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Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke [Round 1] Theolocution on Consciousness, Idealism, and Naturalism
May 1, 2021
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Transcription time: 227m 41s
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Excuse this long introduction. It's a bit different, but this preface can be skipped. You can go to the timestamp there if you want to get straight to the Bernardo Castro and John Vervecki conversation. Many of you may be new to this channel and if so, my name is Kurt Geimungel. I'm a filmmaker as well as I have a background in math and physics and I'm intensely interested in something called theories of everything. Now this includes the standard unified field theories that I'm sure you've heard of, but it also includes the philosophical theories of everything such as that of Karl Friston's or
This episode features two titans of their respective positions, Bernardo Castro defending idealism, that is, the philosophical doctrine that we are all part of the same mind or at least that all that exists are mental states rather than a material reality, whereas John Vervecky takes the position of monism and naturalism. When I speak to the different prodigious interviewees on this channel, I generally ask them about their views on
Other intellectuals such as Douglas Hofstadter, or what do you think of Roger Penrose's idea of orchestrated objective reduction, and so on, and I, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, call it theomachy. That is to say, battle of the gods. Now clearly this is facetious because it's a sin, or at least I think it's a sin to consider any human a god, but there is some truth in the sense that they're godlike in their intellectual and cognitive prowess. However, this episode is different.
First of all, it's the first time I've had on two people at once and I'm less interested in critiquing that is battling skirmishing than I am about getting the interviewees to understand one another's positions and constructively critique if they're going to critique at all. So I call it Theo Locution and it will likely be a new series started on this channel as well. Donald Hoffman was supposed to show up but wasn't able to and it actually turned out wonderfully because Castrop and Verveki had so much
so much
don't have time for that it's my time is I'm I feel already stretched to my my limits as it is but there may be a way to integrate the work already conducted into incentives for patrons so for example I may be writing a book on theories of everything I definitely take notes on the different interviewees as research and what I can do is publish some of that or give some of that to the different tiers people seem to be interested in that as well as watching or
Being with me while I livestream a studying session for some of these interviews, that's another incentive for a certain tier. There are other ideas I have, and I'm also interested in hearing what perks you think I should offer. But the whole point of this is that this channel is growing. It's growing. It's extremely flattering that it's growing. It's a rate that I didn't think it would. It far surpasses my expectations for what people are willing to listen to. Three-hour conversation on meticulous technicalities and
intricacies and abstruse mechanics of these different theories and theorists while simultaneously taking a huge toll on me both physically for sure I'm exhausted much of the time and then spiritually yes because it's destabilizing to have to entertain many different ideas as to what the heck reality is and then cognitively for sure studying for this is difficult it would be great if just the patreon covered income and then this way I could find time to spend and relax and
even sleep while i sleep but sleep well and spend time quality time with my wife and quality time with my family plenty of that is mismanagement of my own time but it's also the stress of uncertainty as to what i'm going to do for income and so on and hopefully this would mitigate it another another reason is that i'd like to invest in equipment so for example i was went to this green screen yesterday by
someone who's been a fan of the channel for months and has been helping out with the discord his name is Phil Shertooke Phil thank you thank you so much Phil the reason for this green screen as an aside for those interested is that this door behind me is a washroom door I rent a one bedroom one washroom place now my wife is we're in lockdown if this is Ontario so you can't actually leave your home and for some jobs you can't actually perform them so my wife is home much of the time
And when I'm conducting these podcasts, I tell her you have to stay in the room. You can't even get food to eat. Get your water. If you're going to get food, just bring the food into the room. And if you have to use the washroom, take these empty cups, please, because I can't have you come in the background distract me, potentially interrupt the guests when they're right at their most profound point. And as well as she may be embarrassed because she's wearing pajamas and so on, whatever. One time I was interviewing
Bernardo cast her up
I remember reeling from that, just shivering with excitement, and elated, going into the bedroom, opening the door, the huge smile on my face, and my wife is livid. Seriously, babe? Five hours? She's holding multiple filled cups. Okay, I would like for that to not happen, so I was speaking to Phil Shurtook again, someone who runs the Discord and is helping out with this channel, and he said, Kurt, just get a green screen, I can lend you one. You put it here, you make it look like it's this background, and then she can come and go.
I would like to invest in equipment and gear like that, so that's another reason why I'm hoping for this Patreon to grow. Lastly, these podcasts take days and days and days to prep for, sometimes weeks. Ian McGilchrist took weeks. Thomas Campbell took months, actually. Now I have Stephen Wolfram coming up, and I have Chris Langan coming up, who is the person with the highest IQ in America, at least reportedly so. Either way, Stephen Wolfram has a theory of physics that
Apparently derives the standard model and some non-standard general Relativistic models which means I have to become familiar with those before I become familiar with Stevens and that's taking some time Chris Lang and has a cognitive theoretic model of the universe and that's Well, it's abnormal and so it it's difficult to wrap one's head around that takes quite a bit of time Chomsky is coming up
At the end of the month, that's actually June 1st, Rupert Spira is coming up and apparently his philosophy is so drastically different than the way that I think I'm extremely analytical. And he abjures the analytical. So I don't know how long that will take for me to wrap my head around. And at the same time, I always have an icky, slimy feeling about promoting myself or even asking people to go to the Patreon and support. You can even see right there where I'm stumbling over my words saying it.
However, some of the patreons patrons already told me Kurt stop Feeling like you're selling something stop feeling bad about it. Just tell people about it I wouldn't have known about it if you didn't advertise it once and I'm happy to support so please Let other people know and so this is me doing that the patreon and the PayPal are huge huge boons that helped me consistently produce podcasts of extremely high quality with extremely high technical depth
which is different than much of the other podcasts that are out there which at least in my opinion are watered down now there's nothing wrong with being watered down especially if you want to get an overview of someone's theories I watch them plenty but paradoxically for me the more watered down it is the more dry it is and if you look at the comments on this channel many of you agree and it seems to indicate there's a huge craving there's a huge huge craving for people interested in the recondite inner workings of a theory and this isn't provided
Links to both of their work are in the description. Thank you.
Sometimes there's a time lag and you want to interject, but you're not sure if it's going to sound rude. Just raise your finger like this, the other person will see. And I may do this, you may do this. If you feel like you're looking rude, don't worry. It'll look rude for the live stream at the most, but I'll take it out when I finally edit it together. I'll just put the other person's face so you don't see it. Hopefully we cannot be rude. That'd be good. Choose the finger wisely.
Yeah, I don't know I mean I have to say I suffer from high blood pressure so I take diuretics also for my manures I don't know if I can go like three hours without going to the bathroom. I'll try I haven't had much to drink this morning, but I want to forewarn I can't guarantee that because You can have a cup in front of you too if you need to yeah
While someone else is speaking, the trickle may then turn the camera to you. The jig is up. This one is an experimental podcast because usually what I do is I do a prodigious amount of research beforehand and ask guests precise questions but this time I thought how about I get two people on and have them get to know one another which usually happens behind the closed doors of academia and have these
Two Titans, the people who are at the top of their respective academic game, speak to one another, converse jovially instead of trying to critique and debate, and watch them get to know, get familiar with one another's ideas. That's the whole point of this. I'm taking much more of a backseat than I usually would take, and I'm just facilitating questions between you both. How does that sound?
Okay, let's see how it goes. I'm Kurt Jaimungal, a filmmaker, and I run the Theories of Everything podcast. I have a background in math and physics, which is why I'm interested in theories of everything. And theories of everything to me don't just include grand unification, but also philosophical worldviews, which is why Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Jonathan, the great John Vervecky, is a professor of the University of Toronto in cognitive science, and I believe he's the only professor
that has a cognitive science course on Buddhism, mindfulness, and wisdom. In 2012, he gained an award called the Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. And there are many more accolades I can say for John, but I'll save that because he's a towering figure and that would take quite some time. Bernardo Castroff has a PhD in both computer science and philosophy, the latter of which is what we're interested in today. His work
leads the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism the notion that reality is essentially mental i respect both of you greatly and i want you to know that both the bernardo interview on the channel the theories of everything channel and john your interview on the theories of everything channel are some of the highest rated if not the highest rated of all the interviews and i still get comments to this day saying that it's not only the best on the channel but maybe the best interviews with you so i am so
Thank you. Fantastic to know that it's resonating so well. It's great to be here, Kurt. It's been a while and it's good to see you again. It's a pleasure to meet you, Bernardo. My pleasure, John.
just so you know the audience for this podcast is generally colossally clever so if you have to use abstruse terminology that you don't think ordinarily people would understand it's okay speak as if you're behind the academic doors this is what this is it's an experiment and if you have to make logical deductive steps quickly go ahead do so it doesn't matter people can rewind people can pause i'll start with philosophically how would you all john how would you describe yourself so there's obviously isms like you're a realist you're a logical positivist you're a materialist whatever maybe
Why don't you give the audience an idea as to where you're coming from and then Bernardo, you'll do the same. Sure, if you want my metaphysical stance, I don't know if that's the most important aspect of my work, but maybe that's the arena we're playing in right now. So I would describe myself as a naturalist and to try and make that clear, I reject the term that people often apply to me, materialist. I don't think that all of reality is just matter. I don't know
I don't know if I know anybody who actually takes that stance. And so, you know, like most physicalists, I think that we have to talk about other real entities, like time, space, cause, structural functional organizations of things, information, etc. And I think they're all good arguments for that. And then I'm not I'm a non reductive physicalist, which means I think there's genuine emergence. I actually
the very bottom level of our ontology, maybe
quantum probability waves or something like that. I think that this level at which we do science must really exist for us, for science to really exist and for us to draw the conclusions about the reference of science such as conclusions about the quantum domain or the relativistic domain. So that's why I call myself a naturalist. So a naturalist says that the ontology is going to be consistent with the natural sciences, biology, chemistry,
physics and perhaps hopefully down the road cognitive science but it is not going to be reducible to them and so it's a quite layered and rich ontology and then within it I happen to hold a position called deep continuity which means this is from work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, a lot of people in what's called 4E cognitive science or third wave cognitive science
There's a deep continuity between the principles that regulate and generate cognition and consciousness and those that regulate and generate living systems. So I take it after a lot of argument that in order to be a cognitive thing, you have to also be a living thing. And then there is also deep continuity between living things that are autopoetic self-making and self-organizing systems like tornadoes and
eddies within streams and things like that. So it's a naturalism with deep continuity is for me the ontology that I think I find most plausible, convergent, and the one that best helps to explain how science itself is possible. And so it's also an ontology that's deeply influenced by neoplatonism because neoplatonism tends to
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?
Bernardo?
I think like John, I'm a naturalist as well. Whatever is not part of nature, even if it exists, it escapes so much the realm of what is relevant that may not be interesting to look at it. Unlike John, I am a reductionist. I'm probably an extreme reductionist and the reason I am that
is I think there are very fundamental, even insoluble problems that you face if your reduction base has more than one thing. Because then you get, you run into the interaction problem, you have issues of parsimony that you really need to postulate many things in your reduction base. And large reduction bases, they don't explain anything, they just avoid the need for explanation by just pronouncing a number of things to be
Primitives dispensing with explanation. So I am a reductionist even though the one element in my reduction base is different from the elements in the reduction base of mainstream materialism today. Today I think the mainstream view would be that all quantum fields are part of the reduction base. There is
Yet no unified feud theory, so we have a reduction base with multiple feuds. Now, I don't go for that. I am critical of strong emergence. I think what we might call weak emergence, what David Chalmers calls weak emergence, obviously exists. Sand dunes emerge out of sand grains and wind.
So we know that these things happen. Ice crystals emerge out of water in temperature variations. But strong emergence as an explanation, for instance, for how phenomenal consciousness could arise from arrangements of matter, I think at best it's an appeal to a complete unknown
and probably it's a flat out appeal to magic. It's a way to put a label on something that is actually incoherent. We label it a problem and we say one day we will explain it, but we are just insisting on a path that is leading nowhere. So to summarize it all, my position is what I like to call analytic idealism.
It's an idealist philosophy that postulates that at the bottom level of nature, there is only mind, not your mind alone, not my mind alone, but only mind stuff at the bottom of nature. And it's a mix between objective and subjective idealism. I can go more into that to explain it more later. Yeah, I think that summarizes it. John, what occurs to you when you hear that?
What questions pop up? I guess maybe there's a question around the notion of strong emergence. I'm actually proposing, it depends what you mean by strong emergence. I mean, strong emergence is the claim that there's not going to be any explanatory relationship between the levels. I take it that what we say happens in weak emergence, like how water emerges out of hydrogen and oxygen, is because we have some account. And then the idea is
Differences of degree, if enough of them become differences in kind.
because then you not only get water emerging and then you get water has a particular set of relationships to organisms such that it's a nutrient which and there's no such thing as a nutrient in physics it doesn't belong in the physics ontology things like that and so I think the position that I'm arguing for is you know is a form of what would technically be called weak emergence because I do think there is emerging no pun intended an ongoing explanation so for example
We used to have a position that looked like strong emergence for life, vitalism. Most people in biology, myself included, reject that because now we have a very complicated, but nevertheless, I think you could rightly say version of weak emergence of life from inorganic material. And so, and I think we're getting a similar thing happening with the weak emergence of intelligence
out of non-intelligent things and so I think given the explanatory base provided by living things that weekly emerge and intelligent things that weekly emerge we have pretty much we need what we need in order to generate a lot of the theoretical explanation for a lot of consciousness which is where this
namely that I think that many people are already coming, converging, this is some of the stuff I've worked on, towards a weak emergence explanation of the function of consciousness. That's becoming less problematic. That was even somewhat excluded in Chalmers' distinction around the heart problem. And I think as we get a richer and richer account of the functionality, we will get a richer and richer account of the nature of consciousness, the phenomenal aspects of it.
So I think I would ultimately say that I'm not defending a strong emergence position. I'm defending a very complicated but never the complication isn't the issue here. The issue is whether or not I'm advocating for a non-explanatory relationship in the emergence. Now, is there a degree to which this is promissory? Well, everybody's position right now is promissory because the only way we wouldn't have a promissory position
John, you have an articulated notion of what it means to be plausible. Do you mind explaining that first? Yeah, so this is some of the work I do outside of these thorny issues of ontology because I'm very interested in trying to
Well, to understand understanding and how understanding differs from knowledge. One of the differences is people generally talk about knowledge in terms of evidence that justifies, where understanding is relevance that basically signifies. And there's an important difference there. And so one way of understanding this is to
When people have a particular kind of understanding, they give it a normative status. When they say something's reasonable, or makes good sense, or they'll even say it's plausible, and they don't mean it as a synonym for probable, they just means it, oh, it's reasonable, that makes good sense that, you know, and so when you take a look at what's going on there, there seems to be a bunch of factors. This is based on a lot of other people's work on plausibility. And I won't try and cite a lot of people here. For brevity sake. One is that we
With the idea that we want a lot of independent lines of converging evidence. The idea being here, this gives what Russia calls trustworthiness. If my particular theoretical construct comes out of independent lines of argument and evidence,
that reduces the chance that it was produced by theoretical bias or empirical bias, etc. For example, that's why even infants prefer information that is multi sensory. So they will they will give priority to information that comes through eyesight and hearing and touch, then over just eyesight, you know, setters paribus, because it's much more likely to be real than subjective illusion, for example. So that's trustworthiness.
You want your construct to have some structural functional organization, some way in which it's structured. It's not just a list of features, but a way it has a structure that indicates its function. And then its function, of course, is explicable in terms of its structure. And then you want elegance. You want that that construct will map it into many new domains, find problems, formulate problems that hasn't been found before and make them
Potentially solvable. So this is sort of elegance. So you have convergence into something like a cognitive optimal grip elegance out and then you want to balance between them. So if you propose something that will explain a lot of things and looks elegant, but isn't very trustworthy. Well, that's when something's far fetched.
You can have the opposite. You can have something that's very trustworthy, but has no elegance to it, and that's trivial. And then you can do various kinds of slips between them. You can do what Dennett calls a deepity, where you equivocate, or you can do a Mott and Bailey thing. So when I'm talking about plausibility, I'm talking about a standard we have to use. We can't rely on because, for example, I can't test all possible hypotheses. The number, the logical number of those is indefinitely large.
So if I'm a scientist, I have to select the plausible ones. And then when I'm testing it, I have to control for confounds. Do I control for all possible alternative explanations? No, that's impossible. That's combinatorial explosive. So I select the plausible ones that I control for. Then I get my data and I have to derive my interpretations from it. Do I derive all logically possible implications? No, that's combinatorial explosive. So I have to I make use of the most plausible.
Bernardo,
I'm sure thoughts present themselves to you. Oh, there's a lot to comment on. Look, I think there is a heart of objectivity in our notion, in the concept of plausibility. And I think John has elaborated on it very well. But in practice, a lot of what we call plausibility is a psychosocial phenomenon.
Why? Because the interpretation of data is never neutral. I mean, we know that from Thomas Kuhn, that the very interpretation of data is already paradigm-laden or theory-laden. If you look to the history of science, there was a point a couple of hundred years ago in which phlogiston was perfectly plausible, an invisible elastic substance
that connected shaft to an ember rod and accounted for what we today call electrostatic attraction. There was a point in time in which Newton's gravitational force, an invisible force that acted instantly and at a distance between celestial bodies, was considered utterly implausible. In fact, in France, it took like 50 years for the French to stop laughing at Newton.
And then later on, we figured that we can laugh at Newton again because there is no such invisible force. It's the fabric of spacetime that bends and curves and accounts then for what we call gravitation. So plausibility, I think it's something we have to take with a grain of salt because it is culturally manufacturable.
and we have been manufacturing plausibility at the highest rate in history lately. For instance, we are very busy in the mainstream media manufacturing plausibility for the outright incoherent notion that you can upload your consciousness into a computer, which betrays all kinds of misunderstandings about computers and about consciousness and neuroscience. An outright ridiculous idea
that now a lot of highly educated people with PhDs consider plausible because our cultural milieu renders it to us as if it were plausible. And since knowledge is now so broad that every single person can only know a tiny bit of what there is to know, we buy into it. It's very difficult to have an overview of all the salient and relevant aspects of knowledge to pass judgment on that. So I would be careful with plausibility in science already.
But when it comes to consciousness, you know, it's not just science because science is a study of nature's behavior, not a study of what nature is in and of itself. What nature is, I would say, is irrelevant to science because science makes predictions about how nature will behave. What an experiment confirms or disproves is the behavioral predictions of a certain model of nature's behavior.
And that's what experiment answers. Experiment produces an answer in the form of a certain thing that nature does, a certain behavior. Now, of course, if you have a metaphysics, a theory of what nature is, that makes itself predictions that are contradicted by science, then you have to discard that metaphysics. So science informs philosophy or metaphysics, but it doesn't settle philosophical questions. And when it comes to consciousness, I don't think it settles the question at all.
I think what's happening today is we think that strong emergence is a plausible account for consciousness because this notion has been culturally manufactured. It's not grounded in objective reasoning or evidence because I think what happened at first was that
Scientists started from where we all start, from conscious experience, the experience of the world out there, the colors, the melodies, the flavors, the scents that are around us. And then they figured out that it was very useful to model those qualities, conscious qualities of the world, with numbers.
which could then be tied up in equations and that was very useful to describe the world. So carrying a heavy piece of luggage is described with 50 kilos and holding a feather is described with 50 grams. And now you have a quantitative way of dealing with these relative differences and making predictive models in the form of equations that relate all these quantities together.
These are all descriptions of the qualities. But at some point, something very strange happened around the time of the cards and the conflict between science and the church and that attempt to find space for both without the church having to burn scientists alive. The question was sort of settled by saying, okay, there is mind, the mental sphere, that's for the church. And then the church was very happy because from the church's perspective, that was all that existed, right?
And then we said, and the descriptions now are not only a description of the contents of mind, the descriptions exist in and of themselves, and moreover they precede the contents of mind.
And that's when the conceptual idea of matter arose. We said that those kilos, hertz, you know, length, weight, or spin, momentum, electric charge, mass, amplitude, frequency, we said those things aren't just descriptions. Those things have standalone existence, and they somehow generate the world of experience, the colors we see, the sense we feel. It's like
trying to pull the territory out of the map, because, you know, we have the territory, we described it, we created the map. And then we said the map precedes the territory. It exists before the territory. The description exists before the thing described. First incoherent move. Second incoherent move. Somehow consciousness, the qualities of experience arise out of that.
It's like pulling the territory out of the map and then we face an insoluble problem, the hard problem of consciousness. But because we've manufactured now a century and a half of plausibility for this idea that matter precedes consciousness.
We, instead of realizing that the hard problem of consciousness is not a problem at all, it's a reduction to absurdity of the materialist postulates, it's just incoherent. The message is backtrack, try another path because this one goes nowhere. Instead of admitting that we don't throw away a century and a half of manufactured plausibility, we label it a problem and we say one day we will solve it and we call it strong emergency or whatever. One day we will account for it in order to sort of
Okay, John. First, do you mind recapitulating what your understanding of what Bernardo said is and then seeing if it matches? I think there's a difference between how I was trying to use plausibility and he is. I'm not equating plausibility to every claim to plausibility any more than I would equate the claim to validity to validity. Many people claim things are plausible for reasons that Bernardo
rightly pointed out, we have a particular paradigm. But I would point out that what he's offering to challenge that is a plausibility argument. He can't make it one of deductive certainty. We sort of given up on the idea that we can produce a deductively certain metaphysics, at least as far as I can tell. And so he's doing what he's doing is presenting any and he's good at it. I'm not denying that he's good at presenting something that's very reasonable.
He draws independent lines of argument and independent lines of evidence together. So I'm talking about plausibility in the normative sense. I'm not talking about it in what simply what people claim. And what I'm claiming is in that normative sense, that's ultimately what we have. This is sort of a pragmatist stance. And the fact that, and he is invoking it, Lawdon's, you know, pessimistic history of science, right, shows that most of our theories turn out to be false. So it couldn't have been
truth that was guiding us. It had to be something like plausibility and probability that were guiding us. And that's what I think we should we should sort of say we're doing. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think he's not offering a plausible argument. I'm not saying that. So I understand that we should periodically step back and criticize our paradigms. But I would point out to him that that means there's something we appeal to above and beyond
are paradigmatic standards in order to make such challenges and hopefully get them understood and accepted. I reject, I don't know if he does too, I reject sort of a pure Cunian response that it's just happenstance and historical circumstance why, you know, people adopt new positions. I do think they do something that is transparadigmatic. But I don't think it's Cartesian certainty, because I've never been convinced that such a thing exists.
That's what I'm trying to invoke, what I'm invoking plausibility. And I think metaphysics, and I think even philosophy at large, is the art of disciplined and justifiable plausibility, something like that. So there, that's that. Now, I don't know what to do about some of the historical, because Bernardo said a lot. I happen to think that the point he's pointing to happens a lot earlier. I think it happens around Scotus. Yes.
Yes, from now on, from this point forward, I'm going to take a seat. I'm very curious about your point about Scotus. I would like to continue to hear it. You're bringing that back to the, what, 10th century, 9th century. No, no, no, no, no, no. Scottish is post Aquinas. So we're talking like the 13th, 14th century, Scottish and Ockham. That's where I think the change is made, because what happens
with Scottish is you have the idea of the universe, the being is univocal that whenever we say being we're saying this, it's the same for everything. And that sort of demolishes platonic realism. Well, demolishes if you think Scottish is right. And then Occam's nominalism brings out the idea that there aren't any actual structures in reality. Because all that really exists are bare particulars, bare individuals. And I think that's what severs
the idea that there is something, it destroys the conformity theory, that there is something identical in being between the knower and the known. So, you know, the idea is when I know something in the older theory, there is some shared structural functional organization in my mind, and the thing that is constitutive of the reality of the thing. And so there is a, and I think it's with Scotus, and with Occam,
And then you get the idea of knowledge not as a conforming to reality, but as coherence of propositions held somewhere inside. And I think that starts the severing in an important way. And so I think the important move is, you know, a shift out of what I think, I think it's plausible to say, you know, ancient realism, ancient philosophy, right up until and including Aquinas is ultimately realistic in
its notion. And I think the severing from realism precedes the emergence of matter as a substantial thing. And so that's where I would start to talk about where the main issues are.
Now, I think what you're talking about does happen with Descartes, but it's also prefigured and made possible by, you know, the ideas of individual conscience with Luther and things like that separate and give a kind of internal authority separate from, you know, demands placed on you by an external authority, whether that's the real world or God. So I think there's a sequence of stages that unfold. And I think that
And I think the issue of consciousness is down the road, downstream from these earlier sort of decisions about, well, realism versus something like, I don't know what to call it initially, but you know, because it's normalism, which is a minimalized realism. And then you get a flat ontology with Scotus, because all the idea of real differences in being disappear.
And the irony of that is if you posit any kind of reductionism, you are actually invoking levels of being again and saying things like there are more real levels than other levels, which actually undermines the Scottish position
that started the whole transition in a powerful way. So we're actually in a really, I think, within this paradigm, if you'll allow me, we're actually in a kind of incoherent place where we want to say, we want to, we're holding to a view that came out of the idea that there's no real differences in levels of being.
But now we are we are moving towards positions in which differences of being are taken to be sort of, you know, a plausible thing. So people will regularly say things like, well, tables don't really exist. And, you know, all this, you know, love doesn't really exist, all that's at the bottom. And so that's to invoke a platonic distinction between levels of being. And so we were actually in an incoherent place with respect to our notion of being, I would argue right now. Okay.
When I said that I'm going to take a backseat, what I mean is no longer from this point forward, John, do you refer to Bernardo as he? Because that means you're talking to me about Bernardo. You just say you because now you're speaking to Bernardo and Bernardo same. So now you say you. So, John, so and so Bernardo, take it away. And John, if you need to interject, you go ahead.
John, there are many points I think that we have in common based on what you just said. I'm trying to make a mental list of those points. I'm not for total relativism either. I think there are
Good objective systemic criteria and that we can follow in order to have a higher degree of certainty or a lower degree of uncertainty about our postulates and inferences. I would go as far as to submit to you that
Kun himself wasn't a relativist in the way he's often portrayed to be, and he was very frustrated, in fact, for the fact that he was portrayed that way. I refer you to an interview done with Kun.
Another thing that I think we have in common is that I'm not postulates that we can have inferential certainty here.
apes evolved on planet Earth in a corner of a typical galaxy somewhere in the universe have the cognitive apparatus to capture with certainty the salient aspects of what's going on. Of course not. Reality is filtered through our cognition and our cognition has evolved to allow us to escape tigers and find fruit and hunt bison. That's basically what we evolved to do.
Even our symbolic thinking is, what, 30, 50,000 years old? I mean, to characterize this as the blink of an eye in the history of the Earth is to vastly overestimate the amount of time since we've evolved that capability. And third, I also think that there are guidelines that are more or less objective.
I'm not sort of surrendering everything to paradigmatic subjectivity. The role you attribute to a more objective notion of plausibility, I would attribute to conceptual parsimony, because it's countable. How many different kinds of things are you postulating to account for observations?
And although it's not written or etched in stone in nature that the best explanation is always the most conceptually parsimonious, it may not be. If we abandon parsimony as an epistemic guideline, we open the doors to all kinds of nonsense. For instance, there is an example I often like to use. If I wake up in the morning and I see strange footprints in my backyard,
I can offer two explanations. Explanation A, a burglar went around, checked my door, figured that it's well secure and gave up and went away. Explanation two, aliens landed on my neighbor's backyard, stole his shoes, came for a stroll in my backyard, left the footprints behind, went back, boarded their spaceship and flew back to the Pleiades. Now, neither theory can be disproved on the basis of the data available.
both account for the data. But one postulates a lot less than the other. One postulates a burglar, a human being of the kind we know exists. The other postulates spaceships, alien races, illogical strolls, illogical shoe robbery. So if we abandon parsimony, because we know it's not etched in stone, if we abandon that, we are lost. So I think that's one
one fairly objective criterion for guiding our epistemology. If you start postulating too many things and interactions between too many things or appealing to too many unknowns, it doesn't go anywhere or it's not reliable. Now, finally, regarding the question of consciousness, you said
we will always have to have a promissory theory. And when it comes to consciousness, I would submit to you that that's only true if you're trying to reduce consciousness to something that isn't consciousness, then whatever theory you come up will be promissory because we have no idea how that reduction can take place. That's why we talk about strong emergency. It's a way to not have to make the reduction explicit.
But you see, every theory of nature needs to have at least one thing in the reduction base. You can't explain one thing in terms of another forever. Otherwise, eventually you will beg the question. Your reasoning will be circular at some point. So you have to always have that one thing, at least one thing in the reduction base for which you have no explanation. In other words, you can't explain that one thing in terms of anything else. That can still be your best theory of nature.
Because so long as you can explain everything else in terms of that one thing, then you're fine, because you always need at least one thing in the reduction base. I would offer to you that if you put consciousness as the one thing in that reduction base,
You eliminate the hard problem of consciousness because you're no longer trying to reduce it. The promissory notes are off the table. Your challenge now is to explain then the phenomenality, our inner phenomenal life and the empirical observations of the world outside, which are always qualitative, ultimately, in terms of that one thing in the reduction base. That is the challenge. But then I would submit to you that
That challenge is of a whole other level and character than trying to reduce consciousness. It entails no hard problems. It entails no appeals to unknowns. You can do that by using phenomena that you already know occur in nature.
So I think it's much more promising to go that way and then there is no promissory notes. This Marshawn beast mode lynch prize pick is making sports season even more fun on prize picks. Whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you always feel 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 projection.
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So I would respond to that. I mean, parsimony is a difficult thing.
It depends on how you individuate your entities, and there's no canonical way of individuating entities. And the attempt to find conceptual primitives, I think, has been a largely failed project. So the number of entities depend on, right, how I individuate them. Is consciousness one thing or many things? How do you know that? How do you determine that? And how do you determine that in a reliable way?
And if you're talking about reduction, do you have one thing or is everything an illusion above that one thing? And then you do have a hard problem of how is it we're doing science at these illusory levels to point to the bottom level, but that we're claiming is the only thing that really exists. And if you say, well, no, I don't mean they don't, they're all illusions. They also exist. Then I posit to you that you do have a complex ontology and you do have multiple things. I mean,
So I don't even know what we're referring to when we're individuating this thing you're calling consciousness. Is it one thing? I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that there's aspects of my consciousness that are qualitative in nature.
There's aspects of my unconscious life that seem to require relationship to something that's unconscious. My memories come and go. I wake up, I fall asleep. Has there actually been one consciousness throughout this time? Or multiple consciousnesses? Do my consciousness disappear? I mean, and I seem to be able to have
experiences where I have sort of a dual consciousness, where I'm sort of aware of my own consciousness, but I'm aware of the world as well. Is that one consciousness or two? I mean, and I'm not trying to be obtuse here. The invocation of parsimony, it seems to me, is to, I think it's really an invocation of elegance.
Because most people qualify, even Occam did, parsimony is you reduce to the minimum needed to generate your explanation. And that depends also, as many people have pointed out, on how we individuate things. And we can't make it syntactic, because all I can do is I can just replace every relation with a higher order noun or a lower order noun. You know, is baseball one thing or many things? How do we count it?
Well, it's made up. Well, it's made up of many people. So it's made up. Oh, media, like, whoa, the person one thing. Consciousness one thing, like, so I think invoking the notion of parsimony is ultimately
something that we do heuristically and pragmatically. I don't think we have an algorithmic formal account. I mean, the accounts that we have that approach that, like Golmogorov simplicity, prove to be computationally impractical. So they can't be what we're using when we invoke parsimony. And other than that, I don't know any formalization of simplicity that isn't question-begging.
Now, we all use it, Bernardo. I'm not denying that. But what I'm saying is, I think the appeal to it as an absolute methodological principle that just runs it objectively. I'm not convinced by that argument. Now, to the point about consciousness, again,
Maybe, and this is what I need to get, and I'm also conscious, pun intended, that we're trying to make this dialogical. We disagree, and we have to be honest about our disagreements, but I don't want to come off as imperious, or I want to come off as receptive and listening to you. Not I don't want to come off, I want to be that, that's what I aspire to. So I'll try and
I'll try and live this as enthusiasm rather than anything aggressive or anything like that, because I don't want to be doing that. So I'm not quite clear what you're pointing to when you say, like, let's take sort of a standard human thing. I'm actually not aware of my consciousness. I'm aware of things consciously, but I'm not aware of a thing, an entity.
John, let's have some shorter bursts of speech and then just hand off to the other person, maybe one question or two questions and two statements.
So maybe you should have a chance to comment on everything I said. Well, no, I'm willing. I'm willing to do. I'll just make those two points. The points is I think that I think and I don't think we actually ever go for simplicity. I think we go for elegance balanced by trustworthiness. I think that and that's so I think parsimony is a problematic notion. But then trustworthiness is even more problematic because what is trustworthy?
But I get your point. And so and then my other point was, since we're counting and a single entity, there is a sort of, you know, the human problems as well. Are we talk, are we equating experience to consciousness, because that's a problematic move? And are you really making consciousness
It seems to me you have a double in consciousness. You have consciousness as experienced and consciousness as experiencer, and therefore you're not actually getting the one thing at the bottom. And then all of this over here, the experiencer is something that's not within conscious, but I'm inferring it from my experience. And then if I'm willing to infer things outside of my consciousness, well then why not be a realist? I guess that's what it sort of comes to.
I want to start with a point where I agree with you, but just with a preamble first. Everything you said is directly applicable as a criticism of physicalism and any other ontology. So you are not sort of singling out idealism. You're criticizing your own position with the arguments you just put on the table. There is one thing where we agree and I think a lot of people miss on it. Our
Carving out the world into things is purely nominal. There is no ontic criterion for saying the car ends here and here begins the road, or here the river ends and the ocean begins. We separate the universe into things out of convenience. It's arbitrary and nominal.
Because if you say, well, I would define a car in terms of functionality. So if I need the spark plugs for the car to move, then the spark plugs are part of the car. Well, then you need the road, because without the road for the tires to grip, you don't move. And you need the air to enable combustion. And you need the gravity of the earth to pull the car towards the road. I mean, soon you have the entire universe. And now with quantum entanglement,
You literally have the entire universe. So partitioning the inanimate universe into things is completely nominal. I do think we have a non-tech criterion for saying that we end here.
Like if you shoot a bullet through the chair where I'm sitting, I will not feel it. But if you shoot a bullet through my belly, I will feel it. If a photon hits my retina, I see it. If it hits the wall behind me, I don't see it. So there is a ontic criterion for saying here we as you know, our inner lives can be delimited in physical space at the boundaries of our body. And that's not merely nominal. It's not arbitrary, because in some in some cases I feel and other cases I don't feel.
Now, where do I want to go with this? I lost my train of thought where I was going with this, but it was very important what I wanted to tell you. John, then do you want to step in? Can you can you just summarize briefly again? Oh, yeah, I remember. I remember the idea of parsimony. And how do you say whether consciousness is more than one thing and Hume's critique of Barclay?
So for the sake of the audience, Barclay said, well, everything is in the mind.
and Hume's critique was to ask, well, what is the mind? I'm not aware of a mind. I am aware of different experiences. So how can you pull a psyche, a mind, a soul out of the variety of experiences I have? And back in the day, that seemed to have been a strong enough criticism back in the 18th century. But it misses out on a very clear intuition that we all have.
Although the qualities of experiences can vary wildly, the quality of having a bellyache is totally different from the quality of falling in love.
All these things are still qualitative. They are experiential. They are not theoretical abstractions. They are not something that can be exhaustively described through quantities or physical parameters. They are qualitative. So I would offer to you the following definition of consciousness, which is consistent with the idea that consciousness is the one member of the reduction base. Mind or consciousness, which I will use interchangeably,
is that whose excitations are experiences. And if you define it that way, then there is only the experiencer and experiences are different patterns of excitation of the experiencer.
So there is nothing to experience but the experiencer, in the same sense that there is nothing to a ripple but the lake where it ripples. We use different words because it's convenient in dialogue to speak of ripples instead of patterns of movement of the lake, but we have to keep in mind that all along there is only the lake, so all along there is only subjectivity, there is only the experiencer,
And experiences are just patterns of excitation of the experiencer. This has another advantage, which it eliminates any interaction problem between experience and the experiencer, because there is no such a thing as an experience outside the experiencer. There is only the experiencer. What is the experiencer above and beyond the set of experiences? Like, why are they not just an atomic sequence of experiences, a sequence of atomic experiences?
That would lead you to all kinds of problems. For instance, what binds these experiences together? Why do we have the inner feeling that these experiences are being had by us as a subjective point of view into a field of phenomenality? Right. And so I answer a problem by inferring a relation, right?
And then that relation and the mechanisms by which that relation works, how things are bound together is actually not something I'm consciously aware of. Let me give you a concrete example. I mean, I'm hearing your words and I'm getting ideas out of that. And that's binding them together into a integrated proposition in my mind. I have no idea how I'm doing that.
My introspective awareness of that gives me no account. In fact, and any common sense intuitions I have, have largely turned out to be wrong. So most of the processing that is allowing me to do the binding is not a processing within my consciousness. It's a processing that makes my consciousness possible.
Here, this has a lot to do with one point you made before, which is you said a lot of my conscious experiences seem to be anchored in something that is not
I find that more generic criticism to hold better than what you just said. I would say
How do you know that there is binding? Well, that binding is itself an experience. It is itself a pattern of excitation of your subjectivity that arises maybe as an interference pattern. Wait, but I'm not asking how I know the binding is there. I'm asking what it is that exists in order to explain the binding. And those aren't the same thing, right? I don't think the entity you're looking for is necessary.
the notion of binding is itself a pattern of excitation of consciousness, because the binding, so far as you can speak of it, it is some kind of experience you're having. No, no, the binding, so I have a conscious experience of you making sense, but I don't have a conscious experience of the binding of those sounds into meaning that then make, you know, and I have no conscious experience of acquiring English.
But here he is, and I have it. Right? How is that bound to me? Right? I want to answer this. But yeah, I want I wanted to answer a better example, because I think here you are looking for an entity that doesn't need to be there. I think there is a very natural flow of experience, which we call understanding. But I agree with you that you are appealing to a lot of background stuff.
to enable that conscious binding, you're appealing to knowledge that you've had before, and which is no longer in the screen of your memory being relived right now. And look, there is over 100 years, 150 years now, if you count far back enough of depth psychology, which sort of has accumulated evidence for parts of the psyche that we cannot report on feelings that we have and we can't report on memories that we have and we can't report on
and which may lead to the notion that there is something other than consciousness, because if my consciousness is operating on the basis of something that I can't consciously report, then there is something other than consciousness. I would dispute that based on the modern differentiation between consciousness and metaconsciousness, between conscious experience and conscious metacognition. I think what we report is an expression of what we are metacognizant of.
the contents of our meta consciousness, the experiences we have and know that we have. But in the background,
stuff that we cannot report because we don't know that we are experiencing that stuff, it is still consciousness. And we have everyday examples to show that you're breathing right now, you're always conscious of your breathing. But only right now, because I mentioned it, did you become meta conscious of your breathing because you placed your attention on it, you reflected that experience of breathing. So this stuff in the background that you referred to,
I would say it's all experiences which are not available to your introspection right now for you to report because they are obfuscated by the limited contents of your meta consciousness or they are dissociated or inferentially isolated. We know dissociation exists and it's for real since the advent of neuroimaging in the 21st century. So I do think that Hume's critique of Barclay
was a straw man because he wanted to produce a thing, a psyche, a soul. You don't need that. All you need is a field of subjectivity whose excitations are our experiences. And now in the 21st century, we now have
a century of examples in physics in which we've done exactly that. We've reduced now elementary subatomic particles to the patterns of excitation of a quantum field and going to M theory, this even goes into the direction of unification theory. There's an enormous tradition about reducing things towards excitations of extended fields, so to say. Okay. John looks like he's bubbling with rage, so please.
