If so, they would also have to have that effect, right? Like, like what if one of these language robots, we encourage it to speak so, so much that it just gets into this manic high and just never shuts up?

• 52:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you can program in boredom as well.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  You could, yes, to get, to get your hitchhikers, the Marvin robot. So I think about this a little bit, right? I mean, every, every physical sport at high performance has warm-up. And we maybe simply believe that it has something to do with the, you know, limberness or stretching or getting the physiology prepared. But the brain is also a physiology machine, right? I mean, it is also responsive to the physiology and the state of the, of the, of the body. So what I wonder, it would be like.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  So, so, okay. One thing that I found really fascinating with with language and conversation, and it's kind of one of these key windows into how the brain actually works under the hood, is you can end a sentence with something very surprising. So if like, you know, I'm, as I'm speaking right now, you, in your brain, you are coming up with a probabilistic model for the likelihood of how I'm going to end up finishing the sentence. I was probably going to finish that sentence with the word sentence, right? Uh, look, I did it again. Um, and if I were to finish it with unicorn or like some other word that was completely and utterly surprising, which if I, if my brain were firing in a more cylinders,

• 54:18Speaker 00

  I would probably do as a live example, but I can't right now. Even though I have no idea which words I'm choosing, it feels really hard for me to actually go like completely orthogonally and to pick a random word out of the dictionary. The very fact that we can actually detect traces. So if we had an EEG on your head as you listen to me speak, and you, as soon as you got to that surprising word, a couple hundred milliseconds afterwards, your brain would register an error. And I don't know if there's work done on whether or not, if you warm up, you're more likely to register that error. But my guess is actually that in order to generate speech, you have to listen to yourself speak,

• 55:00Speaker 00

  and you're having to predict and basically play the game of how to finish a sentence so as to not be surprising. And that is both a listening task and a generating task. So when you're generating speech, you're also listening. And you're having to cancel out the exact kind of speech patterns that you make in a very odd and interesting way. You know, your voice sounds different to you, partly because when you hear it recorded versus what it's like on the inside of your head, yeah, there's some bone conduction through the jaw and all that physical stuff. But it's also the case that everything, every single thing you say, because it's a motor act,

• 55:44Speaker 00

  your brain is also canceling out the consequences of that motor act as it sends it to the sensory parts of the brain. So it's it sounds different in part because when you hear your own voice, you're not getting that copy anymore, a copy that your brain is sending. So your brain, it's kind of like a carbon copy on a check, right? Like when your brain is engaging in a motor output, it'll send one copy to the muscles and another copy to the sensory parts of your brain being like, hey, look, I'm about to move in this one direction. Don't be surprised when I do. This is the whole reason the world looks stable when we move our head around and dash our eyes back and forth three times a second. The only way that works is because your brain knows exactly where that movement is about to be. It's constantly living in the in that

• 56:24Speaker 00

  like a few hundred milliseconds in the future. And so I would guess that the reason talking before doing these interviews helps is you're you're not just preparing the muscles, you're preparing the whole apparatus of prediction and surprise and like kind of word completion. And, you know, these these language robots that people think are sentient or similar to human speech, they're they're just long if statements and they do not have surprise in that way. They have, you know, there's you could probably build in statistical surprise, but they're kind of doing to fill in. They're kind of like elaborate Mad Libs version versions

• 57:03Speaker 00

  of of language, which doesn't have the context and capacity that the human brain does to understand the surprise. And that's something that, you know, we're going to need AGI to get there. We're gonna it's so much harder to make. So for example, it's easy to make a language robot. Well, now it is. It is, I I challenge anyone in that field to make a robot that feels staircase width, right? That leaves the party still simulating what it could have or should have said. And when it comes up with what it believes to be the cleverest one feels bad, right? If when a language robot does that, I will I will officially

• 57:48Speaker 00

  vote sentient. But until then, like, these are just if statements.

• 57:53Chris Williamson?

  I like that as the judgment of whether or not we've reached AGI sentience. All right, what what about the pinball machine analogy? What's that?

