What is Consciousness? Attention Schema Theory, Subjectivity, & the Social Brain | Michael Graziano - Quantum Theory Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
First of all, why does complexity imply something built it?

(00:03):
Like, if something built it, then what built the, like,
how did that thing get so complicated?
When you pay that much attention to something,
then poof magically, an experience comes out, right?
And it's missing a piece.
It's got that so-called explanatory gap
that thing people refer to as consciousness.
They're you tightly balanced to a self-model, right?

(00:23):
It's something we say we have.
It's something we intuitively believe we have.
And the reason is because--
Welcome to the Quantum Theory Podcast.

(00:45):
Well, thank you, Michael, for so much for joining us here
on the Quantum Theory Podcast.
And I'm looking forward to diving into all sorts of aspects
of attention, schema theory, and really
your general theories of consciousness.
But to kind of start things off here,
I'll give you a bit of a softball question
to get into things here.
And that is, what is consciousness?
Right.

(01:06):
A softball question.
Right.
Obviously, lots of different people
of different notions of what that word means
and what it should refer to.
I think most scholars, most people who study it today
consider the word to refer to experience.

(01:26):
Subjective experience.
And so by that, I mean consciousness--
in this view, consciousness is not all the stuff going on
in your head.
It's not your knowledge of yourself.
It's not your memories.

(01:46):
It's not the ability to choose and make decisions.
Consciousness is very specifically the fact
that sometimes those things feel like something
when you're doing them.
Right.
And so there's a lot of stuff going on in the brain
that doesn't feel like anything.
Regulation of this and that and regulation of your heart rate

(02:08):
and processing 90% of the sensory input coming in.
You don't know about it.
It feels like nothing.
There's nothing.
It feels like to do those things.
But there's this tiny subset where you can feel what it's like
to do them.
Feel what it's like to see the color green

(02:28):
and feel what it's like to get poked with a pin
and feel what it's like to try to remember something
from yesterday.
That's consciousness.
The subjective feel itself.
That's how most scholars think of it.
Understood.
I think that's a great segue into kind of kicking things off
with attention scheme and theory.
And really it's getting a basics of the understanding of just

(02:51):
kind of the nuts and bolts of that.
Because for my understanding, really, it centers
around just attention ultimately.
That's right.
So what one of the things we know about the brain,
the mammalian brain was especially the human brain
because most of the research been done
on the human brain on this topic.

(03:13):
So there's this thing called attention.
And everyone kind of uses that word.
And we all kind of vaguely know what it means.
But with respected neuroscience attention,
there's lots of different kinds of attention.
But the main one, the main kind of attention
is this mechanism mostly in our cerebral cortex.
And it's a way of focusing on a small number of items.

(03:36):
Whatever those are, it could be external.
It could be internal.
It could be memories.
Or it could be your emotions.
Or it could be sights and sounds.
But you focus on a very small number.
You process them in great detail.
And as a result, your brain is able to make intelligent decisions
and control behavior.
And so that's attention.

(03:57):
And attention is of this very interesting thing,
but it's also a very mechanistic thing.
And people have even built attention
like artificial systems.
So it's understood well enough to at least begin
to imitate artificially.
That's attention.
And there's a really interesting relationship

(04:18):
between attention and consciousness.
And the relationship is that they almost always come together.
So what you pay attention to, you're almost always conscious
of and what you're not paying attention to,
you're typically not conscious of.
And that's called inattentional blindness.
So attention and consciousness, almost always co-variate.

(04:38):
They almost always move around together.
Not 100% of the time, actually.
You can split them apart a little bit in laboratory situations.
But most of the time they go together.
And so that's a huge hint, I think,
many people think about consciousness
as this really specific relationship to attention.
And things, creatures that don't have that kind of attention

(05:05):
probably don't have our kind of consciousness.
Sure.
And I recall you mentioning as well,
it's similar to the global workspace theory
in the sense that it follows a similar pathway.
You get the information input and it follows--
it goes through, I guess, intense competition.
And there's inhibition and promotion of certain signals.

(05:25):
And it makes its way up to the parietal frontal networks
where it then can eventually enter your consciousness,
quote unquote.
And I'm curious to kind of understand
your perspective on the idea that, would you say that conscious?
If consciousness is based on attention,
or more specifically this attention scheme and network,

(05:45):
our ability to be conscious of our ability
to pay attention to different things,
and I've control over that, would you
say that we are one with the attention schema?
Would that be the house of consciousness?
Or is there a separation between who we are or what we are?
And that mechanism.
Does that question make sense?

(06:06):
Well, I don't know.
So we are literally a collection of a very large number
of different processes that interact with each other.
And so that's like literally what we are.
Like that's what the brain is.
And it's not one thing.
And it's built in a lot of billion.
But lots of different mechanisms

(06:27):
all interacting in different ways.
And of course, also a body and it's all integrated together.
That's literally what we are.
That's of course separate from what we think of we are.
Because everyone has a self-concept and a self model, basically.
And our self models tend to be very simplified.
And we think of ourselves as kind of a conscious entity

(06:50):
floating inside of ourselves that knows things
and makes decisions and like the puppeteer.
That's how we think of ourselves.
And that's not accurate in the slightest bit.
But it's a useful way for the brain to understand itself
and keep track of itself.
So there's who we are.
And then there's the self model who we intuitively

(07:12):
think we are.
And those are really different things.
And so yes, I would say the thing people refer to as consciousness
is very tightly balanced to a self model.
It's something we say we have.
It's something we intuitively believe we have.
And the reason is because our brain has built that kind of self-description.

(07:34):
And it's not a terribly accurate self-description.
But it's useful.
It's got some validity to it.
It's just in its details, not terribly accurate.
Got it.
So how would you-- is there a mechanism or a certain way
that you can pinpoint that process happens
of that self-informing of itself?
Because it just from the outside in,

(07:56):
it sounds like there's something that is aware of this ability
or this attention model, if you will.
What's kind of the relationship there?
So just to sort of lay down a few more basics.
So one of the things that we've already mentioned quite a bit in just this brief

(08:20):
part of the conversation, one of the things the brain does,
one of the main things the brain does is build models.
And there's lots of different vocabulary around that.
And some people talk about representations.
And some people talk about prediction or predictive models and so on and so on.
But the brain does is build models.
And models are basically bundles of information
that represent things in the world.

(08:44):
And they don't just detect things.
They also make predictions about things.
And so we have models of everything around us that we know about.
In fact, if you know about it, then your brain is a model of it.
Because if there's no model in there, then you can't even think about it.
It doesn't enter your cognition.
You can't talk about it.
So even looking around yourself and you see your coffee cup,

(09:07):
your visual system built a model of the coffee cup.
And the model is information about color and shape and location and so on.
And it's on the basis of that model sending information to higher cognition
that allows you to say there's a coffee cup.
And think about it and talk about it.
So whatever is built into these models, we think about, know about and talk about.

(09:32):
Whatever is not represented by a model irrelevant to our minds.
Doesn't exist as far as work and certain because it's not being processed, not there.
So now we have this, so that's a baseline.
So now we have this very special, weird item that people talk about

(09:53):
that they intuitively know they have, that they think they have, that they believe they have.
And that is conscious experience.
Right.
And people can say, well, I don't just know there's a coffee cup.
I have a conscious experience of it.
I don't just, in some weird abstract sense, like a computer, have the information that my,

(10:17):
I don't know, that my foot is itching.
There I, I experience the itch.
Right.
So people talk about having that experience.
That's the essence, that's the heart of the consciousness mystery that people say,
say, believe intuitively understand that they have this experience, this conscious experience.

