Audio Player
Starting at:
Bernardo Kastrup Λ Susan Blackmore: Conscious Illusion?
June 16, 2023
•
1:35:13
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
⚠️ Timestamps are hidden: Some podcast MP3s have dynamically injected ads which can shift timestamps. Show timestamps for troubleshooting.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
230 sentences
14,839 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 93m 28s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
Consciousness is not there. Consciousness is not a personal self. It's not a soul. It's phenomenal states. It has a precise definition. I totally and utterly disagree with you. Good.
Alright, this is one highly anticipated episode. Today we have a Theolocution with Susan Blackmore and Bernardo Castro. Well, what is a Theolocution? It's a conversation between two people who are trying to understand one another's views and even constructively, that is, add to the so-called opponent's views in real time.
Rather than destructively criticizing, with snark and even prepared lines, which is what unfortunately tends to characterize most clashing of ideas. So you can think of a theolocution as a Socratic dialogue that's moderated with regard, appreciation, and fondness.
Bernardo Castrop is a leading voice in the field of philosophy of mind. He's also a strong advocate of what's called analytic idealism. Bernardo argues that consciousness is fundamental in nature, a viewpoint which is articulated in his probative works, including why materialism is baloney, and the idea of the world. Links to both books are in the description as well as links to everything as usual.
Because of the contrasting views, in my opinion, this episode serves as the best, at least the one that I've seen, the best introduction to Bernardo's ideas. Although this is only the case when one already has an overview of some of the theories of consciousness that exist, else you'll just be weltering and swimming. Now, Susan Blackmore is a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth, who's carved out a career in the study of consciousness, memes, and evolutionary biology, becoming one of the most influential voices
Susan is widely recognized for her seminal work, The Meme Machine. In fact, years ago I read that and that's how I was introduced to her work. Again, links to everything that's mentioned will be in the description. Pertinent to today's discussion, Susan's an avid proponent of illusionism, which is more nuanced than simply positing that consciousness is nothing more than some grand illusion. We talk about that as she dispels this myth.
My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I have this podcast here called Theories of Everything where I use my background in math and physics to analyze toes from a theoretical physics perspective predominantly. Though I'm also interested in other approaches as to what is fundamental, what's considered fundamental. Is there holism and reductionism is incorrect? How about consciousness and where does that come into play? You can think of it as the largest mysteries of the universe without already having a defined position that I'm advocating for or trying to in a contrived way steer the conversation toward.
At around 20 to the 30 minute mark or so, there'll be a couple of ads. This video is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends. All right, now let's picture this. You got yourself a phone, a new phone, and you're looking for an adventurous mobile game to play. Enter Raid Shadow Legends with its fantastic visuals, a menagerie of powerful champions, challenging PvE bosses and tactical PvP content. Many of you may know, I love video games.
So, let me tell you about the 3 most interesting aspects of Raid Shadow Legends, in my opinion. Firstly, Raid Call of the Arbiter is in full swing, introducing new characters like Artak, the Orc Lord. Log in to Raid for 7 days before July 24th to get Artak for free. If you haven't watched Call of the Arbiter, give it a shot.
Secondly, Raid Shadow Legends visuals are breathtaking, especially for a mobile game with intricate scenes and character designs immersing you in this fantastic world. Thirdly, Raid's variety of champions and unique abilities offer numerous strategic options. For instance, the character Roy excels in boss fighting. So, new players, if you haven't started playing yet, I urge you to also enjoy this gameplay.
Use my link which is on screen now as well as the QR code. You can scan that and you'll get a free starter pack with tremendous in-game loot. Just hit the toll link in the description and I'll see you on the battlefield.
those drastically help support toe as well as the patrons. And if you'd like to support toe yourself, then visit patreon.com slash Kurt Jai Mungle that's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L as a donation with whatever you like genuinely helps. It helps not only financially, it helps emotionally to know that there are people out there like yourself who support to bring this to everyone at zero cost. Like that's
Fantastic. So thank you to the patrons. Another podcast that's coming up is a field location with Bernardo Castrop and David Papineau. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. You can look up they've had a conversation before on YouTube. So watch that and if you feel like there was plenty that was left out of that, then feel free to comment here and I'll ask those questions to Bernardo and to David.
Bernardo's appeared several times on the Theories of Everything channel. One solo behemoth four-hour episode that is actually one of the top episodes on Theories of Everything. Another one with John Vervecky. In fact, there are two parts to that conversation. Definitely don't miss the second one, as you can see a convergence of their ideas. Another one with Christopher Langen. Another one with Donald Hoffman, as well as Susan Schneider. And another one with Sabine Hassenfelder on Super Determinism. This is Susan's first and definitely not the last time on this channel. Enjoy.
Welcome. Sue, Susan Blackmore, welcome Bernardo Castro up again. It's a privilege to be here with you all. Good to see you both again. Hello. First time for me. Welcome. Sue, you may not know this, but I've wanted to speak to you for years, primarily on memes, because I read your book on memes. The first question is that I'm sure people misconstrue what illusionism is. So do you mind rectifying that so that we all have a shared understanding as to what your understanding of illusionism is? Right.
Well, illusionism, roughly speaking, is to say that what we normally think about consciousness, all the assumptions we make, we're wrong. We're deluded about the nature of consciousness. There are lots of ways you can go with this. So more formally, the idea is this. So the problem of consciousness is basically the mind-body problem. How can there be my experience of looking at Kurt on the screen and the color of his skin and the walls and the chair behind and all this experience
as well as neurons that in some way are related to that. Now, I'm being very cautious there and saying related to that, because then in 1994, the term the hard problem was invented. And that is Dave Chalmers describes that as the problem or the question of how subjective experience arises from brain activity.
Now, as soon as you say that, you're falling into some kind of dualism. And he himself, Dave, is a kind of dualist, a very subtle sort of dualist. But the idea of illusionism is that's the wrong problem. We're so deluded that we imagine consciousness as something that arises from brain activity, but that just simply doesn't work. And that's why we've not got anywhere in consciousness studies with
with really trying to solve the hard problem. If it's the wrong problem, what is the right problem? It is the illusion problem, in other words, or otherwise known as the meta problem of consciousness. It is to understand how we got so deluded, how we have invented all these illusions about the nature of consciousness and we're wrong. So illusionism is a kind of way of approaching the problem of consciousness. It's not a theory
To kind of line up against global workspace or IIT or whatever. It is a way of approaching it that says we won't get anywhere unless we've understood how we got into this model in the first place. So illusionists have a go at describing the illusions. Does that help?
Yeah, well, before Bernardo comes in, I constantly hear that, hey, if consciousness is an illusion, and this may be one of those misinterpretations, but people would say, well, to the illusionist, if consciousness is an illusion, who is the illusion occurring to? So then what is your response to that? And then Bernardo, please, you'll be able to comment on whatever you would like to.
Well, the whom it's to is all part of the illusion, because if you think of it this way, what is a self? The natural way to imagine what a self is, or who am I am,
is to imagine what Dan Denick calls the Cartesian theater. That is you imagine, and it's, I think most of us are like that most of the time, a lot of meditation, you know, I've been meditating for more than 40 years and it blows apart to some extent, maybe eventually, completely, the solution that I'm sitting inside my head, I'm looking out through my eyes to see the world, I'm listening through my ears to hear the world, and I'm in control, I have
stream of conscious experience and i have free will which enables me to manipulate myself and the world or this body and the world. So this false idea of the self goes along with illusionism. So who is being deluded? Well the whole thing is a delusion, the whole thing is a representation
Okay, Bernardo, what is it you agree with and do you perhaps disagree with and perhaps just want to comment on?
There are a lot of things that I agree with, including the illusion of the personal self. I think there is no personal self. It's just not there at all. The illusion of dualism. I don't think there are two things, material brain and phenomenal states that are generated by the material brain. But for the position of illusionism to have use, it has to be specific.
And when you get people talking specifically about it, like lately, Keith Frankish Frankish has been talking about it rather specifically than he than it has spoken has talked specifically about it for quite a while. The claim is that the way illusionism circumvents the hard problem is by saying that phenomenal states or experiential qualities do not exist, that they are illusions.
But then the problem is illusionism is then either coherent or it is useless. It is useless if we say. Phenomenal states aren't what they seem. That's why they are an illusion. This is coherent, but it's useless because it doesn't do anything about the heart problem of consciousness, because the seeming is already a phenomenal state.
That there is an illusion. An illusion is a phenomenal state. An illusion insofar as it is experienced and if it's not experienced, it's not an illusion. It's already an instance of that which one is trying to get rid of. Now, illusionism would be useful if it said phenomenal states are an illusion in the sense that they don't really exist. They are edited digests of neuronal processes.
And that's why our experiences don't look like neurons firings. And this is Danny Dennett, by the way, because our experience is an edited digest of the neuronal firings. This is incoherent because there is an obvious infinite regress and it goes as follows. What is that edit digest? Well, it can only be neuronal processes because for the illusionist, there is nothing but neuronal processes.
So the edit digest of neuronal processes are themselves neuronal processes. So why doesn't the edit digest look like neuronal processes? Well, because then you have a meta edit digest, but that too can only be neuronal processes. So you need a meta meta edit digest and you fall into infinite regress. So my position is illusionism has to be made specific.
Otherwise, we are just we can talk about anything. I'm an illusionist. I think the personal self is an illusion. But like Antonio Damasio claims, and I think he is right in that claim. The problem is that he conflates that with the claim that consciousness is not there. Consciousness is not a personal self. It's not a soul. It's phenomenal states. It has a precise definition. So you have to make it specific. And the moment you make it specific, it's either relevant or it's incoherent.
With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show, or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human.
I totally and utterly disagree with you. The one thing that I do pick up on that I should have said myself was, look up illusion in the dictionary, because what happened was Dan Dennett and I frequently used to get accused of saying consciousness doesn't exist. What? Look, you know, ah, here is experience. So I actually
got some dictionaries and looked up illusion and as you described it, it means something that is not what it seems to be. And that is all illusionism is saying. Now illusionism is not claiming, as I said before, it's not claiming to be specific, it's not claiming to be a theory that can be tested against other theories like IIT or higher order thoughts or you know all the other theories of consciousness. It's an approach that says
We've got it so badly wrong, we need to start again from the beginning. Now, one way to start again might be to idealism. Well, I'm sure come onto that. It wouldn't be the way that I go, but there may be other ways to go. But you said unless it's specific, it can't solve the hard problem, but it's not trying to solve the hard problem. It's trying to say that the hard problem is completely wrong because it still is from the start and it asks us to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. What we need to do is work out
just how how we are imagining our consciousness to be and see why that happened. Now you talked about you said something like an illusionist says subjective states don't exist. Well I mean the thing is illusionism is not one theory so there are lots of us doing different things thinking in different ways but I wouldn't say that subjective states don't exist. I mean as long as there is a subject i.e a self-construction a mental model a representation of a self
and there seems to be a world out there then that's a subjective state but it's not in my mind something that the brain generates. I mean the brain is constructing representations and so maybe we need to ask well why is there something it's like to be a representation and then you think well the representation is telling you what it's like isn't it it's a representation of that tree and that you know whatever. So I think you're
I can understand what you're saying about it needs to be precise, but I and it isn't because it isn't claiming to be. It's not useless because it will help us, I believe, to see through the problems of the other theories which are not solving that all the other theories claim to be approaching at least to the hard problem.
illusionism doesn't and I think in that sense in a very small way I'm not claiming a huge amount for it really but I think it's the way forward to go to work out why and how the illusion appears illusions illusions of self of consciousness of free will all of them
What is illusionism for you if you can be precise i mean that there are illusions going on it's trivial of course there are that consciousness may not be what it seems it's trivial of course there are many things we think we experience but actually it's something else going on so what is this the philosophical metaphysical relevance of illusionism and how do you specify precisely what the claim is because so far you
You just hand waved around the dictionary meaning of the word illusionism. So what is illusionism, illusionism specifically? Well, for me, it is. I can't say any more than I've really said, because I don't know where it's going. I play around with all sorts of possible solutions. I mean, I've thought a lot about idealism. I've thought about a lot about different kinds of panpsychism. I've thought about all sorts of other things.
that maybe if we can see through the illusions, we will understand how that works. Now, I would say this, if I look around at this world now, there seems to be a self and a world that isn't something else. I mean, a materialist will say, well, that, you know, ultimately there's some ultimate underlying whatever it is,
with the forces of nature and whatever, and this is arising from that. And there is a sort of natural separation between experience and the world that we're experiencing. That seems to me that's part of what the illusion is. And how do we get by that? It seems to me that that's what you're trying to do is to get past that. I don't have an answer. I mean, you're both going to be really frustrated with me because I am not going to say that I have an answer to set against your answer.
I'm just saying that we're so deeply confused, we have to throw out an awful lot and start again. I'm sorry if that is not, you know, not enough. It's not enough meat, if you like. But it's very interesting. We both mentioned, didn't it? I mean, back in 1991 in Consciousness Explained, the book that so many people say should be called Consciousness Explained Away, that means they haven't got what he's trying to do at all. That book was full of
traps that you can fall into. The Cartesian theater I mentioned is just one of them, but for example there's a very very common idea in most of consciousness studies, a lot of the research, which is that some processes in the brain are conscious and some other processes in the brain are not conscious. Now what on earth could this mean?
Does some have qualia attached and some don't? Does some sort of magically give rise to produce something called experience or colors or any kind of experience?
It doesn't really make any sense. That's just one of them. But that whole thing has led to the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. Now, I think as an illusionist, that that is one of the things that illusionism helps you to see, and that Dennett's work has helped me to see, that that is a false distinction. There are not conscious and unconscious processes on the brain. It's a category mistake, if you like.
so those are the kind of things that i find helpful in digging down and digging down into the problem and hoping that something will become clearer than it is now and it's not to deny that there's experience that's what we're trying to struggle with
So briefly, are you a materialist or you don't subscribe to that? No, I'm not a materialist because I'm probably for probably the same reasons as Bernardo. It doesn't work. I mean, it gives rise to the hard problem, which is, to my mind, an idiot problem. It's you know, it doesn't make sense to say that that experience arises from brain processes. Either it's got to be brain processes in some way, or we've got to have some other kind of theory.
I think the last comment you made almost ends the debate. We can now just converse. The last comment you made that materialism doesn't work because of the heart problem.
ends the debate we can now just i'm not saying naturalism doesn't work that's a different statement isn't it naturalism is not the same as materialism i said materialism oh sorry sorry i am a naturalist too right fine um i didn't mean when i asked the question that you be more specific i didn't mean to to ask you to give me a metaphysical theory uh let alone a complete one
I asked you to specify the hypothesis you are defending because I can only agree or disagree if I know what it is that you are defending, what it is that your position is. But as you just said, what you call illusionism is not what the vast majority at least of philosophers out there writing about illusionism consider illusionism to be.
The relevance of illusionism in philosophy today is the attempt to deny the existence of phenomenal states, of experiential states. Who says that? Because I'm not a philosopher, I know more about psychologists than philosophers, but who is saying that these states don't exist?
Keith Frankish says that there is an important sense in which experiential states do not exist. Do not have phenomenal properties. That's what he says. They do not have phenomenal properties as in descriptions of qualia. He doesn't say they don't exist. Phenomenal states are phenomenal properties. If states do not have phenomenal properties, they are not phenomenal states. You cannot argue out of it. And Michael Grass, you asked me for examples. So I'm giving you examples. Let me answer.
Michael Graziano is on record saying consciousness does not exist. It's something that doesn't happen. So that's what is being peddled out there. And Keith is quite explicit. Although he dances an impossible dance, because what he says is that we think we have phenomenal states when we introspect, because everything happens as though we had phenomenal states, but we don't.
The problem is that phenomenal states are the only instance of something that the seeming of it is already it. The illusion of it is already it. And after he goes through a tortuous conceptual
Acrobatics, he says, but yes, we don't have the answer yet for how non phenomenal states can represent phenomenal states. Well, that's the only question that matters. That's the question that started the whole thing. So if you ask me, Susan, I think illusionism is a shit showing philosophy.
It's just a bunch of vague hand-waving conceptual acrobatics and contortions that only postpone the problem and hide it behind an absolute lack of clarity of thinking. Now, all materialism, it's the only game in town because given the hard problem of consciousness, the irreducibility of qualities to quantitative parameters, you have to find a way to argue that phenomenal states in a very significant sense are not there.