Not bubbling with rage. Get it all out, John. No, I want to get it all out because I want to make space. So you're dividing consciousness into metaconsciousness and things in the background that I can't get access to because I currently don't have knowledge. And it sounds to me like you have parts of my consciousness that are not aware of each other, are not conscious of each other.
So again, now you have a multiple entity as far as I can see. No, ontologically is only one thing. It's consciousness. Why? Because it's only one kind of stuff and there are dynamisms within this consciousness. No, no, no, no, no, we're not talking, no, no, we're not talking about just one kind of stuff. We're talking about the entity. No, no, we were talking about the number of entities we propose in our explanation in order to generate our explanations. That's what we were talking about.
To say I'm proposing one kind of stuff is to beg the question, because then you're invoking the parsimony, and that's the very thing that I'm pointing to, which is, it seems to me, you're multiplying your entities in order to try and generate your explanation, as you should, as you should. I mean, I deny that. I thought by appealing to feuds, I had to counter that, but okay, go ahead. Okay, so you've got things in my consciousness,
My introspective consciousness that I are never the lack. So there seems to be distinction. There seems to be a distinction between what's in my consciousness and what's available to my consciousness via meta consciousness. So mental consciousness must have a functionality different from the rest of consciousness to explain the fact that it's limited in some fashion. Yes. Yeah. So in terms of the functionality, I can count different things there. Yes. No, no, because why not?
Consciousness and meta-consciousness are both consciousness ontologically. Do they operate the same way according to the same principles and the same functions? Does an electron operate the same way as a quark? Both are parts of a field.
You can have one thing manifest different patterns of behavior or to function in different ways without requiring that thing to be many things. Ontologically, it's still one thing with multiple different patterns of behavior. In a non-question begging manner, what makes it one thing? It's experiential.
But it's precisely not, because my metaconsciousness can't experience parts of my consciousness. No, your metaconsciousness cannot report parts of your consciousness to yourself. But my point is exactly that what is not reported is still experiential. Just as your breathing is experiential, when you're not reporting to yourself, I am breathing. How is that different from your experience being experiential, and I can't, and I'm not aware of it right now?
I would postulate dissociation as something that exists in nature, we not understand it fully well, but we know it exists. And it could account for the appearance of there being multiple minds instead of one and the study of dissociative identity disorder now it has advanced so much that we know it's literally blinding.
Sure. But we also have, you know, accounts of the dissociation in terms of trauma. I mean, there's serious disanalogies. Notice what you tend to invoke when you do that. You have now three entities. You have the meta-consciousness that can't report to myself what's going on in my consciousness. And that seems to me to be... And that's the kind of machinery you typically invoke, at least in the psychological discussions.
of right of dissociation like I get dissociation from this part of this part of my mind from this part of my mind in order to protect myself this part is protected from trauma from that part etc and so it now sounds like you've got meta consciousness that can't fully report to the self what's going on in consciousness both are consciousness meta consciousness is a particular configuration of consciousness what is the self it's reporting to
It's the one field of subjectivity where all these experiences are happening. Some of them are reflected and therefore can be reported. Other experiences are not reflected. But I'm asking you, what is the reporting going to? If it's going back to the field and meta consciousness is in the field, why is meta consciousness unaware of it? Because it's not reporting to itself.
So it's reporting to itself that it doesn't have everything. Is that?
but it's not reporting to itself some of the experiences it is having. I mean, from psychology, we know this happens. I mean, we don't need to go very far, especially men are not able to report even to themselves a lot of the emotions that they are actually having, and which is impacting their behavior. I mean, therapy rooms, the world over, are filled with... Okay, let's turn this into a therapy room for a second.
Right now we're talking about the disagreements and in previous podcasts what I like to refer to is something called Theomachy which is a battle of the gods and it's tongue-in-cheek because obviously you're not gods but intellectually you're intellectually yours you're let's say mini daemons whatever you want to call it and so I like to say that this is Theomachy and I wanted this to be more of a theolocution in fact I was going to coin that term because you have dialogos for veki sure this is theolocution
And I don't care if it turns into Theomache. It's actually entertaining, much like the debate that was about truth between Sam Harris and Peterson. And maybe this is going to become one of those where we hammer down specifically onto one instead of the broad array of subjects, which I don't mind. So to turn it into a bit of a therapeutic session, why don't you first each say something about the other's point of view that you agree with or find interesting? And then you can go and battle it out once more.
Well, I mean, I think we are battling it out precisely because we are respecting each other and we're trying to do science. And the problem here is science is a little bit different configured. I mean, science in terms of scantia, not in the sense of just empirical science that we're trying to do science here. And therefore, we're doing the kind of thing you do in science, which is arguments and evidence against each other.
And I think that's sort of appropriate within the scientific discourse. If we move to more, you know, existentially encompassing issues, I think then we shouldn't stay in the realm of debate. We should move into dialogos. There's a lot I respect. First of all, I wouldn't be giving my time and effort to, and this is not meant to be left handed, to Bernardo if I didn't think he was articulating his position very well.
And so I do want to acknowledge that. And I do think that there is... I would agree with him. I hope this comes off as an appropriate compliment. I think most of the versions of materialism that are prevalent, even within some of the cognitive science community, especially within neuroscience. Neuroscientists, for example, the vast majority of them adopt
You know, a strong identity theory that I think would just be devastated by the kinds of arguments that Bernardo was bringing up. And so that's why I don't eat that it's because of the sophistication of these arguments and and their plausibility. I'll use that if you'll allow me that I think any hardline materialism like that is not a viable position. So I like that about what he's doing. I like that he is
Trying to give a larger place to our phenomenology than is typically given in a lot of the analytic discourse.
around consciousness and the mind-body problem. And that's a bit of a disjunct between the continental and the Anglo-American tradition. And I like that. That's why I've been trying to shift into the phenomenological with him right now and play there, because I think that's important. And so those are two or three things I really like. I like the rigor. I think the arguments against mini versions. And again, this isn't a trivial thing to say. I just pointed out that many neuroscientists
Bernardo,
And I don't have anything against heated debate in the least. That is actually what goes on behind closed doors in academia. No, but I just want to thank you for doing that. I mean, I think it's I think it's important to periodically do what you just did, which is to step back and regroup and see what I mean, it's it's it's it's a sterile thing if we're not capable of listening and potentially learning from each other. OK, so Bernardo. Well, I think
John's focus on what he calls the meaning crisis is the single most important and most devastating problem that we as a species have today. And by highlighting that and offering fairly practical ways of addressing that problem, avenues for trying to get out of it by restoring the role of myth
by taking our phenomenology, our experiential world, seriously and not dismissing it as just an epiphenomenon. I think that attempt to solve the biggest problem we face today as a species, that alone makes him and his work one of the most important people alive today, I think. Thank you, Fernando. That's very high praise. It's precisely because... I second that. I think many of the people in the chat second that.
But they would also credit you with that too, Bernardo. Yeah, I wanted to return the compliment. I think trying to get
I think we agree on this. We may not agree where we end, but we agree that the meeting crisis is not going to be solved at sort of the political market level. It goes down to our fundamental ontology, and it deals with fundamental aspects of our ontology, like subjectivity and objectivity, and how meaning is somehow bound up with those, and the sense of self. And I think we agree on that.
It seems to me we agree on that and you're nodding. So yeah, and so I think in that sense, we're both very critical of a lot of what
I think are misplaced and sometimes distracting attempts to deal with the meaning crisis that do not wrestle with these deep problems. I'm not saying, and I don't think Bernardo is saying, everybody has to be an academic philosopher to wrestle with the meaning crisis. But I do think if we want to
If we want to home whatever ecologies of practices we come up with to address the meeting crisis into a worldview, we have to do something to our current worldview to get us to the place where we have a worldview that can properly home, rehome the ecologies of practices and the experience of sacredness. And I think in that, we also agree. So I want to be clear about something here. I'm not happy
I thought I said this, but I don't think I emphasized. I'm not trying to countenance sort of the standard scientific worldview model. I'm willing to, you know, change my ontology quite a bit. I tried to convey that with some of the things I've said. And so I think the disagreement, it might be more about what are the changes and how far should the changes go. So
I think what Bernardo is doing is important, and I would not want anything I'm saying to be taken as meaning people should not wrestle seriously with his work. I'm not trying to imply that at all. Neither did I interpret to you that way, John. Can I continue? Please do.
Look, I do think that our mainstream ontology plays a role in this. And I don't think it's a positive role. But I'm also quick to admit that it is one role. It's not the whole story. There are other things going on. And I think another enormous thing that you point out, when you say that we overemphasize propositional knowledge, knowledge of facts as distinct from wisdom, which is very hard to define, although you
You elaborate extensively on how we actually can get a grip on what wisdom is. But what is immediately clear is that it entails a lot, a lot more than propositional knowledge. And we live in a society in which the people we take direction from today, the spokespeople of science we see on TV often, they
are sorry if I go too far in this characterization but they are very often psychically unbalanced
one psychic function is taken as the only one that matters. It's a kind of analytic, rational, conceptual thinking. And that is taken as the only thing that is trustworthy. And they are challenged when it comes to the richness of all the other psychic functions, like intuition, appreciation for art, sense perception, you know, being grounded in your senses as opposed to abstraction.
and we don't see it, we take them as the new wise men and they are people who have large chunks of the human psyche amputated from them and they have become our wise men. I call it the idolatry of nerds and the word nerd is appropriate I think to be used here and I think it's tragic that we
been trying to replace wisdom with pure extensive encyclopedic propositional knowledge, as if the latter were a substitute for the former, and as if doing this could be justified merely by the lack of absolute certainty that you can attach to wisdom. Yeah, I think that's very well said, what you've said there, Bernardo.
I agree. And I mean, I've argued for it extensively, which is part of what I was trying to point to where I said, I appreciate you trying to bring in a phenomenological richness to this discussion we were previously engaged in. Yeah, I do think that the recognition of the significance and importance in two directions, both, you know,
in terms of our ontology, the significance of the non-propositional ways of knowing and ways of being in the psyche, I think. And then also the increasing evidence that it's those non-propositional aspects of the psyche and ways of knowing that contribute the most to meaning in a sense of meaning in life. And I think that tyranny of the propositional or the tyranny, the ideology of the nerds
is not only limiting our capacity to try and understand these phenomena and thereby create a worldview to which we can belong, because we don't belong to the current worldview. That's, I think, something we would also agree on, I think. But also the fact that it puts individuals existentially at risk of
Let's get to the disagreements again.
And I think this is important. This is very much like an in-family kind of disagreement that I don't want to presume I just met Bernardo, but Bernardo, I would say to you, you know, everything you're saying here leads me to really appreciate the motivation you're bringing to these more sort of technical ontological disagreements we're having. And I want to I just wanted to express that appreciation before we return back to potential debates, because I think that's important. I mean, for me,
Sorry, I don't want to make this sound pragmatic. One of the things, not the only thing, obviously there's the own internal epistemic success, but one of the things that could potentially move me more towards your ontology is if I could see how it might more readily address some of the difficulties that I'm trying to address with my ontology with respect to the meeting crisis. And so that'd be something perhaps we could also discuss somewhere along the way.
Can you mention two or three concrete points? So, one of the things that I've been trying to do, this was something that you admitted in your ontology, and then I noted it, but I sort of got sidetracked in being heated, I guess. You admitted sort of, even within consciousness, processes of filtering.
And you probably know that the core of my work on like intelligence, as distinct from consciousness, although I think these ultimately are related, has to do with this issue that I call relevance realization, which is of all of the information available to me, I can't, and right, and of all the information available to me in my memory, and of all the possible sequences of operations, that's also combinatorially explosive. So yet, moment by moment, I'm somehow realizing, focusing on what's relevant,
basically intelligently ignoring, and it's a constitutive part of my intelligence, most of that information, that is not any algorithmic process. And it is also it is always prey to the deleterious effects of the bias. So the various things that make me adaptive at this make me subject to bias, the self deception. And we have moments where that self correction comes out when we have aha moments and insight. And so I happen to think that
that that relevance realization is a way in which we're dynamically coupled to the world. I can give that argument in more depth later, but I'm just trying to give it just here. And I think that's that that that underwrites our cognitive agency.
but we also experience that connectedness as deeply rewarding. And that reward is different from the reward of pleasure. It's the reward that we call meaning in life, which is also different from subjective well-being. And so I think our meaning, that sense, that positive rewarding sense,
of meaning in life and man will people do a lot for meaning in life they will sacrifice a lot of pleasure and a lot of contentment in order to get meaning in life and they reliably do that for example when they have a kid because pleasure and subjective well-being go down dramatically but meaning in life go up significantly absolutely so yeah so I think that that connectedness is central to
to meeting in life. And then I use basically an evolutionary model of trying to explain what that connectedness is like. There's something in our brain and no, that's the wrong way of putting it. There's something in the relationship between the brain and the world that is strongly analogous to biological adaptation, biological adaptivity.
And then there's something analogous to how that evolves in a self-organizing fashion that we call intelligence. And that helps me to explain a lot of the progress I see within artificial intelligence, a lot of the convergence I see within cognitive science and cognitive psychology. And so I tend to see that in that way. And I'm wondering if... Well, I want to make it a genuine question.
Is there a way in which your ontology would speak to that in a way that might be particularly helpful? I mean, I'm not trying to put you in a corner. If it doesn't, I'm not saying, oh, well, there, it's false. I'm not doing that. It's an open question. It does. I mean, that's my motivation for doing what I do. I don't do this just because I want to win an academic argument in a world of abstractions and academic journals. Yeah, I totally get that.
Yeah, I do it because I think it makes a difference. I mean, it's not even clear to us anymore that the story we tell ourselves about what we are and what the world is and our role in it is the key source of meaning in our lives. Why are we not aware of this anymore? And I think that's because of fluid compensation, to use a technical term in psychology. We are fluid compensating all over the place. We've replaced
authentic sources of meaning with self validation, with the idea of leaving work behind that survives us with differentiating ourselves as part of an elite group. This happens a lot among scientists. So even if we adopt a worldview that is flat and bleak,
as I would say, mainstream physicalism is not not perhaps, well, certainly not your version of physicalism. But the mainstream physicalist view that consciousness doesn't even really exist. That is so flat and meaning draining and bleak. But we don't notice that because we find ways to fluid compensate and find other sources of meaning. I mean, when we killed God in the second half of the 19th century, we were quick.
to erect another edifice of meaning giving. And that has evolved now, and I will link that to artificial intelligence, which you mentioned as well, that has evolved now into Singulitarianism, which is a purely physicalist religion, which postulates that if we create a AI that can build a better version of itself faster than we could,
then that would accelerate the evolution of AI exponentially and then we would create a de facto god who would then take care of us and like we take care of animals in a zoo. I mean that's the religious impulse, the search for meaning right there. We never abandon that search for meaning even though we fluid compensate and we find sort of
decoy targets for it. But if you ask me honestly, where do I think it went wrong? I think it went wrong the moment we started telling ourselves and believing that the world we see is all there is to the story. That the world is its own meaning as opposed to being an image of something else deeper.
as opposed to being how the world, as it is in itself, presents itself to us. But there is this extra dimension of depth and meaning. The images that we call the world are pointing to something beyond themselves, are pointing to a basic meaning. Sorry to interject. Can you explain what you mean when you say the world itself is meaning? Today, under a physicalist ontology, matter is all there is.
So if you have a material world around you, then there is no extra dimension of depth to that world. That world is all there is. So whatever meaning it has, it is that meaning because it's not pointing at anything else. It's not representing anything else because it's all there is. And this is a notion that is today called naive realism in philosophy.
We know from science and philosophy that this is absolutely and categorically wrong, because one, evolution wouldn't have given us a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Evolution doesn't do that. Evolution equips us to survive. So evolution would have given us a dashboard of dials, not a transparent windscreen into the world.
We also know from hardcore neuroscience that if our inner representational states, our perceptions, if those states mirrored the states of the world as it is in itself, our inner states would be too dispersed and we would basically dissolve into an entropic soup.
we wouldn't be able to maintain our structural and dynamical integrity. So we have to encode the information we have about the world in an inferential manner in order to maintain our physical integrity. So we know that the world as it is in itself is not what we see or even measure through instrumentation because even measurement follows the paradigm
The world as it is in itself is not available to our direct inspection. The only way to know it as it is in itself is to be it. And Kant already said that and Schopenhauer echoed that. So if we recover
If we put back into our explicit metaconscious awareness that this is what's going on, then the world regains a dimension of depth and mystery. And your life in it now has a meaning. Not only the world as it is in itself is the ultimate meaning, which you have to interpret out of how the world presents itself to you, out of the dials that you have, that evolution has given you. Even your role in it is now mysterious.
Because you are in the world, even though you don't see it as it is in itself, you know that you are in it. And that dimension of mystery and meaning, I think, losing contact with that dimension is one of the key sources of the meaning crisis. And one way to recover that is to take myth seriously, not literally, but seriously. And we've lost the art of knowing how to do this.
So I think that was fantastic and beautifully said. Yeah, I think, well, I've already said I think that flat ontologies are incoherent theoretically, and I think they make their adherents engage in ongoing performative contradiction all the time.
in which, like you said, the scientist espouses a meaningless universe as he or she desperately tries to climb to the top of whatever status hierarchy they belong to. And that's all kinds of performative contradiction. So I think there's incoherence and there's performative contradiction. So yeah, I don't think that flat ontologies, I think, are viable. And then I think the idea of recovering, I like what you said, a depth dimension,
to it, to our ontology is important. So I tend to think that that depth dimension comes in when we invoke, well, kind of what I was saying before,
I'm sorry, I'm just worried about, I don't want to sound overly Kantian because I disagree with Kant's idea that we have no access. I disagree with that too, by the way. Okay, go ahead. Okay, thank you for that. And so let's say we always have filtered access or something like that. And I think that follows directly. I think that's something that I
I argue for and perhaps even presuppose in the account of relevance realization that I just talked about. By the way, I would argue this is the hardest problem in artificial intelligence, almost as hard as the hard problem of consciousness. I think relevance is a very hard problem. And I do happen to think the two problems are related, and maybe we could talk about that at some point.
I do think that reality in that sense is other than it's the way see the obviousness of our experience is exactly what we need to explain rather than take as the basis for our explanation and I think by the time we've gotten to the obviousness of experience we've you know our brain mind and its interaction with our brain body world right interaction has
has so filtered things that we have avoided the combinatorially explosive nature of reality itself. And so that's why, and I've been trying to make an argument, and this is a bit of a side thing, of reconfiguring the sense of what you call mystery, and I use that term. I mean, I'm deeply influenced by Gabriel Marcel's work on ontological mystery.
that a mystery is different from a... In a problem, we frame it and then we can bring clarity to it. In a mystery, we find that the framing itself is problematic and we keep doing this, right, and we keep expanding the frames and then we realize, oh shit, it's bigger than I could possibly accommodate and we get experiences of awe, which are tremendously efficacious for transforming individuals at the kind of level we're talking about, conducive to the cultivation of virtue and wisdom and doing experimental work on that right now.
And so I try to think, and maybe this goes back to some of the points I've made earlier, I try to reconceive of that mystery and sacredness not as completion or perfection, but in a sense as an inexhaustibleness.
There's a bit of a Neoplatonic spin on this. There's an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility for us. So as we uncover more in the trajectory into the mystery, it seems to have an underlying order to it, an underlying pattern and intelligibility to it, which does not close off the fact that there's going to be more that's going to surprise us.
And so I tend to think of the sacredness as being exactly that horizon of intelligibility, where we can look back and see all the fields of intelligibility that have arisen for us, but we have a tremendous sense of what we're nowhere near, and we'll never be anywhere near exhausting this. It's kind of like, is it Schelling's, the finite always longing for the infinite? That's the sense of sacredness in some of the early post-Kantian
That's what I'm trying to argue for now. And I think part of the thing that I'm critical of, of the Cartesian paradigm, which also gets taken into
the modernity of the interpretation of religion is this idea of certainty and completion and closure as the things that we are most seeking. And I don't think that is the case. I think that humans want, I mean what we know from the meaning in life literatures, human beings want to be connected to something larger than themselves and to matter to it, to fit to it rather than have it fit to them.
Sorry, I've spoken too long. That's my attempt to say something I think may be convergent with you. Jung said the only important question is whether we are related to something infinite or not. And he nailed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way we long for it and the way that has a normative impact on the way we live our lives.
And I think, again, we agree on this, that we are, we both, if you'll allow me to speak for you, we're both sort of distressed by the, well, I'll use it in a psychological sense, maybe in your ontological, but the dissociation between the worldview people espouse and believe in and the way they're trying to live their lives. And that disjunction comes, that dissociation comes at terrible cost.
terrible cost. I mean, and the way social media is doing exactly the opposite of what it promised. It's accelerating all of this rather than alleviating it any function because it's not getting at the root of the problem. There, I'll be quiet, Bernardo, so you can say so.
I can listen to you for a long time because this subject is very close to my heart. I wanted to ask you a question, but before I do that, just a quick clarification. I also am not with Kant that we can never have any sort of access to the noumena. I think he went too far. I think through perception, we cannot have access to the noumena. But the key insight that he missed and Schopenhauer added very quickly after Kant was that
We are our own numena. So through introspection, I can access my numena. And since I'm part of the world, I can make educated inferences about the numena out there, because I'm also sort of material made of matter, at least as far as perception goes. So if the matter in my body is the representation of my will, then I can conclude the world as it is in itself is also something like the will.
So I think there is a channel to the Newman and that's introspection. And then that's what the world's religious traditions have been saying all along. But the question I wanted to ask you is, I have some clinical psychologists that I count as friends, and we have discussions now and then. And the subject that always comes is, especially when you have a depth psychologist, a psychologist oriented to the depth as opposed to behaviorism or anything like this, or anyway.
Um, the question I always ask is if the task is to help your patient recover meaning
Can that be done in the absence of a certain ontological position? Can you be ontologically neutral? Because psychologists talk about giving meaning. Maybe it's a literal translation from Dutch, but I think it works in English as well. How do you give meaning? And my feeling is that if I am a patient, and I have done therapy, by the way, I always come out of that with the feeling it's like I'm trying to cheat myself because either meaning is really there,
or it's not, and my giving meaning to it is some kind of self-deception. It doesn't work out for me. So do you think we can solve the meaning crisis without addressing ontology head on? So first of all, I want to riff on the first thing you said as a way of preparing for my answer to the second thing. So I think the key and the most foundational, the key to the most foundational kind of knowing, which I call participatory knowing, which I take from
ultimately inspired by Plato. But you can see it either, you can see it in all kinds of Platonists, and I count Jung as a Platonist. I think he's basically the Plato of the inner psyche, and the archetypes are the forms, and I think you could make a good argument for that. And that's why he was attracted to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, things like that. But that's an exegetical claim. But it's this notion
And the reason why I think it's important is I see convergence from, as you said, other religious traditions. I read a lot of the Kyoto school, Nishitani, Nishida, Maso Abe, Suzuki, things like that, and what was going on there. And so the notion that comes out is from these two traditions, and they converge on this idea that
unless you that at bottom and I can make a more long argument for this but I think you'll get the gist of it if I reject skepticism if I reject an absolute skepticism I have to rely on that kind of participatory knowing that I know it because I am it right and that and because I am it and that that part of the world
is also it, we participate in the same thing. That is how my mind and the world touch. I know this might step on a couple of your toes, but that's my way of talking right now. And so the idea that there's a kind of knowing that is simultaneously how I know myself, and I don't mean my autobiography, I mean how I ontically and even ontologically know myself, that is necessarily bound up with how I know the world.
When I see Plato, and I, you know, this means I reject sort of standard academic interpretations of Plato, I see Plato, no, no, that's not, that's not true. Some, there's a growing group of people that would agree with this interpretation of Plato. So I see Plato as basically the person who sort of proposed that at the core of his argument is that idea of participation ultimately grounds us. And then that leads me to, you know,
There's two ways of asking that question, and since you brought it up in the context of clinical psychology, it's important to distinguish. I wouldn't want to claim that everybody has to do fundamental ontology in order to get alleviation from anxiety or despair or depression or loneliness.
They, I would say, there's a level at which they do need a necology of practices. Simply changing their beliefs is radically insufficient. That's why people go into therapy. Many people, I think, live, and this is not meant to be any kind of elitist insult, but they live very pragmatically. If they've got a necology of practices that's working, that's it. That's good, right? So in that sense, I don't think everybody has to do it. But in the deeper sense,
Do they, are they ultimately dependent on scientists and philosophers finding a way to ground and legitimate that ecology of practices in a worldview? Yeah, I think they do. Because I think our worldview, this is deeply influenced by Clifford Geertz, our worldview is our meta-meaning system. I'm not equating our worldview completely with our ontology, but I'm saying our worldview is our sort of our shared
our shared ontology, our shared commitment, if you'll allow me that, okay? And so, and I think our worldview is our meta-meaning system. It is that, it is not itself a meaning system. It is that which, like you said, at the bottom, makes possible all the other meaning systems by giving a participatory relationship, a pattern of co-identification between the agents and what I call, what Chris and I in our book, and Philip and I call it, the agent in the arena. The world becomes a place that is shaped
either physically or mentally to fit me and by which I physically and that also includes technology and or mentally shape myself to the world so that we have a participatory relation. So there are affordances for behavior and I think for me there has to be people out there doing that. There has to be people who are saying
The current worldview does not home us. I mean, we don't belong in our worldview. There's no place for us in it. And that means ultimately everything we're doing with our ecologies of practices doesn't fit in that worldview. And like I say, most people don't have to solve that problem, but that problem cannot remain unsolved, at least in the sense of seriously, plausibly addressed. So I hope that was an answer to your question. Yeah, yeah, I am with you. I even agree with you. And actually, I have
No problem admitting to this and reinforcing this. I don't think any conceptual buy in into a specific ontology will solve anybody's psychological problems. Because conceptual understanding is not embodied. It stays rotating somewhere in the head and it doesn't go down into your emotional life. I do think though that we are in a culture where the intellect is the bouncer of the heart.
The intellect is the bouncer of the heart. So even in situations where somebody would have a transformative experience or a transformative insight, they don't give themselves intellectual permission
to take it on board, to even perceive it, let alone take it seriously. And when the insight sort of muscles in, like the experience of awe that occasionally we have, it comes in, we have the awe, but 15 minutes later saying, ah, that's nothing.
Emotions are just a side effect of evolutionarily encoded behavioral patterns driven by physiology. And off it goes. It doesn't sink in. So I think that although an ontology would not solve the problem, it literally opens the door for whatever solution there might be. Because right now, there is a closed door and a very big muscleful bouncer at the door.
That's preventing us from relating with more richness and depth to ourselves in the world. I would agree with that, Bernardo. Although I guess I think a little bit more like a bifurcation point. I think there are many people who do exactly what you say, the dismissive-distractive response. However, I've met, even within an experimental paradigm, because I've done experiments on people, mystical experiments and stuff like that. I've met people who have the opposite.
So they have a very powerful and there's literature to back me up on what I'm saying. They have these powerful experiences and they precisely can't dismiss them. There's something in and so I call this onto normativity. So often like we people do dismiss many of their altered states of consciousness and again that's adaptive and many of them should be dismissed perhaps. But what's really interesting is people and it looks to be about 30 to 40 percent of the population which is not insignificant.
have these experiences, and they do this. They don't say, oh, it doesn't fit in with this worldview, therefore it's not real. They do the opposite. They say, that's really real, and therefore there's something wrong with this. That happens too. And that happens, again, it's not majority, but 30% to 40% is not insignificant. That's a lot of people. And then, but what typically happens though, is they go looking for some guidance and
they can't find it and then they do an autodidactic thing which can often spin off in very crazy things because precisely there is no ontology that seeks to bridge between, if you'll allow me, everyday obviousness and the kind those kinds of experiences of awe and like onto normativity like and you know if you take a look at Yaden's work when people have these experiences
They will reconfigure their entire lives, their relationships, their careers, even their sense of identity, because they want to, and here's what I want to invoke it, they want to conform more and more to that really real. The really real has an independent normativity and value to them above and beyond, you know, practical power, and they do these major transformations, but they're often
thwarted or that can go awry precisely because they often have to do it in a very autodidactic fashion. And that, you see, and that's where I would hope, you know, however we manage to, you know, flesh out the ontology and make it work. And I think we should both keep working. I would hope that it would allow people to turn
to individuals that they plausibly accord intellectual respect to, not because the project is intellectual, but because they can take seriously the ontology that would allow them to talk to each other. It would give them a lingua franca by which they could do what human beings often need to do, which is to do this in distributed cognition, not as isolated individuals. So that would be one of the hopes I would have.
What occurs to me is a question I'd like you both to explore. That is, what is real? What exists? How do you define what exists? And can we ever know what's real? So Bernardo, why don't you start that?
I don't think apes evolved on planet Earth have the cognitive apparatus that would be necessary for us to know conceptually the ultimate salient truths of nature. I don't think that is possible. So I don't think the game we are playing in ontology is a game of finding what the truth is. I think the game is
Given our limitations and our best learnings and best practices and our epistemic value system, how much closer to truth can we get knowing that we will not arrive
But can we do better than we are doing right now, given what we know, and our value system, but by value system, I mean, our appreciation of empirical evidence, our appreciation of internal consistency, coherence of yeah, I'll say that john conceptual parsimony,
So given this value system around which there is some degree of cultural consensus, not full, not full consensus, but some degree of cultural consensus, at least in academia,
How well can we do? Can we do better than we are doing now? I submit to you guys that I think we can do significantly better than we are doing now. That would not mean that we can get to the truth of the matter as apes evolved on planet Earth, but we can get closer than we are. And by getting closer, I also think, and this is
not by construction, it so happens to be like that. By getting closer, I think we will also get healthier and we will live in a healthier way, more aware of the depth of the mystery where we are inserted, which is that dimension of depth and mystery that we lose sight of today. That I think we can definitely achieve. Now, a quick observation. I need to have a bio break shortly.
So if, if we can find a point right now, or maybe John can answer the same question. So there is, uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. So we'll see you right back. No, I want to hear the answer and then I hope we can, and then we can both break, uh, possible. Um, yeah. So I mean, real could be used in two different ways. It can be used as an absolute or it can be used as a comparative.
And I happen to think that it makes more sense to treat it as a comparative. And I think that's what you're saying, Bernardo. I think although we can't say this is real in an absolute sense, we can with good reason, good evidence and good argument say, but this is more real than that. We can make those comparative judgments in a way that seems to be progressive.
in the sense that we don't keep losing previous claims in some sort of chaos. There's a slowly building coherent structure that emerges and we revise it and blah blah blah blah. I'm not denying any of that. But I think the comparative sense of realness is something that we have to, and I think we can, put our epistemic trust in.
And so I think that is to say, for all of our epistemic boundedness, I agree with you, Bernardo, we are slightly super evolved apes that have culture and culture ratchets, which is, that's an important difference. We don't individually have to relearn everything from scratch, and that does help. But I think culture ratchets precisely because we can make
this progressive improvement. I don't think there's any teleology or anything like that. I think we can go we still could massively just screw this all up. Nevertheless, I agree that what we can get we can get better in a comparative sense of saying this is more real than that. And then this is more real than that. And then soon as we do that, again, I think that means we are all we are already committed to a non flat ontology. And
I think that as soon as we do that, we start drawing relationships of, well, okay, this is dependent on this and this is dependent on that in terms of our judgment. And I think for me that, and this is where I'll put my neck out a little bit more perhaps than Bernardo did, that's where to me, again, that original sort of platonic insight about, you know, intelligibility and realness that our best
The best way we participate in the way we talked about earlier, reality is through intelligibility. It's our best way of getting the platform by which we can walk a little bit more and more closer to what is perhaps real in that absolute sense. But I agree. I think it's hubristic and I think it's just
I think it's damaging to think we have the real, in the really real sense, in some sort of complete sense. I argue against that consistently. On the second point, I agree that if we don't get back to helping people improve those two things in an integrated fashion, intelligible realness, that they have, that things make sense to them, and they feel that that sense is, people want both.
There are different poles, in fact, of meeting life. People want things to make sense, but they also want what they make sense to be, in some sense, real. So I'll do this with my students. I'll say, how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? And they'll put up their hands. And I said, keep up your hand if you would like to know that your partner is cheating on you, even though that would destroy the relationship. 95% of my students keep their hands up.
Because they don't want it if it's not real, even if it's making beautiful sense to them. They ultimately also want it to be real. And so I think that if we do not give if we if we do not afford people a way of Well,
I don't know, drinking more and more from the ongoing fount of intelligibility in a way that they think is realizing them in some fashion. I think it's going to, it is, I wouldn't even say it's going to, it is producing ill health, both at the individual and collective level. And so these issues are not, and I don't mean, I don't use this adjective pejoratively here, but these issues are not academic issues. These are existential issues. And so I think people ignore them.
John, do you have to go as well? Yeah, I'm going to go as well. All right. I'm back. How's it going? Good. How's it going? Good. I'm relieved. You're relieved? How? The washroom. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's actually better if you all continue talking, and I'll wait for Bernardo before I say my next comments, but it's better if you continue to talk. There are questions, but these questions will then be the seed of a four-hour discussion, and you're already in one, so you may as well just continue.
Well, I like and I like moving between these two between debate and dialogue. Thank you. We're gonna get back to debate. Okay, that's fine. I'm happy to just stay here too. Because these issues are issues that really matter to me as well. But I mean, Bernardo is coming at this. And I mean, this is a real compliment. He's coming at this, like in really good faith. And, and I'll always willing
I want to talk to and I want to be open to listening to people who are coming at this with, you know, thoughtful, good faith. And that's clearly the case with him. And so, yeah, well, so is it with you. So thank you. Okay. Well, you're welcome. I just, I just, uh, this is very, very enjoyable. Yeah, thanks. It's always enjoyable when, when I speak to you, or at least when I get a chance to listen to you, most of the time I'm listening rather than speaking to you.
I enjoyed, I think it was two years ago, we had a couple of conversations in person. It was that long ago, eh? Yeah, almost two years ago. In the summer it would be two years. You were abstaining from chocolate then. Yeah, I've been able to, well, I'm on new medication for my manures and I've been on it since about six months now and it's been just enormously successful. And so I can indulge occasionally in chocolate.
You're looking good, man. Someone said that you're sexy but wrong. Which one would you rather? I don't know. Both aspects of what's been going on with us, Bernardo, I've really enjoyed it. I was telling Kurt, you're obviously
I love to talk to people even when I disagree with them at some points, but people that are coming at this with, you know, with reflective good faith, you know, it's deeply appreciative. So I suppose maybe in the end that I'm choosing sexy over. I reciprocate your feeling, by the way, John, I'm having a lot of fun. I can hardly believe it's been two hours already. Yeah, OK, let's get to debate now because we were just talking about.
idea hugging forget about that let's conflict let's have some swords where do you all disagree the most well i'm not i'm not quite clear on that actually given a lot of the discussion here um i know ontologically you disagree whereas bernardo excuse me if i'm paraphrasing incorrectly but you were saying that we can have different contents of consciousness that are all the same much like
There are different fields in quantum physics that are all one underlying field, at least in a grand unified theory. What I meant is you can produce diversity out of unity if you take into account the notion of excitation. And this is what physics does all the time.
So you can have a single field. It's all that exists. So you would say, well, then there is only one thing. How come there is this idea that there is diversity in the universe and physics solves this by saying, okay, that one field has many possible different patterns of excitation on harmonics. And those are the differences. So you account for the
And so the
The analogy, I take it, is that when I was pointing to multiple, I guess they'd be analogous to particles within consciousness, that you are saying that they are just modes of a field. Is that a good way of putting it? Under quantum field theory, there is no electron as an entity.
It's just a shorthand for a ripple on a field, so to say, in that field can ripple in different places in different ways. And those different patterns of rippling would account for the properties of the elementary subatomic particles. So under quantum field theory, there are actually no particles. There are only fields.
And that's the only way to reconcile quantum theory, which you know, we know is true at the microscopic level to reconcile that with general relativity, which we know is true at the macroscopic level. The only way to reconcile them is to use this notion of fields, which began with Maxwell in the 19th century. That was Maxwell's great
insight following up on Faraday's notion of an electromagnetic field. Maxwell's insight was to treat it mathematically as a field. But I take it that the patterns in the field are also real, because that's precisely what allows you to explain the differences. Yeah, that would be the postulate. Of course, John, as far as the philosophy of science is concerned, I am an anti-realist.
I think theoretical entities are useful fictions. And I don't think they need to be anything more than useful fictions. In other words, nature behaves as though there were quantum fields. And that's all we need to know. We do not need to know whether the quantum fields are actually and literally real, so long as they allow us to build a model that is predictively accurate.
Yeah, so I didn't mean to commit you to something there. I was just trying to get the depths of the analogy. And so I'll take it to be an analogy and not commit you to anything at the level of quantum mechanics. So what I'm trying to get at is
that there is a field and the field is real, but there's also mods and modulations in the field and they're also real. Yeah, those harmonics of the field are taken to be real insofar as they are the basis to explain the reality of measurable phenomena, which are then taken to be real too. Okay. So, and then that's one thing I'm trying to understand.
I think I'm getting from your ontology. And the other is the idea is a kind of monism that at base your ontology has to ground in one thing. Because if you have more than one thing, then you have an unexplained relationship between the things. Is that correct? Yeah, the argument against substance dualism is one interaction problem. If these substances are ontologically distinct, how can they interact?
The other one is the causal closure issue. We are very convinced that the physical world is causally closed, even though we don't really have a reason to think that because, you know, from microscopic loss to macroscopic phenomena, all kinds of unknown things can be playing, which we cannot know because there is no control, no experiment done under controlled conditions in the world at large. But so the causal
Right. So why wouldn't those push you towards something like a neoplatonic conclusion or a spinozistic conclusion or some versions of non-dualism which say, well, no, actually mind and matter are actually two different modes of some underlying thing that would explain ultimately the relationship
between them without denying their different, here's, I'm using this, I think correctly, their different modalities. And so, and, you know, and so ultimately there is, like in Neoplatonism, there is the one, and the one is neither conscious nor material, it transcends both, and therefore, right, or Spinoza's God, who is neither, right, who is neither mental nor physical, etc. So, and that
And that strikes me as following very cleanly from those two things we've just talked about, where you've got a monism and you've got this idea of modes, that everything that isn't the one thing is a mode of that one thing. This is a position in philosophy called the dual aspect monism,
arguably Spinoza was a multi-aspect monest. Yeah, he's not just dual aspect. That's unfair to Spinoza. He really thinks of it as an inexhaustible thing, right, that you can't actually capture it. So this is an official position in the sense that it's seriously discussed. I don't adopt it for the following reason.