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, yeah, you can make that the modified Turing test, Patrick Patrick's modified Turing test. The robot doesn't have to convince you that it's a linguistic, you know, of its linguistic ability. It has to feel bad that it the conversation went poorly.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so another, another one of the chapters, thank you, is so. So there's this, there's this analogy that I heard, which a lot, many, many neuroscientists in the field and some colleagues share, which is a very good one, which is that the, when people try to understand why the human brain in its modern form and its current form has some quirks, one of the best ways to think about it is to think about it like a power station. So imagine, imagine you're trying to make, you know, you have a water wheel in the 1700s, I don't know when it happened. And so you have this, this power generation, electricity being generated by the movement of water. And then you go through all of

• 59:02Speaker 00

  the technological step changes. You have steam engine, then you start to burn coal, then suddenly you have nuclear, then you have solar power, and suddenly you have some sort of like AI, natural gas, hybrid grid, you know, like our energy pipelines and our kind of power stations have evolved with new technologies. But imagine, the human brain is the equivalent of effectively like, starting with a power station and then never being able to turn it off, as you had to evolve and add on all of these other kinds of ways of generating power. So if you can imagine like an old water wheel that we then threw a solar panel on and tried to connect with like pneumatic tubes and, and made it a steam engine for a while and had to make a furnace to shovel coal into it, and then

• 59:46Speaker 00

  ultimately had to stick like a nuclear reactor on top of it or nearby, and these things are all still together because you can never, ever, ever turn it off. You had to keep the energy running, you had to keep the town powered. That's, that's what we are. That's what a mammalian brain is. It's this like, you know, we've never been able to turn off from that single cell three billion years ago. That was the original power station. And three billion years later, we're still running. And so that's the kind of analogy de jour in neuroscience. That's the, the common one. And I was thinking about it and I think it's a very good analogy for a physicist. It's a very good analogy from a physicist to understand the kind of biomechanics of how a brain works. But it's missing something

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  crucial, which is that at some point, we became, we, subjectivity came on, came online.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  And so I was trying to think like, okay, if I were to tell this story again, what would I, how would I retell it? And I actually think that the evolution of the game of pinball is the most, most reflects the metaphorical mapping into the evolution of the human brain. And the reason is, two reasons. One, I was so fascinated. I played this digital virtual pinball, like in the mid 90s, like Windows 95, it came with some pinball thing, right? And so now you have the entirety of the virtual universe. You can, you can create anything. You can software, you know, the software can design anything, any, any kind of thing you want. And yet still they made it have like tilt, right?

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Tilt is a thing that pinball machines evolved because they were too expensive and you didn't want people just like smashing them around. The virtual version does not need tilt. You could completely eliminate that rule set. But there was this legacy issue of, ah, pinball's been around for a while. People are familiar with tilt. Let's keep it in. Let's keep in the bells and whistles and sights and sounds of the, of the physical world and try to virtualize it. And I went back and looked at the history of pinball and it turns out it has like these lovely analogues to the evolution of kind of bilateria and biological systems, which is like, it started as one thing and then slowly it became more and more of something that you could control. So it started as literally you just put a ball at the top of a incline and then you just hope and bet on where it ends up.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  You have no power over it. You have no way to exert any force. And then eventually it becomes a little bit of a bigger thing. And then people started to move it around to, to kind of like force the fate that they most wanted. And then it had to evolve the tilt mechanism to prevent that from happening. And then flippers came along and those flippers meant that you could control your fate instead of just be like washed around by the current. And then it eventually had to combine this like, the physical mechanics of the pinball machine, which with, with physical flippers and a real ball, which is subject to inertia and like debris that we can't even see, which changes its route. So you can never kind of hit the same shot twice. And then

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  On top of that, it added this electronic layer. Right? As pinball evolved throughout the 20th century, it added this electronic layer of bells and whistles and lights. And eventually, there's this funny thing where basically, pinball was about to die out because the world was becoming more interesting. Like Hollywood was ascending and Pong had happened and suddenly there was a virtual world that was much more compelling than this silly game of throwing a silver sphere on an incline and leaving it up to fate. And there was this moment, I think the game was called High Speed, which the pinball designers