(10:41):
But the problem is logically what that means is therefore the brain has built a model.
And the model says there's a thing that is experience, experience miss, and you're having it right
now.
And if you didn't have that model, then you would never even know or think that you had

(11:02):
that.
So the brain has built a model.
What is it a model of?
Like what is the thing that's being modeled?
Right.
So that's where the attention schema comes in.
It says, well, attention is the real thing.
And is this mechanism for the brain to focus on a deeply processed some things at the

(11:25):
exclusion of other things, like deeply processed the coffee cup, deeply processed the itch on
your foot.
That's attention.
Then there's a model of attention.
The model says essentially, I have an experience of that thing.
Right.
So what the model is really doing is in a cartoon way or a simplified way, trying to depict

(11:49):
the state of attention.
Right.
So it's like attention is the first order.
Then there's this other thing which is kind of like attention on attention or a representation
of attention, a model of attention.
And that's the necessary step that so many theories I think are missing.
That's the necessary step.

(12:10):
You have to stick in there.
You have to have that piece stuck in the machine.
Otherwise, you cannot explain why people go around being so certain at an intuitive level,
certain that they have experience, subjective experience.
So that's a little piece of the machine you need in there.
Sure.
And I recall you mentioning that in relation to what potentially global workspace theory

(12:31):
was missing because otherwise it would just be sort of information input, but there
wouldn't be a register of the experience.
That's right.
If I have that correct.
That's right.
Global workspace theory, in a sense, is an attention theory.
And that's really what the global workspace is.
It says, if you pay enough attention to something, it gets so boosted in signal strength that

(12:52):
it enters a state of like super influence over the brain.
That's just the peak of attention, like the peak of the pyramid of attention.
Attention, you can pay a little bit of attention in boost signals a little bit, but then they
get boosted it off and it often they reach the peak of that pyramid and they start influencing
the brain.
I think Dan, Dan, Dan, it coined the phrase fame in the brain.

(13:16):
Right.
So that's really paying attention to something.
That's the global workspace theory.
And it says essentially, when you pay that much attention to something, then poof magically
an experience comes out.
Right.
And so it's missing a piece.
It's got that so-called explanatory gap.
And what the attention schema theory says is this is great.

(13:38):
It's all great so far.
Global workspace theory marvel is so far, but you got to fill that gap.
And people can't think, believe or claim, they have conscious experiences unless something
in there has built a model that depicts what conscious experience is.
What is the experience-ness?

(14:00):
And then tells you that you're having it.
So there's this little hidden piece of the machinery that most theories tend to gloss
over or forget.
And the attention schema theory basically focuses on that extra little piece and says, no,
whatever theory you have is great.
But you got to have that extra piece in there.
Otherwise, it's not going to work.
Sure.
And it's interesting because that is almost the substitute for what spiritual traditions

(14:26):
would call the observer.
It seems like that is directly analogous to the attention schema.
It's what's aware of the attention.
Right.
It seems kind of to be one and the same in sort of an analogous sense.
If that's--
Yeah.
If you would.
Sort of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it may be even more subtle than that because attention is in some ways like the observer.

(14:51):
Right.
The machine is paying attention to this thing and is paying attention to that thing.
But if that's all you have, then the machine doesn't know what attention is.
Like, it's observing the coffee cup.
It's observing the itch.
But it's not observing itself observing.
Right.

(15:11):
Right.
That's the piece that the attention schema adds.
Is this is a machine that knows what observation is, that knows what attention is, and it codes
it in this particular way?
Right.
Yeah, that seems to be a very direct parallel.
It's very interesting to hear a very neuroscientifical explanation for that because logically, I mean,

(15:35):
that does make a ton of sense.
I think the one thing that still perplexes me, and I know many people listening that are
likely maybe a bit more conscious, centric in their beliefs or maybe even spiritual as
well as it's always going to come down to, you know, where does the quality come from?
And because you can have attention all day, you can have an attention schema all day,

(15:55):
and have a model that informs itself of its experience.
And I recall, if I have this correctly as well in your book, you're saying that because
it's more of a cartoonish depiction and because these models don't benefit from knowing
every detail.
When you're hitting a hammer to a nail, you don't think about your elbow position and your
shoulder.
And, you know, most times it's different.
Every hit is your, is your sighting.

(16:16):
It's about just generally achieving the goal and not focusing on all the mechanistic little
parts of that.
So I recall that sort of answer as well, but do you think that will ever get a mechanism
for how this model informs itself of the awe of a sunset or the mother, the first glance
that they're newborn child?

(16:37):
Is that something that can be reduced to something as simple as a model?
Well, so two answers to that.
First I want to talk about emotion because the particular examples you gave all tap into
emotion.
And that's something that often comes up when people talk about consciousness and they
want to distinguish between the things that are more understood computationally and the

(17:00):
things that are still mysterious.
And there's a tendency then to say, yeah, but what about emotionality?
The mother's feeling toward the child or the awe of the sunset or the feeling of love
or whatever.
People tend to point that direction.
And that's very convenient because nobody actually understands emotion.
Like sure.
This is a system in the brain that's not really like some of the wiring has been worked out

(17:26):
in a little bit here and there, but it's largely one of the least understood aspects of
brain function or mind or anything.
And so that makes it really easy to point to that and say consciousness is a mystery.
I guess I would say that's mistaking, that's mixing up consciousness with the thing of which

(17:50):
you are conscious.
Those are two different things.
So you can have, so I'm going to make an assertion here which may sound really weird, but
turns out to be true and well established in psychology.
You can have emotions and not be conscious of them.

(18:13):
So you can have anger and not have a conscious experience of having anger.
And it's really hard for people to understand that because if you're not having a conscious
experience of it, then you don't know it.
Don't know it.
And you're like, that's not happening.
And so, but it turns out that is true and it happens frequently.

(18:33):
And that's why you need a therapist to sit down and tell you.
I do, you're really angry today and let me prove it to you.
And then you're like, oh my gosh, right, I was angry.
I didn't even know it.
And so, and some people are more susceptible to that than others.
So emotionality, all love, anger, whatever.
These are somehow products of the brain.

(18:57):
Nobody knows why or how.
They just are.
But then there are some cases when you pay attention to them and then you have a conscious
experience of it.
And those are limited instances.
So probably most of the emotions you have, you're not even conscious of.

(19:19):
But you become conscious of them when you pay attention to them.
And so once again, consciousness, the experience itself is not, you may, we may not understand
the mechanism of emotion, but we can understand the mechanism of attention and how you get the
experience, the experiential side.

(19:39):
It's the same thing for emotion, same thing for vision.
Well, more is known about how vision processes information, but to process color and shape
and so on is not the same thing as having a conscious experience of it.
That's the separate mechanism, right?
To do that, then you meet this mechanism of attention to pay attention to something

(20:02):
and specific focus on that one part of the visual world.
And then you have these other things like the attention schema mechanism coming in.
So I would draw this distinction then between all the mysteries of the specific things that
we can be conscious of versus the more universal mechanism that cuts across all domains.

(20:23):
That's the mechanism of how we get to have a conscious experience of them.
And that universal mechanism, I think, is much simpler.
And I think a lot of it, frankly, is already at least in general, the general outlines of it
can be seen.
Like, we begin to understand it.
Wow.
I'd love to further trace back, get some sort of lineage behind this mechanism, some backdrop,

(20:49):
sort of an evolutionary standpoint.
One thing I find fascinating as well about your theory is it's not a complexity theory,
where the more neurons, the more complex, et cetera, et cetera is the more consciousness.
And as you said, you can slide up and down the slippery slope, which I thought was funny
as well.

(21:10):
Because usually, more mechanistic theories of consciousness, I feel at least come from
a complexity angle.
But your perspective is, hey, there are others and likely others that have consciousness
as you would define it because it comes from this essential schema network.
So I'd love to get an idea of where this came from and maybe even potentially other life

(21:35):
forms that you perceive could even have this consciousness, if you will.
Yeah, sure.
So that's obviously a huge topic.
This and lots of people speculate about who's conscious and who isn't.
And in the world of consciousness studies, like the world of people who are serious about
it, there's actually a huge range of opinions all the way from those who are pan-psychists.

