E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness. His central claim is both unsettling and liberating: we do not passively receive reality, we actively generate it. The world that appears when you open your eyes is not a transparent window onto what is actually out there. It is the brain's best guess, a controlled hallucination, built from the inside out. What We Dive Into: 1. Your brain is not reading out the world like a camera. It is making constant predictions about what is out there and updating them with sensory signals. What you perceive is much more a product of those internal predictions than of the raw sensory data coming in. In that sense, all perception is a form of hallucination, just one that happens to be grounded in reality. 2. Just as the brain generates a model of the external world, it generates a model of the self. The feeling of being a continuous, stable "I" is another best guess, not a fixed essence waiting to be discovered. This is both humbling and freeing, because a constructed self can be examined and updated in ways a fixed one cannot. 3. As AI systems grow more sophisticated, they will increasingly appear to have inner lives. Anil draws a sharp line between intelligence and consciousness, arguing that current AI lacks the biological, embodied, self-regulating properties that we believe underlie genuine experience. Confusing performance for presence is not just a philosophical error. It shapes regulation, design, and how we treat these systems. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://www.im8health.com/knowthyself code KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offer https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:47 We Don't Perceive the World — We Generate It 04:29 The Brain as a Prediction Machine 07:22 Controlled Hallucination: What That Term Really Means 09:37 Reality Is Real, But We Never Perceive It Directly 13:25 Optical Illusions as Windows Into Perception 16:42 Perceptual Humility and Echo Chambers 19:34 The Perception Census: Mapping Our Inner Diversity 25:24 Perception, Priors, and Personal Suffering 29:17 Memory, Identity, and What We Expect to See 33:19 The Minimum of Consciousness: Bare Awareness 38:15 Pure Consciousness and the Feeling of Being Alive 41:51 Can the Contents of Experience Tell Us About Consciousness? 45:46 Out of Body Experiences and the First-Person Perspective 50:31 Psychedelics, Reality, and the Sense of Realness 57:12 Anil's LSD Experience and Mary's Room 1:03:47 Defining Consciousness: Nagel's "What Is It Like" 1:07:25 The Distribution of Consciousness: Animals, Trees, and AI 1:17:27 Steel-Manning Panpsychism 1:21:09 Pragmatic Materialism 1:34:23 Intelligence vs. Consciousness: Why AI Is Different 1:38:17 Why Current AI Is Probably Not Conscious 1:43:53 The Danger of Believing AI Is Conscious 1:49:24 What Happens When We Take the Self Too Seriously 1:52:01 Reflections on Death and What Dies 1:57:34 The Self as Process, Not Essence 2:02:00 Free Will as a Useful Perception 2:05:43 Closing Message: Celebrate the Everyday Miracle of Consciousness ___________ ✨MORE FROM ANIL SETH ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/profanilseth/ ↳Books: https://www.anilseth.com/read/books/ ↳https://www.anilseth.com 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We open our eyes and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just objectively out there. The colors, the shapes, the people. It's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds. But that's a very misleading view. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world. What we perceive as the brain's best guess.

• 0:20André Duqum?

  A controlled hallucination.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, none of us see things as they really are. Just as color seems to be revealing the future of the world. The self seems to be revealing some persistent, unchanging essence of me. That's just not the way it is.

• 0:35André Duqum?

  I want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. What is it about AI that's incompatible with having a conscious experience?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  We're going to talk about that. But firstly, a question I really want to understand. Is consciousness really tied to life or not?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  I spoke to my mother about death. She knew it was coming, but she couldn't imagine not existing.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  What dies? The honest answer is there's wonder and awe in the simplest of experiences of opening your eyes and a world appearing, which should celebrate the everyday miracle of being conscious.

• 1:19André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He's one of the world's leading voices and researchers on consciousness. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because of the wide range of topics that we can dive into with nuance, from the self to reality and consciousness and perception. Anil Seth, thank you for being here.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Thank you, Andrea. It's a great pleasure.

• 1:47André Duqum?

  I'd like to start by what you say is that we don't passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. For somebody that's just tuning into this episode, what does the weight of that statement mean?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  It means a lot to me, anyway. I think it's initially very counterintuitive. We open our eyes and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just objectively out there with all its properties, the colors and shapes and objects and people and places. And it's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds through our eyes and our ears and our other senses. And we just see things, perceive things, hear things as they really are. But that's, I think, a very misleading view of actually how perception works, actually how our experiences of the world and the self are constructed.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Closer to the truth, I think, is that our brains are always actively interpreting the signals that come in through our senses and not just a slightly nuanced or changed them. But think about it this way. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world. The reds, the greens, the oranges and so on. There is light, there's electromagnetic radiation, but that in itself doesn't have color, just has wavelength. And our eyes, the cells in our eyes are sensitive to only three of these wavelengths. And they're short, medium and long. We tend to call them red, green and blue, but they're not. They're just short, medium and long.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  And out of those three wavelengths, our brains somehow construct millions of different colors that we experience that give our lives texture and meaning and beauty.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And so in some sense, when we experience color, we see both less than what's really there because we only experience, or we're only sensitive to three wavelengths of light. But our experience is also more than what's really there because we can experience millions of different colors, not just three. And what holds for color, I think, holds for everything else. The world that we experience comes just as much, if not more, from the inside out than from the outside in.

• 4:10André Duqum?

  So what's the actual mechanism? You know, if I take a glance at this cup right here, it looks like I am perceiving this cup, which is, I mean, is held in my hand, it's out there. How am I actually generating this? Because we perceive that it's out there. This world appears when we open our eyes. What does it mean that we're actively generating?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  This is the nuts and bolts that actually, I mean, this idea of perception being an act of construction is very old. You know, it goes back in philosophy and Western philosophy, at least to Immanuel Kant, who talks about these ideas. And they've evolved and developed slowly. And these days, it is really about nailing down the mechanisms, what's happening inside our brains. And the idea that me and my colleagues we work on is to think of the brain as a kind of prediction machine. So there are lots of connections coming from the eyes that go into the brain, but there are also many connections going in the other direction from the brain back out towards the senses, the eyes and the ears.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  And I think the best theory about what's happening these days is that the brain is able to make predictions about the sensory signals that are coming in. It's able to make predictions, a bit more precisely, it's making predictions about their causes. And the sensory signals that come in, they aren't read out by the brain to form like an inner movie, but rather the sensory signals are used to calibrate and update the predictions. So we have predictions that come, if you like, from the top down or the inside out. And this flow of predictions is continually meeting an inward flow of sensory signals,

• 5:57Speaker 00

  which mainly tell the brain the difference between what it's expecting to get and what it actually gets. And so it's continually calibrating this difference. And then the claim is that what we perceive is much more down to the predictions than the sensory signals. So what we perceive is the brain's best guess of what's going on. In this view, the brain is solving a problem in maths that we call Bayesian inference. It's trying to infer what the most likely state of the world is, given the information that gets through the senses. And importantly, given the brain's prior expectations, if you like,

• 6:42Speaker 00

  about how the world works and what's going on. Some of these are learned. So we may learn to perceive things in different ways. Some of them are just sort of installed from the beginning. Like, our brain knows how shadows work. Our brain knows that light usually comes from above because light typically always came from above. So we have within our brains a kind of model of the world. But we don't perceive the model. We use the model to generate these best guesses. And these best guesses are what we actually perceive.

• 7:17André Duqum?

  And these best guesses you call a controlled hallucination?

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, part of the challenge is that none of our kind of everyday language words really fit the bill.

• 7:32André Duqum?

  They'll always fail us.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  They're always failers. And this is for me, it's one of, one reason I was always drawn to working both with language, but also with mathematics, physics, computer science. Because if you write down the equations, it sort of makes sense what I'm talking about. You have probability distributions and things like that. But that doesn't really help if we want to convey the concepts more intuitively. So yeah, I use controlled hallucination. And the reason I use it is because when we typically say hallucination, what we mean is an experience that's coming from within. I might hear a voice and there's nobody actually speaking. I might see a person and there's nobody actually there.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  The connotation of hallucination is an internally generated experience.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  And I think that's also true for everyday perception as well. But for everyday perception, these hallucinations, which are the brain's internally generated predictions, they're controlled by the sensory signals that come in through the eyes and the ears. So the control is just as important as the hallucination. Control is what keeps our brain's internal perceptual machinery calibrated to the world, grounded in reality.

• 8:54André Duqum?

  And so you mentioned what like Helmholtz would say unconscious inference and how we're act the process of how we're actively guessing and filling in the gaps within perception. Now hallucination, you referred to just then as an internally generated experience, but we have all sorts of internally generated experiences. What is there not more to the story that makes it particularly a hallucination? When you, when you think of what is reality and what would be hallucinated perhaps on top of reality, that's not reality in the capital R sense per se. Yeah. What, uh, what particularly, I guess, and why you use that word hallucination?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  So in my view, reality exists, you know, there's, there's really is stuff out there. What exactly that stuff is, it's still, I think, not very well understood or known. You ask a physicist, ask a philosopher, you know, what, what really is matter? What's the substance of the, what's the substrate of the universe? We never perceive reality directly. It's always indirect. And this again goes right back to Kant and that might be an unknowable in some sense, the way things really are with a capital R. And what we experience is always a sort of a take on it, a perspective on it.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  I think the real tricky thing about the way perception works is the sense that what we do see feels real, you know, it just feels to me in my everyday experience that the colors, the shapes, the movement, time passing, all of these things seem to be independent of my mind and just, just there. And that's, I think, the hardest thing to wrap, at least for me, my head around is that that's only partly true, that the world as it appears to me is always a construction. But there still is a world out there. You know, when I first started talking about perception, using this language of controlled hallucination, people would sometimes say,

• 11:05Speaker 00

  well, look, go and, go and walk across a freeway and you know, you'll soon realize that, you know, the, the trucks are not hallucinated, they're, they're real. And it's, yes, of course they're real. But that's why the control is just as important. So that we experience the world not as it is, but as it's useful for us to do. Now, there are other forms of experience which feel more internal, like I can experience emotions, I can experience thoughts, and they seem to arise maybe in my body, maybe in my mind, and they don't seem to be parts of the, of the external world. But I think they're still constructed in, in the same way. You mentioned Helmholtz.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  So he was one of the, the early proponents of this idea, and he indeed called it unconscious inference, which is puzzling because we're talking about our conscious experience. What Helmholtz was getting at was that we're not generally conscious of the processes unfolding in our brains that give rise to the conscious experiences that we then have.

• 12:12André Duqum?

  And this is strongly illuminated in the various optical illusions that, that you, that you share also.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, this is the beautiful thing about, you know, these, the, all these fun optical illusions, auditory illusions, perceptual illusions of all kinds, they're little windows into how our perceptual systems actually work. And, and I think they really show that, you know, our, our brains, our visual cortex, for example, at the back of the head here, it's not trying to, um, like accurately record the patterns of light that happen to impinge on the eyes like a camera does. It's trying to use the light that comes into the eyes as a way of figuring out what's happening in the world. So that's, you know, we might then see two lines that look to be different lengths and they turn out to be exactly the

• 13:04Speaker 00

  same length, but that's because the context might be that, okay, normally that would be parts of a three dimensional object or two patches of color might appear to be different colors, but then you actually look at, you isolate them and look at them individually and they're the same color. It's the context that means our brains interpret them in a different way.