So you end up dancing this dance in which people say, well, of course there are subjective states. We can't deny that. And then they proceed to argue that there aren't subjective states. What the hell is this? That's why I keep asking you to be specific and precise because illusionism is now so slippery that whatever you think it is, it is, and you argue against that. The defenders will say, well, that's not what I mean. What is it? What the hell then is it that you mean?
And my conclusion is what I said from the beginning. It is either useful or it is coherent. It doesn't go both ways. Now, I understand that what you consider to be illusionism is a much less specific thing. You are just focused on the dictionary meaning of the word illusion. And you're saying, well, there are illusions. Yes, there are illusions. And seeing through them can help us. Yes, seeing through our illusions can help us.
it's almost the issue you see it's it's completely true it says nothing it's not doing anything when you talk about illusions like that you seem to be talking and earlier as well about um uh perception reality kind of errors and this isn't like that this is this is having an illusion about the whole nature of every moment of experience that we have um going back to frankish
In that book, that special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, you may see that in the beginning of my piece I dissociate from his idea that states don't have phenomenal properties because I can't go along with him on that. And so in a way I'm weaker in my argument and you can criticize me for that.
But you mentioned Michael Graziano and
It's very interesting that he refuses to be called an illusionist. Now he's probably being quite canny here and it may pay off because people don't like the word illusionism and he doesn't want to be associated with it. But I think his theory is absolutely a version of illusionism and I think it's the best theory we've got at the moment, although it doesn't solve all the problems. But he is basically saying, just as we have a body schema,
So his theory for anyone listening is attention, um, attentional schema theory. Now, uh, the idea of a schema is quite important. I'm particularly interested in the body schema, which he used to compare with it. So all the time our body, uh, bright, the whole nervous system is constructing, um, our model or representation of where our body is and what it's doing. This is called the body schema.
I'm particularly interested in this because we now know that this is what goes awry in an outer body experience and I've done a lot of work on outer body and near-death experiences and so on. So I'm very familiar with that idea. Now the idea of an attention schema is that any complex inflammation processing system has the divert energy or resources to different things all over the place. We call this attention in humans and other animals and that
What is represented in the attention schema now this is an interesting way of going about it because it's not having an outside world with objects that then have to have
properties that we have phenomenal properties because we're looking at an object, it's mapping or representing the attention schema instead. Now, whether this gets us anywhere, I don't know, but I've spent quite a lot of time playing around with the idea of observing in different states of consciousness, whether it feels like
an attention schema. And that's quite fun. I've been doing the same with predictive processing theory and active inference and so on, which kind of does slightly relate to it. And this leads me to another thought that I have, which is there are lots and lots of ways of going about the problem of consciousness. But one of them for me is through personal practice of mindfulness, meditation, taking psychedelic drugs, all kinds of things that change one's state of consciousness.
Because I feel that that approach is needed alongside the scientific approach and the philosophical approach. You're nodding there, so I'd like to hear what you think about that. Some of your extremely famous colleagues, I think, agree with you, but I can't say anything more beyond that.
I agree. I think introspection is one of the royal avenues to knowledge, especially if you're talking about the mind. If one is doing neuroscience of consciousness or philosophy of mind, introspection is essential so the person know what he's talking about. I mean, that doesn't replace objective studies like neuroimaging, which I think is extremely valuable. It's been getting a lot of flak recently, justifiably to some extent, but I think it's a great advance of the 21st century. It doesn't replace
clinical experience, but it's certainly a key component. Back to Graziano, he's an illusionist in the broad sense that you are using, in the sense that what he's trying to deny is the existence of some kind of personal soul. But, I mean, who would disagree with that? Most people alive on the planet today.
well who amongst the people who are working seriously on this would disagree with that so i almost yawn at that um um he would call he he's considered an eliminativist as opposed to an illusionist
Because illusionism is the denial, not of a disembodied soul, but the denial of phenomenal states. And that's not how you are using the word, because you just said you acknowledge the existence of phenomenal states. So strictly speaking, from a philosophical perspective, you aren't an illusionist. I'm not the real thing. You're an illusion of one. And if you are not a dualist, which it seems you are not,
and you acknowledge the existence of phenomenal states, then you are perforce unidealist. Semantically, there is no other space for you to land, if you know what I mean. What about panpsychism? I'm not particularly landing there, but I'd love to hear what you think about that, because idealism isn't the only possibility, is it? Well, you just said it was. Maybe you could defend that. There are versions of panpsychism that would state the following.
Phenomenal states are not just extra properties of subatomic particles, they are the essence of subatomic particles. And all the other properties like mass charge, momentum, spin, these are all external appearances of that essence. And that comes down to a form of like Leibniz like idealism, a monad like theory. But that's physically incoherent.
And it amazes me that this stuff is still talked about because we have known since at least the 1940s, at least since 1949 when Feynman published his famous quantum electrodynamics paper with the Feynman diagrams and all that stuff that got him the Nobel Prize. We've known since then that particles are just metaphors for local excitations of underlying fields. In other words, there are no particles.
There's nothing to a particle but the underlying field, just as there is nothing to a ripple but the underlying lake. You can't fish the ripple out of the lake because the ripple is a doing of the lake. It's not a thing, it's a behavior. Particles are the same thing. Particles are behaviors of underlying quantum fields. And without this, we couldn't begin to make sense of a great many things we know happen. For instance, we couldn't make sense of particle decay. A Higgs boson can decay into two quarks.
Or two muons, which are heavy electrons. But there aren't two muons in the Higgs boson. So how does it become two muons? Well, it's because decaying means that a particular excitation in the underlying field, in this case, the Higgs field, decays. One ripple becomes two other ripples. There is no magic in that. But if you think particles are things,
Then the Higgs boson magically disappears and two muons magically appear. It's like what the hell, but I don't even need to get to go that far. We wouldn't be able to explain particle interactions, which is
something quantum theory doesn't give us only quantum field theory so there are no particles and panpsychism assumes that there are particles with delineated spatial boundaries and that they are self-existing things but this is physically contradictory it doesn't even well that's only one version of panpsychism i'm not going to defend panpsychism but i i do enjoy playing around with it but there are lots of other forms that say um
only living things can be conscious or only you know higher order thinking things will be conscious or I don't know different size objects there's all sorts of variations or even just representations maybe anything any system that represents something as internal or external to itself could be
There's lots of versions, but what I got confused with what you were saying was I thought you were just talking about Leibniz and then physics and Feynman and so on. But were you actually talking about what you believe? Because what is this underlying field? If you are an idealist, what do you mean by an underlying field? Fields under quantum theory are models.
We model nature in terms of fields, and fields are spatially distributed. They exist in every point of space-time. That's the model of a field. But everything in science is a convenient fiction. Like when Newton proposed this invisible force acting at a distance instantaneously between the Earth and the Moon, the force of gravity, that was a convenient fiction. Today it's no longer convenient. We know there is no such force. Gravity is a distortion of space-time, a bending of space-time. Actually, even that
later convenient fiction is now falling by the side because now with quantum loop gravity, that whole thing is being revised. So we shouldn't take the 17 quantum fields that exist today as real existence because they are just conceptual models that allow us to predict nature's behavior. Now, what it does tell us is that whatever is going on, it's not spatially localized.
The world is not made of little bricks that are put together. That's not how nature works unless you make that step to feuds a great many things would break. You wouldn't be able to reconcile quantum theory with relativity.
You wouldn't be able to explain particle interaction. You wouldn't be able to explain particle decay. You wouldn't be able to explain the quantum foam or spontaneous quantum excitations. And therefore you wouldn't be able to explain what people call zero point force, which is Casimir's effect, which is experimental experimentally demonstrated. So what what these models are telling us is that at the bottom level, nature is not spatially localized.
That's the bottleneck. And it dovetails nicely with idealism, at least with objective forms of idealism, which say, yes, there is a world out there. It's not in our minds. It's not susceptible to our fantasy, our wishes or our affirmations every morning. It's objective from our point of view. And it would still be there even if we were not here.
But it too is mental in nature, just like my thoughts are objective from your point of view. Even if you were not there, I would still be having thoughts and whatever fantasy you may entertain. It doesn't affect my thoughts from your point of view. My thoughts are objective, but they are out there. They are outside your personal mind. So the claim is there are mental processes out there. They are not ours. They are objective from our perspective. They are predictable. That's why science works. They are non localized.
Because there is only one field of subjectivity, this is critical to avoid the combination problem. And it dovetails nicely with field theory, because the whole, for the past 40 years, the whole of physics is trying to do the so-called grand unification theory, sort of folding gravity into the quantum fields and going from 17 to 1. And theory was an attempt, and now we have loop quantum gravity. So it dovetails nicely with that.
Forget idealism. There are no particles. This is not my belief. This is not my opinion. This is textbook quantum field theory. It's the basis of the standard model. It's what is guiding us when we invest billions of dollars or euros at CERN. This is not even news. Some would claim we've known that since the 1920s, but at least since the 1940s.
I don't understand the fundamental lack of understanding I have. If you take your idealist view and you're saying that there are still the fields objectively existing, why do they behave the way they do? I mean, how do you get if everything is basically mind or mental,
I'm not sure whether you would say everything is conscious, but anyway, if everything is mental and that comes first, why do we get these apparent laws of nature, the way things behave and the consistency? Why? I mean, at least materialism has some kind of answers to the way the world behaves. Or are you saying it doesn't? I just think you shift from one to the other. You shift from materialism to idealism. I don't know what you've gained in doing that.
You avoid dualism, you avoid the heart. Yes, absolutely. We have to avoid dualism. And you avoid the heart problem of consciousness. The notion that something that is mental in essence cannot behave regularly is merely a metaphysical prejudice. Human minds evolved in a planetary ecosystem and therefore we evolved to be very reactive.
And so you could say human minds which have developed higher level mental functions and are reactive to their environment, they're difficult to predict. But although even human minds can be predicted and psychology is making progress in that direction, but a mind without higher level mental functions,
can behave according to precise regularities. That's what I want to understand. Why are there these regularities or laws or consistencies? You say that our mind works in particular ways. Why does it produce the appearance of a brain and neurons and all of that kind of stuff? These are two questions. Why does it behave regularly?
Because it is what it is that nature clearly behaves regularly. I mean, whatever metaphysics you have, the regularity of nature's behavior is a given. We can predict what nature will do next. That's why technology works. Otherwise, it wouldn't. But the prejudice is that mind can't behave regularly. Well,
The news is it does even if it's so complex that it's difficult to predict it does behave regularly and to we cannot anthropomorphize that mind of nature out there that can be a very probably is a very simple mind didn't evolve higher level mental functions in a planetary ecosystem it's an instinctive spontaneous mind and behaves according to regularities.
Alligators have very regular behavior. If you approach them and you cross a certain threshold of distance, they may lounge at you. But if you don't cross that threshold, they never try to lounge at you. Minds can be very predictable. So this is not an argument against idealism. Now, why does it seem the way it does?
Now it's a technical answer. Kurt, cut me if you think it's going too far. But there are two reasons for this. One is we cannot see the world as it actually is because there would be information overload. It's like seeing the files in your computer on your desktop exactly the way they are. Millions of open or closed microscopic switches.
That's useless. It doesn't favor survival. What you want is to perceive the salient features that are relevant. That's one answer. The other answer is entropy control. If our inner cognitive states would mirror the states of the world, there would be no upper bounds to our internal entropy because there is no a priori upper bounds to the entropy of the world.
So if you were to mirror those states in our inner cognitive states without a bound to our internal entropy, and I'll use an illustrative metaphor, we could melt into hot meat soup because unbounded entropy is not compatible with structural and dynamic integrity. And this has been shown mathematically by some neuroscientists. So we see the relevant and salient information about our environment at a glance.
And the result of that is what we call the colloquially physical world, the contents of the screen of perception. That's much more conducive to survival and to maintaining our internal structural and dynamic integrity than seeing the states of the world for what they actually are. To use another metaphor, the contents of the screen of perception are like the dashboard of an airplane. The airplane has sensors, it makes measurements of the states of the sky outside, and those measurements are presented to the pilot in the form of a dashboard.
And the pilot can fly based on the dashboard alone, flying by instrument. You don't need a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Guess what? That's exactly what we do. We have sensors, eyes, ears, tongue, surface of the skin. We make measurements and those measurements are presented to meta consciousness, which is different from phenomenal states. It's something that comes on top is presented to meta consciousness in the form of the
physical world. So the physical world is an internal dashboard. It does convey accurate information about the real world, but it doesn't look like the real world because not only does it not need to a dashboard, it doesn't look like the clouds in the sky, but because it shouldn't in order to control our internal entropy and facilitate prompt reactions to environmental challenges.
i'm even more confused now because you're talking about the way the world seems and how the world really is and almost all of that second part of your answer seems to me could be spoken by a materialist and make perfect sense and i don't see what idealism gives you to help with that i mean yes of course this is we i've talked about attention and attention schema theory we have to pay attention to things that matter to us we evolved
We evolve the skills that we have and the minds that we have in order to survive and get around in the environment we evolved in, not to have an accurate view of what is actually out there. And now you're talking about things that are actually out there just as a materialist would or as a dualist would indeed. So I'm deeply confused now because I don't know what idealism, what difference idealism makes and what it adds and how it helps us.
takes away an extra ontic category that is completely unnecessary, namely something that is not mind, something that is not phenomenal, something that is not mental. So you're calling all the outside world there. So we have our experiences of the world and so on. And the outside world there, you're just calling that conscious or mental rather than calling it something completely different and physical. But what does that mean to say that it's mental? That's what I just don't get.
It means that it's of the same kind as your own inner mentation. In other words, it's qualitative in nature. It cannot be exhaustively described in terms of a list of numbers. The latter is materialism. And by avoiding this non-mental stuff,
You avoid having to come back from no mental stuff to mental stuff, which is the hard problem of consciousness. You avoid it altogether. So now you're saying the world out there is made of qualities. These are not the qualities of my perception. These are different qualities. My perception is an internal dashboard representation of the qualities that are out there. There are actual qualities out there and they are mental in some kind of nature that I don't quite understand what that means that they're mental.
They are mental in the sense that they are experienced by nature. They are experiential in essence, but we don't experience those qualities as they are. We have a representation of those qualities. So now we have to come from qualities, the real qualities that are out there to the qualities of perception. That's a much easier bridge because there is no fundamental ontological transition. Now you have mental states of one kind modulating mental states of another.
Is this coherent? Of course it is. It's happening every time, every day to all of us. Your thoughts modulate your emotions. Your emotions modulate your thoughts. Your thoughts modulate your fantasies. Mental states of different kinds are modulating one another all the time in all of us. You said something a bit contentious there about thoughts and emotions.
They are both mental states, so there is no ontic distinction between them. But we use different words because there is something about the respective qualities that allow us to differentiate one from the other. Now, if you have a certain emotion, it changes the kinds of thoughts you are liable to having.
Or if you have certain kinds of thoughts, you become more prone to experiencing certain other emotions. So mental states can modulate other mental states. Trivially, it's happening all the time. That's how minds work. So all I'm saying now is that there are external mental states that modulate our internal cognitive mental states. There is no hard problem anymore, but there is still an external world. It's subjective from its own point of view, but objective from our point of view.
I think why I'm bothered about that was because I'm thinking about the time course of thoughts versus emotions and what causes what and so on. And I was imagining emotion in terms of all the neurotransmitters and hormones and all the other things that give rise to bodily feelings
when you say that thoughts affect bodily feelings there appears to be a problem there but that's the problem that you're getting away with by saying that that they're all mental things affecting each other in a mental the whole world is mental stuff and obviously that makes sense of mental things affecting other mental things yeah yeah and and then what are the neurotransmitters what are the neuronal firings the neurons and all this stuff
There are obvious correlations between this stuff and what we feel from within denying those correlations. It's just silly. It's just, okay, you don't even enter the party if you deny that. How can we account for that under an idealist perspective? Under idealism, all matter is a dashboard representation of a mental state when observed from across a dissociative boundary. But forget that again, observed from
from across a dissociative boundary, because we have to account for why can't I read your thoughts? Why do I not know what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda? If it's all only one big mind, then why am I not enlightened, right?
So we have to account for that. And the account for that is dissociation, which is something that psychiatry now managed to show objectively with the advent of neuroimaging that it does happen and it can literally make you blind. So why wouldn't it make you blind to what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda or in the mind of another person? And then the way it all comes together is all matter under idealism is an inner cognitive representation of external mental states.
