Dornsife Dialogues
Dornsife Dialogues, hosted by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, are conversations among leading scholars and distinguished alumni regarding a wide range of topics relevant to our world today.
Dornsife Dialogues
Exploring the Enigma of Consciousness
Considering AI tools can now effectively mimic human communication, robots can ace the Turing test, and lobsters and crabs have been classified by some nations as sentient, the topic of consciousness has never been more timely or interesting.
Join this fascinating discussion on the latest developments and research regarding consciousness, including philosophical and scientific approaches to consciousness, the relationship between consciousness and the brain, and the potential implications of recent discoveries on our understanding of the human mind.
Speakers:
Antonio Damasio, David Dornsife professor of neuroscience; director of the USC Dornsife Brain and Creativity Institute. Author of numerous books, including Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious (2021).
Tok Thompson, professor (teaching) of anthropology and communication at USC Dornsife. Author of Posthuman Folklore (2019) which explores new concepts of personhood and The Truth of Myth (2020) which explores how fundamental narratives shape how we think of the world.
Moderated by: Jonas Kaplan, neuroscientist, associate professor of psychology and co-director the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center at USC Dornsife.
Learn more about the Dornsife Dialogues and sign up for the next live event here.
00:00:01:14 - 00:00:28:06
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome back to Dornsife Dialogs. Today's discussion will explore the very essence of our existence, the subjective experience of being aware of ourselves and the world around us. Some argue that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, emerging from the complex interactions of neurons in the brain. Others proposed that there is something more to it, something that cannot be explained by our current understanding of the natural world.
00:00:28:25 - 00:00:58:07
Speaker 1
Descartes, in his singular way, said that consciousness is irrefutable because it's something that comes from within. Of course, Descartes wasn't reckoning with the revolution that we find ourselves with. In the past few months, the public has gotten the first look at a whole new level of A.I. technology. These new generative A.I. systems are certainly not conscious in a human way, but their behavior has already made us think hard about what their effect on society could be in the very near future.
00:00:59:04 - 00:01:23:13
Speaker 1
Fortunately, we have experts here with us today will shed light on the implications of our new A.I. friends and the nature of consciousness and what it means to be sentient. Today's discussion will be moderated by cognitive neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan, associate professor of research at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute and co-director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuro Imaging Center.
00:01:24:06 - 00:01:50:14
Speaker 1
Jonas His work explores issues relating to consciousness, identity, empathy and social relationships. He also hosts the podcast Float with filmmaker Mary Sweeney, which explores the creative place where art and science meet. So let's get into it. I'll hand things over to Jonas. We'll introduce our panelists. And thank you, as always, for tuning in. Thank you, Dean Miller, for that excellent introduction.
00:01:50:14 - 00:02:16:29
Speaker 1
And thank you all for being here today, and especially to our speakers, Professor Antonio Damasio and Tony Thompson. I'm going to introduce our speakers first. Antonio Damasio is the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience. He's the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. Duarte and he's the author of numerous books, including Descartes Error and the Strange Order of Things, and most recently Feeling and Knowing, Making Minds Conscious.
00:02:17:15 - 00:02:43:02
Speaker 1
We also have with us today Toke Thompson, professor of anthropology and communication at USC. Dornsife is the author of the book Post-human Folklore, which explores new concepts of personhood and also the truth of myth, which explores how fundamental narratives shape how we think of the world. Thank you both for being here with us today. You know, I want to start this discussion by just talking about what consciousness actually is.
00:02:43:04 - 00:03:00:04
Speaker 1
This is titled The Enigma of Consciousness, and the word itself turns out to be something of an enigma that people can't agree upon. So before we talk about all these different things, like consciousness and mind, I want to get your views on what exactly these words mean. So let's start with you, Antonio. How do you define consciousness?
00:03:01:08 - 00:03:29:18
Speaker 2
Well, I think the different definitions of consciousness, depending on the point of view. My definition comes from my work is to a neuroscientist, is a psychologist in general is quite different from the conventional definitions that you have in in day to day life. In this section, one of the problems. So a lot of people, when they hear the word consciousness, they think of mind.
00:03:29:27 - 00:04:00:05
Speaker 2
So they think about this marvelous space that we have where our perceptions, our reasonings, the translations of our perceptions of, for example, objects and actions in words, where all of that is happening and that is really mind, but mind itself is not consciousness. That's certainly one of the very common things that will come to one's mind when you hear the word consciousness.
00:04:00:18 - 00:04:30:04
Speaker 2
Then there's another use of the term, which is very, very conventional, which has to do with collective knowledge. So for example, one could say something like this celebrations of the 4th of July are part of the American consciousness. And of course, what we mean there is something has to do with history, has to do with the accumulation of knowledge in the history, for example, of the group.
00:04:30:26 - 00:05:10:02
Speaker 2
But that's one way in which consciousness is very often taken. And something I must warn you about is the confusion between the words consciousness and the word consciousness. So very often people think it's consciousness is something has to do with the moral sense rather than the true real consciousness that we're going to talk about in a minute. So all of these different meanings have to be excluded once we really get into the nitty gritty of consciousness from a psychological point of view or from the neuroscientific point of view.
00:05:10:02 - 00:05:45:26
Speaker 2
And this what I'm going to give you right now, and that for me is to do with experience, is to do with the possibility that we have having any of the contents of our mind be perceived to be taken in the perspective of ourselves. So you have an experience of your life going on in your organism. You have an experience of thoughts that are in your mind, and that experience has a perspective.
00:05:46:04 - 00:06:47:11
Speaker 2
And that perspective traditionally is the perspective of the self. So we have to assume there's this magic construction in our minds slash brains slash living organisms, which is the creation, the perspective, the creation of the self experiencer and all the materials that are in that mind have that perspective. So right now, for example, I'm looking at the screen where I actually see do I see journalists, I see myself, and all of that is indelibly coming from me and into me in something that is quite curious and people don't realize is that the grounding for this possibility of experience, this possibility of perspective is actually within our very life so and within feeling itself.