(22:00):
And they're the guy saying everything is conscious, like every bit of everything in your fingernails
are conscious and rocks and stuff, which to me makes the word lose all meaning.
All the way up to the people who will say no, not only are humans the only things that are
conscious, but only adult humans are conscious.

(22:20):
And babies aren't and children aren't and you have to learn it.
So there's the really, I don't believe that side of it either.
So the really interesting mix of opinions in the approach that I've taken so this attention
schema approach.
The key is conscious, well, the relationship between consciousness and attention, what's

(22:46):
called selective attention.
And that kind of attention exists only in some kinds of animals.
And so now you can begin to look in evolutionary terms and you see this particular kind of attention
emerging and really becoming elaborated in animals that have cortex.

(23:08):
They are basically equivalent of cortex.
So we have this big cerebral cortex, primates, but all mammals have that.
Birds have an equivalent of it.
And reptiles, we all evolved from reptiles, birds and mammals kind of branched off from different
types of reptile-like animals.

(23:32):
And so birds, mammals and probably some reptiles definitely have these mechanisms of attention.
I think other animals that don't have that don't have what we call consciousness.
It's very hard for people to accept because they look at animals.

(23:55):
There's a lot of talk about insects these days, for example, like bees or very wonderfully
complicated animals and they compute information and they interact socially and they do all kinds
of things.
They're amazing things that does not mean that they have this conscious experiential kind
of thing as we report it.
There's lots of machines in the world that are unbelievably complicated but aren't built

(24:18):
with that particular set of modules.
And I don't think that they have the attention mechanisms in the same way.
And so that evolutionarily speaking, I would say, we're looking like a couple hundred million
years ago at the branch point between reptile, mammal-like reptiles turned into us eventually

(24:42):
and the other kind evolved into dinosaurs and thus into birds.
And it's all that kind of part of the branching tree that has this really elaborated attention
mechanism that leads to what we're calling consciousness.
Wow.
Yeah, it's so interesting to kind of hear not only that but also kind of your perspective

(25:05):
too on panpsychism.
I think my question in regards to that is I know there's some ask, I think theories of
panpsychism that don't necessarily say that maybe physical matter is conscious but let's
say that there is a field of consciousness.
I don't know how much time you spend thinking about more of the quantum physical or cosmological

(25:30):
side of things but I kind of want to also pick your brain on a complementary topic which
was sort of non-local consciousness given kind of developments in quantum physics like
entanglement or even holographic reality theory where we're kind of understanding that the
universe itself is sort of fractal information patterns that perhaps guide behavior at atomic

(25:54):
to even cosmic levels and we're kind of in this information field and we of course are
connected in part of that.
Do you spend much time thinking about that?
Do you find any merit in those types of thought processes?
No.
I assumed I know the answer to that question.
So I have a background in physics and I studied physics as an undergrad.

(26:20):
I was a physics major and one of my favorite topics was quantum mechanics and so I studied
all this stuff.
I don't believe that any of that makes any sense.
I think that's the people who pursue that are not pursuing.
I think I know what a physics theory is and physics theories are beautiful and elegant

(26:42):
and mathematically precise and they address really specific measurable quantities and then
there's weird fluff that builds on top of them because quantum mechanics is mysterious
and consciousness is mysterious so it must be that they're the same thing.
I don't know what the issue is there but there's a lot of quantum mush.

(27:03):
I'm very much reminded of I used to love while I still love Star Trek.
I don't know, I don't watch, you know, it's been ages but there's kind of a running joke
in Star Trek that whenever they ran into anything complicated they would use a techno
babble and they had special techno babble authors who were experts on that and they would write

(27:26):
a script and then the techno babble authors would have to come in and fill in the techno
babble and it was always quantum.
It was like the quantum field matrix was breaking down into the quantum submodalities
and that's basically what quantum consciousness is.
It's this totally stupid techno babble that's getting in the way of the science.

(27:48):
The heart of the problem I think is we have an intuitive understanding of what this
consciousness thing is.
That intuitive understanding emerges out of the, like I said, the models at the brain
bills, like that's why we think the things we think believe the things we believe because

(28:09):
it derives from these deep models constructed in the brain.
The models are not accurate.
One cannot take them at face value.
They're really interesting.
They probably point to real things that are being represented by the brain but one cannot
take them literally accurately and when you do you run into trouble.
When people say how do we explain how we get energy-like invisible essence inside our

(28:37):
heads that experiences and controls, then you're in trouble because that's the intuitive
understanding of it and the intuitive understanding is not an accurate depiction of it.
It just isn't.
If you an example that I often give, I have found useful lately especially and that's

(29:00):
the example of the phantom limb.
I forget whether I ended up putting that in that particular book.
Okay.
Here's how the phantom limb worked.
Let's say I get my arm appitated.
Hope I don't.
But if I do, chances are very good, like 95% that I'm going to have a phantom experience.
It might fade rapidly and for some people it lingers for years but I get a phantom limb

(29:25):
meaning it feels like there's a limb still there.
If I close my eyes, I can describe it and people can ask me, "Oh my God, what's it like?"
I can say it's got five fingers and it's just like my arm was and it's so on and so on.
I can describe it to pick it.
Now there's two and they're very common phantom limbs and they're very annoying because a

(29:47):
phantom limb can itch and then you can't scratch it.
It can hurt and you can't anesthetize it and it can be horribly painful and you can't go
to a doctor and have him fix your phantom limb because it's not there.
There are medical issues but there's two classes of explanations of phantom limbs and I

(30:08):
going to call one the schema theory because it's a direct relationship to the attention
schema theory of consciousness and it is it's a schema theory and the other I'm going
to call it the hard problem explanation.
It's a direct reference to the kind of more magical list hard problem theories of consciousness.

(30:29):
The schema theory goes like this.
The reason why I think I have this limb here is because my brain is built a model of a limb.
The model is no longer accurate because my real limb is gone and I'm going to be able to
put it there.
And the brain has built the schema, the schematic model that depicts a limb and therefore that

(30:52):
model is informing the rest of my brain and therefore someone asks me I can start describing
that limb and say yeah I can feel it there and got fingers and so on.
And all that report and all that belief derives from a model, a depiction of a limb.
That's schema theory.
That's one way to explain it.
The other way to explain is to say there's actually an invisible limb in energy field

(31:18):
growing out of my stump is really there.
And now we have some problems.
We have three hard problems that are basically unsolvable.
One is how did it grow?
Like what's the mechanism?
Like are there weird little things at the base of the stump that make the energy lean

(31:40):
and grow?
Like what's the recipe that makes the invisible arm grow?
And the second problem is what's it made out of?
Is it like quantum mist or is it reverberation or something else?
Like what is the invisible arm made out of?
And the third problem which is one nobody ever addresses is once it's there, once you

(32:03):
have the invisible arm, how is it energy like weird invisible arm?
How does it specifically affect neurons in my brain in just the right way that I know
it's there and can talk about it and tell you about it?
So those are three hard problems that have no apparent solution.

(32:24):
And they come about from the mistake of thinking that when I introspect and gain access to these
intuitive models, the mistake is thinking the models are literally accurate.
And they're not.
And that's what one has to do here is say these models are not literally accurate.

(32:47):
They have information in them that lead us to make these claims and have these beliefs.
The models are not literally accurate.
So it's exactly the same thing with consciousness.
You can say that models built in the brain, that's why we say we have these magical energy
like essences of experience inside of us.