When they are observed across a dissociative boundary, that's what matter is. Now, your neurons are made of the same atoms and force fields that make up the rest of the universe. They are also material.
So your neurons are what your inner dissociated mental processes look like when they are observed from across a dissociative boundary. Your body is what your dissociated inner mentation looks like when it is observed from across a dissociative boundary and represented on a cognitive dashboard, so to say, like the dashboard of an airplane. Can you please give me the simplest understanding of a dissociative boundary? This Marshawn beast mode lynch prize pick is making sport season even more fun on prize picks whether
Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections.
Anything from touchdown to threes and if you're right you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,
Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details.
I mean i'm sort of struggling with you talking in a lot of different ways there and i kind of think i got the gist of it but then i'm thinking i clearly haven't got this quite right because there'll be dissociative boundaries within the system and between the system and other people and and so on but i haven't quite got to the bottom of what you mean what would be a sort of minimal dissociative boundary
Conceptually, dissociative boundaries is what's given by inferential isolation, but then it gets technical. So instead of that, I will appeal to empirical studies. Then it makes it more and more alive. So you may know this in 2015, there was this woman, a patient of dissociative identity disorder in Germany, and she had many alters or dissociated centers of awareness. Two of these alters claimed to be blind.
But the human, the woman could see perfectly well. Her eyes were OK. Her visual cortex was OK. Her optical optical nerves were OK. There was nothing wrong. So neuroscientists had this fantastic idea of instrumenting her with an EEG cap and measuring her brain activity, both when the host personality had executive control and when one of the so-called blind alters had executive control. Lo and behold, when one of those alters had executive control, the woman would have no brain activity in the visual cortex.
But when the host personality would be back, even though the woman's eyes were open, so she literally couldn't see what was right in front of her eyes, with nothing physically wrong with her eyes, dissociation can do that. When the host personality would be back in exact executive control, there would be normal activity in the visual cortex. So dissociation, this is an extreme form of dissociation, it renders you literally blind to what's in front of your open eyes. But
soft forms of disassociation are happening to us all the time when you forget something that you know you know you're disassociated when you park your relationship problem relationship problems to be able to go to work and perform. You are disassociated when you can't remember an old trauma you're disassociated.
But dissociation does happen in Greece. Now, what is the actual mechanism? How can we conceptualize that? We are not there yet, but it obviously has to do with inferential isolation, which is what happens when you can't remember something. You cannot follow a sort of chain of cognitive association. But I don't get how this kind of relates to idealism. I mean, I can understand all of that in terms of brain function and how, I mean, I don't know the mechanism for shutting down V1, but I do know by playing around
the edges of sleep and so on, that I can manipulate whether what I'm experiencing is from V1 or is from higher imaginary factors. What I was getting at in my question was
You've talked about these dissociative boundaries as though they apply to the whole world, not just to one human being. Because the way you were talking was like between a person and the world out there. And I wondered, can you really find these boundaries in the world as you're imagining it made entirely of mental stuff? What would kind of be a minimal dissociative boundary that needs to be crossed? That's what I don't understand. First, a brief comment.
To really understand idealism, you have to understand it under its own terms, not under materialist terms or assumptions, because otherwise you just... I think life... Okay, let me give you first another study. In 2014, Jolanda Schlumpf here in the Netherlands did this study in which she took a group of people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and a group of actors, and she put both groups under an fMRI,
to see if doctors could objectively diagnose dissociation. And the actors were asked to pretend to themselves that they were dissociated. Lo and behold, you can objectively diagnose. In other words, there is something dissociation looks like. It looks like certain patterns of identifiable patterns of brain activity. Dissociation has an extrinsic appearance, an outer image. It looks like something.
So my claim is life biology is what dissociation at a higher level looks like and that's why I can't read your thoughts for as long as I am alive for as long as I look like biology metabolism.
That's what the dissociative process in nature is looking like at that level, just like a person with DID has patterns of brain activity that look like something identifiable. So that's what life is, and that's why I can't read your thoughts. Now, your inner mental processes within the boundaries of your dissociation, they have to look like something if they are observed from across the dissociative boundary.
lo and behold they look like the neural correlates of consciousness. I find this particularly interesting when you keep talking about why I can't know your thoughts because I spent the first sort of 20 years of my research life looking for telepathy and clairvoyance and so on and never finding them and it's still of great interest to me because I spent a lot of time, you know, it's all out there in the Akashic records as
And all the information is there, then why can't I get it? And I had a great theory when I was doing my PhD that memory, the only reason that we remember our own thoughts and not everybody else's is because they're more similar. And I'm still attracted to thoughts a lot, you know, ideas along that that kind of stream. So that was very interesting to me. But I'd like to pick up on something else you said, because you said it sounds absolutely extraordinary that this
a person suffering from identity dissociation disorder could look at something and not see it. But we can all look straight at something and not see it. And we can also see something that we haven't looked straight at. I say this because it's something that I often talk about in lectures. I was at a conference on psychedelics last weekend, which was wonderful. And I was talking about illusionism there. And I showed simple demonstrations.
The classic one is of course the Gorillaz in our midst video which I'm sure you've seen and I won't say more for anyone who hasn't seen it to spoil it but you know you literally must be looking straight at the thing that you don't see but I also do a little trick which does the opposite thing.
Consciousness Explained, Dan talked about a room it papered entirely with identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe. I just made up a picture of identical portraits of Dan Dennett and there's 18 in this picture and you know how many saccades you can make in a second, probably five or six or something like that.
And if you just show the picture to people for two seconds, you know, they cannot have looked at all the pictures. And yet when you ask them what they saw, they say, I saw 18 identical pictures of Dan Dennett and one with horns and a scar. So we've got one with horns and a scar on it. And so then I can explain how
You're using texture detection, straight line detection, all sorts of shortcuts to say, oh, all those pictures are the same. You don't need to look at them all in order to come to the conclusion. And that conclusion is what you see. It's not what went in your eyes. It's what you will report later that you saw. So it dissociates, you know, you can you can see what you haven't looked at and you can look at what you haven't seen.
This doesn't help with idealism and all of that, but I thought it's kind of relevant to you making that. It is. It is. I mean, blindsight is a super curious phenomenon as well. There is a paper published in 2002. I forgot the name of the author. I know him personally. It's because I take amitriptyline for my tinnitus. Sometimes I forget stuff. We all forget stuff. It's a relief when someone else does. Go on. You might remember.
The paper was called dissociations between consciousness and meta consciousness or something like this so there are multiple mechanisms involved in the case you you refer to that you don't see the gorilla.
I bet that if you had been instrumented with an EEG cap, although you don't report seeing the gorilla, there would be a visual cortex activity. So it's not the same as what these German guys did with the woman with dissociative identity disorder. But it does reflect an important distinction that we often don't make even in academic discourse, which is the difference between phenomenal states, pure and simple experiences, pure and simple and metacognitive phenomenal state.
Those require something more. Those require not only the experience, but the explicit knowing that you are having the experience. And that's a product of attention. You need to attend to become metacognitive of an experience. For instance, we are always experiencing our breathing, the inflation and deflation of our ribcage, the airflow in our nostrils. But we are most of the time not metaconscious
of our breathing, because we don't put our attention there, we don't bring it under the focus of attention. So the curious thing is that there can be almost permanent dissociations between experience and meta experience, like blind sight, where people act as and react as though they see something, but they can't report it. And what I'm trying to drive to is that
There is never such a thing as states that are not phenomenal. There is never such a thing as strictly unconscious states. Even if you go back to the history of psychology and how the word unconsciousness came from Jung, Freud and Piaginet and all the others, what they are describing, and it's very clear when you read their texts, what they are describing is meta-consciousness.
They are not describing experience, they are describing knowledge, explicit, introspective knowledge of the experience. So what this tells us is that we may never actually be unconscious. We know now that if you undergo syncope, if you pass out,
people report amazing stuff during the period in which they were and you talked about us being conscious and that involves a self who is so i can get the idea that the uh these things that we call unconscious are in some sense mental and then the metacognitive is is is added on onto that um but that usually involves the the the feeling that i
I'm now paying attention to this and I am so on. So it's all part of the illusion. So you could say that illusionism, at least in the way I'm thinking of it, is that all that metacognitive stuff is speculations that are untrue and underlying that
i don't know i think it's just you as a proper philosopher who have thought through all this this idealism stuff and you can talk about it coherently i'm only getting as far as saying all this stuff's wrong but what is that when there's processes going on there's responses going on
there's not somebody going ah this is what I'm you know I'm doing this now that's where the illusion comes in thinking that what we have to explain is that not we have to explain the whole underlying thing and I come back again to personal experience I tend not to call it introspection because that has such historical
Problems associated with it, but that that's what you called it and it's fair enough all different kinds Mindfulness is a real nightmare because there's so many different forms of it, but one from I've done a lot of practice intensive practice of mindfulness in ordinary life and what can happen is the whole metacognitive thing disappears and there's stuff happening and
Now, if you're in ordinary life, you can't let go completely of the metacognitive stuff. You have to have some kind of awareness of I'm walking along here and whatever. But in meditation, you can let go of it completely. And then there seems to be this is just I'm talking from personal experience here, in certain kinds of deep meditation, particularly on retreat, there can be a sense in which this stuff happening,
But it's not happening to anybody. And it's not even happening in time or space. It's kind of lost all those things. There's where I kind of go to try to understand things and I don't get very far. And maybe in what you've been telling me today, I've got well, not maybe I have got more possible ways of thinking about it. I'm not completely buying it because I don't understand you well enough. But I think we actually have some commonality
in what I've just said there. By the way, I just remembered a name I had forgotten, Jonathan Schooler. Everybody should know this name. Yeah. So he published this Dissociations Between Awareness and Meta Awareness back in 2002, a fantastic paper that I think everybody should read. I'm going to write that down. I'm doing something with him in the near future, so that will be a good thing to us. Dissociations Between Consciousness and Meta Consciousness are something like this. 2002.
Got it, thank you. I don't totally go along with your use of the word illusionism and I don't blame you for that or anything but I'm not comfortable with it and the reason is the following. Defined so vaguely, the history of science is the history of illusion because hardly anything is what it seems to be. I mean
You see the whole history of science is a testament to that so if the word is so broad that it encompasses so much it becomes a useless word because we can't specify something out of the background by using it.
Don't forget all I'm saying is consciousness is an illusion and by that I guess what I mean is the way people talk about consciousness the theories they build about consciousness the whole idea that consciousness is there's such a thing as consciousness itself which can be separated from you know matter from unconscious states and so on all of that's the problem I'm not trying to say anything about the outside world on physics and so on as being
people's concepts about the nature of their own minds, and if you can clear away that problem, whether you do it by personal practice or by some kind of theorizing, then I think we might be making progress. That's as far as I go really, which is pathetic.
i don't blame you in the least for saying well you know it's too vague and so on but i just feel it has to be done because i get so frustrated with the theorists and the experimenters and so on who constantly refer to consciousness as though it's something produced by the brain and that's the heart of what i'm trying to get away with
If that helps at all. I sympathize completely. So I don't like the word, but I sympathize with it. I'll give you, by the way, I don't believe in a personal self. It's just not there. It's a narrative in a subject. So every time I say I, I'm forced to say this by the English language. There are languages that don't have that particular pronoun, but I don't speak them. So I'm forced to say that. Which language? Which languages?
It doesn't even have a written form, I think. We would call them primitive languages, although I hate this word. I think it's an inappropriate word. But there are languages in which there is no first person pronoun.
but there are some others in a simpler way which which although they kind of infer it i mean i tried to learn polish once because my first husband was polish and there is they don't use the word iron in the same heavy way that english uses it all the time it's very often incorporated into other words or it's such a long time ago that i tried to learn it i've forgotten now but but your point i guess is is just to say
But to go back to the point that you raised, I'll give you an example of a problem I face
Regarding people, people's very loose use of words like mind, consciousness and matter and all the prejudices that are unexamined and go into that. So people don't even know what they're thinking. They don't know what assumptions they're making. So to give you a concrete example, I'm often faced with the falling so-called reputation of idealism. It goes as follows. Well, Bernardo, you said you say that everything is mental.
So everything has to be efficacious insofar as it is mental. Only mental states are causally efficacious. But I can give you an example that it's not the case. Look, if you give me your arm and your arm and I stick a needle in it, that's a very physical thing and you will move your arm. You will register pain and you will move your arm. We don't need to go that far. What if I punch you in the face? What if you drink a bottle of wine?
This very physical thing has a causal effect on mental inner states. Ergo idealism is false. Now you see the problem there. For the idealist, there are no such things as physical states outside mind. All material things are representations of mental states. So that needle going into my arm is a dashboard representation of a mental process interfering with another across its dissociative boundary.
That glass bottle of wine that I drink, that's an icon on my dashboard that represents a transpersonal mental state that I am bringing into my dissociative boundary by ingesting it.
bottle of wine as a material thing. The bottle of wine is a representation of a mental state. Only mental states are causal. But it's very difficult for people to make this switch from dualism. Dualism seems to be so bloody ingrained in language, in our logical assumptions, in how we see everything, that people just, even when they think, even when they agree with idealism, or ostensibly agree with idealism,
I often see this in courses I give that even the idealists, they fall for this constantly. So that's an illusion. It's an illusion that there are no mental states. So from that perspective, I am with you. But I don't think it's I don't want to keep on insisting on this, but I prefer to say specifically what I mean, like I just did. Yeah. And to just say illusionism. Yeah. You see what I mean? Yeah.
Yep. But you're making me think there's something quite uncomfortable. So you've got the, let's say the drug that affects the brain or the pin that goes in my arm. So the pin and all those processes are mental in quality. And then hear me out on this one. I'm struggling to get it clear, but
I'm then constantly asking myself, well, why are the regularities that are? Why does that happen? Why are there, as it were, laws of nature that make the liquid run along there and all of those things? Well, then I realize that as far as I know, physics also can't answer that question. Because if you ask something like,
Or why is Planck's constant what it is? Or why is the speed of light what it is? I don't think there are answers either. So perhaps it's unfair to ask the idealist to explain why the mental properties of the world give rise to or are capable of trees and sky and all the other things.
Well, the answer would be to be is to have properties. Whatever exists has properties and therefore it behaves the way it does because it is what it is instead of something else. Nature is what it is. So it does what it does. It's not something else. So there's self that I could imagine that is the author inside of these words and has free will and all of that.
Would you say that it is what it is? Because, okay, I think nature is what it is. And the illusion of a personal self is a behavior of nature. In other words, it's a narrative of nature. And so I want to ask why it throws up this self all the time.
I mean, in a materialist view, you can sort of say, well, the system needs a representation of its own capabilities. And so it builds such a representation and there it is. And then you can't say why it feels like anything because materialism can't. Well, does idealism really do better on that?
Yeah, you're asking pretty, pretty fundamental science, philosophy of science questions that they apply to any metaphysics, not only idealism, I think, but but I try to answer. There is some use to the fiction of the personal self, you need to know to which mouth to bring the fork, otherwise you starve. So the ego is a useful tool.
so hang on any animal will eat without having i don't think that my cat has much of a personal self but it eats they have a body schema too yeah indeed and an attention schema i imagine what they don't have is matter cognition now matter cognition is when the subject sort of abstracts itself away from its own experiential content and that's why we say i feel pain or i have hunger
Because without metacognition, we would say, I am pain, I am hunger, because the being of the subject is its state and the state of the subject is the experience that it's quote, undergoing. So the moment we say I have pain, or I will go there, or I feel this way, that's already a body schema with metacognition on top.
So a metacognized subject separate from the rest of the world. Is there a use to this? I'm sure there is a use to this. So it's a it's a very easy. Well, I've put forward a different theory that I won't go into now, but Kurt probably knows something about it, that it's actually a product of memetic evolution. It's the force of memes, particularly words.
that get on better when they're associated with the I word and that our culture is constantly backing up this idea of a self and making it bigger and bigger and and more difficult to get rid of but it's not but that's another story which I think Kurt says he wants to talk about some other time. I do feel that I understand a lot better now so I rather enjoyed this conversation even though I find it quite
stressful and difficult trying to get my head around it and say something vaguely intelligent in response but thank you very much for for um revolutionize of your world view in one hour so i mean you've made the questions you asked betray tremendous advance in in in understanding something that you were not familiar with before so kudos to you for that i don't know whether i would be
able to make this advance so quickly it took me years of course of course but then i've been worrying about consciousness for years so you know that's why you said so many things that sparked off things i've thought about over all these many many years when i've been obsessed with consciousness i haven't thought about them in in the exact way that you are but i've thought about them enough at least to
Well, well, thank you all. I don't know if you know Sue, but Bernardo knows that I consider a theolocution a success when I could effectively have popcorn here and just watch. And watch. Yeah, yeah, because it means that you both are, from what I saw, trying to understand one another's point of view rather than trying to understand in order to debate. You're trying to understand because you're curious. So if I could summarize, it went something like initially, Sue, you're saying, look, this is I'm an illusionist. And then Bernardo saying, well,
Firstly, that's not what I understand illusionism to be. There are several others, so that's different. Secondly, if what you're saying is most of what we think of is the case is not so, in the same way that we think that we model it, well then, is that not trivial, to the point of it being useless? Then, somewhat of an agreement there, maybe saying that, well, look, most of the world has that illusion, and then Bernard was like, yeah, but most of the academics that we interact with don't. Like, list me one who studies philosophy who thinks in the folk manner.