00:06:47:22 - 00:07:12:19
Speaker 2
So as we as our life continues, we are constantly feeling having feelings that have to do with our own organism. It's quite curious because the main feeling that we have and we are hardly aware of it, is the feeling of our own life sort of continuing in the organism, the feeling I like to call this feeling of existence.
00:07:13:04 - 00:07:39:25
Speaker 2
But then there are many other feelings of which we are again not quite aware because they are providing us with the grounds for consciousness and they include the feeling of body temperature, the feeling of breath going on, the feeling of our heart beating. And what is so interesting is that when something goes wrong with those systems, we immediately become very aware, take body temperature.
00:07:40:08 - 00:08:13:13
Speaker 2
If you have the flu or you have COVID and your temperature goes up, you immediately become aware of it quite noticeably. But otherwise you're not aware of your the feeling of your body temperature. But all of those things constitute the background for what really is consciousness. So you have a word that is filled with meaning. It's quite different depending on the constituencies that you're dealing with, and it's something that you need to be quite aware of.
00:08:13:28 - 00:08:57:16
Speaker 2
Otherwise, you get into enormous confusions. But the good news and I'll close with this, the good news is that right now with the kind of research that we do in neuroscience, in biology in general, we are getting a purchase on how this is really happening. And one last note for you. It's quite common to say that, well, you know, consciousness, scientifically speaking, comes from the brain and in fact is the same as heart problem of consciousness that asks itself, how is it possible that this physical organ called the brain generates consciousness, which generates the mind and consciousness which are supposedly immaterial?
00:08:58:02 - 00:09:22:24
Speaker 2
Well, the good news that I can tell is that it's not about brains alone. You don't create consciousness with brains alone. You create consciousness with a partnership between the brain, the nervous system, and the rest of the living organism. The brains of late is a late comer in the history of life. And before you have brains, you have living organisms.
00:09:23:02 - 00:09:25:17
Speaker 2
And that's very important to to remember.
00:09:27:09 - 00:09:37:03
Speaker 1
So it's so that's a very biological perspective. As an anthropologist, how does the way you view consciousness overlap or differ from that?
00:09:38:08 - 00:09:58:01
Speaker 3
Well, I think one of the main points is that, you know, what does the word mean? Well, we create meaning, right? Words don't come with meanings built into them. So it's the meanings that we put on these words and then what people do with those. But an elemental level, I think what I would agree that we're looking at, if you want to get to the basics of consciousness, you know, don't start with people.
00:09:58:01 - 00:10:22:10
Speaker 3
We're pretty complex. You can start with slime molds. These are unicellular organisms that can choose. They can figure out little puzzles and pathways. You can remember. So, you know, I think that's a big point is to remember how biological process consciousness is. This is this has been developing for a long, long time on planet Earth. So people sometimes, you know, the theory of mind.
00:10:22:10 - 00:10:42:01
Speaker 3
Do you recognize that you exist or do you recognize that other organisms exist? That's something that people sometimes talk about, conscious self-consciousness, being conscious of oneself. And again, you know, this can get more complex from slime molds, to be sure. One of the things about Homo sapiens sapiens is we like to tell stories and so we can tell.
00:10:42:01 - 00:11:02:24
Speaker 3
We narrate these things and they give you sort of a different sort of narrative consciousness we have. We walk around with these little autobiographies in our mind or, you know, who you think you are. Very often is built out of stories. The story of my people, the story of the human race, the story of me. So there's there's other ways that we can, you know, think about different forms of consciousness.
00:11:02:24 - 00:11:19:09
Speaker 3
But at the elemental level, you know, it's an organism that it has to feel that has to decide. And that's true of the slime mold. And it's true with us. So we're working with the very basics of of biology itself. But if I could say just a couple of words on words, because these do come up, you know.
00:11:19:09 - 00:11:43:20
Speaker 3
What do you mean with consciousness? What is this thing called the mind? Is there a thing called the mind? I think that's a you know, we don't we can't wait. We can't touch it. We've never felt it. Is it a thing or is it basically a amorphous concept or a metaphor or simply a non-existent thing? You know, for Descartes, we were taught to decode error.
00:11:43:20 - 00:12:02:13
Speaker 3
And of course, it's a really important to recognize that our Western society was built on this. And we get our ideas of the mind very often from Descartes, the idea of the mind body split and the he used the word as professor. As you pointed out, his work got him. He used the word mind and soul sort of interchangeably.
00:12:02:13 - 00:12:21:07
Speaker 3
For him. These were pretty much the same thing. The soul was the mind. This was the spirit. Freud wanted to call it the psyche. So, you know, what are these different words mean? What are the different connotations? And so again, we're working with right now with one particular language, or at least with an Indo European tradition, and we can build back from that all the way.
00:12:21:10 - 00:12:42:27
Speaker 3
I would say back to mythology, right? Where did Descartes get his ideas of the mind, from the Christian ideas of the soul or the Christian ideas of the soul come from? And then all the way all the way back to the Garden of Eden. So in different mythological traditions and different linguistic traditions, you're going to have different, you know, basic categorical principles that, you know, imply different sort of questions and ways of thinking about things.
00:12:43:10 - 00:13:03:22
Speaker 3
One of the reasons I've been very surprised by Native American mythological traditions is because Native American philosophical traditions never made Descartes error, right? They never they never thought there was a mind body split. And so there's different ways to tease out these through these different stories and languages and concepts that are often built into those words. So that's always a key concern.
00:13:03:22 - 00:13:15:24
Speaker 3
What does the word mean? Well, we create meaning and we wrestle with this socially speaking. So that's what we're doing right now, right? We're creating meaning.
00:13:15:24 - 00:13:23:05
Speaker 1
Antonio, is is the mind really, even though we can't see it and touch it and and weigh it?