I don't think we need to postulate a third unknown thing which only reveals itself through material and mental aspects. I don't think that's needed because all we know and can know about what we call matter
is essentially mental. Even our abstractions are mental. Our inferences are mental. The material world we see around us is made of qualities. It's made of colors, scents, flavors, mental things. So to postulate anything that isn't essentially mental,
I think is justified only if you cannot account for the facts based on nature's one given, which is mentality. The primary datum of existence is mentality. If you cannot make sense of things based on that one given, then I think you are entitled to go into abstraction territory and invent unknown things in order to account for everything. I happen to think that we can make sense of everything without having to take
Well, what about a standard sort of platonic argument that goes something like this? Well, minds seem to be spatial temporal things, at least if we're doing what you said, which is how I experience it.
And yet I seem to need to invoke non-spatio-temporal things, you know, that I will have certain logical principles, for example, that I need to make use of in my reasoning. And trying to, like, does the law of non-contradiction have a spatio-temporal existence? That seems wrong.
that seems to not capture the kind of entity it is, or most of math. And so the idea is, well, and then which do I use to explain which? Well, I actually use the logic and the mathematics to explain and make my inferential conclusions about my consciousness. And those things don't seem to be spatiotemporal. And therefore, and there you go. And that's what I need. I need something other than mentality in order to get intelligibility.
I think the tendency or the notion to postulate non spatial temporal things, I think it's when we do that, we are confusing a mental archetype with a thing. For instance, Aristotelian logic, it's something that for which there is no objective proof.
Logic is a set of axioms. For instance, using the law of excluded middle, that's an axiom. There is an entirely coherent alternative in logic called intuitionism, which dispenses with the law of excluded middle and it's valid. So logic is founded on a set of axioms that appeal directly to our intuition in a way that seems to dispense with the need for argument. It's self-evident.
The whole of mathematics in a sense is based on these things that are self-evident. 2 plus 2 is 4 by definition because we make it so, right? And we have arguments, for instance, for why multiplying a negative and a positive number results in a negative number.
These are things that are not empirical, they are mental, and yet they seem to be entirely objective. So I would say the objectivity arises from the fact that these are archetypal patterns of mind. These are the natural harmonics, the natural ways in which mind gets excited, the intrinsic natural modes of meditation. They aren't things, and yet they are objective because of that. So we don't need to postulate something non-mental.
to account for mental objectivity. All we need to understand is that mind itself has some preferential modes. I mean, that goes back to Jung and goes back to Plato's forms. So archetypes are just regularities of behavior, they don't need to be things that exist.
in a place somewhere, I think that Roger Penrose makes this mistake. I mean, if I am to be so bold as to point out a mistake by Roger Penrose, but Roger is a trialist and what he sees as the domain of values, platonic values, I think we can account for those as merely the natural frequencies of excitation of mind, we don't need to go beyond mind.
So, I mean, this is what I find challenging, because it seems like this is getting into a kind of normalism again, which is the, and that it gets, I find it very hard to reconcile that with scientific practice, because if I'm going to
The relationships between spatiotemporal things are not themselves spatiotemporal if I want to make the kinds of inferences I'm making. For example, you're making inferences about all of reality, and I take it that all of reality is not itself a spatiotemporal thing. Oh, I see. Right. And so therefore, you have to invoke non-spatiotemporal things, and they're normative on us. We acquiesce in them. That was Plato's point.
We say, oh, this is better than that. Yes, and we can move around in our logics, but I don't think that's ultimately problematic. And the point I'm trying to make is that's radically other than my experience of my mind, which is as a spatiotemporal, limited, locatable, perishing. You know, I talked to my sister and she tells me, and I think she's being directly honest, that there was a time when I did not exist.
And I take that to be the case. I don't think she's lying. And I'm not a solipsist, and I don't think you're a solipsist. And so it seems to me that there's aspects of reality that are unlike my mind, in that my mind seems to be essentially spatiotemporal, and these things are not spatiotemporal, and yet they're normative on our decisions about what is real.
I think your mind as an individual person with private conscious in their life. I think that is finite. I think our bodies are metabolism is what dissociation looks like when observed from across the dissociative boundary and dissociation comes from comes to an end.
But the underlying mind, which is the only thing that ever existed, I don't think that comes to an end. It's the thing where all beginnings and ends take place. On what I mentioned about archetypes and science, there's a paper written in 1960 by Eugene Wigner titled, I'll paraphrase it,
the amazing effectiveness of mathematics to describe the laws of nature or something like this and he used the word miracle 12 times in that paper and then his his wonder was why would axiomatic human thinking the things we take to be self-evident why would those axioms of human mentation apply to the behavior of the universe at large that's a great mystery and i think
Associating the laws of nature to archetypes of the same minds that underlies us in nature in a way that we are ontologically continues with nature would make sense of that. But I do understand the point you made, which is
If I frame everything in spatial temporal terms, then I'm taking space-time as a sort of objective primary scaffolding of nature out there. And do we have reasons to believe that to be the case? No, we have plenty of reasons to believe that that is precisely not the case. That's coming up from neuroscience. Now it's coming up from physics with loop quantum gravity in which space-time is now a derivative phenomenon of quantum processes. It's not a pre-existing scaffolding of the universe.
So the problem is that space time is built into our language, our way of making arguments. So I cannot escape that. So when I talk about excitations, I'm appealing to space time because we think in spatial temporal terms, as Kant put it in Schopenhauer too, space and time are modes of our cognition. If I am to talk about something without pre-assuming space and time, I can't even open my mouth.
because language already presupposes tenses, present, past and future presuppose a distinction between object and subject which requires space that was Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis for two things to be different. They have to be within a certain extended dimension. So don't take me wrong. I don't think space time a primary is just that if I try to be consistent with what I actually think, I can't open my mouth. So
So everything I say that is framed under the notion of space and time, you should take it as what I believe to be penultimate truths. They point at an ultimate truth that I can't capture, can't corral into the space-time framework of language. Well, I'm happy with that. I mean, that's a very, that is a neoplatonic conclusion, that the one as the ground of intelligibility is not something that
I guess what I was pointing back to was the phenomenology, which is it seems to me that
I don't know what to call it. I think in one of your videos you called it cosmic consciousness. I don't want to give you the wrong... I want to talk about the consciousness that isn't my introspective personal consciousness. That's fine. Mind at large, cosmic consciousness. I find these perfectly good descriptive terms. I used cosmic consciousness in an academic paper on purpose, tongue in cheek a little bit, because I wanted to dispel this association with new age. Cosmic consciousness is perfectly descriptive.
Okay, I won't, I'm not, I'm not invoking any new age woo woo. I just wanted your term for this, because there seems to be then, it seems to me, a difference, a very significant difference in degree or maybe difference in kind between my consciousness, which seems to be again, a perishable, spatio-temporally bound thing that is not fully present to itself. And
the cosmic consciousness, which seems to be very different, because I take it that it ultimately is identical to the ground, what I would call the one, which I take to not be spatiotemporal, to be in some sense, if it's one, it has to be present to itself throughout, because if it's not present to itself, it's not one. And so there seems to be a radical difference between my consciousness
and I assume your consciousness and the cosmic consciousness and why isn't that that's really big because you know spatial temporal and mysterious and not and co-present to not these are all big differences you know and when you get enough differences in degree don't you get a difference in kind isn't it different isn't it a different kind of thing I don't know
I think it's a common, I'll use a certain word, not in disrespect to you, it's just that it's a technical word. I think this is a common and ever more popular fallacy, the idea that differences in degree can lead to a difference in kind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness. If you've ever had a high dose, deep psychedelic trip,
you will know that that's not spatial temporal. You get into territories, into certain configurations or states of mind that are not spatial temporal at all. And you come back and you can talk about it because we just don't have the words. But those are very concrete, very present states of mind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness, a kind of trance. And we shouldn't attribute the qualities of this particular state
to mind at large. For instance, I always warn people to not anthropomorphize mind at large by attributing to it our ability to
plan to act in a premeditated way, to self-reflect. I think mind at large is instinctive, and that's why the laws of nature are so predictable and stable. So I think there is an enormous difference in quality, but not in kind. I think both are mental in the sense that both are qualitative or experiential. Well, okay. I mean, I mean,
I think you get into Soraydi's paradoxes if differences of degree don't eventually become differences of kind. And so I do think there is a need for that. But the problem of that is that you would have to pinpoint exactly at what point there is a sudden translation in kind. Because you see, I can add more speakers to my Hi-Fi, but at what point does it turn into a television? You see what I mean? Well, I mean, it's a category error.
Well, I can add a lot of individual units that can't do computation together, and they together can do computation. I mean, and so there is there is there are all those kinds of transitions. Let's take that. Let's take that an exam. This is close to me because I'm a computer engineer. First, that was my first doctorate. Everything
There's a corner of society in which I'm more or less famous for building this this this computer from scratch. Everything a computer does can be done.
with pipes, water and pressure driven. Sure, multiple realisability. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all those computations, it's just a difference of two states, zero or one. So you can have a valve that the shut or open pressure during the valves, pipes and water. So if you people in strong AI now who say that a complex enough computer will be conscious, the challenge to them is to explain at what point you add enough pipes, taps and water
For a system that is only pipes, taps and water to become conscious, if it already doesn't start as being conscious, what is it about extra pipes, taps and water that turns it conscious? I think what we are doing there is the classical hand waving. We are trying to bury the problem under a layer of obfuscating complexity, and then we hand wave our way saying,
Then something magical happens there and I can't explain it to you because it's too complex. No, it's still just pipes, taps and water. If it didn't start as conscious, it will not become conscious because the properties you change or add by adding pipes, taps and water are incommensurable with the property you want to emerge or the transitioning kind you want to have produced.
That would be my view. And then if you disagree, I would challenge you to explain to me exactly how a sufficient high number of pipes, taps and water can change something in kind. Well, let me try to finish the point I was going to make because I wanted to because I think you have an analogous problem, which is if cosmic mind is not itself intelligent, you now have the problem of how does it get arranged such that intelligence emerges?
You said it can't plan or it's acting instinctively. You can have instinctive intelligence that is not informed by metacognition.
So it's not capable of rationality then it can't reflect on itself and correct its own behavior in any fashion. That's what I think because the laws of nature are so predictable and because it took so many years so many billions of three and a half billion years of evolution. So we still have the problem of how rationality emerges right from things that are not rational. Oh that that that's not a hard problem that's a problem of AI and AI exists
Right. And so what you admit is I can take things that are non rational and put them together in the right way and get rationality. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So why and we now think that we can we got a pretty good answer of how we can take non living stuff and put it together and get living things. Yes.
That's a more subtle problem. I would say yes, but a qualified yes. Okay, so I've got a qualified yes for life and I've got a strong yes for intelligence. Yeah. And I didn't, I can't actually in either one of those say to you, this is the line, the dividing point, this is the threshold point. Biology hasn't produced it. And I, but we don't, we don't thereby say, oh, well, that means it's not real. It doesn't emerge. We say, no, no,
right? It's precisely a continuous change, not a bifurcation change. And so again, what's the difference between consciousness and, you know, we're talking about the emergence problem. If we are willing to countenance for life, and at one time we didn't, we thought, no, there's no way.
What's the difference then?
Our concept of intelligence is something that human beings came up with. There is information processing in nature. We apply the label intelligence not based on neutral objective reasons, but based on what we feel is similar enough to us to be considered intelligent. Arguably a paramecium is intelligent in the sense that it goes after the food it needs to and runs away from threats.
So there is no such a thing as a defining boundary in which there is a difference in kind. All you have is information processing. You already start with it, simple information processing, like a transition between two states all over in nature. You flip your switch, it's a transition between one state to the other. Then we get more complex interrelated transitions of states. There is no fundamental
crossing of a boundary, it's just where are we comfortable to put the label intelligence. In AI, we devised an arbitrary test to justify that. We call it the Turing test. Yeah, the Turing test is problematic, but go ahead, go ahead. So there is no fundamental transition. It's just a spectrum. It's a continuum, I would say. When Searle in 1980 wrote his paper on the Chinese room experiment, he was appealing to conscious understanding.
his argument had nothing to do with intelligence. The MIT guys were right in their review to Searle because for them intelligence is just more complex information processing. So the room is intelligent if the manual the clerk is using contains enough complex instructions for that information processing to be considered intelligent. The intuition Searle was appealing to was understanding, not intelligence. And what is that intuition? That intuition is
The conscious experience that goes coupled with certain types of information processing that conscious experience we call understanding and then the clerk inside the room, which is only the only conscious entity there.
does not have understanding because he's not absorbing all the information processing into his mind. A lot of it is in the manual. So that's for intelligence. As for life, I am sympathetic to you there, but I feel obliged to remind you that we have not achieved a biogenesis. We have arguably achieved intelligence. There are server farms today or, you know,
Computer farms using a lot of graphical accelerators running neural networks, which I would be personally comfortable comfortable to say this is intelligent. My intuition would acquiesce to that immediately. So we have achieved that we've created that but we have not created the life from non life.
What Craig Venter has achieved was to artificially create a DNA molecule and insert it into a molecule that was already living and then zap it with electricity and the molecule changed the way it makes proteins. But we have not achieved the biogenesis. So I think the jury is still out. But even if you one day achieve a biogenesis, and I personally think we will, I think what that will mean is that we have found an artificial way to induce dissociation in the universal mind.
because life metabolism is what dissociative processes look like. Okay, so it seems to me like that. I don't want to get into the exegetical disagreement about how to interpret Searle in the Chinese room, because I think there's independent arguments. I think he ultimately said the argument has to do with multiple realisability, not with understanding. I mean, that's what came out of that was my interpretation. I was not I didn't mean to attribute to that to Searle himself.
Okay, okay, so fair enough, fair enough. But I don't think we have to resolve the interpretation of Searle to continue our discussion is what I'm saying. So it sounds like that for you, the emergence of things like life and intelligence are not problematic. But there's something different for consciousness. And the problem I have with that
is we also have deep intuitions about the deep relationship and inter-defining of intelligence and consciousness. Most of our attributions of consciousness, other than yours Bernard, I don't want to misattribute to you, they generally track with attributions of intelligence. And the measures of intelligence, measures of like working memory,
correlate also with, you know, models of consciousness, the global workspace, things like that. Consciousness seems to exist for those problems. So you can compare behavior, which requires our consciousness with behavior that doesn't. Consciousness seems to be those situations that require our most sophisticated intelligence.
I recognize what you're saying. The way I would try to make sense of this. Well, I would say that we are conflating
Phenomenal Consciousness with Meta-Consciousness when we make this argument. Meta-Consciousness entails Phenomenal Consciousness and Access Consciousness, using the definitions from... From Block, Block. Block, 1995, yeah. Almost all research on Consciousness is actually exploring Meta-Consciousness insofar as it depends on the subject's ability to report on what they are experiencing.
So for instance, blind sight studies, we say unconscious sight. Well, we say that because the subject says I am not seeing, but the subject is behaving as if he or she were seeing. So I would say what has gone wrong?
broken there is the feedback loop that is required for reportability. Giulio Tononi's information integration theory that phi, magic phi number, if you cross the phi number, you're unconscious. Well, that's empirically calibrated based on subjective reports. So phi captures the moment you cross the threshold of metacognition, not the threshold of experience, pure and simple. It's very hard to study
experience pure and simple in an objective setting, because you can only study that through introspection. It's only when you suddenly become metaconscious of something you were already conscious of all along that you realize, oh darn, I have known this all along. I knew this. I just didn't know that I knew. So this is the only way for you to realize that there was an experience. The only thing that was missing was the metacognitive loop.
And I think topographically, it's really a loop because research on the neural correlates of consciousness always points out that you have to have a cycle loop.
closed. Phi depends on that structure of loops being closed. That's what's called information integration. Previous research prior to Tonani points out that you needed this feedback and feed forward ping ponging of information between two brain areas. For instance, the visual cortex and the limbic system. If you cut that, then you get, for instance, blind sight. And then we say, well, the person is not conscious of sight. No, the person is not reporting the experience of seeing
But the person is behaving entirely consistently with the awareness of seeing the phenomenal conscious of vision.
So look, this is an area where so many misunderstandings have happened throughout the history of psychology and neuroscience. If you read Jung, let's go back to the early 20th century. If you read Jung and you distill how he defines consciousness, you will see that what he's talking about is metaconsciousness. He talks about consciousness requiring an associative web
If you don't have this web of associations, it's not conscious. He talks about consciousness having to be coupled to a wheel.
And if you read what he means by the will, what he means is deliberation, reflection. He's talking about reflection, self-reflection. He talks about children slowly becoming conscious in the first years of their lives. Does he mean by that that his five children did not experience anything until they were seven? Of course, he didn't mean that. There are neuroscientists today who define consciousness as meta-consciousness. And I think it's fine to use the word that way.
The moment where it goes wrong is when we think we've solved the problem, because we are using the word consciousness, when in fact, we mean meta-consciousness, and we are not solving the problem of consciousness at all. That's my grievance about what happens today. So is meta-consciousness, though, the only way we have access, experiential access, to our consciousness? I mean, I don't have access to your consciousness.
So I think the best paper on this was from 2002. I forgot the name of the author. I can send it to you offline afterwards. Sure, sure. The author explains that we have experiences.
And meta conscious consciousness is what happens when we re represent those experiences. So suppose we're talking about perception, then we have a direct perceptual experience that's representational by definition, it's perception. But at some point, we really represent
our own inner representations in order to investigate the contents of our own awareness. That's the point where meta-consciousness arises. It's this step of re-representation. And that's not built into experience. So if you'd say, do we need that to access our experiences?
I would say no, because experiences are accessible as experiences, but we need that to explicitly access our experiences. If I go back to Jung, Jung has said it all in old-fashioned language, but everything is in Jung. Jung said in answer to Job, God is omniscient, but he doesn't know how to consult his omniscient.
The devil is much more clever in knowing how to consult omniscience. What is he talking about? He's talking about the meta-consciousness. So I think we have experiential access to everything in our own minds, but we cannot deliberately access all of it because not all of it can be placed under the microscope of reflection at our own will. We don't have that much control over the entirety of the psyche.
So let me make sure I understand you. So what you're saying is we do have access to experience that's non-reflective access. You have experiential access to that, yeah. Sorry that sounds, sorry that sounds circular. You're saying you don't want to say, like you don't want to get into an infinite request that I have qualia
We experience everything that is in our own minds, but we cannot explicitly re-represent everything that is experienced in our own minds. For instance, I'd maintain that five minutes ago, you were experiencing your breathing, but you were not re-representing the experience of your breathing.
Therefore, you were not reporting to yourself, I am breathing. But I wasn't experiencing my belief that Africa was a continent, which I'm experiencing right now. Yeah, was that so what were you trying to say that that? Yeah, I mean, I have the belief, but I'm not experiencing it until I
just did now, Africa is a continent, but I have the belief and I know that I have the belief because if you ask me, I'll say yes. And when I look on a map, I'll say there's one of the continents, but I'm not doing that constantly. So that's not the evidence. That's the evidence that I have the belief. It's not the belief. So I reject behaviorism of belief, right? The beliefs are something other beyond the behavior and you're nodding. So I think you agree with that. And yet I wasn't experiencing that.
And in fact, most of what I believe I'm not experiencing right now. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. I understand the heart of your argument. And you're poking in the right place because you already understood that the direct implication of what I'm saying is that everything has to be experiential. There is no other place for psychic contents to lay dormant waiting to be experienced because by definition, analytic idealism says everything is experiential.
So we have to have a mental mechanism that is able to compartmentalize experience such that you are not able to access all of those experiences. And now, of course, what we mean by you is part of the answer. But I would postulate two things as mechanisms for that.
One is what we've been talking about, metacognition. Metacognition not only amplifies the contents that are re-represented, because you can pile up re-representation on top of re-representation. You can know that you know that you know that you're experiencing and so on, and it obfuscates everything else. Another mechanism I would put forward to you is dissociation. I mean,
And I think there is now plenty of empirical evidence that dissociation is strong enough to do exactly what I needed to do, which is to compartmentalize experience completely, including your experience of the knowledge of Africa. Because in 2015, people in Germany, two researchers in Germany, they were dealing with a woman who claimed to have multiple dissociated alters, amongst which two claimed to be blind.
although there was nothing wrong physically with the woman's ability to see and the host personality could see perfectly well. So they had this brilliant idea of hooking her up to an EEG cap and measuring her visual cortex activity while a sighted alter was in control. And then there was normal visual cortex activity. And when the blind alter would take executive control,
visual cortex activity would disappear, even though the woman's eyes were wide open and things were happening in front of her. Now dissociation is powerful enough to be literally blinding. So I would think of a hierarchy of dissociative processes. We know many types of dissociative processes, not only forgetting things, but losing the sense of ownership to your own memories, even though you still remember the memories, but they feel like they are alien memories, somebody else's memories.
all kinds of dissociation, all different degrees of dissociation, and multiple levels of re-representation, hierarchical re-representation. I would put forward to you that these two things, these two complex processes that we know happen, the existing nature, there is no empirical doubt about it, they are sufficient to compartmentalize mind in such a way that you think a lot of things that are happening in the mind of nature
are not actually happening because they are not accessible to you. You may be dissociated from them, you may not be re-representing them, you may be obfuscating them. All kinds of hierarchical levels of compartmentalizing processes may be taking place. And I submit to you that although this sounds complex,
It's a lot more plausible and less complex than the alternatives, like the combination problem in bottom-up panpsychism or constitutive panpsychism or the heart problem of consciousness for which we don't even have in principle answers.
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
So I guess you're willing to countenance the existence of processes that are outside consciousness, modifying it, because that's what dissociation is. I mean, if it's blind... Outside your consciousness. Well, whose consciousness is it residing in? Is it residing in cosmic mind consciousness? I think there is only one consciousness. And what we consider to be us is a dissociative complex of that one consciousness.
So where is the dissociation? Where does it exist? In the one consciousness. Yeah, but some consciousness must be aware of it. So is the cosmic consciousness aware of the dissociation? That's what consciousness means. It experiences the dissociation from both sides. From the inner side, which is us, we are part of nature, we are not a separate entity, and it experiences the dissociation from the other side, the side of the inanimate universe.
And those experiences are presented to us in the form that we call the inanimate universe, which is a representation of what is essentially natural instinctive mental processes unfolding beyond the boundary of our own dissociation. So Schopenhauer, it's the will inside and it's the will outside.
So why does this dissociation occur? It's a question that I get all the time. I will answer but I first invite you to ask yourself why there needs to be a why? Is anything else in nature? No, no, wait, wait, there does because your whole I mean, the whole defense depends on
the dissociations and the differences between metacognition and dissociated cognition. That is the main thing you use to explain the external world. So if I don't have any principles by which this operates, then it's not clear to me that I've gained anything by just saying, oh, well, there's an external world.
I don't quite know how that works, any more than you can explain to me how the dissociation and the metacognitive leveling works. Yeah, okay. I understand what you mean now. You were not asking for a reason, you were asking for a process, a mechanism. I understand it now. We will answer that question once we figure out how abiogenesis ever happened, how life arose from nonlife.
Because I would submit to you that from the point of view of representation, the Kantian phenomena, the Schopenhauerian representation, what that process looked like was the emergence of life. Because for me, life is the extrinsic appearance of dissociation. So the answer to your question is exactly the same as the answer to the question, how did life arose from non-life?
It's just that you're looking at the same process from two perspectives, the first person perspective and an outside third person perspective, the perspective of representation. But it's one in the same process and therefore it follows one in the same mechanism. If there is a need to have a why beyond the mechanism, like why did the universe do this? I don't think there is a need for that. But if there were. Yeah, I wasn't asking for a motive, you know. OK, OK. I was.
I mean, I take it that you're saying that there are processes that are self-organizing in some fashion. Because we see, right. You even use that metaphor in a couple of your videos. You talk about eddies within the river. Yeah, yeah. And life is... Sorry. No, no, I'm not making accusations. I'm just trying to make sure that I'm getting you correctly. And whatever life is, it's a very complex self-organizing thing. And I actually think that Varela is right.
I'm with you all the way. What I'm putting forward does not require any change in our scientific understanding of how life works and how it arose.
provides a another perspective to the same process. I'm saying that there is actually an inner perspective.
that the representation is not the whole story. It's a valid story. It is an accurate representation of the process. So knowledge gained by looking at the process as it unfolds in the physical world is valid knowledge. All I'm saying is that the thing in itself, which lies behind how it's represented by our perception and cognitive apparatus, that thing in itself is mental and it is of a dissociative character. But it's not changing any science.
No, no, but yeah, I get that. I hope I wasn't implying that because I didn't see you saying that. But that's sort of what the problem I'm coming up with. It looks like the science stays the same.
You invoke the principle of parsimony, all invoke a principle, which is don't invoke in your explanation an entity more controversial than the entity in the thing you're trying to explain. And you're ultimately invoking what looks to me like God, which I would need independent evidence for this. I mean, other than, right, in a circular fashion, I would need independent evidence for cosmic mind, right, in order to
make this argument run. And that's been a very problematic thing to do for a very, very long time. The thing is, you're appealing to controversial, something controversial, which is an entirely culture-laden thing. Is it controversial or not? It's entirely subjective. I didn't talk about God anywhere. I even volunteered to you that I think this universal mind is instinctive and naturalistic. It's not premeditated. It's not anthropomorphic. So
that you attribute the quality of being controversial to it, I would bear to submit to you that it's an entirely subjective value judgment. Okay, what I meant was, other than that, let's try and make it a little bit more formal, that I don't invoke something that requires argumentation as much as the argument I'm giving.
I'll submit to you that mine is the simplest in terms of argumentation. It requires no miracle. It requires no strong emergency. It requires no magical combination of fundamentally separate subjective points of view. And there is a host of empirical substantiation for it. Beat that. Well, I mean, I still think you have the equivalent of what the panpsychist has. You have an explanation.
needs to be forthcoming of how I get living minded, rational entities like me out of a mind that is not biologically alive, that is not capable of rationale, etc, etc, etc. It seems to me that I don't know what I've gained by replacing the external world from which I have to explain intelligence and consciousness and rationality from saying, well, there's this other mind out there
that is but it's it's not capable it doesn't have rationality it doesn't have personality it doesn't have all the features of god for example and it's and right and and and then there's some self-organizing process that emerges well that sounds to me like well there's matter it doesn't have all these properties there's some self-organizing process and it and mind and life emerge what's the difference between the two moves if you think it's implausibly complex to say
that complex minds like ours have evolved from a very simple, phenomenal substrate. Imagine how implausible it is to say that complex minds like ours emerged out of non-mind. Which one is better?
They seem to me to be not different. That's my point. One requires a huge ontological jump from no mind to mind. The other one only requires degrees. The thing is, you're very focused on this notion that degree can lead to a difference in kind, which I think is a fallacy. But you're invoking it. You're invoking it because you're saying that the cosmic mind is ultimately different in kind
That's why me calling it something like God is fundamentally a mistake because it doesn't have some of the fundamental features of my personhood, which is what the traditional definition of God is.
I'm not saying it's different in kind, because I'm saying it's also mental in the sense that its processes are of an experiential or qualitative nature. But the complexity of those processes, the inner interactions, the changes of state, the structure and dynamics of those processes can vary over large degrees. And the substrate is still the same field of subjectivity, the same field of phenomenality. So there is no ontologically, there is no transition in kind. It's a transition of
sophistication, the complexity of the processes that unfold there, if you will, the underlying mind at large, you can look at it as a lake with simple straight ripples. And our minds with all kinds of, you know, higher level mental functions, feedback mechanisms, intelligence, rationality, self-reflection, self-awareness, re-representation and all that stuff,
as a very stormy water in a cup, but very stormy water in a cup with all kinds of patterns of movement that are much more complex waves that fold in upon themselves and form reflective surfaces, all kinds of access patterns going on.
But you're invoking new kinds, all kinds of patterns, all kinds of things that are real. Yes, but not a different kind of the medium that is excited.
So there's ultimately physics, which isn't just matter. It's time and space and quantum crap and relativistic crap and some of it gets very complex and that's me and some of it doesn't get very complex and that's a rock. I mean, again,
I think there's a difference in complexity, which leads to different properties.
And you can pass judgments based on the properties that are available, but I don't think there is a difference in kind as far as the ontological substrate is concerned. It's still mental. It's still subjectivity. You can have very simple ripples and very complex ripples, but it's still just ripples in water. It's still just water. Or you can have
I want to point out to you the irony that you're using a physical analogy to describe this, thereby pointing to the fact that physical things can actually do the kind of stuff you're pointing to. I'm not denying that which we call the physical. I'm denying the theoretical inference that that which we call the physical has a root in something non-mental. But I'm not denying the experience of the world that we call physical. Right. John, I feel like you're holding back. What are your true thoughts?
No, I'm not holding back in the sense that there's stuff I want to say that I'm not saying. I don't mean this pejoratively to either Bernardo or myself. I think there's an intuitive vision here that we're not necessarily sharing. What do you mean by that? I think the intuitions about
I mean, it seems to me like Bernardo was saying, the world exists independently of my mind, but it doesn't exist independently of some mind that I'm not directly aware of. And that strikes me as problematic because I would need evidence for that mind independent of me in order to make the argument run. I got it. So the analogy I like to use for this is the following.
Unless we are solipsists, unless we think that the only mind going on is our own mind, the ones we have direct access to, I would consider that something that we don't need to debate. We can reject that. I even wrote about an argument to reject that. I know you reject it. As Russell said, even those who purport to believe in solipsism actually don't act as if they believe... It's a performative contradiction. Yes, totally.
So unless you wear that, you have to infer something outside of that which you have direct access to. You have to make an inference beyond your own mind, unless you're a solipsist. So the difference is, what is that inference? How complex, how parsimonious and how explanatorily powerful is that inference? But everybody has to make that inference. So the analogy I use is the following. My mind is the earth I can see until the horizon.
beyond the horizon, I cannot see directly. But I need to infer that the earth, that there is something beyond the horizon to make sense of empirical experience. Otherwise, I do not have a satisfactory explanatory model for how you and me seem to be sharing the same world and all that, granting that you also are conscious. I reject solipsism, too. I reject solipsism, too. So, my inference is the following. Up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental.
Beyond the horizon, it's just more mind. It's just that I cannot see it. The physicalist will say, up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental. Beyond the horizon, it's a totally different kind of stuff that is exhaustively definable in terms of pure quantities and out of which we do not have a way even in principle to derive qualities. Take your pick.
Oh, well, I mean, that's a little bit of a prejudicial description, because it sounds like there's no problems in your in your position also. But let's, let's, let's, let's, let's do that, then. So we agree that there isn't solipsism. So we agree that there are things that exist outside of my consciousness, and that takes care of the problem that I didn't exist at one point, and I won't exist at another point. And so the issue then, I guess, becomes
The reason why people believe in the external world typically is they think of things going on outside of any human consciousness. Before there were sentient beings, the earth was forming, the sun was forming, things like that, evolution was eventually going on, etc.
And what they, the physicalist will then say is, well, when I look at reality, when I first come upon it, where there has not been any human beings, I don't see any evidence for intelligence and I don't see any evidence for directed behavior. I don't see any evidence for what I typically need in order to attribute mine to something. So I don't attribute mine to my refrigerator normally because it doesn't have blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't do all these things. And that's why, you know, and that's how I make distinctions between
my mind and the dog's mind etc in terms of the behavioral consequences and the physicalist says well it looks like most of the universe is behaving as if there is no mind and what i would need for the cosmic mind is evidence outside of human consciousness of things that are mental like in behavior and that's exactly not what the universe seems to operate like it seems to operate non-teleologically non-intelligently
It seems to happen really haphazardly. It doesn't seem to have even the basis of moral concerns or emotional attachment to anything. Why would I attribute mind to that? Okay. I don't think you're right when you say there is no evidence for that. But suppose you were right that there is no evidence for us to attribute mind to the world. I would still say
that is by far still the least problematic option, given what options are on the table. How do you produce qualities out of purely quantitative properties? Or how do you merge fundamentally different fields of experience? It's a different matter. This is coming down to intellectual taste. I mean, really, I mean, because you're asking me to say that
you know, we have some, our experience has some special role. Like, you know, this is one of the criticisms made by speculative realists, you know, correlationism, that we're binding all of ontology to our particular ontology. And that seems like a really, really unjustifiable
I will answer that. Let me just very briefly insist on the point I made before. In the technical literature, there are papers arguing that the problems faced by physicalism and panpsychism
leads to incoherence. And these are technical arguments made by different people. I've read a lot of these arguments, too. And there are also people that counter those arguments. It's not fair for you to present it as a resolved debate or consensus. I don't think that's fair. There has been no technical argument saying that analytic idealism is incoherent in principle. These arguments have been made for the other two options.
but there is no in principle incoherence argument. For instance, for constitutive panpsychism, the incoherence argument takes the following form. If fundamentally separate fields of subjectivity experiencing different qualities were to merge, it would lose the original fields of experience. Like if the compound subject is seeing purple and the sub-subjects were seeing red and blue,
then they would subsume themselves into the higher level subject, which contradicts what the panpsychism is trying to do, which is to follow the rules of chemical combinations in physicalism. The molecules that compose tissues don't disappear. So you have an argument like that. There isn't a technical argument claiming incoherence for analytic idealism. There may be. I find it very hard, but there may be.
But still, let me grant you that I cannot use this line of arguments. And let's look at what you said. You said for something to be minded, you need to care about relationships. You need to be emotionally bound to something. Solving problems even. Yeah. Does a mosquito have those properties? Does a crocodile have all these properties you're alluding to? Can you envision that water flea
is a purely instinctive, reactive, conscious being that does not have any of these experiential qualities that we have. A paramecium. I think paramecium has the sort of basic abilities of making sense, aspectualizing its environment. So it relates to some things as food and some things as poison.
And I think that aspectualization is continuous with how you're aspectualizing right now, you're seeing me as a man, you're seeing me as etc etc. So there's deep continuity between their capacity for aspectualization and mine, but that doesn't mean that they can aspectualize
But can you attribute a lot simpler conscious in their life to them than you have? I think the paramecium in some
sense has to care about some information rather than the other. It wouldn't be my full-blown subjective experience of love, but there's many subjective emotions I have like pride that I don't think a dog has, but I think a dog is nevertheless conscious. So I think a paramecium, I mean, that's one of the big differences between us and between standard existing computers.
is we have to care about the information we're processing, which means we devote attention and arousal, we dispose metabolic energy towards it. I think the paramecium is doing all of these things. Okay, so I'm with you that there is a continuum. I'm just trying to establish that in that continuum there is a point of much lower, much higher simplicity than where we are.
That's the only thing I want to establish, that they can be conscious in their life with a lot more simplicity than the one we experience as human beings. And we are both in a continuum. Okay, now, the paramecium has what philosophers call intentionality, because there is something outside the paramecium that isn't the paramecium. Now, for the cosmic mind, there is nothing outside of it by definition, so it cannot have intentionality.
So all its conscious states have to be endogenous and there can't be this actualization that you're talking about because there isn't an outside environment. So what I propose is it's very
In terms of emotions and qualities, it's much simpler in their life, and it does not have intentionality. It's purely endogenous. It's of a different kind. Now, is there evidence that that might be going on? Even if there weren't, I would say I still have the best theory on the table because the problems of the others are insurmountable. But recent research is showing two things, and this is fresh out of the oven, one of them, not the first I will talk about.
There is a lot of study now showing that in terms of network topology, and I'm not talking about pretty images, pretty photographs, I'm talking about network topology, which is quantified and mathematized. There are surprising similarities between the network topology of the universe at its largest scales, galaxy clusters and all that, and neuronal networks in mammals.
Yeah, that arguments made in existence for quite a while design in nature, I forget the author of the book, he points out those that formal similarity, but it's also similarity with, you know, how, how things branch in your in your lungs, how river deltas branch out, things like that. Recent research
The most recent one is done by an Italian neuroscientist and an Italian physicist. You have the advantage on me then, I guess. Go ahead. Well, Bernardo, is that not a moot point? Because if we had more cosmic data and we find out that the universe looks completely different from another point of view, you still wouldn't say that your theory is invalidated. So in some sense, it's neither a pro nor a con. This is more than just what it looks like. That's what I'm trying to highlight.
Quantitative studies have been done at the University of California at Irvine, I think in 2014, and there is this more recent research done by this Franco Vazza and Alberto Felletti, these two guys. Oh, I'm amazed I could retrieve that. Normally I'm not that good. Mine at large has been kind to you.
This is a quantitative network structure and network topology analysis. And it shows the similarity is really between neural networks and the universe. And it doesn't involve the fractal patterns of arteries in our lungs or the fractal patterns of river delta as it goes. It's much more specific than that. Now there is a paper fresh out of the oven published by a physicist called Stephen
Are these papers proposing that there's information processing going on in this structure? I mean, that's going to violate all kinds of relativistic limitations, etc. No, no, okay. So before I talk about Stefan's paper, first this, because it's a good point. Of course, there is information processing. What you don't have is closed loops of information because the age of the universe is not
not long enough for information to go across galaxy clusters and close a loop. There hasn't been enough time for that to happen. So what you cannot have is Tononi's information integration phi topologies. There hasn't been time for that, which only means that the universe is then not self-reflective.
but it can still be phenomenally conscious or it can be phenomenal consciousness because the letter does not require disclosed loops of information integration for which, you're right, there has not been time. But information processing in a feed-forward manner, of course, that's happening all the time, and the universe is an information processing engine. Actually, there is a whole field of physics called digital physics, which is based entirely on this postulate. But the paper of Stefan
And it's amazing. It's beginning of research. There's a long way to go. But what he's showing is that the laws of physics may correspond in terms of model models may correspond to the weights of neurons in the neural network.
that the universe may be learning its laws of physics. So, John, if you say this is all circumstantial, I will be the first to jump and agree with you. But you put me on the spot of producing this kind of argument.
Is there any evidence? And then I would say, well, yeah, there is. There actually is. And it's evidence that we are so confused about that we cannot make sense of it. We do not know why galaxy clusters look more like a neuron than they look like the interior of a galaxy. Why should that be the case? There is nothing in our understanding of nature that would suggest why this relationship is there at all.
that it is there and that its information processing can actually be modeled as the weights of a artificial neural network in the process of learning. But only a feed forward artificial network, which is exactly the point you just made, which means it can't have a lot of the properties
that we find in any networks that do feedback loops on themselves. Correct. It isn't even capable of doing Hinton's deep learning or anything like that. Correct. Right? And so, I mean, so this is going to be a pretty, sorry, I don't mean to be insulting to your view. I'm not. Okay. That's a pretty stupid consciousness. And it has no intentionality. I mean, and so you're talking about a mind without, without intent, you said without intentionality, and without even rudimentary intelligence, I mean,
Well, be careful, be careful. There are methods of neural network learning, which are only feed forward, particularly unsupervised learning techniques that do not require this deep feedback mechanism. So you can still have some intelligence. But remember, I started today by saying I am a naturalist. I'm just being consistent with it.