And then it became much of Bernardo explaining idealism. So that's my summary. To be fairer to Susan, she did specify more concretely what is the illusion that she's talking about. It has to do with introspective illusions. So that's narrowed down things quite a bit when she said that. Why did you not want to use the word introspection earlier, Sue? You said it was loaded. Oh, just because of the way when it happened in the early 20th century and
I suppose brought up in psychology and learning about that the word in
Introspection has a bad press, but perhaps that doesn't apply to most people who hear about introspection. I mean, all it means is looking within. Now, before that happened, William James was really good on the importance of looking within and seeing what we there find in his 1890 book, for example. But behaviourism partly came about because of the failure of introspectionism.
Skinner's black box. Those were very dark times.
Okay, before you both get going, the last question I had, well, I guess it's the second question I had, is it's difficult to ask Sue this because you don't place yourself in opposition to something. Whereas Bernardo, as far as I see from you, if you're in opposition to something, it would be materialism. So let's just take materialism.
What evidence or event can occur that would make you reframe your worldview to the opposite side? So materialism, like hypothetically, what could happen? What could you see? What evidence would exist? And Sue, the same for you, but it's difficult for me to place yourself in opposition to say you move to the other side. So I don't know. Well, I can give you a different other side that I'd move to, because this comes up a lot in my life.
If there were convincing evidence of telepathy or of, well, let's stick with telepathy, that was done with experiments with adequate design and the statistics properly done and with enough subjects and so on, so on. And I became convinced that telepathy was possible. Then most of what I've thought about is wrong.
In fact, most of science is wrong and the world changes dramatically if that were the case. But you are not a materialist. You said it in the beginning.
No, no, no, it's not about materialism, it's about the way minds work because if there were telepathy then most of the psychology experiments that we do wouldn't work because you have to have you know control conditions in which people don't know what's going on and then things like the placebo effect would be completely changed because you could never really be sure what people knew or didn't know because they'd know they'd know more than
You think they know if there was telepathy was possible. It would just ruin a whole lot of stuff. Whether you're a materialist or not, it would have a dramatic effect on my thinking about the nature of mind. Wouldn't it just increase the error bar and not invalidate everything? I don't know. It's difficult to think through. That's a perfectly reasonable question. I think the error bars would be so huge that a whole lot of things would just collapse.
I'm more optimistic than you in this regard. Yeah, you think it might happen? I think no process in nature is perfect. When it stops raining, the ground doesn't dry immediately. When something burns, it doesn't consume everything there is to be combusted. No process in nature is perfect. Dissociation wouldn't be perfect either.
especially under laboratory conditions, when you don't have that emotional charge of real life circumstances, then you would be highly dissociated. But under normal circumstances, that could be occasions in which the dissociation becomes porous. And I'm saying this to you because I witnessed one of these cases that I just cannot dismiss. But I don't think it would invalidate science because even if it can happen,
It happens so rarely. Now, it's not even rare, but the strength, the degree of the effect is so tiny that statistically speaking, I don't think it would invalidate anything. Obviously, we can't read each other's minds all the time. Obviously, we don't know what's going on in China all the time. Right. So even if there is some porosity under emotionally charged circumstances of normal life,
They wouldn't apply on their laboratory conditions anyway, and that's why we don't see it on their laboratory conditions. So I wouldn't be worried. At least personally, I'm not worried. And I saw one thing I'm worried it would be terribly exciting. I've said so many times I would go back into parapsychology if that happened. I mean, the fact is there is no viable theory within parapsychology of how this could work. And if there were evidence that it did work, you could start
to do experimental work to test theories, but that just hasn't happened. So that's what makes me kind of, well, it's not pessimistic, pessimistic about the possibility of being found. But I don't think it's going to happen, but we shall see. And if it did, I still maintain it would have dramatic effects on our understanding of all sorts of things.
I was in a
Sure. No, it was not under psychedelics. I was on a holiday with my girlfriend. We were sort of out of civilization for one week in Germany. She's from Germany. And we were already out of contact with family and friends for one week. One day she wakes up in the morning. I was already awake when she woke up and she says, I had a strange dream. I saw my grandmother with her head wrapped up in gauze, gauze.
hospital with her two daughters on her side nothing was moving nothing was happening but it could pick up from her thoughts that she was okay and then i was playing with interpreting her dreams from a union perspective for a while we were playing that game and when she told me that i thought this this is highly unusual and something came into me and i said call your father so she called her father and her grandmother had three children two women and her father
And her father was at home, picked up the phone and said, well, good that you're calling, because in the middle of the night, two or three hours ago, before she had woken up, her grandmother had a brain stroke and was in the hospital with her two daughters. But the doctor said, although she couldn't speak yet, the doctor said she is not on the risk of life anymore. And I thought, this is unprompted, so bloody specific.
That I thought, okay, this shit happens. It's all right. I can live with it and I'm not abandoning science either.
oh dear well i won't go through all my usual reasons why those things happen and how never mind now i know you got to get going sue but briefly i didn't get bernardo's answer to that question of what would cause them to reconsider or not reconsider but actually move and we're going to get to that but you mentioned that you didn't see any evidence and i know that there's parapsychologists like dean raiden and julia
this has to be for another time. There's so much to say and I'm tired now and I
I really don't want to have to do that fairly would be very complex and it would involve a lot of devious things that have gone on and things I've discovered along the way. And it's another story. Okay, but the point is you've gone through their research and it's not that you haven't seen. Oh, gosh, yes, a lot. Not recently because I gave up.
I really gave up doing parapsychology around the turn of the century. And up until that time, I would have said that I was pretty much an expert on the literature at the time, because I was really kept up with it all. Since then, I haven't. So there may have been things that have happened I know vaguely about. But to really examine somebody's work and find out what was going on takes a lot of effort. Arguably, it can take more time and effort than doing the original research. And I've done a lot of that. But it's a long story.
Okay, and Bernardo for your answer. You're asking me to hypothesize about evidence that would convince me of an unnecessary and problematic hypothesis. So this is how I hear it. So you understand how I experienced the question.
It's like somebody who is telling me the flying spaghetti monster exists and it's the thing responsible for making the planets go around their orbits with its invisible noodly appendages reaching out from a higher dimension. So, Bernardo, what evidence would you need to or I would ask this person, what evidence do you need to discard the flying spaghetti monster hypothesis? It's like
What do you have to come up with? Materialism is explanatory dissatisfying, doesn't explain experience. In other words, there is a sense in which it explains nothing because all of our knowledge is conveyed by experience. Materialism is internally contradictory. It replaces descriptions for the thing described and then tries to recover the thing described from the descriptions. I mean, it's like a dog chasing its own tail at light speed and hoping to catch it one day.
It is empirically inadequate. Nobel Prize last year went to experiments that show that physical entities do not have standalone existence unless you believe in some science fiction stuff like parallel universes popping out every fraction of a second for no reason or if you believe in the magical hidden variables of super determinism that are not even described enough for us to be able to say what they are supposed to be. They are defined in terms of what they need to do for us to rescue materialism from that.
so it's so overwhelming that the case against it is so overwhelming that if you and i know it's a dissatisfactory answer but if you ask me what would make you change your mind it's like well i would need to be a child again that's what it would take i would need to not have the knowledge and the understanding that i have today
uh because it's a pure rile hypothesis and it was from the beginning the difference is that people knew in the beginning it was a pure rile hypothesis and they did it anyway because it was a weapon against the church by the way danie did their own record one of the authors of la encyclopedia the founding document of the enlightenment his own record saying paternalism doesn't work but we need to keep on using it as a weapon against the church but at some point mid 19th century because of the you know the
the bourgeois revolution led by Darwin and others. We forgot that because we wanted the intellectual elite to have not only to survive the church, but to have a domain over the church as far as the culture is concerned. And then it went sideways. But to me, it's like, I can't answer this question. I would have to unlearn what I have learned over 48 years to tell you something. It's a malformed hypothesis. It's not even wrong. It's inconsistent.
It's a catastrophe, so if you ask me what would change my mind about the multiverse hypothesis, that I could tell you. I could tell you about if we had an event with statistics behind it at CERN in which the energy footprint exceeds what we can account for under quantum field theory,
Then I would say, OK, there is a leakage across dimensions and I would take that hypothesis more seriously. But if you ask me what would make me take materialism seriously, it's like asking me what would what would it take for me to take the flying spaghetti monster seriously? I don't know. The flying spaghetti monster would have to show up in front of me. No. Oh, heaven and hell.
What could convince me that the 7-0 hell? Well, near-death experiences certainly won't. Yeah, sorry, it's a dissatisfying answer. All right. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. And thank you for coming on. Thank you for coming on for your seventh or eighth time, Bernardo, and thank you for your premiere on toe, Susan. And hopefully it's not your last time. Hopefully we do a one-on-one as well. Thanks both of you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate tolls, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own tolls. Links to both are in the description.
Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theories of everything dot org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time.
Thank you.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 8095,
"audio_duration_seconds": 5607.6,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T00:59:03Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 78.114,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.203,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 108.234,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 78.609,
"text": " Consciousness is not there. Consciousness is not a personal self. It's not a soul. It's phenomenal states. It has a precise definition. I totally and utterly disagree with you. Good."
},
{
"end_time": 129.019,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 110.213,
"text": " Alright, this is one highly anticipated episode. Today we have a Theolocution with Susan Blackmore and Bernardo Castro. Well, what is a Theolocution? It's a conversation between two people who are trying to understand one another's views and even constructively, that is, add to the so-called opponent's views in real time."
},
{
"end_time": 144.206,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 129.019,
"text": " Rather than destructively criticizing, with snark and even prepared lines, which is what unfortunately tends to characterize most clashing of ideas. So you can think of a theolocution as a Socratic dialogue that's moderated with regard, appreciation, and fondness."
},
{
"end_time": 167.244,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 144.206,
"text": " Bernardo Castrop is a leading voice in the field of philosophy of mind. He's also a strong advocate of what's called analytic idealism. Bernardo argues that consciousness is fundamental in nature, a viewpoint which is articulated in his probative works, including why materialism is baloney, and the idea of the world. Links to both books are in the description as well as links to everything as usual."
},
{
"end_time": 194.77,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 167.244,
"text": " Because of the contrasting views, in my opinion, this episode serves as the best, at least the one that I've seen, the best introduction to Bernardo's ideas. Although this is only the case when one already has an overview of some of the theories of consciousness that exist, else you'll just be weltering and swimming. Now, Susan Blackmore is a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth, who's carved out a career in the study of consciousness, memes, and evolutionary biology, becoming one of the most influential voices"
},
{
"end_time": 217.91,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 194.77,
"text": " Susan is widely recognized for her seminal work, The Meme Machine. In fact, years ago I read that and that's how I was introduced to her work. Again, links to everything that's mentioned will be in the description. Pertinent to today's discussion, Susan's an avid proponent of illusionism, which is more nuanced than simply positing that consciousness is nothing more than some grand illusion. We talk about that as she dispels this myth."
},
{
"end_time": 246.425,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 217.91,
"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I have this podcast here called Theories of Everything where I use my background in math and physics to analyze toes from a theoretical physics perspective predominantly. Though I'm also interested in other approaches as to what is fundamental, what's considered fundamental. Is there holism and reductionism is incorrect? How about consciousness and where does that come into play? You can think of it as the largest mysteries of the universe without already having a defined position that I'm advocating for or trying to in a contrived way steer the conversation toward."
},
{
"end_time": 273.353,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 246.425,
"text": " At around 20 to the 30 minute mark or so, there'll be a couple of ads. This video is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends. All right, now let's picture this. You got yourself a phone, a new phone, and you're looking for an adventurous mobile game to play. Enter Raid Shadow Legends with its fantastic visuals, a menagerie of powerful champions, challenging PvE bosses and tactical PvP content. Many of you may know, I love video games."
},
{
"end_time": 293.985,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 273.353,
"text": " So, let me tell you about the 3 most interesting aspects of Raid Shadow Legends, in my opinion. Firstly, Raid Call of the Arbiter is in full swing, introducing new characters like Artak, the Orc Lord. Log in to Raid for 7 days before July 24th to get Artak for free. If you haven't watched Call of the Arbiter, give it a shot."
},
{
"end_time": 317.927,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 293.985,
"text": " Secondly, Raid Shadow Legends visuals are breathtaking, especially for a mobile game with intricate scenes and character designs immersing you in this fantastic world. Thirdly, Raid's variety of champions and unique abilities offer numerous strategic options. For instance, the character Roy excels in boss fighting. So, new players, if you haven't started playing yet, I urge you to also enjoy this gameplay."
},
{
"end_time": 330.009,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 317.927,
"text": " Use my link which is on screen now as well as the QR code. You can scan that and you'll get a free starter pack with tremendous in-game loot. Just hit the toll link in the description and I'll see you on the battlefield."
},
{
"end_time": 353.302,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 330.384,
"text": " those drastically help support toe as well as the patrons. And if you'd like to support toe yourself, then visit patreon.com slash Kurt Jai Mungle that's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L as a donation with whatever you like genuinely helps. It helps not only financially, it helps emotionally to know that there are people out there like yourself who support to bring this to everyone at zero cost. Like that's"
},
{
"end_time": 372.193,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 353.302,
"text": " Fantastic. So thank you to the patrons. Another podcast that's coming up is a field location with Bernardo Castrop and David Papineau. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. You can look up they've had a conversation before on YouTube. So watch that and if you feel like there was plenty that was left out of that, then feel free to comment here and I'll ask those questions to Bernardo and to David."
},
{
"end_time": 401.954,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 372.193,
"text": " Bernardo's appeared several times on the Theories of Everything channel. One solo behemoth four-hour episode that is actually one of the top episodes on Theories of Everything. Another one with John Vervecky. In fact, there are two parts to that conversation. Definitely don't miss the second one, as you can see a convergence of their ideas. Another one with Christopher Langen. Another one with Donald Hoffman, as well as Susan Schneider. And another one with Sabine Hassenfelder on Super Determinism. This is Susan's first and definitely not the last time on this channel. Enjoy."
},
{
"end_time": 431.937,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 401.954,
"text": " Welcome. Sue, Susan Blackmore, welcome Bernardo Castro up again. It's a privilege to be here with you all. Good to see you both again. Hello. First time for me. Welcome. Sue, you may not know this, but I've wanted to speak to you for years, primarily on memes, because I read your book on memes. The first question is that I'm sure people misconstrue what illusionism is. So do you mind rectifying that so that we all have a shared understanding as to what your understanding of illusionism is? Right."
},
{
"end_time": 461.715,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 432.244,
"text": " Well, illusionism, roughly speaking, is to say that what we normally think about consciousness, all the assumptions we make, we're wrong. We're deluded about the nature of consciousness. There are lots of ways you can go with this. So more formally, the idea is this. So the problem of consciousness is basically the mind-body problem. How can there be my experience of looking at Kurt on the screen and the color of his skin and the walls and the chair behind and all this experience"
},
{
"end_time": 488.473,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 462.005,
"text": " as well as neurons that in some way are related to that. Now, I'm being very cautious there and saying related to that, because then in 1994, the term the hard problem was invented. And that is Dave Chalmers describes that as the problem or the question of how subjective experience arises from brain activity."