(33:08):
But that intuitive belief emerges from information models, representations in the brain.
Or you can say you actually have the energy like essences in there.
Now we're stuck with a whole bunch of unsolvable problems and endless arguments and debates

(33:31):
back and forth and the common refrain no one will ever understand consciousness.
And those are kind of the two sides of the divide.
On one side on schema theory, the solutions essentially already there.
And on the other side, the more hard problem magical aside, you made a mistake at the very

(33:52):
outset by assuming something is real when it isn't.
Or rather assuming something is literally accurate when it's not literally accurate.
And now you're stuck.
Now you'll never solve it.
This reminds me a lot of synesthesia.
Do you do any work or with synesthesia, are you familiar with that?

(34:12):
Or you kind of have phantom three dimensional objects or confusing different senses for
other senses?
It kind of reminds me of that a little bit.
Yeah, it does.
And I think it's all part of the same point that the thing we think of, each one of us thinks

(34:33):
that we live in a reality.
And we take that reality for granted.
We think this is it.
This is the real world.
But what's really happening is our brains are constructing that.
I mean, I keep using the word model.
That's what's happening.
The brain is building a model of reality.
And whatever the model says, that's what your reality is.

(34:55):
And so synesthesia is another example where the brain has constructed something that's a
little weird, a little non-standard.
But for those people, that's reality.
For those people, I mean, if you're a synesthet, very often numbers have colors.
Right.

(35:15):
It's just what it is.
And other people don't get that.
You can never get that unless you're a synesthet.
And there's other examples of synesthesia.
And you can spend forever.
Like the hard problem of that kind of synesthesia is how does the number nine get the colored
green?
Like what is it about nineness in the universe that makes greenness appear?

(35:39):
Right.
And that would be the magic explanation that assumes it to be literally accurate.
And then the schema explanation would be, well, the brain built a schema.
And the schema is not accurate.
It's saying something that's not fully coherent.
But because it's saying that, then that's what the whole rest of the brain is going to think.
Right.

(36:00):
Yeah.
That makes sense.
And to also kind of double onto this kind of point here is, I'd love to hear your perspective
on meditation.
I think it's interesting because, you know, with this theory of consciousness, it's attention.
And it's our awareness of our attention.
I think the foundation of meditation is like the exact opposite.

(36:21):
It's where you are becoming nobody with no thoughts and no time.
And you're just becoming a pure essence of awareness or whatever you want to call it.
You are just in a state of existence.
Nothing more and nothing less.
And I've even seen studies personally where it even increases cortical thickness.
People that meditate a ton and have practiced it.

(36:42):
But how can one be conscious?
But yeah, in the definition of attention, not be paying or be paying nearly to zero attention,
if that makes sense.
Yeah.
So we're very interested.
My whole lab is very interested in meditation.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Yeah.
And we study.
We've stuck people in scanners and just try to understand what, you know, many people have

(37:05):
done this.
What are the networks and what can you deduce about what's going on during meditation?
And one kind of meditation.
So there's lots of different kinds.
But one kind that really interests us is focused attention meditation.
But I would say no matter what kind of attention you're doing, it's not that you're taking all
attention away.

(37:27):
Or it's not that you're shrinking your attention to this one mantra.
It's that you're controlling your attention.
This is always the key to meditation is hyper control of your attention.
And so one of the, I mean, the mechanism, the whole use of having an attention mechanism
is to control attention.

(37:49):
Right.
So attention controls behavior.
Because what you pay attention to drives your behavior.
And if you want to control your own behavior, you got to control your attention.
Right.
If it's as simple as making a sandwich, a peanut butter sandwich, you still have to make
your attention move to the peanut butter jar and then moved the bread and then moved to

(38:11):
the knife and so on.
You have to control where your attention is going.
So volition and everything we do depends on high level control of attention.
So one of the biggest challenges in control of attention is not so much getting your attention
on something, but keeping it away from everything else.

(38:34):
Pulling on it.
Right.
So I think meditation is at its root about control of attention and the people who put themselves
in the state of kind of seeming nothingness.
What they're really doing is saying, I have learned to pull my attention away from all the
distractions.
Maybe I'm focusing just on the fact that I'm here and nothing else.

(39:00):
But I can still control my attention.
There's other people who have mantras and they focus on that or people who focus on their
breathing and that becomes the singular thing that other attention is focused on.
So it's always about attention.
It's not a lack of attention.
And what interests us about meditation and expert meditators, we think this whole mechanism

(39:21):
of attention control is getting beefed up.
They're getting better at it.
They're getting better at controlling their own attention.
And in this attention schema theory, that essentially means they're beefing up that whole consciousness
mechanism.
Almost like an athlete or dancer, dancers probably better example, dancers learn to focus

(39:46):
on body postures and limb positions and imagine them and they beef up their internal models
of their bodies and their body postures.
So the point that they can even practice dancing just in their own minds without moving their
bodies and they can actually get better by really imagining they have amazingly beefed

(40:07):
up body schemas, representations of their bodies.
And I think that meditators are basically beefing up their attention schemas.
Their models are understanding of what their attention is doing at any one moment.
So I think there's a really deep connection actually between meditation and attention and

(40:29):
attention schemas.
I love that.
I love thinking of it similar to an athlete would think of their body and getting their
physical awareness and their physical proficiency.
Meditations like the gym for your attention.
And I think if people realize that, I think more people would see it more as like a practical
practice for them and for their productivity and their goals or whatever it might be versus

(40:53):
something that is just kind of like a woo woo sit cross like it and breathe to some mantra.
I think it's so cool that neuroscientists even like yourselves are finding some serious
positive benefit, especially for attention by doing those practices.
I'm curious as well just because you guys are on this right now.

(41:15):
What would you say is like one of the number one or top couple most interesting things
you've learned about meditation when it comes to the mind?
Well, I'm not sure how to answer that.
Probably unfortunately when you study these things scientifically, you tend to focus in
on little teeny mechanistic questions that are addressable.

(41:36):
And so the things that we tend to learn about are networks in the brain that seem to light
up at different phases of meditation.
And to me, of course, that's terribly interesting.
I want to know that the default mode network is really active in some moments and less so

(42:00):
in others.
I want to know that.
So for example, mind wandering is one of the things we study.
So when people try to meditate and then and focus on one thing and then all of a sudden
they realize oops, my mind wandered.
I was thinking about my taxes and then they yank their mind back.
There's this moment of conscious realization.

(42:21):
And that particular moment seems to involve activation of a certain set of structures in
the brain and that's completely fascinating to us.
So those are the kinds of things that we tend to learn about meditation, which are probably
less practically applicable.
No, that's so cool.
I think that's still connected to just the major blanket of what is consciousness, even

(42:45):
what are the things that bring your attention back to focus and what are those networks.
That's absolutely fascinating.
I'd like to kind of even switch gears a little bit towards even the realm of social cognition
and kind of go into the world of theory of mind.
If you don't mind, give us just some general context there.
Yeah, sure.
So absolutely.

(43:08):
One of the things that my lab people in my lab realized quite a long time ago is that when
you talk about consciousness, especially in people, it is way more than just the private
stuff in your head.
And the main way that we seem to use this whole concept of consciousness is applying it

(43:29):
to other people.
We see it in other people.
And it's kind of the root of all of our social interaction.
So right now you and I are talking to each other.
We see a conscious mind in each other.
Otherwise, the interaction becomes impossible.
And it's, of course, it's really interesting online that you're just a bunch of pixels.

(43:52):
But, I mean, well, I'm bunch of pixels to you.
Your pixels to me.
And yet, I have these social networks in my brain.
They're busy building this whole construct of a human being and a conscious mind and projecting
it onto those pixels.
And I see it as a human being.
And we do this all the time to each other.