Well, yeah, and I want to I won't get into the technicalities because then you have learning speed problems and your self correction problems and debugging problems, which is why, you know, we plausibly have meta consciousness and meta intelligence, right, we can use our intelligence to improve our intelligence. We learn literacy, for example, that improves our capacity for problem solving.
Like, yeah, I mean, I guess what comes down to it is, I'm not quite sure what the difference is now, because I got something out there that's no intentionality, which is unlike what I experienced. I mean, let me be fair to you, I do experience states in deep meditation that are states without
Intentionality and for which you could plausibly say I'm not exercising any significant degree of intelligence and those are the pure consciousness events and they're reliable. I've I've achieved that that sounds like an achievement. So I've been in those states multiple times. I know there's lots of research Foreman has done it and there's lots of things on that.
Is that the kind of thing what people, I mean, I know it's not exactly the same, but I'm trying to get something from within what I normally point to with consciousness. Is that the kind of consciousness you see for mind at large, the kind of consciousness without intentionality and intelligence I have in pure consciousness event, in which I'm not even conscious of my consciousness, I'm just conscious? Is it something like that?
Yes, just a quick clarification. When I use the term intentionality, I mean it in a technical sense. I do too. I mean aboutness. I mean aboutness. Yeah. Okay. Then we are aligned. And that is lost in the PC. That's by definition. By definition, there cannot be intentionality because there is no aboutness. There is only the thing by definition. There's no outside. Intentionality arises when you have... But we achieve intentionality.
Yeah, because there is an outside world. An outside world is created once you have a boundary. I would say that boundary is the dissociative boundary. It's the dissociation that creates the distinction between the inside and the outside. And now you can have intentionality or aboutness because there is something outside that you don't identify yourself with. So intentionality emerges out of non intentional states. Through dissociation. But you know that the problem of intentionality is regarded as deeply a problem
Intentional content
No, no, the existence of intentionality. I mean, so the big problems are consciousness, intentionality, right? How do you get, I mean, that's what I think is actually going on, by the way, I think, in Searle's Chinese room argument, Searle often describes it that way, is how do I get intentionality? How do I get the things inside the room to be about things outside the room?
And he attributes that to consciousness, but obviously that's not what you're claiming because the universal consciousness, sorry, I keep changing the names on you. That's unfair. The mind at large doesn't have intentionality.
So it's no different than the Chinese room, right? Because it doesn't have intentionality. No, because remember, I mentioned to you that my interpretation of Searle's thought experiment was that what's missing is consciousness. And here... But what the consciousness supplies is intentionality. That's why Searle claims, again and again, it's an argument about meaning. All the syntax is there, but as he says, there's no semantics there. Yes. The intentionality, right? Yeah, but notice now that I am already starting with phenomenal consciousness.
So that problem of intentionality you don't have. But how does consciousness produce intentionality? Don't you have that problem? Because consciousness at large doesn't have intentionality. But once there is a dissociative boundary, then there is an outside state of the world and there is an inside state of the altar.
through evolution, you will start trying to represent outside states into inner states, because that's how you survive. Now that representation will never be mirrored, because otherwise you would dissolve into an entropic soup. We've known that since 10 years. No, no, no, I think I think I'm not presenting. How would I give a machine the capacity for intentionality? The moment Oh, but now you're
You're not thinking within the framework of what I'm putting forward. If you're assuming the machine is not consciousness, no, no, but you've already admitted that consciousness, that base consciousness doesn't have intentionality. Yes. So you don't get to have intentionality coming along for the ride. Correct. Consciousness. That's unfair. Yeah. I need to explain. So you start with consciousness. So now what you have to explain is having started with phenomenal consciousness, how does intentionality arise? How does it arise?
Because it's better to survive if you can represent the external environment into inner states,
the organism will do that. And these inner states will then be phenomenal states. What else can they be? I'm saying that everything is in consciousness, then they will. That's how intentionality arises. No, no, that's a teleological explanation. That's telling me that no, it's not telling me how it arises ontologically. It's telling me how it arises teleologically. It's like, well, how does the eye work? Well, there was evolution and natural selection selected for things that had vision. And that's how vision arose. Okay, no, no, that's not
That's not what I'm asking for. What you're asking for is how did sensory organs evolve. You are asking for a mechanism for that.
And the answer is the same. No, no, I'm not. Because the answer for how my eye evolved is the same answer for how my foot evolved natural selection variation. But that doesn't mean that my foot functions according to the same principles that my eye does. I want to know the different things. I don't want to know the history. I want to know the structural functional organization that makes it causally possible.
That's what I was trying to say. You will represent external states into inner states. Representation invokes intentionality. You're invoking the very thing you're trying to explain. Because what's the difference between a representation and a non-representation is that a representation possesses intentionality. Then the question you're asking is, how did the first sensory organ arose? Because that's what does the representation.
That's what does the representation. That doesn't tell me how representation works. What I'm trying to say is the answer to your question is the same answer that the physicalist would give you because it's the same process. It's how did sensorium arise? How did it happen?
Well, we have evolutionary biologists studying that. How would the inner states of an organism represent the outer states of the world around it? So I don't need a consciousness explanation, therefore, to explain how intentionality emerges out of consciousness. I can give a completely physicalist mechanism, because that's what evolution is. It's a complete... You can give a purely physical explanation if you already started with consciousness, because that's what solves the problem Searle was referring to.
I don't see that because you said the base consciousness doesn't have intentionality. So I need a mechanism of how something without intentionality gets intentionality. And then you offer me evolution, which is a completely physicalist explanation, which means I don't need consciousness to explain how I get intentionality out of consciousness. Let me try it another way. Try it another way. So let's forget consciousness. Let's talk purely in physical terms. Is it okay that we say
physical organisms, very simple life, three and a half billion years ago, evolved so to represent physical states of the world outside into internal states. I think that's a very hard problem, like knowing how that works. But you accept it happened? Yes. Okay. Now,
If we accept that this happened, what is the problem remaining? The problem remaining is that those internal physical states are not conscious, so there isn't intentionality. But what I'm saying is that the physicality is the extrinsic appearance of what's going on, but the intrinsic view, the thing in itself, those internal states are phenomenal states, because they cannot be anything else. No, no, the problem is that intentionality doesn't
I think this is a problem also for physicalism, right? So I think you're mistaking what I'm trying to do, right? Intentionality is not like any physical, I mean, this is Brian Kentwell-Smith. I can be an intentional relationship to things outside the light cone. I just did it. I thought about it.
That's what it's about. But I'm not in causal relationship. I can't be with things outside the light code. I can think about Napoleon and I can't be in causal relationship with him because he doesn't exist anymore. Intentionality is not, you can't, it's not reducible to causation in any kind of easy fashion. And so I don't think you can just say consciousness without intentionality, some causal process and then intentionality.
I think intentionality is a philosophical problem. But what you described as intentionality just now, like Napoleon and what's happening beyond the event horizon of the cone of the universe that we can see because the light has already arrived at where we are.
That's more complex than, I think, the normal definition of intentionality in philosophy, which is just associated with perception, an internal conscious state that reflects... I don't agree with that. I don't think so. Maybe we move in different philosophical circles. The part of philosophy that overlaps with cog-sci is really, really concerned. Take a look at, like, Brian Cantwell-Smith, he's a colleague of mine at the University of Toronto, and, you know, all of Third Wave, you know,
cognitive science is deeply influenced by phenomenology, and so Husserl's notions of intentionality, which are supposed to deal with things like this, are also pertinent issues. And I think, you know, that's what Husserl's talking about. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that is born in a language. That's why he uses the example of Chinese, right? He's not talking about just simple perceptual. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that's born in Chinese. I assume that Chinese people can talk about Napoleon, and they can talk about things outside the light cone.
I'm probably missing something in your argument. I don't see the problem. Once the inner states are conscious states, associations will be established through learning between your inner states and your model of the world. You can't get intentionality out of association. This is one of the problems that bedevils neural networks.
When neural networks are firing, these two nodes are firing, these three nodes, John, Love and Mary, they're all associated with each other. But that can't distinguish between Mary loves John and John loves Mary, which is an intentional difference. And that's still an existing problem for neural networks that hasn't been solved.
I think that's a representation problem because neural networks in silicon as we do them today, digital neural networks, they don't have symbolic anchoring to the thing that is perceived. Everything is encoded in bytes, which are symbols. There is work done by an AI researcher,
17 years ago, began 17 years ago. He used to work at Nokia Research and he wrote a series of books about conscious computers. I think they are flawed philosophically, but he makes this point clearly that
Sorry, I have to interject as a moderator.
Before we go forward, some people are saying rightly so, that they know plenty more about Bernardo's position than they do about yours, John, and that's because Bernardo's is so outside the norm for us, for the majority of people, that it's more interesting to hear in many ways. I think it's also credit to how well he articulates and defends his position. I think we should give credit to him. It's not just that it's
John, do you mind giving the audience a background as to what you believe exists ontologically or what your philosophical point of view is? Well, I tried to do that at the beginning. And part of the reason why I think Bernardo and I are not just shouting at each other is that there are overlaps between our ontologies in certain ways.
So I describe myself as a naturalist, which means, as I said, I'm not a materialist because I don't think that everything's made out of matter. I think that's a ridiculous claim.
I don't think you can do science with materialism. I think scientists who claim they're materialists are engaging in performative contradiction. I think scientists have to invoke non-spatial temporal relations to do science, and Berman and others have argued that, and therefore trying to reduce it even to causal relations and spatial temporal relations, I think, can't explain how you do science.
I do think that everything we do has to be consistent with what our science, and I don't think Bernardo is like, disagreeing with that either. So I agree. Okay. So thank you, Bernardo. So I, my position is, and again, I'm not, I'm not isolated any more than Bernardo is. I think he's a little bit more of a pioneer right now. I'll give him credit for that. But there are many people
outside of like, I would say like neuroscience and things like that within cognitive science. And that's the only audience I'm really that conversant with who would agree with what's called a non reductive physicalism.
And this is the idea that you have to count the layers at which we're doing our science, the layers, these are just metaphors, by the way, the layers at which we're doing science as real as any other layer we point to with our science, because you get into all kinds of contradictions, you don't. So I think this world that I'm experiencing right now is as real as the world of quantum probabilities, for example.
And the reason with that is that if you drop down to that level, you lose all the differences that are required for science and required for knowledge and required for information, blah, blah, blah. I can do that at more length. But I'm not trying to defend it right now. I'm just trying to describe it. I'm just trying to show you though that it does come out of reasoning and argumentation, right? And so
I think that there, and unlike many people, so this is where I'm a bit of a pioneer, I'm much more of a neoplatonist, I think we have to talk about, equally about emergence and emanation. I think there's ways in which reality, in which
the possibilities of form are really structured. And I don't equate actuality with reality. That's the influence of Eastern thinking on me. I think that possibility, we have to treat possibility just as real as actuality. And we do this with things like potential energy and stuff like that anyway. And laws, what are laws? Laws aren't advanced. They're not actions. They're real constraints on what can happen. They're real. And so as much as there is emergence bottom up,
from the physical substrata, there's emanation down from the non-spatial temporal sets of constraints on possibility. And some people say that that's sort of cryptically Whitehead's God or something like that. I don't know if I have to go there, but I wouldn't say it's something like the neoplatonic one.
And, you know, and that's not really that strange. If you look at the history, if you look at people, you know, John Spencer's work on the eternal law, other people like that, a lot of the people that brought about the revolutions that we're talking about right now in science, or that we're pursuing, I saw in our discussion about science, a lot of them had direct
like explicit connections to Neoplatonism or similar things, or they had connections to like what Einstein was Spinoza, and Spinoza is deeply in the Neoplatonic tradition. He uses, you know, he basically co-ops Proclus' elements of theology for the structure that he uses for the ethics and things like that. So what I'm saying is, although I don't, I want to be clear, I'm not, I don't present that position,
a position you see in people like John Scotus Erigina of the complete interpenetration as the consensus position. I want to say that there have been notable people within the history, even the recent history of science that have had this position, and very important people in the history of philosophy, the whole Neoplatonic tradition, especially post Platinus, John Scotus Erigina as an example. So I think that reality is
understood in the way our cognition works, simultaneously bottom up and top down fashion, that there are bottom up causal interactions, top down constraints, which aren't causes. And they afford all of the structural functional organization that accounts for most of the phenomena that are in dispute here. I do think, for example,
And I haven't I haven't tried to make that argument here. People can look at it. I have an existing series out there untangling the world knot with Greg Enriquez. I do think you can fatten up access consciousness so that you can get a lot of phenomenal consciousness out of it.
So one of the main things I argue is that if you give a system intelligence and you give it relevance realization, you're giving it foregrounding and backgrounding of information, you're giving it aspectualization, you're giving it a lot of what I call the adverbial quality, the here, the here-ness and the now-ness and the togetherness of
which is not the same thing as the standard qualia of blueness and greenness and yellowness and things like that. And the thing that's interesting about those adverbial qualia is unlike the adjectival qualia, they don't disappear in the pure consciousness event. They're still there. People describe the here-ness as presence, the now-ness as eternity, and the togetherness as absolute unity.
So the adverbial qualia seem to be necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And the adjectival qualia that gets so many of these arguments going, I think, aren't necessary and sufficient for consciousness. I don't think that means they're unproblematic. I don't think I've solved that problem. But what I think I would argue is that we can thicken up access consciousness to get a lot of the phenomenology of our consciousness. And that makes me not so convinced that we won't be able to cross the gap even more like we have with
life and with intelligence. So that's my position. Now, I am not, I hope I didn't come across, arrogant enough to claim that I have a foreclosure argument, and that therefore, I think Bernardo is insane, or his position is not intellectually respectable. Far from it. I wouldn't be doing this if I thought that. But you were asking me to state what my position is, and that's where my position is. And so, one more thing, Bernardo. Like I said, I
I want to be able to explain what I think is the base state of consciousness for us and that Fernando said it might be the best analog for cosmic mind, which is the pure consciousness event. And like I said, that seems to be completely the reason we don't blank out and lose memory of it is because it's not absolutely absent of content. It has no representational conceptual propositional content. It has no adjectival content, but it does have
And many of the people, you know, you know, bars
is explicit that the function of consciousness is higher-order relevance realization. Working memory, Lin Hasher, is higher-order relevance realization. Tononi, well, his isn't about relevance realization. Yeah, be asking for his test of consciousness.
It's a test for relevance realization, a test for appropriateness, blah, blah, blah, blah. Same thing with Clearman's and his caring, higher order caring for lower order representations. All the higher order ones, because they can't be inferential, involve some kind of appropriateness or relevance thing. So a lot of the access models are already converging on relevance realization. And I think you can thicken that up, if you'll allow me a metaphor, to get a lot more of the phenomenology. That's my position.
Now, the thing about that is, the thing that's kind of like going like this between Bernardo and I is suppose that turned out to be right, Bernardo could still make his arguments.
His argument, I don't think his arguments ultimately would be defeated if that turned out to be right, because he seems to be running them, and I don't mean seem in the pernicious sense, I'm just saying it is my judgment that he seems to be running them on the basis of sort of more fundamental features.
That's what I've been trying to get clear about. I hope that was fair to you, Bernardo. I hope that wasn't a misrepresentation. Can I ask a couple of clarifying questions? Do we understand correctly that adverbial qualia can be reduced to pure non-phenomenal access consciousness in your view?
Yeah, I think, although part of what I'm trying to do is undermine the clean distinction, and other people have noted this for Block, right, the clean distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. Because people have pointed out, well, there seems to be something it is like to access, right, or to be poised. And I take poisedness, which is the defining feature of access consciousness, to be a metaphor for very sophisticated relevance realization.
That's what I take it to mean. That I will bring out of my long-term memory what's most appropriate and I will structure it in my working memory so that it best fits the environment, et cetera, et cetera. But you do think we should be able in principle at least to reduce adverbial qualia
to non-phenomenal access consciousness. If by what it reduces that I would be able to give an explanation of how it arises out of something that is, yeah, that's what I mean by it. That doesn't mean that I think it's ontologically reducible for reasons I've already given, but yes. Oh, so it could be that that entity that's performing access consciousness has adverbial qualia as fundamental properties of it
at least in potentiality. Yeah, yes. So that would make a pen scientist of you. It depends. I mean, and this is a debate. And again, we've had this debate, I don't know, we'll resolve it. I mean, it makes me a deep continuity theorist. And whereas,
Again, is that enough of a difference of degree, that it's a difference in kind, etc. And so I take it that the difference between the deep continuity, I mean, I've had debates with JP Morceau about this, and he is a panpsychist, although he seems to be loosening that, that there's a difference between panpsychism and deep continuity in
So that the explanatory principles might be the same, but that doesn't mean the entity is the same. And we do sort of countenance that idea, because we use the same explanatory principles for things that exist at different scales, for example, even spatiotemporally, et cetera, et cetera. And regarding adjectival quality, you think those are more problematic? Yes, I do. I do. And what I do think
is that we, so this is a meta critique, I think we are holding the topic of consciousness hostage to Adjective Aqualia when we have clear evidence for states of consciousness, if that's the right word, like the Pure Consciousness event, in which Adjective Aqualia are not present.
And I think if we had adjectival qualia without the adverbial qualia, we would have a genuine humian monster. We would have no togetherness, here-ness, now-ness to these experiences. And we would have the humian monster of these completely atomic blips of qualia. And I don't think that would constitute a consciousness anymore. That would still leave a problem there. The integration problem would still be there. Exactly, exactly, exactly.
I think I understand your view. I do think the burden of argument is more on you because you would have them to explicitly make sense of how at least adverbial qualia can emerge from non qualia simply because of a kind of access configuration. I understand that this is where you were leaning. I would point out that the Giulio Tononi himself has come out
I think it's because there are a lot of the problems. Well, this goes to another issue. Oh, crap, I was supposed to end at three o'clock. I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry. No, I don't want to make the move or say something, but I mean, I think there's deep connections between the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of relevance. And I don't think it's a coincidence that all the, all, most of the theories of the functionality of consciousness are converging on the relevance realization idea. And I mean, I make that argument.
And then I do think that there's important overlap between, I've already argued this, between intelligence and consciousness in some fashion. But I agree with you, it's not an intelligence that has anything like intentionality or meta-reflective capacities. And I think that has to be something like a base relevance realization ability that we get with that verbal qualia. So I'm trying to close the explanatory gap. Okay, let's close this video as well. Seems like you've got to get going.
I don't want to sneak in a last word like that against Bernardo. I want to give him a chance to respond. My last word is for you. Regardless of whatever ontological differences we seem to have, John and I,
I think our mission is the same or the reason why we are doing what we do is to address the meaning crisis. I don't use that term, but ultimately I think we are big buddies, John. We are allies in what we are trying to accomplish.
Yeah, and there's a lot about what you say that I think is really important. I mean, I don't ultimately agree with you on some points, but I think you can see that there's important ways in which I am really significantly modifying the standard ontology to try and address some of your concerns. So at least, I at least think I'm responsible to your concerns. I know you don't have to, I'm not asking you to agree with me, but I am asking you to see that I am responsible to your concerns. I acknowledge that and appreciate it very much.
Thank you very much for saying that. I want to thank you both. I'm incredibly blessed and I'm so lucky that I get to be a vessel for or a cup for your holy water or your manna, at least temporarily. So thank you so much for that. I want to let the audience know about where to find out more about you just in a second. I also should let the audience know
I've been told I need to mention this quite a bit more about I have a Patreon and I always feel slimy and filled with discomposure when I talk about that. But some people say just advertise it more. So if you want to see more conversations like this, where there are cognacentis like Bernardo and John duking it out, but also at the same time, loving one another in their own
Yeah, please please do visit patreon.com slash Kurt J Mungo it every dollar and literally every dollar helps every patron helps and it helps me extremely Not only financially but motivationally to just to know that there are some people that voluntarily they don't have to pay you'll get this content no matter what but they support it and that's I'm Well, thank you so much
With that said, I wanted to talk to you all about Jesus and Buddha and what's the difference and are they compatible? And what about God and free will? And there are quite a few more questions. I think I have two or three. I'm happy to talk with Bernardo again. I'm very happy. It's been a delight. My brother in arms. Very much. I'd be happy to talk with him again. Great. We'll arrange that again. And if anyone wants to know where to find out more about you, John, and then Bernardo, where do they go?
The best thing, I mean, other than, you know, doing academic search on Google Scholar for my papers is, you know, go onto YouTube, go onto my channel, look at Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, which is about the meeting crisis, of course. You can take a look at a dialogical series I did with Greg Enriquez about consciousness called Untangling the World Knot. By the way, Bernardo, that's a reference to Schopenhauer, right? Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness.
And then I'm currently doing one called The Elusive Eye, The Nature and Function of the Self, with Greg Enriquez again and Christopher Mastropietro. So that would be so. And then if you want to see more of these kinds of dialogues on my channel, I have an ongoing dialogical series called Voices with Reveke, where I try to exemplify how we can weave together argumentation and genuine dialogos. Bernardo.
Just go to BernardoKestrup.com. There's a lot of free stuff linked from there. Okay, great. And if you all want, I can give you the video files for this. Once it's up on our site, if you want to use it as extra content on yours, you're more than welcome to. Thank you so much again. Thank you. This was
Far different in a positive manner than I expected it to be. I'm glad that I took a backseat because it's mainly about, like I said, Theo Maki, but also Theo Locution. So thank you all. I'm happy that you were... Yeah, and I wanted to thank you. You helped us to steer out of getting locked into local minima.
Great pleasure meeting you. Great pleasure indeed. Enormous pleasure from my side as well, John. Great meeting you and getting to know you. Let's do this again. I'm happy to do so.
I love Don Hoffman, but I'm glad that he wasn't here because it would be far too many voices and it was great to see you all get to know one another and try and understand each other's viewpoints. Thank you. Excellent. Take care, everybody. Have some chocolate, John. Bye bye.
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"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."
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"text": " Excuse this long introduction. It's a bit different, but this preface can be skipped. You can go to the timestamp there if you want to get straight to the Bernardo Castro and John Vervecki conversation. Many of you may be new to this channel and if so, my name is Kurt Geimungel. I'm a filmmaker as well as I have a background in math and physics and I'm intensely interested in something called theories of everything. Now this includes the standard unified field theories that I'm sure you've heard of, but it also includes the philosophical theories of everything such as that of Karl Friston's or"
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"text": " This episode features two titans of their respective positions, Bernardo Castro defending idealism, that is, the philosophical doctrine that we are all part of the same mind or at least that all that exists are mental states rather than a material reality, whereas John Vervecky takes the position of monism and naturalism. When I speak to the different prodigious interviewees on this channel, I generally ask them about their views on"
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"text": " Other intellectuals such as Douglas Hofstadter, or what do you think of Roger Penrose's idea of orchestrated objective reduction, and so on, and I, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, call it theomachy. That is to say, battle of the gods. Now clearly this is facetious because it's a sin, or at least I think it's a sin to consider any human a god, but there is some truth in the sense that they're godlike in their intellectual and cognitive prowess. However, this episode is different."
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"text": " First of all, it's the first time I've had on two people at once and I'm less interested in critiquing that is battling skirmishing than I am about getting the interviewees to understand one another's positions and constructively critique if they're going to critique at all. So I call it Theo Locution and it will likely be a new series started on this channel as well. Donald Hoffman was supposed to show up but wasn't able to and it actually turned out wonderfully because Castrop and Verveki had so much"
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"text": " don't have time for that it's my time is I'm I feel already stretched to my my limits as it is but there may be a way to integrate the work already conducted into incentives for patrons so for example I may be writing a book on theories of everything I definitely take notes on the different interviewees as research and what I can do is publish some of that or give some of that to the different tiers people seem to be interested in that as well as watching or"
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"text": " Being with me while I livestream a studying session for some of these interviews, that's another incentive for a certain tier. There are other ideas I have, and I'm also interested in hearing what perks you think I should offer. But the whole point of this is that this channel is growing. It's growing. It's extremely flattering that it's growing. It's a rate that I didn't think it would. It far surpasses my expectations for what people are willing to listen to. Three-hour conversation on meticulous technicalities and"
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"text": " intricacies and abstruse mechanics of these different theories and theorists while simultaneously taking a huge toll on me both physically for sure I'm exhausted much of the time and then spiritually yes because it's destabilizing to have to entertain many different ideas as to what the heck reality is and then cognitively for sure studying for this is difficult it would be great if just the patreon covered income and then this way I could find time to spend and relax and"
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"text": " even sleep while i sleep but sleep well and spend time quality time with my wife and quality time with my family plenty of that is mismanagement of my own time but it's also the stress of uncertainty as to what i'm going to do for income and so on and hopefully this would mitigate it another another reason is that i'd like to invest in equipment so for example i was went to this green screen yesterday by"
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"text": " someone who's been a fan of the channel for months and has been helping out with the discord his name is Phil Shertooke Phil thank you thank you so much Phil the reason for this green screen as an aside for those interested is that this door behind me is a washroom door I rent a one bedroom one washroom place now my wife is we're in lockdown if this is Ontario so you can't actually leave your home and for some jobs you can't actually perform them so my wife is home much of the time"
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"text": " And when I'm conducting these podcasts, I tell her you have to stay in the room. You can't even get food to eat. Get your water. If you're going to get food, just bring the food into the room. And if you have to use the washroom, take these empty cups, please, because I can't have you come in the background distract me, potentially interrupt the guests when they're right at their most profound point. And as well as she may be embarrassed because she's wearing pajamas and so on, whatever. One time I was interviewing"
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"text": " I remember reeling from that, just shivering with excitement, and elated, going into the bedroom, opening the door, the huge smile on my face, and my wife is livid. Seriously, babe? Five hours? She's holding multiple filled cups. Okay, I would like for that to not happen, so I was speaking to Phil Shurtook again, someone who runs the Discord and is helping out with this channel, and he said, Kurt, just get a green screen, I can lend you one. You put it here, you make it look like it's this background, and then she can come and go."
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"text": " I would like to invest in equipment and gear like that, so that's another reason why I'm hoping for this Patreon to grow. Lastly, these podcasts take days and days and days to prep for, sometimes weeks. Ian McGilchrist took weeks. Thomas Campbell took months, actually. Now I have Stephen Wolfram coming up, and I have Chris Langan coming up, who is the person with the highest IQ in America, at least reportedly so. Either way, Stephen Wolfram has a theory of physics that"
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"text": " Apparently derives the standard model and some non-standard general Relativistic models which means I have to become familiar with those before I become familiar with Stevens and that's taking some time Chris Lang and has a cognitive theoretic model of the universe and that's Well, it's abnormal and so it it's difficult to wrap one's head around that takes quite a bit of time Chomsky is coming up"
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"text": " At the end of the month, that's actually June 1st, Rupert Spira is coming up and apparently his philosophy is so drastically different than the way that I think I'm extremely analytical. And he abjures the analytical. So I don't know how long that will take for me to wrap my head around. And at the same time, I always have an icky, slimy feeling about promoting myself or even asking people to go to the Patreon and support. You can even see right there where I'm stumbling over my words saying it."
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"text": " However, some of the patreons patrons already told me Kurt stop Feeling like you're selling something stop feeling bad about it. Just tell people about it I wouldn't have known about it if you didn't advertise it once and I'm happy to support so please Let other people know and so this is me doing that the patreon and the PayPal are huge huge boons that helped me consistently produce podcasts of extremely high quality with extremely high technical depth"
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"text": " which is different than much of the other podcasts that are out there which at least in my opinion are watered down now there's nothing wrong with being watered down especially if you want to get an overview of someone's theories I watch them plenty but paradoxically for me the more watered down it is the more dry it is and if you look at the comments on this channel many of you agree and it seems to indicate there's a huge craving there's a huge huge craving for people interested in the recondite inner workings of a theory and this isn't provided"
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"text": " Links to both of their work are in the description. Thank you."
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"text": " Sometimes there's a time lag and you want to interject, but you're not sure if it's going to sound rude. Just raise your finger like this, the other person will see. And I may do this, you may do this. If you feel like you're looking rude, don't worry. It'll look rude for the live stream at the most, but I'll take it out when I finally edit it together. I'll just put the other person's face so you don't see it. Hopefully we cannot be rude. That'd be good. Choose the finger wisely."
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"text": " Yeah, I don't know I mean I have to say I suffer from high blood pressure so I take diuretics also for my manures I don't know if I can go like three hours without going to the bathroom. I'll try I haven't had much to drink this morning, but I want to forewarn I can't guarantee that because You can have a cup in front of you too if you need to yeah"
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"text": " While someone else is speaking, the trickle may then turn the camera to you. The jig is up. This one is an experimental podcast because usually what I do is I do a prodigious amount of research beforehand and ask guests precise questions but this time I thought how about I get two people on and have them get to know one another which usually happens behind the closed doors of academia and have these"
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"text": " Two Titans, the people who are at the top of their respective academic game, speak to one another, converse jovially instead of trying to critique and debate, and watch them get to know, get familiar with one another's ideas. That's the whole point of this. I'm taking much more of a backseat than I usually would take, and I'm just facilitating questions between you both. How does that sound?"
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"text": " Okay, let's see how it goes. I'm Kurt Jaimungal, a filmmaker, and I run the Theories of Everything podcast. I have a background in math and physics, which is why I'm interested in theories of everything. And theories of everything to me don't just include grand unification, but also philosophical worldviews, which is why Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Jonathan, the great John Vervecky, is a professor of the University of Toronto in cognitive science, and I believe he's the only professor"
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"text": " that has a cognitive science course on Buddhism, mindfulness, and wisdom. In 2012, he gained an award called the Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. And there are many more accolades I can say for John, but I'll save that because he's a towering figure and that would take quite some time. Bernardo Castroff has a PhD in both computer science and philosophy, the latter of which is what we're interested in today. His work"
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"text": " leads the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism the notion that reality is essentially mental i respect both of you greatly and i want you to know that both the bernardo interview on the channel the theories of everything channel and john your interview on the theories of everything channel are some of the highest rated if not the highest rated of all the interviews and i still get comments to this day saying that it's not only the best on the channel but maybe the best interviews with you so i am so"
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"text": " Thank you. Fantastic to know that it's resonating so well. It's great to be here, Kurt. It's been a while and it's good to see you again. It's a pleasure to meet you, Bernardo. My pleasure, John."
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"text": " just so you know the audience for this podcast is generally colossally clever so if you have to use abstruse terminology that you don't think ordinarily people would understand it's okay speak as if you're behind the academic doors this is what this is it's an experiment and if you have to make logical deductive steps quickly go ahead do so it doesn't matter people can rewind people can pause i'll start with philosophically how would you all john how would you describe yourself so there's obviously isms like you're a realist you're a logical positivist you're a materialist whatever maybe"
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"text": " Why don't you give the audience an idea as to where you're coming from and then Bernardo, you'll do the same. Sure, if you want my metaphysical stance, I don't know if that's the most important aspect of my work, but maybe that's the arena we're playing in right now. So I would describe myself as a naturalist and to try and make that clear, I reject the term that people often apply to me, materialist. I don't think that all of reality is just matter. I don't know"
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"text": " I don't know if I know anybody who actually takes that stance. And so, you know, like most physicalists, I think that we have to talk about other real entities, like time, space, cause, structural functional organizations of things, information, etc. And I think they're all good arguments for that. And then I'm not I'm a non reductive physicalist, which means I think there's genuine emergence. I actually"
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"text": " the very bottom level of our ontology, maybe"
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"text": " quantum probability waves or something like that. I think that this level at which we do science must really exist for us, for science to really exist and for us to draw the conclusions about the reference of science such as conclusions about the quantum domain or the relativistic domain. So that's why I call myself a naturalist. So a naturalist says that the ontology is going to be consistent with the natural sciences, biology, chemistry,"
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"index": 37,
"start_time": 966.903,
"text": " physics and perhaps hopefully down the road cognitive science but it is not going to be reducible to them and so it's a quite layered and rich ontology and then within it I happen to hold a position called deep continuity which means this is from work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, a lot of people in what's called 4E cognitive science or third wave cognitive science"
},
{
"end_time": 1023.968,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 995.981,
"text": " There's a deep continuity between the principles that regulate and generate cognition and consciousness and those that regulate and generate living systems. So I take it after a lot of argument that in order to be a cognitive thing, you have to also be a living thing. And then there is also deep continuity between living things that are autopoetic self-making and self-organizing systems like tornadoes and"
},
{
"end_time": 1052.005,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1024.258,
"text": " eddies within streams and things like that. So it's a naturalism with deep continuity is for me the ontology that I think I find most plausible, convergent, and the one that best helps to explain how science itself is possible. And so it's also an ontology that's deeply influenced by neoplatonism because neoplatonism tends to"
},
{
"end_time": 1080.333,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1052.432,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?"
},
{
"end_time": 1104.411,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1083.131,
"text": " Bernardo?"
},
{
"end_time": 1125.879,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1105.708,
"text": " I think like John, I'm a naturalist as well. Whatever is not part of nature, even if it exists, it escapes so much the realm of what is relevant that may not be interesting to look at it. Unlike John, I am a reductionist. I'm probably an extreme reductionist and the reason I am that"
},
{
"end_time": 1156.067,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1126.425,
"text": " is I think there are very fundamental, even insoluble problems that you face if your reduction base has more than one thing. Because then you get, you run into the interaction problem, you have issues of parsimony that you really need to postulate many things in your reduction base. And large reduction bases, they don't explain anything, they just avoid the need for explanation by just pronouncing a number of things to be"
},
{
"end_time": 1178.609,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1156.476,
"text": " Primitives dispensing with explanation. So I am a reductionist even though the one element in my reduction base is different from the elements in the reduction base of mainstream materialism today. Today I think the mainstream view would be that all quantum fields are part of the reduction base. There is"
},
{
"end_time": 1206.561,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1178.609,
"text": " Yet no unified feud theory, so we have a reduction base with multiple feuds. Now, I don't go for that. I am critical of strong emergence. I think what we might call weak emergence, what David Chalmers calls weak emergence, obviously exists. Sand dunes emerge out of sand grains and wind."
},
{
"end_time": 1231.186,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1207.125,
"text": " So we know that these things happen. Ice crystals emerge out of water in temperature variations. But strong emergence as an explanation, for instance, for how phenomenal consciousness could arise from arrangements of matter, I think at best it's an appeal to a complete unknown"
},
{
"end_time": 1254.172,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1231.766,
"text": " and probably it's a flat out appeal to magic. It's a way to put a label on something that is actually incoherent. We label it a problem and we say one day we will explain it, but we are just insisting on a path that is leading nowhere. So to summarize it all, my position is what I like to call analytic idealism."
},
{
"end_time": 1282.022,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1254.462,
"text": " It's an idealist philosophy that postulates that at the bottom level of nature, there is only mind, not your mind alone, not my mind alone, but only mind stuff at the bottom of nature. And it's a mix between objective and subjective idealism. I can go more into that to explain it more later. Yeah, I think that summarizes it. John, what occurs to you when you hear that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1312.278,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1282.995,
"text": " What questions pop up? I guess maybe there's a question around the notion of strong emergence. I'm actually proposing, it depends what you mean by strong emergence. I mean, strong emergence is the claim that there's not going to be any explanatory relationship between the levels. I take it that what we say happens in weak emergence, like how water emerges out of hydrogen and oxygen, is because we have some account. And then the idea is"
},
{
"end_time": 1318.882,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1312.568,
"text": " Differences of degree, if enough of them become differences in kind."
},
{
"end_time": 1349.326,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1319.582,
"text": " because then you not only get water emerging and then you get water has a particular set of relationships to organisms such that it's a nutrient which and there's no such thing as a nutrient in physics it doesn't belong in the physics ontology things like that and so I think the position that I'm arguing for is you know is a form of what would technically be called weak emergence because I do think there is emerging no pun intended an ongoing explanation so for example"
},
{
"end_time": 1379.07,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1350.128,
"text": " We used to have a position that looked like strong emergence for life, vitalism. Most people in biology, myself included, reject that because now we have a very complicated, but nevertheless, I think you could rightly say version of weak emergence of life from inorganic material. And so, and I think we're getting a similar thing happening with the weak emergence of intelligence"
},
{
"end_time": 1402.449,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1379.497,
"text": " out of non-intelligent things and so I think given the explanatory base provided by living things that weekly emerge and intelligent things that weekly emerge we have pretty much we need what we need in order to generate a lot of the theoretical explanation for a lot of consciousness which is where this"
},
{
"end_time": 1430.23,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1403.029,
"text": " namely that I think that many people are already coming, converging, this is some of the stuff I've worked on, towards a weak emergence explanation of the function of consciousness. That's becoming less problematic. That was even somewhat excluded in Chalmers' distinction around the heart problem. And I think as we get a richer and richer account of the functionality, we will get a richer and richer account of the nature of consciousness, the phenomenal aspects of it."
},
{
"end_time": 1460.247,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1430.708,
"text": " So I think I would ultimately say that I'm not defending a strong emergence position. I'm defending a very complicated but never the complication isn't the issue here. The issue is whether or not I'm advocating for a non-explanatory relationship in the emergence. Now, is there a degree to which this is promissory? Well, everybody's position right now is promissory because the only way we wouldn't have a promissory position"
},
{
"end_time": 1490.111,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1460.572,
"text": " John, you have an articulated notion of what it means to be plausible. Do you mind explaining that first? Yeah, so this is some of the work I do outside of these thorny issues of ontology because I'm very interested in trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 1514.77,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1490.316,
"text": " Well, to understand understanding and how understanding differs from knowledge. One of the differences is people generally talk about knowledge in terms of evidence that justifies, where understanding is relevance that basically signifies. And there's an important difference there. And so one way of understanding this is to"
},
{
"end_time": 1543.729,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1515.026,
"text": " When people have a particular kind of understanding, they give it a normative status. When they say something's reasonable, or makes good sense, or they'll even say it's plausible, and they don't mean it as a synonym for probable, they just means it, oh, it's reasonable, that makes good sense that, you know, and so when you take a look at what's going on there, there seems to be a bunch of factors. This is based on a lot of other people's work on plausibility. And I won't try and cite a lot of people here. For brevity sake. One is that we"
},
{
"end_time": 1559.07,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1544.053,
"text": " With the idea that we want a lot of independent lines of converging evidence. The idea being here, this gives what Russia calls trustworthiness. If my particular theoretical construct comes out of independent lines of argument and evidence,"
},
{
"end_time": 1587.91,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1559.292,
"text": " that reduces the chance that it was produced by theoretical bias or empirical bias, etc. For example, that's why even infants prefer information that is multi sensory. So they will they will give priority to information that comes through eyesight and hearing and touch, then over just eyesight, you know, setters paribus, because it's much more likely to be real than subjective illusion, for example. So that's trustworthiness."
},
{
"end_time": 1615.077,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1588.422,
"text": " You want your construct to have some structural functional organization, some way in which it's structured. It's not just a list of features, but a way it has a structure that indicates its function. And then its function, of course, is explicable in terms of its structure. And then you want elegance. You want that that construct will map it into many new domains, find problems, formulate problems that hasn't been found before and make them"
},
{
"end_time": 1635.776,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1615.794,
"text": " Potentially solvable. So this is sort of elegance. So you have convergence into something like a cognitive optimal grip elegance out and then you want to balance between them. So if you propose something that will explain a lot of things and looks elegant, but isn't very trustworthy. Well, that's when something's far fetched."