},
{
"end_time": 513.916,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 489.224,
"text": " Now, as soon as you say that, you're falling into some kind of dualism. And he himself, Dave, is a kind of dualist, a very subtle sort of dualist. But the idea of illusionism is that's the wrong problem. We're so deluded that we imagine consciousness as something that arises from brain activity, but that just simply doesn't work. And that's why we've not got anywhere in consciousness studies with"
},
{
"end_time": 540.435,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 514.036,
"text": " with really trying to solve the hard problem. If it's the wrong problem, what is the right problem? It is the illusion problem, in other words, or otherwise known as the meta problem of consciousness. It is to understand how we got so deluded, how we have invented all these illusions about the nature of consciousness and we're wrong. So illusionism is a kind of way of approaching the problem of consciousness. It's not a theory"
},
{
"end_time": 558.763,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 541.101,
"text": " To kind of line up against global workspace or IIT or whatever. It is a way of approaching it that says we won't get anywhere unless we've understood how we got into this model in the first place. So illusionists have a go at describing the illusions. Does that help?"
},
{
"end_time": 577.056,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 558.968,
"text": " Yeah, well, before Bernardo comes in, I constantly hear that, hey, if consciousness is an illusion, and this may be one of those misinterpretations, but people would say, well, to the illusionist, if consciousness is an illusion, who is the illusion occurring to? So then what is your response to that? And then Bernardo, please, you'll be able to comment on whatever you would like to."
},
{
"end_time": 590.776,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 577.773,
"text": " Well, the whom it's to is all part of the illusion, because if you think of it this way, what is a self? The natural way to imagine what a self is, or who am I am,"
},
{
"end_time": 620.896,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 591.544,
"text": " is to imagine what Dan Denick calls the Cartesian theater. That is you imagine, and it's, I think most of us are like that most of the time, a lot of meditation, you know, I've been meditating for more than 40 years and it blows apart to some extent, maybe eventually, completely, the solution that I'm sitting inside my head, I'm looking out through my eyes to see the world, I'm listening through my ears to hear the world, and I'm in control, I have"
},
{
"end_time": 639.189,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 621.101,
"text": " stream of conscious experience and i have free will which enables me to manipulate myself and the world or this body and the world. So this false idea of the self goes along with illusionism. So who is being deluded? Well the whole thing is a delusion, the whole thing is a representation"
},
{
"end_time": 664.121,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 639.923,
"text": " Okay, Bernardo, what is it you agree with and do you perhaps disagree with and perhaps just want to comment on?"
},
{
"end_time": 690.794,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 664.582,
"text": " There are a lot of things that I agree with, including the illusion of the personal self. I think there is no personal self. It's just not there at all. The illusion of dualism. I don't think there are two things, material brain and phenomenal states that are generated by the material brain. But for the position of illusionism to have use, it has to be specific."
},
{
"end_time": 720.418,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 691.237,
"text": " And when you get people talking specifically about it, like lately, Keith Frankish Frankish has been talking about it rather specifically than he than it has spoken has talked specifically about it for quite a while. The claim is that the way illusionism circumvents the hard problem is by saying that phenomenal states or experiential qualities do not exist, that they are illusions."
},
{
"end_time": 750.776,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 721.51,
"text": " But then the problem is illusionism is then either coherent or it is useless. It is useless if we say. Phenomenal states aren't what they seem. That's why they are an illusion. This is coherent, but it's useless because it doesn't do anything about the heart problem of consciousness, because the seeming is already a phenomenal state."
},
{
"end_time": 778.882,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 751.323,
"text": " That there is an illusion. An illusion is a phenomenal state. An illusion insofar as it is experienced and if it's not experienced, it's not an illusion. It's already an instance of that which one is trying to get rid of. Now, illusionism would be useful if it said phenomenal states are an illusion in the sense that they don't really exist. They are edited digests of neuronal processes."
},
{
"end_time": 809.411,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 779.462,
"text": " And that's why our experiences don't look like neurons firings. And this is Danny Dennett, by the way, because our experience is an edited digest of the neuronal firings. This is incoherent because there is an obvious infinite regress and it goes as follows. What is that edit digest? Well, it can only be neuronal processes because for the illusionist, there is nothing but neuronal processes."
},
{
"end_time": 839.599,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 809.821,
"text": " So the edit digest of neuronal processes are themselves neuronal processes. So why doesn't the edit digest look like neuronal processes? Well, because then you have a meta edit digest, but that too can only be neuronal processes. So you need a meta meta edit digest and you fall into infinite regress. So my position is illusionism has to be made specific."
},
{
"end_time": 869.138,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 840.009,
"text": " Otherwise, we are just we can talk about anything. I'm an illusionist. I think the personal self is an illusion. But like Antonio Damasio claims, and I think he is right in that claim. The problem is that he conflates that with the claim that consciousness is not there. Consciousness is not a personal self. It's not a soul. It's phenomenal states. It has a precise definition. So you have to make it specific. And the moment you make it specific, it's either relevant or it's incoherent."
},
{
"end_time": 896.903,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 869.684,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show, or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human."
},
{
"end_time": 925.555,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 900.555,
"text": " I totally and utterly disagree with you. The one thing that I do pick up on that I should have said myself was, look up illusion in the dictionary, because what happened was Dan Dennett and I frequently used to get accused of saying consciousness doesn't exist. What? Look, you know, ah, here is experience. So I actually"
},
{
"end_time": 950.708,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 925.964,
"text": " got some dictionaries and looked up illusion and as you described it, it means something that is not what it seems to be. And that is all illusionism is saying. Now illusionism is not claiming, as I said before, it's not claiming to be specific, it's not claiming to be a theory that can be tested against other theories like IIT or higher order thoughts or you know all the other theories of consciousness. It's an approach that says"
},
{
"end_time": 978.592,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 951.305,
"text": " We've got it so badly wrong, we need to start again from the beginning. Now, one way to start again might be to idealism. Well, I'm sure come onto that. It wouldn't be the way that I go, but there may be other ways to go. But you said unless it's specific, it can't solve the hard problem, but it's not trying to solve the hard problem. It's trying to say that the hard problem is completely wrong because it still is from the start and it asks us to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. What we need to do is work out"
},
{
"end_time": 1009.394,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 979.411,
"text": " just how how we are imagining our consciousness to be and see why that happened. Now you talked about you said something like an illusionist says subjective states don't exist. Well I mean the thing is illusionism is not one theory so there are lots of us doing different things thinking in different ways but I wouldn't say that subjective states don't exist. I mean as long as there is a subject i.e a self-construction a mental model a representation of a self"
},
{
"end_time": 1034.445,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1009.718,
"text": " and there seems to be a world out there then that's a subjective state but it's not in my mind something that the brain generates. I mean the brain is constructing representations and so maybe we need to ask well why is there something it's like to be a representation and then you think well the representation is telling you what it's like isn't it it's a representation of that tree and that you know whatever. So I think you're"
},
{
"end_time": 1055.879,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1035.128,
"text": " I can understand what you're saying about it needs to be precise, but I and it isn't because it isn't claiming to be. It's not useless because it will help us, I believe, to see through the problems of the other theories which are not solving that all the other theories claim to be approaching at least to the hard problem."
},
{
"end_time": 1073.2,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1056.408,
"text": " illusionism doesn't and I think in that sense in a very small way I'm not claiming a huge amount for it really but I think it's the way forward to go to work out why and how the illusion appears illusions illusions of self of consciousness of free will all of them"
},
{
"end_time": 1100.538,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1073.933,
"text": " What is illusionism for you if you can be precise i mean that there are illusions going on it's trivial of course there are that consciousness may not be what it seems it's trivial of course there are many things we think we experience but actually it's something else going on so what is this the philosophical metaphysical relevance of illusionism and how do you specify precisely what the claim is because so far you"
},
{
"end_time": 1129.087,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1100.845,
"text": " You just hand waved around the dictionary meaning of the word illusionism. So what is illusionism, illusionism specifically? Well, for me, it is. I can't say any more than I've really said, because I don't know where it's going. I play around with all sorts of possible solutions. I mean, I've thought a lot about idealism. I've thought about a lot about different kinds of panpsychism. I've thought about all sorts of other things."
},
{
"end_time": 1156.92,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1129.411,
"text": " that maybe if we can see through the illusions, we will understand how that works. Now, I would say this, if I look around at this world now, there seems to be a self and a world that isn't something else. I mean, a materialist will say, well, that, you know, ultimately there's some ultimate underlying whatever it is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1186.203,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1157.159,
"text": " with the forces of nature and whatever, and this is arising from that. And there is a sort of natural separation between experience and the world that we're experiencing. That seems to me that's part of what the illusion is. And how do we get by that? It seems to me that that's what you're trying to do is to get past that. I don't have an answer. I mean, you're both going to be really frustrated with me because I am not going to say that I have an answer to set against your answer."
},
{
"end_time": 1215.282,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1186.544,
"text": " I'm just saying that we're so deeply confused, we have to throw out an awful lot and start again. I'm sorry if that is not, you know, not enough. It's not enough meat, if you like. But it's very interesting. We both mentioned, didn't it? I mean, back in 1991 in Consciousness Explained, the book that so many people say should be called Consciousness Explained Away, that means they haven't got what he's trying to do at all. That book was full of"
},
{
"end_time": 1238.968,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1215.828,
"text": " traps that you can fall into. The Cartesian theater I mentioned is just one of them, but for example there's a very very common idea in most of consciousness studies, a lot of the research, which is that some processes in the brain are conscious and some other processes in the brain are not conscious. Now what on earth could this mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 1260.794,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1239.462,
"text": " Does some have qualia attached and some don't? Does some sort of magically give rise to produce something called experience or colors or any kind of experience?"
},
{
"end_time": 1288.148,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1261.049,
"text": " It doesn't really make any sense. That's just one of them. But that whole thing has led to the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. Now, I think as an illusionist, that that is one of the things that illusionism helps you to see, and that Dennett's work has helped me to see, that that is a false distinction. There are not conscious and unconscious processes on the brain. It's a category mistake, if you like."
},
{
"end_time": 1302.944,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1288.933,
"text": " so those are the kind of things that i find helpful in digging down and digging down into the problem and hoping that something will become clearer than it is now and it's not to deny that there's experience that's what we're trying to struggle with"
},
{
"end_time": 1333.763,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1304.121,
"text": " So briefly, are you a materialist or you don't subscribe to that? No, I'm not a materialist because I'm probably for probably the same reasons as Bernardo. It doesn't work. I mean, it gives rise to the hard problem, which is, to my mind, an idiot problem. It's you know, it doesn't make sense to say that that experience arises from brain processes. Either it's got to be brain processes in some way, or we've got to have some other kind of theory."
},
{
"end_time": 1356.288,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1334.48,
"text": " I think the last comment you made almost ends the debate. We can now just converse. The last comment you made that materialism doesn't work because of the heart problem."
},
{
"end_time": 1382.381,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1356.698,
"text": " ends the debate we can now just i'm not saying naturalism doesn't work that's a different statement isn't it naturalism is not the same as materialism i said materialism oh sorry sorry i am a naturalist too right fine um i didn't mean when i asked the question that you be more specific i didn't mean to to ask you to give me a metaphysical theory uh let alone a complete one"
},
{
"end_time": 1406.817,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1382.671,
"text": " I asked you to specify the hypothesis you are defending because I can only agree or disagree if I know what it is that you are defending, what it is that your position is. But as you just said, what you call illusionism is not what the vast majority at least of philosophers out there writing about illusionism consider illusionism to be."
},
{
"end_time": 1428.2,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1407.159,
"text": " The relevance of illusionism in philosophy today is the attempt to deny the existence of phenomenal states, of experiential states. Who says that? Because I'm not a philosopher, I know more about psychologists than philosophers, but who is saying that these states don't exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 1457.944,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1428.712,
"text": " Keith Frankish says that there is an important sense in which experiential states do not exist. Do not have phenomenal properties. That's what he says. They do not have phenomenal properties as in descriptions of qualia. He doesn't say they don't exist. Phenomenal states are phenomenal properties. If states do not have phenomenal properties, they are not phenomenal states. You cannot argue out of it. And Michael Grass, you asked me for examples. So I'm giving you examples. Let me answer."
},
{
"end_time": 1488.234,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1458.268,
"text": " Michael Graziano is on record saying consciousness does not exist. It's something that doesn't happen. So that's what is being peddled out there. And Keith is quite explicit. Although he dances an impossible dance, because what he says is that we think we have phenomenal states when we introspect, because everything happens as though we had phenomenal states, but we don't."
},
{
"end_time": 1505.879,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1489.155,
"text": " The problem is that phenomenal states are the only instance of something that the seeming of it is already it. The illusion of it is already it. And after he goes through a tortuous conceptual"
},
{
"end_time": 1526.271,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1506.493,
"text": " Acrobatics, he says, but yes, we don't have the answer yet for how non phenomenal states can represent phenomenal states. Well, that's the only question that matters. That's the question that started the whole thing. So if you ask me, Susan, I think illusionism is a shit showing philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 1556.647,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1526.647,
"text": " It's just a bunch of vague hand-waving conceptual acrobatics and contortions that only postpone the problem and hide it behind an absolute lack of clarity of thinking. Now, all materialism, it's the only game in town because given the hard problem of consciousness, the irreducibility of qualities to quantitative parameters, you have to find a way to argue that phenomenal states in a very significant sense are not there."
},
{
"end_time": 1583.524,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1556.988,
"text": " So you end up dancing this dance in which people say, well, of course there are subjective states. We can't deny that. And then they proceed to argue that there aren't subjective states. What the hell is this? That's why I keep asking you to be specific and precise because illusionism is now so slippery that whatever you think it is, it is, and you argue against that. The defenders will say, well, that's not what I mean. What is it? What the hell then is it that you mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 1611.715,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1583.882,
"text": " And my conclusion is what I said from the beginning. It is either useful or it is coherent. It doesn't go both ways. Now, I understand that what you consider to be illusionism is a much less specific thing. You are just focused on the dictionary meaning of the word illusion. And you're saying, well, there are illusions. Yes, there are illusions. And seeing through them can help us. Yes, seeing through our illusions can help us."
},
{
"end_time": 1639.377,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1612.671,
"text": " it's almost the issue you see it's it's completely true it says nothing it's not doing anything when you talk about illusions like that you seem to be talking and earlier as well about um uh perception reality kind of errors and this isn't like that this is this is having an illusion about the whole nature of every moment of experience that we have um going back to frankish"
},
{
"end_time": 1665.009,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1639.804,
"text": " In that book, that special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, you may see that in the beginning of my piece I dissociate from his idea that states don't have phenomenal properties because I can't go along with him on that. And so in a way I'm weaker in my argument and you can criticize me for that."
},
{
"end_time": 1683.183,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1665.282,
"text": " But you mentioned Michael Graziano and"
},
{
"end_time": 1712.722,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1683.609,
"text": " It's very interesting that he refuses to be called an illusionist. Now he's probably being quite canny here and it may pay off because people don't like the word illusionism and he doesn't want to be associated with it. But I think his theory is absolutely a version of illusionism and I think it's the best theory we've got at the moment, although it doesn't solve all the problems. But he is basically saying, just as we have a body schema,"
},
{
"end_time": 1736.971,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1712.841,
"text": " So his theory for anyone listening is attention, um, attentional schema theory. Now, uh, the idea of a schema is quite important. I'm particularly interested in the body schema, which he used to compare with it. So all the time our body, uh, bright, the whole nervous system is constructing, um, our model or representation of where our body is and what it's doing. This is called the body schema."
},
{
"end_time": 1766.715,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1737.346,
"text": " I'm particularly interested in this because we now know that this is what goes awry in an outer body experience and I've done a lot of work on outer body and near-death experiences and so on. So I'm very familiar with that idea. Now the idea of an attention schema is that any complex inflammation processing system has the divert energy or resources to different things all over the place. We call this attention in humans and other animals and that"
},
{
"end_time": 1781.493,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1767.073,
"text": " What is represented in the attention schema now this is an interesting way of going about it because it's not having an outside world with objects that then have to have"
},
{
"end_time": 1803.677,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1782.159,
"text": " properties that we have phenomenal properties because we're looking at an object, it's mapping or representing the attention schema instead. Now, whether this gets us anywhere, I don't know, but I've spent quite a lot of time playing around with the idea of observing in different states of consciousness, whether it feels like"
},
{
"end_time": 1831.8,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1804.138,
"text": " an attention schema. And that's quite fun. I've been doing the same with predictive processing theory and active inference and so on, which kind of does slightly relate to it. And this leads me to another thought that I have, which is there are lots and lots of ways of going about the problem of consciousness. But one of them for me is through personal practice of mindfulness, meditation, taking psychedelic drugs, all kinds of things that change one's state of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1851.852,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1832.261,
"text": " Because I feel that that approach is needed alongside the scientific approach and the philosophical approach. You're nodding there, so I'd like to hear what you think about that. Some of your extremely famous colleagues, I think, agree with you, but I can't say anything more beyond that."