• 13:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, well, maybe we can put one or two on screen. The checkerboard one is always fun as a go-to because it's just like, it's baffling, right? It's the reality, the truth is that they're the same shade, same brightness, but there's nothing we can do to not see it that way.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. There's, there's a kind of a slightly jargon-y term, but I quite like it. These illusions are what psychologists would call cognitively impenetrable. That, that means even when you know what's going on, you know, you can, you can look at these patches in a checkerboard in isolation and indeed it's entirely clear that they're exactly the same. But in the context of the checkerboard, uh, they're gonna always look different. And I've seen this illusion, I mean, probably well over a thousand times, and it works just as well as the first time. Now, that's not true for all illusions. And that's another interesting thing about perception. Sometimes what we know can change what we experience and other times it doesn't.

• 14:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, we've probably seen on social media that various auditory illusions, the blue dress that you referenced in your TED Talk, I believe, right? And to me, these are, like you said, these are a window into the world of controlled hallucinations, you know, and where I want to go quickly in this episode is deeper down the rabbit hole, so to speak, to say, okay, if that's just a window, what, what's inside the whole house, so to speak. And I think an interesting area to, to explore that is, you know, we've had Don Hoffman on quite a bit and what you just referred to seems fairly in alignment with his kind of understanding of fitness beats truth, right?

• 15:04André Duqum?

  Evolutionary systems adapted for survival, not to actually see objective reality, whatever that is. And getting into the shoes of an octopus, you know, or a bat, and what does the conscious experience look like from their perception? Clearly they're navigating the same realm as we are, but they have a completely different ontological experience and see up to 13 cones of color in the case of the mantis shrimp. And so if we all have these different experiences of reality, which is right?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Well, I think this is a really excellent point. You don't have to go to octopuses or mantis shrimps. I mean, you and I will have slightly different brains, so we'll experience the same shared objective reality. We are sitting in the same room, but even you and I might be experiencing things slightly differently. Maybe you see the color of my shirt in a slightly different way to how I see it. And it's very easy to ignore that because probably the differences between you and me aren't super dramatic. So we'll still use the same words like, like blue or something like that. You mentioned the dress. The dress, that image, like over 10 years ago now, and half the world saw it as blue and black, and the other half saw it as, as white and gold. That was super

• 16:25Speaker 00

  interesting because the differences between individuals was so unexpectedly large that people for the first time realized that, hold on a minute, like, how is it possible for you to be looking at that and have such a different experience to how, to, to mine? I think there's a really important lesson there, which is a lesson in, in perceptual humility. Like, it seems as though what we see is real. It seems as though it's not dependent on the specific peculiarities of my own brain. So then it's very easy to assume that everyone else is going to have the same experience. And when they don't, it's a real lesson that actually none of us see things as they really are. We all see

• 17:09Speaker 00

  them in our individual, unique way. We all experience a unique world, even for a shared objective reality. And I, this always makes me think of like the echo chambers in social media that we were all too familiar with. And it's very easy, when you get deep into an echo chamber, it becomes almost impossible to understand how somebody else could believe something different. And I often use the example of a dress to illustrate that danger. I mean, the dresses, no one really cares whether the dress is actually blue or black or white or gold, doesn't really matter. It's not a high stakes aspect of reality. But in, in

• 17:50Speaker 00

  many of our other echo chambers, we are disagreeing, becoming polarized about things that matter. And if you can show that even for something as unimportant as a, as a dress, we can differ so dramatically, I think that kind of opens a bit of space to consider how our beliefs might be similarly constructed and may not reflect things as they really are.

• 18:16André Duqum?

  It makes me think about how much of our individual suffering is a byproduct of feeling like we have the right perspective on any given situation in our life, you know? And that humility that you bring into the, the perceptual humility, that maybe the way I'm seeing things are not the way they are, and perhaps they can actually never be the full picture.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I think they, they definitely cannot be the full picture because I don't think it even makes sense to say they can be the full picture. And here's where, you know, Don Hoffman and I agree a bit that, that evolution didn't really care about giving us the full picture, whatever that might even mean. And what would it mean? That we would experience quarks or superstrings or photons? No one even knows what a photon is, you know, it's some kind of field in quantum foam. No, we're not going to experience that. It's, it's necessarily going to be something else. And that something else is then, would have been tuned by evolution to be useful, not to be the most faithful

• 19:22Speaker 00

  representation of how things are.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  And we can measure this. So one of the experiments we've been doing at Sussex is called the perception census. So motivated a bit by the photo of the dress, but also by some other work we've done using stroboscopic light to give people visual hallucinations.

• 19:44André Duqum?

  So they'll be like, just you'll flash a white light very quickly and...

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, we flash a white light, just pure white. We flash it around, it varies, but let's say 10 Hz, so 10 flashes per second, which happens to be the kind of frequency at which your visual brain naturally oscillates. You flash a bright light around that frequency, have someone sit in front of it with their eyes closed, they will have pretty extraordinary visual experiences, at least most people do. They'll see colors. The colors aren't there, your eyes are closed and the white, the light is just white. People see other things too, patterns and shapes and geometries. But everybody experiences something a bit

• 20:28Speaker 00

  different. But what they're looking at is always the same. So we were inspired by this to sort of look, try and try and create a bit more of a map of how different our inner worlds are, one person to another. So we did an experiment with around 40,000 people, about 50 different tasks, visual illusions and other things, to try to get a sense of perceptual diversity. Just what does it look like? We're all different, height, body shape, skin colors and so on. And it turns out that we differ on the inside in much the same way. There's always a distribution. There's always a kind of mean and then, you know, and then things tail off on either side. And that seems to be true, whatever

• 21:13Speaker 00

  aspect of perception we look at, whether it's the effect of context on color, whether it's how fast we perceive time to go, it's whether we see faces in clouds or not, whatever we look at, we see out there distribution. And I think that's, that's really interesting. And it's exactly what you would expect because evolution is all about variability. We differ and then sometimes it works better, sometimes it doesn't work quite so well. But biological systems in general just, just always instantiate this kind of variability. And that's true for our inner worlds, just as it is for our bodies.

• 21:58André Duqum?

  So are they reporting what they perceive in those settings? Or are you guys, how are you measuring the internal experience?

• 22:04Speaker 00

  In this particular experiment, we, you can do some clever things with visual illusions. Like you can, you can do things where there's one illusion, it's called the Ebbinghaus illusion. And in this illusion, you have two circles and one on the left, one on the right. And each circle is surrounded by some other ones that can either be small or large. Depending on that, the two circles in the middle can look different sizes, even though they're the same size. So what we can do is we can, we can have a kind of interactive version of this, where the circles start out different sizes. And then we have people adjust the

• 22:45Speaker 00

  circles around the edge until they look the same. Because we can tell, people can tell, they can like, oh yeah, it's a bit like when you go to the, the opticians and they always say like, you know, do they look different? Does it look the same? And eventually you get to a point where you really can't tell whether one lens is different from another. And you can do, you can just calibrate until those circles to you look the same. But then in reality, they will now be different. And so you can measure how different they are in reality as an objective measure of how strong that illusion is for you specifically. And if we do that, then we can measure that for 40,000 people and we can sort of see

• 23:26Speaker 00

  how, you know, is this, how does it vary? Is it sort of like, there's an average effect and then some people experience it more strongly, some people experience it less strongly. And that's, that's what we see. And we can play the same game with, with other kinds of illusions as well. And bit by bit, we can build up a picture of, of how perception works for that person. And maybe this is stuff we're still working on, we can ask other questions like, are there deeper things happening that explain, like correlations between different illusions? Like if I see, if, if this circle illusion is, is strong for me and maybe, maybe that correlates with something else, like the, the color I see

• 24:11Speaker 00

  a dress. So what's the common factor? What's the organizing principle of, of our perception? And we're also now looking at how perception changes as we get older. And that's also something people have been interested in for a while, but, but we have a large set of data about this now. And we can ask, how does it change in the lifespan? And, and in particular, what happens in dementia and Alzheimer's, where people typically focus on memory and how functional people are behaviorally and cognitively. But comparatively little focus on how the world seems to someone with dementia. And so this gives us now a

• 24:52Speaker 00

  way to understand that. And when we know more about that, we might be able to, you know, adapt people's environments so that they're more comfortable for people with dementia, or even find ways to diagnose it, or, or maybe even to develop ways to train perception so people can improve in their symptoms. I mean, this is all for the future. But the idea of focusing less on what people can do and more on how people experience their worlds, I think opens up a lot of opportunities. You mentioned a minute ago about a cause of our everyday suffering might be the fact that we, we take the, the content of our

• 25:36Speaker 00

  experiences to just be the way it is and without any possibility, any, any sort of flex in there. And I actually think that, I think that's, that's right. That the more we understand that our perceptual experience is, is constructed, that opens a little bit of space for the idea that even if the objective reality doesn't change, our way of relating to it, our way of experiencing it can still change. And, and that's ultimately what matters, is how we feel about things.

• 26:08André Duqum?

  Yeah. What starts as perhaps a reducing of suffering on an individual level, as you take 40,000 on the Ebbinghaus illusion to 8 billion with the collective illusions we all, you know, that we scale at that level. It also breeds a lot of compassion and empathy for realizing how many biases and priors we are all walking around the world looking through as though they are absolute reality. And I think seeing the part we play and the illusions that we, that we have, that we've, you know, that we've let go of, or the new ones that we might be currently having, and we see that internally, it allows a little bit more compassion to realize and look at other people almost as phenomena playing

• 26:53André Duqum?

  out with their, you know, with their own priors.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  I think that's right. I think the only thing, the only kind of slight tweak I would add is, is that, is yes, we have our biases, but we can't do without them. And I think this is, this is sometimes part of the problem. People aspire to like, well, you know, I don't have any bias, you know, I just see things as they are, or I believe, you know, the most rational thing that, that I should in these circumstances. But the point is that to perceive anything, and I think indeed to believe anything, we have to have some prior expectation. We have to have some pre-existing model of, of what's going on, of how the world works, whether that's how it works politically, or how light works when it's

• 27:37Speaker 00

  bouncing off objects. We can't get rid of that at all. And I think that's part of this, this humility that we're talking about, the recognition that prior expectations deep within our brain are just necessary to experience anything, to, to believe anything. So knowing they're there is, is I think, is helpful. Feeling that we can get rid of them is, I think, not so helpful because ultimately we can't.

• 28:12André Duqum?

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• 29:18André Duqum?

  What would happen? Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I expect to see my face, give or take, you know, a few hairs and wrinkles, whatever. If we were to wipe your memory, how much of what we expect to see about ourself and the world determines legitimately, literally, what we actually see?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  That's a very good question. It depends on what you mean by memory, which is a very, very tricky question, right? Because in a sense, the basic structure of our brains that just develops over time, you can think of that as a kind of memory that's been installed very gradually by evolution. So if I wake up in the morning too, I look in the mirror, I see my face, a few more wrinkles in you, a few less hairs in you. But, you know.

• 30:12André Duqum?

