July 16, 2014 • 38 mins
What is consciousness and have researchers found the on/off switch? We look at what we know so far.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Hello, is
there anybody in there? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bob,
(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey everybody. Yeah, Joe, I have
a question for you, ask away, Are you conscious? Barely? Yeah? Yeah,
I was gonna make a similar statement, but I will
say that I am confident that I'm conscious. I'm not
confident that that's my preferable state of being right at
this very moment. Well, I'm not conscious. Um, so you're
(00:45):
just I just wanted the You're just speaking unconsciously? You
are you are channeling some sort of unconscious mind. No, no, no,
I'm what philosophers, some philosophers might refer to as a
p zombie. I display all of the outward appearance of
being a conscious entity, but I have no inner experience.
(01:06):
I have no quality of They might say, ah, got you. Well,
the whole purpose of this, uh, this charming intro where
we discover that our friend and compatriot Joe is in
fact not what he seems to be. He only that's
all he is. I guess it is really so. I
guess it's the opposite that he's exactly what he seems
(01:26):
to be and no more than that. Uh, we wanted
to talk about consciousness, and as it turns out, I mean,
this is a subject that has been a matter of
discussion in philosophical circles for centuries. I mean, this is
one of those things like, yeah, exactly what there's there
there's evidence of preliterate cultures having at least some concept
(01:50):
of things that tie into consciousness. And there's gonna be
a lot of vague discussion in this episode, mainly because
consciousness is it's tricky to even define it, right, Yeah,
there's sort of a question here. Is consciousness a matter
of philosophy something we just sort of reason and talk
about in the abstract, or is it a question that
(02:12):
is susceptible to science? Can you scientifically? Is there a
mechanism that is consciousness? Is there is there something that
we can point to in the brain and say this
is where consciousness comes from and this is what it means.
So for the longest time, this was sort of the
realm of the philosophers. There were really weren't a whole
lot of scientific inroads to consciousness. Yeah. I mean it's
(02:34):
one of those things where John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher,
was talking about how consciousness had to be essential for
thought and for personal identity. This isn't, by the way
of you, that many philosophers, but not all philosophers share.
We're gonna be talking a lot about philosophers early in
this episode and just kind of the different perspectives when
(02:57):
it comes to consciousness. Well, yeah, I think the philosophical
perspectives are a good way to begin this discussion because
we're going to talk about some new scientific discoveries, yeah,
that are related to consciousness. So there's this idea you
may have heard of. It's called the hard problem of consciousness.
Are you familiar with this? It's usually what I think
(03:18):
when I'm trying desperately to go to sleep and insomnia
has taken hold. Right, that's the hard problem. Yeah, that's
basically right. No, that's not it at all. So okay, Well,
I have a fundamental misunderstanding. Joe Pray, do elaborate and
enlighten me. Okay, So for a while now, some philosophers
have divided questions about consciousness into basically two categories. You
have the hard problem and then you have the easy problems.
(03:41):
Problems plural with easy. So the Australian philosopher David Chalmers,
he's written a lot about this, and in the nineteen
paper called Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness he
defined the easy problems as the ones that pretty much
everybody can admit can potentially be solved by science. So
the easy problems include things like locating the mechanisms behind
(04:05):
individual cognitive functions, for example, the ability to discriminate, categorize,
and react to environmental stimuli. These are his words. Now, uh,
the integration of information behind a cognitive system, the reportability
of mental states, the ability of a system to access
its own internal states, the focus of attention, the deliberate
(04:28):
control of behavior, the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Those
are just some examples he listed. So the idea is, okay,
I think pretty much everybody's on board. We can find
the things that are happening in the brain that cause
each of those, the regions of the brain responsible, and
the actual processes that manifest. Yeah, these might be now
(04:52):
he called them easy sort of in context. These might
in practice be very very hard to solve, easy in
the sense that it is probably possible rather than something
that is probably impossible. So as difficult as these might be,
to suss out what is his hard problem yea. So
Chalmers defines the hard problem as quote the problem of experience,
(05:16):
and he goes on to say, when we think and perceive,
there is a whir of information processing, but there is
also a subjective aspect, as Nagel has put it in
he's referring to the philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is quote
something it is like to be a conscious organism. This
subjective aspect is experience. So he he also later on
(05:38):
in the paper sort of tries to say, maybe it's
easier to just use the term experience rather than consciousness,
because that's really what the hard problem of consciousness is
all about. What generates this thing we know as experience.
You are having an experience right now, Lauren, and you
are having one, Jonathan, but I am not having one
(05:58):
because I'm a p zombie uh or or Rock probably
is not having one as far as we know. What
causes this. Now, there's this group of people who are
often referred to maybe disparagingly. Maybe not as the new mysterians,
they're the philosophers who have basically concluded that the second problem,
the hard problem of consciousness or experience, will never be
(06:21):
solved by humans. In other words, while we may learn
more and more about the brain and the individual functions
of the brain, we're just never really going to be
able to understand the origins of this, uh, this complex
final product of brain called experience. So there are a
lot of different ways you could arrive at this conclusion.
(06:41):
There might be some people who could see like a
technical problem with the inquiry or the questions, say you're
not framing it right. Or they might define consciousness in
such a way that makes the search for a mechanism impossible.
Or you could have duellists who that means somebody who
thinks that the mind and the brain are actually separate substances.
There's like a soul or an over spirit, some kind
(07:04):
of other spiritual thing that controls consciousness and it's just
not found in the brain. Or you might have people
who accept the problem and the framing of the question
and they agree that there might be a physical basis
for the mind, but they just simply don't think that
human minds are capable of solving the task. So, for
an example of the final one, I found a quote
(07:26):
by the British philosopher Colin McGinn in a two thousand
twelve piece for The New Statesman called all Machine and
No Ghost question mark um. So he says, paleo anthropologist
have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from
ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centering on
(07:47):
the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and
constrained to the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls,
as the lifestyle of other species form their set of
cognitive skills. Chance is there that an intelligence geared to
making stone tools and grounded in the contingent particularities of
(08:08):
the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries
of the universe. Can omniscient spring from an opposable thumb?
It seems unlikely, So why presume that the mysteries of
consciousness will be revealed to a thumb shaped brain like ours?