},
{
"end_time": 1666.374,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1636.425,
"text": " You can have the opposite. You can have something that's very trustworthy, but has no elegance to it, and that's trivial. And then you can do various kinds of slips between them. You can do what Dennett calls a deepity, where you equivocate, or you can do a Mott and Bailey thing. So when I'm talking about plausibility, I'm talking about a standard we have to use. We can't rely on because, for example, I can't test all possible hypotheses. The number, the logical number of those is indefinitely large."
},
{
"end_time": 1692.227,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1666.715,
"text": " So if I'm a scientist, I have to select the plausible ones. And then when I'm testing it, I have to control for confounds. Do I control for all possible alternative explanations? No, that's impossible. That's combinatorial explosive. So I select the plausible ones that I control for. Then I get my data and I have to derive my interpretations from it. Do I derive all logically possible implications? No, that's combinatorial explosive. So I have to I make use of the most plausible."
},
{
"end_time": 1722.142,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1692.705,
"text": " Bernardo,"
},
{
"end_time": 1744.804,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1722.602,
"text": " I'm sure thoughts present themselves to you. Oh, there's a lot to comment on. Look, I think there is a heart of objectivity in our notion, in the concept of plausibility. And I think John has elaborated on it very well. But in practice, a lot of what we call plausibility is a psychosocial phenomenon."
},
{
"end_time": 1767.278,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1745.196,
"text": " Why? Because the interpretation of data is never neutral. I mean, we know that from Thomas Kuhn, that the very interpretation of data is already paradigm-laden or theory-laden. If you look to the history of science, there was a point a couple of hundred years ago in which phlogiston was perfectly plausible, an invisible elastic substance"
},
{
"end_time": 1796.084,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1767.585,
"text": " that connected shaft to an ember rod and accounted for what we today call electrostatic attraction. There was a point in time in which Newton's gravitational force, an invisible force that acted instantly and at a distance between celestial bodies, was considered utterly implausible. In fact, in France, it took like 50 years for the French to stop laughing at Newton."
},
{
"end_time": 1818.899,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1796.561,
"text": " And then later on, we figured that we can laugh at Newton again because there is no such invisible force. It's the fabric of spacetime that bends and curves and accounts then for what we call gravitation. So plausibility, I think it's something we have to take with a grain of salt because it is culturally manufacturable."
},
{
"end_time": 1847.21,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1819.343,
"text": " and we have been manufacturing plausibility at the highest rate in history lately. For instance, we are very busy in the mainstream media manufacturing plausibility for the outright incoherent notion that you can upload your consciousness into a computer, which betrays all kinds of misunderstandings about computers and about consciousness and neuroscience. An outright ridiculous idea"
},
{
"end_time": 1876.698,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1847.551,
"text": " that now a lot of highly educated people with PhDs consider plausible because our cultural milieu renders it to us as if it were plausible. And since knowledge is now so broad that every single person can only know a tiny bit of what there is to know, we buy into it. It's very difficult to have an overview of all the salient and relevant aspects of knowledge to pass judgment on that. So I would be careful with plausibility in science already."
},
{
"end_time": 1902.329,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1877.056,
"text": " But when it comes to consciousness, you know, it's not just science because science is a study of nature's behavior, not a study of what nature is in and of itself. What nature is, I would say, is irrelevant to science because science makes predictions about how nature will behave. What an experiment confirms or disproves is the behavioral predictions of a certain model of nature's behavior."
},
{
"end_time": 1929.36,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1902.91,
"text": " And that's what experiment answers. Experiment produces an answer in the form of a certain thing that nature does, a certain behavior. Now, of course, if you have a metaphysics, a theory of what nature is, that makes itself predictions that are contradicted by science, then you have to discard that metaphysics. So science informs philosophy or metaphysics, but it doesn't settle philosophical questions. And when it comes to consciousness, I don't think it settles the question at all."
},
{
"end_time": 1948.422,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1929.753,
"text": " I think what's happening today is we think that strong emergence is a plausible account for consciousness because this notion has been culturally manufactured. It's not grounded in objective reasoning or evidence because I think what happened at first was that"
},
{
"end_time": 1968.353,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1949.002,
"text": " Scientists started from where we all start, from conscious experience, the experience of the world out there, the colors, the melodies, the flavors, the scents that are around us. And then they figured out that it was very useful to model those qualities, conscious qualities of the world, with numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 1991.732,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1968.575,
"text": " which could then be tied up in equations and that was very useful to describe the world. So carrying a heavy piece of luggage is described with 50 kilos and holding a feather is described with 50 grams. And now you have a quantitative way of dealing with these relative differences and making predictive models in the form of equations that relate all these quantities together."
},
{
"end_time": 2019.377,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1991.732,
"text": " These are all descriptions of the qualities. But at some point, something very strange happened around the time of the cards and the conflict between science and the church and that attempt to find space for both without the church having to burn scientists alive. The question was sort of settled by saying, okay, there is mind, the mental sphere, that's for the church. And then the church was very happy because from the church's perspective, that was all that existed, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2031.954,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2020.009,
"text": " And then we said, and the descriptions now are not only a description of the contents of mind, the descriptions exist in and of themselves, and moreover they precede the contents of mind."
},
{
"end_time": 2060.674,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2032.398,
"text": " And that's when the conceptual idea of matter arose. We said that those kilos, hertz, you know, length, weight, or spin, momentum, electric charge, mass, amplitude, frequency, we said those things aren't just descriptions. Those things have standalone existence, and they somehow generate the world of experience, the colors we see, the sense we feel. It's like"
},
{
"end_time": 2085.691,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2061.067,
"text": " trying to pull the territory out of the map, because, you know, we have the territory, we described it, we created the map. And then we said the map precedes the territory. It exists before the territory. The description exists before the thing described. First incoherent move. Second incoherent move. Somehow consciousness, the qualities of experience arise out of that."
},
{
"end_time": 2101.22,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2086.101,
"text": " It's like pulling the territory out of the map and then we face an insoluble problem, the hard problem of consciousness. But because we've manufactured now a century and a half of plausibility for this idea that matter precedes consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2131.391,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2101.749,
"text": " We, instead of realizing that the hard problem of consciousness is not a problem at all, it's a reduction to absurdity of the materialist postulates, it's just incoherent. The message is backtrack, try another path because this one goes nowhere. Instead of admitting that we don't throw away a century and a half of manufactured plausibility, we label it a problem and we say one day we will solve it and we call it strong emergency or whatever. One day we will account for it in order to sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 2161.186,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2131.749,
"text": " Okay, John. First, do you mind recapitulating what your understanding of what Bernardo said is and then seeing if it matches? I think there's a difference between how I was trying to use plausibility and he is. I'm not equating plausibility to every claim to plausibility any more than I would equate the claim to validity to validity. Many people claim things are plausible for reasons that Bernardo"
},
{
"end_time": 2186.527,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2161.271,
"text": " rightly pointed out, we have a particular paradigm. But I would point out that what he's offering to challenge that is a plausibility argument. He can't make it one of deductive certainty. We sort of given up on the idea that we can produce a deductively certain metaphysics, at least as far as I can tell. And so he's doing what he's doing is presenting any and he's good at it. I'm not denying that he's good at presenting something that's very reasonable."
},
{
"end_time": 2212.244,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2186.766,
"text": " He draws independent lines of argument and independent lines of evidence together. So I'm talking about plausibility in the normative sense. I'm not talking about it in what simply what people claim. And what I'm claiming is in that normative sense, that's ultimately what we have. This is sort of a pragmatist stance. And the fact that, and he is invoking it, Lawdon's, you know, pessimistic history of science, right, shows that most of our theories turn out to be false. So it couldn't have been"
},
{
"end_time": 2242.346,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2212.619,
"text": " truth that was guiding us. It had to be something like plausibility and probability that were guiding us. And that's what I think we should we should sort of say we're doing. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think he's not offering a plausible argument. I'm not saying that. So I understand that we should periodically step back and criticize our paradigms. But I would point out to him that that means there's something we appeal to above and beyond"
},
{
"end_time": 2268.951,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2242.773,
"text": " are paradigmatic standards in order to make such challenges and hopefully get them understood and accepted. I reject, I don't know if he does too, I reject sort of a pure Cunian response that it's just happenstance and historical circumstance why, you know, people adopt new positions. I do think they do something that is transparadigmatic. But I don't think it's Cartesian certainty, because I've never been convinced that such a thing exists."
},
{
"end_time": 2299.019,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2269.138,
"text": " That's what I'm trying to invoke, what I'm invoking plausibility. And I think metaphysics, and I think even philosophy at large, is the art of disciplined and justifiable plausibility, something like that. So there, that's that. Now, I don't know what to do about some of the historical, because Bernardo said a lot. I happen to think that the point he's pointing to happens a lot earlier. I think it happens around Scotus. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 2325.845,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2300.06,
"text": " Yes, from now on, from this point forward, I'm going to take a seat. I'm very curious about your point about Scotus. I would like to continue to hear it. You're bringing that back to the, what, 10th century, 9th century. No, no, no, no, no, no. Scottish is post Aquinas. So we're talking like the 13th, 14th century, Scottish and Ockham. That's where I think the change is made, because what happens"
},
{
"end_time": 2354.718,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2326.305,
"text": " with Scottish is you have the idea of the universe, the being is univocal that whenever we say being we're saying this, it's the same for everything. And that sort of demolishes platonic realism. Well, demolishes if you think Scottish is right. And then Occam's nominalism brings out the idea that there aren't any actual structures in reality. Because all that really exists are bare particulars, bare individuals. And I think that's what severs"
},
{
"end_time": 2383.507,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2355.009,
"text": " the idea that there is something, it destroys the conformity theory, that there is something identical in being between the knower and the known. So, you know, the idea is when I know something in the older theory, there is some shared structural functional organization in my mind, and the thing that is constitutive of the reality of the thing. And so there is a, and I think it's with Scotus, and with Occam,"
},
{
"end_time": 2411.544,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2383.78,
"text": " And then you get the idea of knowledge not as a conforming to reality, but as coherence of propositions held somewhere inside. And I think that starts the severing in an important way. And so I think the important move is, you know, a shift out of what I think, I think it's plausible to say, you know, ancient realism, ancient philosophy, right up until and including Aquinas is ultimately realistic in"
},
{
"end_time": 2427.807,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2411.783,
"text": " its notion. And I think the severing from realism precedes the emergence of matter as a substantial thing. And so that's where I would start to talk about where the main issues are."
},
{
"end_time": 2455.811,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2428.473,
"text": " Now, I think what you're talking about does happen with Descartes, but it's also prefigured and made possible by, you know, the ideas of individual conscience with Luther and things like that separate and give a kind of internal authority separate from, you know, demands placed on you by an external authority, whether that's the real world or God. So I think there's a sequence of stages that unfold. And I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 2485.964,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2456.237,
"text": " And I think the issue of consciousness is down the road, downstream from these earlier sort of decisions about, well, realism versus something like, I don't know what to call it initially, but you know, because it's normalism, which is a minimalized realism. And then you get a flat ontology with Scotus, because all the idea of real differences in being disappear."
},
{
"end_time": 2505.794,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2486.578,
"text": " And the irony of that is if you posit any kind of reductionism, you are actually invoking levels of being again and saying things like there are more real levels than other levels, which actually undermines the Scottish position"
},
{
"end_time": 2525.247,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2506.135,
"text": " that started the whole transition in a powerful way. So we're actually in a really, I think, within this paradigm, if you'll allow me, we're actually in a kind of incoherent place where we want to say, we want to, we're holding to a view that came out of the idea that there's no real differences in levels of being."
},
{
"end_time": 2554.684,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2525.247,
"text": " But now we are we are moving towards positions in which differences of being are taken to be sort of, you know, a plausible thing. So people will regularly say things like, well, tables don't really exist. And, you know, all this, you know, love doesn't really exist, all that's at the bottom. And so that's to invoke a platonic distinction between levels of being. And so we were actually in an incoherent place with respect to our notion of being, I would argue right now. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2574.275,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2555.538,
"text": " When I said that I'm going to take a backseat, what I mean is no longer from this point forward, John, do you refer to Bernardo as he? Because that means you're talking to me about Bernardo. You just say you because now you're speaking to Bernardo and Bernardo same. So now you say you. So, John, so and so Bernardo, take it away. And John, if you need to interject, you go ahead."
},
{
"end_time": 2588.558,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2574.821,
"text": " John, there are many points I think that we have in common based on what you just said. I'm trying to make a mental list of those points. I'm not for total relativism either. I think there are"
},
{
"end_time": 2607.005,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2589.224,
"text": " Good objective systemic criteria and that we can follow in order to have a higher degree of certainty or a lower degree of uncertainty about our postulates and inferences. I would go as far as to submit to you that"
},
{
"end_time": 2623.251,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2607.381,
"text": " Kun himself wasn't a relativist in the way he's often portrayed to be, and he was very frustrated, in fact, for the fact that he was portrayed that way. I refer you to an interview done with Kun."
},
{
"end_time": 2641.886,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2623.746,
"text": " Another thing that I think we have in common is that I'm not postulates that we can have inferential certainty here."
},
{
"end_time": 2670.435,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2642.295,
"text": " apes evolved on planet Earth in a corner of a typical galaxy somewhere in the universe have the cognitive apparatus to capture with certainty the salient aspects of what's going on. Of course not. Reality is filtered through our cognition and our cognition has evolved to allow us to escape tigers and find fruit and hunt bison. That's basically what we evolved to do."
},
{
"end_time": 2698.473,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2670.759,
"text": " Even our symbolic thinking is, what, 30, 50,000 years old? I mean, to characterize this as the blink of an eye in the history of the Earth is to vastly overestimate the amount of time since we've evolved that capability. And third, I also think that there are guidelines that are more or less objective."
},
{
"end_time": 2725.282,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2698.626,
"text": " I'm not sort of surrendering everything to paradigmatic subjectivity. The role you attribute to a more objective notion of plausibility, I would attribute to conceptual parsimony, because it's countable. How many different kinds of things are you postulating to account for observations?"
},
{
"end_time": 2749.718,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2725.589,
"text": " And although it's not written or etched in stone in nature that the best explanation is always the most conceptually parsimonious, it may not be. If we abandon parsimony as an epistemic guideline, we open the doors to all kinds of nonsense. For instance, there is an example I often like to use. If I wake up in the morning and I see strange footprints in my backyard,"
},
{
"end_time": 2778.2,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2750.179,
"text": " I can offer two explanations. Explanation A, a burglar went around, checked my door, figured that it's well secure and gave up and went away. Explanation two, aliens landed on my neighbor's backyard, stole his shoes, came for a stroll in my backyard, left the footprints behind, went back, boarded their spaceship and flew back to the Pleiades. Now, neither theory can be disproved on the basis of the data available."
},
{
"end_time": 2807.927,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2778.353,
"text": " both account for the data. But one postulates a lot less than the other. One postulates a burglar, a human being of the kind we know exists. The other postulates spaceships, alien races, illogical strolls, illogical shoe robbery. So if we abandon parsimony, because we know it's not etched in stone, if we abandon that, we are lost. So I think that's one"
},
{
"end_time": 2834.172,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2809.019,
"text": " one fairly objective criterion for guiding our epistemology. If you start postulating too many things and interactions between too many things or appealing to too many unknowns, it doesn't go anywhere or it's not reliable. Now, finally, regarding the question of consciousness, you said"
},
{
"end_time": 2860.23,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2835.52,
"text": " we will always have to have a promissory theory. And when it comes to consciousness, I would submit to you that that's only true if you're trying to reduce consciousness to something that isn't consciousness, then whatever theory you come up will be promissory because we have no idea how that reduction can take place. That's why we talk about strong emergency. It's a way to not have to make the reduction explicit."
},
{
"end_time": 2890.111,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2860.725,
"text": " But you see, every theory of nature needs to have at least one thing in the reduction base. You can't explain one thing in terms of another forever. Otherwise, eventually you will beg the question. Your reasoning will be circular at some point. So you have to always have that one thing, at least one thing in the reduction base for which you have no explanation. In other words, you can't explain that one thing in terms of anything else. That can still be your best theory of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2906.51,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2890.794,
"text": " Because so long as you can explain everything else in terms of that one thing, then you're fine, because you always need at least one thing in the reduction base. I would offer to you that if you put consciousness as the one thing in that reduction base,"
},
{
"end_time": 2937.039,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2907.466,
"text": " You eliminate the hard problem of consciousness because you're no longer trying to reduce it. The promissory notes are off the table. Your challenge now is to explain then the phenomenality, our inner phenomenal life and the empirical observations of the world outside, which are always qualitative, ultimately, in terms of that one thing in the reduction base. That is the challenge. But then I would submit to you that"
},
{
"end_time": 2957.739,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2937.381,
"text": " That challenge is of a whole other level and character than trying to reduce consciousness. It entails no hard problems. It entails no appeals to unknowns. You can do that by using phenomena that you already know occur in nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2986.22,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2958.831,
"text": " So I think it's much more promising to go that way and then there is no promissory notes. This Marshawn beast mode lynch prize pick is making sports season even more fun on prize picks. Whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you always feel 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 projection."
},
{
"end_time": 3001.63,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2986.22,
"text": " anything from touchdown to threes and if you write you can win big mix and match players from any sport on proge picks america's number one daily fantasy sports app proge picks is available in 40 plus states including california texas"
},
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"end_time": 3028.66,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3001.886,
"text": " So I would respond to that. I mean, parsimony is a difficult thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3052.927,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3029.087,
"text": " It depends on how you individuate your entities, and there's no canonical way of individuating entities. And the attempt to find conceptual primitives, I think, has been a largely failed project. So the number of entities depend on, right, how I individuate them. Is consciousness one thing or many things? How do you know that? How do you determine that? And how do you determine that in a reliable way?"
},
{
"end_time": 3082.654,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3053.37,
"text": " And if you're talking about reduction, do you have one thing or is everything an illusion above that one thing? And then you do have a hard problem of how is it we're doing science at these illusory levels to point to the bottom level, but that we're claiming is the only thing that really exists. And if you say, well, no, I don't mean they don't, they're all illusions. They also exist. Then I posit to you that you do have a complex ontology and you do have multiple things. I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 3103.012,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3084.821,
"text": " So I don't even know what we're referring to when we're individuating this thing you're calling consciousness. Is it one thing? I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that there's aspects of my consciousness that are qualitative in nature."
},
{
"end_time": 3127.125,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3103.712,
"text": " There's aspects of my unconscious life that seem to require relationship to something that's unconscious. My memories come and go. I wake up, I fall asleep. Has there actually been one consciousness throughout this time? Or multiple consciousnesses? Do my consciousness disappear? I mean, and I seem to be able to have"
},
{
"end_time": 3148.797,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3127.449,
"text": " experiences where I have sort of a dual consciousness, where I'm sort of aware of my own consciousness, but I'm aware of the world as well. Is that one consciousness or two? I mean, and I'm not trying to be obtuse here. The invocation of parsimony, it seems to me, is to, I think it's really an invocation of elegance."
},
{
"end_time": 3175.589,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3149.002,
"text": " Because most people qualify, even Occam did, parsimony is you reduce to the minimum needed to generate your explanation. And that depends also, as many people have pointed out, on how we individuate things. And we can't make it syntactic, because all I can do is I can just replace every relation with a higher order noun or a lower order noun. You know, is baseball one thing or many things? How do we count it?"
},
{
"end_time": 3191.203,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3176.288,
"text": " Well, it's made up. Well, it's made up of many people. So it's made up. Oh, media, like, whoa, the person one thing. Consciousness one thing, like, so I think invoking the notion of parsimony is ultimately"
},
{
"end_time": 3217.619,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3192.159,
"text": " something that we do heuristically and pragmatically. I don't think we have an algorithmic formal account. I mean, the accounts that we have that approach that, like Golmogorov simplicity, prove to be computationally impractical. So they can't be what we're using when we invoke parsimony. And other than that, I don't know any formalization of simplicity that isn't question-begging."
},
{
"end_time": 3240.981,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3218.063,
"text": " Now, we all use it, Bernardo. I'm not denying that. But what I'm saying is, I think the appeal to it as an absolute methodological principle that just runs it objectively. I'm not convinced by that argument. Now, to the point about consciousness, again,"
},
{
"end_time": 3268.882,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3241.442,
"text": " Maybe, and this is what I need to get, and I'm also conscious, pun intended, that we're trying to make this dialogical. We disagree, and we have to be honest about our disagreements, but I don't want to come off as imperious, or I want to come off as receptive and listening to you. Not I don't want to come off, I want to be that, that's what I aspire to. So I'll try and"
},
{
"end_time": 3295.606,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3269.616,
"text": " I'll try and live this as enthusiasm rather than anything aggressive or anything like that, because I don't want to be doing that. So I'm not quite clear what you're pointing to when you say, like, let's take sort of a standard human thing. I'm actually not aware of my consciousness. I'm aware of things consciously, but I'm not aware of a thing, an entity."
},
{
"end_time": 3323.865,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3296.101,
"text": " John, let's have some shorter bursts of speech and then just hand off to the other person, maybe one question or two questions and two statements."
},
{
"end_time": 3354.531,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3324.889,
"text": " So maybe you should have a chance to comment on everything I said. Well, no, I'm willing. I'm willing to do. I'll just make those two points. The points is I think that I think and I don't think we actually ever go for simplicity. I think we go for elegance balanced by trustworthiness. I think that and that's so I think parsimony is a problematic notion. But then trustworthiness is even more problematic because what is trustworthy?"
},
{
"end_time": 3376.544,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3354.889,
"text": " But I get your point. And so and then my other point was, since we're counting and a single entity, there is a sort of, you know, the human problems as well. Are we talk, are we equating experience to consciousness, because that's a problematic move? And are you really making consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 3406.135,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3376.852,
"text": " It seems to me you have a double in consciousness. You have consciousness as experienced and consciousness as experiencer, and therefore you're not actually getting the one thing at the bottom. And then all of this over here, the experiencer is something that's not within conscious, but I'm inferring it from my experience. And then if I'm willing to infer things outside of my consciousness, well then why not be a realist? I guess that's what it sort of comes to."
},
{
"end_time": 3432.483,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3406.578,
"text": " I want to start with a point where I agree with you, but just with a preamble first. Everything you said is directly applicable as a criticism of physicalism and any other ontology. So you are not sort of singling out idealism. You're criticizing your own position with the arguments you just put on the table. There is one thing where we agree and I think a lot of people miss on it. Our"
},
{
"end_time": 3458.029,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3433.234,
"text": " Carving out the world into things is purely nominal. There is no ontic criterion for saying the car ends here and here begins the road, or here the river ends and the ocean begins. We separate the universe into things out of convenience. It's arbitrary and nominal."
},
{
"end_time": 3487.756,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3458.473,
"text": " Because if you say, well, I would define a car in terms of functionality. So if I need the spark plugs for the car to move, then the spark plugs are part of the car. Well, then you need the road, because without the road for the tires to grip, you don't move. And you need the air to enable combustion. And you need the gravity of the earth to pull the car towards the road. I mean, soon you have the entire universe. And now with quantum entanglement,"
},
{
"end_time": 3500.452,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3487.756,
"text": " You literally have the entire universe. So partitioning the inanimate universe into things is completely nominal. I do think we have a non-tech criterion for saying that we end here."
},
{
"end_time": 3530.589,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3500.879,
"text": " Like if you shoot a bullet through the chair where I'm sitting, I will not feel it. But if you shoot a bullet through my belly, I will feel it. If a photon hits my retina, I see it. If it hits the wall behind me, I don't see it. So there is a ontic criterion for saying here we as you know, our inner lives can be delimited in physical space at the boundaries of our body. And that's not merely nominal. It's not arbitrary, because in some in some cases I feel and other cases I don't feel."
},
{
"end_time": 3561.032,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3531.084,
"text": " Now, where do I want to go with this? I lost my train of thought where I was going with this, but it was very important what I wanted to tell you. John, then do you want to step in? Can you can you just summarize briefly again? Oh, yeah, I remember. I remember the idea of parsimony. And how do you say whether consciousness is more than one thing and Hume's critique of Barclay?"
},
{
"end_time": 3565.913,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3561.34,
"text": " So for the sake of the audience, Barclay said, well, everything is in the mind."
},
{
"end_time": 3592.5,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3566.305,
"text": " and Hume's critique was to ask, well, what is the mind? I'm not aware of a mind. I am aware of different experiences. So how can you pull a psyche, a mind, a soul out of the variety of experiences I have? And back in the day, that seemed to have been a strong enough criticism back in the 18th century. But it misses out on a very clear intuition that we all have."
},
{
"end_time": 3602.176,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3593.029,
"text": " Although the qualities of experiences can vary wildly, the quality of having a bellyache is totally different from the quality of falling in love."
},
{
"end_time": 3632.432,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3603.012,
"text": " All these things are still qualitative. They are experiential. They are not theoretical abstractions. They are not something that can be exhaustively described through quantities or physical parameters. They are qualitative. So I would offer to you the following definition of consciousness, which is consistent with the idea that consciousness is the one member of the reduction base. Mind or consciousness, which I will use interchangeably,"
},
{
"end_time": 3647.483,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3632.892,
"text": " is that whose excitations are experiences. And if you define it that way, then there is only the experiencer and experiences are different patterns of excitation of the experiencer."
},
{
"end_time": 3674.326,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3648.148,
"text": " So there is nothing to experience but the experiencer, in the same sense that there is nothing to a ripple but the lake where it ripples. We use different words because it's convenient in dialogue to speak of ripples instead of patterns of movement of the lake, but we have to keep in mind that all along there is only the lake, so all along there is only subjectivity, there is only the experiencer,"
},
{
"end_time": 3703.609,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3674.326,
"text": " And experiences are just patterns of excitation of the experiencer. This has another advantage, which it eliminates any interaction problem between experience and the experiencer, because there is no such a thing as an experience outside the experiencer. There is only the experiencer. What is the experiencer above and beyond the set of experiences? Like, why are they not just an atomic sequence of experiences, a sequence of atomic experiences?"
},
{
"end_time": 3724.923,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3704.275,
"text": " That would lead you to all kinds of problems. For instance, what binds these experiences together? Why do we have the inner feeling that these experiences are being had by us as a subjective point of view into a field of phenomenality? Right. And so I answer a problem by inferring a relation, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3746.237,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3725.333,
"text": " And then that relation and the mechanisms by which that relation works, how things are bound together is actually not something I'm consciously aware of. Let me give you a concrete example. I mean, I'm hearing your words and I'm getting ideas out of that. And that's binding them together into a integrated proposition in my mind. I have no idea how I'm doing that."
},
{
"end_time": 3764.599,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3747.193,
"text": " My introspective awareness of that gives me no account. In fact, and any common sense intuitions I have, have largely turned out to be wrong. So most of the processing that is allowing me to do the binding is not a processing within my consciousness. It's a processing that makes my consciousness possible."
},
{
"end_time": 3791.425,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3765.077,
"text": " Here, this has a lot to do with one point you made before, which is you said a lot of my conscious experiences seem to be anchored in something that is not"
},
{
"end_time": 3801.305,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3791.715,
"text": " I find that more generic criticism to hold better than what you just said. I would say"
},
{
"end_time": 3828.814,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3802.449,
"text": " How do you know that there is binding? Well, that binding is itself an experience. It is itself a pattern of excitation of your subjectivity that arises maybe as an interference pattern. Wait, but I'm not asking how I know the binding is there. I'm asking what it is that exists in order to explain the binding. And those aren't the same thing, right? I don't think the entity you're looking for is necessary."
},
{
"end_time": 3857.671,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3829.599,
"text": " the notion of binding is itself a pattern of excitation of consciousness, because the binding, so far as you can speak of it, it is some kind of experience you're having. No, no, the binding, so I have a conscious experience of you making sense, but I don't have a conscious experience of the binding of those sounds into meaning that then make, you know, and I have no conscious experience of acquiring English."
},
{
"end_time": 3881.886,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3858.507,
"text": " But here he is, and I have it. Right? How is that bound to me? Right? I want to answer this. But yeah, I want I wanted to answer a better example, because I think here you are looking for an entity that doesn't need to be there. I think there is a very natural flow of experience, which we call understanding. But I agree with you that you are appealing to a lot of background stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 3910.299,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3882.21,
"text": " to enable that conscious binding, you're appealing to knowledge that you've had before, and which is no longer in the screen of your memory being relived right now. And look, there is over 100 years, 150 years now, if you count far back enough of depth psychology, which sort of has accumulated evidence for parts of the psyche that we cannot report on feelings that we have and we can't report on memories that we have and we can't report on"
},
{
"end_time": 3938.251,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3910.657,
"text": " and which may lead to the notion that there is something other than consciousness, because if my consciousness is operating on the basis of something that I can't consciously report, then there is something other than consciousness. I would dispute that based on the modern differentiation between consciousness and metaconsciousness, between conscious experience and conscious metacognition. I think what we report is an expression of what we are metacognizant of."
},
{
"end_time": 3944.872,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3938.251,
"text": " the contents of our meta consciousness, the experiences we have and know that we have. But in the background,"
},
{
"end_time": 3974.838,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3945.35,
"text": " stuff that we cannot report because we don't know that we are experiencing that stuff, it is still consciousness. And we have everyday examples to show that you're breathing right now, you're always conscious of your breathing. But only right now, because I mentioned it, did you become meta conscious of your breathing because you placed your attention on it, you reflected that experience of breathing. So this stuff in the background that you referred to,"
},
{
"end_time": 4003.251,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3974.838,
"text": " I would say it's all experiences which are not available to your introspection right now for you to report because they are obfuscated by the limited contents of your meta consciousness or they are dissociated or inferentially isolated. We know dissociation exists and it's for real since the advent of neuroimaging in the 21st century. So I do think that Hume's critique of Barclay"
},
{
"end_time": 4018.302,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4004.138,
"text": " was a straw man because he wanted to produce a thing, a psyche, a soul. You don't need that. All you need is a field of subjectivity whose excitations are our experiences. And now in the 21st century, we now have"
},
{
"end_time": 4046.135,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4018.78,
"text": " a century of examples in physics in which we've done exactly that. We've reduced now elementary subatomic particles to the patterns of excitation of a quantum field and going to M theory, this even goes into the direction of unification theory. There's an enormous tradition about reducing things towards excitations of extended fields, so to say. Okay. John looks like he's bubbling with rage, so please."
},
{
"end_time": 4069.753,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4046.493,
"text": " Not bubbling with rage. Get it all out, John. No, I want to get it all out because I want to make space. So you're dividing consciousness into metaconsciousness and things in the background that I can't get access to because I currently don't have knowledge. And it sounds to me like you have parts of my consciousness that are not aware of each other, are not conscious of each other."
},
{
"end_time": 4097.79,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4070.06,
"text": " So again, now you have a multiple entity as far as I can see. No, ontologically is only one thing. It's consciousness. Why? Because it's only one kind of stuff and there are dynamisms within this consciousness. No, no, no, no, no, we're not talking, no, no, we're not talking about just one kind of stuff. We're talking about the entity. No, no, we were talking about the number of entities we propose in our explanation in order to generate our explanations. That's what we were talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 4123.746,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4098.097,
"text": " To say I'm proposing one kind of stuff is to beg the question, because then you're invoking the parsimony, and that's the very thing that I'm pointing to, which is, it seems to me, you're multiplying your entities in order to try and generate your explanation, as you should, as you should. I mean, I deny that. I thought by appealing to feuds, I had to counter that, but okay, go ahead. Okay, so you've got things in my consciousness,"
},
{
"end_time": 4149.787,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4124.155,
"text": " My introspective consciousness that I are never the lack. So there seems to be distinction. There seems to be a distinction between what's in my consciousness and what's available to my consciousness via meta consciousness. So mental consciousness must have a functionality different from the rest of consciousness to explain the fact that it's limited in some fashion. Yes. Yeah. So in terms of the functionality, I can count different things there. Yes. No, no, because why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 4164.326,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4150.435,
"text": " Consciousness and meta-consciousness are both consciousness ontologically. Do they operate the same way according to the same principles and the same functions? Does an electron operate the same way as a quark? Both are parts of a field."
},
{
"end_time": 4185.725,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4164.701,
"text": " You can have one thing manifest different patterns of behavior or to function in different ways without requiring that thing to be many things. Ontologically, it's still one thing with multiple different patterns of behavior. In a non-question begging manner, what makes it one thing? It's experiential."
},
{
"end_time": 4211.971,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4186.63,
"text": " But it's precisely not, because my metaconsciousness can't experience parts of my consciousness. No, your metaconsciousness cannot report parts of your consciousness to yourself. But my point is exactly that what is not reported is still experiential. Just as your breathing is experiential, when you're not reporting to yourself, I am breathing. How is that different from your experience being experiential, and I can't, and I'm not aware of it right now?"
},
{
"end_time": 4231.084,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4212.517,
"text": " I would postulate dissociation as something that exists in nature, we not understand it fully well, but we know it exists. And it could account for the appearance of there being multiple minds instead of one and the study of dissociative identity disorder now it has advanced so much that we know it's literally blinding."
},
{
"end_time": 4261.049,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4232.449,
"text": " Sure. But we also have, you know, accounts of the dissociation in terms of trauma. I mean, there's serious disanalogies. Notice what you tend to invoke when you do that. You have now three entities. You have the meta-consciousness that can't report to myself what's going on in my consciousness. And that seems to me to be... And that's the kind of machinery you typically invoke, at least in the psychological discussions."
},
{
"end_time": 4289.787,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4261.374,
"text": " of right of dissociation like I get dissociation from this part of this part of my mind from this part of my mind in order to protect myself this part is protected from trauma from that part etc and so it now sounds like you've got meta consciousness that can't fully report to the self what's going on in consciousness both are consciousness meta consciousness is a particular configuration of consciousness what is the self it's reporting to"
},
{
"end_time": 4315.913,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4290.469,
"text": " It's the one field of subjectivity where all these experiences are happening. Some of them are reflected and therefore can be reported. Other experiences are not reflected. But I'm asking you, what is the reporting going to? If it's going back to the field and meta consciousness is in the field, why is meta consciousness unaware of it? Because it's not reporting to itself."
},
{
"end_time": 4337.381,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4316.254,
"text": " So it's reporting to itself that it doesn't have everything. Is that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4363.66,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4337.892,
"text": " but it's not reporting to itself some of the experiences it is having. I mean, from psychology, we know this happens. I mean, we don't need to go very far, especially men are not able to report even to themselves a lot of the emotions that they are actually having, and which is impacting their behavior. I mean, therapy rooms, the world over, are filled with... Okay, let's turn this into a therapy room for a second."
},
{
"end_time": 4391.664,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4365.094,
"text": " Right now we're talking about the disagreements and in previous podcasts what I like to refer to is something called Theomachy which is a battle of the gods and it's tongue-in-cheek because obviously you're not gods but intellectually you're intellectually yours you're let's say mini daemons whatever you want to call it and so I like to say that this is Theomachy and I wanted this to be more of a theolocution in fact I was going to coin that term because you have dialogos for veki sure this is theolocution"
},
{
"end_time": 4420.708,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4392.346,
"text": " And I don't care if it turns into Theomache. It's actually entertaining, much like the debate that was about truth between Sam Harris and Peterson. And maybe this is going to become one of those where we hammer down specifically onto one instead of the broad array of subjects, which I don't mind. So to turn it into a bit of a therapeutic session, why don't you first each say something about the other's point of view that you agree with or find interesting? And then you can go and battle it out once more."
},
{
"end_time": 4448.131,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4422.329,
"text": " Well, I mean, I think we are battling it out precisely because we are respecting each other and we're trying to do science. And the problem here is science is a little bit different configured. I mean, science in terms of scantia, not in the sense of just empirical science that we're trying to do science here. And therefore, we're doing the kind of thing you do in science, which is arguments and evidence against each other."
},
{
"end_time": 4475.947,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4448.422,
"text": " And I think that's sort of appropriate within the scientific discourse. If we move to more, you know, existentially encompassing issues, I think then we shouldn't stay in the realm of debate. We should move into dialogos. There's a lot I respect. First of all, I wouldn't be giving my time and effort to, and this is not meant to be left handed, to Bernardo if I didn't think he was articulating his position very well."
},
{
"end_time": 4504.906,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4476.323,
"text": " And so I do want to acknowledge that. And I do think that there is... I would agree with him. I hope this comes off as an appropriate compliment. I think most of the versions of materialism that are prevalent, even within some of the cognitive science community, especially within neuroscience. Neuroscientists, for example, the vast majority of them adopt"
},
{
"end_time": 4535.265,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4505.367,
"text": " You know, a strong identity theory that I think would just be devastated by the kinds of arguments that Bernardo was bringing up. And so that's why I don't eat that it's because of the sophistication of these arguments and and their plausibility. I'll use that if you'll allow me that I think any hardline materialism like that is not a viable position. So I like that about what he's doing. I like that he is"
},
{
"end_time": 4547.381,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4535.964,
"text": " Trying to give a larger place to our phenomenology than is typically given in a lot of the analytic discourse."
},
{
"end_time": 4577.261,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4547.756,
"text": " around consciousness and the mind-body problem. And that's a bit of a disjunct between the continental and the Anglo-American tradition. And I like that. That's why I've been trying to shift into the phenomenological with him right now and play there, because I think that's important. And so those are two or three things I really like. I like the rigor. I think the arguments against mini versions. And again, this isn't a trivial thing to say. I just pointed out that many neuroscientists"
},
{
"end_time": 4605.691,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4577.585,
"text": " Bernardo,"
},
{
"end_time": 4634.753,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4606.067,
"text": " And I don't have anything against heated debate in the least. That is actually what goes on behind closed doors in academia. No, but I just want to thank you for doing that. I mean, I think it's I think it's important to periodically do what you just did, which is to step back and regroup and see what I mean, it's it's it's it's a sterile thing if we're not capable of listening and potentially learning from each other. OK, so Bernardo. Well, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 4662.432,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4635.538,
"text": " John's focus on what he calls the meaning crisis is the single most important and most devastating problem that we as a species have today. And by highlighting that and offering fairly practical ways of addressing that problem, avenues for trying to get out of it by restoring the role of myth"
},
{
"end_time": 4691.8,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4662.807,
"text": " by taking our phenomenology, our experiential world, seriously and not dismissing it as just an epiphenomenon. I think that attempt to solve the biggest problem we face today as a species, that alone makes him and his work one of the most important people alive today, I think. Thank you, Fernando. That's very high praise. It's precisely because... I second that. I think many of the people in the chat second that."
},
{
"end_time": 4699.753,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4692.176,
"text": " But they would also credit you with that too, Bernardo. Yeah, I wanted to return the compliment. I think trying to get"
},
{
"end_time": 4725.691,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4701.357,
"text": " I think we agree on this. We may not agree where we end, but we agree that the meeting crisis is not going to be solved at sort of the political market level. It goes down to our fundamental ontology, and it deals with fundamental aspects of our ontology, like subjectivity and objectivity, and how meaning is somehow bound up with those, and the sense of self. And I think we agree on that."