(44:14):
We live in the sea of perceived conscious minds.
And so the mechanism of consciousness is for humans at least fundamentally of social mechanism.
And it's not just about how does the brain build its own consciousness.
But how does the brain see consciousness and others?
How does it build consciousness that it projects onto others and everything all around us that

(44:40):
allows us to interact?
So you mentioned theory of mind.
I just wanted to find that in case I'm about there.
Curious theory of mind concepts been around since the 70s.
And it basically is the idea that we have intuitive theories that we build about the insides
of other people's minds like about what they want and what they're feeling and what their

(45:03):
goals are.
And so theory of mind is something we all do as social beings.
And it's kind of at the heart of who we are, social animals.
And at the heart of that, the very basis of that is recognizing when we're talking to
something, interacting with something that has a mind that has a conscious mind in it.

(45:23):
I recall your ventriloquist example as well.
And how you do your son, I believe, you do the puppet and it looks real.
It looks got a personality and you want to attribute the consciousness to it in a similar
sense.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
I liked to use that.
I would drag my ventriloquist orangutan puppet with me everywhere to my talks.

(45:48):
And then he would sort of get up there and talk and argue with me.
And that just to illustrate the point that we're building these models of minds and projecting
it onto the things around us.
Because the puppet doesn't have a mind, but we all kind of perceive it.
And we do that to each other.

(46:09):
That's the whole point is that we're all ventriloquist puppets to each other.
People just see flappy mouths, hear noises, and then we attribute thoughts and beliefs and
emotions to the people around us.
What percentage of that do you think really is thoughts, beliefs and emotions versus,
as you said, like the flappy mouths?

(46:30):
Because it sounds like it's kind of going to the kind of extreme, not that it is extreme,
but just towards kind of the absolute that that's kind of what everything is.
Where does attributing consciousness to everything is not some of it valid for, like I know you cited,
how interesting the octopus was.
And even, let's say, our pet dog who loves us very much or at least we think, what is,

(46:56):
would you say all of that in your theoretic perspective is just really the same mechanism
at play or is some of it valid if those beings also have this similar type of attention
scheme in network?
Yeah, some of them do.
Just in the obvious case of people talking to each other, I always sort of feel like when

(47:19):
two people talk to each other, there's four people present.
There's me, there's you, there's a version of you that my brain constructed and just projected
onto you whether it's quite accurate or not.
And then there's a version of me that you constructed and projected onto me.
So we're doing that to each other all the time.
The difference with a puppet is that only one of us is doing the construction and puppet

(47:43):
is made sense.
Right.
So you talk about a pet dog.
Yeah.
The personality and emotion in mind in that dog that you see is a construct of your brain,
is your social machinery that built that.
That doesn't mean it's invalid because you're using cues and information you're getting

(48:03):
from your dog.
And your dog is doing the same thing back to you like it has social machinery.
It does build models of minds.
It has it sees itself effectively as a conscious being even if it doesn't have the verbal
constructs.
And it sees you as a conscious being too.
And I guarantee you that the human, that not the person, the mind that the dog thinks

(48:29):
you have is not really the same as the mind you actually have.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
That definitely makes sense.
Macurious just on a side note, do you have a sort of an idea of which organisms out there
have this type of network and which ones out of your definition that you could perhaps

(48:53):
attribute some level of consciousness to because I know you're mentioning evolutionarily.
It's really when the attention scheme of networks showed up and you know, kind of from
that evolutionary tree, is that kind of from those branches forward where you attribute
consciousness?
So yes, if this whole theoretical construct is right, then you can draw a fairly clean line

(49:17):
around a bunch of, you know, a part of that big branching tree and say these creatures
definitely have this mechanism.
And like I said, that includes all mammals, all birds, probably many reptiles.
Outside of that, I don't know.
It becomes much harder to tell, right?
So there's the possibility of these same mechanisms evolving independently.

(49:42):
There's a possibility of these mechanisms being present in some really insipient form that
is not easily recognizable, but then gets elaborated further in some evolutionary branches,
right?
So we don't know.
Could it be that there are some fish?
I don't know.

(50:03):
It seems unlikely to me, but it's possible.
And you mentioned octopus.
This is a wonderful example.
There's so alien that I think nobody knows what kind of attention mechanisms in the brain
of an octopus exist.
Nobody knows if they have any of that.

(50:23):
Nobody knows if they have self models that tell them that they have conscious experiences.
I mean, it's clear they're super smart.
Yeah.
But it's not clear that they have this consciousness intuition about themselves.
But what is clear is that they got big eyes and they look cute and people who study them

(50:50):
and interact with them have their own social machinery working overtime, projecting consciousness
onto them.
And so people look at them and say they got to be conscious.
So that certainly happens.
But what's happening inside the octopus brain is really not clear.
So it's possible, of course.

(51:11):
But what I can do based on the theory is point to certain types of animals and say they
definitely have it.
So what accounts for the trickiness between species?
Why are we more fooled by an octopus's consciousness than, let's say, an ants?
What's behind the gradient of how much we are sort of enchanted into that creature?

(51:39):
Yeah.
It actually turns out there's a lot of interesting work on anthropomorphism, the tendency of people
to attribute mind to things.
And so one aspect is just visual appearance.

(52:00):
Turns out to be one of the biggest factors that influence.
So if you have something with eyeballs, then you're way more likely to think that it has a
mind.
And this works, it's automatic.
Like across the board, people are like this.

(52:20):
An ant just looks like a little wiry thing.
You have to get really close before you see the eyeballs.
So octopuses just look more like people because they have heads with eyeballs on them.
The second kind of set of factors is complex behavior.

(52:41):
That's sort of obvious.
If you see something behaving in a very complex way, but that's tricky because self-driving
cars are really complicated.
In fact, their brains are more sophisticated than probably any insect brain out there.
But they don't have those consciousness mechanisms in them.

(53:03):
They're not self-driving cars or not consciousness.
But you can imagine somebody getting that false intuition.
So I think it's really easy to attribute mind to things that have big eyeballs that act
complicated, that solve problems, that do things as they act more like humans.

(53:27):
We start to humanize them more.
And that's on us.
What they actually have inside of them is a separate question.
I'm not saying octopuses are just machines and we're all fools for thinking otherwise.
I mean, they may have all those wonderful mechanisms.
All I'm saying is when people talk about octopus, consciousness, and minds, all of that

(53:52):
thus far is on us.
It's our social imagination going into overdrive.
I don't think there's good evidence or understanding of the actual octopuses yet.
Sure.
I think it's a good segue to the kind of experiment you mentioned in the book, which was, I

(54:12):
guess, a theoretical one of an AI that tracked a person that would walk into a room with nothing
more than a microphone and a camera.
And it would basically be looking to predict their behavior, kind of getting onto this sort
of social cognition aspect that could really get a model down to a T of human behavior.

(54:33):
So my question is, that kind of makes it out to be like we are almost like automaton's
in a way.
And I'm not saying that necessarily even a negative connotation, just really that we are capable
of being predicted to an extremely high fidelity.
And I'm curious your thoughts of where free will enters this because kind of a little

(54:56):
side-dot experiment is, let's say there is someone that is walking into this room who is a
compulsive overeater, like let's say they're overweight, and they have certain tendencies,
and add the heuristic, they have an eaten in eight hours.
And they walk in and the donuts under the spotlight, and your model is going to say they

(55:17):
have a 90% chance the donut.
And then you use, I think, those some Bayesian statistics and now they're looking at the
donut.
Now it's like 99% chance the donut, right?
But that person, you know, with the agency that we have for whatever reason in that moment
decides to make a lifestyle change and say, you know what, I'm sick of being overweight,

(55:38):
I'm sick of feeling this way, you know, I'm not eating this donut, I'm going to go on a
diet, lose weight and change my ways.
You know, that statistical probability was a 99% accuracy.
I know it's a little bit of a silly example, but I'm just, I'm most wondering where free
will wedges into that because I feel like that free will is the sort of linchpin in us being

(56:01):
100% predictable.
What are your thoughts on that just general thought process and what are your thoughts on free
will even?
Right.
Well, I certainly don't think we're 100% predictable.
I think even if you had a very sophisticated machine learning algorithm that had good cameras

(56:21):
on us, I don't think it would predict our behavior 100%.
I think that's probably really hard to do.
I think people evolved to be good at that with respect to each other.
I mean, that's the whole point of having social machinery.
So a point of theory of mind is to have good algorithms for predicting someone else's
behavior so you can interact and bounce off in a better way.