00:13:23:05 - 00:14:01:12
Speaker 2
I would say yes. I would say yes. I think the six that we can touch, in a way, it is no big problem. That's plenty. There's plenty of real physical reality that we can touch or or see. And yet it's there and it's doing pretty good things like for example, allowing the communication that we're having right now, we're all in different places and in the physics of the systems that we're using to communicate allow us to be all in the same space or to appear to be all in the same space for for a moment.
00:14:01:12 - 00:14:42:01
Speaker 2
It's something that Duke said is very interesting is sex, which I like very much. You related, of course, through life two very simple organisms. You know, we have the most numerous organisms on Earth are extremely unicellular organisms, many of them without even a nucleus. And yet they have an intelligence they are capable of making, quote unquote, choices, not choices in the same way we do, because there's nothing in them that permits internal observation of sex or a decision among sex that compete.
00:14:42:13 - 00:15:14:06
Speaker 2
And yet they make these decisions automatically. What is very interesting, this is one of the main issues in current research on the topic of consciousness is to what degree you can even say that they have consciousness or to which degree you can say that they have minds. I prefer to said that they don't. I prefer to say that they have an enormous intelligence that is not mind it, but where in fact there are many of the intentions.
00:15:14:16 - 00:15:56:07
Speaker 2
It will become clear once we have minds and once we have consciousness. So, for example, in in those simple living creatures, there is a sort of quote unquote, desire to become conscious, that desire that eventually materializes only after you have a nervous system. So until you have a nervous system that allows you to make representations of events either inside or outside, you don't have the possibility of having a reflection, the possibility of having a mind that could think through those events.
00:15:56:14 - 00:16:32:09
Speaker 2
But that doesn't mean that the intelligence in the intention of having those elements is not there in the living creature. This is again, very, very important because we're talking about living. We're talking about living creatures that are quite distinct from the creatures that we now have around us, and that attracts so much attention made by say, I in that include, for example, things like chipmunks that people are very astonished by because they appear to be thinking and doing things of their own, which they're not.
00:16:32:19 - 00:16:57:24
Speaker 2
They're not because they actually don't have life in themselves. Nothing like it. They don't have the possibility of mind. They don't have a possibility of consciousness in the sense that we do. So they are very, very different creatures in that this puts them in a completely different category. But the the problematic thing is that many people see them as creatures.
00:16:57:24 - 00:17:35:11
Speaker 2
So while I'm very concerned with having life be respected, whether it is life in the single celled organism or life in the multicellular complex organism like a human being or in general the bird or a mammal, I am not concerned at all with what happens to these other creatures that we are inventing because they are non-living. They are they have no possibility of sentience, they have no possibility of feeling, they have no possibility of suffering, which is the critical issue.
00:17:35:11 - 00:17:57:04
Speaker 3
If I may. Yeah, I think it's kind of a sort of an interesting point in history that we have this sort of explosion of interest in artificial computing intelligence is what is the same moment that we're witnessing this sort of wholesale ecocide and loss of biodiversity, particularly for the higher for the more complex animals, the mammals and whatnot.
00:17:57:16 - 00:18:25:11
Speaker 3
So, you know, it's sort of interesting the both these kind of impinge on that same question, you know, which which side are we on? We make these simulacra to to act like us, to look like us and respond like we want them to respond. But they're not responding from an emotional sense. You know, a robot will never an android will ever be able to tell you if they like a picture, they can say it, but they're never going to feel what it's like to that biological feeling of, wow, that's a beautiful picture.
00:18:25:21 - 00:18:45:17
Speaker 3
So again, we're much more like, you know, snails than we are robots, but we've built these. Some allow for people to respond to them to to fall in love with them, to become best friends with them, to rely on them. So it is it is an interesting moment. These these process are, I would say, somewhat linked. You know, are we earthlings or are we not?
00:18:46:10 - 00:19:11:03
Speaker 3
Where do our loyalties lie? There's something else I would love to pick up on, Professor Damasio said. There's sort of the about the simpler creatures sort of wanted to become desire to become conscious. And it reminded me of I've been so inspired by Occupy and because they're a mollusk, and yet they're very intelligent mollusk. So intelligence has it had been selected for among the mollusks and among the mammals.
00:19:11:03 - 00:19:31:06
Speaker 3
And so it was not the same line. But but in both lines, intelligence and consciousness had been selected for us. So I think that's sort of interesting to to see that this there are some evolutionary advantages to being more and more intelligent and more and more conscious. So it's interesting to see that that's, you know, true for all of life, not just for, you know, the hominids or something.
00:19:31:09 - 00:20:03:28
Speaker 2
But the advantages of intelligence are quite obvious. So the maintenance of life in an organism that is in fact not conscious and that cannot decide by itself undoing A or B is that is, as this provides you, it's like an insurance on the maintenance of life. And of course, as organisms get to be more and more complex, that there's this magic moment in which consciousness really appears.
00:20:04:07 - 00:20:42:03
Speaker 2
And it appears when you have a possibility of making your deliberation. So, for example, take one of the one of those feelings that is, in fact the vehicle for consciousness. You know, I like to say that feelings or esthetic feelings, the ones that I've talked about early on, you know, things like breath and the heartbeat and temperature and hunger and thirst and desire and pain and all of those are anesthetic feelings because they all represent something that is going on in our organism.
00:20:42:03 - 00:21:09:27
Speaker 2
And what is so interesting is that when they appeared, when they first appeared, what what they immediately give is a chance of prolonging the prospects of your life on your own deliberation. So if you have pain right now, you are given an opportunity to do something about it. And if you are hungry right now, you are given an opportunity to do something about it.
00:21:10:09 - 00:21:39:01
Speaker 2
And in a a now you are fully conscious of it. Now you have in full consciousness as opposed to your mollusk that may be hungry and eats what appears in the vicinity with you. You have a much larger array of possibilities that you can pick from so that you will be more likely to find an effective solution to your life problems of the moment.