},
{
"end_time": 4737.79,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4725.691,
"text": " It seems to me we agree on that and you're nodding. So yeah, and so I think in that sense, we're both very critical of a lot of what"
},
{
"end_time": 4756.954,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4738.183,
"text": " I think are misplaced and sometimes distracting attempts to deal with the meaning crisis that do not wrestle with these deep problems. I'm not saying, and I don't think Bernardo is saying, everybody has to be an academic philosopher to wrestle with the meaning crisis. But I do think if we want to"
},
{
"end_time": 4788.473,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4758.695,
"text": " If we want to home whatever ecologies of practices we come up with to address the meeting crisis into a worldview, we have to do something to our current worldview to get us to the place where we have a worldview that can properly home, rehome the ecologies of practices and the experience of sacredness. And I think in that, we also agree. So I want to be clear about something here. I'm not happy"
},
{
"end_time": 4814.411,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4788.916,
"text": " I thought I said this, but I don't think I emphasized. I'm not trying to countenance sort of the standard scientific worldview model. I'm willing to, you know, change my ontology quite a bit. I tried to convey that with some of the things I've said. And so I think the disagreement, it might be more about what are the changes and how far should the changes go. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4838.643,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4815.128,
"text": " I think what Bernardo is doing is important, and I would not want anything I'm saying to be taken as meaning people should not wrestle seriously with his work. I'm not trying to imply that at all. Neither did I interpret to you that way, John. Can I continue? Please do."
},
{
"end_time": 4866.664,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4839.104,
"text": " Look, I do think that our mainstream ontology plays a role in this. And I don't think it's a positive role. But I'm also quick to admit that it is one role. It's not the whole story. There are other things going on. And I think another enormous thing that you point out, when you say that we overemphasize propositional knowledge, knowledge of facts as distinct from wisdom, which is very hard to define, although you"
},
{
"end_time": 4894.309,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4866.988,
"text": " You elaborate extensively on how we actually can get a grip on what wisdom is. But what is immediately clear is that it entails a lot, a lot more than propositional knowledge. And we live in a society in which the people we take direction from today, the spokespeople of science we see on TV often, they"
},
{
"end_time": 4903.643,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4894.77,
"text": " are sorry if I go too far in this characterization but they are very often psychically unbalanced"
},
{
"end_time": 4930.93,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4904.343,
"text": " one psychic function is taken as the only one that matters. It's a kind of analytic, rational, conceptual thinking. And that is taken as the only thing that is trustworthy. And they are challenged when it comes to the richness of all the other psychic functions, like intuition, appreciation for art, sense perception, you know, being grounded in your senses as opposed to abstraction."
},
{
"end_time": 4959.906,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4931.305,
"text": " and we don't see it, we take them as the new wise men and they are people who have large chunks of the human psyche amputated from them and they have become our wise men. I call it the idolatry of nerds and the word nerd is appropriate I think to be used here and I think it's tragic that we"
},
{
"end_time": 4988.319,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4960.23,
"text": " been trying to replace wisdom with pure extensive encyclopedic propositional knowledge, as if the latter were a substitute for the former, and as if doing this could be justified merely by the lack of absolute certainty that you can attach to wisdom. Yeah, I think that's very well said, what you've said there, Bernardo."
},
{
"end_time": 5015.623,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4988.643,
"text": " I agree. And I mean, I've argued for it extensively, which is part of what I was trying to point to where I said, I appreciate you trying to bring in a phenomenological richness to this discussion we were previously engaged in. Yeah, I do think that the recognition of the significance and importance in two directions, both, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5044.241,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5016.357,
"text": " in terms of our ontology, the significance of the non-propositional ways of knowing and ways of being in the psyche, I think. And then also the increasing evidence that it's those non-propositional aspects of the psyche and ways of knowing that contribute the most to meaning in a sense of meaning in life. And I think that tyranny of the propositional or the tyranny, the ideology of the nerds"
},
{
"end_time": 5074.189,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5044.411,
"text": " is not only limiting our capacity to try and understand these phenomena and thereby create a worldview to which we can belong, because we don't belong to the current worldview. That's, I think, something we would also agree on, I think. But also the fact that it puts individuals existentially at risk of"
},
{
"end_time": 5094.48,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5074.616,
"text": " Let's get to the disagreements again."
},
{
"end_time": 5126.084,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5096.681,
"text": " And I think this is important. This is very much like an in-family kind of disagreement that I don't want to presume I just met Bernardo, but Bernardo, I would say to you, you know, everything you're saying here leads me to really appreciate the motivation you're bringing to these more sort of technical ontological disagreements we're having. And I want to I just wanted to express that appreciation before we return back to potential debates, because I think that's important. I mean, for me,"
},
{
"end_time": 5156.186,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5126.869,
"text": " Sorry, I don't want to make this sound pragmatic. One of the things, not the only thing, obviously there's the own internal epistemic success, but one of the things that could potentially move me more towards your ontology is if I could see how it might more readily address some of the difficulties that I'm trying to address with my ontology with respect to the meeting crisis. And so that'd be something perhaps we could also discuss somewhere along the way."
},
{
"end_time": 5185.538,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5156.715,
"text": " Can you mention two or three concrete points? So, one of the things that I've been trying to do, this was something that you admitted in your ontology, and then I noted it, but I sort of got sidetracked in being heated, I guess. You admitted sort of, even within consciousness, processes of filtering."
},
{
"end_time": 5215.316,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5186.169,
"text": " And you probably know that the core of my work on like intelligence, as distinct from consciousness, although I think these ultimately are related, has to do with this issue that I call relevance realization, which is of all of the information available to me, I can't, and right, and of all the information available to me in my memory, and of all the possible sequences of operations, that's also combinatorially explosive. So yet, moment by moment, I'm somehow realizing, focusing on what's relevant,"
},
{
"end_time": 5245.435,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5215.862,
"text": " basically intelligently ignoring, and it's a constitutive part of my intelligence, most of that information, that is not any algorithmic process. And it is also it is always prey to the deleterious effects of the bias. So the various things that make me adaptive at this make me subject to bias, the self deception. And we have moments where that self correction comes out when we have aha moments and insight. And so I happen to think that"
},
{
"end_time": 5262.278,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5245.657,
"text": " that that relevance realization is a way in which we're dynamically coupled to the world. I can give that argument in more depth later, but I'm just trying to give it just here. And I think that's that that that underwrites our cognitive agency."
},
{
"end_time": 5282.602,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5262.705,
"text": " but we also experience that connectedness as deeply rewarding. And that reward is different from the reward of pleasure. It's the reward that we call meaning in life, which is also different from subjective well-being. And so I think our meaning, that sense, that positive rewarding sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 5308.319,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5282.602,
"text": " of meaning in life and man will people do a lot for meaning in life they will sacrifice a lot of pleasure and a lot of contentment in order to get meaning in life and they reliably do that for example when they have a kid because pleasure and subjective well-being go down dramatically but meaning in life go up significantly absolutely so yeah so I think that that connectedness is central to"
},
{
"end_time": 5328.319,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5309.735,
"text": " to meeting in life. And then I use basically an evolutionary model of trying to explain what that connectedness is like. There's something in our brain and no, that's the wrong way of putting it. There's something in the relationship between the brain and the world that is strongly analogous to biological adaptation, biological adaptivity."
},
{
"end_time": 5355.418,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5328.677,
"text": " And then there's something analogous to how that evolves in a self-organizing fashion that we call intelligence. And that helps me to explain a lot of the progress I see within artificial intelligence, a lot of the convergence I see within cognitive science and cognitive psychology. And so I tend to see that in that way. And I'm wondering if... Well, I want to make it a genuine question."
},
{
"end_time": 5382.363,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5355.845,
"text": " Is there a way in which your ontology would speak to that in a way that might be particularly helpful? I mean, I'm not trying to put you in a corner. If it doesn't, I'm not saying, oh, well, there, it's false. I'm not doing that. It's an open question. It does. I mean, that's my motivation for doing what I do. I don't do this just because I want to win an academic argument in a world of abstractions and academic journals. Yeah, I totally get that."
},
{
"end_time": 5410.845,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5382.875,
"text": " Yeah, I do it because I think it makes a difference. I mean, it's not even clear to us anymore that the story we tell ourselves about what we are and what the world is and our role in it is the key source of meaning in our lives. Why are we not aware of this anymore? And I think that's because of fluid compensation, to use a technical term in psychology. We are fluid compensating all over the place. We've replaced"
},
{
"end_time": 5431.613,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5411.118,
"text": " authentic sources of meaning with self validation, with the idea of leaving work behind that survives us with differentiating ourselves as part of an elite group. This happens a lot among scientists. So even if we adopt a worldview that is flat and bleak,"
},
{
"end_time": 5458.336,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5431.988,
"text": " as I would say, mainstream physicalism is not not perhaps, well, certainly not your version of physicalism. But the mainstream physicalist view that consciousness doesn't even really exist. That is so flat and meaning draining and bleak. But we don't notice that because we find ways to fluid compensate and find other sources of meaning. I mean, when we killed God in the second half of the 19th century, we were quick."
},
{
"end_time": 5481.596,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5458.712,
"text": " to erect another edifice of meaning giving. And that has evolved now, and I will link that to artificial intelligence, which you mentioned as well, that has evolved now into Singulitarianism, which is a purely physicalist religion, which postulates that if we create a AI that can build a better version of itself faster than we could,"
},
{
"end_time": 5503.183,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5481.869,
"text": " then that would accelerate the evolution of AI exponentially and then we would create a de facto god who would then take care of us and like we take care of animals in a zoo. I mean that's the religious impulse, the search for meaning right there. We never abandon that search for meaning even though we fluid compensate and we find sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 5525.674,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5503.183,
"text": " decoy targets for it. But if you ask me honestly, where do I think it went wrong? I think it went wrong the moment we started telling ourselves and believing that the world we see is all there is to the story. That the world is its own meaning as opposed to being an image of something else deeper."
},
{
"end_time": 5554.872,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5525.913,
"text": " as opposed to being how the world, as it is in itself, presents itself to us. But there is this extra dimension of depth and meaning. The images that we call the world are pointing to something beyond themselves, are pointing to a basic meaning. Sorry to interject. Can you explain what you mean when you say the world itself is meaning? Today, under a physicalist ontology, matter is all there is."
},
{
"end_time": 5581.544,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5555.691,
"text": " So if you have a material world around you, then there is no extra dimension of depth to that world. That world is all there is. So whatever meaning it has, it is that meaning because it's not pointing at anything else. It's not representing anything else because it's all there is. And this is a notion that is today called naive realism in philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 5604.787,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5581.869,
"text": " We know from science and philosophy that this is absolutely and categorically wrong, because one, evolution wouldn't have given us a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Evolution doesn't do that. Evolution equips us to survive. So evolution would have given us a dashboard of dials, not a transparent windscreen into the world."
},
{
"end_time": 5624.104,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5605.213,
"text": " We also know from hardcore neuroscience that if our inner representational states, our perceptions, if those states mirrored the states of the world as it is in itself, our inner states would be too dispersed and we would basically dissolve into an entropic soup."
},
{
"end_time": 5647.466,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5624.36,
"text": " we wouldn't be able to maintain our structural and dynamical integrity. So we have to encode the information we have about the world in an inferential manner in order to maintain our physical integrity. So we know that the world as it is in itself is not what we see or even measure through instrumentation because even measurement follows the paradigm"
},
{
"end_time": 5675.265,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5647.466,
"text": " The world as it is in itself is not available to our direct inspection. The only way to know it as it is in itself is to be it. And Kant already said that and Schopenhauer echoed that. So if we recover"
},
{
"end_time": 5704.07,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5675.589,
"text": " If we put back into our explicit metaconscious awareness that this is what's going on, then the world regains a dimension of depth and mystery. And your life in it now has a meaning. Not only the world as it is in itself is the ultimate meaning, which you have to interpret out of how the world presents itself to you, out of the dials that you have, that evolution has given you. Even your role in it is now mysterious."
},
{
"end_time": 5731.391,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5704.599,
"text": " Because you are in the world, even though you don't see it as it is in itself, you know that you are in it. And that dimension of mystery and meaning, I think, losing contact with that dimension is one of the key sources of the meaning crisis. And one way to recover that is to take myth seriously, not literally, but seriously. And we've lost the art of knowing how to do this."
},
{
"end_time": 5751.442,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5733.558,
"text": " So I think that was fantastic and beautifully said. Yeah, I think, well, I've already said I think that flat ontologies are incoherent theoretically, and I think they make their adherents engage in ongoing performative contradiction all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 5777.807,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5751.783,
"text": " in which, like you said, the scientist espouses a meaningless universe as he or she desperately tries to climb to the top of whatever status hierarchy they belong to. And that's all kinds of performative contradiction. So I think there's incoherence and there's performative contradiction. So yeah, I don't think that flat ontologies, I think, are viable. And then I think the idea of recovering, I like what you said, a depth dimension,"
},
{
"end_time": 5801.954,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5778.319,
"text": " to it, to our ontology is important. So I tend to think that that depth dimension comes in when we invoke, well, kind of what I was saying before,"
},
{
"end_time": 5825.401,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5802.995,
"text": " I'm sorry, I'm just worried about, I don't want to sound overly Kantian because I disagree with Kant's idea that we have no access. I disagree with that too, by the way. Okay, go ahead. Okay, thank you for that. And so let's say we always have filtered access or something like that. And I think that follows directly. I think that's something that I"
},
{
"end_time": 5847.585,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5826.067,
"text": " I argue for and perhaps even presuppose in the account of relevance realization that I just talked about. By the way, I would argue this is the hardest problem in artificial intelligence, almost as hard as the hard problem of consciousness. I think relevance is a very hard problem. And I do happen to think the two problems are related, and maybe we could talk about that at some point."
},
{
"end_time": 5872.022,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5848.217,
"text": " I do think that reality in that sense is other than it's the way see the obviousness of our experience is exactly what we need to explain rather than take as the basis for our explanation and I think by the time we've gotten to the obviousness of experience we've you know our brain mind and its interaction with our brain body world right interaction has"
},
{
"end_time": 5896.101,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5872.5,
"text": " has so filtered things that we have avoided the combinatorially explosive nature of reality itself. And so that's why, and I've been trying to make an argument, and this is a bit of a side thing, of reconfiguring the sense of what you call mystery, and I use that term. I mean, I'm deeply influenced by Gabriel Marcel's work on ontological mystery."
},
{
"end_time": 5923.916,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5896.647,
"text": " that a mystery is different from a... In a problem, we frame it and then we can bring clarity to it. In a mystery, we find that the framing itself is problematic and we keep doing this, right, and we keep expanding the frames and then we realize, oh shit, it's bigger than I could possibly accommodate and we get experiences of awe, which are tremendously efficacious for transforming individuals at the kind of level we're talking about, conducive to the cultivation of virtue and wisdom and doing experimental work on that right now."
},
{
"end_time": 5941.493,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5924.241,
"text": " And so I try to think, and maybe this goes back to some of the points I've made earlier, I try to reconceive of that mystery and sacredness not as completion or perfection, but in a sense as an inexhaustibleness."
},
{
"end_time": 5968.882,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5941.732,
"text": " There's a bit of a Neoplatonic spin on this. There's an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility for us. So as we uncover more in the trajectory into the mystery, it seems to have an underlying order to it, an underlying pattern and intelligibility to it, which does not close off the fact that there's going to be more that's going to surprise us."
},
{
"end_time": 5996.732,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5969.206,
"text": " And so I tend to think of the sacredness as being exactly that horizon of intelligibility, where we can look back and see all the fields of intelligibility that have arisen for us, but we have a tremendous sense of what we're nowhere near, and we'll never be anywhere near exhausting this. It's kind of like, is it Schelling's, the finite always longing for the infinite? That's the sense of sacredness in some of the early post-Kantian"
},
{
"end_time": 6007.995,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5996.732,
"text": " That's what I'm trying to argue for now. And I think part of the thing that I'm critical of, of the Cartesian paradigm, which also gets taken into"
},
{
"end_time": 6033.336,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6008.49,
"text": " the modernity of the interpretation of religion is this idea of certainty and completion and closure as the things that we are most seeking. And I don't think that is the case. I think that humans want, I mean what we know from the meaning in life literatures, human beings want to be connected to something larger than themselves and to matter to it, to fit to it rather than have it fit to them."
},
{
"end_time": 6060.538,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6033.336,
"text": " Sorry, I've spoken too long. That's my attempt to say something I think may be convergent with you. Jung said the only important question is whether we are related to something infinite or not. And he nailed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way we long for it and the way that has a normative impact on the way we live our lives."
},
{
"end_time": 6086.544,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6060.794,
"text": " And I think, again, we agree on this, that we are, we both, if you'll allow me to speak for you, we're both sort of distressed by the, well, I'll use it in a psychological sense, maybe in your ontological, but the dissociation between the worldview people espouse and believe in and the way they're trying to live their lives. And that disjunction comes, that dissociation comes at terrible cost."
},
{
"end_time": 6102.312,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6086.92,
"text": " terrible cost. I mean, and the way social media is doing exactly the opposite of what it promised. It's accelerating all of this rather than alleviating it any function because it's not getting at the root of the problem. There, I'll be quiet, Bernardo, so you can say so."
},
{
"end_time": 6131.186,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6102.312,
"text": " I can listen to you for a long time because this subject is very close to my heart. I wanted to ask you a question, but before I do that, just a quick clarification. I also am not with Kant that we can never have any sort of access to the noumena. I think he went too far. I think through perception, we cannot have access to the noumena. But the key insight that he missed and Schopenhauer added very quickly after Kant was that"
},
{
"end_time": 6158.439,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6131.783,
"text": " We are our own numena. So through introspection, I can access my numena. And since I'm part of the world, I can make educated inferences about the numena out there, because I'm also sort of material made of matter, at least as far as perception goes. So if the matter in my body is the representation of my will, then I can conclude the world as it is in itself is also something like the will."
},
{
"end_time": 6186.032,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6158.439,
"text": " So I think there is a channel to the Newman and that's introspection. And then that's what the world's religious traditions have been saying all along. But the question I wanted to ask you is, I have some clinical psychologists that I count as friends, and we have discussions now and then. And the subject that always comes is, especially when you have a depth psychologist, a psychologist oriented to the depth as opposed to behaviorism or anything like this, or anyway."
},
{
"end_time": 6193.695,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6186.357,
"text": " Um, the question I always ask is if the task is to help your patient recover meaning"
},
{
"end_time": 6224.326,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6195.111,
"text": " Can that be done in the absence of a certain ontological position? Can you be ontologically neutral? Because psychologists talk about giving meaning. Maybe it's a literal translation from Dutch, but I think it works in English as well. How do you give meaning? And my feeling is that if I am a patient, and I have done therapy, by the way, I always come out of that with the feeling it's like I'm trying to cheat myself because either meaning is really there,"
},
{
"end_time": 6251.954,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6224.906,
"text": " or it's not, and my giving meaning to it is some kind of self-deception. It doesn't work out for me. So do you think we can solve the meaning crisis without addressing ontology head on? So first of all, I want to riff on the first thing you said as a way of preparing for my answer to the second thing. So I think the key and the most foundational, the key to the most foundational kind of knowing, which I call participatory knowing, which I take from"
},
{
"end_time": 6277.005,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6252.278,
"text": " ultimately inspired by Plato. But you can see it either, you can see it in all kinds of Platonists, and I count Jung as a Platonist. I think he's basically the Plato of the inner psyche, and the archetypes are the forms, and I think you could make a good argument for that. And that's why he was attracted to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, things like that. But that's an exegetical claim. But it's this notion"
},
{
"end_time": 6302.654,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6277.329,
"text": " And the reason why I think it's important is I see convergence from, as you said, other religious traditions. I read a lot of the Kyoto school, Nishitani, Nishida, Maso Abe, Suzuki, things like that, and what was going on there. And so the notion that comes out is from these two traditions, and they converge on this idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 6323.592,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6303.114,
"text": " unless you that at bottom and I can make a more long argument for this but I think you'll get the gist of it if I reject skepticism if I reject an absolute skepticism I have to rely on that kind of participatory knowing that I know it because I am it right and that and because I am it and that that part of the world"
},
{
"end_time": 6352.415,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6323.916,
"text": " is also it, we participate in the same thing. That is how my mind and the world touch. I know this might step on a couple of your toes, but that's my way of talking right now. And so the idea that there's a kind of knowing that is simultaneously how I know myself, and I don't mean my autobiography, I mean how I ontically and even ontologically know myself, that is necessarily bound up with how I know the world."
},
{
"end_time": 6379.735,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6352.415,
"text": " When I see Plato, and I, you know, this means I reject sort of standard academic interpretations of Plato, I see Plato, no, no, that's not, that's not true. Some, there's a growing group of people that would agree with this interpretation of Plato. So I see Plato as basically the person who sort of proposed that at the core of his argument is that idea of participation ultimately grounds us. And then that leads me to, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6406.305,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6380.503,
"text": " There's two ways of asking that question, and since you brought it up in the context of clinical psychology, it's important to distinguish. I wouldn't want to claim that everybody has to do fundamental ontology in order to get alleviation from anxiety or despair or depression or loneliness."
},
{
"end_time": 6435.162,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6406.715,
"text": " They, I would say, there's a level at which they do need a necology of practices. Simply changing their beliefs is radically insufficient. That's why people go into therapy. Many people, I think, live, and this is not meant to be any kind of elitist insult, but they live very pragmatically. If they've got a necology of practices that's working, that's it. That's good, right? So in that sense, I don't think everybody has to do it. But in the deeper sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 6462.568,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6435.759,
"text": " Do they, are they ultimately dependent on scientists and philosophers finding a way to ground and legitimate that ecology of practices in a worldview? Yeah, I think they do. Because I think our worldview, this is deeply influenced by Clifford Geertz, our worldview is our meta-meaning system. I'm not equating our worldview completely with our ontology, but I'm saying our worldview is our sort of our shared"
},
{
"end_time": 6492.756,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6462.858,
"text": " our shared ontology, our shared commitment, if you'll allow me that, okay? And so, and I think our worldview is our meta-meaning system. It is that, it is not itself a meaning system. It is that which, like you said, at the bottom, makes possible all the other meaning systems by giving a participatory relationship, a pattern of co-identification between the agents and what I call, what Chris and I in our book, and Philip and I call it, the agent in the arena. The world becomes a place that is shaped"
},
{
"end_time": 6518.302,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6493.2,
"text": " either physically or mentally to fit me and by which I physically and that also includes technology and or mentally shape myself to the world so that we have a participatory relation. So there are affordances for behavior and I think for me there has to be people out there doing that. There has to be people who are saying"
},
{
"end_time": 6549.48,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6519.872,
"text": " The current worldview does not home us. I mean, we don't belong in our worldview. There's no place for us in it. And that means ultimately everything we're doing with our ecologies of practices doesn't fit in that worldview. And like I say, most people don't have to solve that problem, but that problem cannot remain unsolved, at least in the sense of seriously, plausibly addressed. So I hope that was an answer to your question. Yeah, yeah, I am with you. I even agree with you. And actually, I have"
},
{
"end_time": 6577.005,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6550.009,
"text": " No problem admitting to this and reinforcing this. I don't think any conceptual buy in into a specific ontology will solve anybody's psychological problems. Because conceptual understanding is not embodied. It stays rotating somewhere in the head and it doesn't go down into your emotional life. I do think though that we are in a culture where the intellect is the bouncer of the heart."
},
{
"end_time": 6601.391,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6577.466,
"text": " The intellect is the bouncer of the heart. So even in situations where somebody would have a transformative experience or a transformative insight, they don't give themselves intellectual permission"
},
{
"end_time": 6618.507,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6601.8,
"text": " to take it on board, to even perceive it, let alone take it seriously. And when the insight sort of muscles in, like the experience of awe that occasionally we have, it comes in, we have the awe, but 15 minutes later saying, ah, that's nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 6645.179,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6618.507,
"text": " Emotions are just a side effect of evolutionarily encoded behavioral patterns driven by physiology. And off it goes. It doesn't sink in. So I think that although an ontology would not solve the problem, it literally opens the door for whatever solution there might be. Because right now, there is a closed door and a very big muscleful bouncer at the door."
},
{
"end_time": 6674.821,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6645.179,
"text": " That's preventing us from relating with more richness and depth to ourselves in the world. I would agree with that, Bernardo. Although I guess I think a little bit more like a bifurcation point. I think there are many people who do exactly what you say, the dismissive-distractive response. However, I've met, even within an experimental paradigm, because I've done experiments on people, mystical experiments and stuff like that. I've met people who have the opposite."
},
{
"end_time": 6702.688,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6675.486,
"text": " So they have a very powerful and there's literature to back me up on what I'm saying. They have these powerful experiences and they precisely can't dismiss them. There's something in and so I call this onto normativity. So often like we people do dismiss many of their altered states of consciousness and again that's adaptive and many of them should be dismissed perhaps. But what's really interesting is people and it looks to be about 30 to 40 percent of the population which is not insignificant."
},
{
"end_time": 6731.8,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6702.688,
"text": " have these experiences, and they do this. They don't say, oh, it doesn't fit in with this worldview, therefore it's not real. They do the opposite. They say, that's really real, and therefore there's something wrong with this. That happens too. And that happens, again, it's not majority, but 30% to 40% is not insignificant. That's a lot of people. And then, but what typically happens though, is they go looking for some guidance and"
},
{
"end_time": 6755.759,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6732.056,
"text": " they can't find it and then they do an autodidactic thing which can often spin off in very crazy things because precisely there is no ontology that seeks to bridge between, if you'll allow me, everyday obviousness and the kind those kinds of experiences of awe and like onto normativity like and you know if you take a look at Yaden's work when people have these experiences"
},
{
"end_time": 6780.708,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6755.759,
"text": " They will reconfigure their entire lives, their relationships, their careers, even their sense of identity, because they want to, and here's what I want to invoke it, they want to conform more and more to that really real. The really real has an independent normativity and value to them above and beyond, you know, practical power, and they do these major transformations, but they're often"
},
{
"end_time": 6809.002,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6781.817,
"text": " thwarted or that can go awry precisely because they often have to do it in a very autodidactic fashion. And that, you see, and that's where I would hope, you know, however we manage to, you know, flesh out the ontology and make it work. And I think we should both keep working. I would hope that it would allow people to turn"
},
{
"end_time": 6836.374,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6809.343,
"text": " to individuals that they plausibly accord intellectual respect to, not because the project is intellectual, but because they can take seriously the ontology that would allow them to talk to each other. It would give them a lingua franca by which they could do what human beings often need to do, which is to do this in distributed cognition, not as isolated individuals. So that would be one of the hopes I would have."
},
{
"end_time": 6863.814,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6836.698,
"text": " What occurs to me is a question I'd like you both to explore. That is, what is real? What exists? How do you define what exists? And can we ever know what's real? So Bernardo, why don't you start that?"
},
{
"end_time": 6894.957,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6866.237,
"text": " I don't think apes evolved on planet Earth have the cognitive apparatus that would be necessary for us to know conceptually the ultimate salient truths of nature. I don't think that is possible. So I don't think the game we are playing in ontology is a game of finding what the truth is. I think the game is"
},
{
"end_time": 6911.118,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6895.845,
"text": " Given our limitations and our best learnings and best practices and our epistemic value system, how much closer to truth can we get knowing that we will not arrive"
},
{
"end_time": 6929.667,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6911.357,
"text": " But can we do better than we are doing right now, given what we know, and our value system, but by value system, I mean, our appreciation of empirical evidence, our appreciation of internal consistency, coherence of yeah, I'll say that john conceptual parsimony,"
},
{
"end_time": 6943.234,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6929.667,
"text": " So given this value system around which there is some degree of cultural consensus, not full, not full consensus, but some degree of cultural consensus, at least in academia,"
},
{
"end_time": 6970.026,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6944.258,
"text": " How well can we do? Can we do better than we are doing now? I submit to you guys that I think we can do significantly better than we are doing now. That would not mean that we can get to the truth of the matter as apes evolved on planet Earth, but we can get closer than we are. And by getting closer, I also think, and this is"
},
{
"end_time": 6999.633,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6970.64,
"text": " not by construction, it so happens to be like that. By getting closer, I think we will also get healthier and we will live in a healthier way, more aware of the depth of the mystery where we are inserted, which is that dimension of depth and mystery that we lose sight of today. That I think we can definitely achieve. Now, a quick observation. I need to have a bio break shortly."
},
{
"end_time": 7026.476,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7000.947,
"text": " So if, if we can find a point right now, or maybe John can answer the same question. So there is, uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. So we'll see you right back. No, I want to hear the answer and then I hope we can, and then we can both break, uh, possible. Um, yeah. So I mean, real could be used in two different ways. It can be used as an absolute or it can be used as a comparative."
},
{
"end_time": 7049.974,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7026.937,
"text": " And I happen to think that it makes more sense to treat it as a comparative. And I think that's what you're saying, Bernardo. I think although we can't say this is real in an absolute sense, we can with good reason, good evidence and good argument say, but this is more real than that. We can make those comparative judgments in a way that seems to be progressive."
},
{
"end_time": 7074.36,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7050.401,
"text": " in the sense that we don't keep losing previous claims in some sort of chaos. There's a slowly building coherent structure that emerges and we revise it and blah blah blah blah. I'm not denying any of that. But I think the comparative sense of realness is something that we have to, and I think we can, put our epistemic trust in."
},
{
"end_time": 7098.592,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7074.753,
"text": " And so I think that is to say, for all of our epistemic boundedness, I agree with you, Bernardo, we are slightly super evolved apes that have culture and culture ratchets, which is, that's an important difference. We don't individually have to relearn everything from scratch, and that does help. But I think culture ratchets precisely because we can make"
},
{
"end_time": 7126.135,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7098.848,
"text": " this progressive improvement. I don't think there's any teleology or anything like that. I think we can go we still could massively just screw this all up. Nevertheless, I agree that what we can get we can get better in a comparative sense of saying this is more real than that. And then this is more real than that. And then soon as we do that, again, I think that means we are all we are already committed to a non flat ontology. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7150.828,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7126.408,
"text": " I think that as soon as we do that, we start drawing relationships of, well, okay, this is dependent on this and this is dependent on that in terms of our judgment. And I think for me that, and this is where I'll put my neck out a little bit more perhaps than Bernardo did, that's where to me, again, that original sort of platonic insight about, you know, intelligibility and realness that our best"
},
{
"end_time": 7175.282,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7151.186,
"text": " The best way we participate in the way we talked about earlier, reality is through intelligibility. It's our best way of getting the platform by which we can walk a little bit more and more closer to what is perhaps real in that absolute sense. But I agree. I think it's hubristic and I think it's just"
},
{
"end_time": 7204.172,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7175.64,
"text": " I think it's damaging to think we have the real, in the really real sense, in some sort of complete sense. I argue against that consistently. On the second point, I agree that if we don't get back to helping people improve those two things in an integrated fashion, intelligible realness, that they have, that things make sense to them, and they feel that that sense is, people want both."
},
{
"end_time": 7230.52,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7204.957,
"text": " There are different poles, in fact, of meeting life. People want things to make sense, but they also want what they make sense to be, in some sense, real. So I'll do this with my students. I'll say, how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? And they'll put up their hands. And I said, keep up your hand if you would like to know that your partner is cheating on you, even though that would destroy the relationship. 95% of my students keep their hands up."
},
{
"end_time": 7246.647,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7231.135,
"text": " Because they don't want it if it's not real, even if it's making beautiful sense to them. They ultimately also want it to be real. And so I think that if we do not give if we if we do not afford people a way of Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 7275.845,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7246.886,
"text": " I don't know, drinking more and more from the ongoing fount of intelligibility in a way that they think is realizing them in some fashion. I think it's going to, it is, I wouldn't even say it's going to, it is producing ill health, both at the individual and collective level. And so these issues are not, and I don't mean, I don't use this adjective pejoratively here, but these issues are not academic issues. These are existential issues. And so I think people ignore them."
},
{
"end_time": 7306.305,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7276.323,
"text": " John, do you have to go as well? Yeah, I'm going to go as well. All right. I'm back. How's it going? Good. How's it going? Good. I'm relieved. You're relieved? How? The washroom. Yeah, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7334.053,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7306.937,
"text": " Yeah, it's actually better if you all continue talking, and I'll wait for Bernardo before I say my next comments, but it's better if you continue to talk. There are questions, but these questions will then be the seed of a four-hour discussion, and you're already in one, so you may as well just continue."
},
{
"end_time": 7362.295,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7334.838,
"text": " Well, I like and I like moving between these two between debate and dialogue. Thank you. We're gonna get back to debate. Okay, that's fine. I'm happy to just stay here too. Because these issues are issues that really matter to me as well. But I mean, Bernardo is coming at this. And I mean, this is a real compliment. He's coming at this, like in really good faith. And, and I'll always willing"
},
{
"end_time": 7390.947,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7362.995,
"text": " I want to talk to and I want to be open to listening to people who are coming at this with, you know, thoughtful, good faith. And that's clearly the case with him. And so, yeah, well, so is it with you. So thank you. Okay. Well, you're welcome. I just, I just, uh, this is very, very enjoyable. Yeah, thanks. It's always enjoyable when, when I speak to you, or at least when I get a chance to listen to you, most of the time I'm listening rather than speaking to you."
},
{
"end_time": 7418.097,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7392.142,
"text": " I enjoyed, I think it was two years ago, we had a couple of conversations in person. It was that long ago, eh? Yeah, almost two years ago. In the summer it would be two years. You were abstaining from chocolate then. Yeah, I've been able to, well, I'm on new medication for my manures and I've been on it since about six months now and it's been just enormously successful. And so I can indulge occasionally in chocolate."
},
{
"end_time": 7447.193,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7418.49,
"text": " You're looking good, man. Someone said that you're sexy but wrong. Which one would you rather? I don't know. Both aspects of what's been going on with us, Bernardo, I've really enjoyed it. I was telling Kurt, you're obviously"
},
{
"end_time": 7476.886,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7447.671,
"text": " I love to talk to people even when I disagree with them at some points, but people that are coming at this with, you know, with reflective good faith, you know, it's deeply appreciative. So I suppose maybe in the end that I'm choosing sexy over. I reciprocate your feeling, by the way, John, I'm having a lot of fun. I can hardly believe it's been two hours already. Yeah, OK, let's get to debate now because we were just talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 7506.954,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7477.688,
"text": " idea hugging forget about that let's conflict let's have some swords where do you all disagree the most well i'm not i'm not quite clear on that actually given a lot of the discussion here um i know ontologically you disagree whereas bernardo excuse me if i'm paraphrasing incorrectly but you were saying that we can have different contents of consciousness that are all the same much like"
},
{
"end_time": 7527.978,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7507.585,
"text": " There are different fields in quantum physics that are all one underlying field, at least in a grand unified theory. What I meant is you can produce diversity out of unity if you take into account the notion of excitation. And this is what physics does all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 7548.114,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7528.285,
"text": " So you can have a single field. It's all that exists. So you would say, well, then there is only one thing. How come there is this idea that there is diversity in the universe and physics solves this by saying, okay, that one field has many possible different patterns of excitation on harmonics. And those are the differences. So you account for the"
},
{
"end_time": 7575.094,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7548.49,
"text": " And so the"
},
{
"end_time": 7603.882,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7575.52,
"text": " The analogy, I take it, is that when I was pointing to multiple, I guess they'd be analogous to particles within consciousness, that you are saying that they are just modes of a field. Is that a good way of putting it? Under quantum field theory, there is no electron as an entity."
},
{
"end_time": 7627.125,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7604.309,
"text": " It's just a shorthand for a ripple on a field, so to say, in that field can ripple in different places in different ways. And those different patterns of rippling would account for the properties of the elementary subatomic particles. So under quantum field theory, there are actually no particles. There are only fields."
},
{
"end_time": 7648.763,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7627.517,
"text": " And that's the only way to reconcile quantum theory, which you know, we know is true at the microscopic level to reconcile that with general relativity, which we know is true at the macroscopic level. The only way to reconcile them is to use this notion of fields, which began with Maxwell in the 19th century. That was Maxwell's great"
},
{
"end_time": 7677.432,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7649.206,
"text": " insight following up on Faraday's notion of an electromagnetic field. Maxwell's insight was to treat it mathematically as a field. But I take it that the patterns in the field are also real, because that's precisely what allows you to explain the differences. Yeah, that would be the postulate. Of course, John, as far as the philosophy of science is concerned, I am an anti-realist."
},
{
"end_time": 7703.558,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7677.807,
"text": " I think theoretical entities are useful fictions. And I don't think they need to be anything more than useful fictions. In other words, nature behaves as though there were quantum fields. And that's all we need to know. We do not need to know whether the quantum fields are actually and literally real, so long as they allow us to build a model that is predictively accurate."
},
{
"end_time": 7732.892,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7703.899,
"text": " Yeah, so I didn't mean to commit you to something there. I was just trying to get the depths of the analogy. And so I'll take it to be an analogy and not commit you to anything at the level of quantum mechanics. So what I'm trying to get at is"
},
{
"end_time": 7763.114,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7734.275,
"text": " that there is a field and the field is real, but there's also mods and modulations in the field and they're also real. Yeah, those harmonics of the field are taken to be real insofar as they are the basis to explain the reality of measurable phenomena, which are then taken to be real too. Okay. So, and then that's one thing I'm trying to understand."
},
{
"end_time": 7793.217,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7763.422,
"text": " I think I'm getting from your ontology. And the other is the idea is a kind of monism that at base your ontology has to ground in one thing. Because if you have more than one thing, then you have an unexplained relationship between the things. Is that correct? Yeah, the argument against substance dualism is one interaction problem. If these substances are ontologically distinct, how can they interact?"
},
{
"end_time": 7820.043,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7793.541,
"text": " The other one is the causal closure issue. We are very convinced that the physical world is causally closed, even though we don't really have a reason to think that because, you know, from microscopic loss to macroscopic phenomena, all kinds of unknown things can be playing, which we cannot know because there is no control, no experiment done under controlled conditions in the world at large. But so the causal"
},
{
"end_time": 7849.497,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7820.452,
"text": " Right. So why wouldn't those push you towards something like a neoplatonic conclusion or a spinozistic conclusion or some versions of non-dualism which say, well, no, actually mind and matter are actually two different modes of some underlying thing that would explain ultimately the relationship"
},
{
"end_time": 7877.278,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7849.838,
"text": " between them without denying their different, here's, I'm using this, I think correctly, their different modalities. And so, and, you know, and so ultimately there is, like in Neoplatonism, there is the one, and the one is neither conscious nor material, it transcends both, and therefore, right, or Spinoza's God, who is neither, right, who is neither mental nor physical, etc. So, and that"
},
{
"end_time": 7906.425,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7877.773,
"text": " And that strikes me as following very cleanly from those two things we've just talked about, where you've got a monism and you've got this idea of modes, that everything that isn't the one thing is a mode of that one thing. This is a position in philosophy called the dual aspect monism,"
},
{
"end_time": 7930.128,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7906.852,
"text": " arguably Spinoza was a multi-aspect monest. Yeah, he's not just dual aspect. That's unfair to Spinoza. He really thinks of it as an inexhaustible thing, right, that you can't actually capture it. So this is an official position in the sense that it's seriously discussed. I don't adopt it for the following reason."