The quote mysterianism unquote I advocate, is really nothing more
than the acknowledgement that human intelligence is a local, contingent temporal,
(08:32):
practical and expendable feature of life on Earth, and incremental
adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one
would regard as fairly omniscient. Um I would argue that
just his ability to frame it in such a way
kind of dismisses his own argument at some extent, because
(08:53):
what sort of how would you how would you say
that if you take his premise that that you know,
all of our achievement is and I know he's making
a point, he's oversimplifying, but if you take this premise
that a lot of our achievements are all due to
this whole opposable thumb approach, you would never have reached
a point where you could even frame an argument in
(09:14):
that sense. It's I think it helps disprove itself. I
get it. It's sort of an agnosticism of of we
don't know and we can't know. I find that I
find that personally a little pessimistic. I mean, I think
of some of the achievements that have we have already
as a species scene I mean not even recent ones,
(09:36):
I'm talking throughout all of human history. That to me
suggest that you should never really underestimate human ability and achievement. Yeah,
I don't want to dismiss this point of view out
of hand. At the point of view express McGain in
the quote, I read like, I think there's some intelligence
behind it, that there is some interesting thinking. But in
(09:56):
the end I can't really go along with Yeah, I
apprec sheet what he's saying, and and let's go ahead
and say this. I am absolutely certain that he is
far more intelligent than I am. I do not I
do not mean to suggest otherwise, I just do do
not agree with that particular philosophy. Well as as science
minded people, or rather to science minded people and some
(10:18):
kind of weird automaton um, we we have to believe that,
I mean, you know, we like to believe generally that
science is going to come up with answers. Yeah, the
mysteries of the universe. So I guess that forces us
to ask the question, has science found anything interesting that
might bear on this question? So? Is there anything we
(10:41):
can come back that the mysteriens with right now? Well,
before we get into that, let's first just address the
fact that this has been a difficult problem for science,
not just for philosophy, because the human brain, as we
have discussed in previous episodes of forward thinking is a
complex little critter and too kind of Devil's advocate for yes,
(11:04):
I've verb that now and all the time. Please please
that advocate devilishly Lauren for the point of view that
we can't figure this kind of thing out. We certainly
haven't yet, Like we've got a few leads and there's
one in specific that we're going to be talking about.
But but there's so much, so much about the brain
that we don't know. Yeah. I described it in the
(11:24):
episode as if we have a general map that's missing
tons of detail. So we have we know the general
parameters of the human brain, we know some of the regions.
We know what some of the regions do, or at
least we have very strong evidence supporting what those regions
of the brain do. But when you start getting beyond that,
it gets really murky, really fast. And it's not like
(11:46):
one of the GPS units is down or something like that.
It's more like there be dragons exactly. This is this
is the earliest days when cartographers were making observations of
landscapes and doing their best to represent that so that
future generations won't run their their ships upon the breakers. Right,
(12:07):
They're not they That's the whole kind of place we're
in neurologically speaking, as far as brain science goes. That's
not to say that we don't have top scientists working
on right now. We do, but it is one of
those things where we can't just easily say this is
exactly how this particular brain function works. I mean, in
(12:28):
our discussion about memory, we talked about how we've made
a lot of of progress towards understanding memory, but that's
just progress toward it. We don't have a full working
like documents saying this is how we encode and uh
and decode memory, how we recall memory, how we re
(12:48):
encoded so that we can recall it again later, and
exactly what the mechanism is. If we had that and
we knew exactly how it worked, we could probably even
work on ways to improve memory so that it's actually reliable.
But but you know, we we can't, So we have
to first be completely honest about that that the brain
(13:09):
is still very much at large a thing of mystery
to us. One of the other things I think we
should acknowledge is the limitations that some are practical, some
might be ethical on what we can do with the brain.
I mean, so you can do f M R. I.
You can put somebody in a scanner and look at
which parts of the brain are getting blood flow and
(13:32):
lighting up with activity. You can do experiments like that,
But those kinds of experiments only show you so much, right,
And to get really into the nitty and or a
gritty of the brain, one often has to pop the top,
as in, remove part of the skull and put some
probes on in there and chemical sensors. Yeah, yeah, you
(13:54):
gotta you gotta, you gotta zapps themselves essentially, is what
we're talking about. And here's the issue here. Um, it's
hard to get people to volunteer to be part of
such an experiment. Yeah, that's not a nice thing to
do to somebody unless they've agreed to it. Yeah, so
you're right, So if you're not, if they haven't agreed
to it, and and be right, that's not really my
(14:17):
idea of a fun Tuesday, right, If I'm if I'm
going like I think about, I take the train to
and from work, right, And every time I take the train,
there's always some advertisements somewhere for some sort of medical study,
and they're targeting students mainly who are able to have
the time and the willingness to put themselves through some
sort of study, and they get a small compensation for
(14:40):
doing so. I cannot imagine a compensation great enough for
your average students to say, yeah, I don't mind if
you shave my head, cut open my skull and start
a probe and mess around. So it's really hard to
do fundamental research on living brains in an ethical and
responsible way. So that's one of the big reasons why
(15:02):
are our our knowledge is so limited. It's that practically speaking,
it's hard to do. So that being said, we can
we can definitely talk about some efforts that science has
made in order to really understand consciousness, and one of
them totally blows my mind. Are Yeah, our our buddy
(15:28):
tech Mark, Max tech Mark of m I T. By buddy,
I mean someone that has no idea who we are,
and we have never met. But Max tech Mark of
m I T has proposed that we think of consciousness
as a new state of matter. So we've got you know,
we've got solid liquid gas plasma consciousness. Yeah. So he
(15:49):
he has proposed a let's let's call it a hypothetical
form of of matter called he Yeah, he calls it
a hypothesis. He's not saying there really is. But it's
called perceptonium, which, like an obtanium and transformium, is largely
an imaginary substance. But the reason why he proposes it
(16:11):
is so that scientists can start to think about consciousness
as if it is a physical substance in order to
start applying various scientific and mathematical principles to the various
elements of consciousness. It's really all about, Yeah, it's sort
of the same way that dark energy, dark matter, or
(16:34):
the Higgs boson until we discovered it, not not us personally.
I mean, we were busy that day, I didn't know,
but scientists discovered it. So it's really a placeholder. But
it's meant to be something that allows scientists to kind
of conceive of consciousness in a way that makes it
more uh more solid in a way, an idea where
(16:56):
they can actually start forming various scientists think theories about
it and testing them. I think what he sort of
said he wanted was to create a framework where we
could do mathematics with respect to thinking. Yeah, the idea
of exploring how the physical laws of the universe themselves
could give rise to consciousness and also ultimately allow us
(17:20):
to better understand how it is we perceive the world
the way we do and why we do. And by
the way, if you guys listening at home ever here
any rumbling. We're doing this apparently in the middle of
an amazing thunderstorm that I don't I don't suggest that
such thunderstorm is conscious by the way, I well, I okay,
(17:41):
we can agree to discree. Yeah, if you're a panpsychist,
you might think that that that cloud has some rudimentary
form of consciousness at any rate. Um, okay. So we've
been talking about consciousness as with the potential that it
is a physical bit of matter. Perhaps, so if it's
a physical thing, and if perhaps it operates vaguely like computers,
(18:04):
does it have an on off switch. That's a interesting
question that you asked, and I'm glad you did, because
the answer appears to be maybe. I'm definitely hedging my
bets on this one, because, as you'll see when we
talk about this case, there are a lot of things
you have to take into consideration, which means that making
(18:26):
any kind of yes or no statement would be uh premature.
As a preface, Yeah, We're about to tell you a
story that is very interesting, but we don't know for
sure if it means what we think it means, but
it's certainly exciting. So here here's the story. Once upon
(18:46):
a time, there was a team of doctors who were
working at George Washington University, and they were working with
a patient who suffered from epilepsy. Now, epilepsy is call
caused by having abnormal activity in the brain. The neurons
fire abnormally. Usually you can think of it as, uh,
(19:07):
just an overload of of discharging neurons in a way,
and it manifests itself in various types of symptoms. Not
all of them are the dramatic seizures that we often
think of as an epileptic fit. Some of them are
things where someone just loses focus, but it often will
(19:28):
be accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Now, these doctors
weren't necessarily looking for anything that had to relate to consciousness.