00:21:39:11 - 00:22:14:24
Speaker 2
So the extension from automatic to automatic pursuit of life to the conscious pursuit of life is the increase in possibilities that you have and the possibility of even creating a solution that did not seem to appear. And that's what consciousness really gives us. And and of course, once again, and I'm so glad we agree on that, the creatures that we are inventing in the world, they I have nothing of the sort, you know, that's inert material.
00:22:15:18 - 00:22:47:10
Speaker 2
They are not they are not at risk for dying, you know, unless you take a hammer to them and destroy them, they going to stay. This is of course, not at all what happens with bacteria or with your mollusks, with or with the birds or the fish, for example? You know, I'm very astonished that people the other day I heard a conversation where somebody said, are fish conscious in this.
00:22:47:11 - 00:23:13:29
Speaker 2
You know, fish are very simple organisms. Of course they're not conscious. And once you if you ever see a fisherman getting fish out of the water on the hook in how the fish contorts itself, trying to get away from the hook and revealing quite clearly to anybody who's open eyes and brain that you are seeing suffering, you are seeing pain.
00:23:14:09 - 00:23:30:15
Speaker 2
There is no such thing. And that creature is in fact quite conscious of the pain that he's having right the moment. But these these words, it's very important that we make a distinction. The world of the eye and those of the living are very different words.
00:23:31:07 - 00:24:03:12
Speaker 3
And is there a sort of an irony that here we are supposed to be that intelligence is going to make it easier to stay alive? Right. That's kind of the point of intelligence, evolutionary speaking. And yet here we are so intelligent that we are destroying life on Earth and a great deal the possibility for our future, while we seem so fascinated with air or androids or other sort of simulacra that appeal to our social needs and desires to reach the limit of useful intelligence or.
00:24:04:26 - 00:24:34:13
Speaker 2
You're quite right, it's an irony, you know, it's astonishing when I see the concern for the new AI developments. You know, it just comes from a complete misunderstanding of what the checkbox, the fact that you have access to a huge amount of knowledge. Basically, they have access to all the knowledge that is there on the web and easy to manipulate it according to to certain intelligent programs.
00:24:35:00 - 00:25:02:02
Speaker 2
Of course, on the on the on the on the first the questions are of the relatively simple nature. You can come up with interesting answers. But in fact, you also have the chance of getting complete gibberish and getting things that are completely wrong. Because again, you don't have this survey of our mental space the way that we have.
00:25:02:21 - 00:25:29:27
Speaker 2
So there's no there's no superintelligence that that can solve the problems of these machines. And I have respect for these machines. I actually have respect for the people who created them. And I'm not denigrating and I want to I want them to stay a bit useful. But let's not get to be romantic and sentimental about these poor devices and what can happen to them.
00:25:30:06 - 00:25:32:29
Speaker 2
I don't want to give them the status in our society.
00:25:33:25 - 00:25:52:04
Speaker 3
But I think we will. People are already getting romantic in and about these devices because that's what we built them for. We built them to respond to our biological needs, right, as Homo sapiens sapiens. So they're going to be better friends than your real friends or better lovers, you know, this sort of thing. But they're not people. They're not us.
00:25:52:04 - 00:25:57:27
Speaker 3
They're not they don't really care about you, even if they say they do because they can't they can't feel that they can.
00:25:58:05 - 00:25:59:25
Speaker 2
They can't even care for themselves.
00:26:00:18 - 00:26:21:05
Speaker 1
Right. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the future of consciousness. But both of you have talked about how consciousness is rooted in the history of life on earth. And now you're sort of talking about the present artificial intelligence that we're living with and dealing with now. But I wonder what you both think about the far future of consciousness.
00:26:21:14 - 00:26:38:06
Speaker 1
You know, are you saying that it's impossible for a non-living creature to ever develop some kind of consciousness or or what? I mean, talk. You have written a lot about post humanism. What does post humanism mean and where do you see post humanism.
00:26:38:14 - 00:27:01:05
Speaker 3
Sort of a general philosophical thread or a corrective, I guess you could say. It really questions what we mean. We say human because that has been this overarching principle that, you know, humanity is completely different than other animals, than machines. And so Post-human is was questioning the human humanism part. What is it to be human? And that's both the animal turn and animal studies that are really reverberating throughout the academy.
00:27:01:05 - 00:27:25:01
Speaker 3
You know, dolphins give each other personal names, right? There's a lot of culture that is not just in Homo sapiens sapiens. And then the other side of post humanism is the sort of interest in AI, you know, going into even transhumanism, this sort of rhetoric or belief that people should be able or could be able someday to upload their consciousness to a digital environment and therefore achieve immortality.
00:27:25:01 - 00:27:47:00
Speaker 3
I don't think this is a very likely time for exactly the reasons that we've been talking. I'm not saying it's impossible that it could develop some kind of adaptive machine that cares about themselves sometime in the future. But but we're not there yet. We certainly haven't seen out there yet. What we do see, though, is that, you know, this is impacting how people are thinking of how people think about themselves, how people think about other people.
00:27:47:12 - 00:28:07:02
Speaker 3
This is all being radically informed now by these artificial intelligence things and think an androids too, like why put artificial intelligence in a human looking robot so that we respond to them as if they were one of our own species, you know? So the way we develop emotions with them that actually reason we make them look like us?
00:28:07:02 - 00:28:44:25
Speaker 2
Well, I think that's the genesis question is interesting. We can do that. You know, I'm perfectly capable of thinking of systems that would increase the amount of information in artificial organism quantum is about itself and imbue that organism with a bit of vulnerability. It would generate something that is like the responses that you have coming from human consciousness.
00:28:45:08 - 00:29:12:29
Speaker 2
But it's not going to be the same thing. It's not going to be the same thing just because there's no fundamental vulnerability, which is the vulnerability of the life process with any cell in any living cell that has existed in the universe till now, and that exists now. It comes with a certificate that gives it a certain number of hours or days or months or even years of life.