(56:46):
And even at that, our predictive ability after millions of years of evolution, our prediction
machinery doesn't work that great.
Like it's better than chance, way better, which is why it's so effective for us.
But people are not anywhere near, you know, maybe we're 60% predictable.
I don't know.

(57:06):
We're not super predictable.
So there's a lot of weird chaotic, stochastic junk going on in the brain.
That can lead to all kinds of different decisions under different circumstances.
And you can run exactly the same scenario with the same person 100 times and you'll find

(57:27):
only 80% of the time they do the one thing and then they're still doing something weird,
the other 20%.
So I absolutely believe that that's the case.
So that's one side of the question is how predictable.
It's very important that we are predictable because if we're not, then we have no social

(57:48):
glue at all.
Because that's the whole social cognition, social understanding is 100% about predicting
each other and predicting our own behavior.
Because if you can't predict your own behavior, again, you have no control.
You have no way of strategizing.
I'm going to do this so that I make sure I don't do that and then it'll help me do that.

(58:10):
If you're not predictable, all that goes out the window.
So very important, predictability is very important.
Never 100% never even close to 100% because of stochastic chaos in the brain.
But now you have this separate question of free will.
I'm not a huge fan of the whole philosophical argument over free will because I find I don't

(58:36):
understand it.
So if the question is do we have a magical essence that sits outside of the physical universe
and is not subject to the laws of any physics that can come in like a puppeteer and make
us do something so that no consideration of physics could ever have known about it because

(59:03):
the decision itself is made by magic outside of the realm of physics.
If that's what you mean by free will, I'm pretty sure it does not exist.
All right.
But if what you mean by free will is that processes in the brain make decisions about what the
body should do next.

(59:24):
Which those processes are a little bit chaotic so that they're not 100% predictable.
If that's what you mean by free will, then I would say, yeah, obviously that's exactly
right.
That's what free will is.
And so I don't know whether to say yes, it exists or no, it doesn't.
It depends on what you mean by it.

(59:45):
I feel very similarly.
I feel I've always I ask the question because I think it's always great to get you know
leading experts perspectives on it, but I'm in a similar school of thought.
It's almost use your own discernment.
Is there some force compelling you not to act in the way that you want in this very moment?
You know, I think I think free will is pretty self evident.

(01:00:08):
But I think a little bit of a layer below that on the nuanced side.
You'll forget the prior example you mentioned.
I think we both can discard that.
But you know from the brain activity is you know inducing certain behaviors and actions
and all of that.
Where does that what it what is the impetus of that brain activity?
Is it brain is it purely brain activity or what's the will behind that brain activity is if

(01:00:33):
you if you can see what I'm what I'm saying there.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think it's all brain activity.
Some of the brain activity is just in the motor system and it's making the muscles move.
Some of the brain activity is in deeper layers coming up with these deeper conceptual
constructs and decisions that send signals forward into your motor system.

(01:00:56):
So maybe you could say that the will lies in certain deeper layers in the brain.
But it's all neural neural activity.
I mean, it's that's what it is.
It's information processing.
It's neurons manipulating altering and sending signals.
So it's computational.
I guess you could say I'm a computationalist.

(01:01:18):
And but not a response stimuliist if you will, right?
Because I remember you singing the book that you're not is incorrect me if I'm wrong, but
you're not in the school of thought where we're just getting stimuli and then responding.
And we're just kind of automaton's in that way that there is this level of cognition happening.
Right.
So there is a new wants to that correct.

(01:01:39):
Yeah.
Of course.
Right.
I mean, I think there are contrairions who love the idea that we don't make decisions.
That the external world, the stimuli impose certain things on us and then we react and that

(01:01:59):
we have some kind of weird imaginative cognition that makes up a story that tells us after the
fact, oh, I did that because of this.
And I just chose that because of that, but it's all made up and really we did this because
the stimulus poked us.
We made that decision because we had to.
We were forced to buy unconscious factors like that.

(01:02:22):
There's a contrarium point of view that has had a big presence in psychology.
And I think that it's not 100% wrong because there are definitely cases when people are prompted
to do things by circumstance and stimulus.

(01:02:43):
And then after they do those things, they can formulate a reason and they believe the reason.
And then they say, I did it because I made a deep decision in my conscious will and yet
what they're saying is false.
Like that does happen as well known phenomenon, but that isn't everything that's only a tiny

(01:03:04):
fraction actually.
There really is complicated, deep layers computing stuff all the time in your brain that
has a giant impact influence on your decisions and your behavior.
So it's absolutely 100% crystal clear.
We are not just stimulus response machines that are forever driven by the environment right

(01:03:28):
in front of us.
So all this kind of level cognition is doing something that's actually modifying our behavior.
And so in that sense, yeah, we got we got will.
We got free will, but it's not ever independent of computation and neuronal processing.
I mean, that's all we got in there.
I think your theory is a really beautiful balance of that because I think a lot of sort of

(01:03:52):
more mechanistic type of theories will kind of go to the extreme like you're saying.
It's a product of complexity.
There's this kind of a slippery slow-bass back and we're response stimuli, you know, stimuli
response machines.
And I think your theory kind of strikes a really nice balance in that way through those
nuances.
So that's really cool.
Now one of the other things I wanted to probe into, which is always a fun topic of conversation

(01:04:18):
is the philosophical zombie.
Because I know you covered that in the book as well when you talked about hemispatial neglect.
If you could just really quickly give the audience kind of some background on number one,
the philosophical zombie idea and the hemispatial neglect and then we can kind of move forward
from there.
Right.
So the philosophical zombie idea was a way to conceptually clarify what consciousness

(01:04:45):
is.
And the thought experiment was imagine you had a person who was in every way just like
a normal person, reacted to stimuli the same way, spoke the same way, acted the same
way and you could never tell the difference.
But even though they're processing information apparently in similar ways, they don't have

(01:05:09):
the subjective feeling.
So they don't have consciousness of what they're doing.
But they behave the same way.
So externally it seems exactly the same.
And the point to the philosophical zombie thought experiment is like so much of what I consider

(01:05:29):
to be poor philosophy.
Apologies to the people who love the philosophical zombie.
It's an example of poor philosophy because it asks you to imagine something that is counterfactual.
And then once you imagine it, it says, aha, because of that, therefore subjective experience

(01:05:52):
is different from all the computations.
And of course my response would be okay, show it to me, like actually do that, come up
with that.
Build that thing.
Make a prank and sign.
Yeah.
And then we can talk.
But I don't think you can do that because I don't think that's possible.
And so that's the philosophical zombie.

(01:06:13):
And can you separate, can you have a person in attention schemas theory, philosophical zombies
are impossible for people at least the way the human brain is organized because the consciousness
thing is part of the machine that helps regulate and control your attention.

(01:06:35):
And so if you take the consciousness thing away, then attention no longer works right.
And if attention doesn't work right, nothing works right.
And the example of that is sort of the most obvious example is the hemispacial neglect example
which you mentioned.
And so there are people who have damage to a particular part of the brain, usually on

(01:06:59):
the right hemisphere that wipes out their conscious experience of everything on the left side
of space.
It's just completely weird.
That's wild.
Centrum.
Yeah.
Totally nutty, but that's what happens.
So they lose their conscious experience, everything on the left side of space.
They still can pay attention.