What they were looking for was what part of the
this patient's brain was responsible for triggering these seizures. Yeah,
they were doing a case study, so they were kind
of basically poking around and stimulating different bits of her
(19:52):
brain exactly in order to kind of see what happened. Yeah,
it's kind of uh it makes me think of the
scene and buckeru an Zai where they're performing brain surgery
and Buck rubonds I says to one of his fellow surgeons, No, no,
don't touch that. You never know what's connected to uh So,
in this case, what they were doing was they were stimulating,
(20:13):
like you said, different regions of the brain, and at
one point they reach a part of the brain called
the clostrum, and when they used the the electrodes to
stimulate that part of the brain, the patient would stop
whatever she was doing. She would gradually lose consciousness. It
didn't sound like it was a instant thing. It sounded
(20:34):
more like it was a process. So she would lose
consciousness and then just sort of stare off into the distance,
not at anything in particular, until they stopped stimulating that
part of the brain, in which case she would recover
but have no recollection of the moments that had passed
while that part of our brain was being stimulated, almost
(20:54):
as if it had just never happened. Yeah. So, if
anyone's ever had one of those moments where know, you've
blacked out for one reason or another. It could be
a reaction to medication. It could be head trauma, it
could be an epileptic seizure. Whatever. If it's one of
those moments where you aren't now alert, you remember exactly
what you were doing before you had that moment, but
(21:16):
you have no recollection of what happened in between, and
other people have to tell you, and you just have
to go on what they said, that's what was going
on scientifically in the lab at this moment. And again
the doctors were not looking for this. They just happened
to stumble upon it. And so it was at that
point where they said, you know, it's possible that the clostroum,
(21:39):
this thin membrane it's under the neo cortex in the brain,
this thin membrane, it may be the key, the on
off switch for consciousness. Not to say that it's ultimately
responsible for what we call consciousness, but it might be
one element that without it you can't have consciousness. It
(21:59):
doesn't It might be like the lynch pen that ties
everything together. Right, because there are a lot of different
ways of explaining what consciousness exactly would be, or if
it would have a location within the brain. But in
an interesting way, of thinking about it is okay. So
you have lots of different things going on in your
brain at any given time. You're processing visual data, you're
(22:19):
processing auditory data, you're accessing memories from the past, you
are having motor control, you're speaking, and somehow all of
these things come together in our brain to create this
thing we think of as experience. But all of these
things are separate. So what's combining them for us in
(22:40):
this way? What's creating the thing that that that makes
a continuous, conscious, single experience. It could be that there
is one organ in the brain that takes everything and
smashes it together and makes you an experience, and previous
research has suggested that that thing might in fact be
the class stroom. Uh. Back in two thousand four, Francis Krick,
(23:03):
who's one of the guys who helped sess out the
structure of DNA back in the nineteen fifties along with
Christoph Koke, who is a prominent neuroscientist, noted that the
classroom receives input from and projects output to almost all
of the regions of the cortex, and they speculated that
if you know, the philosophical concept of consciousness is indeed
(23:24):
the sum of cooperative activity of the senses and the
nervous system together that the classroom might be certainly worth
further study. This was backed up in when another group
of researchers published a paper hypothesizing that, I mean, well,
basically that these guys were correct based on studies that
they did of signals that were being relayed into and
out of the classroom. They observed it receiving signals from
(23:47):
from several areas of the brain and sending signals out
specifically to the motor cortex, and so therefore thought that
it might be controlling lots of interactive process is through
the brain and voluntary behavior as well. Um, they were
a little bit less philosophical about it than some of
the other people we've been talking about. They kind of
(24:09):
concluded that the classrooms control quote, may include the neural
correlates of consciousness. But but that's still, I mean, for
science duds, pretty pretty high philosophical. Y. Yeah, I think
that's that's proper scientific rhetorical humility. Right, Yes. And so
(24:29):
this this result here, you know, I hesitated. I can't
really call it a study because again, that wasn't necessarily
what they were looking for. But this result that the
doctors found at George Washington University. Yeah, uh, that that
seems to again give more evidence for support for that
particular point of view. Uh, it definitely feels like this
(24:51):
gives more support for that the idea that consciousness is
a manifestation of neurophysical processes, that there is something to
do with the rain, that the mind and the brain
are one and the same, the mind itself as a
manifestation of the brain. That's what it seems to support. Now,
all that being said, here are some of those facts
that we we mentioned at the top. We were going
(25:12):
to have to bring into context in this discussion because
you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based upon this
one incident, right, This this was a case study, and
a case study, if you have never heard that particular
medical term before, means that you are looking at a
single patient at a single point in time, and you're
not even trying to draw any other data into the argument. Right. So,
(25:37):
when you have a a you know, it's a nifty observation. Right,
You've got one example and that's it. Uh. So that
means that, first of all, you can't definitely conclude that
that one example is representative of everyone's experience as a whole. Right, Also,
it makes a really boring chart. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's well, you have a right because the one person participants, Yeah,
(26:03):
of one participant. Yeah, So you have to keep in
mind the sample sizes a sample size of one, so
you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based on the
sample size of one. On top of that, I think
I read somewhere, Jonathan, you might be able to confirm
this that this particular patient's brain was probably not what
we would call typical. Right. She had had a previous
(26:26):
surgical procedure done where part of her hippocampus had been removed. Now,
the hippocampus, as we've discussed in our optogenetics episode, is
the part of the brain that's associated with forming memory,
and so she had had part of that removed in
a previous surgery, So her experience may not be typical
of someone else's experience for that reason as well. Also,
(26:48):
I mean she had a pre existing neurological condition suffering
from So it might be that this particular individual's brain
is affected by stuff in the way that somebody else's
brain might not be. Right, So you have to take
all those sort of caveats into mind before you you
go any further, and to make matters more complicated, we
(27:10):
get back round to that problem we mentioned earlier. To
do further study would require some pretty invasive procedures, right,
I mean, it's not like we can easily say, oh, hey,
get Jim in here and let's find out if it
works on him too. Yeah, yeah, I'm really interested in this.
I'm not going to sign up for that. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean it makes sense in this case because this
was sort of a byproduct of attempted therapy, right right.
(27:34):
This wasn't This wasn't a case of, well, this person
has is already in this particular situation, let's see if
we can get them to agree to help us just
do some exploratory research. That wasn't the case. The case
was they were specifically trying to make this woman's life better.
They're trying to figure out what is it that's causing
these epileptic seizures, so we can understand that better and
(27:56):
not only help her, but potentially, if we learn enough
about epilepsy and general help future people who suffer from epilepsy.
And as it turns out, this study might help even
more people than that. Yeah, as it turns out, if
in fact, this cloths Stroum ends up being that on
off switch, if it ends up being the kind of
(28:18):
the gateway for us to understand more scientifically about what
consciousness is and its role and and how the mechanisms work.