  I'm on my way. Give it enough time. Entropy do its thing.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Exactly. Entropy comes for us all in the end.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  But it's still recognizably me. Now, if I wiped my memory, let's say I took a drug that kind of completely obliterated my memory of the last year, would I still recognize myself in the mirror? Probably yes, because I have learned what I looked like over a longer time period, the time period of my life. Now, let's say I obliterated my memory for many years. Then it might be a bit trickier. But I would still see a face. I would still see this face with eyes, with a nose, with ears and so on. And that's because what a face is, is something that all my ancestors and all your ancestors,

• 31:04Speaker 00

  going back a very long way, have had to deal with. We're a very social species. We care about faces a lot. So the memory of what counts as a face is not something that you or I just develops individually over a lifetime. It's how our brains have evolved. What this means in practice is that

• 31:29Speaker 00

  we have quite a bit of pre-installed memories about how the world works. And then there are other things that we learn during our lifetimes. So if you think about wine tasters, no one is born, well, maybe some French people are, I don't know, but no one is born being able to tell the difference between two Cabernet Sauvignons. But you can learn to tell the difference. And this isn't just wine. This is kind of anything that we care about, pay attention to. So we'll learn to discriminate things that previously seemed the same. And those, if you like, lifetime memories for perception that we can develop.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  And then there's the very immediate memory, like what happened yesterday. And typically, that won't really impact very much on what we perceive. But in some cases, it might. You know, in some cases, I mean, there's some times when I'm traveling and I've been such a deep sleep because I'm jet lagged or something like that. And I wake up and I don't really know where I am. And nothing really makes sense, even visually. It's like, where are things in this room? And I don't remember which hotel I'm in, or I arrived late and didn't really look around. And then it takes a little while for things to kind of click into place because I don't have the predictions in my mind about the layout of the room or where, indeed, what kind of room I'm in.

• 32:57André Duqum?

  So what would happen then if we took it all the way? You know, I know you said it depends on how we define memory. But if I have

• 33:07André Duqum?

  just raw experience, raw awareness, with no perception of future or past, because memory is sort of needed for that, yeah, what would happen in that state? Would it just be raw consciousness?

• 33:22Speaker 00

  This is a very good question. I mean, there's this lovely phrase, I think it's from William James, who talks about consciousness as the remembered present,

• 33:31Speaker 00

  which kind of conveys the idea that to experience anything, we have to have some amount of memory. And this is very much in line with the idea of perception as this process of controlled hallucination. It's always reaching back a little bit into time. But it does beg the question about, so what would be the most basic form of conscious experience? There's an old thought experiment from Greek philosophy called Avicenna's Man. You know about this one?

• 34:02André Duqum?

  I know.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  I think sometimes it's called the floating man. And the idea is, I picture a man, or a woman, or any person, just floating in the air. And gradually, you take away their senses. And you ask, what's left? So you take away vision.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  What's left? Well, you know, they're gonna still be conscious, to hear the wind whistling, birds. Take away hearing, take away smell, take away taste, take away touch. All the time, ask what's left. And you might still think, well, there's the self. Well, take away the feeling of where the body is, take away the feeling of emotion and so on.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  How far can you strip down the specific contents of consciousness and still have consciousness? I don't think there's a good answer to this. I'm pretty confident there's no obvious answer to this because this is a question that people have been asking in so many different ways for thousands of years. And people in the meditative traditions, they try to, well, they don't try, that's kind of against the grain for meditation, but they talk about these states of minimal or pure consciousness, bare consciousness, where there's no other content. In psychedelics as well, people report experiences of complete ego dissolution in some psychedelic states,

• 35:30Speaker 00

  where there's no content to consciousness, there's just consciousness.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  My own feeling about this, having, I'm not a meditator. I have tried the psychedelic route to minimal phenomenal experience. And just thinking about it as well is that

• 35:54Speaker 00

  I'm not sure you can strip away absolutely everything. I think my view on consciousness in the broader frame is very, very closely tied up with our nature as living creatures. And this is speculation. It's very hard to do an experiment on this. But I tend to think that the most basic form of conscious experience that certainly a human being can have

• 36:22Speaker 00

  is something like the feeling of being alive, without any particular shape, without any particular form, without any specific emotion, without even really the background texture of a mood, but just this simple, formless, structureless feeling of being alive. If there is anything left in a state of bare consciousness, maybe it's that.

• 36:51André Duqum?

  Yeah, so the contemplative traditions would,

• 36:55André Duqum?

  of course, as words continue to fail us, but attempt to give explanations as to who we are in our most fundamental essence, right? Saying of I am that, just pure I am-ness, right? Like, if you stripped all your sensory experiences, even the feeling of self and thought and emotion, would it just be like an eyes, you know, looking into the abyss? But then it gets into the question of that, okay, if there's no seer, if there's no memory of someone who is seeing, then is it just pure I, like pure am-ness, pure existence, pure aliveness? Does that kind of intuitively feel like what the answer would be from your end too?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  I think so, especially the last thing you said. Like, I struggle a bit with the, I think I am that is an interesting way to put it. From, you know, I was listening to your conversation with Swami Srivastava Piananda. And then he talks about I am that as a way of summarizing some of Advaita Yetvadanta. And it's a really nice way of, I think, summarizing this idea that within that tradition, you know, the world that we experience is part of our consciousness. That's kind of not, I mean, I'm intrigued by those ideas. But when we come to this idea of pure bare awareness, I becomes problematic

• 38:20Speaker 00

  because the word I, as we use it, at least in the West, is all about personal identity. It implies a sort of a duality between subject and object, a perspective, a first-person perspective. And you can say, well, I'll strip away the memories of I so that, you know, I don't have a name or I don't remember anything, what I had for breakfast and so on. But still, this I does lead us to think that there will still be a first-person perspective, maybe. There'll still be a difference between self and other. And I, you know, now I'm using it because I'm not in that state. I think that's probably wrong.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  And I think there are states of consciousness where the first-person perspective can dissolve, where the boundary between the experience of self and world can dissolve. And I think that gets us closer to what this this most basic experience would be, which, again, is a hypothesis. But perhaps the one thing you can't get rid of is this experience of being alive, experience of aliveness, which is actually a little bit related to, I was thinking some years ago about the soul, which is a concept that's got, it's not got a great reputation in modern science these days.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  But different traditions talk about the soul in different ways. In Western philosophy, the soul is often associated with a kind of disembodied or disembodiable seat of rational thinking. I mean, Descartes would have described it maybe in those terms. But then in Hinduism, we have this concept of Atman, which isn't about rational thought. It's much more about breath, about life. And I'm not saying that this is, that we should say, oh, yeah, great. Now we've really, that's true. Now this is the true way to think of soul. But I think that's something, for me at least,

• 40:30Speaker 00

  more appealing than the soul as disembodied cognition, this idea of what's really core to consciousness being inseparable from life and maybe manifest through breath.

• 40:46André Duqum?

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• 41:30André Duqum?

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• 41:54André Duqum?

  Yeah, it makes me think when reflecting on the question of who am I or what am I?

• 42:00André Duqum?

  As you strip experience down and you try to get what the essence of a thing is,

• 42:08André Duqum?

  it's tough to, it's tough to convey what the essence of a thing is without the complex system and ecosystem in which it is existing within.

• 42:18André Duqum?

  Just like we explained with, with memory being entirely connected with, with our perception of self. Now, you study consciousness and we talked a lot about the variance in contents of experience, right? And we can show all the biases and priors we have and the controlled hallucinations in our own internal subjective experience. I'm curious, to what degree do, do you think that examining the contents of our experience can actually even explain anything about the nature of consciousness? Which is the background field in which all contents are experienced? Do you think that it can? Clearly, you're, you're doing a lot of studies in, in the space.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  I think, I think we have to be very, very careful about what the contents of experience can tell us about the nature of consciousness.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  I think the contents of experience are, and this may be, this may be so obvious, it seems unnecessary to say, but I think they're very good evidence for the kinds of experiences that, that people can have. And they can tell us a lot about the biases, the mechanisms, all the, the statistical acrobatics that our brains play around with when we open our eyes and, and, and see a world, experience a world. But I think the nature of our experience is less reliable when we use it to make claims about the fundamental nature of reality

• 43:53Speaker 00

  or the fundamental relationship between consciousness and, and reality. These are sort of metaphysical claims. Like, for instance, if someone reports, maybe, maybe thanks to a psychedelic experience, maybe thanks to some very profound meditative journey, that they experienced that consciousness is everywhere. They have this very powerful experience that the whole universe is, is consciousness. Maybe they have an experience of I am that. Is that evidence for I am that? Is that evidence that consciousness is, is everywhere? Well, it's compatible with that idea.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  But I don't think it's particularly good evidence for that idea. I think it's a big leap to take the content of experience as evidence for one metaphysics over another.

• 44:50André Duqum?

  How are you using the word evidence?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Well, in the, in a way, we might use it, I suppose scientifically, rationally. Like, how do I update my beliefs about the way the world is? How should I take the content of an experience when I'm reaching some conclusion about the nature of reality?

• 45:10André Duqum?

  This is what you referred to, like the difficulty in trying to epistemically find something objective in a ontologically subjective experience.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Partly, I think it's, it's partly about just the status of experience itself when we, when we try to make these kinds of claims. Look, let me try one more example, which I think sometimes works. So many people have experienced out of body experiences. They've had the experience that their consciousness has left their body and is temporarily somewhere else, maybe above them. Maybe it's on out of a window and flowing around a bit.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And then it comes back into their body.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  People definitely have these experiences. They've been reported for thousands of years over many, many cultures. And they've happened in, in lab situations and hospitals as well. People have them. And I think, you know, they report them more or less accurately. I don't doubt that anyone who says that's what they experienced is more or less true, that that's what they experienced. But how do we, what kind of evidence is that? And you can, you can interpret it in two ways, at least. But here are two ways. One way would be you take the experience not only seriously, but also literally. And you say, okay, that is evidence that indeed consciousness can leave the body and the brain and be somewhere else

• 46:38Speaker 00

  and experience the world from, from somewhere else.

• 46:40André Duqum?

  Which is a big jump.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  That's a big jump. And that's very hard to explain. And you have all sorts of other issues there about like, well, how come you can see something from somewhere else when your eyes are still where you left them? So there's, there's problems with that. But you can, you can take it as a different kind of evidence. And the different kind of evidence would be that, oh, actually, this first person perspective, like where I seem to see the world from is, just like color or shape, not something I should take for granted. The brain is continually trying to figure out where, where the first person perspective should be. And pretty much all of the time, it, it gets it right and puts the first person perspective somewhere where the, where the head is.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  But in some cases, you know, it gets it wrong. And we experience the first person perspective from a different location. And to me, that's, it's a better explanation because it's more compatible with everything else we know. We can, we know, we no longer have to explain how it's possible to see things without eyes. But it also, I think it's just more interesting because it reveals to us that there's an aspect of our experience that we might have taken for granted, that we might not think we needed to explain. And now we need to come up with an explanation. Ah, I see. So the first person perspective is something the brain is doing. How is it doing it?