(01:07:20):
And there's a subtlety that is often lost even in the literature.
It is possible for them, for the brains to focus their processing on things on the left
side of space.
They just aren't consciously aware of it.
So they have attention.
They just don't have consciousness of it.
And you end up with people who do not respond or respond very weekly to things on the left

(01:07:45):
side.
They can't regulate their attention.
Their attention may get yanked a little bit here and there, but they can't regulate, can't
control it.
They can't act in an intentional way toward things on the left side of space because they've
lost that mechanism, that awareness mechanism, that attention scheme of mechanism has gone

(01:08:08):
for the left side of space.
And it shows this, it shows what happens.
It is not true that a philosophical zombie, if you could suck out just the awareness part
that the person would go on and be normal and act normal.
This would be a person who would be a vegetable.
So if you, instead of any space and neglect, if you had total neglect, no conscious experience

(01:08:34):
of anything, then you have somebody who's not reacting to anything, not able to behave
in any complex or meaningful way, you'd have a vegetable.
So that's the link between the philosophical zombie concept, heavy space and neglect and
consciousness or awareness.

(01:08:56):
Very interesting.
To provide a buffer counter perspective on the spiritual sides to see where the stereotype
lies and that is back to the observer concept.
I think a good analogy to use here is imagine Tony Stark with his suit, right?
He's flying through the air, he gets hit by a rocket and his sensors on the left side of

(01:09:19):
his suit get blown up, but he's still there and he's still conscious and he's still Tony
Stark and doing his thing, but he just has lost access to that part of his machinery.
What are your thoughts on that in the sense of the consciousness itself has just lost the
connection to that, but that person who has the heavy space and neglect still has goals,

(01:09:41):
dreams, love, you know, all of these different attributes that we associate with consciousness,
but it's just disconnected from the hardware, if you will.
Yeah, I think that, again, there's a distinction between the things you are conscious of and
the mechanism of being conscious of them.

(01:10:03):
And so one of the examples I give is, you know, the bucket and the items in the bucket,
the things you're conscious of are like the items in the bucket and consciousness is the
bucket.
And so you can try really hard to explain all the little items in the bucket.
That's not the same thing as a theory of consciousness itself, which is a theory of the bucket

(01:10:23):
itself.
So I think this person who's lost, who's got heavy space and neglect has lost the ability
to apply the consciousness machinery to things on the left side of space, those things are
no longer in the consciousness bucket.
They can't go in there anymore.
But it is different.
Your Tony Stark example is actually really different because there you're talking about

(01:10:47):
cutting off sensory input and neglect is not a heavy space and neglect is not a loss of
sensory input.
Actually, the sensory inputs all there, it's still coming in.
It's a loss of consciousness of everything to the left side and it is weird.
So for example, people eat food on one side of the plate and they think they're done because

(01:11:14):
it never occurs to them that there even is another side of the plate because they're not
aware of it.
And until you rotate the plate, so if a missing food appears on the good side, they can't
conceive of it.
And then they don't know where that extra food came from.
Or a classic example of memory, put someone in, sit someone in a chair, say, "Okay, close your

(01:11:42):
eyes.
Imagine you're in your bedroom, standing at the door, looking in, describing everything
in your room."
And they describe all the furniture on one side and stop.
And it never occurs to them that they forgot the other side of the room.
And then you tell them, "Okay, now imagine you're standing at the window looking back at

(01:12:02):
the door, described your room and they close your eyes and imagine it."
And they describe the opposite set of furniture.
And again, it doesn't occur to them that they've missed half the room because they're not
aware of it.
And if you're not aware of it, why would you even notice that it's not there?
So losing sensory input, I would take to give an example that we're all familiar with.

(01:12:29):
We have no vision behind our heads.
But we're still aware that there's stuff back there.
We can remember it, we can talk about it, we can guess what might be back there, we can
think about it.
So just lacking sensory input is not the same thing as erasing it from your consciousness.

(01:12:49):
And any spatial neglect is this weird syndrome where the mechanism of becoming conscious of
things becomes cut off from the sensory processing mechanisms on this side of space.
So it's really, it's a weird, weird kind of syndrome.
Yeah, that's almost hard to even fathom.

(01:13:15):
From one entire side of your existence.
So yeah, that's absolutely, absolutely wild.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
No, I was going to say that's right.
There's a lot of these things that are very hard to fathom because people is really easy
to forget that the brain constructs reality.

(01:13:36):
And so whatever that brain is constructing for that particular person, that's their reality.
Right.
And I think this is an interesting point to kind of segue from that is in your section
about uploading the mind.
That was an absolute mind-bending roller coaster going through kind of your vision, you

(01:13:59):
know, of what would be necessary and how long it would take and what reality and civilization,
you know, what would look like on perhaps the other side of that.
And a couple things, you know, I was curious about just philosophically on that end is, you
know, do you really believe that, you know, uploading just neuronal pathways synapses

(01:14:22):
and those types of things and absolute perfect fidelity is enough in terms of consciousness
is, you know, quite embodied in the sense that even our hearts have their own central,
you know, cardiac nervous system and we get so much knowledge from our physical experience.

(01:14:43):
You know, is there like, is just neuronal pathways and synapses, of course, barring some
further complexity enough to just actually copy a consciousness?
Well, so the embodiment question is really interesting.
I think it's important.
But I think if you get your arm cut off, you're still a conscious being.

(01:15:05):
If I think you get both arms and both legs removed, you're still a conscious being.
I think if you had some terrible accident where your torso was cut off halfway, as happens
to some people, arms, legs, half a torso, you're still a conscious being or different.
Like as your body changes, all the inputs change and your perspective on the world, especially

(01:15:29):
your emotional perspective is going to change.
Like it's really important, but you're still a conscious being.
I think if you had just a head and that hasn't been done yet on people, then goodness.
But if you had just a head that was kept alive with like blood pumping up through the veins
or something or the arteries, you'd still have consciousness, right?

(01:15:52):
So I think, yes, the brain is the key, the brain and how it's handling information.
It is fundamentally about that.
On the other hand, and I think you alluded to this, is it just neuronal pathways?

(01:16:13):
I suspect the answer is no.
I suspect there's more going on in the brain than just which neuron is connected to which
other neuron.
I suspect there's things going on in there that aren't yet well understood.
And after on neurons, make up only about a tenth or less of the cells in the brain.

(01:16:36):
There's a lot of other stuff going on.
Glea cells are the big topic on that end.
So I suspect probably if you copied a brain with perfect fidelity just the neurons and
their connections that you would probably have something that's very impoverished that
doesn't really quite work.
That's my guess.
But it's a place to start.

(01:16:57):
I mean, not that you want to be an early adopter of that kind of like you don't want to
be the dude who wakes up with just the neurons and be like, oh my god, this existence is awful.
But certainly the brain is the key.
Sure.
Man, that's so interesting.

(01:17:19):
Definitely something to ponder for sure.
I'm curious as well, microtubules.
Do you spend any time in microtubules?
I know like there's pen rows and emeroves talk about quantum collapse and all this stuff.
I just throw that at you.
What's your take on microtubules in that bigger picture?

(01:17:42):
I mean, from the point of view of a neuroscientist, it's complete nonsense.
That's interesting.
Literally the definition of pseudoscience.
Wow.
So I understand that these people have made contributions in other areas, especially the
physics of black holes.

(01:18:02):
But no, there are microtubules like they do exist.
There's all kinds of structures and cells that do exist.
When you get down to very small structures, quantum effects become prominent.
That's true.
But none of that has anything to do with any of what they're talking about.