00:29:12:29 - 00:29:48:14
Speaker 2
That's it. So there is a beginning, is a birth. This is a middle life. There's a death point. And this is, of course, not the way artificial machines are designed. They can technically live forever depending on the age of the materials. But then even that there's no death of the material. When you when you take 747 and you send it to to be dismantled, there's no bit of the 747 is going to be crying out and saying, help me, I'm killing me.
00:29:49:09 - 00:30:05:12
Speaker 2
The entire thing is going to be chopped into pieces and and none of those pieces are imbued with life, which is about risk, which is about growth in this in sickness two, which is very important. So I.
00:30:05:12 - 00:30:06:05
Speaker 1
Don't see how you.
00:30:06:29 - 00:30:07:10
Speaker 2
Please.
00:30:08:19 - 00:30:21:29
Speaker 1
Don't mention the possibility of downloading one's consciousness into a machine to live forever. Is this something that is just pure science fiction fantasy, or is it possible for us to achieve that kind of technology one day?
00:30:22:28 - 00:30:44:07
Speaker 2
I don't think that we could achieve that. I think you can. I. I don't have any problem with the idea that we will be able to download tons of information. The problem is the system into which we're going to do that, that information, those systems exist already, so we can put plenty of information on the system of computers.
00:30:44:15 - 00:31:03:29
Speaker 2
But that doesn't mean that you're going to that that is going to be the equivalent to what our mind is going to be able to put information there and pull it out. We already do that quite efficiently, but it is also I. Yeah, please.
00:31:04:13 - 00:31:28:10
Speaker 3
Yeah. I was just going to say also that, you know, we get this question of ontology like we're going to upload me. Well, what does this me You know what, for example, one thing I like to think about is that I try to eat yogurt every day. Probiotic yogurt. Studies have shown that if you do these little organisms that live in your gut, help calm you down and reduce stress and the days you don't have it, your stress level goes up.
00:31:28:10 - 00:31:42:05
Speaker 3
But it's a very fluid study. So, you know, if I'm sitting here and I'm not that stressed, I think, oh, I'm thinking this, but what does this mean? It includes those little guys in my gut. It includes, you know, a lot of the stuff in this bag that we're walking around with. Most of it is not human DNA.
00:31:42:20 - 00:31:51:20
Speaker 3
And so when I say that, I act like a certain thing again, who is this me and how could I upload these these guys to that to the cloud with me? I don't think we could.
00:31:52:15 - 00:32:00:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, you're right. I agree.
00:32:00:18 - 00:32:22:18
Speaker 1
We have some really interesting questions coming in from the audience that I'm going to start feeding to you because I think they're going to fit into the conversation really well. You know, as we start to move towards consciousness in artificial intelligences, to the extent that that is possible, how do we really know if a non-living system or even a living system is conscious?
00:32:22:18 - 00:32:34:04
Speaker 1
I mean, how do we develop a is it possible develop a kind of Turing test that tells us for sure whether another being is consciousness is conscious, and will it be important for us to do that So.
00:32:37:10 - 00:32:55:16
Speaker 3
This is a similar question. We can program to say whatever you want them to say, but they're not and they're not going to feel in the same way that we do. And if you want to call that consciousness together, it's kind of up to you what you want to do with that word. But what how Homo sapiens sapiens experience consciousness is part and parcel of biological life on earth.
00:32:56:11 - 00:33:26:05
Speaker 2
But no, I think that for me the test always starts with feelings. I think that that only static feelings are the inaugural events of consciousness, and they are the test of whether some creature or organism is conscious or not. So if that organism has achieved species, that could be this feeling of comfort or discomfort and malaise or well-being.
00:33:26:23 - 00:33:47:03
Speaker 2
It's that's there. In a way, I was going to say in a palpable way, then it's conscious. And if it's not, it's there's no indication that there is that element of potential suffering or potential joy in pleasure, then it's not conscious.
00:33:47:03 - 00:34:11:27
Speaker 1
So this is a related question from Jean. Might it be possible that our species is defining consciousness in such a way that dismisses the experiences of organisms that are not the same as us? And I would like to expand that to just get you to talk about, you know, what some of the ethical considerations are as we start to deal with other organisms and artificial intelligence is that that might be happening.
00:34:11:27 - 00:34:23:08
Speaker 1
Something like experiences. Do we have to start to worry about what what, what their feeling is and what how we treat them is causing all these bacteria every day in his gut is.
00:34:24:17 - 00:34:50:08
Speaker 2
I think it's I think it's high time that we that we worry. Of course we have started worrying already, which is good but we certainly when we're dealing with living species, there's every reason why we should worry about what we do not obviously we're not going to be able to worry about single celled organisms in this gut when in mind it was, you know, go going.
00:34:50:08 - 00:35:30:16
Speaker 2
There is actually you could be worrying about the organisms in your guts, but you might actually be doing harm to yourself by worrying about the organisms in your gut. So, you know, it's extremely fantasy land when you start thinking about it. But there are plenty of organisms around us and it's actually quite, quite remarkable that in just a few decades we've gone from being, you know, insensitive creatures like Ernest Hemingway going on safari in Africa and killing as many animals as you could and being proud of it to actually being ashamed of doing something like that.
00:35:30:23 - 00:35:55:28
Speaker 2
So there's been an enormous progress. And that's the kind of progress that I hope can be extended even to tokes octopuses. And that's fine with the machines. I'm not worried at all. You know, I, I think my, my, my car is got my new car has got so many automated systems that gives me trouble really to cope with them.
00:35:56:11 - 00:36:02:11
Speaker 2
I don't want to worry about their life or their well-being. I want them gone responsible.
00:36:03:03 - 00:36:18:21
Speaker 3
It is going to be the ethics of it's going to be tricky. It's already tricky. You're talking about driverless cars. Well, you know, the driver, even if that's I have to make ethical decisions, right. You're going to wipe out and get to kill. You know, you're going to either kill three old people or one baby, Which is it?