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  were like, you know what we maybe could do is we could make it not that your ball is something separate from you, which is just trying to accumulate points. But what if we made some narrative around it such that it seemed as if you were playing as the ball? And you, as the ball, had a goal. And the High Speed was just a game where you had to run from some police. You know, it was like GTA, it was the original GTA, Grand Theft Auto. And this game became a sensation and it was in part because suddenly it became story and it became storytelling. And there was, through nothing, nothing was added except this narrative. And suddenly, you weren't playing pinball as you.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  You were playing pinball as the ball. And to our earlier question about this narrative and the need for narrative in the human brain and how we're all just stories. I found that to be like a really nice analogy to the kind of biological evolution of organisms, which is to say, they started out without a story, with no storytelling device. And then at some point, they learned to gain control over their own fate. You know, hands, flippers, the little cilia that you were talking about earlier, which uses descent gradient to choose to go one way or the other. That's like the flipper. And then we had literal flippers. And then we became story. And then we had to combine the physical part with the electrical part as neurons figured out how to keep charge on one side of their membrane. And then...

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  We became, you know, maybe one day we'll become virtual, like the Windows 95 version of it. So, so I actually like, basically, I just, I just think pinball tells this, the, the, the history of the evolution of a pinball machine tells the story of biology in a really interesting way.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  You've continued to build throughout the evolution of our brain, this unbroken lineage from whatever that first single cell organism was, has continued to add in features. And it's had to,

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  it's had to work out a way to add in something which is adaptive to the new environment that this creature finds itself in, or the way that the local ecology's changed, or whatever. But it's difficult to get rid of the existing thing, because all of the changes occur very slowly. If you were to go from single cell and what it had to human and what we have, you would retain very little, you would change an awful lot, but it's been iterative over time. Does that suggest that brains have never lost any functionality then?

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that's interesting. So, we would have to be more specific in the way of we frame the question. So, human brains? Because it is certainly the case that, for example, I'm just thinking of a, a very basic, there's some salamander that lived in a cave and lost its eyes, right? It just evolved out, and like, there was no light in there, and it just didn't need eyes anymore. And so it just slowly became blind. Like, the whole species is now blind. So, that, that organism's brain has significantly changed. It lost a function.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  But, this is a kind of nuanced, I'm about to make a nuanced statement, which I don't even know is, which I don't even know if it's, it's completely accurate.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  And it's pretty broad. I, and kind of anthropomorphizes evolution as if it's a thing. I don't think evolution by natural selection cares whether or not it gains or loses a function with any passing iteration. I think a large amount, I mean, we, we used to have a tail. Right? And we don't have tails anymore. I think about this sometimes in terms of, I think there was some time I like almost slipped in the shower. And I think as I was catching myself on the curtain, I thought to myself, "God damn, I wish I had a tail," which would have been really useful then to catch me from falling, as it is for all the monkeys in all the trees, right? And then I started to think about, uh, this is what I, this is perhaps why I live alone.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  And then I started to think about, like, what is it like to control a tail? What is the experience of a primate that has a tail sticking out its back? You can't see it, right? So like, how do you know to use it to latch around something? It feels like actually a very subconscious or unconscious thing that they must be doing. They must kind of have some awareness of the tail behind them and what it can and cannot do. And the fact that it could or could not grab certain things if you're falling or, you know, if you need stability or something. But then the question is, how does it think about or control? How does a monkey think about or control its tail consciously?

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  If all it is is this kind of appendage in our, behind us that you never really get the visual or proprioceptive feedback for. And I, and I, my conclusion, um, based on nothing, was, uh, that maybe this is what it's like to be some kinds of kind of lesser animals on the evolutionary spectrum. So smaller, smaller animals that might not be mammals, like an octopus or something. You know, maybe it's, maybe it's as if, it's as dark to them subjectively on the inside of their head as it would be to us as primates being able to control a tail that we no longer have.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  So, so, and, and maybe it's just all that, right? Maybe the whole thing is that. Maybe the whole thing is this darkness where it feels like they can do some things. They have some motor computation going on about what they can and cannot do in their immediate environment. But fundamentally, the whole thing, the, the, the whole, um, Cine-rama is...