You know, not saying we're there yet, but if this
happens to lead to more research that does extend that understanding,
we might be able to see some practical applications that
could demonstrably make people's lives better. For example, there are
(28:42):
people who suffer various ailments that impact their ability to
have awareness of themselves and the environment around them, for exactly,
people who are in a comatose state. And it may
be that by understanding more about the mechanisms of consciousness
we can create new therapies that would help people come
out of komato states, or people who have suffered from amnesia,
(29:05):
which you know, it sounds pretty similar. The idea that
you have lost big blocks of time you have no
recollection of it kind of coincides with this idea of well,
when you are unconscious, you're not collecting memories anymore. So
maybe there's another relationship there in a relationship between memory
and consciousness that we could further explore and perhaps help
(29:29):
people who have suffered from these kind of these kind
of ailments. One thing that I thought was really interesting
and might bear on the potential applications is the distinction
that you noted here in the notes, and I think
it's a good one to make between wakefulness and consciousness. Right.
This was something that was observed in this particular case. Right,
it's the idea that being awake and being conscious are
(29:52):
different things. You might say an even kind of a
weird way that you could be considered conscious while you're asleep,
say if you're having dreams or something. Right that you're
you're still having an experience. So what if you were
to flip that just say that you are in fact awake,
but you're not conscious. And that was one of those
(30:13):
things that has been a matter of debate and philosophy
for for generations. Right. The idea a lot of philosophers
kind of combined wakefulness and consciousness as very much inter
related and that you could not have you couldn't you
couldn't have consciousness without wakefulness, was the idea. But apparently
you can have wakefulness without consciousness. Now, philosophically, perhaps you
(30:38):
would debate whether or not the patient was truly wakeful, right,
she was not asleep, But words, that's what philosophy does. No, No,
I know, yeah. I mean if you wanted to define
wakefulness is say, being able to say, have motor control
(30:59):
like you you can say words. Well, I don't know
if people do that in their sleep. It is hard
to define. Brain stuff is tricky, yo. That was going
to be the alternate title of this particular episode, brain
stuff is tricky, yo, But I figured I could not
pull that off. But all of all of that aside,
even this research could help with the originally intended study. Um.
(31:23):
As it turns out, the patient's loss of consciousness was
associated with increased synchronized activity across a few different parts
of her brain, and as we mentioned earlier, kind of
similar things happened during epileptic seizures, and it's kind of
an overwhelming electrical bit in the brain that happens. Okay. Um,
So the researchers think that minor synchronized activity means the
(31:46):
brain is binding different aspects of an experience together, but
that too much here might be overwhelming and disrupt the
cohesion of thoughts or even consciousness as a whole. So
up next in the future there going to be investigating
whether a more mild stimulus to the region might kind
of jolt the brain activity back to normal and prevent
(32:08):
the seizure from interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, sort of like
a pacemaker for seizures. Wow. And then on top of that,
our understanding of consciousness could extend beyond humans. We may
be able to start looking at the concept of consciousness
as it applies to other organisms. Yeah, because all of
(32:29):
the mammals whose brains we've investigated so far have a classroom. Yeah,
that some animals probably don't write. Yeah, so non mammals
may not have this. And so the question is, well,
first of all, if you have to, you have to
assume that the classroom does in fact play a key
role in conscious discover that. Ye. So if that holds true,
(32:52):
then does that mean that mammals have at least some
level of consciousness? And again, this may mean that we
have to start better defining what consciousness is, perhaps creating
a spectrum of consciousness and whether you know, when you
say an animal is conscious, what does that actually mean
in in the within the spectrum right, Yeah, and it's
(33:13):
really interesting to have this very concrete thing to look
at as opposed to previous tests of consciousness that are
a little bit more psychological. Um. There's, for example, what's
called the mirror test, wherein you take a critter put
a glob of something on its face sticking in front
of a mirror. If the critter tries to wipe the
thing off of its face, that means that it is
(33:34):
recognizing itself in the mirror, uh, and realizing that it's
got something there, and it's going like I get it off,
get it up, as opposed to either thinking that whatever
the thing is in the mirror is another creature or
not recognizing it as something at all, right, exactly. Um.
And there are a few animals that can pass this
mirror test, the great apes, dolphins, uh, orca elephants, and
(33:56):
the European magpie. Actually, so one bird is in there
as well. Interesting. But you know that's not always a
terrific test, even for for all animals. Like if you
did that to an octopus, it would fail the test. However,
OCTOPI use tools and they show amazing ingenuity, yeah, problem
solving skills. Yeah, and some might even I think question
(34:19):
the definition of consciousness that's being approached there. I mean
that seems to raise that that difference between consciousness and
self consciousness, like is one having an experience versus is one, uh,
I don't know, having an image of the cell. Yeah,
an awareness of the self in some form. Yeah. Again,
this is where it gets all super fuzzy. Um. Not
(34:43):
to mention some of the animals are also super fuzzy.
They are then, especially octopy. So so the way I
concluded the episode of the video episode is really how
we're going to kind of wrap up this one to
the idea that if we are in act on the
pathway to getting a better grip scientifically speaking on the
(35:05):
mechanisms of consciousness, if we get to a point where, uh,
let's say ten to twenty years or however whatever you know,
the the ex unit of time that means a long
time from now, but not so long as right that's
somewhere in that time frame, we get to a point
where we have a really keen understanding of what's going
(35:27):
on within the brain as far as consciousness is concerned.
It doesn't seem like that far of a stretch. Granted,
right now, we don't know anything, but that far of
a stretch that we might be able to replicate that,
to simulate that in some way, and then to give
that that state to an artificial being, a machine and
(35:49):
have machine consciousness kind of scary. I mean, one of
the big limitations right now that people say they're to
having like an artificially intelligent machine that has that strong
AI human like intelligence, which for a lot of people
also includes this idea of sentience and self awareness. It
doesn't have to have that, but for a lot of
(36:10):
people's concept that usually goes hand in hand that a
lot of people say, well, that's almost impossible to do
because we don't understand it in ourselves. But it could
be that the stuff we're seeing today is just that
that gentle creak of the door opening, just a little
tiny crack, and that maybe in a few decades we'll
(36:32):
have actually understood enough where that will no longer be
the limiting factor. Now, there may be some other limiting
factor that eventually tells us we cannot create a simulation
of this. But the interesting thing here is saying, look,
we're starting to learn things scientifically about consciousness. And this
was something that some philosophers thought was an impossibility, so
(36:57):
I find it really exciting. I did try and and
caution people saying this is the stuff is years or
decades away from it ever being something that is practical,
practical in any any use, because we're we don't even
know what we know yet, and until we have that settled,
we can't start building on it. But it is really exciting.