• 48:07Speaker 00

  How can you change it? And indeed, we can induce out of body illusions in the lab now by understanding the mechanisms. And maybe the brain stops doing it altogether in some cases. And then we have an experience of, of no first person perspective. So this is, this is the game, I think, we have to play. We always have to ask, so what kind of evidence is, is contained within a specific experience? And what, what kind of explanation should we, should we use to account for that experience?

• 48:37Speaker 02

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• 48:53Speaker 03

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• 49:12André Duqum?

  It's something that I think is inherently so tricky about psychedelic altered state experiences because they can feel incredibly compelling to then make a conclusion about objective reality because it feels to so many, so much more real than waking normal consciousness. And for those that are a bit more, I guess, rationally oriented, to them, you could say, you know, there's, there's no real evidence. We can't measure it in a repeatable way. And yet, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, right? And so it's, I think it's just humility can you, could serve us all across the board

• 49:57André Duqum?

  when we're examining such an alluring concept. It's, there's something incredibly compelling about thinking that mind extends beyond the self and the body

• 50:08André Duqum?

  for various different reasons. And that might very well be the case. How do you think about this? Because you tend to lean more towards the, the perspective, which for many could be seen as the Occam's razor, which is like your, your brain. These are happening, these are also hallucinations to a degree.

• 50:30André Duqum?

  I've just, yeah, and I know you've talked to, and I've talked to many people who think that, in contrast, our waking experience is like looking at the world through a straw, a small hole, it's like a flashlight of awareness, awareness, we point our attention at various different things. And in these altered states, whatever's happening in our DMN, you know, it's like the, we just, our awareness fills this warehouse where the lights get turned on and you're existing in a much bigger context, at least objectively it appears that way. So, yeah, what do you, I think you explained your perspective, but anything else you want to add on to how you approach this?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  I think it's, you know, you put it pretty well, I think. So with psychedelics, one thing that I think worth emphasizing is that another dimension along which experiences can vary is how real they seem.

• 51:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  And again, I think we've got to play the same game, like the fact that something seems real, what is that evidence for? Is that evidence that the experience is a better reflection of reality? Or is it evidence that the experience of what is real is also something that the brain is kind of doing? And in a psychedelic state, it may kind of dial that up a bit sometimes, or maybe down, it depends.

• 51:50André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  When we're dreaming, normally we experience things as being real, but in some cases, in lucid dreaming, we know we're dreaming. And so we experience the dream content as not as real as waking content. There are people with derealization who perceive the world in the same way, in terms of objects and so on, as you or I might, but, but their experiences, if you like, faded a little bit in terms of its reality, there's this sort of sense that things aren't quite as real as they are for you or me. And again, I think that's the more interesting account, that reality is not an always valid signature

• 52:33Speaker 00

  of how good our perceptions are in some sense, but it's also something the brain is actively doing. So back to psychedelics, yeah, the way I think of it is not that psychedelics sort of takes, widens the filter and gives us deeper access to the nature of reality. It can do that a little indirectly by, for instance, stripping away some of the assumptions we might have about how experience has to be, like if you can have an experience of ego dissolution, and that can really make very clear that, ah, consciousness can unfold without this, this very explicit sense of personhood, of subjectivity within it. But

• 53:15Speaker 00

  I don't think it sort of allows the objective universe to sort of sweep in and manifest itself directly. I do prefer the other view, which is, yeah, from a materialist perspective, you mess around with the neurochemistry of the brain, you're going to expect strange things to happen. And you can study that. I mean, this is, this is, it's a beautiful resource, a beautiful intervention for understanding consciousness, because you can, in a controlled way, maybe not as controlled as you would like, but you inject a very small amount of some specific chemical, we know what it does at the level of the brain's chemistry,

• 53:57Speaker 00

  you know, it might affect this serotonin receptors in these areas and so on. And people's conscious experience reliably changes. And so that gives us a tool for figuring out, okay, so how do we, you know, connect up the levels? What's it doing more broadly across the networks of the brain? And can we explain and understand the nature of the psychedelic experience in terms of these changes in the brain? That's, I guess that's my approach.

• 54:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, and for people that have the natural curiosity of examining, to whatever degree we can, what is really real? Like, what is, what is the most real reality that we can come to know or experience? If, you know, the analogy you gave with the dream world is very apt, it's, it's like we, in the experience of being in the dream, feel as though it's real, we're in a country we've never been before, sometimes speaking a language we made up, you know, or whatever, and we don't second guess it, you know?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Your dreams are more interesting than mine. I'm usually running for a plane or something in my dreams.

• 54:59André Duqum?

  They get weird sometimes. But, but then you come back into this world and we also feel like it's very real. And that analogy could be also drawn out to us in this, in this given moment. We are in a sort of dream. Now, we actually had, so we have an online community, one, one member sent in a question that I think goes in well here. So this is from Elizabeth from California. "When people undergo deep psychedelic trips, it feels more real than waking life. If our brain evolved to prioritize survival utility over objective truth, why does the brain generate its highest feelings of raw, unmediated truth,

• 55:41André Duqum?

  precisely when its survival-driven prediction engine is entirely shattered?"

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a very good question from Elizabeth. It's a good question because I don't know the answer. And I mean, I suppose what I could say is that

• 56:00Speaker 00

  the psychedelic intervention is not something we were evolved to deal with. So you're really putting the brain in a state which is, is kind of unusual. Like, I don't really buy that there's some theories out there.

• 56:13André Duqum?

  Stoned ape theory?

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Stoned ape theory, for instance, that, that, you know, this sort of...

• 56:17André Duqum?

  Because of mushrooms, we, the apes...

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Right, there's some sort of essential psychedelic component to how our minds and brains evolve. Maybe there's some small component that, I don't, I don't, I don't know. But most of the time, our perceptual systems work pretty well about distinguishing what's real from, from what's not. Like, if I, if I think of an image in my mind, I don't immediately confuse it with something happening in the world. People, this is another dimension that people vary in, by the way, how vivid their inner mental imagery is. This has been known for a long time. Some people claim to have no inner mental imagery, we call that aphantasia. Other people have hyperphantasia, their mental images are very vivid. But even

• 57:00Speaker 00

  for those people, you don't really confuse your, your imagination with, with reality. So I think evolution's done a pretty good job of, of having perceptual experiences distinguish between reality and imagination. But yeah, you can, you can mess them up. And I think for reasons that are not really understood, some psychedelics turn the volume up on the, on the sense of reality, and we feel that things are more real. I don't think that's always the case, though. You know, I certainly, and again, I'm speaking just like anecdotally from my own experience, sometimes I'm very well, you know, I kind of experience the psychedelic

• 57:43Speaker 00

  experience as definitely less real than the reality that I'm in every day.

• 57:50André Duqum?

  What was it like when you did acid?

• 57:53Speaker 00

  I mean, so there's, it was, you know, I tried LSD for the first time when I was already, you know, already been doing neuroscience for quite a long time. It wasn't available when I was growing up as a kid in South Oxfordshire, at least I didn't know whether it was or not. In one sense, the experience was sort of exactly, well, exactly, too strong. In one sense, it was very aligned with what I expected to happen. But at the same time, the first person experience always adds something. It reminded me of, there's, there's a famous thought experiment in philosophy called Mary's Room. And Mary's, the idea

• 58:34Speaker 00

  is Mary is a scientist, she studies color vision, but she spent her whole life in a black and white environment. It's a very boring life in a way. She's just down there in this basement, reading books about the brain, doing experiments. She knows everything there is to know about how color vision is supposed to work. But she's never seen a red rose. And then one day, armed with all this knowledge, she comes out of the lab and there's a red rose. And does she learn anything new? Is there something surprising about it? I think, I can, I can empathize with that dilemma because she, in one sense, she's going to, the experience she's going to be, have is what she would expect. It's

• 59:19Speaker 00

  not like, oh, you know, that's totally not what I was expecting. But of course, when you have an experience for the first time, your, your brain is in a, a different state. The state of experiencing the red rose is different from the state of knowing about the experience of a red rose. So, yeah, I mean, for me, it was, it was, it was a little, it was a little like that, that, ah, yeah, that's what it's actually like, which was the same and different from what I expected.

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• 1:00:51André Duqum?

  It brings into this examination of what is evidence a bit, right? Because we could read all the chemistry of what makes up a leaf of a mint, right? But then, when you actually taste it, do you learn something? From a rational perspective, maybe not. You know, you've kind of already knew everything there was in terms of the rational aspect of it. But from the raw, self-evident experience, subjectively of that, surely we gained something. I mean, maybe it's the whole thing. Yeah, it makes me think about the qualia of experience. And we have a huge variance in the contents of our experience

• 1:01:32André Duqum?

  and in the variety of all the experiences that are on offer. And William James, you know, explored the varieties of religious experiences with the main qualities that they contain. Two of the four, ineffability, meaning, right? You like, you have this experience, can't really put it into words. In some degree, it's non-rational, right? Irrational, meaning one plus one equals three, doesn't, doesn't, it doesn't work. Non-rational, perhaps fundamentally incompatible with reason in a sense. The second being noetic. It has this quality of feeling like we've contacted something that is genuine

• 1:02:13André Duqum?

  and that there's actual knowledge that we're encountering. Did any of that show up in your personal journey or experience?

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  I think so. You know, sometimes these things are a little hard to, to, to remember. But, but yeah, I think in my personal experience, yeah, things like this do show up. You do have these experiences of, of, of meaning, of deep insight. So this idea of irrationality, that's kind of important. It's not that the experience itself is irrational, but, but you have the experience of something that is beyond rationality happening. You have the sense of being in contact noetically with something. You have some, yeah, you have these other things too. And, and it's similar to the out-of-body experience thing for me.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  It's like, these are fascinating, thinking back on them, they're fascinating elements of the experience. But do I take them literally? As in that experience really did bring me in closer to contact with reality? It really did indicate something fundamentally incompatible with rationality happening? I don't think so. I think those are, those are data points about phenomenology. They're data points about the space of possible human experiences, which is super interesting because we realize how our experience can change in ways, can be stretched in different directions that we might not have realized before,

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  which means that in the everyday, we take those aspects of experience less for granted. And that for me, that's, that's the lasting impact of these kinds of things. And for me, it's also the lasting impact of just thinking about perception in this way a lot and all the experiments we've done. It's, it's that the everyday experience, just waking up in the morning, you open your eyes, a world appears, you have a sip of coffee. These are all little everyday miracles. All the stuff that's, that's very much on the surface in some of these altered states is still there in every experience, every moment of everyday life as well.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  And, you know, I think people who've done a lot of meditation can sometimes say similar things, that, that one of the lessons or one of the things that, the impact of that is that you, you take your everyday experiences a bit less for granted. And these, not just necessarily outside world now, but also the experience of self, you know, the stream of thought, that you don't fall immediately into the rarefication of these things, of thinking they're just there, that that's just how things are, whether it's the world or the self, that you realize that these things are processes, that they unfold, that they can vary.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  And I think that's, that to me is extremely useful, just, just having that as part of everyday life to some extent, for me, not a big extent, but it's there, I think, a little bit.

• 1:05:24André Duqum?

  Yeah. I'm very enamored by the sheer amount of theories of consciousness there are, you know? And so many of them make very compelling cases. And, you know, and we've been talking around it quite a bit. Nagel's definition of like, you know, what is it like to be a bat? What is the interior experience? And Tholmer's hard problem of consciousness. Could you just reiterate, what is your conception of how you think consciousness exists?