(01:18:25):
Interesting.
Just to get further clarity too on that is what would you say is some of the main issues
with it?
Just fundamentally as a structure, or are there any nuances too that you would disagree
with?
I mean, I don't think we need to get into the nuances.
I think it's basically, it's just total nonsense.

(01:18:48):
Sorry.
But that's not the level at which bits of information are being processed in the brain or any
of the things that we think we know internally or introspectively that does not emerge.
You don't need, if you could build neurons, artificial neurons that didn't have microtubules

(01:19:11):
but still function to the same way, they'd be fine.
So what functions just for the layman, what functions do marketubules serve?
There's all kinds of microstructure within a cell.
And so there's transport of material around a cell.
The chemistry of the cell has to get transported, especially in a neuron because neurons have

(01:19:35):
a cell body and then they have these long processes that stick out of them to connect to other
neurons.
So something's got to transport neurotransmitters or precursors of neurotransmitters or proteins
or this or that has to get transported through the cells.
So that's one of the main roles of these kinds of microstructures and there's lots of other

(01:19:56):
roles like that.
And they're all really important from a biological point of view.
But this obsession with them is, I mean, there's something so extraordinarily stupid about
it.
What do you think, given that perspective, what do you think for people who are very accomplished
scientists in their perspective disciplines?

(01:20:17):
What's so attractive about that?
Obviously, they'll write very extensive books and have lots of papers and research and it's
like, where's the impetus there then?
I don't know.
I mean, these things crop up all the time if you look over the centuries.
Right?
I mean, there are supposedly books and books on how many angels dance on the head of a pit.

(01:20:38):
That's basically what this is.
It's, I don't know why, I don't know where this stuff comes from.
It's curious from an actual neuroscientist in the community.
But it's always interesting to hear your perspective from the inner world.
Right.
Yeah, I just, yeah, I don't know why these, I mean, it depends a lot on personality.
There's a certain cult of personality that tends to grow these ideas.

(01:21:03):
But no.
Sure.
Simple enough.
Yeah.
Got it.
Well, you know, I guess to kind of wrap up here and I feel like I may know your answer
to this question.
I'm just curious, something that always fascinates me is just how complex and how unbelievable living

(01:21:39):
systems are.
You know, let alone our universe.
I mean, good, good God.
I mean, literally.
You know, but it just, it just baffles me that there is just a chance that is a neuron can
come into existence.
Like what, you know, reality could very well just said screw it.
I'm not going to make a neuron, right?

(01:22:01):
Like why is, why are we, why is there some force?
It feels like that's pushing for greater and greater levels of intelligence and complexity
because it very well doesn't have to be that way.
You know, and that's some things that I kind of pondered introspective, some of the main
stakes I put in that thought processes is, you know, how, where is the blueprint for a neuron?

(01:22:21):
I mean, is it really just like a mutation here and there over a long period of time?
And now we have this information, biological information technology system that's like,
you know, we can barely replicate nowadays in terms of like the neural net, oh, it can
neural networks, but I don't want to digress too much.
But your thoughts on all of that.
Yeah.
And a lot of what you're talking about, I think, is a, well, it's a perspective grounded

(01:22:53):
in the human social intuitive way of understanding the universe.
So we're built, we evolved to look at really complicated things and try to figure out what
their motivations were and why they chose this and what their mind state is.

(01:23:18):
That's how we evolved, right?
So we have that in us.
We naturally look at things like the complexity of life and we ask, we start with an assumption.
My God, something built it, right?
Is that's the social cognition approach to the universe to look at complexity, look at
anything.
So you're somebody hanging out 5,000 years ago and lightning hits the tree behind your

(01:23:45):
house and your built, your brain is built and you lack the scientific structure around that.
So you look at that and say something made something wanted that to happen, like something
intentionally did it.
Why?
Because that's how we evolved to see intentionality.
We evolved to see motivation behind things.

(01:24:06):
Because if we didn't have that in us, then we wouldn't understand each other and we wouldn't
have social interactions.
We wouldn't be the cooperative species, successful species we are.
So we evolved to have the kind of perspective that you're putting forward right now, which
is to ask these questions, who wanted it that way, who designed it that way, who intended

(01:24:28):
it to be that way.
But these are theory of mind questions and the mind that you're attributing and projecting
out there is some kind of big cosmic mind.
But if you can escape for a moment from the social cognition perspective and try to get
into a somewhat uncomfortable perspective of the scientist who's trying to strip away

(01:24:54):
all the preconceptions, you might ask yourself, first of all, why does complexity imply something
built it?
If something built it, then what built, like how did that thing get so complicated?
But maybe there's other ways that complexity emerges that's not an intentional being made

(01:25:19):
it happen.
And we know there are.
We know there's tons of ways that complexity can happen.
So that's one major thought, I would say, is that a lot of the impetus for the questions
you're asking, understand that these come from a theory of mind perspective, which is baked
into the human brain to see the world in that way and baked in by evolution.

(01:25:43):
So the second thing I would say is don't mistake the time scales and the space scales.
So a neuron is an astonishing thing.
It had three and a half billion years to evolve.

(01:26:05):
Like that's a freaking long time.
Yeah, pretty long.
And then they seem to appear maybe half a billion years ago, roughly.
So even half a billion years is an unimaginably long time period.
And it's really hard even when we try to wrap our minds around the time scales and the little

(01:26:28):
tweaks that can happen year by year, decade by decade.
And then, well, we know, for example, that little changes like we all saw code.
And just month by month, it was evolving because of little tweaks to the machinery of COVID,
little tweaks to the DNA.
Will you build that up?

(01:26:50):
Not just over the months and year or two before COVID fizzed out.
You build it up or three and a half billion years.
And who knows what you get at the end of that, right?
And so there's a wonderful, totally speculative, but interesting account of neurons that they're
modified muscle cells.

(01:27:11):
And so muscles have to contract, but the contraction has to be coordinated.
And so they evolve basically ways of spreading signal.
All muscles work this way.
They're electrical.
And then there's an impulse that is triggered at one end.
All the cells that are connected start contracting the electrical impulse spreads all the way across

(01:27:34):
the muscle, cell by cell.
And now imagine you have a muscle cell with a mutation that takes away its ability to contract.
And so it's basically a broken muscle cell, but it still has this ability to transmit
the electrical signal from one end to the other.
Now all you have, instead of a broken muscle cell, is the beginning of information transfer

(01:28:00):
and information processing, just because of a mutation.
And so then we have nervous systems and brains evolving basically as these little broken
muscle cells that lost the ability to contract, but still send signals from one end to the other.
And so I'll just meet heads, so to speak.

(01:28:23):
Those are definitely very, very strong and profound perspectives to ponder.
I think the time arc is definitely a good one to factor in.
It's like really fathoming, you know, or attempting to those arcs of time and these mutations
and the other aspects you mentioned as well.
But no, Michael, this has been an absolute pleasure and I really appreciate you lending

(01:28:47):
all of your expertise and insights.
I feel like I've definitely expanded my consciousness, you know, or my knowledge through this experience
and I know our audience did as well.
But I'd love to unwrap things up here real quickly.
If you want to take a quick second, let everyone know where they can find you.
I will link all of your books and all of your work as well in the description.
But if you want to take this a quick second, if there are any other links or places you want

(01:29:10):
people to go find you.
I would say just look me up on Google, on there.
Michael Grazi, I don't Princeton University.
I have a bunch of things you can check out.
I have obviously a lot of science, a lot of science books.
I also have some hopefully interesting music on YouTube and other things.

(01:29:32):
I have some fiction books, so check it all out.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much again, Michael.
Really appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you.
Are you take care?
All right.
Final.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Quantum Theory Podcast.
If you desire to embark on the path of self-mastery, visit Quantum Theory Podcasts.com to join

(01:29:54):
and a like-minded community of purpose seekers committed to personal growth.

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