(37:20):
Anyone anything else you guys want to add before we
try and brave the terrible uh tsunami that's outside. Yeah,
I think so too. I'm actually feeling pretty good about
it right now, which is kind of why I'm thinking,
there's a break in the clouds. We should conclude and
get out of here alright. So on that note, ladies
and gentlemen, remember if you have any suggestions for future episodes,
(37:41):
or any questions for us anything like that, let us
know on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Our handle at
all three is f W Thinking and we will talk
to you again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, it forward thinking dot com
(38:03):
problem brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Hello, is
there anybody in there? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bob,
(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey everybody. Yeah, Joe, I have
a question for you, ask away, Are you conscious? Barely? Yeah? Yeah,
I was gonna make a similar statement, but I will
say that I am confident that I'm conscious. I'm not
confident that that's my preferable state of being right at
this very moment. Well, I'm not conscious. Um, so you're
(00:45):
just I just wanted the You're just speaking unconsciously? You
are you are channeling some sort of unconscious mind. No, no, no,
I'm what philosophers, some philosophers might refer to as a
p zombie. I display all of the outward appearance of
being a conscious entity, but I have no inner experience.
(01:06):
I have no quality of They might say, ah, got you. Well,
the whole purpose of this, uh, this charming intro where
we discover that our friend and compatriot Joe is in
fact not what he seems to be. He only that's
all he is. I guess it is really so. I
guess it's the opposite that he's exactly what he seems
(01:26):
to be and no more than that. Uh, we wanted
to talk about consciousness, and as it turns out, I mean,
this is a subject that has been a matter of
discussion in philosophical circles for centuries. I mean, this is
one of those things like, yeah, exactly what there's there
there's evidence of preliterate cultures having at least some concept
(01:50):
of things that tie into consciousness. And there's gonna be
a lot of vague discussion in this episode, mainly because
consciousness is it's tricky to even define it, right, Yeah,
there's sort of a question here. Is consciousness a matter
of philosophy something we just sort of reason and talk
about in the abstract, or is it a question that
(02:12):
is susceptible to science? Can you scientifically? Is there a
mechanism that is consciousness? Is there is there something that
we can point to in the brain and say this
is where consciousness comes from and this is what it means.
So for the longest time, this was sort of the
realm of the philosophers. There were really weren't a whole
lot of scientific inroads to consciousness. Yeah. I mean it's
(02:34):
one of those things where John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher,
was talking about how consciousness had to be essential for
thought and for personal identity. This isn't, by the way
of you, that many philosophers, but not all philosophers share.
We're gonna be talking a lot about philosophers early in
this episode and just kind of the different perspectives when
(02:57):
it comes to consciousness. Well, yeah, I think the philosophical
perspectives are a good way to begin this discussion because
we're going to talk about some new scientific discoveries, yeah,
that are related to consciousness. So there's this idea you
may have heard of. It's called the hard problem of consciousness.
Are you familiar with this? It's usually what I think
(03:18):
when I'm trying desperately to go to sleep and insomnia
has taken hold. Right, that's the hard problem. Yeah, that's
basically right. No, that's not it at all. So okay, Well,
I have a fundamental misunderstanding. Joe Pray, do elaborate and
enlighten me. Okay, So for a while now, some philosophers
have divided questions about consciousness into basically two categories. You
have the hard problem and then you have the easy problems.
(03:41):
Problems plural with easy. So the Australian philosopher David Chalmers,
he's written a lot about this, and in the nineteen
paper called Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness he
defined the easy problems as the ones that pretty much
everybody can admit can potentially be solved by science. So
the easy problems include things like locating the mechanisms behind
(04:05):
individual cognitive functions, for example, the ability to discriminate, categorize,
and react to environmental stimuli. These are his words. Now, uh,
the integration of information behind a cognitive system, the reportability
of mental states, the ability of a system to access
its own internal states, the focus of attention, the deliberate
(04:28):
control of behavior, the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Those
are just some examples he listed. So the idea is, okay,
I think pretty much everybody's on board. We can find
the things that are happening in the brain that cause
each of those, the regions of the brain responsible, and
the actual processes that manifest. Yeah, these might be now
(04:52):
he called them easy sort of in context. These might
in practice be very very hard to solve, easy in
the sense that it is probably possible rather than something
that is probably impossible. So as difficult as these might be,
to suss out what is his hard problem yea. So
Chalmers defines the hard problem as quote the problem of experience,
(05:16):
and he goes on to say, when we think and perceive,
there is a whir of information processing, but there is
also a subjective aspect, as Nagel has put it in
he's referring to the philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is quote
something it is like to be a conscious organism. This
subjective aspect is experience. So he he also later on
(05:38):
in the paper sort of tries to say, maybe it's
easier to just use the term experience rather than consciousness,
because that's really what the hard problem of consciousness is
all about. What generates this thing we know as experience.
You are having an experience right now, Lauren, and you
are having one, Jonathan, but I am not having one
(05:58):
because I'm a p zombie uh or or Rock probably
is not having one as far as we know. What
causes this. Now, there's this group of people who are
often referred to maybe disparagingly. Maybe not as the new mysterians,
they're the philosophers who have basically concluded that the second problem,
the hard problem of consciousness or experience, will never be
(06:21):
solved by humans. In other words, while we may learn
more and more about the brain and the individual functions
of the brain, we're just never really going to be
able to understand the origins of this, uh, this complex
final product of brain called experience. So there are a
lot of different ways you could arrive at this conclusion.
(06:41):
There might be some people who could see like a
technical problem with the inquiry or the questions, say you're
not framing it right. Or they might define consciousness in
such a way that makes the search for a mechanism impossible.
Or you could have duellists who that means somebody who
thinks that the mind and the brain are actually separate substances.
There's like a soul or an over spirit, some kind
(07:04):
of other spiritual thing that controls consciousness and it's just
not found in the brain. Or you might have people
who accept the problem and the framing of the question
and they agree that there might be a physical basis
for the mind, but they just simply don't think that
human minds are capable of solving the task. So, for
an example of the final one, I found a quote
(07:26):
by the British philosopher Colin McGinn in a two thousand
twelve piece for The New Statesman called all Machine and
No Ghost question mark um. So he says, paleo anthropologist
have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from
ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centering on
(07:47):
the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and
constrained to the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls,
as the lifestyle of other species form their set of
cognitive skills. Chance is there that an intelligence geared to
making stone tools and grounded in the contingent particularities of
(08:08):
the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries
of the universe. Can omniscient spring from an opposable thumb?
It seems unlikely, So why presume that the mysteries of
consciousness will be revealed to a thumb shaped brain like ours?