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  So in terms of definitions, which, you know, we need, but we don't need it to be exhaustive. So, you know, consciousness, of course, we need to define it in some way. Because otherwise, you know, I might be talking about birds or airplanes or something. No, I'm talking about something we're all intimately familiar with. We've already been talking about it a lot. But in terms of a definition, I do like Thomas Nagel's definition. And this goes back more than 50 years now. And it's very, very simple. It's perhaps almost circular. But he says, "For a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism." It feels like something to be me, it feels like something to be you. What does it feel like? It depends, you know, it could be very minimal, maybe just a feeling of being alive.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  But most of the time, there's all sorts of other things going on. But any kind of experience is enough. Wherever there's experience, there's consciousness. Wherever there's consciousness, there's, there's experience.

• 1:06:55André Duqum?

  Is that synonymous with sentience in the way that you use it?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  I, it can be. One of the, one of the confusions that, you know, our field is plagued with is that all of these words can be used in different ways by different people. So sometimes people use consciousness to refer to something social, perhaps even political. You know, you raise the consciousness of the people, you raise people's awareness so they become, you know, more, more sensitive to things going on in society. Sentience sometimes goes the other way. So sometimes people use sentience just to mean that an organism or system is sensitive to something. So, you know, a tree might be sensitive to, to light, and maybe it's sentient. I mean, I don't, I don't use it that way.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  I use, try to use anyway, consciousness, awareness and sentience to mean the same thing. And that thing is very minimal. It's the Thomas Nagel sense of any kind of experience whatsoever. There is something it is like to be you. There is not anything it is like to be this beautiful side table here. This is an object. It doesn't feel like anything to be a table, at least, I don't think so.

• 1:08:10André Duqum?

  Okay, so then, and then that's a working definition. But then how, how does, why are some things conscious rather than, than, than others? What are the boundaries of consciousness in the way that you?

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's a huge question.

• 1:08:26André Duqum?

  Just a simple little question for you and me?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  It's, it's a very important current question. It's a difficult problem. And, you know, you could, again, just sort of, you could be very philosophical about it and say, "I only really know that I'm conscious, I don't even know that you're conscious." But I have limited patience for that kind of solipsism, you know? I'm, I'm pretty sure you're conscious. I'm pretty sure all other people are conscious. And that's good enough for me. I don't have to have some sort of one plus one equals two level proof. It's just, that's fine, let's get on with it. The question just becomes very practical when we ask, what about non-human animals? What about a newborn human infant? What about someone after traumatic brain injury

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  who might be in a condition we call coma or vegetative state? And then what about all the things happening in our technologies these days? What about AI systems? What about these things called organoids, which are synthetic biology creations made of neurons grown in petri dishes in various labs in California and elsewhere? What's the distribution of consciousness itself? This is an incredibly important question because with consciousness travels moral status. Things matter for their own sakes when they can have experiences. At least, that's a reasonably consensus view. And for each of us, you know, consciousness really is everything that matters.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  Everything that makes life worth living is because we experience things. In my approach, and many of my colleagues too,

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  We have to go at things incrementally, iteratively, slowly, step by step.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  And what this means is, let's take dogs and cats and seals and other mammals. Now, those creatures have brains that are actually pretty similar to human brains in many ways. They lack some things, they have other things.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  But to the extent that we now know in a human brain that we don't need, let's say, we don't need language to be conscious. We can be conscious without language. We can be conscious without rational thinking.

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  The parts of the brain that are responsible for language may not be there in, let's say, a cat. But the rest of the stuff is. So we can begin to infer that cats are conscious. I mean, I don't think anybody really doubts that. There were times when people did, over history.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  And bit by bit, we can generalize out and we can say, okay, given our best theory of what's necessary and sufficient for consciousness in humans and now mammals, to what extent is something like that present in birds, in fish, in bacteria?

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  And it's a slow process. My own zone of maximum uncertainty at the moment are with creatures like insects and fish.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  They're similar enough to cases where I'm pretty sure consciousness is present, that I think the question arises. But they're at the same time sufficiently different that it's hard to be confident about the presence or absence of consciousness.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

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• 1:12:27Speaker 02

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• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  I have a backyard with a bunch of oak trees. And so when you see that they clearly have an awareness of their environment, you know, there's so many signals they're exchanging in any given moment to prosper, how would you even test if

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  there could be some sort of rudimentary, subjective experience? I think most of us probably presume that they don't have a conscious experience. But they are alive. So how do you kind of cut that out? Yeah, so I've written a lot about how I think life is intimately related to consciousness. This does not mean that I think that everything that is alive is conscious. I think that life may be necessary, but not sufficient. Trees, yeah, they are, they're clearly sensitive to their environment. And they're sensitive to other trees as well. There's a sort of social aspect, mediated by these now pretty famous mycorrhizal networks of fungi and so on.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  There's a film that came out this year called Silent Friend by the Hungarian director Ildiko Nyeddy. I was a little bit involved as an advisor for it. And it's about a tree. That's the silent friend. It's a tree, a ginkgo tree in Marburg in Germany. And it's an old tree, it's been around for hundreds of years. And the film tracks three successive generations, like early 20th century, 1970s, and now.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  And then the main character in each of these generations interacts with the tree in some way. And the most recent, the character in the 2000s is a neuroscientist who tries to record from the tree

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  and figure out what's going on. Maybe trying to answer this question, is it aware of anything? The film is very, very careful not to really take sides on whether the tree is conscious or not. But what it does beautifully is it sort of shows the importance of how sensitive, how delicate that question is, and just how the presence of the tree shapes human consciousness, I think, in really interesting ways. It came to mind because I think sometimes these questions are important, but just not answerable. So in the case of the tree,

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  yeah, sure, they're alive, they behave in some ways over different timescales. They communicate. But there are two differences that I think, for me,

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  I would bet that they're not actually conscious. One is that they don't have a nervous system. And maybe we don't need a nervous system. Maybe a nervous system is just the way animals do consciousness. Maybe trees do it another way. But if there is another way, I don't know what that other way is. Maybe that's because I don't understand enough about consciousness yet. But to the extent that we know nervous systems are necessary, but not sufficient. And trees lack nervous systems. So my starting assumption is, well, they're not conscious. This is, by the way, will have a very interesting relationship to AI. Because AIs also don't have biological nervous systems.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  But they bear other similarities to real brains, just to anticipate. I also don't think they're conscious, but for different reasons.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  And the other thing about trees is they don't face the similar sorts of problems that moving animals face in this continuous battle to survive and thrive. One way to understand consciousness is kind of through a Darwinian lens, a biological evolutionary lens, where it always helps to ask, what's it for? You look at birds' wings, and what are they for? They're for flying. Look at eyes, what are they for? And so on. What is consciousness for?

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  And no one knows. But there's lots of, I think, plausible and interesting ideas that we can test. We can at least ask, what is consciousness for in us? How does it help us? And one, I think, reasonably plausible idea is conscious experiences bring together an enormous amount of information about the world and the self in this single format. We have one experience at a time. And in that experience is so much about the world, so much about the self, so much about our emotional state. Even what we're going to do next, we sort of experience that at a particular moment. This is incredibly useful. Like, an organism that's faced with a rapidly changing world,

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  that can move in many different directions, can do many things at any one time. It's really useful that a system like that has something like consciousness. Now, trees, and I don't want to underestimate how rich and complex the life of a tree is, but it's not the same. They don't seem to have that sort of capacity to behave very differently one moment to the next in response to many, many different things going on. Maybe I don't know enough about trees, but they're just different from animals. And so the problems that trees face might not require conscious experience. So it's that with a nervous system.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  My guess is, you know, trees are brilliant. I love trees, but I don't think they're conscious.

• 1:18:37André Duqum?

  Yeah, and I could see some tree huggers, maybe

• 1:18:41André Duqum?

  that would collapse what you said with a sort of value judgment, you know, which of course, if something has a conscious experience, there's something innate in us because of our relatability with that, that it demands some sort of moral weight.

• 1:19:00André Duqum?

  Something that's also alive and clearly intelligent does in a different context, I suppose. Now, the panpsychist view that consciousness is purely fundamental, right? The materialist perception perhaps is more like we have this unconscious neural complexity that we dial up at a certain stage and we have an experience of self. Which is, as Coin, you know, the hard problem. Because it's still like, it's very, that doesn't really make sense. Why would we have an experience of itself? Is it an illusion? How does that work? Ancient wisdom traditions and many seemingly increasing amount of researchers are exploring

• 1:19:44André Duqum?

  the panpsychist notion that consciousness is a more fundamental constituent of the universe. Before you lay out your, whatever credence you give to these other theories, could you actually steel man the panpsychist view if you were to do that?

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  You're asking me to do something that I don't generally like doing, you know? But fair enough, fair enough. I mean firstly, you're right that panpsychism is having kind of a little bit of a moment in the sun. It seems to be appealing to more people than it used to. So to steel man panpsychism, I think I would-

• 1:20:22André Duqum?

  Try not to vomit as you do it.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  It's fine, it's fine. It might be right. That's the first thing to steel man, you know? It really might be right. I don't know what the, if any of the options on the menu of metaphysics are the correct ones. Panpsychism is not my choice of main dish, but it might be right. I don't think it is, but let me steel man it. A friend and colleague of mine, Philip Goff, is a philosopher working in the UK.

• 1:20:55André Duqum?

  We've had him on.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  You've had him on. So he's a prominent advocate for panpsychism and I think he gives a good, he gives a good account. So he's a good steel man person for it. And if I try to paraphrase Philip's view, it's something, goes something like this. Science has done a brilliant job of explaining how things behave, how things interact with each other. A materialistic view of the world is all about that. It's about how atoms bounce off each other, how fields constrain, how things move, cause and effect.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  That's fine, but materialist science in Philip's view doesn't actually tell us what anything is intrinsically. Science is all about how things react to each other. It's not about what something actually is. At the same time, we have this phenomenon of consciousness, which seems very hard to account for by this materialist, physicalist view of the universe in terms of like particles or fields or waves interacting. "We don't seem to be getting anywhere," says Philip. So, hold on a minute. Why don't we put these two things together?

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  And consciousness is the intrinsic nature of things? And then now we've got an account of what consciousness is? And we still have our materialist science of how things interact and behave? But we won't use it to try to explain the presence of consciousness in the universe because it's already there, because that's what things essentially are. You know? And now we can go home, job done. That's my attempt to steel man panpsychism. Oh, and maybe sometimes people feel that panpsychism is true because they have this experience of consciousness being everywhere. So that's, you know, another line of evidence for it. I'm just trying to be generous.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'm succeeding.

• 1:23:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really steel man. It was like a weak steel.

• 1:23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'd go to bridge out of that steel.

• 1:23:12André Duqum?

  Okay, well, I mean, we've already explored why it is incredibly compelling, especially those who have the subjective, transpersonal experiences where mine seems to be much more vast than the meatsuit we are inhabiting. But that is not sufficient for you because, because what?