},
{
"end_time": 1882.056,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1852.381,
"text": " I agree. I think introspection is one of the royal avenues to knowledge, especially if you're talking about the mind. If one is doing neuroscience of consciousness or philosophy of mind, introspection is essential so the person know what he's talking about. I mean, that doesn't replace objective studies like neuroimaging, which I think is extremely valuable. It's been getting a lot of flak recently, justifiably to some extent, but I think it's a great advance of the 21st century. It doesn't replace"
},
{
"end_time": 1905.299,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1882.056,
"text": " clinical experience, but it's certainly a key component. Back to Graziano, he's an illusionist in the broad sense that you are using, in the sense that what he's trying to deny is the existence of some kind of personal soul. But, I mean, who would disagree with that? Most people alive on the planet today."
},
{
"end_time": 1919.514,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1905.998,
"text": " well who amongst the people who are working seriously on this would disagree with that so i almost yawn at that um um he would call he he's considered an eliminativist as opposed to an illusionist"
},
{
"end_time": 1945.333,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1919.804,
"text": " Because illusionism is the denial, not of a disembodied soul, but the denial of phenomenal states. And that's not how you are using the word, because you just said you acknowledge the existence of phenomenal states. So strictly speaking, from a philosophical perspective, you aren't an illusionist. I'm not the real thing. You're an illusion of one. And if you are not a dualist, which it seems you are not,"
},
{
"end_time": 1973.899,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1945.964,
"text": " and you acknowledge the existence of phenomenal states, then you are perforce unidealist. Semantically, there is no other space for you to land, if you know what I mean. What about panpsychism? I'm not particularly landing there, but I'd love to hear what you think about that, because idealism isn't the only possibility, is it? Well, you just said it was. Maybe you could defend that. There are versions of panpsychism that would state the following."
},
{
"end_time": 2001.067,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1974.138,
"text": " Phenomenal states are not just extra properties of subatomic particles, they are the essence of subatomic particles. And all the other properties like mass charge, momentum, spin, these are all external appearances of that essence. And that comes down to a form of like Leibniz like idealism, a monad like theory. But that's physically incoherent."
},
{
"end_time": 2026.527,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2001.664,
"text": " And it amazes me that this stuff is still talked about because we have known since at least the 1940s, at least since 1949 when Feynman published his famous quantum electrodynamics paper with the Feynman diagrams and all that stuff that got him the Nobel Prize. We've known since then that particles are just metaphors for local excitations of underlying fields. In other words, there are no particles."
},
{
"end_time": 2055.572,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2027.005,
"text": " There's nothing to a particle but the underlying field, just as there is nothing to a ripple but the underlying lake. You can't fish the ripple out of the lake because the ripple is a doing of the lake. It's not a thing, it's a behavior. Particles are the same thing. Particles are behaviors of underlying quantum fields. And without this, we couldn't begin to make sense of a great many things we know happen. For instance, we couldn't make sense of particle decay. A Higgs boson can decay into two quarks."
},
{
"end_time": 2081.613,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2056.203,
"text": " Or two muons, which are heavy electrons. But there aren't two muons in the Higgs boson. So how does it become two muons? Well, it's because decaying means that a particular excitation in the underlying field, in this case, the Higgs field, decays. One ripple becomes two other ripples. There is no magic in that. But if you think particles are things,"
},
{
"end_time": 2095.623,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2081.92,
"text": " Then the Higgs boson magically disappears and two muons magically appear. It's like what the hell, but I don't even need to get to go that far. We wouldn't be able to explain particle interactions, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 2122.125,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2096.186,
"text": " something quantum theory doesn't give us only quantum field theory so there are no particles and panpsychism assumes that there are particles with delineated spatial boundaries and that they are self-existing things but this is physically contradictory it doesn't even well that's only one version of panpsychism i'm not going to defend panpsychism but i i do enjoy playing around with it but there are lots of other forms that say um"
},
{
"end_time": 2145.196,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2122.449,
"text": " only living things can be conscious or only you know higher order thinking things will be conscious or I don't know different size objects there's all sorts of variations or even just representations maybe anything any system that represents something as internal or external to itself could be"
},
{
"end_time": 2173.677,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2145.486,
"text": " There's lots of versions, but what I got confused with what you were saying was I thought you were just talking about Leibniz and then physics and Feynman and so on. But were you actually talking about what you believe? Because what is this underlying field? If you are an idealist, what do you mean by an underlying field? Fields under quantum theory are models."
},
{
"end_time": 2203.814,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2174.155,
"text": " We model nature in terms of fields, and fields are spatially distributed. They exist in every point of space-time. That's the model of a field. But everything in science is a convenient fiction. Like when Newton proposed this invisible force acting at a distance instantaneously between the Earth and the Moon, the force of gravity, that was a convenient fiction. Today it's no longer convenient. We know there is no such force. Gravity is a distortion of space-time, a bending of space-time. Actually, even that"
},
{
"end_time": 2232.892,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2204.087,
"text": " later convenient fiction is now falling by the side because now with quantum loop gravity, that whole thing is being revised. So we shouldn't take the 17 quantum fields that exist today as real existence because they are just conceptual models that allow us to predict nature's behavior. Now, what it does tell us is that whatever is going on, it's not spatially localized."
},
{
"end_time": 2249.189,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2233.319,
"text": " The world is not made of little bricks that are put together. That's not how nature works unless you make that step to feuds a great many things would break. You wouldn't be able to reconcile quantum theory with relativity."
},
{
"end_time": 2277.381,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2249.667,
"text": " You wouldn't be able to explain particle interaction. You wouldn't be able to explain particle decay. You wouldn't be able to explain the quantum foam or spontaneous quantum excitations. And therefore you wouldn't be able to explain what people call zero point force, which is Casimir's effect, which is experimental experimentally demonstrated. So what what these models are telling us is that at the bottom level, nature is not spatially localized."
},
{
"end_time": 2300.64,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2278.063,
"text": " That's the bottleneck. And it dovetails nicely with idealism, at least with objective forms of idealism, which say, yes, there is a world out there. It's not in our minds. It's not susceptible to our fantasy, our wishes or our affirmations every morning. It's objective from our point of view. And it would still be there even if we were not here."
},
{
"end_time": 2330.179,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2301.118,
"text": " But it too is mental in nature, just like my thoughts are objective from your point of view. Even if you were not there, I would still be having thoughts and whatever fantasy you may entertain. It doesn't affect my thoughts from your point of view. My thoughts are objective, but they are out there. They are outside your personal mind. So the claim is there are mental processes out there. They are not ours. They are objective from our perspective. They are predictable. That's why science works. They are non localized."
},
{
"end_time": 2359.189,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2330.691,
"text": " Because there is only one field of subjectivity, this is critical to avoid the combination problem. And it dovetails nicely with field theory, because the whole, for the past 40 years, the whole of physics is trying to do the so-called grand unification theory, sort of folding gravity into the quantum fields and going from 17 to 1. And theory was an attempt, and now we have loop quantum gravity. So it dovetails nicely with that."
},
{
"end_time": 2385.435,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2359.718,
"text": " Forget idealism. There are no particles. This is not my belief. This is not my opinion. This is textbook quantum field theory. It's the basis of the standard model. It's what is guiding us when we invest billions of dollars or euros at CERN. This is not even news. Some would claim we've known that since the 1920s, but at least since the 1940s."
},
{
"end_time": 2408.37,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2386.237,
"text": " I don't understand the fundamental lack of understanding I have. If you take your idealist view and you're saying that there are still the fields objectively existing, why do they behave the way they do? I mean, how do you get if everything is basically mind or mental,"
},
{
"end_time": 2438.131,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2409.599,
"text": " I'm not sure whether you would say everything is conscious, but anyway, if everything is mental and that comes first, why do we get these apparent laws of nature, the way things behave and the consistency? Why? I mean, at least materialism has some kind of answers to the way the world behaves. Or are you saying it doesn't? I just think you shift from one to the other. You shift from materialism to idealism. I don't know what you've gained in doing that."
},
{
"end_time": 2463.933,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2438.78,
"text": " You avoid dualism, you avoid the heart. Yes, absolutely. We have to avoid dualism. And you avoid the heart problem of consciousness. The notion that something that is mental in essence cannot behave regularly is merely a metaphysical prejudice. Human minds evolved in a planetary ecosystem and therefore we evolved to be very reactive."
},
{
"end_time": 2481.647,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2464.48,
"text": " And so you could say human minds which have developed higher level mental functions and are reactive to their environment, they're difficult to predict. But although even human minds can be predicted and psychology is making progress in that direction, but a mind without higher level mental functions,"
},
{
"end_time": 2507.807,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2482.022,
"text": " can behave according to precise regularities. That's what I want to understand. Why are there these regularities or laws or consistencies? You say that our mind works in particular ways. Why does it produce the appearance of a brain and neurons and all of that kind of stuff? These are two questions. Why does it behave regularly?"
},
{
"end_time": 2524.855,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2507.978,
"text": " Because it is what it is that nature clearly behaves regularly. I mean, whatever metaphysics you have, the regularity of nature's behavior is a given. We can predict what nature will do next. That's why technology works. Otherwise, it wouldn't. But the prejudice is that mind can't behave regularly. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2545.947,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2525.162,
"text": " The news is it does even if it's so complex that it's difficult to predict it does behave regularly and to we cannot anthropomorphize that mind of nature out there that can be a very probably is a very simple mind didn't evolve higher level mental functions in a planetary ecosystem it's an instinctive spontaneous mind and behaves according to regularities."
},
{
"end_time": 2565.299,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2545.947,
"text": " Alligators have very regular behavior. If you approach them and you cross a certain threshold of distance, they may lounge at you. But if you don't cross that threshold, they never try to lounge at you. Minds can be very predictable. So this is not an argument against idealism. Now, why does it seem the way it does?"
},
{
"end_time": 2588.131,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2565.657,
"text": " Now it's a technical answer. Kurt, cut me if you think it's going too far. But there are two reasons for this. One is we cannot see the world as it actually is because there would be information overload. It's like seeing the files in your computer on your desktop exactly the way they are. Millions of open or closed microscopic switches."
},
{
"end_time": 2610.179,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2588.131,
"text": " That's useless. It doesn't favor survival. What you want is to perceive the salient features that are relevant. That's one answer. The other answer is entropy control. If our inner cognitive states would mirror the states of the world, there would be no upper bounds to our internal entropy because there is no a priori upper bounds to the entropy of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 2638.08,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2610.691,
"text": " So if you were to mirror those states in our inner cognitive states without a bound to our internal entropy, and I'll use an illustrative metaphor, we could melt into hot meat soup because unbounded entropy is not compatible with structural and dynamic integrity. And this has been shown mathematically by some neuroscientists. So we see the relevant and salient information about our environment at a glance."
},
{
"end_time": 2668.387,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2638.524,
"text": " And the result of that is what we call the colloquially physical world, the contents of the screen of perception. That's much more conducive to survival and to maintaining our internal structural and dynamic integrity than seeing the states of the world for what they actually are. To use another metaphor, the contents of the screen of perception are like the dashboard of an airplane. The airplane has sensors, it makes measurements of the states of the sky outside, and those measurements are presented to the pilot in the form of a dashboard."
},
{
"end_time": 2691.152,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2668.968,
"text": " And the pilot can fly based on the dashboard alone, flying by instrument. You don't need a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Guess what? That's exactly what we do. We have sensors, eyes, ears, tongue, surface of the skin. We make measurements and those measurements are presented to meta consciousness, which is different from phenomenal states. It's something that comes on top is presented to meta consciousness in the form of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2714.121,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2691.766,
"text": " physical world. So the physical world is an internal dashboard. It does convey accurate information about the real world, but it doesn't look like the real world because not only does it not need to a dashboard, it doesn't look like the clouds in the sky, but because it shouldn't in order to control our internal entropy and facilitate prompt reactions to environmental challenges."
},
{
"end_time": 2744.411,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2714.94,
"text": " i'm even more confused now because you're talking about the way the world seems and how the world really is and almost all of that second part of your answer seems to me could be spoken by a materialist and make perfect sense and i don't see what idealism gives you to help with that i mean yes of course this is we i've talked about attention and attention schema theory we have to pay attention to things that matter to us we evolved"
},
{
"end_time": 2773.319,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2744.77,
"text": " We evolve the skills that we have and the minds that we have in order to survive and get around in the environment we evolved in, not to have an accurate view of what is actually out there. And now you're talking about things that are actually out there just as a materialist would or as a dualist would indeed. So I'm deeply confused now because I don't know what idealism, what difference idealism makes and what it adds and how it helps us."
},
{
"end_time": 2802.466,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2773.933,
"text": " takes away an extra ontic category that is completely unnecessary, namely something that is not mind, something that is not phenomenal, something that is not mental. So you're calling all the outside world there. So we have our experiences of the world and so on. And the outside world there, you're just calling that conscious or mental rather than calling it something completely different and physical. But what does that mean to say that it's mental? That's what I just don't get."
},
{
"end_time": 2820.606,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2803.507,
"text": " It means that it's of the same kind as your own inner mentation. In other words, it's qualitative in nature. It cannot be exhaustively described in terms of a list of numbers. The latter is materialism. And by avoiding this non-mental stuff,"
},
{
"end_time": 2848.592,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2821.152,
"text": " You avoid having to come back from no mental stuff to mental stuff, which is the hard problem of consciousness. You avoid it altogether. So now you're saying the world out there is made of qualities. These are not the qualities of my perception. These are different qualities. My perception is an internal dashboard representation of the qualities that are out there. There are actual qualities out there and they are mental in some kind of nature that I don't quite understand what that means that they're mental."
},
{
"end_time": 2877.995,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2849.531,
"text": " They are mental in the sense that they are experienced by nature. They are experiential in essence, but we don't experience those qualities as they are. We have a representation of those qualities. So now we have to come from qualities, the real qualities that are out there to the qualities of perception. That's a much easier bridge because there is no fundamental ontological transition. Now you have mental states of one kind modulating mental states of another."
},
{
"end_time": 2903.968,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2878.387,
"text": " Is this coherent? Of course it is. It's happening every time, every day to all of us. Your thoughts modulate your emotions. Your emotions modulate your thoughts. Your thoughts modulate your fantasies. Mental states of different kinds are modulating one another all the time in all of us. You said something a bit contentious there about thoughts and emotions."
},
{
"end_time": 2933.643,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2904.667,
"text": " They are both mental states, so there is no ontic distinction between them. But we use different words because there is something about the respective qualities that allow us to differentiate one from the other. Now, if you have a certain emotion, it changes the kinds of thoughts you are liable to having."
},
{
"end_time": 2963.592,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2933.985,
"text": " Or if you have certain kinds of thoughts, you become more prone to experiencing certain other emotions. So mental states can modulate other mental states. Trivially, it's happening all the time. That's how minds work. So all I'm saying now is that there are external mental states that modulate our internal cognitive mental states. There is no hard problem anymore, but there is still an external world. It's subjective from its own point of view, but objective from our point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 2983.302,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2964.838,
"text": " I think why I'm bothered about that was because I'm thinking about the time course of thoughts versus emotions and what causes what and so on. And I was imagining emotion in terms of all the neurotransmitters and hormones and all the other things that give rise to bodily feelings"
},
{
"end_time": 3008.797,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2983.626,
"text": " when you say that thoughts affect bodily feelings there appears to be a problem there but that's the problem that you're getting away with by saying that that they're all mental things affecting each other in a mental the whole world is mental stuff and obviously that makes sense of mental things affecting other mental things yeah yeah and and then what are the neurotransmitters what are the neuronal firings the neurons and all this stuff"
},
{
"end_time": 3033.746,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3009.241,
"text": " There are obvious correlations between this stuff and what we feel from within denying those correlations. It's just silly. It's just, okay, you don't even enter the party if you deny that. How can we account for that under an idealist perspective? Under idealism, all matter is a dashboard representation of a mental state when observed from across a dissociative boundary. But forget that again, observed from"
},
{
"end_time": 3048.148,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3034.309,
"text": " from across a dissociative boundary, because we have to account for why can't I read your thoughts? Why do I not know what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda? If it's all only one big mind, then why am I not enlightened, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3078.37,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3048.473,
"text": " So we have to account for that. And the account for that is dissociation, which is something that psychiatry now managed to show objectively with the advent of neuroimaging that it does happen and it can literally make you blind. So why wouldn't it make you blind to what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda or in the mind of another person? And then the way it all comes together is all matter under idealism is an inner cognitive representation of external mental states."