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Is darkness, is unconscious, but so they would still look as if they're acting and behaving and going around and moving around the world, but there's kind of nothing, the lights aren't on on the inside. And so, just very simply to the, like, we've lost the ability to control the tail. So that means our brains are functionally kind of different than they used to be even a couple hundred thousand or million years ago. So, yeah, I don't, I don't think evolution cares whether or not it's a game. We, we think of gain as good and loss as bad, but evolution doesn't care. It just wants you to, just wants you to go.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and I suppose that we're now in an environment which is very, very, very quickly changing to the point where evolution amongst humans at the moment is going to be incredibly difficult to optimize for in any case. You go one generation to another generation and all of the things that you optimized for within the last mutation is now no longer viable.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  Completely pointless. You know, when the bicycle, I was learning about how the bicycle got invented and it liberated a lot of women because women were able to go out without a chaperone, which would have been something that would have been catastrophic in Victorian Britain. But now they had a bicycle and they could just cycle around. And you think, okay, well, now we're going to adapt, we're going to adapt people for bicycle riding. You go, well, within four generations of that, everybody's got a car. So that's, that's not going to, that's not going to work. What about your favorite or the most exotic explanation that you looked at for the book when it comes to consciousness? Which one was the wildest or your favorite?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think the wildest bar none, if you rank choice voted across all neuroscientists is the Penrose-Hemroff-Orcoar theory, which is the kind of, so, nobody's come up with a good explanation, right? Nobody has one. So it's kind of fun that like, theories get to find, get, get their heyday. They get to stand up on stage and give their speech. Because we don't really have disconfirming evidence. It's pretty hard. And one of the thorny pieces of this is we do not know.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  How to describe, we do not know how to describe in physical terms why the brain is not determined. Why it's not the case that like, like, like the little pinball at the top that it gets pushed and it just ends up there and it will always end up there because that's fate and that's physics. Determinism would say your brain is also just, you know, tens of trillions of tiny little pinballs that are called protons bouncing around and no matter what you do, you're going to end up in the same place you started. We still don't know how to get around that. So you get to do all kinds of wacky things to explain that. And I say wacky in the kindest way. Which is, there's this theory that basically down, you need, in order to kind of harness,

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  as you might say, an oil field, you want to dredge out free will from under like a, you know, there's veins of free will in the universe and we're consciousness and we're the brain and we're evolution to tap into every one of its possible resources, it would at some point. I mean, if you think about it, like, I find it absolutely remarkable and a kind of underappreciated fact that every single time we discover something fancy about the world. So when we discovered electricity, you know, a couple hundred years ago, when we discovered steam and thermodynamics, when we discovered quantum, quantum stuff, when we discovered deep learning, we then look in the brain and it turns out the brain is already doing it.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  And that's not just because we're treating it metaphorically, like there are thermodynamics, there, the brain is a closed, well, not closed, but it's a thermodynamic system. Heat matters, temperature matters, a huge amount for enzyme kinetics, right? So the steam theory, it's there. You know, our brains are not like computers, but goddamn, they are very similar in terms of that kind of learning mechanism. It's exquisite. But so, but so here's what you could do is you can extrapolate further into the future, which is to say, Well, every single time, you know, like before we understood gravity, our muscles and our brains were computing approximately 9.8 seconds per meter squared of what gravity is. Anytime you catch a ball, you're having to compute the arc and the trajectory of

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  the thing with very complicated kind of eye and brain and history, experience and all this to approximate. The fact that a baseball player can catch a, you know, well-hit pop fly, that brain is computing something very close to 9.86 meters per second squared, which is gravity. It understood gravity, right? The brain understood, air quotes, gravity long before Newton. It understood and was using electricity long before Benjamin Franklin.

• 1:14:22Chris Williamson?

  I just got to jump in there, Patrick. Can you imagine what it would be like for humans to play a game of baseball on a planet that had double the gravity or half of the gravity? And you would be there and you would throw the ball towards someone and all of the parabolic lines that you had planned for about where it was going to go and your gloves down and then you take it straight in the face? Or it drops half the distance or a quarter of the distance from where you would, I just, I was imagining that as you were talking, being on a different planet and someone throws the ball and you go, I, I'm starting again here. In fact, worse than starting again, I'm going to guess that I need to unlearn everything I've learned, deprogram whatever genetic predisposition

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  we have to 9.68 meters per second squared. And then I've got, I've got to learn Mars gravity or Saturn gravity or whatever it is.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  For, for very strange reasons involving kind of a petrilineal estrangement, I have been playing golf since I was a kid, since I was like three. I did the whole Tiger thing. I mean, he did it first, but I did it, you know, before it was cool to like train a three-year-old. I was taking lessons at three. I cannot conceive of a visceral intellectual and emotional joy greater than being able to hit a golf ball on the moon. Like, like, like, I don't know which astronaut it was, the one of them did that. I can think of nothing I would enjoy more because it is so horrifying to do your best

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  and hit the perfect shot and just have the ball just kind of go, you know, like, even if it's 300 yards away, even if it's a great well-stuck ball for our earth gravity, it's still like, it's mostly heading down. You know, it's mostly you see the defeat. You can see the defeat in a couple of seconds.