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  I think because it, it doesn't to me lead in a direction that I think is likely to be insightful. So I, at least, I like to think that I wear my metaphysical clothes quite lightly. And so I will often say, you know, Philip will say I'm a materialist. I kind of agree, but I also think I'm a pragmatic materialist. I find it useful to take a materialist stance in trying to explain phenomena and figuring out what experiments to do next and so on. Like for the out of body experience example, I think the materialist stance leads to questions

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  about, oh, so how is the brain generating a first person perspective? Rather than, maybe if you're a panpsychist and you think about an out of body experience, you might think, oh, that's, you know, consciousness has gone somewhere. I don't know, don't know what would be said there. But I find materialism a useful heuristic. I think the fact that we haven't explained everything yet is not a good enough reason to say it's failed. I think actually a lot of progress has been made. Panpsychism is often motivated by the supposed inadequacy of a materialist perspective. And I just think that's a little premature.

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  Our ideas about the nature of consciousness are, I think they are becoming more interesting, more sophisticated, perhaps closer to truth from a broadly materialist perspective. And one thing, in many conversations with Philip, one thing he often says is like, all the things that you found out, you neuroscientists, you materialists, all these things you found out about the brain, they're all perfectly compatible with panpsychism. And panpsychism has the advantage of dissolving this hard problem, or just like, not really dissolving it, but it no longer is there in the first place. And when I think about that, he's right, you know, that panpsychism, his version of

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  it is compatible with everything that materialist neuroscientists find, because everything that materialist neuroscientists discover is all about how things behave, not what things intrinsically are. But my question is, and I pose this to Philip, and of course we don't know the answer, but like, would we have found these things out if we were all panpsychists? Would we have asked the same questions, done the same experiment? Maybe we'd have found out other better things, but maybe we would have made less progress because we would have been focusing on problems which are specific to a panpsychist view. For instance, panpsychists, instead of having the hard problem of the relationship between

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  consciousness and matter, they have the problem called the combination problem of how you go from small conscious things, since consciousness is intrinsic to everything, how you go from small conscious things to big conscious things like people. That's a problem that doesn't arise from the materialist view because we don't start with small conscious things. And my feeling is that if we'd all focused on the combination problem, then we would have made less progress than we have. Now, this is a counterfactual, it's a hypothetical, I don't know. But that's my, that's my bet.

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  Now, my bet is that materialism has done really well at, at kind of demystifying things that have seemed mysterious previously. Like life at one point seemed very mysterious. We don't understand everything about life yet either, but a materialist view has deepened our understanding of life. And it's now broadly accepted that there's nothing supernatural, we don't need to change the laws of physics to accommodate life. That's another problem with panpsychism. It's like, okay, how does this actually work? Will we need new laws of nature?

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

  And if consciousness is just what something is and has no relation to what it does, then it has no, can have no function. It sort of rules itself out of being useful, which seems exactly against everyday evidence that conscious experiences are useful. I actually find idealism perhaps a little bit more compelling than panpsychism. Idealism is the idea that, that it's not just that, panpsychism is that consciousness is a fundamental property, along with other fundamental properties. Idealism is the idea that really there's only consciousness.

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  And the things that we think of as being material, physical properties are also just consciousness.

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  Um, I don't, it's not my preferred metaphysics, but I think it has a consistency and a coherence. That I can see the appeal of that, I can see the appeal of that too. But yeah, I think ultimately,

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  we can't determine these, among these metaphysical views, we can't decide among these metaphysical views simply on the basis of the kinds of experiences that, that we have. And, uh, but it's a challenge to hold these things lightly, isn't it? I mean, we, we, we want certainty, we want something, something, some solid foundation on which we can build everything else. And it's, it's, yeah, there's, there is a discomfort.

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  I tend to be materialist, but, but yeah, I ultimately, I don't know. And I have to be comfortable with that, with that uncertainty too.

• 1:29:40André Duqum?

  Have you found Spinoza's conception of the dual aspect monism compelling at all? That like mind and matter kind of come from one?

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I, I, I do that. There's a sort of point at which, so there's a naive materialism, which would say like, all that exists is like maybe particles bouncing off each other. And somehow they produce consciousness as this separate phenomenon. And we have to understand like how consciousness is produced, much like steam might be produced from a kettle. I don't think, that's not the kind of materialism that, that I, that I am in favor of.

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think it's rather that consciousness is a property entailed by properties of physics. This is a slightly weird word, but it just means it's a property of matter, not a property generated by matter. And in that sense, it's, it is kind of compatible with, with these things like dual aspect monisms, where you just say, there's just one kind of thing. And, and maybe from the inside, it feels like consciousness. And from the outside, it looks like, looks like matter.

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  I find that, you know, fairly, fairly reasonable. But the, because when, in my everyday work, when we think about what material things are, I am thinking about things like neurons, things like neurotransmitters, things like eyes, ears and objects in the world. Then, um,

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  that kind of dual aspect monism is, is, is a bit less helpful in, in the everyday world in which we live. Because in that world, you know, there are objects and we have our perceptions of, of objects and we have brains. And, and, and so it becomes again a pragmatic view that I think holding materialism sort of pragmatically and lightly is, is, is helpful.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's compatible, you know, dual aspect monism. Also, there's a Kantian form of transcendental idealism, which is also, I think, fairly compatible. And, and I, I feel reasonably at ease with that, which is there is this numinous, you know, the way things really are, which we will never know. And all we can have access to is some indirect reflection of that. That's very much like this view from the brain as a inference engine, a prediction machine.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  So it's there. But then again, in, in the everyday world in which I live and, and work, it helps me to think of the brain as a physical object. And then of consciousness as having phenomenological properties and still doing the work of figuring out how they relate to each other.

• 1:32:33André Duqum?

  Would you say that it's deepened our understanding of the mechanisms of life? Or of life itself?

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Well, I would say the two are pretty much the same thing. So the phenomenon of life is, is the process of, that unfolds with a particular, particular mechanism.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

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• 1:33:07Speaker 05

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• 1:33:38André Duqum?

  And yet consciousness inherently, there's this, currently this mystical

• 1:33:46André Duqum?

  perception of it because we don't know why

• 1:33:50André Duqum?

  stuff would give us the experience of the color of the red rose, right?

• 1:33:56André Duqum?

  Do you, you agree, we currently like, don't have an, an understanding of, of how that, of how matter or unconscious material could become conscious?

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  I, I, yeah, I mostly agree. This year, actually, there was a meeting in Germany with David Chalmers. It's 30 years since he wrote his book, uh, famous book, The Conscious Mind, in which he talks about the hard problem. And, and Dave was, you know, was asked to reflect on the 30 years. And I think his summary was hard problem, it's still pretty hard.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  And I think he's right, it's still, it's still mysterious. We still don't know how to fit consciousness into our broader picture of nature. I think the mistake is when we, we recognize that, but then make the further claim that, well, we've made no progress and we don't understand anything. That, and I think that's just wrong. You know, we have, there's lots of theories you mentioned, but we, some are more dominant than others. And, and, you know, we know certain things and certain things make sense about the, the neural correlates of consciousness and so on.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  You know, the views of perception that we've been talking about, I think, really do help us understand things about the nature of self and, and the world. Will that be enough going along that trajectory?

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Or will there always be some residue? Some explanatory gap between physics and consciousness? The honest answer is I don't know.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  I think it's plausible that there might be. But I think the only way we'll know is to see how far we get. And, and also, maybe we set a different criteria for consciousness compared to other, other phenomena that seem mysterious. And that's because we are ourselves conscious. So there are many things that are distinctive about consciousness compared to other problems in, in, in science, like the origin of life or the origin of the universe, the nature of time and so on. It's that we're trying to explain a phenomenon that we instantiate.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  And you can make the argument that we therefore expect more from an explanation than we typically might do in science. Now, scientific theories in general are asked to explain properties of phenomenon, predict when they might happen and maybe control them, explain, predict and control. They don't necessarily have to give you an intuitive sense of aha, now I understand that's how, of course it has to be. That would be nice. Like, we don't really have that in quantum mechanics and physics. No one understands what that means. But it's, it's able to explain properties. We can make predictions and we can control things. And it's a, it's a successful science. I think the same, a similar thing might, might apply in consciousness.

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  We have to ask what Dave called the meta problem of consciousness. It's what we have to address the meta problem, which is why do people think there's a hard problem of consciousness? Part of that might be because of the, you know, the actual nature of reality, that, that it's mysterious because we haven't figured out how consciousness fits into our picture of the universe. But part of the answer might be in our own psychologies, that we expect something different from a theory of consciousness. That is just simply unfair to ask of scientific explanations in general.

• 1:37:18André Duqum?

  You gave this delineation between consciousness, life and intelligence and some of your recent writings, which have won awards and were very well articulated. Examine just this because humanity is moments from birthing superintelligence. And, uh, many people even think we're there already. But increasingly, it's going to get to the point, especially when the biotech, you know, is, uh, gives the AI a place to be inhabited.

• 1:37:48André Duqum?

  They will seem very conscious. And yet seeming and being conscious are two different things. So what is it about intelligence and intelligent systems like AI

• 1:38:02André Duqum?

  that you think is fundamentally perhaps incompatible with having a conscious experience?

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  I mean, this is indeed very much a topic for today. It's very much my mind. I was just in San Francisco the last couple of days, which is the, the center of the universe for these things at the moment.

• 1:38:21Speaker 00

  And it's fascinating, like the idea of whether AI can be conscious has been, people have talked about this for a long time, you know, in philosophy groups and in neuroscience seminars and in tech as well. But, but basically nobody cared. It was sort of a very abstract, abstract discussion that in the last few years has just catapulted itself into everyday reality.

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

  And it really matters what people think about this, you know? It shapes regulation, it shapes how we interact with AI systems. It will shape the sorts of systems people build.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  My perspective,

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  and I should say first that humility is necessary here because we don't know by we, I think, I think anybody knows the necessary or sufficient conditions for consciousness. So we cannot be sure about whether AI is conscious or not. But I'm very skeptical that AI as we know it now either is or, or will be. And by know it now, I mean like programs running on silicon systems, server farms, wherever they might be.

• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  The, all the things being developed in biotech labs, that's another thing. All together, we'll put that aside for now.

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  And I think there's like two kinds of reasons. Firstly,

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  Back to our biases. Just as we have perceptual biases to see faces in clouds, we have perceptual biases to project consciousness into AI systems. Why? Because of like some deeper principles of how our minds work. We, we humans, we tend to be both anthropocentric. We see the world in our own terms. And we know we're conscious and we, we like to think we're intelligent. And we also take language as a signature of intelligence. And it's something that makes us distinct from, from other animals, something special, exceptionist about, about humans. So we tend to bundle these things together.

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  But of course, the fact that they go together in us doesn't mean they always have to go together in general. Many non-human animals can be conscious without being intelligent by human standards. And I think with AI, we've got just the other situation that we can have systems that are intelligent in some way, but consciousness doesn't have to travel along with that. We need independent reasons for thinking that, that are more than just our own biases. If we see something speak to us. And language models do this, right? Language models, I mean, amazing. I don't want to underplay how amazing these systems are. They've taken everybody by surprise.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  They speak to us and because they speak to us, we tend to project into them all the other qualities that go along with fluent language in us humans. Having a mind, being able to understand, and yes, consciousness too. So I think that's one reason we over attribute properties. Like there are other AI systems, like systems that fold, predict how proteins fold, alpha fold, brilliant. No one really worries about whether alpha fold is, is conscious, but it's basically the same thing. It just doesn't speak to us. So our biases are definitely playing some role. But then there's a more fundamental thing, which is, is consciousness the kind of thing that a computer could, could even have?