00:36:19:02 - 00:36:34:18
Speaker 3
So these are ethical decisions and dilemmas. And our we're saying that the supposed to learn those and I certainly are being a part of our social network. So it's going to be a there's a lot of ethical questions and these things you know we'll get androids they're going to just be slaves, you know, can you beat your android?
00:36:34:29 - 00:36:50:14
Speaker 3
You can beat your car. I guess nobody's going to really object. But if you beat your android and it looks like a person and the android in the street is saying, please, Bob, don't beat me. And you're standing there watching that, that's going to be very difficult for you to witness. It's a lot of ethical, you know, where are the ethics in that?
00:36:50:14 - 00:37:05:02
Speaker 3
Maybe they can feel. But I'm going to feel that if you're mistreating something that looks like a human being, what about sex robots? You know, some people are saying, oh, this is great, this would be wonderful. Help people with disability, blah, blah, blah. Other people saying, this is horrible. This is going to be. So what are the ethics?
00:37:05:02 - 00:37:33:19
Speaker 3
Do they have ethical claims regardless of whether they feel we're going to feel for them. So they're going to be a part of those ethics and then actual organism. Yeah, right. We'll look at the travesty, the way we industry look at the, you know, the amount of data coming out of, you know, non-human consciousness is, is astounding from all sorts of species, even plants and forests and fungi and, and how do you actually learn how to do the little dance from other honeybees?
00:37:33:19 - 00:37:52:13
Speaker 3
I just read this a couple of days ago. Just keeping up with these developments is astounding. And it's a reminder of how much we have denied them their agency in the past. When I went to college, I couldn't you couldn't talk about animal feelings. You said you're anthropomorphizing. It was forbidden. So we didn't even allow these very complex organism to have feelings for the most part.
00:37:52:25 - 00:38:10:02
Speaker 3
So that's been a sea change. And just the last few years. And we have to sort of admit that to what are the ethics, right? If these things are other sort of ethical agents, if we are we enmeshed with the ethics with other animals, a lot of people would now say, yes, the idea of animal rights is not now it's too kooky idea or environmental rights.
00:38:10:22 - 00:38:29:25
Speaker 3
The person who's been granted Two Rivers and the Dolphins and to various other things around the place. So yeah, the ethics of this are all very, very unclear. And again, that's why I get inspired by non-Western discourses, because Western discourse has been really very, very influenced by this categorical split between man and everything else for a long, long time.
00:38:29:25 - 00:38:34:05
Speaker 3
And that's actually not true with other discourses.
00:38:34:05 - 00:38:45:29
Speaker 1
So I actually took we have a question from Paulette that is directly about that. What are the differences between the Western and Eastern concepts of consciousness, and do they differ significantly?
00:38:45:29 - 00:39:09:27
Speaker 3
I'm not an expert on Eastern philosophy. I would I would I would have to defer that. I could say a little bit about Native American. And then if you look at the Native American ideas of consciousness and even their mythologies and their religious cosmologies or world view where they emphasize connections rather than differences, So their stories are about very often other animals and their connections to people, other organisms and plants and their connections to people.
00:39:10:10 - 00:39:29:26
Speaker 3
And with that, the ethics and Native American traditions include non-human actors. So you're always in an ethical web with other forms of life. It's not to say you don't kill them and eat them. In general, we deal with life feeds our life, but it comes with a set of ethical requirements that you really don't see in Western culture in the same way not built in to that way of thinking about consciousness.
00:39:31:15 - 00:39:45:13
Speaker 2
Interesting. So how how in is in those cultures that you accommodate the sense of responsibility and respect for that other life with the fact that you're going to eat it for breakfast?
00:39:45:29 - 00:40:06:11
Speaker 3
Yes. Well, that's it's a great question. That's sort of the that's sort of the theological tension in a lot of Native American traditions. And the thing is, you know, for Native Americans, you know, do whales have souls or do reindeer have souls? Yes. But they're still going to, you know, kill that kobo and eat it. But what that means is that you're involved in this very cosmological ethical relationship.
00:40:06:11 - 00:40:25:26
Speaker 3
And like, for example, you know, you're killing something with the souls. You've got to pray for its afterlife. You've got to ensure that you use it all respectfully. You know, I've hunted with both native groups and non-native, and if you can do the same sort of harm to abandon it was a purely main thing activity. You're getting food for the freezer, you shoot the animal, you leave the rest for the squirrels.
00:40:26:14 - 00:40:41:26
Speaker 3
No, In native traditions, you have to pay funeral respect. You have to pray for them. You have to promise to use everything and you would never like take it all. Like you never take all the berries from a bush. You want to leave that bush with some berries. And so it sets up a different way of managing one's relationship with other life.
00:40:42:06 - 00:40:45:03
Speaker 2
Right. Interesting.
00:40:45:03 - 00:41:06:22
Speaker 1
Good. Here's an interesting question from the audience. You know, we all have art behind us. And as artificial intelligence gets more sophisticated, what is the future of art and what is the future of storytelling, given the ability of general artificial intelligence is to produce art or art like products.
00:41:08:09 - 00:41:25:25
Speaker 3
Cyber attention? Or do you think people art for their inspiration, don't they? I mean, they could have scoured the work of other artists and put something together. And same thing with if you ask Alexa to tell you a story, she doesn't really come up with the story. She sort of scours stories that have been generated by people. So I don't think that that that the people are what's going to go away.
00:41:25:25 - 00:41:34:22
Speaker 3
I don't think I was going to be creative in that same way. But our culture is going to be continue to be influenced by it. And already you can see that happening.
00:41:34:22 - 00:42:16:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, you already have examples of art that has been very much influenced by I, but of course there will be art created by AI by itself with given and of course the appropriate setting in France. But I, I agree with talk. I don't think the art is going to go away. And I think having a certain degree is the interaction between the the new modalities of communication, for example, the new capabilities that they bring and one's own inspiration and artistic tradition.
00:42:16:18 - 00:42:20:11
Speaker 2
I think it just makes the world richer. So I don't see any problem with that.