},
{
"end_time": 3090.64,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3079.241,
"text": " When they are observed across a dissociative boundary, that's what matter is. Now, your neurons are made of the same atoms and force fields that make up the rest of the universe. They are also material."
},
{
"end_time": 3120.794,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3090.981,
"text": " So your neurons are what your inner dissociated mental processes look like when they are observed from across a dissociative boundary. Your body is what your dissociated inner mentation looks like when it is observed from across a dissociative boundary and represented on a cognitive dashboard, so to say, like the dashboard of an airplane. Can you please give me the simplest understanding of a dissociative boundary? This Marshawn beast mode lynch prize pick is making sport season even more fun on prize picks whether"
},
{
"end_time": 3137.892,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3121.169,
"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
},
{
"end_time": 3153.285,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3137.892,
"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes and if you're right you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3174.923,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3153.507,
"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details."
},
{
"end_time": 3202.022,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3179.121,
"text": " I mean i'm sort of struggling with you talking in a lot of different ways there and i kind of think i got the gist of it but then i'm thinking i clearly haven't got this quite right because there'll be dissociative boundaries within the system and between the system and other people and and so on but i haven't quite got to the bottom of what you mean what would be a sort of minimal dissociative boundary"
},
{
"end_time": 3227.91,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3202.193,
"text": " Conceptually, dissociative boundaries is what's given by inferential isolation, but then it gets technical. So instead of that, I will appeal to empirical studies. Then it makes it more and more alive. So you may know this in 2015, there was this woman, a patient of dissociative identity disorder in Germany, and she had many alters or dissociated centers of awareness. Two of these alters claimed to be blind."
},
{
"end_time": 3258.063,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3228.456,
"text": " But the human, the woman could see perfectly well. Her eyes were OK. Her visual cortex was OK. Her optical optical nerves were OK. There was nothing wrong. So neuroscientists had this fantastic idea of instrumenting her with an EEG cap and measuring her brain activity, both when the host personality had executive control and when one of the so-called blind alters had executive control. Lo and behold, when one of those alters had executive control, the woman would have no brain activity in the visual cortex."
},
{
"end_time": 3288.148,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3258.729,
"text": " But when the host personality would be back, even though the woman's eyes were open, so she literally couldn't see what was right in front of her eyes, with nothing physically wrong with her eyes, dissociation can do that. When the host personality would be back in exact executive control, there would be normal activity in the visual cortex. So dissociation, this is an extreme form of dissociation, it renders you literally blind to what's in front of your open eyes. But"
},
{
"end_time": 3309.599,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3288.456,
"text": " soft forms of disassociation are happening to us all the time when you forget something that you know you know you're disassociated when you park your relationship problem relationship problems to be able to go to work and perform. You are disassociated when you can't remember an old trauma you're disassociated."
},
{
"end_time": 3338.865,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3310.64,
"text": " But dissociation does happen in Greece. Now, what is the actual mechanism? How can we conceptualize that? We are not there yet, but it obviously has to do with inferential isolation, which is what happens when you can't remember something. You cannot follow a sort of chain of cognitive association. But I don't get how this kind of relates to idealism. I mean, I can understand all of that in terms of brain function and how, I mean, I don't know the mechanism for shutting down V1, but I do know by playing around"
},
{
"end_time": 3355.845,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3338.865,
"text": " the edges of sleep and so on, that I can manipulate whether what I'm experiencing is from V1 or is from higher imaginary factors. What I was getting at in my question was"
},
{
"end_time": 3384.991,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3357.108,
"text": " You've talked about these dissociative boundaries as though they apply to the whole world, not just to one human being. Because the way you were talking was like between a person and the world out there. And I wondered, can you really find these boundaries in the world as you're imagining it made entirely of mental stuff? What would kind of be a minimal dissociative boundary that needs to be crossed? That's what I don't understand. First, a brief comment."
},
{
"end_time": 3409.326,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3385.282,
"text": " To really understand idealism, you have to understand it under its own terms, not under materialist terms or assumptions, because otherwise you just... I think life... Okay, let me give you first another study. In 2014, Jolanda Schlumpf here in the Netherlands did this study in which she took a group of people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and a group of actors, and she put both groups under an fMRI,"
},
{
"end_time": 3434.548,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3409.633,
"text": " to see if doctors could objectively diagnose dissociation. And the actors were asked to pretend to themselves that they were dissociated. Lo and behold, you can objectively diagnose. In other words, there is something dissociation looks like. It looks like certain patterns of identifiable patterns of brain activity. Dissociation has an extrinsic appearance, an outer image. It looks like something."
},
{
"end_time": 3449.377,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3435.026,
"text": " So my claim is life biology is what dissociation at a higher level looks like and that's why I can't read your thoughts for as long as I am alive for as long as I look like biology metabolism."
},
{
"end_time": 3475.35,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3449.735,
"text": " That's what the dissociative process in nature is looking like at that level, just like a person with DID has patterns of brain activity that look like something identifiable. So that's what life is, and that's why I can't read your thoughts. Now, your inner mental processes within the boundaries of your dissociation, they have to look like something if they are observed from across the dissociative boundary."
},
{
"end_time": 3505.538,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3475.862,
"text": " lo and behold they look like the neural correlates of consciousness. I find this particularly interesting when you keep talking about why I can't know your thoughts because I spent the first sort of 20 years of my research life looking for telepathy and clairvoyance and so on and never finding them and it's still of great interest to me because I spent a lot of time, you know, it's all out there in the Akashic records as"
},
{
"end_time": 3534.735,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3505.538,
"text": " And all the information is there, then why can't I get it? And I had a great theory when I was doing my PhD that memory, the only reason that we remember our own thoughts and not everybody else's is because they're more similar. And I'm still attracted to thoughts a lot, you know, ideas along that that kind of stream. So that was very interesting to me. But I'd like to pick up on something else you said, because you said it sounds absolutely extraordinary that this"
},
{
"end_time": 3563.558,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3535.742,
"text": " a person suffering from identity dissociation disorder could look at something and not see it. But we can all look straight at something and not see it. And we can also see something that we haven't looked straight at. I say this because it's something that I often talk about in lectures. I was at a conference on psychedelics last weekend, which was wonderful. And I was talking about illusionism there. And I showed simple demonstrations."
},
{
"end_time": 3586.596,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3563.933,
"text": " The classic one is of course the Gorillaz in our midst video which I'm sure you've seen and I won't say more for anyone who hasn't seen it to spoil it but you know you literally must be looking straight at the thing that you don't see but I also do a little trick which does the opposite thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3608.473,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3586.92,
"text": " Consciousness Explained, Dan talked about a room it papered entirely with identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe. I just made up a picture of identical portraits of Dan Dennett and there's 18 in this picture and you know how many saccades you can make in a second, probably five or six or something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 3627.261,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3608.968,
"text": " And if you just show the picture to people for two seconds, you know, they cannot have looked at all the pictures. And yet when you ask them what they saw, they say, I saw 18 identical pictures of Dan Dennett and one with horns and a scar. So we've got one with horns and a scar on it. And so then I can explain how"
},
{
"end_time": 3653.643,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3627.688,
"text": " You're using texture detection, straight line detection, all sorts of shortcuts to say, oh, all those pictures are the same. You don't need to look at them all in order to come to the conclusion. And that conclusion is what you see. It's not what went in your eyes. It's what you will report later that you saw. So it dissociates, you know, you can you can see what you haven't looked at and you can look at what you haven't seen."
},
{
"end_time": 3681.425,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3654.155,
"text": " This doesn't help with idealism and all of that, but I thought it's kind of relevant to you making that. It is. It is. I mean, blindsight is a super curious phenomenon as well. There is a paper published in 2002. I forgot the name of the author. I know him personally. It's because I take amitriptyline for my tinnitus. Sometimes I forget stuff. We all forget stuff. It's a relief when someone else does. Go on. You might remember."
},
{
"end_time": 3693.814,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3681.817,
"text": " The paper was called dissociations between consciousness and meta consciousness or something like this so there are multiple mechanisms involved in the case you you refer to that you don't see the gorilla."
},
{
"end_time": 3723.66,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3694.224,
"text": " I bet that if you had been instrumented with an EEG cap, although you don't report seeing the gorilla, there would be a visual cortex activity. So it's not the same as what these German guys did with the woman with dissociative identity disorder. But it does reflect an important distinction that we often don't make even in academic discourse, which is the difference between phenomenal states, pure and simple experiences, pure and simple and metacognitive phenomenal state."
},
{
"end_time": 3750.299,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3724.258,
"text": " Those require something more. Those require not only the experience, but the explicit knowing that you are having the experience. And that's a product of attention. You need to attend to become metacognitive of an experience. For instance, we are always experiencing our breathing, the inflation and deflation of our ribcage, the airflow in our nostrils. But we are most of the time not metaconscious"
},
{
"end_time": 3776.288,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3750.538,
"text": " of our breathing, because we don't put our attention there, we don't bring it under the focus of attention. So the curious thing is that there can be almost permanent dissociations between experience and meta experience, like blind sight, where people act as and react as though they see something, but they can't report it. And what I'm trying to drive to is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3799.735,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3777.022,
"text": " There is never such a thing as states that are not phenomenal. There is never such a thing as strictly unconscious states. Even if you go back to the history of psychology and how the word unconsciousness came from Jung, Freud and Piaginet and all the others, what they are describing, and it's very clear when you read their texts, what they are describing is meta-consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 3817.381,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3800.333,
"text": " They are not describing experience, they are describing knowledge, explicit, introspective knowledge of the experience. So what this tells us is that we may never actually be unconscious. We know now that if you undergo syncope, if you pass out,"
},
{
"end_time": 3841.357,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3817.705,
"text": " people report amazing stuff during the period in which they were and you talked about us being conscious and that involves a self who is so i can get the idea that the uh these things that we call unconscious are in some sense mental and then the metacognitive is is is added on onto that um but that usually involves the the the feeling that i"
},
{
"end_time": 3858.575,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3841.852,
"text": " I'm now paying attention to this and I am so on. So it's all part of the illusion. So you could say that illusionism, at least in the way I'm thinking of it, is that all that metacognitive stuff is speculations that are untrue and underlying that"
},
{
"end_time": 3875.111,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3859.172,
"text": " i don't know i think it's just you as a proper philosopher who have thought through all this this idealism stuff and you can talk about it coherently i'm only getting as far as saying all this stuff's wrong but what is that when there's processes going on there's responses going on"
},
{
"end_time": 3897.381,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3875.452,
"text": " there's not somebody going ah this is what I'm you know I'm doing this now that's where the illusion comes in thinking that what we have to explain is that not we have to explain the whole underlying thing and I come back again to personal experience I tend not to call it introspection because that has such historical"
},
{
"end_time": 3921.578,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3897.602,
"text": " Problems associated with it, but that that's what you called it and it's fair enough all different kinds Mindfulness is a real nightmare because there's so many different forms of it, but one from I've done a lot of practice intensive practice of mindfulness in ordinary life and what can happen is the whole metacognitive thing disappears and there's stuff happening and"
},
{
"end_time": 3946.715,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3922.039,
"text": " Now, if you're in ordinary life, you can't let go completely of the metacognitive stuff. You have to have some kind of awareness of I'm walking along here and whatever. But in meditation, you can let go of it completely. And then there seems to be this is just I'm talking from personal experience here, in certain kinds of deep meditation, particularly on retreat, there can be a sense in which this stuff happening,"
},
{
"end_time": 3974.855,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3947.363,
"text": " But it's not happening to anybody. And it's not even happening in time or space. It's kind of lost all those things. There's where I kind of go to try to understand things and I don't get very far. And maybe in what you've been telling me today, I've got well, not maybe I have got more possible ways of thinking about it. I'm not completely buying it because I don't understand you well enough. But I think we actually have some commonality"
},
{
"end_time": 4004.565,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3975.589,
"text": " in what I've just said there. By the way, I just remembered a name I had forgotten, Jonathan Schooler. Everybody should know this name. Yeah. So he published this Dissociations Between Awareness and Meta Awareness back in 2002, a fantastic paper that I think everybody should read. I'm going to write that down. I'm doing something with him in the near future, so that will be a good thing to us. Dissociations Between Consciousness and Meta Consciousness are something like this. 2002."
},
{
"end_time": 4032.159,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4005.418,
"text": " Got it, thank you. I don't totally go along with your use of the word illusionism and I don't blame you for that or anything but I'm not comfortable with it and the reason is the following. Defined so vaguely, the history of science is the history of illusion because hardly anything is what it seems to be. I mean"
},
{
"end_time": 4047.073,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4032.722,
"text": " You see the whole history of science is a testament to that so if the word is so broad that it encompasses so much it becomes a useless word because we can't specify something out of the background by using it."
},
{
"end_time": 4076.834,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4047.295,
"text": " Don't forget all I'm saying is consciousness is an illusion and by that I guess what I mean is the way people talk about consciousness the theories they build about consciousness the whole idea that consciousness is there's such a thing as consciousness itself which can be separated from you know matter from unconscious states and so on all of that's the problem I'm not trying to say anything about the outside world on physics and so on as being"
},
{
"end_time": 4099.053,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4077.159,
"text": " people's concepts about the nature of their own minds, and if you can clear away that problem, whether you do it by personal practice or by some kind of theorizing, then I think we might be making progress. That's as far as I go really, which is pathetic."
},
{
"end_time": 4120.503,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4099.497,
"text": " i don't blame you in the least for saying well you know it's too vague and so on but i just feel it has to be done because i get so frustrated with the theorists and the experimenters and so on who constantly refer to consciousness as though it's something produced by the brain and that's the heart of what i'm trying to get away with"
},
{
"end_time": 4147.91,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4120.93,
"text": " If that helps at all. I sympathize completely. So I don't like the word, but I sympathize with it. I'll give you, by the way, I don't believe in a personal self. It's just not there. It's a narrative in a subject. So every time I say I, I'm forced to say this by the English language. There are languages that don't have that particular pronoun, but I don't speak them. So I'm forced to say that. Which language? Which languages?"
},
{
"end_time": 4160.828,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4148.729,
"text": " It doesn't even have a written form, I think. We would call them primitive languages, although I hate this word. I think it's an inappropriate word. But there are languages in which there is no first person pronoun."
},
{
"end_time": 4184.428,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4161.374,
"text": " but there are some others in a simpler way which which although they kind of infer it i mean i tried to learn polish once because my first husband was polish and there is they don't use the word iron in the same heavy way that english uses it all the time it's very often incorporated into other words or it's such a long time ago that i tried to learn it i've forgotten now but but your point i guess is is just to say"
},
{
"end_time": 4206.032,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4185.026,
"text": " But to go back to the point that you raised, I'll give you an example of a problem I face"
},
{
"end_time": 4235.043,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4206.323,
"text": " Regarding people, people's very loose use of words like mind, consciousness and matter and all the prejudices that are unexamined and go into that. So people don't even know what they're thinking. They don't know what assumptions they're making. So to give you a concrete example, I'm often faced with the falling so-called reputation of idealism. It goes as follows. Well, Bernardo, you said you say that everything is mental."
},
{
"end_time": 4260.589,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4235.623,
"text": " So everything has to be efficacious insofar as it is mental. Only mental states are causally efficacious. But I can give you an example that it's not the case. Look, if you give me your arm and your arm and I stick a needle in it, that's a very physical thing and you will move your arm. You will register pain and you will move your arm. We don't need to go that far. What if I punch you in the face? What if you drink a bottle of wine?"
},
{
"end_time": 4290.145,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4261.067,
"text": " This very physical thing has a causal effect on mental inner states. Ergo idealism is false. Now you see the problem there. For the idealist, there are no such things as physical states outside mind. All material things are representations of mental states. So that needle going into my arm is a dashboard representation of a mental process interfering with another across its dissociative boundary."
},
{
"end_time": 4305.742,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4290.708,
"text": " That glass bottle of wine that I drink, that's an icon on my dashboard that represents a transpersonal mental state that I am bringing into my dissociative boundary by ingesting it."