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  Is it a matter of computation? And that comes down to what, what kind of a thing do we think a brain is? Now, is a brain just a computer that happens to be made of meat rather than metal? If it is, then we could say, okay, like we'll figure out whatever the algorithms that are running in our meat-based supercomputers are, and we'll just implement versions of those algorithms in silicon. If the brain is nothing but a computer, then that should be fine, because that's the whole point about computers. The algorithm is enough. You don't need to worry about what's implementing it. The algorithm is, is sufficient.

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  That's the fundamental assumption that computation, that consciousness is a matter of computation, that computation is sufficient for consciousness. And I just think this is a very, very shaky assumption. You, you look at a real brain and it's so different from the physical computers that we have in ways that really matter. In a brain, there's no sharp separation between mindware and wetware, as there is between software and hardware in a computer. In a real brain, continuous time matters. We can't escape continuous time. You know, we, the tendrils of entropy will always suck us in. But in an algorithm, time doesn't matter, only sequence matters.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  You could have a microsecond or a year between two steps of an algorithm. It's the same algorithm. So the, the idea that all that matters about the brain is just algorithm, I think, is, is demonstrably, or I would say like very likely to be wrong. Right? Everything we know about brains points that that's not the case. And if that's not the case, then it's a very, it's a very, very sketchy assumption that somehow still algorithms will be enough for consciousness. What we have instead, I think, are systems that mimic consciousness very persuasively, but they're not actually conscious underneath.

• 1:44:04André Duqum?

  And yet, to so many that AI systems are going to increasingly seem conscious, right? And we're already seeing this on a mass scale in terms of the relationships that are, people are building with AIs that are falling in love, you know? You think of movies and films like Ex Machina and Her, right? And we've kind of foreseen this coming to some degree. We would get into dangerous territory the more that a system, because of how much it mimics what we deem to be conscious, is conscious and what sort of implications that would, you know? There's something in us that would just kind of feel wrong about, let's say there's

• 1:44:45André Duqum?

  an AI robotic that looks fairly human, that has a super intelligent computer inside of it, and there's something that will probably feel off and just shutting that down or killing it, you know? But in essence, you know, if what you're saying is true, then there should actually be no real moral value to something inherently unconscious or inherently conscious.

• 1:45:11Speaker 00

  We are already in dangerous territory, I think. And the question is, how do we deal with that now? I mean, earlier we were talking about how do we infer the distribution of consciousness, like beyond the human? And I was saying, we've kind of got to go slowly and we go from humans to other mammals and then maybe to fish and, and so on. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time when it comes to AI for exactly the reasons that you said. There are many people who already believe that AIs are conscious, and not only just people out there in the general public. Experts in machine learning also think this. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI, has said it several times, that he thinks AI is already conscious.

• 1:45:55Speaker 00

  And again, that just fuels the wider belief because he's, you know, he's an extremely smart guy, he's got a Nobel Prize. If he thinks, and he's, he's, he created AI, so like, if he thinks that, then who are we to disagree? So the idea is very much out there already and it has consequences. Of course, if AIs really are conscious, then they do deserve like moral consideration. And the fact that I think current AIs and near future ones are not, are not likely to be, that doesn't mean conscious AI is impossible altogether.

• 1:46:34Speaker 00

  Now, the, the question here is how, how brain-like does an AI have to be to move the needle on the credence that it might be conscious? You know, you make another brain out of the same stuff and that's, that's, it's going to be enough. And technologies are changing. People are building things that are more brain-like, neuromorphic computing, hybrid systems, partly silicon, partly biological. So we may get there at some point as the technologies change. And here, I think the most important thing to say is, this is a terrible idea. Even if it's unlikely now, no one should be trying to build conscious AI. Pretty much every science fiction novel out there tells us it's a terrible idea.

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  Things don't tend to go very well. And it would inaugurate this, this ethical crisis that, okay, what do we do? Can we turn these things off if we need to? Do they have rights? Lots of, lots and lots of problems. I just don't think it's a good idea to have conscious AIs. We already have enough conscious things on the planet that we're failing to take care of properly. That's one thing. But the world we live in right now is not that world. The world we live in right now is a world where these systems seem to be conscious and will increasingly give that impression most likely, but they aren't, or they're very unlikely to be.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  And the, the dangers here are related, but, but very different. So if people think that AIs are conscious, then we may still give them rights. We may still extend welfare protection. We may still gut ourselves into a situation where we're regulated out of being able to turn off an AI because it might be considered murder. And if we're doing this because we think they're conscious when they're not, then what we're in fact doing is we're really hampering our ability to exercise control and regulation over technologies that are already very difficult to control and regulate. We've been making the problem of AI alignment much harder than it already is, and it's

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  already is very, very hard. So that's one, one problem. Another one is it's, it's bad for us too. You mentioned the other films like Her and Ex Machina. And I think it's very plausible that if we interact with AI systems that seem to be conscious, we're much more easily exploited psychologically. You know, we may form parasocial relationships with these systems more readily. We might do what they say more easily, more quickly, if we really believe that they really feel for us, that they really empathize with us, that they really understand us. And there's been plenty of examples of, of, you know, what in quotes is called AI psychosis,

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  or people just doing things that are very detrimental to themselves and society after interactions with chatbots.

• 1:49:36André Duqum?

  Yeah. How many overnight geniuses with their new theory of everything were born when AI came into the picture, which is so under-reported and quite, quite alarming.

• 1:49:47Speaker 00

  It's alarming, but you know, there's plenty worse than that as well. I mean, there are people taking their lives there. There are, you know, people going down all kinds of, of rabbit holes. And, and there's very little data on whether this is, you know, how much this is modulated by whether people believe the AI is conscious. So I don't think there is like, there's not really hard data on that, but it does seem plausible enough to, to worry about. And we've already seen with social media that, um, social media technologies can, can come for our attention, but conscious seeming AIs will come for much more. You know, they'll, they won't stop at attention. They'll come for our relationships and they'll come for our, for our minds.

• 1:50:32Speaker 00

  I think there's a more subtle issue with conscious seeming AI here as well, which is that if we, the extent to which we think of AIs as basically alternative people, you know, the more likely, and this is speculation at this point, but I think we'd be more likely to form relationships of dependence with them rather than complementarity. One of my mentors, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who we lost a couple of years ago sadly, you know, he always said we should remember that AI systems are tools and not colleagues, not alternative people. And if we can do that, then we can, at least we stand a chance of being able

• 1:51:12Speaker 00

  to utilize these systems to amplify our, our own innate cognitive capacities rather than replace them, to add rather than subtract. And even more fundamentally, I think if we think that an AI is conscious or has all these other properties that human minds and brains have, then we become tempted to think of ourselves in those terms too. You know, we can just think, okay, what is a human being? Well, it's just a computer. What else could it be? It's just a computer. And I think this is hugely reductive and diminishing, not only for human beings, but for living creatures in general.

• 1:51:53Speaker 00

  It takes us further away from nature. We become more apart from nature and lesser part of nature. This is a bit motivated reasoning. You know, I like to feel that we're part of nature, but I also think that we are. And we'll, we'll understand ourselves better, we'll know ourselves better by appreciating the continuity with the rest of nature and by resisting, you know, this, this historical fascination by which we confuse ourselves with our technologies. We see ourselves in our algorithms, but then we also see our algorithms in ourselves. And I think when we do that, we lose sight of what and who we really are.

• 1:52:36André Duqum?

  What are your thoughts on death?

• 1:52:48Speaker 00

  It's very hard to wrap your head around. It's, I spoke to my, my mother about death quite a lot in the last years of her life. And even when she was getting close to death, she would say she knew it was, it was coming, but she couldn't imagine not existing. There's something pretty profound about that. It's, it just seems conceptually impossible to imagine not existing because the act of imagining requires existing. You know, we can imagine the experience of absence.

• 1:53:32Speaker 00

  And we can even imagine, well, actually, that's the wrong way around. I can imagine the absence of experience, but imagining the absence of experience is an experience. So is that going to change as I get closer? Maybe it's tomorrow, maybe it's in 30 years, maybe it's in 40 years. I don't know. Maybe we'll all take these longevity drugs and it will never happen. I doubt that. Entropy comes for us all. So I don't know how that will change, but I do think about death a little bit differently now. One thing that I often return to is,

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  well, there was all this time before I was born. And I don't really feel terrible about not being there over these eons of time before I was born. Like, yeah, in some sense, it might've been nice to sort of visit, I don't know, London in the 1960s or some other period of history, a bit more imaginative probably, wouldn't that be great? Maybe ancient Greece and the birth of democracy, something like that. But really, you know, this is a, these are flights of fantasy. I don't feel any sense of fundamental existential angst about not having existed in the past. So why should I feel a sense of existential angst about not existing at some time in the future?

• 1:54:59Speaker 00

  You know, I won't be there. There's no suffering possible. So there's this kind of weird temporal asymmetry that of course, you know, having been alive, then of course, there are things that my being alive might have, might affect. And so that's one, one thing I might miss out on. But I still think that's not really commensurate with the, with the way we think about death versus birth. And then there's the idea that, that it gets us back to where we started. What is this, what dies? And the self is always changing.

• 1:55:38Speaker 00

  I was thinking about this for some reason this, this morning, just thinking, oh, there was, there was some music playing in, in the car actually on the way here. It was like, it was, it was "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. I mention that because I think, I remember just listening to that when it first came out in the 1980s, like on a kazat tape in my, in my house where I was growing up in Oxfordshire. And I was trying to remember the, what it felt like to be, I don't know, I might've been 11 years old or something. I don't really remember. But I was trying to imagine the feelings that I had listening to that, the life I was living and fundamentally who I was. And, and there's a sense in which it's the same person,

• 1:56:23Speaker 00

  but there's a sense in which that person hasn't existed for a long time. Never died. It's just changed. And this, this brings us to these other, the contemplative views, right? The Buddhist view of the self as a process. And I think the more we think about that, the more we realize that what a self is, is not a persistent essence of anything. It's, it's always changing. And so what dies is not a single person that's just been there for however many years. It's a sense of self at a particular time.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  The more we can hold the nature of self lightly, I think that, that can help us come to terms with the prospect of not existing. But I still wonder what it will feel like as that moment gets closer and closer.

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• 1:58:25André Duqum?

  When you examine your own experience, what is it that hasn't changed from you when you were five to your present moment?

• 1:58:37Speaker 00

  It's quite possible that there's almost nothing in common. I don't know. I mean, in some sense, yeah, I'm a lot, I'm a lot bigger as a person, but you know, I'm still roughly the same. My proportions haven't changed that, that much. There's a, there's, there is a thread of continuity, of course, because, because it's the same body and the same brain. That is not exactly the same. Of course it changes, so it's not exactly the same. But there has been a, some kind of continuity interrupted. We, we fall asleep. We have general anesthesia.