00:42:21:02 - 00:42:42:24
Speaker 3
There's an interesting side question Can I copyright? It's art and this is being addressed differently in different courts in the United States? No, in China, I believe. Yes. And then there's a related question. What about animal artists who've been several examples? Can animals own art? There's a big court case. Can the monkey on the selfie it took. So, you know, again, you're asking both the same question is right.
00:42:42:24 - 00:42:47:14
Speaker 3
Copyright is supposed to be invested in a person. Well, what counts is the person anymore.
00:42:47:14 - 00:43:00:12
Speaker 1
Yeah. One of our audience members, Major, is asked, Are there levels of consciousness? And if there are, art is is the consciousness of humans somehow superior to that of other species?
00:43:01:24 - 00:43:39:27
Speaker 2
It's interesting. So of course there are levels of consciousness in such as ourselves. In those levels, probably the levels of consciousness in general should describe. Interesting when you think, let's go back to this bit of information that I gave you. It's a start in my current physiological perspective, the consciousness emerges with feeling. So at the moment you have a feeling of any kind of because we're having feelings continuously.
00:43:39:27 - 00:44:10:08
Speaker 2
There's no moment. We don't have feelings unless you are in deep sleep where you are enjoying this. By the way, think of this marvelous thing that one of the experimental ways in which you suspend consciousness so in a totally controlled manner is anesthesia and then seizure it does is literally, quote unquote, freeze the physiological process in such a way that you no longer can know that you exist.
00:44:10:08 - 00:44:31:14
Speaker 2
And of course, that's very important. The reason why anesthesia was developed is because I'm one of those very, very important esthetic feelings called pain. If you if you are subject to pain, you're not going to have surgery because you're not going to cut yourself or allow anybody to cut into yourself because the pain is going to be horrendous.
00:44:31:21 - 00:45:11:08
Speaker 2
And that's why anesthesia is such an interesting experimental setting for good. The study of consciousness. But clearly, once you have that inaugural feeling, you have consciousness. And I would say you have consciousness 100%. What very often people think of in terms of levels of consciousness is the amount of that you bring into the conscious moment. So it is one thing to be alive and conscious in not thinking deeply about the problems that we are thinking.
00:45:11:08 - 00:45:44:23
Speaker 2
For example, right now that we are in this conversation, somebody from the outside would say, Well, these people a very sophisticated level of understanding of consciousness, because they bringing in all of these comparisons with different species, with the non-living creatures that can operate intelligently and so forth. So there's a way in which levels of consciousness can be conceived by the kind of field that they take it in.
00:45:44:25 - 00:46:15:05
Speaker 2
In That, of course, is very different across individuals and across human situations. But then you also have levels of consciousness that have to do, for example, with the coming of sleep. Once you are sleepy, your level of consciousness begins to be dampened and you begin to not respond to certain kinds of stimuli, especially in your periphery, and eventually you fall into sleep, which is a way of suspending consciousness quite naturally.
00:46:15:10 - 00:46:51:01
Speaker 2
It's not like in seizure, but in a way it operates in very, very comparable, very comparable ways. So there are the answer to your to to the question is that, yes, there are levels of consciousness within it. You could say that basically you either are conscious or not once you have or not access to feelings, it's clear we place you in a certain in a certain setting in relation to your life is very important.
00:46:51:24 - 00:47:34:01
Speaker 2
You know, so, so much of our discussion today is about the contrast between creatures that have life versus creatures that don't. We obviously do and plenty of animals. And then there are the creatures like the organisms quote unquote, that don't have life and it's very important because the way we become conscious is by having a process called feeling that is representing mentally some of the characteristics of the process of being alive.
00:47:34:18 - 00:48:12:01
Speaker 2
That's quite critical and the way in which it operates. And this is the way in which our science is talking about, about human neuroscience in neurobiology has just gotten a purchased on how this operates. This really operates because of the peculiarities of the system in ourselves, this so-called interception. So we have in general, we can divide our perceptions of the world into three categories ex reception.
00:48:12:01 - 00:48:45:13
Speaker 2
Right now I'm looking at a screen, which you guys are, and I can see you and I can see the rest of my my study here and this extra reception, the object is there. My nervous system through certain portals is taking in information and putting it together in the form of a percentage. But we also have perception of one part of our interior which is related to our joints, our bones, our muscles, which is proprioception.
00:48:45:20 - 00:49:23:16
Speaker 2
And then we have this marvelous world of so-called interception and interception is about all the nerve endings that are in every nook and cranny of our organism, in our picking up infamy about the state of the flesh. So it's not the passive state of the skin. What about the state of our readiness? It's about the stage of interior organs in the thick of those organs and we way representing improving together all of this information in component of the nervous system.
00:49:24:05 - 00:49:56:06
Speaker 2
What is very interesting and this is new is very interesting, is that this process is not one that's collecting information from the outside in the same way that I collect information visually from the outside. It is also a way of regulating internally. So as I see, for example, the state of my gut, the interior system is already responding to what has been picked up in as a way of adjusting to the situation.
00:49:56:15 - 00:50:29:19
Speaker 2
So this is not interception is not pure perception is about perceive and regulating life internally in what we have, what we call consciousness in us humans for certain is the process of perceiving this state of struggle in regulation for life. So we're not just perceiving the interior, which by the way, is how I described it. The first time I described this when I started working on the subject.
00:50:29:28 - 00:50:43:01
Speaker 2
It's a way of describing the struggle for the maintenance of lives within your organism. That is what consciousness really is today, as far as I can see.
00:50:43:01 - 00:50:59:18
Speaker 3
Yeah, if I could address that question as well. The question said something about, you know, the different levels of, of, of consciousness and where humans have superior levels. And I'm always sort of worried about putting things in a direct hierarchy. And I know that right now it's easy to look around and be very sort of impressed by what humans have managed to do.
00:50:59:18 - 00:51:17:13
Speaker 3
We have iPhones and computers and Zoom and but that's not really what makes us us. You know, there's plenty of hunter gatherers. We spent most of our time as hunter gatherers or still hunter gatherers out there. They're fully as human as as I am, but they don't have all these accouterments. And then there's a lot of other intelligences out there that we've just sort of stumbled on.