},
{
"end_time": 4334.326,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4306.51,
"text": " bottle of wine as a material thing. The bottle of wine is a representation of a mental state. Only mental states are causal. But it's very difficult for people to make this switch from dualism. Dualism seems to be so bloody ingrained in language, in our logical assumptions, in how we see everything, that people just, even when they think, even when they agree with idealism, or ostensibly agree with idealism,"
},
{
"end_time": 4364.138,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4334.667,
"text": " I often see this in courses I give that even the idealists, they fall for this constantly. So that's an illusion. It's an illusion that there are no mental states. So from that perspective, I am with you. But I don't think it's I don't want to keep on insisting on this, but I prefer to say specifically what I mean, like I just did. Yeah. And to just say illusionism. Yeah. You see what I mean? Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4387.312,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4364.48,
"text": " Yep. But you're making me think there's something quite uncomfortable. So you've got the, let's say the drug that affects the brain or the pin that goes in my arm. So the pin and all those processes are mental in quality. And then hear me out on this one. I'm struggling to get it clear, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4411.664,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4387.79,
"text": " I'm then constantly asking myself, well, why are the regularities that are? Why does that happen? Why are there, as it were, laws of nature that make the liquid run along there and all of those things? Well, then I realize that as far as I know, physics also can't answer that question. Because if you ask something like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4440.043,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4411.937,
"text": " Or why is Planck's constant what it is? Or why is the speed of light what it is? I don't think there are answers either. So perhaps it's unfair to ask the idealist to explain why the mental properties of the world give rise to or are capable of trees and sky and all the other things."
},
{
"end_time": 4469.189,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4440.759,
"text": " Well, the answer would be to be is to have properties. Whatever exists has properties and therefore it behaves the way it does because it is what it is instead of something else. Nature is what it is. So it does what it does. It's not something else. So there's self that I could imagine that is the author inside of these words and has free will and all of that."
},
{
"end_time": 4491.715,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4470.282,
"text": " Would you say that it is what it is? Because, okay, I think nature is what it is. And the illusion of a personal self is a behavior of nature. In other words, it's a narrative of nature. And so I want to ask why it throws up this self all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 4510.657,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4492.21,
"text": " I mean, in a materialist view, you can sort of say, well, the system needs a representation of its own capabilities. And so it builds such a representation and there it is. And then you can't say why it feels like anything because materialism can't. Well, does idealism really do better on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4534.445,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4512.227,
"text": " Yeah, you're asking pretty, pretty fundamental science, philosophy of science questions that they apply to any metaphysics, not only idealism, I think, but but I try to answer. There is some use to the fiction of the personal self, you need to know to which mouth to bring the fork, otherwise you starve. So the ego is a useful tool."
},
{
"end_time": 4561.135,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4535.196,
"text": " so hang on any animal will eat without having i don't think that my cat has much of a personal self but it eats they have a body schema too yeah indeed and an attention schema i imagine what they don't have is matter cognition now matter cognition is when the subject sort of abstracts itself away from its own experiential content and that's why we say i feel pain or i have hunger"
},
{
"end_time": 4585.35,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4561.766,
"text": " Because without metacognition, we would say, I am pain, I am hunger, because the being of the subject is its state and the state of the subject is the experience that it's quote, undergoing. So the moment we say I have pain, or I will go there, or I feel this way, that's already a body schema with metacognition on top."
},
{
"end_time": 4604.889,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4585.947,
"text": " So a metacognized subject separate from the rest of the world. Is there a use to this? I'm sure there is a use to this. So it's a it's a very easy. Well, I've put forward a different theory that I won't go into now, but Kurt probably knows something about it, that it's actually a product of memetic evolution. It's the force of memes, particularly words."
},
{
"end_time": 4629.889,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4604.889,
"text": " that get on better when they're associated with the I word and that our culture is constantly backing up this idea of a self and making it bigger and bigger and and more difficult to get rid of but it's not but that's another story which I think Kurt says he wants to talk about some other time. I do feel that I understand a lot better now so I rather enjoyed this conversation even though I find it quite"
},
{
"end_time": 4656.8,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4630.435,
"text": " stressful and difficult trying to get my head around it and say something vaguely intelligent in response but thank you very much for for um revolutionize of your world view in one hour so i mean you've made the questions you asked betray tremendous advance in in in understanding something that you were not familiar with before so kudos to you for that i don't know whether i would be"
},
{
"end_time": 4687.159,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4657.227,
"text": " able to make this advance so quickly it took me years of course of course but then i've been worrying about consciousness for years so you know that's why you said so many things that sparked off things i've thought about over all these many many years when i've been obsessed with consciousness i haven't thought about them in in the exact way that you are but i've thought about them enough at least to"
},
{
"end_time": 4715.128,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4687.722,
"text": " Well, well, thank you all. I don't know if you know Sue, but Bernardo knows that I consider a theolocution a success when I could effectively have popcorn here and just watch. And watch. Yeah, yeah, because it means that you both are, from what I saw, trying to understand one another's point of view rather than trying to understand in order to debate. You're trying to understand because you're curious. So if I could summarize, it went something like initially, Sue, you're saying, look, this is I'm an illusionist. And then Bernardo saying, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4742.688,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4715.128,
"text": " Firstly, that's not what I understand illusionism to be. There are several others, so that's different. Secondly, if what you're saying is most of what we think of is the case is not so, in the same way that we think that we model it, well then, is that not trivial, to the point of it being useless? Then, somewhat of an agreement there, maybe saying that, well, look, most of the world has that illusion, and then Bernard was like, yeah, but most of the academics that we interact with don't. Like, list me one who studies philosophy who thinks in the folk manner."
},
{
"end_time": 4771.527,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4743.012,
"text": " And then it became much of Bernardo explaining idealism. So that's my summary. To be fairer to Susan, she did specify more concretely what is the illusion that she's talking about. It has to do with introspective illusions. So that's narrowed down things quite a bit when she said that. Why did you not want to use the word introspection earlier, Sue? You said it was loaded. Oh, just because of the way when it happened in the early 20th century and"
},
{
"end_time": 4788.2,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4771.834,
"text": " I suppose brought up in psychology and learning about that the word in"
},
{
"end_time": 4815.725,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4788.49,
"text": " Introspection has a bad press, but perhaps that doesn't apply to most people who hear about introspection. I mean, all it means is looking within. Now, before that happened, William James was really good on the importance of looking within and seeing what we there find in his 1890 book, for example. But behaviourism partly came about because of the failure of introspectionism."
},
{
"end_time": 4833.183,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4816.254,
"text": " Skinner's black box. Those were very dark times."
},
{
"end_time": 4851.391,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4833.677,
"text": " Okay, before you both get going, the last question I had, well, I guess it's the second question I had, is it's difficult to ask Sue this because you don't place yourself in opposition to something. Whereas Bernardo, as far as I see from you, if you're in opposition to something, it would be materialism. So let's just take materialism."
},
{
"end_time": 4876.459,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4851.988,
"text": " What evidence or event can occur that would make you reframe your worldview to the opposite side? So materialism, like hypothetically, what could happen? What could you see? What evidence would exist? And Sue, the same for you, but it's difficult for me to place yourself in opposition to say you move to the other side. So I don't know. Well, I can give you a different other side that I'd move to, because this comes up a lot in my life."
},
{
"end_time": 4902.142,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4876.459,
"text": " If there were convincing evidence of telepathy or of, well, let's stick with telepathy, that was done with experiments with adequate design and the statistics properly done and with enough subjects and so on, so on. And I became convinced that telepathy was possible. Then most of what I've thought about is wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 4910.981,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4902.551,
"text": " In fact, most of science is wrong and the world changes dramatically if that were the case. But you are not a materialist. You said it in the beginning."
},
{
"end_time": 4936.988,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4911.92,
"text": " No, no, no, it's not about materialism, it's about the way minds work because if there were telepathy then most of the psychology experiments that we do wouldn't work because you have to have you know control conditions in which people don't know what's going on and then things like the placebo effect would be completely changed because you could never really be sure what people knew or didn't know because they'd know they'd know more than"
},
{
"end_time": 4965.503,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4936.988,
"text": " You think they know if there was telepathy was possible. It would just ruin a whole lot of stuff. Whether you're a materialist or not, it would have a dramatic effect on my thinking about the nature of mind. Wouldn't it just increase the error bar and not invalidate everything? I don't know. It's difficult to think through. That's a perfectly reasonable question. I think the error bars would be so huge that a whole lot of things would just collapse."
},
{
"end_time": 4987.449,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4966.288,
"text": " I'm more optimistic than you in this regard. Yeah, you think it might happen? I think no process in nature is perfect. When it stops raining, the ground doesn't dry immediately. When something burns, it doesn't consume everything there is to be combusted. No process in nature is perfect. Dissociation wouldn't be perfect either."
},
{
"end_time": 5015.265,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4987.944,
"text": " especially under laboratory conditions, when you don't have that emotional charge of real life circumstances, then you would be highly dissociated. But under normal circumstances, that could be occasions in which the dissociation becomes porous. And I'm saying this to you because I witnessed one of these cases that I just cannot dismiss. But I don't think it would invalidate science because even if it can happen,"
},
{
"end_time": 5044.531,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5015.589,
"text": " It happens so rarely. Now, it's not even rare, but the strength, the degree of the effect is so tiny that statistically speaking, I don't think it would invalidate anything. Obviously, we can't read each other's minds all the time. Obviously, we don't know what's going on in China all the time. Right. So even if there is some porosity under emotionally charged circumstances of normal life,"
},
{
"end_time": 5071.834,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5045.333,
"text": " They wouldn't apply on their laboratory conditions anyway, and that's why we don't see it on their laboratory conditions. So I wouldn't be worried. At least personally, I'm not worried. And I saw one thing I'm worried it would be terribly exciting. I've said so many times I would go back into parapsychology if that happened. I mean, the fact is there is no viable theory within parapsychology of how this could work. And if there were evidence that it did work, you could start"
},
{
"end_time": 5092.688,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5072.312,
"text": " to do experimental work to test theories, but that just hasn't happened. So that's what makes me kind of, well, it's not pessimistic, pessimistic about the possibility of being found. But I don't think it's going to happen, but we shall see. And if it did, I still maintain it would have dramatic effects on our understanding of all sorts of things."
},
{
"end_time": 5106.596,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5093.575,
"text": " I was in a"
},
{
"end_time": 5134.053,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5107.278,
"text": " Sure. No, it was not under psychedelics. I was on a holiday with my girlfriend. We were sort of out of civilization for one week in Germany. She's from Germany. And we were already out of contact with family and friends for one week. One day she wakes up in the morning. I was already awake when she woke up and she says, I had a strange dream. I saw my grandmother with her head wrapped up in gauze, gauze."
},
{
"end_time": 5163.046,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5134.36,
"text": " hospital with her two daughters on her side nothing was moving nothing was happening but it could pick up from her thoughts that she was okay and then i was playing with interpreting her dreams from a union perspective for a while we were playing that game and when she told me that i thought this this is highly unusual and something came into me and i said call your father so she called her father and her grandmother had three children two women and her father"
},
{
"end_time": 5192.654,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5163.78,
"text": " And her father was at home, picked up the phone and said, well, good that you're calling, because in the middle of the night, two or three hours ago, before she had woken up, her grandmother had a brain stroke and was in the hospital with her two daughters. But the doctor said, although she couldn't speak yet, the doctor said she is not on the risk of life anymore. And I thought, this is unprompted, so bloody specific."
},
{
"end_time": 5200.486,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5192.961,
"text": " That I thought, okay, this shit happens. It's all right. I can live with it and I'm not abandoning science either."
},
{
"end_time": 5224.36,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5202.534,
"text": " oh dear well i won't go through all my usual reasons why those things happen and how never mind now i know you got to get going sue but briefly i didn't get bernardo's answer to that question of what would cause them to reconsider or not reconsider but actually move and we're going to get to that but you mentioned that you didn't see any evidence and i know that there's parapsychologists like dean raiden and julia"
},
{
"end_time": 5243.712,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5224.36,
"text": " this has to be for another time. There's so much to say and I'm tired now and I"
},
{
"end_time": 5261.288,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5244.206,
"text": " I really don't want to have to do that fairly would be very complex and it would involve a lot of devious things that have gone on and things I've discovered along the way. And it's another story. Okay, but the point is you've gone through their research and it's not that you haven't seen. Oh, gosh, yes, a lot. Not recently because I gave up."
},
{
"end_time": 5290.026,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5261.766,
"text": " I really gave up doing parapsychology around the turn of the century. And up until that time, I would have said that I was pretty much an expert on the literature at the time, because I was really kept up with it all. Since then, I haven't. So there may have been things that have happened I know vaguely about. But to really examine somebody's work and find out what was going on takes a lot of effort. Arguably, it can take more time and effort than doing the original research. And I've done a lot of that. But it's a long story."
},
{
"end_time": 5309.258,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5291.032,
"text": " Okay, and Bernardo for your answer. You're asking me to hypothesize about evidence that would convince me of an unnecessary and problematic hypothesis. So this is how I hear it. So you understand how I experienced the question."
},
{
"end_time": 5331.954,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5309.65,
"text": " It's like somebody who is telling me the flying spaghetti monster exists and it's the thing responsible for making the planets go around their orbits with its invisible noodly appendages reaching out from a higher dimension. So, Bernardo, what evidence would you need to or I would ask this person, what evidence do you need to discard the flying spaghetti monster hypothesis? It's like"
},
{
"end_time": 5361.63,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5332.517,
"text": " What do you have to come up with? Materialism is explanatory dissatisfying, doesn't explain experience. In other words, there is a sense in which it explains nothing because all of our knowledge is conveyed by experience. Materialism is internally contradictory. It replaces descriptions for the thing described and then tries to recover the thing described from the descriptions. I mean, it's like a dog chasing its own tail at light speed and hoping to catch it one day."
},
{
"end_time": 5391.186,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5362.09,
"text": " It is empirically inadequate. Nobel Prize last year went to experiments that show that physical entities do not have standalone existence unless you believe in some science fiction stuff like parallel universes popping out every fraction of a second for no reason or if you believe in the magical hidden variables of super determinism that are not even described enough for us to be able to say what they are supposed to be. They are defined in terms of what they need to do for us to rescue materialism from that."
},
{
"end_time": 5412.722,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5391.544,
"text": " so it's so overwhelming that the case against it is so overwhelming that if you and i know it's a dissatisfactory answer but if you ask me what would make you change your mind it's like well i would need to be a child again that's what it would take i would need to not have the knowledge and the understanding that i have today"
},
{
"end_time": 5442.619,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5413.063,
"text": " uh because it's a pure rile hypothesis and it was from the beginning the difference is that people knew in the beginning it was a pure rile hypothesis and they did it anyway because it was a weapon against the church by the way danie did their own record one of the authors of la encyclopedia the founding document of the enlightenment his own record saying paternalism doesn't work but we need to keep on using it as a weapon against the church but at some point mid 19th century because of the you know the"
},
{
"end_time": 5473.029,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5443.08,
"text": " the bourgeois revolution led by Darwin and others. We forgot that because we wanted the intellectual elite to have not only to survive the church, but to have a domain over the church as far as the culture is concerned. And then it went sideways. But to me, it's like, I can't answer this question. I would have to unlearn what I have learned over 48 years to tell you something. It's a malformed hypothesis. It's not even wrong. It's inconsistent."
},
{
"end_time": 5495.708,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5473.746,
"text": " It's a catastrophe, so if you ask me what would change my mind about the multiverse hypothesis, that I could tell you. I could tell you about if we had an event with statistics behind it at CERN in which the energy footprint exceeds what we can account for under quantum field theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 5517.654,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5496.544,
"text": " Then I would say, OK, there is a leakage across dimensions and I would take that hypothesis more seriously. But if you ask me what would make me take materialism seriously, it's like asking me what would what would it take for me to take the flying spaghetti monster seriously? I don't know. The flying spaghetti monster would have to show up in front of me. No. Oh, heaven and hell."
},
{
"end_time": 5545.981,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5518.763,
"text": " What could convince me that the 7-0 hell? Well, near-death experiences certainly won't. Yeah, sorry, it's a dissatisfying answer. All right. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. And thank you for coming on. Thank you for coming on for your seventh or eighth time, Bernardo, and thank you for your premiere on toe, Susan. And hopefully it's not your last time. Hopefully we do a one-on-one as well. Thanks both of you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 5571.596,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5546.374,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate tolls, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own tolls. Links to both are in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 5598.541,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5571.596,
"text": " Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theories of everything dot org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time."
},
{
"end_time": 5607.602,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5598.541,
"text": " Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.