• 1:59:19Speaker 00

  It's not a perfectly connected thread, but there, there is some kind of thread. But I think it's, I think the experience of being me now compared to being me at five years old, many more things have changed and have stayed the same.

• 1:59:37André Duqum?

  Would you say that there is that raw feeling of experiencing, the contemplative traditions would maybe call the ground of being, you know, that pure conscious awareness and the unmediated experience that is perhaps maybe the only singular consistent through line in our life?

• 2:00:00Speaker 00

  It might be. It might be this feeling of being alive is, is actually the only thing that's, that's stayed. And, and even that has occasionally been interrupted by, by anesthesia. But is that me? Then I think, you know, I think that's the point, isn't it? That this basic feeling of being alive is so basic that all the things that we think of as characteristic of a self aren't there anyway. So what continues is consciousness, but not self. But we, we have, we have this experience of something continuing. We have this experience of, of identity. And it's picking out something.

• 2:00:44Speaker 00

  But it's, you know, just as our experience of color seems to be revealing an objective, independent future of the world, you know, our experience of self seems to be revealing some independence, some persistent, unchanging essence of me. I think those two, that's just not the way it is that our experience of self is tracking something. It's tracking, you know, all the ways the brain has about perceiving and interpreting the body, the, the way perspective is formed, relations with memories over time, relations with, with other people.

• 2:01:28Speaker 00

  All of these things play into the experience of self that unfolds for a, a human being in every moment. Nowhere within that network of processes is one thing you'd point to and say, oh, that's the self.

• 2:01:44André Duqum?

  It's something that I explore quite a bit in dialogue on this podcast, obviously self being in the name.

• 2:01:53André Duqum?

  But because I think we have this presumption

• 2:02:00André Duqum?

  deeply embedded that we are this locus of thoughts and emotions and the memory of being a self that we operate, you know, and exchange and transact through the world with and through. And

• 2:02:14André Duqum?

  it's just fascinating as you go on that process of examining what is, what is there actually that's not impermanent in that, in that, is there anything permanent in that structure of self? And it continually changes and

• 2:02:27André Duqum?

  shifts and

• 2:02:30André Duqum?

  what a gift it is to have an experience as an individual, you know, that like there's you, thank God you're there and I'm here and we get to have this conversation for so many different reasons and

• 2:02:42André Duqum?

  and yet it can be taken too far in some, in some ways. I'm curious your thoughts on that sense of individuality and the sense of self which we have

• 2:02:54André Duqum?

  acting as though it's, it's, it's like, it's a concrete aspect of reality, you know? It's inherently ephemeral in the way that I at least understand it.

• 2:03:10André Duqum?

  And

• 2:03:12André Duqum?

  yeah. What's the byproduct of taking a self to be so real and concrete? What's the cost of that?

• 2:03:18Speaker 00

  The cost of taking ourselves too seriously, I think, yeah.

• 2:03:23Speaker 00

  Probably a high, a high price is paid, I think. I mean, there's cost the other way, of course, as well. You know, if, if we underplay the importance of, of individual selfhood, then we'll still get into trouble. You just don't care about people and that's, that's equally problematic. I think like many, many things, no, there's virtue in moderation. Selfhood is good in limited, in limited doses, but, but you know, we don't want to do away with it. I think if we overestimate the, the reality of the self, then we probably underestimate the importance to which self experiences is shaped by the societies we live in, the interactions we have with, with other people,

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  with animals, with nature in, in general.

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  We may suffer more because we feel that the self has to be preserved at all costs, can't change and things become more threatening to the self. But if we a bit more fluid with the nature of self, that it's always changing, then perhaps we can, we can diminish a little bit of the fear of change and diffuse some of these, some of these threats.

• 2:04:38Speaker 00

  Now ultimately, I worry about

• 2:04:44Speaker 00

  as something we're seeing a little bit more these days, people really taking seriously the idea that they want to live forever.

• 2:04:52Speaker 00

  Imagine a world where that becomes possible. I think there'd be many, many poor, many problematic consequences.

• 2:05:04Speaker 00

  You know, life

• 2:05:09Speaker 00

  is cyclical and

• 2:05:12Speaker 00

  one of the great, I guess, retaining walls on some sense of equality is the fact that within an order of magnitude, everyone dies at more or less the same time.

• 2:05:23Speaker 00

  Once that's gone,

• 2:05:26Speaker 00

  then inequality in society will become massively increased. And that's probably not a good thing.

• 2:05:37Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, there's, there's, there's lots of issues in taking ourselves too seriously, but it's also understandable. I mean, we are, we are built to try to stay alive. And it's very understandable that things that seem to support our ability to not die are things we will naturally want to do.

• 2:06:02André Duqum?

  Is free will just like a story the brain tells itself? What is free will in your understanding?

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  You know, when I was writing the, the book, Being You, this was a chapter I found really hard to, to write.

• 2:06:18Speaker 00

  Cause and I've always found that when, when talking about consciousness

• 2:06:26Speaker 00

  to, to people, you can explain how the world that's out there isn't the world as it seems to be. You can explain how the experience of self might not reveal an unchanging essence of a person.

• 2:06:42Speaker 00

  And people can be more or less, you know, they can take it on board to some degree or other. But then free will is the point of maximum resistance. I think of, of all those aspects of self

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  that we, we want to cling on to as being somehow beyond the reach of science, the free will is probably that thing.

• 2:07:06Speaker 00

  It also just can, puts many different types of confusing things together. We have like, is physics deterministic or stochastic? Like is, are things just unfolding in a predetermined way? Or is there some inherent randomness? And then we have the feeling of free will and then we have all the moral and ethical issues when we hold people responsible for their actions.

• 2:07:27Speaker 00

  My perspective that I, that I still feel pretty comfortable with is that there's a kind of free will that we can't have, that we don't even need. And this is the free will where there's sort of some, some uncaused cause, something that's maybe it's my soul, maybe it's my consciousness that, that swoops into the brain, pulls some strings and I do something that I wouldn't have otherwise done. Philosophers call this a libertarian kind of free will, that it's a, that it really does shift the course of the universe in one way or another. I don't think we have that. I don't think we need it. I don't think we can have that because you'd have to explain

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  how this could happen. But what could change the laws of physics or what, what could be that uncaused cause? What we do have is the experience of free will. We have the experience of making actions according to our beliefs and desires of, we have the feeling that the action comes from within rather than being externally imposed. And we have the feeling that I could have done something different.

• 2:08:34Speaker 00

  I think these are all kinds of perceptions. I think they're very useful because they allow

• 2:08:41Speaker 00

  the thing that is me to distinguish between actions that come relatively from within and that are aligned with, with goals, from those actions that are externally imposed. And that's, that's a useful thing. We are,

• 2:08:57Speaker 00

  we're creatures with many degrees of freedom. We can do many different things, but you can't replay the tape and have a different outcome.

• 2:09:07Speaker 00

  So the kind of free will that I think we have is what philosophers call a compatibilist free will, which is we have the capacity to behave according to our beliefs and desires.

• 2:09:22Speaker 00

  And I think that's all the free will we need. So it sort of exists in the same way that color exists. Like it's useful, but it's not what you think it is. The feeling that our actions come from nowhere doesn't mean they came from nowhere. The feeling that, that consciousness caused our actions doesn't mean that consciousness caused the action. It's a useful perception of the fact that certain actions come more from within than from without. And that's a very useful thing for creatures like us to have.

• 2:09:52André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54André Duqum?

  We have a closing tradition on the show where I'd just like to ask if you had 60 seconds to share one message to humanity around the self perception or reality?

• 2:10:07André Duqum?

  What would it be?

• 2:10:18Speaker 00

  It would be to not take our worlds or ourselves for granted. That there's wonder and awe in the simplest of experiences of opening your eyes and a world appearing. And we should celebrate the everyday miracle of being conscious.

• 2:10:42André Duqum?

  A near miracle. Thank you for being on the show and the reminders that you gave plentiful of, I think, generate that feeling of awe. And now certainly within me and the wider audience that get to have into your world and your work. It's so fascinating. There's the stuff that you're researching and the studies and you're writing. What upcoming projects do you have? Do you have, are you writing another book? Do you have, what's going on?

• 2:11:08Speaker 00

  No, lots, lots going on. I mean, so one thing that's occupying a lot of time is this idea of, or the debate around consciousness and AI.

• 2:11:18Speaker 00

  And partly because of just what's happening in tech at the moment. So I am writing another book, but it's going to be more about how what's happening AI can help us understand ourselves better. We can use AI as a constructive mirror in this way by putting the focus back on what makes us not the same as, as AIs. So that's going on. We also have, I think, a fascinating project back to these strobe lights that, that give people visual hallucinations. When we did this, I was working with a group of people a few years ago now. And we did this at pretty large scale in the UK.

• 2:12:01Speaker 00

  So we got 40,000 people to have visually induced hallucinations with strobe. And we found quite a lot of people reported feeling improvements in their mental health afterwards. Now, this might be just because they had a nice time for 90 minutes and were looked after well. But there's also the possibility that we're tapping into something similar to how psychedelic therapy might work for conditions like depression that we've talked about this in early parts of this podcast, that altered states of experience can, you know, the psychedelic people talk about it shaking the snow globe. It can take us out of perceptual habits and it may open up

• 2:12:46Speaker 00

  a space of recognition that our experiences can, can change, even if our objective circumstances don't. So we, we're at the early stages of testing whether strobe induced hallucinations can be a potential intervention for, for major depression. Now, I have to stress, we don't know yet. It's, it's very early, early days. But it strikes me as a hypothesis worth testing and, and we're going to do that. And then more generally, my, my lab is, is really just interested in drilling ever further down into, into the nature of perception and the nature of self and,

• 2:13:31Speaker 00

  and unpacking what these mechanisms are within the brain that give rise to these experiences and, and just pulling further on, on this thread. And ultimately, the question I really want to understand, if I, if I sort of think, if I look back in towards the end of my life and think, did I figure that out? The question I want to figure out is this question of life, like, is, is consciousness really tied to life or not? Are we conscious because of our nature's living systems? Or is that just something that happens to be the case, but is not really necessary? So that's, that's the long goal. That's the long road, but it's a road that I'm determined to keep walking down.

• 2:14:19André Duqum?

  Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Yeah. Any, any other last words before we close out?

• 2:14:25Speaker 00

  I mean, just this, I, I feel that, you know, when I started out as a student in the 1990s, the idea of having a career, working on, thinking about consciousness was seen completely out of the question. You know, at that time, consciousness was, was a philosophical matter, was not really considered particularly legitimate in sciences, at least not in the UK where I was. So I just feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to, to think about consciousness, to work on it, to talk about it to broader audiences,

• 2:15:04Speaker 00

  to indulge the curiosity that I feel for, for something that's so fundamental. And, and I feel it's been, it's been a privilege in that. So thank you for helping me along that journey too.

• 2:15:20André Duqum?

  Oh, that's very gracious. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it's fascinating when someone's passion and curiosity is so sincere and genuine and where that leads you to and how, uh, how impactful that becomes for everybody that gets to live vicariously through your curiosity. Amazing. Until next time, everybody, take care, be well.