00:51:17:13 - 00:51:38:24
Speaker 3
And so what is the Dolphins interior world we don't really know. They talk, We don't they say things to each other. We don't quite know what they're saying. What is the interior world of a whale? We don't know. You know, we have a static reaction to what we sense, but other things sense other things, ultraviolet light, perhaps. Maybe that makes them pleased or unhappy.
00:51:39:02 - 00:52:02:29
Speaker 3
We don't have that sensation. So but then we were talking about different states of consciousness within people. And most of them, as you mentioned, sleep. And that is easy. And I would just add on to that the purposeful ones like trance or transcendental meditation or these alter states of consciousness that people seek. And in fact, there's a new study out the gorillas like to spend themselves around to get dizzy, to sort of experience that altered state of consciousness.
00:52:03:16 - 00:52:21:18
Speaker 3
So this is very rare. So we find it in many, many societies around the world. You know, shamanism is built on dirt and that's a cornerstone as well, the animistic world. So people are very interested in different levels or different styles of consciousness. And again, we've even seen that demonstrated at least in the great apes. So we may not be alone enough.
00:52:22:07 - 00:52:42:05
Speaker 1
Now I think we have time for maybe one more question, and this one that I think leads very nicely from what doctor said, which is a question about psychedelics. And there's been a lot of new research on the neuroscience of how psychedelics work. This is a topic that touches both neuroscience and anthropology. So I think it's an interesting one.
00:52:43:20 - 00:52:54:20
Speaker 1
How do both of you think that psychedelics, like psilocybin or LSD, can be used to help further our understanding of the nature of consciousness? And let's start with talk so you can continue from where you left off.
00:52:54:20 - 00:53:13:14
Speaker 3
Yeah, I'm going to build just a little bit of what I sort of ended with because I was talking about altered states of consciousness and, you know, shamanism. So sometimes traditional shamans will use psychedelics, but not always. And so the shoulders are pretty much the same, whether they use psychedelics or not. It may be colored a bit differently, but that's not sort of at the core of it.
00:53:13:22 - 00:53:42:01
Speaker 3
But again, we're not alone in trying to change our our states of consciousness through use of of of other chemicals. We see other animals engaged in this. Two birds get drunk off of berries and seem to enjoy the experience. I've seen them staggering around my yard. So clearly these do shake up some of our states of consciousness. And I think, you know, there's been encouraging results from some trials that this can have therapeutic benefits, a lot of PTSD or other sort of things.
00:53:42:13 - 00:53:59:03
Speaker 3
I'm not enough of a neurologist to talk about the neurological reactions, but certainly this is something that has been seen in many, many cultures throughout the world and have made use of it in different ways.
00:53:59:03 - 00:54:04:18
Speaker 1
And Tony, do you have any feeling about whether psychedelics can be used to understand the neuroscience of consciousness?
00:54:05:04 - 00:54:52:14
Speaker 2
Sure. I mean, it's it's more information about the and the specific effect of certain specific molecules. And that's the I don't think it's it's a main avenue for the understanding of unconscious or consciousness in general, but it is it's important information. It can give you if you can find certain correlations between the certain chemical with a certain dose and a certain fact, it's more information that comes your way which can be useful in a variety of ways, can be useful to understand the basic problem can even its therapeutic implications.
00:54:52:14 - 00:54:55:07
Speaker 2
So it's definitely something be done.
00:54:57:02 - 00:55:12:14
Speaker 1
Great. So in your in the last just couple of minutes, I just wonder if there's anything else that you two would like to say that that our questions haven't directly gotten to that you'd like people to be thinking about when they think about consciousness.
00:55:12:15 - 00:55:51:23
Speaker 2
Antonio Well, I see that people ought to realize that this is a very old question and very old question that comes repeatedly, you know, in our own time. For example, we've had one way of closing the problem of understanding consciousness called the heart problem of consciousness, which was posed by a by a British philosopher, David Chalmers. And one thing we can say is that today we have an answer to the heart problem of consciousness as posed by Chalmers.
00:55:52:02 - 00:56:28:18
Speaker 2
And that's very important. So we have ways of answering physiologically that issue that was considered an insolvable problem. So I think that's good news and why we know, we know thanks to research which is of different disciplines, but is solidly based in biology, solidly human as well, because we want to for something like this, we can get information from animals to humans going to be the critical that the critical experience of the creature.
00:56:29:05 - 00:56:48:14
Speaker 2
And so I think this is good news. And what we're going to reveal in the next few years of research about consciousness and related and related problems is, I think, very important in this consequences for how we see humans in its consequences, short variety actions. So I think it's a good moment.
00:56:48:14 - 00:56:51:26
Speaker 1
Actually took a final word.
00:56:51:26 - 00:57:15:22
Speaker 3
Well, just as an anthropologist, again, I would say that when we look at these words, what we mean, we're looking at a great deal of our own sort of cultural background. And so it's good to be sort of reflective about that. And understand different cultures and different ways of looking at things and even just talk about consciousness. We should be aware that with the ongoing ecocide is we've destroyed so much consciousness in the last few years with entire species going extinct and whatnot.
00:57:15:22 - 00:57:47:06
Speaker 3
So just as we're beginning to understand these ideas of animal culture and animal mentalities, we have yet to really, I think, grapple with these at a sort of fundamental philosophical level. I'm going to echo Graham Harvey, the philosopher, called for an academic atomism of thinking, Now that we know these things, feel and think in our conscious, what what does that mean for rethinking things like the humanities or anthropology or these very words that are that are built in very often to our Western systems of thought right.
00:57:47:06 - 00:58:03:25
Speaker 1
Thank thank you both so much. And thank you to our audience for joining us today. I really enjoyed this discussion and I hope everybody watching as well. So thank you to everyone who organized this and to both of you.