The quote mysterianism unquote I advocate, is really nothing more
than the acknowledgement that human intelligence is a local, contingent temporal,
(08:32):
practical and expendable feature of life on Earth, and incremental
adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one
would regard as fairly omniscient. Um I would argue that
just his ability to frame it in such a way
kind of dismisses his own argument at some extent, because
(08:53):
what sort of how would you how would you say
that if you take his premise that that you know,
all of our achievement is and I know he's making
a point, he's oversimplifying, but if you take this premise
that a lot of our achievements are all due to
this whole opposable thumb approach, you would never have reached
a point where you could even frame an argument in
(09:14):
that sense. It's I think it helps disprove itself. I
get it. It's sort of an agnosticism of of we
don't know and we can't know. I find that I
find that personally a little pessimistic. I mean, I think
of some of the achievements that have we have already
as a species scene I mean not even recent ones,
(09:36):
I'm talking throughout all of human history. That to me
suggest that you should never really underestimate human ability and achievement. Yeah,
I don't want to dismiss this point of view out
of hand. At the point of view express McGain in
the quote, I read like, I think there's some intelligence
behind it, that there is some interesting thinking. But in
(09:56):
the end I can't really go along with Yeah, I
apprec sheet what he's saying, and and let's go ahead
and say this. I am absolutely certain that he is
far more intelligent than I am. I do not I
do not mean to suggest otherwise, I just do do
not agree with that particular philosophy. Well as as science
minded people, or rather to science minded people and some
(10:18):
kind of weird automaton um, we we have to believe that,
I mean, you know, we like to believe generally that
science is going to come up with answers. Yeah, the
mysteries of the universe. So I guess that forces us
to ask the question, has science found anything interesting that
might bear on this question? So? Is there anything we
(10:41):
can come back that the mysteriens with right now? Well,
before we get into that, let's first just address the
fact that this has been a difficult problem for science,
not just for philosophy, because the human brain, as we
have discussed in previous episodes of forward thinking is a
complex little critter and too kind of Devil's advocate for yes,
(11:04):
I've verb that now and all the time. Please please
that advocate devilishly Lauren for the point of view that
we can't figure this kind of thing out. We certainly
haven't yet, Like we've got a few leads and there's
one in specific that we're going to be talking about.
But but there's so much, so much about the brain
that we don't know. Yeah. I described it in the
(11:24):
episode as if we have a general map that's missing
tons of detail. So we have we know the general
parameters of the human brain, we know some of the regions.
We know what some of the regions do, or at
least we have very strong evidence supporting what those regions
of the brain do. But when you start getting beyond that,
it gets really murky, really fast. And it's not like
(11:46):
one of the GPS units is down or something like that.
It's more like there be dragons exactly. This is this
is the earliest days when cartographers were making observations of
landscapes and doing their best to represent that so that
future generations won't run their their ships upon the breakers. Right,
(12:07):
They're not they That's the whole kind of place we're
in neurologically speaking, as far as brain science goes. That's
not to say that we don't have top scientists working
on right now. We do, but it is one of
those things where we can't just easily say this is
exactly how this particular brain function works. I mean, in
(12:28):
our discussion about memory, we talked about how we've made
a lot of of progress towards understanding memory, but that's
just progress toward it. We don't have a full working
like documents saying this is how we encode and uh
and decode memory, how we recall memory, how we re
(12:48):
encoded so that we can recall it again later, and
exactly what the mechanism is. If we had that and
we knew exactly how it worked, we could probably even
work on ways to improve memory so that it's actually reliable.
But but you know, we we can't, So we have
to first be completely honest about that that the brain
(13:09):
is still very much at large a thing of mystery
to us. One of the other things I think we
should acknowledge is the limitations that some are practical, some
might be ethical on what we can do with the brain.
I mean, so you can do f M R. I.
You can put somebody in a scanner and look at
which parts of the brain are getting blood flow and
(13:32):
lighting up with activity. You can do experiments like that,
But those kinds of experiments only show you so much, right,
And to get really into the nitty and or a
gritty of the brain, one often has to pop the top,
as in, remove part of the skull and put some
probes on in there and chemical sensors. Yeah, yeah, you
(13:54):
gotta you gotta, you gotta zapps themselves essentially, is what
we're talking about. And here's the issue here. Um, it's
hard to get people to volunteer to be part of
such an experiment. Yeah, that's not a nice thing to
do to somebody unless they've agreed to it. Yeah, so
you're right, So if you're not, if they haven't agreed
to it, and and be right, that's not really my
(14:17):
idea of a fun Tuesday, right, If I'm if I'm
going like I think about, I take the train to
and from work, right, And every time I take the train,
there's always some advertisements somewhere for some sort of medical study,
and they're targeting students mainly who are able to have
the time and the willingness to put themselves through some
sort of study, and they get a small compensation for
(14:40):
doing so. I cannot imagine a compensation great enough for
your average students to say, yeah, I don't mind if
you shave my head, cut open my skull and start
a probe and mess around. So it's really hard to
do fundamental research on living brains in an ethical and
responsible way. So that's one of the big reasons why
(15:02):
are our our knowledge is so limited. It's that practically speaking,
it's hard to do. So that being said, we can
we can definitely talk about some efforts that science has
made in order to really understand consciousness, and one of
them totally blows my mind. Are Yeah, our our buddy
(15:28):
tech Mark, Max tech Mark of m I T. By buddy,
I mean someone that has no idea who we are,
and we have never met. But Max tech Mark of
m I T has proposed that we think of consciousness
as a new state of matter. So we've got you know,
we've got solid liquid gas plasma consciousness. Yeah. So he
(15:49):
he has proposed a let's let's call it a hypothetical
form of of matter called he Yeah, he calls it
a hypothesis. He's not saying there really is. But it's
called perceptonium, which, like an obtanium and transformium, is largely
an imaginary substance. But the reason why he proposes it
(16:11):
is so that scientists can start to think about consciousness
as if it is a physical substance in order to
start applying various scientific and mathematical principles to the various
elements of consciousness. It's really all about, Yeah, it's sort
of the same way that dark energy, dark matter, or
(16:34):
the Higgs boson until we discovered it, not not us personally.
I mean, we were busy that day, I didn't know,
but scientists discovered it. So it's really a placeholder. But
it's meant to be something that allows scientists to kind
of conceive of consciousness in a way that makes it
more uh more solid in a way, an idea where
(16:56):
they can actually start forming various scientists think theories about
it and testing them. I think what he sort of
said he wanted was to create a framework where we
could do mathematics with respect to thinking. Yeah, the idea
of exploring how the physical laws of the universe themselves
could give rise to consciousness and also ultimately allow us
(17:20):
to better understand how it is we perceive the world
the way we do and why we do. And by
the way, if you guys listening at home ever here
any rumbling. We're doing this apparently in the middle of
an amazing thunderstorm that I don't I don't suggest that
such thunderstorm is conscious by the way, I well, I okay,
(17:41):
we can agree to discree. Yeah, if you're a panpsychist,
you might think that that that cloud has some rudimentary
form of consciousness at any rate. Um, okay. So we've
been talking about consciousness as with the potential that it
is a physical bit of matter. Perhaps, so if it's
a physical thing, and if perhaps it operates vaguely like computers,
(18:04):
does it have an on off switch. That's a interesting
question that you asked, and I'm glad you did, because
the answer appears to be maybe. I'm definitely hedging my
bets on this one, because, as you'll see when we
talk about this case, there are a lot of things
you have to take into consideration, which means that making
(18:26):
any kind of yes or no statement would be uh premature.
As a preface, Yeah, We're about to tell you a
story that is very interesting, but we don't know for
sure if it means what we think it means, but
it's certainly exciting. So here here's the story. Once upon
(18:46):
a time, there was a team of doctors who were
working at George Washington University, and they were working with
a patient who suffered from epilepsy. Now, epilepsy is call
caused by having abnormal activity in the brain. The neurons
fire abnormally. Usually you can think of it as, uh,
(19:07):
just an overload of of discharging neurons in a way,
and it manifests itself in various types of symptoms. Not
all of them are the dramatic seizures that we often
think of as an epileptic fit. Some of them are
things where someone just loses focus, but it often will
(19:28):
be accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Now, these doctors
weren't necessarily looking for anything that had to relate to consciousness.