},
{
"end_time": 7945.469,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7930.674,
"text": " I don't think we need to postulate a third unknown thing which only reveals itself through material and mental aspects. I don't think that's needed because all we know and can know about what we call matter"
},
{
"end_time": 7965.657,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7946.032,
"text": " is essentially mental. Even our abstractions are mental. Our inferences are mental. The material world we see around us is made of qualities. It's made of colors, scents, flavors, mental things. So to postulate anything that isn't essentially mental,"
},
{
"end_time": 7993.592,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7965.657,
"text": " I think is justified only if you cannot account for the facts based on nature's one given, which is mentality. The primary datum of existence is mentality. If you cannot make sense of things based on that one given, then I think you are entitled to go into abstraction territory and invent unknown things in order to account for everything. I happen to think that we can make sense of everything without having to take"
},
{
"end_time": 8008.456,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7993.899,
"text": " Well, what about a standard sort of platonic argument that goes something like this? Well, minds seem to be spatial temporal things, at least if we're doing what you said, which is how I experience it."
},
{
"end_time": 8027.739,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8008.814,
"text": " And yet I seem to need to invoke non-spatio-temporal things, you know, that I will have certain logical principles, for example, that I need to make use of in my reasoning. And trying to, like, does the law of non-contradiction have a spatio-temporal existence? That seems wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 8057.551,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8027.739,
"text": " that seems to not capture the kind of entity it is, or most of math. And so the idea is, well, and then which do I use to explain which? Well, I actually use the logic and the mathematics to explain and make my inferential conclusions about my consciousness. And those things don't seem to be spatiotemporal. And therefore, and there you go. And that's what I need. I need something other than mentality in order to get intelligibility."
},
{
"end_time": 8082.432,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8058.456,
"text": " I think the tendency or the notion to postulate non spatial temporal things, I think it's when we do that, we are confusing a mental archetype with a thing. For instance, Aristotelian logic, it's something that for which there is no objective proof."
},
{
"end_time": 8108.046,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8082.927,
"text": " Logic is a set of axioms. For instance, using the law of excluded middle, that's an axiom. There is an entirely coherent alternative in logic called intuitionism, which dispenses with the law of excluded middle and it's valid. So logic is founded on a set of axioms that appeal directly to our intuition in a way that seems to dispense with the need for argument. It's self-evident."
},
{
"end_time": 8125.503,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8108.746,
"text": " The whole of mathematics in a sense is based on these things that are self-evident. 2 plus 2 is 4 by definition because we make it so, right? And we have arguments, for instance, for why multiplying a negative and a positive number results in a negative number."
},
{
"end_time": 8151.954,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8125.811,
"text": " These are things that are not empirical, they are mental, and yet they seem to be entirely objective. So I would say the objectivity arises from the fact that these are archetypal patterns of mind. These are the natural harmonics, the natural ways in which mind gets excited, the intrinsic natural modes of meditation. They aren't things, and yet they are objective because of that. So we don't need to postulate something non-mental."
},
{
"end_time": 8168.319,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8151.954,
"text": " to account for mental objectivity. All we need to understand is that mind itself has some preferential modes. I mean, that goes back to Jung and goes back to Plato's forms. So archetypes are just regularities of behavior, they don't need to be things that exist."
},
{
"end_time": 8192.142,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8168.916,
"text": " in a place somewhere, I think that Roger Penrose makes this mistake. I mean, if I am to be so bold as to point out a mistake by Roger Penrose, but Roger is a trialist and what he sees as the domain of values, platonic values, I think we can account for those as merely the natural frequencies of excitation of mind, we don't need to go beyond mind."
},
{
"end_time": 8210.555,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8193.353,
"text": " So, I mean, this is what I find challenging, because it seems like this is getting into a kind of normalism again, which is the, and that it gets, I find it very hard to reconcile that with scientific practice, because if I'm going to"
},
{
"end_time": 8238.643,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8211.442,
"text": " The relationships between spatiotemporal things are not themselves spatiotemporal if I want to make the kinds of inferences I'm making. For example, you're making inferences about all of reality, and I take it that all of reality is not itself a spatiotemporal thing. Oh, I see. Right. And so therefore, you have to invoke non-spatiotemporal things, and they're normative on us. We acquiesce in them. That was Plato's point."
},
{
"end_time": 8264.804,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8238.882,
"text": " We say, oh, this is better than that. Yes, and we can move around in our logics, but I don't think that's ultimately problematic. And the point I'm trying to make is that's radically other than my experience of my mind, which is as a spatiotemporal, limited, locatable, perishing. You know, I talked to my sister and she tells me, and I think she's being directly honest, that there was a time when I did not exist."
},
{
"end_time": 8286.374,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8265.111,
"text": " And I take that to be the case. I don't think she's lying. And I'm not a solipsist, and I don't think you're a solipsist. And so it seems to me that there's aspects of reality that are unlike my mind, in that my mind seems to be essentially spatiotemporal, and these things are not spatiotemporal, and yet they're normative on our decisions about what is real."
},
{
"end_time": 8302.91,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8286.988,
"text": " I think your mind as an individual person with private conscious in their life. I think that is finite. I think our bodies are metabolism is what dissociation looks like when observed from across the dissociative boundary and dissociation comes from comes to an end."
},
{
"end_time": 8322.142,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8303.251,
"text": " But the underlying mind, which is the only thing that ever existed, I don't think that comes to an end. It's the thing where all beginnings and ends take place. On what I mentioned about archetypes and science, there's a paper written in 1960 by Eugene Wigner titled, I'll paraphrase it,"
},
{
"end_time": 8348.558,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8322.79,
"text": " the amazing effectiveness of mathematics to describe the laws of nature or something like this and he used the word miracle 12 times in that paper and then his his wonder was why would axiomatic human thinking the things we take to be self-evident why would those axioms of human mentation apply to the behavior of the universe at large that's a great mystery and i think"
},
{
"end_time": 8362.073,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8348.848,
"text": " Associating the laws of nature to archetypes of the same minds that underlies us in nature in a way that we are ontologically continues with nature would make sense of that. But I do understand the point you made, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 8393.387,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8363.473,
"text": " If I frame everything in spatial temporal terms, then I'm taking space-time as a sort of objective primary scaffolding of nature out there. And do we have reasons to believe that to be the case? No, we have plenty of reasons to believe that that is precisely not the case. That's coming up from neuroscience. Now it's coming up from physics with loop quantum gravity in which space-time is now a derivative phenomenon of quantum processes. It's not a pre-existing scaffolding of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 8422.363,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8393.712,
"text": " So the problem is that space time is built into our language, our way of making arguments. So I cannot escape that. So when I talk about excitations, I'm appealing to space time because we think in spatial temporal terms, as Kant put it in Schopenhauer too, space and time are modes of our cognition. If I am to talk about something without pre-assuming space and time, I can't even open my mouth."
},
{
"end_time": 8450.52,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8422.824,
"text": " because language already presupposes tenses, present, past and future presuppose a distinction between object and subject which requires space that was Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis for two things to be different. They have to be within a certain extended dimension. So don't take me wrong. I don't think space time a primary is just that if I try to be consistent with what I actually think, I can't open my mouth. So"
},
{
"end_time": 8479.497,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8451.22,
"text": " So everything I say that is framed under the notion of space and time, you should take it as what I believe to be penultimate truths. They point at an ultimate truth that I can't capture, can't corral into the space-time framework of language. Well, I'm happy with that. I mean, that's a very, that is a neoplatonic conclusion, that the one as the ground of intelligibility is not something that"
},
{
"end_time": 8502.688,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8479.804,
"text": " I guess what I was pointing back to was the phenomenology, which is it seems to me that"
},
{
"end_time": 8529.855,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8503.097,
"text": " I don't know what to call it. I think in one of your videos you called it cosmic consciousness. I don't want to give you the wrong... I want to talk about the consciousness that isn't my introspective personal consciousness. That's fine. Mind at large, cosmic consciousness. I find these perfectly good descriptive terms. I used cosmic consciousness in an academic paper on purpose, tongue in cheek a little bit, because I wanted to dispel this association with new age. Cosmic consciousness is perfectly descriptive."
},
{
"end_time": 8556.817,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8530.23,
"text": " Okay, I won't, I'm not, I'm not invoking any new age woo woo. I just wanted your term for this, because there seems to be then, it seems to me, a difference, a very significant difference in degree or maybe difference in kind between my consciousness, which seems to be again, a perishable, spatio-temporally bound thing that is not fully present to itself. And"
},
{
"end_time": 8585.435,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8557.21,
"text": " the cosmic consciousness, which seems to be very different, because I take it that it ultimately is identical to the ground, what I would call the one, which I take to not be spatiotemporal, to be in some sense, if it's one, it has to be present to itself throughout, because if it's not present to itself, it's not one. And so there seems to be a radical difference between my consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 8606.152,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8585.811,
"text": " and I assume your consciousness and the cosmic consciousness and why isn't that that's really big because you know spatial temporal and mysterious and not and co-present to not these are all big differences you know and when you get enough differences in degree don't you get a difference in kind isn't it different isn't it a different kind of thing I don't know"
},
{
"end_time": 8630.896,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8606.51,
"text": " I think it's a common, I'll use a certain word, not in disrespect to you, it's just that it's a technical word. I think this is a common and ever more popular fallacy, the idea that differences in degree can lead to a difference in kind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness. If you've ever had a high dose, deep psychedelic trip,"
},
{
"end_time": 8657.858,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8630.896,
"text": " you will know that that's not spatial temporal. You get into territories, into certain configurations or states of mind that are not spatial temporal at all. And you come back and you can talk about it because we just don't have the words. But those are very concrete, very present states of mind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness, a kind of trance. And we shouldn't attribute the qualities of this particular state"
},
{
"end_time": 8668.2,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8658.148,
"text": " to mind at large. For instance, I always warn people to not anthropomorphize mind at large by attributing to it our ability to"
},
{
"end_time": 8694.377,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8668.848,
"text": " plan to act in a premeditated way, to self-reflect. I think mind at large is instinctive, and that's why the laws of nature are so predictable and stable. So I think there is an enormous difference in quality, but not in kind. I think both are mental in the sense that both are qualitative or experiential. Well, okay. I mean, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 8724.172,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8695.009,
"text": " I think you get into Soraydi's paradoxes if differences of degree don't eventually become differences of kind. And so I do think there is a need for that. But the problem of that is that you would have to pinpoint exactly at what point there is a sudden translation in kind. Because you see, I can add more speakers to my Hi-Fi, but at what point does it turn into a television? You see what I mean? Well, I mean, it's a category error."
},
{
"end_time": 8745.452,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8724.718,
"text": " Well, I can add a lot of individual units that can't do computation together, and they together can do computation. I mean, and so there is there is there are all those kinds of transitions. Let's take that. Let's take that an exam. This is close to me because I'm a computer engineer. First, that was my first doctorate. Everything"
},
{
"end_time": 8760.811,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8746.51,
"text": " There's a corner of society in which I'm more or less famous for building this this this computer from scratch. Everything a computer does can be done."
},
{
"end_time": 8789.428,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8761.323,
"text": " with pipes, water and pressure driven. Sure, multiple realisability. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all those computations, it's just a difference of two states, zero or one. So you can have a valve that the shut or open pressure during the valves, pipes and water. So if you people in strong AI now who say that a complex enough computer will be conscious, the challenge to them is to explain at what point you add enough pipes, taps and water"
},
{
"end_time": 8810.162,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8789.889,
"text": " For a system that is only pipes, taps and water to become conscious, if it already doesn't start as being conscious, what is it about extra pipes, taps and water that turns it conscious? I think what we are doing there is the classical hand waving. We are trying to bury the problem under a layer of obfuscating complexity, and then we hand wave our way saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 8833.166,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8810.162,
"text": " Then something magical happens there and I can't explain it to you because it's too complex. No, it's still just pipes, taps and water. If it didn't start as conscious, it will not become conscious because the properties you change or add by adding pipes, taps and water are incommensurable with the property you want to emerge or the transitioning kind you want to have produced."
},
{
"end_time": 8861.51,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8833.166,
"text": " That would be my view. And then if you disagree, I would challenge you to explain to me exactly how a sufficient high number of pipes, taps and water can change something in kind. Well, let me try to finish the point I was going to make because I wanted to because I think you have an analogous problem, which is if cosmic mind is not itself intelligent, you now have the problem of how does it get arranged such that intelligence emerges?"
},
{
"end_time": 8873.848,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8861.8,
"text": " You said it can't plan or it's acting instinctively. You can have instinctive intelligence that is not informed by metacognition."
},
{
"end_time": 8901.442,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8875.572,
"text": " So it's not capable of rationality then it can't reflect on itself and correct its own behavior in any fashion. That's what I think because the laws of nature are so predictable and because it took so many years so many billions of three and a half billion years of evolution. So we still have the problem of how rationality emerges right from things that are not rational. Oh that that that's not a hard problem that's a problem of AI and AI exists"
},
{
"end_time": 8917.466,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8902.278,
"text": " Right. And so what you admit is I can take things that are non rational and put them together in the right way and get rationality. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So why and we now think that we can we got a pretty good answer of how we can take non living stuff and put it together and get living things. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 8947.892,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8918.746,
"text": " That's a more subtle problem. I would say yes, but a qualified yes. Okay, so I've got a qualified yes for life and I've got a strong yes for intelligence. Yeah. And I didn't, I can't actually in either one of those say to you, this is the line, the dividing point, this is the threshold point. Biology hasn't produced it. And I, but we don't, we don't thereby say, oh, well, that means it's not real. It doesn't emerge. We say, no, no,"
},
{
"end_time": 8971.118,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8948.387,
"text": " right? It's precisely a continuous change, not a bifurcation change. And so again, what's the difference between consciousness and, you know, we're talking about the emergence problem. If we are willing to countenance for life, and at one time we didn't, we thought, no, there's no way."
},
{
"end_time": 8981.834,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8971.442,
"text": " What's the difference then?"
},
{
"end_time": 9010.486,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8983.49,
"text": " Our concept of intelligence is something that human beings came up with. There is information processing in nature. We apply the label intelligence not based on neutral objective reasons, but based on what we feel is similar enough to us to be considered intelligent. Arguably a paramecium is intelligent in the sense that it goes after the food it needs to and runs away from threats."
},
{
"end_time": 9037.654,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9010.913,
"text": " So there is no such a thing as a defining boundary in which there is a difference in kind. All you have is information processing. You already start with it, simple information processing, like a transition between two states all over in nature. You flip your switch, it's a transition between one state to the other. Then we get more complex interrelated transitions of states. There is no fundamental"
},
{
"end_time": 9066.442,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9038.097,
"text": " crossing of a boundary, it's just where are we comfortable to put the label intelligence. In AI, we devised an arbitrary test to justify that. We call it the Turing test. Yeah, the Turing test is problematic, but go ahead, go ahead. So there is no fundamental transition. It's just a spectrum. It's a continuum, I would say. When Searle in 1980 wrote his paper on the Chinese room experiment, he was appealing to conscious understanding."
},
{
"end_time": 9096.203,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9066.442,
"text": " his argument had nothing to do with intelligence. The MIT guys were right in their review to Searle because for them intelligence is just more complex information processing. So the room is intelligent if the manual the clerk is using contains enough complex instructions for that information processing to be considered intelligent. The intuition Searle was appealing to was understanding, not intelligence. And what is that intuition? That intuition is"
},
{
"end_time": 9109.292,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9096.647,
"text": " The conscious experience that goes coupled with certain types of information processing that conscious experience we call understanding and then the clerk inside the room, which is only the only conscious entity there."
},
{
"end_time": 9134.889,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9109.582,
"text": " does not have understanding because he's not absorbing all the information processing into his mind. A lot of it is in the manual. So that's for intelligence. As for life, I am sympathetic to you there, but I feel obliged to remind you that we have not achieved a biogenesis. We have arguably achieved intelligence. There are server farms today or, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 9154.735,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9135.299,
"text": " Computer farms using a lot of graphical accelerators running neural networks, which I would be personally comfortable comfortable to say this is intelligent. My intuition would acquiesce to that immediately. So we have achieved that we've created that but we have not created the life from non life."
},
{
"end_time": 9183.951,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9154.735,
"text": " What Craig Venter has achieved was to artificially create a DNA molecule and insert it into a molecule that was already living and then zap it with electricity and the molecule changed the way it makes proteins. But we have not achieved the biogenesis. So I think the jury is still out. But even if you one day achieve a biogenesis, and I personally think we will, I think what that will mean is that we have found an artificial way to induce dissociation in the universal mind."
},
{
"end_time": 9210.93,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9184.582,
"text": " because life metabolism is what dissociative processes look like. Okay, so it seems to me like that. I don't want to get into the exegetical disagreement about how to interpret Searle in the Chinese room, because I think there's independent arguments. I think he ultimately said the argument has to do with multiple realisability, not with understanding. I mean, that's what came out of that was my interpretation. I was not I didn't mean to attribute to that to Searle himself."
},
{
"end_time": 9239.77,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9211.305,
"text": " Okay, okay, so fair enough, fair enough. But I don't think we have to resolve the interpretation of Searle to continue our discussion is what I'm saying. So it sounds like that for you, the emergence of things like life and intelligence are not problematic. But there's something different for consciousness. And the problem I have with that"
},
{
"end_time": 9264.906,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9240.452,
"text": " is we also have deep intuitions about the deep relationship and inter-defining of intelligence and consciousness. Most of our attributions of consciousness, other than yours Bernard, I don't want to misattribute to you, they generally track with attributions of intelligence. And the measures of intelligence, measures of like working memory,"
},
{
"end_time": 9289.206,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9265.23,
"text": " correlate also with, you know, models of consciousness, the global workspace, things like that. Consciousness seems to exist for those problems. So you can compare behavior, which requires our consciousness with behavior that doesn't. Consciousness seems to be those situations that require our most sophisticated intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 9317.654,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9289.206,
"text": " I recognize what you're saying. The way I would try to make sense of this. Well, I would say that we are conflating"
},
{
"end_time": 9346.237,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9318.217,
"text": " Phenomenal Consciousness with Meta-Consciousness when we make this argument. Meta-Consciousness entails Phenomenal Consciousness and Access Consciousness, using the definitions from... From Block, Block. Block, 1995, yeah. Almost all research on Consciousness is actually exploring Meta-Consciousness insofar as it depends on the subject's ability to report on what they are experiencing."
},
{
"end_time": 9360.589,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9346.613,
"text": " So for instance, blind sight studies, we say unconscious sight. Well, we say that because the subject says I am not seeing, but the subject is behaving as if he or she were seeing. So I would say what has gone wrong?"
},
{
"end_time": 9389.548,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9361.152,
"text": " broken there is the feedback loop that is required for reportability. Giulio Tononi's information integration theory that phi, magic phi number, if you cross the phi number, you're unconscious. Well, that's empirically calibrated based on subjective reports. So phi captures the moment you cross the threshold of metacognition, not the threshold of experience, pure and simple. It's very hard to study"
},
{
"end_time": 9418.695,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9389.633,
"text": " experience pure and simple in an objective setting, because you can only study that through introspection. It's only when you suddenly become metaconscious of something you were already conscious of all along that you realize, oh darn, I have known this all along. I knew this. I just didn't know that I knew. So this is the only way for you to realize that there was an experience. The only thing that was missing was the metacognitive loop."
},
{
"end_time": 9428.643,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9419.224,
"text": " And I think topographically, it's really a loop because research on the neural correlates of consciousness always points out that you have to have a cycle loop."
},
{
"end_time": 9456.391,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9428.985,
"text": " closed. Phi depends on that structure of loops being closed. That's what's called information integration. Previous research prior to Tonani points out that you needed this feedback and feed forward ping ponging of information between two brain areas. For instance, the visual cortex and the limbic system. If you cut that, then you get, for instance, blind sight. And then we say, well, the person is not conscious of sight. No, the person is not reporting the experience of seeing"
},
{
"end_time": 9464.821,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9456.766,
"text": " But the person is behaving entirely consistently with the awareness of seeing the phenomenal conscious of vision."
},
{
"end_time": 9489.701,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9465.23,
"text": " So look, this is an area where so many misunderstandings have happened throughout the history of psychology and neuroscience. If you read Jung, let's go back to the early 20th century. If you read Jung and you distill how he defines consciousness, you will see that what he's talking about is metaconsciousness. He talks about consciousness requiring an associative web"
},
{
"end_time": 9497.961,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9489.701,
"text": " If you don't have this web of associations, it's not conscious. He talks about consciousness having to be coupled to a wheel."
},
{
"end_time": 9525.862,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9498.422,
"text": " And if you read what he means by the will, what he means is deliberation, reflection. He's talking about reflection, self-reflection. He talks about children slowly becoming conscious in the first years of their lives. Does he mean by that that his five children did not experience anything until they were seven? Of course, he didn't mean that. There are neuroscientists today who define consciousness as meta-consciousness. And I think it's fine to use the word that way."
},
{
"end_time": 9555.145,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9526.169,
"text": " The moment where it goes wrong is when we think we've solved the problem, because we are using the word consciousness, when in fact, we mean meta-consciousness, and we are not solving the problem of consciousness at all. That's my grievance about what happens today. So is meta-consciousness, though, the only way we have access, experiential access, to our consciousness? I mean, I don't have access to your consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 9572.585,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9555.691,
"text": " So I think the best paper on this was from 2002. I forgot the name of the author. I can send it to you offline afterwards. Sure, sure. The author explains that we have experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 9591.647,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9573.473,
"text": " And meta conscious consciousness is what happens when we re represent those experiences. So suppose we're talking about perception, then we have a direct perceptual experience that's representational by definition, it's perception. But at some point, we really represent"
},
{
"end_time": 9610.247,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9591.954,
"text": " our own inner representations in order to investigate the contents of our own awareness. That's the point where meta-consciousness arises. It's this step of re-representation. And that's not built into experience. So if you'd say, do we need that to access our experiences?"
},
{
"end_time": 9633.797,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9610.247,
"text": " I would say no, because experiences are accessible as experiences, but we need that to explicitly access our experiences. If I go back to Jung, Jung has said it all in old-fashioned language, but everything is in Jung. Jung said in answer to Job, God is omniscient, but he doesn't know how to consult his omniscient."
},
{
"end_time": 9663.746,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9634.224,
"text": " The devil is much more clever in knowing how to consult omniscience. What is he talking about? He's talking about the meta-consciousness. So I think we have experiential access to everything in our own minds, but we cannot deliberately access all of it because not all of it can be placed under the microscope of reflection at our own will. We don't have that much control over the entirety of the psyche."
},
{
"end_time": 9688.063,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9665.674,
"text": " So let me make sure I understand you. So what you're saying is we do have access to experience that's non-reflective access. You have experiential access to that, yeah. Sorry that sounds, sorry that sounds circular. You're saying you don't want to say, like you don't want to get into an infinite request that I have qualia"
},
{
"end_time": 9718.148,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9688.49,
"text": " We experience everything that is in our own minds, but we cannot explicitly re-represent everything that is experienced in our own minds. For instance, I'd maintain that five minutes ago, you were experiencing your breathing, but you were not re-representing the experience of your breathing."
},
{
"end_time": 9742.278,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9718.473,
"text": " Therefore, you were not reporting to yourself, I am breathing. But I wasn't experiencing my belief that Africa was a continent, which I'm experiencing right now. Yeah, was that so what were you trying to say that that? Yeah, I mean, I have the belief, but I'm not experiencing it until I"
},
{
"end_time": 9770.026,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9742.671,
"text": " just did now, Africa is a continent, but I have the belief and I know that I have the belief because if you ask me, I'll say yes. And when I look on a map, I'll say there's one of the continents, but I'm not doing that constantly. So that's not the evidence. That's the evidence that I have the belief. It's not the belief. So I reject behaviorism of belief, right? The beliefs are something other beyond the behavior and you're nodding. So I think you agree with that. And yet I wasn't experiencing that."
},
{
"end_time": 9795.862,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9770.316,
"text": " And in fact, most of what I believe I'm not experiencing right now. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. I understand the heart of your argument. And you're poking in the right place because you already understood that the direct implication of what I'm saying is that everything has to be experiential. There is no other place for psychic contents to lay dormant waiting to be experienced because by definition, analytic idealism says everything is experiential."
},
{
"end_time": 9815.486,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9795.862,
"text": " So we have to have a mental mechanism that is able to compartmentalize experience such that you are not able to access all of those experiences. And now, of course, what we mean by you is part of the answer. But I would postulate two things as mechanisms for that."
},
{
"end_time": 9839.65,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9815.811,
"text": " One is what we've been talking about, metacognition. Metacognition not only amplifies the contents that are re-represented, because you can pile up re-representation on top of re-representation. You can know that you know that you know that you're experiencing and so on, and it obfuscates everything else. Another mechanism I would put forward to you is dissociation. I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 9867.381,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9840.077,
"text": " And I think there is now plenty of empirical evidence that dissociation is strong enough to do exactly what I needed to do, which is to compartmentalize experience completely, including your experience of the knowledge of Africa. Because in 2015, people in Germany, two researchers in Germany, they were dealing with a woman who claimed to have multiple dissociated alters, amongst which two claimed to be blind."
},
{
"end_time": 9892.875,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9867.824,
"text": " although there was nothing wrong physically with the woman's ability to see and the host personality could see perfectly well. So they had this brilliant idea of hooking her up to an EEG cap and measuring her visual cortex activity while a sighted alter was in control. And then there was normal visual cortex activity. And when the blind alter would take executive control,"
},
{
"end_time": 9921.084,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9893.2,
"text": " visual cortex activity would disappear, even though the woman's eyes were wide open and things were happening in front of her. Now dissociation is powerful enough to be literally blinding. So I would think of a hierarchy of dissociative processes. We know many types of dissociative processes, not only forgetting things, but losing the sense of ownership to your own memories, even though you still remember the memories, but they feel like they are alien memories, somebody else's memories."
},
{
"end_time": 9948.37,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9921.084,
"text": " all kinds of dissociation, all different degrees of dissociation, and multiple levels of re-representation, hierarchical re-representation. I would put forward to you that these two things, these two complex processes that we know happen, the existing nature, there is no empirical doubt about it, they are sufficient to compartmentalize mind in such a way that you think a lot of things that are happening in the mind of nature"
},
{
"end_time": 9965.759,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 9948.729,
"text": " are not actually happening because they are not accessible to you. You may be dissociated from them, you may not be re-representing them, you may be obfuscating them. All kinds of hierarchical levels of compartmentalizing processes may be taking place. And I submit to you that although this sounds complex,"
},
{
"end_time": 9980.009,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 9966.049,
"text": " It's a lot more plausible and less complex than the alternatives, like the combination problem in bottom-up panpsychism or constitutive panpsychism or the heart problem of consciousness for which we don't even have in principle answers."
},
{
"end_time": 10009.531,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9980.213,
"text": " This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way."
},
{
"end_time": 10041.954,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10013.302,
"text": " So I guess you're willing to countenance the existence of processes that are outside consciousness, modifying it, because that's what dissociation is. I mean, if it's blind... Outside your consciousness. Well, whose consciousness is it residing in? Is it residing in cosmic mind consciousness? I think there is only one consciousness. And what we consider to be us is a dissociative complex of that one consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 10072.483,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10042.585,
"text": " So where is the dissociation? Where does it exist? In the one consciousness. Yeah, but some consciousness must be aware of it. So is the cosmic consciousness aware of the dissociation? That's what consciousness means. It experiences the dissociation from both sides. From the inner side, which is us, we are part of nature, we are not a separate entity, and it experiences the dissociation from the other side, the side of the inanimate universe."
},
{
"end_time": 10099.121,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10072.944,
"text": " And those experiences are presented to us in the form that we call the inanimate universe, which is a representation of what is essentially natural instinctive mental processes unfolding beyond the boundary of our own dissociation. So Schopenhauer, it's the will inside and it's the will outside."
},
{
"end_time": 10126.664,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10101.049,
"text": " So why does this dissociation occur? It's a question that I get all the time. I will answer but I first invite you to ask yourself why there needs to be a why? Is anything else in nature? No, no, wait, wait, there does because your whole I mean, the whole defense depends on"
},
{
"end_time": 10150.469,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10126.954,
"text": " the dissociations and the differences between metacognition and dissociated cognition. That is the main thing you use to explain the external world. So if I don't have any principles by which this operates, then it's not clear to me that I've gained anything by just saying, oh, well, there's an external world."
},
{
"end_time": 10175.179,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10150.828,
"text": " I don't quite know how that works, any more than you can explain to me how the dissociation and the metacognitive leveling works. Yeah, okay. I understand what you mean now. You were not asking for a reason, you were asking for a process, a mechanism. I understand it now. We will answer that question once we figure out how abiogenesis ever happened, how life arose from nonlife."
},
{
"end_time": 10196.954,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10175.401,
"text": " Because I would submit to you that from the point of view of representation, the Kantian phenomena, the Schopenhauerian representation, what that process looked like was the emergence of life. Because for me, life is the extrinsic appearance of dissociation. So the answer to your question is exactly the same as the answer to the question, how did life arose from non-life?"
},
{
"end_time": 10226.391,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10197.295,
"text": " It's just that you're looking at the same process from two perspectives, the first person perspective and an outside third person perspective, the perspective of representation. But it's one in the same process and therefore it follows one in the same mechanism. If there is a need to have a why beyond the mechanism, like why did the universe do this? I don't think there is a need for that. But if there were. Yeah, I wasn't asking for a motive, you know. OK, OK. I was."
},
{
"end_time": 10255.52,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10226.869,
"text": " I mean, I take it that you're saying that there are processes that are self-organizing in some fashion. Because we see, right. You even use that metaphor in a couple of your videos. You talk about eddies within the river. Yeah, yeah. And life is... Sorry. No, no, I'm not making accusations. I'm just trying to make sure that I'm getting you correctly. And whatever life is, it's a very complex self-organizing thing. And I actually think that Varela is right."
},
{
"end_time": 10285.162,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10255.794,
"text": " I'm with you all the way. What I'm putting forward does not require any change in our scientific understanding of how life works and how it arose."
},
{
"end_time": 10293.302,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10285.742,
"text": " provides a another perspective to the same process. I'm saying that there is actually an inner perspective."
},
{
"end_time": 10320.401,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10293.558,
"text": " that the representation is not the whole story. It's a valid story. It is an accurate representation of the process. So knowledge gained by looking at the process as it unfolds in the physical world is valid knowledge. All I'm saying is that the thing in itself, which lies behind how it's represented by our perception and cognitive apparatus, that thing in itself is mental and it is of a dissociative character. But it's not changing any science."
},
{
"end_time": 10340.043,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 10320.657,
"text": " No, no, but yeah, I get that. I hope I wasn't implying that because I didn't see you saying that. But that's sort of what the problem I'm coming up with. It looks like the science stays the same."
},
{
"end_time": 10365.674,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 10340.503,
"text": " You invoke the principle of parsimony, all invoke a principle, which is don't invoke in your explanation an entity more controversial than the entity in the thing you're trying to explain. And you're ultimately invoking what looks to me like God, which I would need independent evidence for this. I mean, other than, right, in a circular fashion, I would need independent evidence for cosmic mind, right, in order to"
},
{
"end_time": 10395.503,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10366.015,
"text": " make this argument run. And that's been a very problematic thing to do for a very, very long time. The thing is, you're appealing to controversial, something controversial, which is an entirely culture-laden thing. Is it controversial or not? It's entirely subjective. I didn't talk about God anywhere. I even volunteered to you that I think this universal mind is instinctive and naturalistic. It's not premeditated. It's not anthropomorphic. So"
},
{
"end_time": 10421.34,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 10395.862,
"text": " that you attribute the quality of being controversial to it, I would bear to submit to you that it's an entirely subjective value judgment. Okay, what I meant was, other than that, let's try and make it a little bit more formal, that I don't invoke something that requires argumentation as much as the argument I'm giving."
},
{
"end_time": 10449.036,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 10421.647,
"text": " I'll submit to you that mine is the simplest in terms of argumentation. It requires no miracle. It requires no strong emergency. It requires no magical combination of fundamentally separate subjective points of view. And there is a host of empirical substantiation for it. Beat that. Well, I mean, I still think you have the equivalent of what the panpsychist has. You have an explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 10479.224,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 10449.531,
"text": " needs to be forthcoming of how I get living minded, rational entities like me out of a mind that is not biologically alive, that is not capable of rationale, etc, etc, etc. It seems to me that I don't know what I've gained by replacing the external world from which I have to explain intelligence and consciousness and rationality from saying, well, there's this other mind out there"
},
{
"end_time": 10509.343,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 10479.599,
"text": " that is but it's it's not capable it doesn't have rationality it doesn't have personality it doesn't have all the features of god for example and it's and right and and and then there's some self-organizing process that emerges well that sounds to me like well there's matter it doesn't have all these properties there's some self-organizing process and it and mind and life emerge what's the difference between the two moves if you think it's implausibly complex to say"
},
{
"end_time": 10523.763,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10509.497,
"text": " that complex minds like ours have evolved from a very simple, phenomenal substrate. Imagine how implausible it is to say that complex minds like ours emerged out of non-mind. Which one is better?"
},
{
"end_time": 10553.831,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10525.896,
"text": " They seem to me to be not different. That's my point. One requires a huge ontological jump from no mind to mind. The other one only requires degrees. The thing is, you're very focused on this notion that degree can lead to a difference in kind, which I think is a fallacy. But you're invoking it. You're invoking it because you're saying that the cosmic mind is ultimately different in kind"
},
{
"end_time": 10567.022,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10554.121,
"text": " That's why me calling it something like God is fundamentally a mistake because it doesn't have some of the fundamental features of my personhood, which is what the traditional definition of God is."
},
{
"end_time": 10597.073,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10567.449,
"text": " I'm not saying it's different in kind, because I'm saying it's also mental in the sense that its processes are of an experiential or qualitative nature. But the complexity of those processes, the inner interactions, the changes of state, the structure and dynamics of those processes can vary over large degrees. And the substrate is still the same field of subjectivity, the same field of phenomenality. So there is no ontologically, there is no transition in kind. It's a transition of"
},
{
"end_time": 10623.814,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10597.841,
"text": " sophistication, the complexity of the processes that unfold there, if you will, the underlying mind at large, you can look at it as a lake with simple straight ripples. And our minds with all kinds of, you know, higher level mental functions, feedback mechanisms, intelligence, rationality, self-reflection, self-awareness, re-representation and all that stuff,"
},
{
"end_time": 10645.452,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 10624.275,
"text": " as a very stormy water in a cup, but very stormy water in a cup with all kinds of patterns of movement that are much more complex waves that fold in upon themselves and form reflective surfaces, all kinds of access patterns going on."
},
{
"end_time": 10659.121,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10645.452,
"text": " But you're invoking new kinds, all kinds of patterns, all kinds of things that are real. Yes, but not a different kind of the medium that is excited."
},
{
"end_time": 10676.169,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10659.991,
"text": " So there's ultimately physics, which isn't just matter. It's time and space and quantum crap and relativistic crap and some of it gets very complex and that's me and some of it doesn't get very complex and that's a rock. I mean, again,"
},
{
"end_time": 10695.043,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10676.561,
"text": " I think there's a difference in complexity, which leads to different properties."
},
{
"end_time": 10715.555,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10695.401,
"text": " And you can pass judgments based on the properties that are available, but I don't think there is a difference in kind as far as the ontological substrate is concerned. It's still mental. It's still subjectivity. You can have very simple ripples and very complex ripples, but it's still just ripples in water. It's still just water. Or you can have"
},
{
"end_time": 10745.503,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10715.828,
"text": " I want to point out to you the irony that you're using a physical analogy to describe this, thereby pointing to the fact that physical things can actually do the kind of stuff you're pointing to. I'm not denying that which we call the physical. I'm denying the theoretical inference that that which we call the physical has a root in something non-mental. But I'm not denying the experience of the world that we call physical. Right. John, I feel like you're holding back. What are your true thoughts?"
},
{
"end_time": 10772.449,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10746.476,
"text": " No, I'm not holding back in the sense that there's stuff I want to say that I'm not saying. I don't mean this pejoratively to either Bernardo or myself. I think there's an intuitive vision here that we're not necessarily sharing. What do you mean by that? I think the intuitions about"
},
{
"end_time": 10800.845,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10773.643,
"text": " I mean, it seems to me like Bernardo was saying, the world exists independently of my mind, but it doesn't exist independently of some mind that I'm not directly aware of. And that strikes me as problematic because I would need evidence for that mind independent of me in order to make the argument run. I got it. So the analogy I like to use for this is the following."
},
{
"end_time": 10828.524,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10801.664,
"text": " Unless we are solipsists, unless we think that the only mind going on is our own mind, the ones we have direct access to, I would consider that something that we don't need to debate. We can reject that. I even wrote about an argument to reject that. I know you reject it. As Russell said, even those who purport to believe in solipsism actually don't act as if they believe... It's a performative contradiction. Yes, totally."
},
{
"end_time": 10857.688,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10828.797,
"text": " So unless you wear that, you have to infer something outside of that which you have direct access to. You have to make an inference beyond your own mind, unless you're a solipsist. So the difference is, what is that inference? How complex, how parsimonious and how explanatorily powerful is that inference? But everybody has to make that inference. So the analogy I use is the following. My mind is the earth I can see until the horizon."
},
{
"end_time": 10885.674,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10858.148,
"text": " beyond the horizon, I cannot see directly. But I need to infer that the earth, that there is something beyond the horizon to make sense of empirical experience. Otherwise, I do not have a satisfactory explanatory model for how you and me seem to be sharing the same world and all that, granting that you also are conscious. I reject solipsism, too. I reject solipsism, too. So, my inference is the following. Up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental."
},
{
"end_time": 10909.036,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10886.084,
"text": " Beyond the horizon, it's just more mind. It's just that I cannot see it. The physicalist will say, up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental. Beyond the horizon, it's a totally different kind of stuff that is exhaustively definable in terms of pure quantities and out of which we do not have a way even in principle to derive qualities. Take your pick."