• 1:16:15Chris Williamson?

  You want a 1500 yard carry?

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Hit it to the, yeah, from the moon to earth and get a hole. And I can only imagine, though, it's, and, and what I mean by that is, you know, what, when I was saying earlier about the surprise of, uh, uh, throughout a conversation, if you totally surprise the brain and finish a sentence with a new word, your brain detects that because it's like, oh, wait a second, that's new, that's different. Let's learn from that. Hold on, pause. I would just do it once. I would just hit a golf ball on the moon once because I believe that my joy would be proportional to the amount of surprise my brain would have. And it would be like, holy shit, you just hit a 1500, like,

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  like, how did you, you know, because it would still, of course, most of it, the unconscious parts would think it was still on earth.

• 1:17:04Chris Williamson?

  Be expecting that slightly shitty 240 yard fade that you usually get.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So I would do it just for that surprise. I can't wait for there to be like, uh, space tourism. So I can go do that before I die.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

  So exotic Penrose, seeking the rivers of, uh, free will in amongst the determinism. The exterior line of our brain is now no longer where thermodynamics finishes and ends. Where does it actually end up happening? What did Penrose have to say?

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Right. Thank you. Um, so, so basically.

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  So the remarkable thing about that kind of set of facts that the brain is always doing something, no matter what we discover, the brain is already doing it, would be, okay, well, what are we going to discover in the future that we determine, we figure out the brain is already doing, right? We're not done. We're not done with science. We're not done. Physics isn't done. Biology isn't done. So at some point in the future, we're going to discover some mechanism by which the universe works, and it will almost certainly be the case that if it was accessible to a biological system, evolution would have found it, tapped into it, and exploited it. And so Penrose and Hamroth, who's an anesthesiologist, and Penrose, of course, the theoretical physicist,

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  they have this idea that down in the smallest of the atomic pieces, so, I guess, not quite atomic yet, but there are microtubules that are kind of the, let's call them like the rebar of each individual cell. They're the structure, the matrix upon which a cell forms its solidity and its shape. And that there's a tiny kind of, almost like a water slide in the middle of each of these microtubules. And inside there, you have the only possible chance, that is where, if you're going to have a vein of free will, if you're going to have a vein of quantum uncertainty, which

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  is where they believe free will will come, that's the crude oil of free will to this theory, that it's being mined effectively from inside of these microtubules, of which there are probably thousands of trillions in any given human brain. Like, I mean, these are the things, there's like probably millions, I don't know my order of magnitude, but there's a lot of them in any individual neuron, multiplied by 86 billion. And that, so basically, this theory would say that when we discover that inside of that tiny little space, and it's a special space, according to quantum physics, where

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  basically it's too hot and too messy and too noisy to do anything bigger, at bigger scales, so it's the only scale at which you might conceivably be able to tap into quantum indeterminacy, which just means whether or not a particle is one way or the other, its position. So it's like a, I would say it's a beautiful... Theory. Um, and what it does, though, is basically take two unknowns and combine them, right? It says, we don't know about quantum physics and we don't know about consciousness. Let's take the parts that we don't know and overlap them and call that a theory. So if you were to find fault with it, as many have, you know, it's, it's basically, that would be both the, that kind of pro and the con of, of believing in that theory.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  But we're not there yet, but you know, when we say we're not there yet, it's simply the case that, um, we still have a lot of work to do, right? Like, we still don't even have a Galileo. We still don't even have a Newton.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  Patrick House, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do online, where should they go?

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  Uh, PatrickHouse.com, I suppose. And I'm, I'm on Twitter somewhere, but I haven't quite figured out how to get over, how to get over doing anything more than retweeting.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  And 19 Ways to Look at Consciousness will be linked in the show notes below as well.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Great, great, great, great. Yeah. Book 19 Ways of Looking at Consciousness, not, not in the LA way, subtitled not in the LA way.

• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  Patrick, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what?

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  I'm not the earth then.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.