What they were looking for was what part of the
this patient's brain was responsible for triggering these seizures. Yeah,
they were doing a case study, so they were kind
of basically poking around and stimulating different bits of her
(19:52):
brain exactly in order to kind of see what happened. Yeah,
it's kind of uh it makes me think of the
scene and buckeru an Zai where they're performing brain surgery
and Buck rubonds I says to one of his fellow surgeons, No, no,
don't touch that. You never know what's connected to uh So,
in this case, what they were doing was they were stimulating,
(20:13):
like you said, different regions of the brain, and at
one point they reach a part of the brain called
the clostrum, and when they used the the electrodes to
stimulate that part of the brain, the patient would stop
whatever she was doing. She would gradually lose consciousness. It
didn't sound like it was a instant thing. It sounded
(20:34):
more like it was a process. So she would lose
consciousness and then just sort of stare off into the distance,
not at anything in particular, until they stopped stimulating that
part of the brain, in which case she would recover
but have no recollection of the moments that had passed
while that part of our brain was being stimulated, almost
(20:54):
as if it had just never happened. Yeah. So, if
anyone's ever had one of those moments where know, you've
blacked out for one reason or another. It could be
a reaction to medication. It could be head trauma, it
could be an epileptic seizure. Whatever. If it's one of
those moments where you aren't now alert, you remember exactly
what you were doing before you had that moment, but
(21:16):
you have no recollection of what happened in between, and
other people have to tell you, and you just have
to go on what they said, that's what was going
on scientifically in the lab at this moment. And again
the doctors were not looking for this. They just happened
to stumble upon it. And so it was at that
point where they said, you know, it's possible that the clostroum,
(21:39):
this thin membrane it's under the neo cortex in the brain,
this thin membrane, it may be the key, the on
off switch for consciousness. Not to say that it's ultimately
responsible for what we call consciousness, but it might be
one element that without it you can't have consciousness. It
(21:59):
doesn't It might be like the lynch pen that ties
everything together. Right, because there are a lot of different
ways of explaining what consciousness exactly would be, or if
it would have a location within the brain. But in
an interesting way, of thinking about it is okay. So
you have lots of different things going on in your
brain at any given time. You're processing visual data, you're
(22:19):
processing auditory data, you're accessing memories from the past, you
are having motor control, you're speaking, and somehow all of
these things come together in our brain to create this
thing we think of as experience. But all of these
things are separate. So what's combining them for us in
(22:40):
this way? What's creating the thing that that that makes
a continuous, conscious, single experience. It could be that there
is one organ in the brain that takes everything and
smashes it together and makes you an experience, and previous
research has suggested that that thing might in fact be
the class stroom. Uh. Back in two thousand four, Francis Krick,
(23:03):
who's one of the guys who helped sess out the
structure of DNA back in the nineteen fifties along with
Christoph Koke, who is a prominent neuroscientist, noted that the
classroom receives input from and projects output to almost all
of the regions of the cortex, and they speculated that
if you know, the philosophical concept of consciousness is indeed
(23:24):
the sum of cooperative activity of the senses and the
nervous system together that the classroom might be certainly worth
further study. This was backed up in when another group
of researchers published a paper hypothesizing that, I mean, well,
basically that these guys were correct based on studies that
they did of signals that were being relayed into and
out of the classroom. They observed it receiving signals from
(23:47):
from several areas of the brain and sending signals out
specifically to the motor cortex, and so therefore thought that
it might be controlling lots of interactive process is through
the brain and voluntary behavior as well. Um, they were
a little bit less philosophical about it than some of
the other people we've been talking about. They kind of
(24:09):
concluded that the classrooms control quote, may include the neural
correlates of consciousness. But but that's still, I mean, for
science duds, pretty pretty high philosophical. Y. Yeah, I think
that's that's proper scientific rhetorical humility. Right, Yes. And so
(24:29):
this this result here, you know, I hesitated. I can't
really call it a study because again, that wasn't necessarily
what they were looking for. But this result that the
doctors found at George Washington University. Yeah, uh, that that
seems to again give more evidence for support for that
particular point of view. Uh, it definitely feels like this
(24:51):
gives more support for that the idea that consciousness is
a manifestation of neurophysical processes, that there is something to
do with the rain, that the mind and the brain
are one and the same, the mind itself as a
manifestation of the brain. That's what it seems to support. Now,
all that being said, here are some of those facts
that we we mentioned at the top. We were going
(25:12):
to have to bring into context in this discussion because
you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based upon this
one incident, right, This this was a case study, and
a case study, if you have never heard that particular
medical term before, means that you are looking at a
single patient at a single point in time, and you're
not even trying to draw any other data into the argument. Right. So,
(25:37):
when you have a a you know, it's a nifty observation. Right,
You've got one example and that's it. Uh. So that
means that, first of all, you can't definitely conclude that
that one example is representative of everyone's experience as a whole. Right, Also,
it makes a really boring chart. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's well, you have a right because the one person participants, Yeah,
(26:03):
of one participant. Yeah, So you have to keep in
mind the sample sizes a sample size of one, so
you can't make any sweeping scientific conclusion based on the
sample size of one. On top of that, I think
I read somewhere, Jonathan, you might be able to confirm
this that this particular patient's brain was probably not what
we would call typical. Right. She had had a previous
(26:26):
surgical procedure done where part of her hippocampus had been removed. Now,
the hippocampus, as we've discussed in our optogenetics episode, is
the part of the brain that's associated with forming memory,
and so she had had part of that removed in
a previous surgery, So her experience may not be typical
of someone else's experience for that reason as well. Also,
(26:48):
I mean she had a pre existing neurological condition suffering
from So it might be that this particular individual's brain
is affected by stuff in the way that somebody else's
brain might not be. Right, So you have to take
all those sort of caveats into mind before you you
go any further, and to make matters more complicated, we
(27:10):
get back round to that problem we mentioned earlier. To
do further study would require some pretty invasive procedures, right,
I mean, it's not like we can easily say, oh, hey,
get Jim in here and let's find out if it
works on him too. Yeah, yeah, I'm really interested in this.
I'm not going to sign up for that. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean it makes sense in this case because this
was sort of a byproduct of attempted therapy, right right.
(27:34):
This wasn't This wasn't a case of, well, this person
has is already in this particular situation, let's see if
we can get them to agree to help us just
do some exploratory research. That wasn't the case. The case
was they were specifically trying to make this woman's life better.
They're trying to figure out what is it that's causing
these epileptic seizures, so we can understand that better and
(27:56):
not only help her, but potentially, if we learn enough
about epilepsy and general help future people who suffer from epilepsy.
And as it turns out, this study might help even
more people than that. Yeah, as it turns out, if
in fact, this cloths Stroum ends up being that on
off switch, if it ends up being the kind of
(28:18):
the gateway for us to understand more scientifically about what
consciousness is and its role and and how the mechanisms work.