},
{
"end_time": 10936.015,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10909.428,
"text": " Oh, well, I mean, that's a little bit of a prejudicial description, because it sounds like there's no problems in your in your position also. But let's, let's, let's, let's, let's do that, then. So we agree that there isn't solipsism. So we agree that there are things that exist outside of my consciousness, and that takes care of the problem that I didn't exist at one point, and I won't exist at another point. And so the issue then, I guess, becomes"
},
{
"end_time": 10959.974,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10938.422,
"text": " The reason why people believe in the external world typically is they think of things going on outside of any human consciousness. Before there were sentient beings, the earth was forming, the sun was forming, things like that, evolution was eventually going on, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 10990.64,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 10961.459,
"text": " And what they, the physicalist will then say is, well, when I look at reality, when I first come upon it, where there has not been any human beings, I don't see any evidence for intelligence and I don't see any evidence for directed behavior. I don't see any evidence for what I typically need in order to attribute mine to something. So I don't attribute mine to my refrigerator normally because it doesn't have blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't do all these things. And that's why, you know, and that's how I make distinctions between"
},
{
"end_time": 11016.118,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 10990.862,
"text": " my mind and the dog's mind etc in terms of the behavioral consequences and the physicalist says well it looks like most of the universe is behaving as if there is no mind and what i would need for the cosmic mind is evidence outside of human consciousness of things that are mental like in behavior and that's exactly not what the universe seems to operate like it seems to operate non-teleologically non-intelligently"
},
{
"end_time": 11041.203,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11016.118,
"text": " It seems to happen really haphazardly. It doesn't seem to have even the basis of moral concerns or emotional attachment to anything. Why would I attribute mind to that? Okay. I don't think you're right when you say there is no evidence for that. But suppose you were right that there is no evidence for us to attribute mind to the world. I would still say"
},
{
"end_time": 11066.715,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11041.51,
"text": " that is by far still the least problematic option, given what options are on the table. How do you produce qualities out of purely quantitative properties? Or how do you merge fundamentally different fields of experience? It's a different matter. This is coming down to intellectual taste. I mean, really, I mean, because you're asking me to say that"
},
{
"end_time": 11087.432,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11067.039,
"text": " you know, we have some, our experience has some special role. Like, you know, this is one of the criticisms made by speculative realists, you know, correlationism, that we're binding all of ontology to our particular ontology. And that seems like a really, really unjustifiable"
},
{
"end_time": 11107.568,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11087.961,
"text": " I will answer that. Let me just very briefly insist on the point I made before. In the technical literature, there are papers arguing that the problems faced by physicalism and panpsychism"
},
{
"end_time": 11135.828,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11107.568,
"text": " leads to incoherence. And these are technical arguments made by different people. I've read a lot of these arguments, too. And there are also people that counter those arguments. It's not fair for you to present it as a resolved debate or consensus. I don't think that's fair. There has been no technical argument saying that analytic idealism is incoherent in principle. These arguments have been made for the other two options."
},
{
"end_time": 11164.428,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 11136.357,
"text": " but there is no in principle incoherence argument. For instance, for constitutive panpsychism, the incoherence argument takes the following form. If fundamentally separate fields of subjectivity experiencing different qualities were to merge, it would lose the original fields of experience. Like if the compound subject is seeing purple and the sub-subjects were seeing red and blue,"
},
{
"end_time": 11193.814,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 11164.855,
"text": " then they would subsume themselves into the higher level subject, which contradicts what the panpsychism is trying to do, which is to follow the rules of chemical combinations in physicalism. The molecules that compose tissues don't disappear. So you have an argument like that. There isn't a technical argument claiming incoherence for analytic idealism. There may be. I find it very hard, but there may be."
},
{
"end_time": 11221.561,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 11194.07,
"text": " But still, let me grant you that I cannot use this line of arguments. And let's look at what you said. You said for something to be minded, you need to care about relationships. You need to be emotionally bound to something. Solving problems even. Yeah. Does a mosquito have those properties? Does a crocodile have all these properties you're alluding to? Can you envision that water flea"
},
{
"end_time": 11251.015,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 11221.8,
"text": " is a purely instinctive, reactive, conscious being that does not have any of these experiential qualities that we have. A paramecium. I think paramecium has the sort of basic abilities of making sense, aspectualizing its environment. So it relates to some things as food and some things as poison."
},
{
"end_time": 11268.08,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 11251.254,
"text": " And I think that aspectualization is continuous with how you're aspectualizing right now, you're seeing me as a man, you're seeing me as etc etc. So there's deep continuity between their capacity for aspectualization and mine, but that doesn't mean that they can aspectualize"
},
{
"end_time": 11289.326,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 11268.422,
"text": " But can you attribute a lot simpler conscious in their life to them than you have? I think the paramecium in some"
},
{
"end_time": 11314.531,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 11289.94,
"text": " sense has to care about some information rather than the other. It wouldn't be my full-blown subjective experience of love, but there's many subjective emotions I have like pride that I don't think a dog has, but I think a dog is nevertheless conscious. So I think a paramecium, I mean, that's one of the big differences between us and between standard existing computers."
},
{
"end_time": 11337.278,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 11314.838,
"text": " is we have to care about the information we're processing, which means we devote attention and arousal, we dispose metabolic energy towards it. I think the paramecium is doing all of these things. Okay, so I'm with you that there is a continuum. I'm just trying to establish that in that continuum there is a point of much lower, much higher simplicity than where we are."
},
{
"end_time": 11362.892,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 11337.278,
"text": " That's the only thing I want to establish, that they can be conscious in their life with a lot more simplicity than the one we experience as human beings. And we are both in a continuum. Okay, now, the paramecium has what philosophers call intentionality, because there is something outside the paramecium that isn't the paramecium. Now, for the cosmic mind, there is nothing outside of it by definition, so it cannot have intentionality."
},
{
"end_time": 11375.435,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 11363.183,
"text": " So all its conscious states have to be endogenous and there can't be this actualization that you're talking about because there isn't an outside environment. So what I propose is it's very"
},
{
"end_time": 11400.35,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 11375.998,
"text": " In terms of emotions and qualities, it's much simpler in their life, and it does not have intentionality. It's purely endogenous. It's of a different kind. Now, is there evidence that that might be going on? Even if there weren't, I would say I still have the best theory on the table because the problems of the others are insurmountable. But recent research is showing two things, and this is fresh out of the oven, one of them, not the first I will talk about."
},
{
"end_time": 11425.93,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 11400.742,
"text": " There is a lot of study now showing that in terms of network topology, and I'm not talking about pretty images, pretty photographs, I'm talking about network topology, which is quantified and mathematized. There are surprising similarities between the network topology of the universe at its largest scales, galaxy clusters and all that, and neuronal networks in mammals."
},
{
"end_time": 11446.357,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 11426.408,
"text": " Yeah, that arguments made in existence for quite a while design in nature, I forget the author of the book, he points out those that formal similarity, but it's also similarity with, you know, how, how things branch in your in your lungs, how river deltas branch out, things like that. Recent research"
},
{
"end_time": 11473.558,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 11446.783,
"text": " The most recent one is done by an Italian neuroscientist and an Italian physicist. You have the advantage on me then, I guess. Go ahead. Well, Bernardo, is that not a moot point? Because if we had more cosmic data and we find out that the universe looks completely different from another point of view, you still wouldn't say that your theory is invalidated. So in some sense, it's neither a pro nor a con. This is more than just what it looks like. That's what I'm trying to highlight."
},
{
"end_time": 11493.456,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 11473.558,
"text": " Quantitative studies have been done at the University of California at Irvine, I think in 2014, and there is this more recent research done by this Franco Vazza and Alberto Felletti, these two guys. Oh, I'm amazed I could retrieve that. Normally I'm not that good. Mine at large has been kind to you."
},
{
"end_time": 11520.503,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 11493.677,
"text": " This is a quantitative network structure and network topology analysis. And it shows the similarity is really between neural networks and the universe. And it doesn't involve the fractal patterns of arteries in our lungs or the fractal patterns of river delta as it goes. It's much more specific than that. Now there is a paper fresh out of the oven published by a physicist called Stephen"
},
{
"end_time": 11548.387,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 11522.363,
"text": " Are these papers proposing that there's information processing going on in this structure? I mean, that's going to violate all kinds of relativistic limitations, etc. No, no, okay. So before I talk about Stefan's paper, first this, because it's a good point. Of course, there is information processing. What you don't have is closed loops of information because the age of the universe is not"
},
{
"end_time": 11571.852,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 11548.643,
"text": " not long enough for information to go across galaxy clusters and close a loop. There hasn't been enough time for that to happen. So what you cannot have is Tononi's information integration phi topologies. There hasn't been time for that, which only means that the universe is then not self-reflective."
},
{
"end_time": 11601.834,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 11572.381,
"text": " but it can still be phenomenally conscious or it can be phenomenal consciousness because the letter does not require disclosed loops of information integration for which, you're right, there has not been time. But information processing in a feed-forward manner, of course, that's happening all the time, and the universe is an information processing engine. Actually, there is a whole field of physics called digital physics, which is based entirely on this postulate. But the paper of Stefan"
},
{
"end_time": 11618.268,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 11602.756,
"text": " And it's amazing. It's beginning of research. There's a long way to go. But what he's showing is that the laws of physics may correspond in terms of model models may correspond to the weights of neurons in the neural network."
},
{
"end_time": 11633.831,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 11618.814,
"text": " that the universe may be learning its laws of physics. So, John, if you say this is all circumstantial, I will be the first to jump and agree with you. But you put me on the spot of producing this kind of argument."
},
{
"end_time": 11662.534,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 11633.831,
"text": " Is there any evidence? And then I would say, well, yeah, there is. There actually is. And it's evidence that we are so confused about that we cannot make sense of it. We do not know why galaxy clusters look more like a neuron than they look like the interior of a galaxy. Why should that be the case? There is nothing in our understanding of nature that would suggest why this relationship is there at all."
},
{
"end_time": 11680.435,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 11662.91,
"text": " that it is there and that its information processing can actually be modeled as the weights of a artificial neural network in the process of learning. But only a feed forward artificial network, which is exactly the point you just made, which means it can't have a lot of the properties"
},
{
"end_time": 11709.633,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 11680.691,
"text": " that we find in any networks that do feedback loops on themselves. Correct. It isn't even capable of doing Hinton's deep learning or anything like that. Correct. Right? And so, I mean, so this is going to be a pretty, sorry, I don't mean to be insulting to your view. I'm not. Okay. That's a pretty stupid consciousness. And it has no intentionality. I mean, and so you're talking about a mind without, without intent, you said without intentionality, and without even rudimentary intelligence, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 11732.5,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 11710.691,
"text": " Well, be careful, be careful. There are methods of neural network learning, which are only feed forward, particularly unsupervised learning techniques that do not require this deep feedback mechanism. So you can still have some intelligence. But remember, I started today by saying I am a naturalist. I'm just being consistent with it."
},
{
"end_time": 11754.582,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 11732.5,
"text": " Well, yeah, and I want to I won't get into the technicalities because then you have learning speed problems and your self correction problems and debugging problems, which is why, you know, we plausibly have meta consciousness and meta intelligence, right, we can use our intelligence to improve our intelligence. We learn literacy, for example, that improves our capacity for problem solving."
},
{
"end_time": 11777.227,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 11755.572,
"text": " Like, yeah, I mean, I guess what comes down to it is, I'm not quite sure what the difference is now, because I got something out there that's no intentionality, which is unlike what I experienced. I mean, let me be fair to you, I do experience states in deep meditation that are states without"
},
{
"end_time": 11799.258,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 11778.217,
"text": " Intentionality and for which you could plausibly say I'm not exercising any significant degree of intelligence and those are the pure consciousness events and they're reliable. I've I've achieved that that sounds like an achievement. So I've been in those states multiple times. I know there's lots of research Foreman has done it and there's lots of things on that."
},
{
"end_time": 11826.237,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 11800.196,
"text": " Is that the kind of thing what people, I mean, I know it's not exactly the same, but I'm trying to get something from within what I normally point to with consciousness. Is that the kind of consciousness you see for mind at large, the kind of consciousness without intentionality and intelligence I have in pure consciousness event, in which I'm not even conscious of my consciousness, I'm just conscious? Is it something like that?"
},
{
"end_time": 11856.169,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 11827.193,
"text": " Yes, just a quick clarification. When I use the term intentionality, I mean it in a technical sense. I do too. I mean aboutness. I mean aboutness. Yeah. Okay. Then we are aligned. And that is lost in the PC. That's by definition. By definition, there cannot be intentionality because there is no aboutness. There is only the thing by definition. There's no outside. Intentionality arises when you have... But we achieve intentionality."
},
{
"end_time": 11883.524,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 11856.886,
"text": " Yeah, because there is an outside world. An outside world is created once you have a boundary. I would say that boundary is the dissociative boundary. It's the dissociation that creates the distinction between the inside and the outside. And now you can have intentionality or aboutness because there is something outside that you don't identify yourself with. So intentionality emerges out of non intentional states. Through dissociation. But you know that the problem of intentionality is regarded as deeply a problem"
},
{
"end_time": 11894.923,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 11883.985,
"text": " Intentional content"
},
{
"end_time": 11916.408,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 11895.128,
"text": " No, no, the existence of intentionality. I mean, so the big problems are consciousness, intentionality, right? How do you get, I mean, that's what I think is actually going on, by the way, I think, in Searle's Chinese room argument, Searle often describes it that way, is how do I get intentionality? How do I get the things inside the room to be about things outside the room?"
},
{
"end_time": 11932.09,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 11916.715,
"text": " And he attributes that to consciousness, but obviously that's not what you're claiming because the universal consciousness, sorry, I keep changing the names on you. That's unfair. The mind at large doesn't have intentionality."
},
{
"end_time": 11960.708,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 11932.09,
"text": " So it's no different than the Chinese room, right? Because it doesn't have intentionality. No, because remember, I mentioned to you that my interpretation of Searle's thought experiment was that what's missing is consciousness. And here... But what the consciousness supplies is intentionality. That's why Searle claims, again and again, it's an argument about meaning. All the syntax is there, but as he says, there's no semantics there. Yes. The intentionality, right? Yeah, but notice now that I am already starting with phenomenal consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 11978.575,
"index": 484,
"start_time": 11960.708,
"text": " So that problem of intentionality you don't have. But how does consciousness produce intentionality? Don't you have that problem? Because consciousness at large doesn't have intentionality. But once there is a dissociative boundary, then there is an outside state of the world and there is an inside state of the altar."
},
{
"end_time": 12002.09,
"index": 485,
"start_time": 11979.053,
"text": " through evolution, you will start trying to represent outside states into inner states, because that's how you survive. Now that representation will never be mirrored, because otherwise you would dissolve into an entropic soup. We've known that since 10 years. No, no, no, I think I think I'm not presenting. How would I give a machine the capacity for intentionality? The moment Oh, but now you're"
},
{
"end_time": 12031.63,
"index": 486,
"start_time": 12002.363,
"text": " You're not thinking within the framework of what I'm putting forward. If you're assuming the machine is not consciousness, no, no, but you've already admitted that consciousness, that base consciousness doesn't have intentionality. Yes. So you don't get to have intentionality coming along for the ride. Correct. Consciousness. That's unfair. Yeah. I need to explain. So you start with consciousness. So now what you have to explain is having started with phenomenal consciousness, how does intentionality arise? How does it arise?"
},
{
"end_time": 12037.551,
"index": 487,
"start_time": 12032.09,
"text": " Because it's better to survive if you can represent the external environment into inner states,"
},
{
"end_time": 12067.858,
"index": 488,
"start_time": 12037.892,
"text": " the organism will do that. And these inner states will then be phenomenal states. What else can they be? I'm saying that everything is in consciousness, then they will. That's how intentionality arises. No, no, that's a teleological explanation. That's telling me that no, it's not telling me how it arises ontologically. It's telling me how it arises teleologically. It's like, well, how does the eye work? Well, there was evolution and natural selection selected for things that had vision. And that's how vision arose. Okay, no, no, that's not"
},
{
"end_time": 12076.783,
"index": 489,
"start_time": 12067.858,
"text": " That's not what I'm asking for. What you're asking for is how did sensory organs evolve. You are asking for a mechanism for that."
},
{
"end_time": 12098.609,
"index": 490,
"start_time": 12077.449,
"text": " And the answer is the same. No, no, I'm not. Because the answer for how my eye evolved is the same answer for how my foot evolved natural selection variation. But that doesn't mean that my foot functions according to the same principles that my eye does. I want to know the different things. I don't want to know the history. I want to know the structural functional organization that makes it causally possible."
},
{
"end_time": 12123.575,
"index": 491,
"start_time": 12098.899,
"text": " That's what I was trying to say. You will represent external states into inner states. Representation invokes intentionality. You're invoking the very thing you're trying to explain. Because what's the difference between a representation and a non-representation is that a representation possesses intentionality. Then the question you're asking is, how did the first sensory organ arose? Because that's what does the representation."
},
{
"end_time": 12145.64,
"index": 492,
"start_time": 12124.241,
"text": " That's what does the representation. That doesn't tell me how representation works. What I'm trying to say is the answer to your question is the same answer that the physicalist would give you because it's the same process. It's how did sensorium arise? How did it happen?"
},
{
"end_time": 12175.418,
"index": 493,
"start_time": 12146.032,
"text": " Well, we have evolutionary biologists studying that. How would the inner states of an organism represent the outer states of the world around it? So I don't need a consciousness explanation, therefore, to explain how intentionality emerges out of consciousness. I can give a completely physicalist mechanism, because that's what evolution is. It's a complete... You can give a purely physical explanation if you already started with consciousness, because that's what solves the problem Searle was referring to."
},
{
"end_time": 12203.814,
"index": 494,
"start_time": 12175.418,
"text": " I don't see that because you said the base consciousness doesn't have intentionality. So I need a mechanism of how something without intentionality gets intentionality. And then you offer me evolution, which is a completely physicalist explanation, which means I don't need consciousness to explain how I get intentionality out of consciousness. Let me try it another way. Try it another way. So let's forget consciousness. Let's talk purely in physical terms. Is it okay that we say"
},
{
"end_time": 12223.319,
"index": 495,
"start_time": 12204.155,
"text": " physical organisms, very simple life, three and a half billion years ago, evolved so to represent physical states of the world outside into internal states. I think that's a very hard problem, like knowing how that works. But you accept it happened? Yes. Okay. Now,"
},
{
"end_time": 12248.234,
"index": 496,
"start_time": 12223.985,
"text": " If we accept that this happened, what is the problem remaining? The problem remaining is that those internal physical states are not conscious, so there isn't intentionality. But what I'm saying is that the physicality is the extrinsic appearance of what's going on, but the intrinsic view, the thing in itself, those internal states are phenomenal states, because they cannot be anything else. No, no, the problem is that intentionality doesn't"
},
{
"end_time": 12267.875,
"index": 497,
"start_time": 12248.234,
"text": " I think this is a problem also for physicalism, right? So I think you're mistaking what I'm trying to do, right? Intentionality is not like any physical, I mean, this is Brian Kentwell-Smith. I can be an intentional relationship to things outside the light cone. I just did it. I thought about it."
},
{
"end_time": 12293.66,
"index": 498,
"start_time": 12267.875,
"text": " That's what it's about. But I'm not in causal relationship. I can't be with things outside the light code. I can think about Napoleon and I can't be in causal relationship with him because he doesn't exist anymore. Intentionality is not, you can't, it's not reducible to causation in any kind of easy fashion. And so I don't think you can just say consciousness without intentionality, some causal process and then intentionality."
},
{
"end_time": 12318.865,
"index": 499,
"start_time": 12295.316,
"text": " I think intentionality is a philosophical problem. But what you described as intentionality just now, like Napoleon and what's happening beyond the event horizon of the cone of the universe that we can see because the light has already arrived at where we are."
},
{
"end_time": 12349.224,
"index": 500,
"start_time": 12319.514,
"text": " That's more complex than, I think, the normal definition of intentionality in philosophy, which is just associated with perception, an internal conscious state that reflects... I don't agree with that. I don't think so. Maybe we move in different philosophical circles. The part of philosophy that overlaps with cog-sci is really, really concerned. Take a look at, like, Brian Cantwell-Smith, he's a colleague of mine at the University of Toronto, and, you know, all of Third Wave, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 12379.65,
"index": 501,
"start_time": 12349.667,
"text": " cognitive science is deeply influenced by phenomenology, and so Husserl's notions of intentionality, which are supposed to deal with things like this, are also pertinent issues. And I think, you know, that's what Husserl's talking about. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that is born in a language. That's why he uses the example of Chinese, right? He's not talking about just simple perceptual. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that's born in Chinese. I assume that Chinese people can talk about Napoleon, and they can talk about things outside the light cone."
},
{
"end_time": 12399.974,
"index": 502,
"start_time": 12381.067,
"text": " I'm probably missing something in your argument. I don't see the problem. Once the inner states are conscious states, associations will be established through learning between your inner states and your model of the world. You can't get intentionality out of association. This is one of the problems that bedevils neural networks."
},
{
"end_time": 12419.974,
"index": 503,
"start_time": 12400.367,
"text": " When neural networks are firing, these two nodes are firing, these three nodes, John, Love and Mary, they're all associated with each other. But that can't distinguish between Mary loves John and John loves Mary, which is an intentional difference. And that's still an existing problem for neural networks that hasn't been solved."
},
{
"end_time": 12439.616,
"index": 504,
"start_time": 12420.316,
"text": " I think that's a representation problem because neural networks in silicon as we do them today, digital neural networks, they don't have symbolic anchoring to the thing that is perceived. Everything is encoded in bytes, which are symbols. There is work done by an AI researcher,"
},
{
"end_time": 12454.121,
"index": 505,
"start_time": 12439.991,
"text": " 17 years ago, began 17 years ago. He used to work at Nokia Research and he wrote a series of books about conscious computers. I think they are flawed philosophically, but he makes this point clearly that"
},
{
"end_time": 12473.148,
"index": 506,
"start_time": 12454.855,
"text": " Sorry, I have to interject as a moderator."
},
{
"end_time": 12498.865,
"index": 507,
"start_time": 12473.148,
"text": " Before we go forward, some people are saying rightly so, that they know plenty more about Bernardo's position than they do about yours, John, and that's because Bernardo's is so outside the norm for us, for the majority of people, that it's more interesting to hear in many ways. I think it's also credit to how well he articulates and defends his position. I think we should give credit to him. It's not just that it's"
},
{
"end_time": 12526.254,
"index": 508,
"start_time": 12498.865,
"text": " John, do you mind giving the audience a background as to what you believe exists ontologically or what your philosophical point of view is? Well, I tried to do that at the beginning. And part of the reason why I think Bernardo and I are not just shouting at each other is that there are overlaps between our ontologies in certain ways."
},
{
"end_time": 12538.507,
"index": 509,
"start_time": 12526.561,
"text": " So I describe myself as a naturalist, which means, as I said, I'm not a materialist because I don't think that everything's made out of matter. I think that's a ridiculous claim."
},
{
"end_time": 12560.52,
"index": 510,
"start_time": 12538.916,
"text": " I don't think you can do science with materialism. I think scientists who claim they're materialists are engaging in performative contradiction. I think scientists have to invoke non-spatial temporal relations to do science, and Berman and others have argued that, and therefore trying to reduce it even to causal relations and spatial temporal relations, I think, can't explain how you do science."
},
{
"end_time": 12586.817,
"index": 511,
"start_time": 12560.794,
"text": " I do think that everything we do has to be consistent with what our science, and I don't think Bernardo is like, disagreeing with that either. So I agree. Okay. So thank you, Bernardo. So I, my position is, and again, I'm not, I'm not isolated any more than Bernardo is. I think he's a little bit more of a pioneer right now. I'll give him credit for that. But there are many people"
},
{
"end_time": 12599.309,
"index": 512,
"start_time": 12587.073,
"text": " outside of like, I would say like neuroscience and things like that within cognitive science. And that's the only audience I'm really that conversant with who would agree with what's called a non reductive physicalism."
},
{
"end_time": 12622.381,
"index": 513,
"start_time": 12599.684,
"text": " And this is the idea that you have to count the layers at which we're doing our science, the layers, these are just metaphors, by the way, the layers at which we're doing science as real as any other layer we point to with our science, because you get into all kinds of contradictions, you don't. So I think this world that I'm experiencing right now is as real as the world of quantum probabilities, for example."
},
{
"end_time": 12642.261,
"index": 514,
"start_time": 12622.619,
"text": " And the reason with that is that if you drop down to that level, you lose all the differences that are required for science and required for knowledge and required for information, blah, blah, blah. I can do that at more length. But I'm not trying to defend it right now. I'm just trying to describe it. I'm just trying to show you though that it does come out of reasoning and argumentation, right? And so"
},
{
"end_time": 12654.957,
"index": 515,
"start_time": 12642.892,
"text": " I think that there, and unlike many people, so this is where I'm a bit of a pioneer, I'm much more of a neoplatonist, I think we have to talk about, equally about emergence and emanation. I think there's ways in which reality, in which"
},
{
"end_time": 12683.37,
"index": 516,
"start_time": 12655.384,
"text": " the possibilities of form are really structured. And I don't equate actuality with reality. That's the influence of Eastern thinking on me. I think that possibility, we have to treat possibility just as real as actuality. And we do this with things like potential energy and stuff like that anyway. And laws, what are laws? Laws aren't advanced. They're not actions. They're real constraints on what can happen. They're real. And so as much as there is emergence bottom up,"
},
{
"end_time": 12700.964,
"index": 517,
"start_time": 12683.763,
"text": " from the physical substrata, there's emanation down from the non-spatial temporal sets of constraints on possibility. And some people say that that's sort of cryptically Whitehead's God or something like that. I don't know if I have to go there, but I wouldn't say it's something like the neoplatonic one."
},
{
"end_time": 12720.179,
"index": 518,
"start_time": 12700.964,
"text": " And, you know, and that's not really that strange. If you look at the history, if you look at people, you know, John Spencer's work on the eternal law, other people like that, a lot of the people that brought about the revolutions that we're talking about right now in science, or that we're pursuing, I saw in our discussion about science, a lot of them had direct"
},
{
"end_time": 12744.923,
"index": 519,
"start_time": 12720.52,
"text": " like explicit connections to Neoplatonism or similar things, or they had connections to like what Einstein was Spinoza, and Spinoza is deeply in the Neoplatonic tradition. He uses, you know, he basically co-ops Proclus' elements of theology for the structure that he uses for the ethics and things like that. So what I'm saying is, although I don't, I want to be clear, I'm not, I don't present that position,"
},
{
"end_time": 12775.111,
"index": 520,
"start_time": 12745.486,
"text": " a position you see in people like John Scotus Erigina of the complete interpenetration as the consensus position. I want to say that there have been notable people within the history, even the recent history of science that have had this position, and very important people in the history of philosophy, the whole Neoplatonic tradition, especially post Platinus, John Scotus Erigina as an example. So I think that reality is"
},
{
"end_time": 12799.206,
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"text": " understood in the way our cognition works, simultaneously bottom up and top down fashion, that there are bottom up causal interactions, top down constraints, which aren't causes. And they afford all of the structural functional organization that accounts for most of the phenomena that are in dispute here. I do think, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 12813.848,
"index": 522,
"start_time": 12799.906,
"text": " And I haven't I haven't tried to make that argument here. People can look at it. I have an existing series out there untangling the world knot with Greg Enriquez. I do think you can fatten up access consciousness so that you can get a lot of phenomenal consciousness out of it."
},
{
"end_time": 12831.288,
"index": 523,
"start_time": 12814.087,
"text": " So one of the main things I argue is that if you give a system intelligence and you give it relevance realization, you're giving it foregrounding and backgrounding of information, you're giving it aspectualization, you're giving it a lot of what I call the adverbial quality, the here, the here-ness and the now-ness and the togetherness of"
},
{
"end_time": 12853.507,
"index": 524,
"start_time": 12831.476,
"text": " which is not the same thing as the standard qualia of blueness and greenness and yellowness and things like that. And the thing that's interesting about those adverbial qualia is unlike the adjectival qualia, they don't disappear in the pure consciousness event. They're still there. People describe the here-ness as presence, the now-ness as eternity, and the togetherness as absolute unity."
},
{
"end_time": 12881.357,
"index": 525,
"start_time": 12853.507,
"text": " So the adverbial qualia seem to be necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And the adjectival qualia that gets so many of these arguments going, I think, aren't necessary and sufficient for consciousness. I don't think that means they're unproblematic. I don't think I've solved that problem. But what I think I would argue is that we can thicken up access consciousness to get a lot of the phenomenology of our consciousness. And that makes me not so convinced that we won't be able to cross the gap even more like we have with"
},
{
"end_time": 12910.111,
"index": 526,
"start_time": 12881.732,
"text": " life and with intelligence. So that's my position. Now, I am not, I hope I didn't come across, arrogant enough to claim that I have a foreclosure argument, and that therefore, I think Bernardo is insane, or his position is not intellectually respectable. Far from it. I wouldn't be doing this if I thought that. But you were asking me to state what my position is, and that's where my position is. And so, one more thing, Bernardo. Like I said, I"
},
{
"end_time": 12939.77,
"index": 527,
"start_time": 12911.51,
"text": " I want to be able to explain what I think is the base state of consciousness for us and that Fernando said it might be the best analog for cosmic mind, which is the pure consciousness event. And like I said, that seems to be completely the reason we don't blank out and lose memory of it is because it's not absolutely absent of content. It has no representational conceptual propositional content. It has no adjectival content, but it does have"
},
{
"end_time": 12958.353,
"index": 528,
"start_time": 12940.333,
"text": " And many of the people, you know, you know, bars"
},
{
"end_time": 12973.507,
"index": 529,
"start_time": 12958.592,
"text": " is explicit that the function of consciousness is higher-order relevance realization. Working memory, Lin Hasher, is higher-order relevance realization. Tononi, well, his isn't about relevance realization. Yeah, be asking for his test of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 13003.063,
"index": 530,
"start_time": 12973.712,
"text": " It's a test for relevance realization, a test for appropriateness, blah, blah, blah, blah. Same thing with Clearman's and his caring, higher order caring for lower order representations. All the higher order ones, because they can't be inferential, involve some kind of appropriateness or relevance thing. So a lot of the access models are already converging on relevance realization. And I think you can thicken that up, if you'll allow me a metaphor, to get a lot more of the phenomenology. That's my position."
},
{
"end_time": 13015.913,
"index": 531,
"start_time": 13003.558,
"text": " Now, the thing about that is, the thing that's kind of like going like this between Bernardo and I is suppose that turned out to be right, Bernardo could still make his arguments."
},
{
"end_time": 13036.425,
"index": 532,
"start_time": 13016.22,
"text": " His argument, I don't think his arguments ultimately would be defeated if that turned out to be right, because he seems to be running them, and I don't mean seem in the pernicious sense, I'm just saying it is my judgment that he seems to be running them on the basis of sort of more fundamental features."
},
{
"end_time": 13058.097,
"index": 533,
"start_time": 13037.159,
"text": " That's what I've been trying to get clear about. I hope that was fair to you, Bernardo. I hope that wasn't a misrepresentation. Can I ask a couple of clarifying questions? Do we understand correctly that adverbial qualia can be reduced to pure non-phenomenal access consciousness in your view?"
},
{
"end_time": 13089.428,
"index": 534,
"start_time": 13059.548,
"text": " Yeah, I think, although part of what I'm trying to do is undermine the clean distinction, and other people have noted this for Block, right, the clean distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. Because people have pointed out, well, there seems to be something it is like to access, right, or to be poised. And I take poisedness, which is the defining feature of access consciousness, to be a metaphor for very sophisticated relevance realization."
},
{
"end_time": 13111.271,
"index": 535,
"start_time": 13089.667,
"text": " That's what I take it to mean. That I will bring out of my long-term memory what's most appropriate and I will structure it in my working memory so that it best fits the environment, et cetera, et cetera. But you do think we should be able in principle at least to reduce adverbial qualia"
},
{
"end_time": 13141.749,
"index": 536,
"start_time": 13111.903,
"text": " to non-phenomenal access consciousness. If by what it reduces that I would be able to give an explanation of how it arises out of something that is, yeah, that's what I mean by it. That doesn't mean that I think it's ontologically reducible for reasons I've already given, but yes. Oh, so it could be that that entity that's performing access consciousness has adverbial qualia as fundamental properties of it"
},
{
"end_time": 13164.309,
"index": 537,
"start_time": 13142.807,
"text": " at least in potentiality. Yeah, yes. So that would make a pen scientist of you. It depends. I mean, and this is a debate. And again, we've had this debate, I don't know, we'll resolve it. I mean, it makes me a deep continuity theorist. And whereas,"
},
{
"end_time": 13186.903,
"index": 538,
"start_time": 13164.94,
"text": " Again, is that enough of a difference of degree, that it's a difference in kind, etc. And so I take it that the difference between the deep continuity, I mean, I've had debates with JP Morceau about this, and he is a panpsychist, although he seems to be loosening that, that there's a difference between panpsychism and deep continuity in"
},
{
"end_time": 13215.469,
"index": 539,
"start_time": 13187.244,
"text": " So that the explanatory principles might be the same, but that doesn't mean the entity is the same. And we do sort of countenance that idea, because we use the same explanatory principles for things that exist at different scales, for example, even spatiotemporally, et cetera, et cetera. And regarding adjectival quality, you think those are more problematic? Yes, I do. I do. And what I do think"
},
{
"end_time": 13235.964,
"index": 540,
"start_time": 13216.288,
"text": " is that we, so this is a meta critique, I think we are holding the topic of consciousness hostage to Adjective Aqualia when we have clear evidence for states of consciousness, if that's the right word, like the Pure Consciousness event, in which Adjective Aqualia are not present."
},
{
"end_time": 13265.52,
"index": 541,
"start_time": 13236.22,
"text": " And I think if we had adjectival qualia without the adverbial qualia, we would have a genuine humian monster. We would have no togetherness, here-ness, now-ness to these experiences. And we would have the humian monster of these completely atomic blips of qualia. And I don't think that would constitute a consciousness anymore. That would still leave a problem there. The integration problem would still be there. Exactly, exactly, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 13294.275,
"index": 542,
"start_time": 13267.602,
"text": " I think I understand your view. I do think the burden of argument is more on you because you would have them to explicitly make sense of how at least adverbial qualia can emerge from non qualia simply because of a kind of access configuration. I understand that this is where you were leaning. I would point out that the Giulio Tononi himself has come out"
},
{
"end_time": 13319.838,
"index": 543,
"start_time": 13294.701,
"text": " I think it's because there are a lot of the problems. Well, this goes to another issue. Oh, crap, I was supposed to end at three o'clock. I'm so sorry."
},
{
"end_time": 13345.265,
"index": 544,
"start_time": 13320.418,
"text": " I'm sorry. No, I don't want to make the move or say something, but I mean, I think there's deep connections between the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of relevance. And I don't think it's a coincidence that all the, all, most of the theories of the functionality of consciousness are converging on the relevance realization idea. And I mean, I make that argument."
},
{
"end_time": 13373.916,
"index": 545,
"start_time": 13345.657,
"text": " And then I do think that there's important overlap between, I've already argued this, between intelligence and consciousness in some fashion. But I agree with you, it's not an intelligence that has anything like intentionality or meta-reflective capacities. And I think that has to be something like a base relevance realization ability that we get with that verbal qualia. So I'm trying to close the explanatory gap. Okay, let's close this video as well. Seems like you've got to get going."
},
{
"end_time": 13391.391,
"index": 546,
"start_time": 13374.326,
"text": " I don't want to sneak in a last word like that against Bernardo. I want to give him a chance to respond. My last word is for you. Regardless of whatever ontological differences we seem to have, John and I,"
},
{
"end_time": 13408.166,
"index": 547,
"start_time": 13391.391,
"text": " I think our mission is the same or the reason why we are doing what we do is to address the meaning crisis. I don't use that term, but ultimately I think we are big buddies, John. We are allies in what we are trying to accomplish."
},
{
"end_time": 13437.09,
"index": 548,
"start_time": 13409.07,
"text": " Yeah, and there's a lot about what you say that I think is really important. I mean, I don't ultimately agree with you on some points, but I think you can see that there's important ways in which I am really significantly modifying the standard ontology to try and address some of your concerns. So at least, I at least think I'm responsible to your concerns. I know you don't have to, I'm not asking you to agree with me, but I am asking you to see that I am responsible to your concerns. I acknowledge that and appreciate it very much."
},
{
"end_time": 13462.073,
"index": 549,
"start_time": 13438.046,
"text": " Thank you very much for saying that. I want to thank you both. I'm incredibly blessed and I'm so lucky that I get to be a vessel for or a cup for your holy water or your manna, at least temporarily. So thank you so much for that. I want to let the audience know about where to find out more about you just in a second. I also should let the audience know"
},
{
"end_time": 13483.473,
"index": 550,
"start_time": 13462.073,
"text": " I've been told I need to mention this quite a bit more about I have a Patreon and I always feel slimy and filled with discomposure when I talk about that. But some people say just advertise it more. So if you want to see more conversations like this, where there are cognacentis like Bernardo and John duking it out, but also at the same time, loving one another in their own"
},
{
"end_time": 13508.985,
"index": 551,
"start_time": 13483.473,
"text": " Yeah, please please do visit patreon.com slash Kurt J Mungo it every dollar and literally every dollar helps every patron helps and it helps me extremely Not only financially but motivationally to just to know that there are some people that voluntarily they don't have to pay you'll get this content no matter what but they support it and that's I'm Well, thank you so much"
},
{
"end_time": 13537.739,
"index": 552,
"start_time": 13508.985,
"text": " With that said, I wanted to talk to you all about Jesus and Buddha and what's the difference and are they compatible? And what about God and free will? And there are quite a few more questions. I think I have two or three. I'm happy to talk with Bernardo again. I'm very happy. It's been a delight. My brother in arms. Very much. I'd be happy to talk with him again. Great. We'll arrange that again. And if anyone wants to know where to find out more about you, John, and then Bernardo, where do they go?"
},
{
"end_time": 13564.445,
"index": 553,
"start_time": 13538.626,
"text": " The best thing, I mean, other than, you know, doing academic search on Google Scholar for my papers is, you know, go onto YouTube, go onto my channel, look at Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, which is about the meeting crisis, of course. You can take a look at a dialogical series I did with Greg Enriquez about consciousness called Untangling the World Knot. By the way, Bernardo, that's a reference to Schopenhauer, right? Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 13589.548,
"index": 554,
"start_time": 13564.77,
"text": " And then I'm currently doing one called The Elusive Eye, The Nature and Function of the Self, with Greg Enriquez again and Christopher Mastropietro. So that would be so. And then if you want to see more of these kinds of dialogues on my channel, I have an ongoing dialogical series called Voices with Reveke, where I try to exemplify how we can weave together argumentation and genuine dialogos. Bernardo."
},
{
"end_time": 13607.773,
"index": 555,
"start_time": 13590.572,
"text": " Just go to BernardoKestrup.com. There's a lot of free stuff linked from there. Okay, great. And if you all want, I can give you the video files for this. Once it's up on our site, if you want to use it as extra content on yours, you're more than welcome to. Thank you so much again. Thank you. This was"
},
{
"end_time": 13627.517,
"index": 556,
"start_time": 13608.968,
"text": " Far different in a positive manner than I expected it to be. I'm glad that I took a backseat because it's mainly about, like I said, Theo Maki, but also Theo Locution. So thank you all. I'm happy that you were... Yeah, and I wanted to thank you. You helped us to steer out of getting locked into local minima."
},
{
"end_time": 13642.312,
"index": 557,
"start_time": 13627.517,
"text": " Great pleasure meeting you. Great pleasure indeed. Enormous pleasure from my side as well, John. Great meeting you and getting to know you. Let's do this again. I'm happy to do so."
},
{
"end_time": 13660.52,
"index": 558,
"start_time": 13642.961,
"text": " I love Don Hoffman, but I'm glad that he wasn't here because it would be far too many voices and it was great to see you all get to know one another and try and understand each other's viewpoints. Thank you. Excellent. Take care, everybody. Have some chocolate, John. Bye bye."
}
]
}No transcript available.