You know, not saying we're there yet, but if this
happens to lead to more research that does extend that understanding,
we might be able to see some practical applications that
could demonstrably make people's lives better. For example, there are
(28:42):
people who suffer various ailments that impact their ability to
have awareness of themselves and the environment around them, for exactly,
people who are in a comatose state. And it may
be that by understanding more about the mechanisms of consciousness
we can create new therapies that would help people come
out of komato states, or people who have suffered from amnesia,
(29:05):
which you know, it sounds pretty similar. The idea that
you have lost big blocks of time you have no
recollection of it kind of coincides with this idea of well,
when you are unconscious, you're not collecting memories anymore. So
maybe there's another relationship there in a relationship between memory
and consciousness that we could further explore and perhaps help
(29:29):
people who have suffered from these kind of these kind
of ailments. One thing that I thought was really interesting
and might bear on the potential applications is the distinction
that you noted here in the notes, and I think
it's a good one to make between wakefulness and consciousness. Right.
This was something that was observed in this particular case. Right,
it's the idea that being awake and being conscious are
(29:52):
different things. You might say an even kind of a
weird way that you could be considered conscious while you're asleep,
say if you're having dreams or something. Right that you're
you're still having an experience. So what if you were
to flip that just say that you are in fact awake,
but you're not conscious. And that was one of those
(30:13):
things that has been a matter of debate and philosophy
for for generations. Right. The idea a lot of philosophers
kind of combined wakefulness and consciousness as very much inter
related and that you could not have you couldn't you
couldn't have consciousness without wakefulness, was the idea. But apparently
you can have wakefulness without consciousness. Now, philosophically, perhaps you
(30:38):
would debate whether or not the patient was truly wakeful, right,
she was not asleep, But words, that's what philosophy does. No, No,
I know, yeah. I mean if you wanted to define
wakefulness is say, being able to say, have motor control
(30:59):
like you you can say words. Well, I don't know
if people do that in their sleep. It is hard
to define. Brain stuff is tricky, yo. That was going
to be the alternate title of this particular episode, brain
stuff is tricky, yo, But I figured I could not
pull that off. But all of all of that aside,
even this research could help with the originally intended study. Um.
(31:23):
As it turns out, the patient's loss of consciousness was
associated with increased synchronized activity across a few different parts
of her brain, and as we mentioned earlier, kind of
similar things happened during epileptic seizures, and it's kind of
an overwhelming electrical bit in the brain that happens. Okay. Um,
So the researchers think that minor synchronized activity means the
(31:46):
brain is binding different aspects of an experience together, but
that too much here might be overwhelming and disrupt the
cohesion of thoughts or even consciousness as a whole. So
up next in the future there going to be investigating
whether a more mild stimulus to the region might kind
of jolt the brain activity back to normal and prevent
(32:08):
the seizure from interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, sort of like
a pacemaker for seizures. Wow. And then on top of that,
our understanding of consciousness could extend beyond humans. We may
be able to start looking at the concept of consciousness
as it applies to other organisms. Yeah, because all of
(32:29):
the mammals whose brains we've investigated so far have a classroom. Yeah,
that some animals probably don't write. Yeah, so non mammals
may not have this. And so the question is, well,
first of all, if you have to, you have to
assume that the classroom does in fact play a key
role in conscious discover that. Ye. So if that holds true,
(32:52):
then does that mean that mammals have at least some
level of consciousness? And again, this may mean that we
have to start better defining what consciousness is, perhaps creating
a spectrum of consciousness and whether you know, when you
say an animal is conscious, what does that actually mean
in in the within the spectrum right, Yeah, and it's
(33:13):
really interesting to have this very concrete thing to look
at as opposed to previous tests of consciousness that are
a little bit more psychological. Um. There's, for example, what's
called the mirror test, wherein you take a critter put
a glob of something on its face sticking in front
of a mirror. If the critter tries to wipe the
thing off of its face, that means that it is
(33:34):
recognizing itself in the mirror, uh, and realizing that it's
got something there, and it's going like I get it off,
get it up, as opposed to either thinking that whatever
the thing is in the mirror is another creature or
not recognizing it as something at all, right, exactly. Um.
And there are a few animals that can pass this
mirror test, the great apes, dolphins, uh, orca elephants, and
(33:56):
the European magpie. Actually, so one bird is in there
as well. Interesting. But you know that's not always a
terrific test, even for for all animals. Like if you
did that to an octopus, it would fail the test. However,
OCTOPI use tools and they show amazing ingenuity, yeah, problem
solving skills. Yeah, and some might even I think question
(34:19):
the definition of consciousness that's being approached there. I mean
that seems to raise that that difference between consciousness and
self consciousness, like is one having an experience versus is one, uh,
I don't know, having an image of the cell. Yeah,
an awareness of the self in some form. Yeah. Again,
this is where it gets all super fuzzy. Um. Not
(34:43):
to mention some of the animals are also super fuzzy.
They are then, especially octopy. So so the way I
concluded the episode of the video episode is really how
we're going to kind of wrap up this one to
the idea that if we are in act on the
pathway to getting a better grip scientifically speaking on the
(35:05):
mechanisms of consciousness, if we get to a point where, uh,
let's say ten to twenty years or however whatever you know,
the the ex unit of time that means a long
time from now, but not so long as right that's
somewhere in that time frame, we get to a point
where we have a really keen understanding of what's going
(35:27):
on within the brain as far as consciousness is concerned.
It doesn't seem like that far of a stretch. Granted,
right now, we don't know anything, but that far of
a stretch that we might be able to replicate that,
to simulate that in some way, and then to give
that that state to an artificial being, a machine and
(35:49):
have machine consciousness kind of scary. I mean, one of
the big limitations right now that people say they're to
having like an artificially intelligent machine that has that strong
AI human like intelligence, which for a lot of people
also includes this idea of sentience and self awareness. It
doesn't have to have that, but for a lot of
(36:10):
people's concept that usually goes hand in hand that a
lot of people say, well, that's almost impossible to do
because we don't understand it in ourselves. But it could
be that the stuff we're seeing today is just that
that gentle creak of the door opening, just a little
tiny crack, and that maybe in a few decades we'll
(36:32):
have actually understood enough where that will no longer be
the limiting factor. Now, there may be some other limiting
factor that eventually tells us we cannot create a simulation
of this. But the interesting thing here is saying, look,
we're starting to learn things scientifically about consciousness. And this
was something that some philosophers thought was an impossibility, so
(36:57):
I find it really exciting. I did try and and
caution people saying this is the stuff is years or
decades away from it ever being something that is practical,
practical in any any use, because we're we don't even
know what we know yet, and until we have that settled,
we can't start building on it. But it is really exciting.
(37:20):
Anyone anything else you guys want to add before we
try and brave the terrible uh tsunami that's outside. Yeah,
I think so too. I'm actually feeling pretty good about
it right now, which is kind of why I'm thinking,
there's a break in the clouds. We should conclude and
get out of here alright. So on that note, ladies
and gentlemen, remember if you have any suggestions for future episodes,
(37:41):
or any questions for us anything like that, let us
know on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Our handle at
all three is f W Thinking and we will talk
to you again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, it forward thinking dot com
(38:03):
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Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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